Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  “Do you need me to score again?” I asked, slightly confused since I’d just delivered a couple grams to him.

  “No, brother, that’s for you.”

  “What? C’mon, man, I can’t take all that. Are you crazy?”

  “I love you and you need it. It’s that simple. Lanegan, take it, please.”

  I did need it, stopped protesting, and stood with him as he caught a cab, and watched it all the way up Cherry Street, until it was out of sight. I loved him, too. His gentle concern for my well-being and willingness to be there whenever I needed him was a largely uncommon thing in my life. I was grateful for his continued presence in my world. I sensed a piercing sadness somewhere inside, though, when I thought about our years of close friendship. How it had begun from a pure appreciation of each other’s music and certain shared aspects of personality to how it had now warped into a dynamic where, instead of being a positive influence on this guy I considered a genius and cherished little brother, I had become a facilitator to his undoing.

  When I got home and counted out the money he’d given me, I couldn’t help but feel shame. A little over three thousand dollars. Nothing to him, but a temporary life preserver for me, something to keep my head out of the sewage just a bit longer.

  Whiskey for the Holy Ghost was released to much critical acclaim, way more than any Screaming Trees record ever had. Some publications even called it a “masterpiece,” the exact term that had prodded and haunted me the three long years I’d struggled to complete the record. This was toxic validation, though: I had wasted thousands of dollars and hours, days, months, and years, nearly losing my mind to arrive at a finished product not far from the very first songs I’d done during the very first sessions. I had become a paranoid, over-the-top asshole making this record, and by calling it brilliant, the world was telling me I had been correct in doing so. Toxic validation, indeed.

  Like with my first Sub Pop record, I again refused to put together a band, do any touring or even one single show in support of this album. I had no plans to ever play any of this solo music live and still looked at the Trees as my main gig. I once again tried to start working with them on our much overdue follow-up to Sweet Oblivion.

  John Hicks was staying in my apartment at this time. Hicks had always been a reliable and loyal friend. He had traveled the world with me, my most trusted sidekick who was willing to do my dirty work when I was unable or unwilling to do it myself. Late one night, I got a phone call from Kurt. He was obviously so fucked up I couldn’t understand three-quarters of what he was saying and it scared me. The only thing I really understood was that he wanted me to come over and to come over right away. Since he clearly was not in need of drugs, my mind went haywire with worry: What the fuck was going on? Hicks and I hopped in a cab and took the fifteen-minute ride to Kurt’s lakefront estate.

  After we walked up to the door and knocked without any response, I cased the perimeter of the place until I came to a window with no blinds. The scene inside the brightly lit room sent a jolt of adrenaline rocketing to my brain. Lying flat on the floor, facedown, was Kurt. He looked like he might be dead.

  “Hicks!” I yelled. “Find a way into the house!”

  He began quickly checking every door and window, searching for an unlocked entryway inside. I began banging hard and loudly on the huge, thick, six-foot-high window and screaming Kurt’s name to no response. I began to freak out. The thought crossed my mind to go to a neighbor’s house to call an ambulance, something I knew I couldn’t do unless absolutely necessary due to the massive wave of unwanted negative publicity that would bring down on him.

  But then I thought I saw his hand move slightly. I began banging and yelling twice as hard. John whipped around the corner, covered in sweat and out of breath.

  “I’m sorry, boss, I can’t find a way in.”

  “Check it out,” I said, “he’s moving in there, he’s not dead!”

  After more banging and yelling, we watched as, with supreme effort that looked like it took every last ounce of physical power he had, Kurt managed to flip over onto his back.

  “Fuck, no!”

  I immediately envisioned Kurt’s dead body, strangled to death on his own vomit.

  “Go get a big rock or a brick!”

  If he started to puke, I was going to have to break a window and get inside. Hicks returned in a minute with a boulder I couldn’t believe he was able to carry. With the rush of adrenaline coursing through his veins, he seemed to be finding strength I couldn’t imagine he’d ever accessed before.

  But after an hour or so of us yelling, banging, knocking, and screaming his name, Kurt slowly began to come to life. We urged him on as he tried to stand yet fell painfully back to the floor over and over again. At one point he got to his feet and, with eyes completely closed, managed to take a couple of steps toward the door before his ankle turned in a way that looked so fucked I was sure he must have broken it.

  At the end of nearly two full hours, he was still crawling his way toward the door, inch by agonizing inch. Finally, with much loud verbal encouragement from the two of us in the yard, he managed to unlock it. As we burst through, I picked him up and quickly carried him to the couch while John grabbed a towel and a cooking pot full of water and ice cubes from the huge kitchen. He soaked the towel in it and held it against the back of Kurt’s neck. We spent the night keeping an eye on him, checking his breathing and making sure he was warm and kept under blankets.

  The next morning, he said all he could remember was that he’d done a shot of heroin, nothing out of the ordinary, had not taken any pills, drunk any alcohol, or anything else out of character for him. It had been a stressful, exhausting night for Hicks and me, but for Kurt, it looked to be something much more dangerous. Once again, I felt the heat of guilt as I was acutely aware of my willful participation in his close-to-the-edge addiction. I had been blessed with a large frame and hardy constitution. He wasn’t physically built like me, with a much slighter body, and was often ill with some unknown stomach ailments, making it torture for him to eat anything. I was, at heart, just a sick fucking enabler. No, actually something much worse: a parasite who had lived off the misery of this guy I had loved for so long by being a conduit through which he received his death doses. An actively negative presence in the life of this beautiful and talented man, who instead of showing him any positive guidance, consistently chose to take the low road so that I could continue to stay high. When these thoughts jumped uninvited into my head, I was instantly filled with an all-encompassing guilt and self-loathing.

  21

  DAYS GONE DARK

  One day in early April of ’94, I was lying on my tattered, cigarette-burned sofa, chain-smoking and watching stupid soap operas on TV with the sound off, when my phone rang. As was my normal routine, I let the answering machine pick it up and waited to see if whoever called would leave a message.

  “Hey, man, it’s Kurt. I’m back in town. What’re you doing? C’mon over and listen to records with me.”

  I thought about it for a minute. Though I loved Kurt, I knew I wasn’t calling back today—(a) I had quite a bit of cash at the moment and plenty of dope so the thought of possibly running out to score for him was a drag, and (b) I assumed Courtney would be there. I had become conditioned to steer clear of their house because every time I had been there in recent months, some kind of drama would erupt between the two of them. It unfolded like some dreary sitcom joke: Courtney would be uncomfortably friendly to me in front of Kurt till she finally triggered an outburst from him. So I blew Kurt off because I didn’t feel like playing the pawn in a fucked-up chess game that particular day.

  He called twice more over the next couple hours. Despite the gnawing feeling that I was the world’s shittiest friend, I never picked up, just continued to lie around the place in dirty boxers and the stained robe a stripper girlfriend had left in my bedroom, imagining myself a modern-­day Oscar Wilde. Listening to a Stranglers record and staring mindlessly at
the silent TV screen, I was oblivious to the gathering storm headed in my direction.

  Late in the afternoon, I got a call from the entertainment lawyer I shared with Kurt, Rosemary Carroll, an extremely smart, no-nonsense woman who happened to be the ex-wife of celebrated writer/musician Jim Carroll.

  “Mark, if you know where Kurt is, you need to tell me now.”

  A couple minutes later, another message.

  “If he is at your apartment and you’re not telling me, we’re going to have a problem.”

  I called her back to assure her I wasn’t hiding him.

  “Mark,” she said, “I don’t think you realize what’s going on. He checked himself out of rehab yesterday, flew back to Seattle today, and now nobody can get in touch with him.”

  “He’s probably fine, Rosemary. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll check in soon.”

  In fact, I had not known what was going on: a highly publicized overdose earlier had been posed to both Dylan Carlson and me as accidental and only much later was it revealed to us as a suicide attempt. I had also not known he’d left rehab and come home on the same day he called me.

  I called Kurt: no answer. I called our mutual friends but no one had heard from him. I began to wonder if something was really wrong. I chastised myself for not answering the phone earlier, but I told myself, How could I know? How could I know what was really going on? How could I have known Courtney wasn’t even there? How, how, how …

  The next day someone in the Nirvana camp asked if I would go with Dylan to some Capitol Hill dope houses to see if Kurt was hanging out at any of them. A private investigator Courtney had hired named Tom Grant picked us up. With money he supplied, we went from place to place, buying drugs and looking for Kurt to no avail: he couldn’t be found.

  After we had gone to the spot of every last dealer we could think of, Grant drove us to Kurt’s house near Lake Washington. We went from room to room calling his name but there was no answer. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs that led to a small room above his garage. For a moment, I thought about going up and taking a look.

  Just then Dylan and Grant walked out, ready to leave. I knocked the cherry off my half-finished smoke and put the rest in my coat pocket. For a brief second, I had a terrible premonition, but I shook it off and got in the car, eager just to get home and do my share of the heroin we had bought.

  A day or two later, Rosemary called me, her voice shaking with emotion, and delivered the news. Kurt’s body had been found in the small room above his garage—the same room at which I had stood at the foot of earlier—the victim of an apparent suicide. A medical examiner judged his death to have taken place the same day we were at the house looking for him. I hung up the phone and burst into tears of remorse, self-hatred, and mountainous grief. I knew I would never get over his death. It would shadow me until the day I died.

  The next few days went by in a blur. Everett True, a British journalist I’d drunkenly knocked off his barstool at the Reading Festival in ’92, came to Seattle and stayed with me at Courtney’s request the week before Kurt’s memorial. The incident at Reading had marked the only time Kurt had been openly angry with me. He had looked at me with silent fury and disappointment and quietly said, “You shithead.” True and I hadn’t known each other before then and he turned out to be the perfect companion for me during those dark days. Mainly, we sat together in silent, stunned, shared grief. When we talked, it was of our good memories of Kurt.

  On the day of the service, a girl who was also sharing my room at the time found him some suitable clothes in my closet to wear, he having busted the buttons off his only, coffee-stained white shirt. We attended the memorial together at some hall near the Space Needle. I sat through it in a daze, unable to pay attention to anything that was said. I was lost in the darkest, most depressing regret and self-loathing I’d ever experienced.

  Later, at the private wake at Kurt and Courtney’s house, she grabbed me in a tight embrace and began sobbing. All eyes in the room were on her. Filled with sorrow and shame myself, it took all of my resolve to not start crying as well.

  Unable to endure much of this sad party, I turned to leave. Just as I was going out, sultry, pitch-black-haired Hole bass player Kristen Pfaff was coming in. We’d only met a small handful of times, but the way she looked into my eyes and smiled at me as she passed gave me an instant hard-on. Her gaze had been an unmistakable come-on and the thought of sex crossed my mind for the first time in weeks. Although I felt a certain amount of shame for thinking about fucking at the wake for my dead friend, my cock had a mind of its own. I got in a cab and my grieving mind took shelter in the thought of her eyes the entire ride home and long into the night.

  A couple of weeks later, my friend Lori Barbero, drummer of the Minneapolis band Babes in Toyland, called me out of the blue.

  “Hey, man, someone wants to talk to you.”

  I could hear her hand the phone off to someone else.

  “Mark?” a young female voice on the other end asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know who this is?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” I replied honestly, not recognizing the voice.

  “It’s Kristen, from Hole. What’re you doing right now?”

  So, my radar had been correct in identifying the intent behind her gaze at Kurt’s wake after all.

  “. . . um, not much. What are you doing?”

  She paused for a second and then said, “I’m thinking about you, man. I wanna hang out, I totally want to date you. What do you think about that?”

  I laughed out loud at her directness, my first authentic laugh in a long while.

  “That sounds like an excellent idea to me. Are you guys in Seattle?”

  She laughed and replied, “No, we’re in Minneapolis, but I’ll be back the second week of June. So we’re gonna hang out, right? You’re not gonna forget about me, right?”

  “That’s probably not going to happen,” I said, sounding to myself like a smoker’s version of Bob Newhart. She laughed. I smiled stupidly as I hung up the phone, thinking that my luck had taken a huge upswing for the better. I stood up, took out my recently neglected-by-everyone dick, and spontaneously masturbated onto my dining room tabletop.

  A couple of weeks later, a tearful, completely downtrodden, and embattled-sounding Courtney called and left a bullet-to-the heart message: Kristen had OD’d and died in a bathtub the first night she was back in Seattle. I dizzily sat down on the floor, put my head in my hands, and stared numbly through my fingers at the wall in disbelief. Not only was my pipe dream of some sort of relationship with this exotic girl crushed, but horrifically, she was stone gone forever. Life was an utterly cruel, savage beast. Everything and everyone around me was fucking cursed.

  22

  WILDERNESS OF HORRORS

  With Kurt gone, I lived close to the bone, estranged from family and all my nonusing friends, haunted by my willful absence on the day Kurt died, disappearing into the painful wilderness of horrors my memories created for days on end. Always broke, I had begun selling crack outside of my apartment building to street people, mostly Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants. I spent the profits on heroin. No matter how many drugs I did, I still couldn’t escape myself. I couldn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time, usually sitting up in an uncomfortable wooden straight-backed, grade-school-style chair that sat near the noisy, wheezing old radiator under one of my windows, frequently awakened by the seagulls’ incessant screaming outside. I was loath to ever lie down, convinced that if I did, I would never wake up. The result was mounting damage to my feet. My toes were constantly numb on the surface but painful as hell when I walked around. If I accidentally knocked them against something while wandering my apartment in a mindless haze, the pain was excruciating.

  Courtney leaned on me nearly every other day. For company, for drugs, for emotional support, for a shoulder to cry on and an ear to talk into. She told me that Kurt had
been obsessively listening to my record Whiskey for the Holy Ghost often in the weeks before he died. I was horrified. Not only had I not responded when he was calling out for my help—a fact I naturally kept to myself, to the extent that I’d lied to a Rolling Stone reporter, saying I’d not heard from him for weeks previous to his death—but the thought that somehow my music had lent itself to his suicidal state shattered my already-stunned psyche. Totally devastated, the sense of obligation I felt toward Courtney was turning out to be more than I could give. I felt torn between what I thought Kurt would want me to do and my natural inclination to avoid her at all costs. She was extremely quick mentally, with ferocious, twenty-steps-ahead intelligence and a biting sense of humor that reminded me at times of Kurt himself. She was also very generous, and always interesting in a whirlwind, over-the-top fashion. But life was too all-consuming, too dramatic, difficult, exhausting, and messed-up in her sphere.

  As someone who largely preferred to go through the world unnoticed, the few times we were out in public together and she drew so much attention to herself and, by extension, me, I was embarrassed, even pissed off. She talked me into seeing a movie with her and then chattered loudly throughout. Not only did everyone in the theater hate our guts, they also knew exactly who was making all the noise. The smart and outspoken widow of a beloved international rock star who some blamed as the source of his unhappiness and cause of his suicide. Courtney took no shit but was a publicly unpopular figure and a constant target for it. I watched with increasing dismay every time I would see some TV show or magazine article where she was blamed or ridiculed. Worse still were the ongoing rumors of her possible involvement in a murder meant to look as suicide. Suddenly, Dylan was also vilified. Kurt had talked him into buying the shotgun he’d used to kill himself, under the guise that it was needed for home protection. Both Dylan and I had become accustomed to performing these kinds of tasks for him, simply because the imprisonment of his fame made going out into public a fucking drag he could not escape. The crackpot theories that insinuated Courtney and Dylan had conspired to murder Kurt were complete horseshit, but with her manic energy, she did sometimes take me to my absolute limit. At one point Dylan said to me, “Fuck, man, if anyone was gonna have me kill somebody, it would have been Kurt having me do Courtney.” Something I knew actually made perfect sense.