Thoughts From Tom G. Warrior Wearing a Goofy Mascot Head at Euro Disneyland
Remember our list of crappy off-tour day jobs held by metal’s elite? One of them was Tom Gabriel Fischer of Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Triptykon, who plays Goofy at Euro Disneyland in Paris. An unnamed but super-reliable source has actually sent us a transcript of Tom’s diary from his days as Goofy. Read below…
Day 31:
The children never consider their own deaths. They run frantically, mouths smeared with gelato, towards the grotesque being I represent in this armature of cloth and polystyrene. What would they say if I breached the seal and showed them the being inside the suit, the obsidian reminder that though they maybe be a long way from Death, they’ll never truly get out alive?
But no. They devour corndogs shoved in their hands by glassy-eyed parents who have long since ceased copulating. They point and coo at bizarre servants of the ridiculous myth of a happiest place on earth. They do not feel the currents of ancient witchcraft that run underneath their feet. They see Pluto as a yipping cur, not the dread god of the Romans who stole spring away from half the year through trickery born of an abandoned heart.
The head grows hot so quickly. It is like an incubation chamber for my loathing. The French sun that so enchanted a drunken Baudelaire cooks my thoughts to the boiling point. It would be easy to give up now, yank off this bucktoothed brain oven and declare my repulsion for this hellish place. But I resist. I am strong, and these hellish musings will be perfect for the new record. There is no hatred like Disney hatred. If I vomit again today, it will only serve as further fuel for the next record.
While getting a bottle of water behind the scenes, my manager Mike approaches me and asks me why I wear this disguise when I don’t need to. “Doesn’t your evil metal band make you enough money?” he asks. When word first spread as to my identity, Mike laughed and asked that I inform him if I join a band he has “ever heard of.” A week later, the simpering approached me with his youngest sister’s copy of Monotheist and asked for my autograph. Now, his ridicule no longer focuses on my history but the vital horrors of my everyday. He asks why a “famous person” would don the head and dance for the oblivious children, and he constantly sneaks up behind me and tries to say, “UNGH”, though he always sounds like he needs to defecate. He’ll never understand the vistas of darkness I have scene.
A child’s birth is celebrated. It is one of the two honest moments that will ever occur in her life, and so I attend. The little girl is only six year old, and is overwhelmed by the presence of sparklers and cameras. When I kneel and thrust my head into her face, she shrieks horribly and flees into the park. It is the first proper response to my visage I have seen all day. Within the head, I weep opal tears of broken joy.
While heading towards the castle for the night’s explosive bacchanal, I decide to take a shortcut through a staff tunnel beneath Fuente de Oro in Frontierland. Within seconds, I am gripped with painful memory. The curved support beams along the cylindrical tunnel are so Gigerian, suggesting that I am in fact a pockmarked foetus passing through the cervical chamber of a biomechanical gun. You can almost smell the amniotic crude that coats the many joints of the bone-rafters which hold up this esophagus of false hope. Damn, if only they’d let him take a stab at designing this place…
Leila, a fellow Swiss who plays one of our three Elsas, smokes a cigarette at the tunnel’s exit. She and I have a good report. She recounts to me how a boy with an earring grabbed her ass earlier and told her to “let it go” when she became upset. I pantomime strangling the boy, and she laughs and pats me on the arm. A brief respite from this hollow-eyed torment.
Finally, we stand before Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant in the open night. The masses close in around me with their wasp’s buzzing and scent of fried dough. The castle lights up and spews an outpouring of fireworks. The shadows on the smiling faces are like those of damned souls, flickering with the lights of Hell. A young boy approaches me and holds my hand. His parents take photos, thinking everything is all right, but his frightened face displays a confusion and panic I know all too well, and I mentally set this memory aside for the next Triptykon record.
As I wave goodbye to the not-yet-dead child, Leila nods towards a group of Italian teenagers laughing together and flicking popcorn at one another. No doubt these are the ones who tormented her. As they leave the fireworks, I follow them, keeping my jocular gait so as not to arouse suspicion. They think they’ll leave this place unscathed. They know nothing. Their bluster, their arrogance, it’s all a lie. Only Goofy is real.
