Strength has always been my foundation—physically, mentally, and spiritually—that and the short string of belief that I cling to each day, the hope that my wife and children actually care about me. I began my strength-building routine after the first time my wife beat me up and embarrassed me in front of our children and I finally decided it was time for me to giddyup. Every morning after powering down my Valhalla java I head into my gym, the Doom Crew Iron Dungeon, and throw around some chunks of iron. I even bring a weight set with me when we’re out on deployment so I can get in a good pump each day before we hit the stage. I also like to get in a good pump with my wife, or if she’s not havin’ it, with my right hand.
Although I do all sorts of exercises in the gym, squats are my favorite. Just that repetitive motion of grinding up and down, lunging and throbbing, sweating and clenching, greasing and buttering, gripping and stretching, gaping and . . . Oh wait, time out. What the fuck happened? Where am I? Oh yeah, I drifted back into the music business again, where greasing, buttering, ass-gaping, and backstabbing are bodily functions like pissing and shitting.
Aside from the heavy-hitting squats, I also follow a strong regimented workout that I designed over the years and that works well for me. It’s basically the same as the routine of most power lifters and bodybuilding champions, except for the results. Then I drop in an hour and a half of cardio daily, whether it’s on the treadmill or while blasting through a Black Label set onstage. I also have a high-protein diet, taking in up to three hundred grams of protein a day, depending on how many grams of protein I dumped on the Warden that morning, or again, if she wasn’t havin’ it, how many loads I splattered on the bathroom stall down at the venue. Replenishing my loads of doom is really easy, being that I’m in the music business. There is no shortage of motherfuckers I gotta suck off in order to keep the almighty Black Label Armada rolling. With the amount of music biz cock-gobbling I’ve gotta perform, between my manager, agents, band salaries, per diems, bus drivers, truck drivers, my wife’s personal trainer (who I’m sure she’s been fucking while I’m out here killing myself, bleeding Black fuckin’ Label every waking second . . . mind you, I couldn’t really give a shit as long as she’s got a smile on her face; you know how it goes—the girls don’t like to be disappointed!), the bright side is that my vocal cords are eternally lubed. Gotta stay positive! Fuck it—Merciless. (What that means, we’ll get to soon enough.)
I don’t do steroids, but I should. Then I’d have an excuse for all the pissy fits, road rages, tantrums, outbursts, yelling at my wife, then forgiveness flowers, screaming at my children, then forgiveness allowances—not to mention all the douchebag lead-singer shit I pull on the guys in the band. That said, I think it’s fucking hilarious when people say that I’m on the juice. They see a picture of me at 249 pounds and a shot of me when I was eighteen years old at 140 pounds, and they assume it all happened overnight after a magical injection straight out of Barry Bonds’s medicine cabinet. But if I did use steroids I wouldn’t need Barry. I’d have my own team of shady gym owners and back-door physicians who would supply me with a black-market Titanic-load of growth hormones, Dianabol and Winstrol—enough to have any pancreas, liver, or pair of kidneys screaming for mercy.
They don’t think of the twenty-plus years in between 1987 Zakk and 2011 Zakk where I was training all the time and eating healthy (though drinking professionally). The only supplements I take are protein shakes and vitamins. I don’t bother with anything else. With the blood-thinning medication I’m on these days to avoid blood clots, I don’t know how certain supplements will react. I’m no fuckin’ nuclear physicist, but I do play one on television. And what if I do take creatine and it doesn’t mix well with the shit I have to take for my blood, and I fucking croak in my sleep? I’ll tell you what would happen. It would set off a nuclear chain reaction of money-hungry scavengers hoping to squeeze any remaining drops of blood from my deteriorating corpse.
I can picture it now—Barbaranne, management, and the accountants would all meet at Spago in Beverly Hills for a nice lunch and to begin planning how they are going to repackage all of the Black Label Society catalog and also release every fucking recording I’ve ever made, in a studio or on a cassette tape, and then probably even try to release some shit that I had nothing to do with. Back-alley meetings would take place with a black-market taxidermist to have me stuffed and preserved so that they could prop me up and continue selling meet-and-greet packages to the Black Label family. Barbaranne would sell the compound and run off with a failed NBA player. At seven foot two, with a relentlessly hammering, pounding cock of doom, and the life insurance money, and whatever Black Label shit the wife and management can pawn off, his basketball skills really won’t fucking matter at that juncture, nor what college he claims to have graduated from.
Next my manager would place an order for his own corporate jet, and it would be one big party for all. I guess everything is fair game once I’m up in God’s tavern with the rest of our fallen saints. But seriously, as I sit here writing, there is a vulture sitting impatiently on the back of my chair staring down at me like I’m a giant fleshy sack of cash, its insatiable drool spilling over the pages of my manuscript, just waiting to get the proceeds from this book and every other motherfucking thing I’ve ever done. Anyway, about the steroids, fuck all that noise. The last time I checked, I’m doing just fine by lifting weights and eating clean proteins.
Besides being physically fit, you’ve also got to keep your mind strong. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, no one else is going to. That’s why I have to believe Barbaranne when she tells me that she’s not cheating on me and that our three children are really ours. Mind you, we didn’t have sex during the two years prior to our youngest being born, but Barb told me that Immaculate Conception is a real and common occurrence. Lucky for her I’m a devout Catholic and not a devout atheist. Otherwise, I’d ask her if she filmed herself fucking the other guy so I can at least jerk off to this shit. Once again—gotta stay positive, kids.
And having religion won’t hurt either. There are so many choices out there, it can’t hurt to pick one of the nicer ones and run with it. Being a soldier of Christ, I believe in Jesus and everything he represents. Having compassion for others, giving to those who are less fortunate, protecting the innocent, empowering others as opposed to enslaving, making sacrifices for the benefit of others, and bringing someone other than yourself happiness. And through Jesus, the crucifix represents unconquerable and everlasting strength, sacrifice, blood, commitment, and faith in all that is good. Then I just ask the good Lord, why have you put JDesus in my life? Why? Why, beloved Father? Why?
Now, if your religious leader tells you to go out and murder a bunch of innocent people because they think the Stones are better than the Beatles, or that Lady Gaga can bench-press more than Madonna could when she was the same age—try to stay away from this religion. As history has shown, in the poker game of life, when you try to explain to a judge that your religious leader told you to murder innocent people over a Stones vs. Beatles debate, you will usually find that the law carries a royal flush over your religious leader. If you need any proof, ask the Manson girls—as their long-awaited album and tour has been pushed back so many times at each passing year’s parole meeting. It makes Geffen Records look like they got off easy with Chinese Democracy.
The next religion I would try to persuade you to stay away from would be the one where the religious leader tells everybody that a meteor is coming to take us all away. But before we jump on board the meteor to go to the promised land where the McDonald’s two-for-one is eternally on, we each have to put a Hefty bag over our head and seal it around our neck, suffocating us, while we slice off our fucking genitals! Now, this religion and religious leader can put a goliath fucking damper on all of your rock ’n’ roll dreams. For not just one but four terrible reasons:
1. Putting a Hefty bag over your head to snuff the life out of you is bad.
2. What happens if your favorite football team is making a push for the play-offs after several bad seasons?
3. You find out that Carvel ice cream is reintroducing the legendary ice cream cake that is Cookie Puss.
4. Your wife