Sing Backwards and Weep
Page 21
Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, a thoughtful, caring, and intelligent guy I considered a friend, gave me a stern talking-to: I was NOT to score any drugs for Courtney. I took that to heart. Eric was the one person in our circle who I looked up to as a no-nonsense, even-keeled, steadying influence. He always seemed to be the rock in the eye of the hurricane, the proverbial boy who stood on the burning deck. It wasn’t like I enjoyed playing that role in Courtney’s life, but I felt as though I had inherited it. As she ratcheted up the intensity of her focus on me, I found it increasingly hard to live with and nearly impossible to get out of. I resolved to extricate myself from the situation. Something told me there was a 99 percent chance that shit would meet fan in the process.
Early one morning, I heard her voice on my answering machine.
“Hey, what’re you doing? I want to see you, come over.”
I ignored it. An hour or so later, I got another message, this one in a somewhat more seductive voice.
“Hey, sugar, I want to see you. What are you doing?”
Again, I ignored it. She would give up and turn in another direction for solace soon. But throughout the rest of the day and well into the evening, the calls kept coming. Her tone shifted from faux-alluring to slightly harsh to finally: “You motherfucker! Where the fuck are you? Call me back, you son of a bitch!”
As it got later, I grew tired of listening to these abusive messages and unplugged the machine altogether, and just in case she was motivated to come over, I turned off the front door buzzer. My mind a bit lighter after making the decision to disengage, I lit some incense, turned off the lights, put on a VHS tape of Seven Samurai with the sound off, and lay back on the couch with my feet out on the coffee table to try and catch a nod. Somehow, I fell into a deep sleep.
I was awakened by a light knocking on my apartment door. Voices in the hallway. I recognized instantly the fawning voice of my dickhead apartment manager, Christian, who I hated and who hated me. He had passed out fliers to everyone on my side of the building, telling tenants to report it anytime someone yelled up to my window, something I’d instructed some customers to do if my lights were on. I’d not wanted certain fiends to have knowledge of my apartment number and thus buzz me incessantly all night. When I wanted to be left alone, I simply left the lights off. Christian was determined to get me either arrested or kicked out, preferably both.
“I can’t believe you’re in my building!” he gushed. “I had no idea Mark was a friend of yours!”
“Oh yes, we’re very close. He was supposed to come over today. I’m worried about him.”
The other voice belonged to Courtney. It was clear she had this prick eating out of her hand. I tiptoed over to the door to hear them better and, by reflex, grabbed the badly dented aluminum baseball bat next to the door. The next thing I heard blew my mind and enraged me at the same time.
“Well, seeing how you are such close friends, I can unlock the door and let you in to take a look around. Just to make sure nothing’s wrong . . .”
He wasn’t just sucking up to the famous person in his presence, I knew he also intended to take a look around my place and make note of any incriminating contraband. I quietly took a deep breath and suddenly broke out in a cold, sticky sweat. My mind seized on a dark thought and I silently lifted the chain lock off the door. The moment he opened it up, I would clock him with the bat, beat my sniveling apartment manager unconscious. I would be in my rights to do so if he were to enter without my permission. Wait a second … No, I would actually beat them both to death, Christian and Courtney both, put an immediate end to two separate but now entwined aggravations, and let the chips fall where they may.
I silently raised the bat. I could almost hear Courtney thinking on the other side of the door. I bent my knees, tensed my arms and shoulders, ready to uncoil the moment the door swung open. She took a breath. Here it comes.
“Oh well, I’m sure he’s okay. We better not invade his privacy.”
And just like that, they left.
I ran into her a couple weeks later. I said I had been out of town for a family emergency. And that was it. By that time, she had new connections and interests that rarely included me anymore.
23
GO FUCK A DONKEY
I had become known as a guy who could procure drugs for traveling rock bands. When the Lollapalooza tour came to Washington at the end of August, I was contacted by an old friend.
I’d first met Paul Bearer when he was the singer for a Philadelphia band called the Serial Killers. He was a one-of-a-kind dude with a crazy, funny-as-fuck intelligence who shared my fiending, black-hole, all-encompassing love of opiates and all things bizarre. More provocative stand-up comic than singer, he was a favorite of mine ever since his band had opened for us in San Diego in the late ’80s or early ’90s. While I sat watching their set from the back of the empty room, his onstage banter had pissed off one of the only two other audience members to the extent that she’d thrown an entire glass mug of beer at his head from five feet away. He went straight into a hilarious retaliatory routine that included blow jobs at the Greyhound bus station restroom, unplugging the Slurpee machine at 7-Eleven, and, most memorably, telling the woman to go back to Tijuana to fuck a donkey. (Years later, I’d recited almost the exact same routine from memory while being mercilessly heckled by a drunken woman during a show in Seattle. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Tijuana reference didn’t exactly translate when spoken in the Great Northwest, but I’d waited years to unload it, so what the hell.)
Paul was traveling with the all-female Los Angeles band L7 on the tour. A couple of the L7 girls dabbled in dope, and in the past, I’d scored for them and they for me. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were also on the Lollapalooza tour and Paul had asked me if I could hook something up for Nick and bass player Martyn Casey when they were in Seattle on a day off.
I’d been a huge fan of Nick Cave for years. I felt a deep connection to his music, and he and the Bad Seeds had been a central influence on the solo records I’d been toiling away at for some years now.
Once I had collected some shit for these Australian musicians, I felt a bit of anticipatory excitement about meeting them, even if just in my capacity as a middleman for small drug deals. When they showed up in a cab at my building, we went upstairs, politely did the deal, exchanging the dope for dough, and started preparing hits. As I sat at my dining room table trying to locate a vein, Cave looked at my fucked-up arms, crisscrossed like a road map of Germany with huge, deep, red-and-black abscessed tracks.
“Damn,” he said, “I guess you can’t just pop into the can for a quick hit.”
I was a pariah in my apartment building and was especially despised by the young Goth couple whose door was directly opposite mine. The nonstop daily parade of unwashed street people and Eritrean crack addicts in and out of my apartment had them perpetually pissed off. As Nick, Martyn, and I were leaving to go get some dinner, the couple just happened to be unlocking their door and entering their apartment. As we stepped out, they caught a glimpse of Cave standing there in his three-piece suit, his iconic jet-black pompadour perfectly in place, and almost broke their necks doing a double take. Nick calmly noticed them freaking out.
“Good evening,” he said coolly.
That was a small win for me. My neighbors never looked at me the same again.
24
BACK TO THE NEEDLE
Layne had gone to Minnesota to attend a rehab program and I wished him well. I supported any of my friends who tried to get clean as I was often trying to kick on my own. Whenever anyone found out I was trying to kick, however, my efforts were greeted with raised eyebrows and rolled eyes from pals and using buddies alike. Neither Kurt nor Layne believed I would ever get clean due to my maniacal hunger for drugs and the lengths I’d go to get them. Both had said as much at different times in conversation with me. They both imagined they would kick for good someday, but that my chances of ever getting clean were next to nil.
I got buzzed from the front door one afternoon. To my surprise, it was Layne. He’d put on a lot of weight and I’d never seen him look so healthy. He’d come directly from the airport to my apartment after finishing rehab, jonesing to get high.
“Hey, bro, you got anything on you?” he asked, knowing that I most likely did.
“Are you sure you wanna do that, man? You’re finally clean, for real. Why do you want to start all over again?”
“All I thought about the whole time was getting out and getting high. I never wanted to quit. I only did it to make everyone happy and shut them up.”
He cooked himself up a shot in my kitchen. I heard him puke into my sink the instant he hit the vein. He walked unsteadily out into my living room with a goofy smile, sat down on my couch, and nodded for hours. When he came out of it, I made him promise to not tell anyone he’d fallen off the wagon so soon at my place. I didn’t want Jerry and the other Alice guys blaming me for his relapse.
For years, he’d had a passionate on-and-off relationship with a girl named Demri, a friend of my ex-girlfriend Anna. It had been marked by dizzying highs and dark, depressing lows. A fellow addict, she was said to be somewhat indiscriminate when it came to sex, much like myself. Who knows, I thought before I really knew him, maybe it’s an open relationship. But once we’d become friends, it became clear that her behavior caused Layne some pain.
I had gotten a glimpse into her straightforward approach before I’d even met him. Like Layne and I did, she and I encountered each other for the first time outside a Capitol Hill dope house. As I was leaving, she was going in.
“Hey there, aren’t you Anna’s boyfriend? I’m Demri.”
I was instantly attracted to this sexy, smiling creature. The first thought that rolled through my head was DAMN! She had an alluring outward sexuality, a beautiful face, and the most extraordinary, devilish eyes.
“Yeah, I am. Please don’t tell her you saw me here, though, that would cause problems.”
I felt like such a jackass whenever I was compelled to ask a stranger to keep my secrets, but most addicts were keeping secrets from someone themselves. There was some semblance of a code of secrecy among certain junkies.
“No problems here, handsome. What are you doing right now?” she asked with a coy smile.
“No plans, just heading home.”
“Why don’t you come home with me? We can get high and fuck.”
That came out of the blue. Her brazen, direct approach put me on my heels for a second but struck me like a kick to the balls … a shockingly pleasurable one.
“Uhh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea. Thanks, but I can’t.”
She grabbed my hand and said, “Aww, c’mon. I’ll never tell anyone. You’re cute, I like you, nobody’s at my place. C’mon, you won’t be sorry.”
I was sorely tempted but I had a feeling I would somehow end up very sorry. Your private business could spread quickly through the small, incestuous music scene. I had heard she was Layne’s girlfriend from my own girlfriend and had almost instantly found the reputation that preceded her to be pretty fucking spot-on. It was the type of situation I found nearly impossible to pass up, but her connection to Anna and to this guy I’d not met but already deeply respected as an artist and whose singing I loved made me think twice.
For once, I was smart enough to not take the bait. With more than a little regret, I again declined and walked home alone. But for quite a while afterward, it continued to play heavy on my mind. And in my fantasies.
25
NIGHT OUT WITH JERRY
One night, I went out alone to a local dive rock-and-roll bar, the Off Ramp, to see a Judas Priest cover band. Located on a street parallel to the I-5 freeway, hence its name, it was a shithole I rarely ever set foot inside. I was friends with an acquaintance of the British singer Jim Jones of the London band Thee Hypnotics and had visited him and his girlfriend once or twice in the run-down apartment they rented above the place, but other than that, I generally avoided the building. I’d seen Priest as a teenager and still, after seeing hundreds of great shows over the years, it remained the greatest concert I’d ever attended and I’d heard this band turned out an amazing imitation.
After more than a few drinks while sitting at the bar and waiting for the band to hit, I noticed two guys come stumbling through the door, obviously quite wasted themselves: Jerry Cantrell, guitarist/singer/songwriter of Alice in Chains, and local hero and nice guy Tommy Niemeyer, guitarist of the influential and beloved thrash/punk band the Accüsed. Jerry immediately came over and ordered drinks for the three of us. After watching about thirty minutes of the headliner and putting away half as many drinks, we wobbled unsteadily out the door, looking for a place to do some of the coke Jerry always had his pockets full of. My place was the closest, most obvious destination so we hailed a cab and headed up First Hill.
Always in hot water with my apartment manager Christian, whose window was directly next to the front steps, I warned the two of them to remain silent until we got upstairs. Once inside, Jerry dumped a huge bag of coke on a plate and starting cutting lines. I got a bottle of booze from the kitchen and we began one of those all-night coke-and-alcohol mind-melting sessions of intense yet instantly forgettable conversation, the kind you always regretted once the sun came up and your melon was pounding like Rod Carew had taken batting practice on your head all night, endlessly connecting his wooden bat with your skull, stroking single after single to the opposite field. After an hour or two, Tommy had clearly reached and then stepped way over and past his limit.
“Guys,” he said, “I gotta go. I have to do some stuff for my mom today and I can’t bail on her.”
I really loved hanging out with Tommy, who was funny as hell and one of the sweetest guys ever. I hated to see him leave, but since I’d not one loving or happy childhood memory of my mother, I let him go without a fight. Good on ol’ Tommy for caring for his mom; it was an impulse I would never know. As he left, I suddenly remembered I had a commitment myself that morning, one I absolutely could not miss. Bob Pfeifer was in town and I had a breakfast meeting with him that there was no way I could get out of. If the Trees were going to remain on Epic, some things were going to have to change, and Bob was hell-bent on giving me a dressing down. It wasn’t something I looked forward to, but knew it would be the end of us if I didn’t attend and take it on the chin.
“Fuck, Jerry! I just remembered I have breakfast with Pfeifer at nine thirty! What time is it? Jesus Christ, thank God I remembered.”
“Oh fuck that, dude. You’re coming out on the boat with me today. Forget Pfeifer. What’s he gonna do, drop you?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he’s gonna do. Those guys have had enough of us, bro. We don’t sell millions of records like you. He said, point blank, if I didn’t come to breakfast, he was gonna drop us! He’s serious, man.” I looked at the clock in my bedroom. Four thirty a.m. If I managed to fall asleep I might get four hours or so. I could do it on that. “Jerry, hang out as long as you want, make yourself at home, but I’ve gotta try and get some sleep or I’m fucked. Big-time fucked.”
“Okay, man. I’m gonna stay awake, come with you to breakfast, and then we’ll go spend the day on my boat.”
“Okay. Deal. Goodnight.”
I ate a handful of Valiums and climbed into bed. I don’t know how much time had passed but I was fully asleep when I felt someone gently shaking my shoulder.
“Lanegan. Lanegan,” came the whispered yet persistent voice waking me up. I opened my eyes to find Cantrell shaking me awake.
“What, Jerry? What time is it?”
“It’s six. I’m gonna head out to my boat now. I can’t stay awake for breakfast.”
“That’s cool. I’ll call you this week and we’ll hang.”
“Okay,” he replied. And then, “Hey, bro, do you mind if I borrow some of your porn?”
“Sure, man, take whatever you want. I’ll see you later.” And with that, I fell asleep, only to be rudely awakened by the incessant banging of my old-school alarm clock at nine. I stumbled out of bed, pulled on some jeans, brushed my teeth, and opened the closet near the front door to grab my coat. I stood staring into it for a minute. Something was not right. I pulled the light string and looked in disbelief into my previously packed closet.
My closet had been crammed side to side with a quarter of a refrigerator box filled with my lifetime’s collection of porn. It had every magazine, videotape, and sundry item I had collected in my twenty-plus years on the planet. It had held my nearly complete collection of Traci Lords’s catalog that Gary Conner had told me to get rid of when the scandal of her underage work had broken. Gone. All gone. That box must have weighed at least a hundred pounds. In my hungover state, I realized I didn’t have time to stand around pondering this mystery.