The Last Temptation of Dougie

It's no different, Dougie argued, than the hundred safety pins he had poked into himself for his last stunt. "I didn't get an infection then."

"Barbed wire is a lot different than safety pins," his mother insisted. "Why can't you go into the backyard and pull some thorny vines from my rosebushes? That would be more authentic anyway."

When she's out of earshot, Dougie explained, "My mom's seen me do some crazy shit. When I was 17, I was brought home naked, in a cop car, tripping on acid. She's seen me do everything a bad kid can do."

She also saw authorities in Atlanta peg her son as a kid with a behavior disorder.

"I rode the short bus with retarded kids and freakouts," Dougie said. "Disturbing shit." He said he "graduated" from his special school and was able to return to regular high school, where he graduated as senior class president. He pulled out his yearbook to back it up, and a picture inside showed Dougie wearing bulbous clown shoes and sporting giant, fluffy blond hair.

A friend will film the crucifixion show. His plan is to someday edit film of his shows, call it a documentary and shop it to the Sundance Film Festival. "Hopefully, that will get me enough money to direct my first film. Then I can buy a restaurant and become a designer and do all those things. I pretty much want to do everything."

At the end of November, Dougie received some good news from Sunshine: She's going to have his baby.

The first day he saw her after receiving the news, they met at a midtown McDonald's. Sunshine is carrying herself differently, walking taller, stronger. She'd gained 15 pounds and looked almost like her old self.

"You really grew up," Dougie told her.

She shrugged. "Yeah. I'm having a kid now. I'm pregnant. What am I supposed to do?"

Dougie told her about a dream he'd had, in which he saw their child's face. It put everything in perspective.

Sunshine says she's positive that the baby is Dougie's. She laughs at the question because everyone asks it. It will be Dougie's second child — he has a redheaded daughter named Akyla Una Nighttime Rosenbrook-Geraci, who is 7 and lives with her mother in Texas.

For Sunshine, pregnancy happened at just the right time. Before she found out, she says, "I was in my own world. I had entered into a different world, and I was reaching rock-bottom. I seriously was. I was scraping the ground. I'd hit that point where I felt like I was going psycho. People were pushing me away, like, Girl, you got problems."

Word of her pregnancy was all she needed to ground her. She wants to work on designing a clothing line. And she's considering getting back together with Dougie.

"It's just going to be one of those things," she says. "I'll go off this way, you go off that way, but we're still going to meet back in the middle, and we always have. It was just a break, people, don't worry! The celebrity couple is still together! We were riders of the underground soul train, but now we're onto something else."

Dougie is thrilled. He has a name in mind if it's a boy: Dugo Danger — so he can say "Danger is my middle name."

He also has come up with a name for his crucifixion: "The Religion Game." He has designated December 28, the day of the show, as his own Good Friday.

"I personally am not saying anything against religion," he explains. "I'm not in any way trying to say that, ooh, I'm trying to do what He [Jesus] did. I'm not. I'm not going to do the feet, you know. I'm not carrying a cross around the city with a bunch of people whipping me and screaming at me, even though I was thinking about it ... I believe that any sacrifice like that should be respected. And damn it, I'm gonna check it out."