by Mark Lanegan
Then one night, Dylan failed to come home. Weeks later, I found out he’d been arrested on a burglary charge and was in county awaiting trial. That left me with only my ever-growing cadre of Eritreans, Ethiopians, and street people I dealt with daily for company.
29
THE LOTTERY
After Dylan was busted and Slayer made himself scarce, I was living alone. I began a relationship and scam with a homeless crack addict who, even after living hard on the streets, still had a head-turning, inherent beauty. She called herself Shadow and that was the only name I ever knew her by.
I was introduced to her by Dawitt and Mikey, a scandalous pair of crackheads who had traveled together from war-torn Eritrea in the Horn of Africa to escape conscription into the army. First to Khartoum in Sudan, where they survived by selling stolen newspapers on the street. Eventually they made their way to Saudi Arabia, where they were jailed as vagrants. Somehow they were found by some American Christian association that secured their freedom and brought them to Chicago. Mikey, the shorter, older, always-smiling, and sweet-natured of the two had supposedly won the lotto not once but twice and had lost it all both times to divorce. With the last of his second winnings, he had purchased two tickets on the Greyhound bus and they came out west to Seattle, God knows why.
Dawitt was a different story. He and I were great pals for a long time. Whenever I heard a car alarm going off outside, I knew he was in the neighborhood. He car-prowled and smoked crack all day, most of which he bought from me. Either that or he would trade some stolen shit to me for a rock or two. He had begged me to sell him some heroin one night and I did. He cooked it up and shot it in my apartment and instantly went into a seizure, falling on the floor, shaking and foaming at the mouth. I tried to pull him out of it but when it had stretched to three, then four and five minutes and he hadn’t stopped seizing, I thought he might die. Panicked and jacked on fear, just the two of us there, I picked up the one-hundred-and-sixty-pound, six-foot-tall African and carried him over my shoulder, his shaking more pronounced every step I took. Down the long hallway to the four flights of stairs at the back of my building and then an entire city block to the Harborview emergency entrance. I laid him on the ground, rang the bell, and quickly crossed the street, walking back toward my building as fast as possible. Not an easy feat to pull off. After that, he hated me with a seething bitterness and would only come to me for crack as an absolute last resort. His intense burning distaste was suddenly so obvious, I couldn’t understand it. He had turned on me like a snake overnight. I asked Mikey what the fuck his problem was, hadn’t I saved his life after all? Mikey informed me that Dawitt would hate me forever because I had “shamed” him and as a man he could never forgive that. I guess he would have preferred to die on my apartment floor than to be carried all the way to the fucking hospital on the back of another man. From that point on, as far as he was concerned, it was war. He spent a good deal of time and energy trying his best to do whatever he could to fuck me up and take me down.
The only good thing Dawitt had done for me after his declaration of war was introduce me to Shadow. She was a dark-skinned African American who had the same skin affliction Michael Jackson had, with large patches of light, almost-white skin across her body and face. For a couple hits of crack, she would clean my filthy apartment and give me an incredible blow job. I liked having her around. She had a great off-the-wall sense of humor and giant cast-iron balls. She was not to be fucked with. If you made a deal with her, by God, you’d best stick to it. Life was dangerous and hard for a homeless woman in the ’90s Northwest, a place rife with sadistic johns and a hunting ground for more than one active serial killer at all times. She had to be tough as fuck just to survive.
“Hey, Whitey Ford, I got a plan for you. I think you’re gonna like it,” she announced one night after smoking with me in my pad all day. Whitey Ford was Shadow’s name for me. No one in my hood called me by my name. I sometimes wondered if anyone even knew what it was.
“You know that mattress in your dining room? I could get so many johns off the street up here for some good fifty-dollar head. We could split the dough and smoke all night.” She paused for a second and then, “Or I can just get ’em up here, and after I got their money in my hand, you come on out of the bedroom there carrying that baseball bat of yours or the pistol I seen in the box in your closet and you just tell ’em ‘GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE I FUCKING KILL YOU!’ What’ya think?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“We gotta take all their money, not just fifty bucks. Whatever they’re carrying. If anyone has the balls to go to the cops, we’ll say you are my girlfriend and they offered it all to you before I came out and caught them trying to fuck my woman.”
“Hahahaha! I like the way you think, white boy! Let’s do it!”
And so we began a routine that caught so many ugly, fat old men with their dick in their hand. It was easier than my punchboard scam as a kid. She did all the work; I was just the frightening, unexpected cherry on top. Not one guy ever put up a fight or went to the cops, or at least no cop ever showed up. We pulled this successful rip-off daily for quite a while. I always made sure to get my apartment keys back from her whenever we were done for the day, even on the occasions she spent the night. I was very fond of her but had no illusions as to what the true nature of our relationship really was, and the last thing I needed was for her to get my keys duplicated and give her free rein to my shit when I was out. Then one day, she just disappeared. Whether she’d been busted or had simply left the life to get clean, I never saw her again, to not a small amount of sadness.
I got buzzed by someone at the front door. I took the stairs since the elevator was out as usual. To my unhappy surprise, there was Demri, dressed in a white hospital gown, wheeling a pole with an IV bottle, at my front door in broad daylight. I was pissed off beyond words. Should Christian happen to catch sight of this scene, it would be yet one more notch on his belt of complaints.
“What the fuck, Demri? What happened to you?”
She lowered her gown and showed me the ugly red vertical scar running down the middle of her chest.
“I got endocarditis and they gave me a pacemaker.” She smiled as if she were telling me she won the lottery. “Mark, baby, do you have any dope? I’ll even take cottons, whatever.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? No way, get your ass back over to the hospital. You’re out of your mind.”
Endocarditis was a dreaded malady an IV drug user could catch from the bacteria in heroin. It destroyed your heart valves and was often deadly. That she’d contracted the infection, had to have a pacemaker installed, and still wheeled her shit over to here to try and get high, even if it were just off my cottons, blew my mind. The unforgiving power of her addiction was shocking. I callously shut the door on her midsentence during her plea for drugs, turned around, walked back upstairs to my apartment, and turned the buzzer off. Like my first meeting with her, I kept this episode to myself, not wanting to cause Layne any more heartache then he’d already taken.
Around the same time, Mike Starr also buzzed me one night. Surprised to see him, I opened the door and let him in. He was the ex–bass player for Alice in Chains. I hadn’t seen him in years.
“What the fuck, Mike? How you been?”
“Jesus Christ, man, I just got busted but made bail. I’m dopesick as hell, are you holding anything?”
I had not known Starr as a junkie during the time we spent touring together, just a strange cat like the trailer-park hoodlums I’d grown up around in eastern Washington, not super intelligent but with a dubious gift for getting over on people. A low-level rip-off and conman.
“Damn. Sorry to hear that, bro. C’mon up to my place.”
Once inside my apartment, I saw that, despite the cold weather, he was dressed in only a white T-shirt and a pair of white boxer shorts with a very noticeable shitstain running down the back of them. No shoes, nothing.
“Sorry, bro, I do
n’t have any dope, just a little crack for sale if you’re interested.”
I lied about the dope since I could plainly see he wasn’t holding a wallet or any dough, no pockets to keep them in if he did; crack was something I could share a tiny bit of, if he were so inclined.
“Oh fuck. What am I gonna do?”
He was talking to himself, not me.
“Mark, can I use your phone?”
“Sure, Mike, go on ahead.”
He got on the phone and went around the corner into my kitchen for privacy but in his agitated state did not notice me standing right outside the door, listening.
“No, goddamnit! He doesn’t have any!” he muttered emphatically to whoever was on the other line. “He’s got crack, that’s all I know. No, I don’t know if he’s got cash up here.”
Someone had either coerced him into trying to burn me or he was just the scout for whoever came next. He hung up the phone.
“Hey, man, sorry I couldn’t help you out but I got somewhere to be so you gotta split now.”
“Hey, can I catch a ride with you?” he asked.
“Not riding. See ya, brother,” I said, opening my infrequently used kitchen door and gently shoving him out, locking the door behind.
For the next ten minutes or so, he continued knocking intermittently, saying quietly, “Hey, Mark. Hey, bro, can I come back in?” I didn’t answer him, sitting on my couch with the loaded, stolen Desert Eagle .44 Magnum pistol I had traded Dawitt fifty bucks’ worth of crack for on my lap, just in case there was going to be more to this scene than met the eye. Eventually, I heard him sigh heavily and the hallway floor creaking as he walked barefoot softly away down the corridor and to the stairs. I would not see him again for another several years.
30
LUCKY
At the end of ’95, the Trees had put together enough demos that Epic agreed to give us another shot at making a record. Bob Pfeifer had taken a job as president of Disney’s new “rock” record label, Hollywood Records. The guy I’d hand-delivered the cassette of “Nearly Lost You” to for the Singles soundtrack, Michael “Goldie” Goldstone, had taken on the task of being our new A&R man. We hired producer George Drakoulias to make this record and in the fall of that year we moved to Los Angeles to begin.
George was a singular character, in a class by himself. Extremely outgoing and fun-loving, always smiling and laughing. He was physically imposing, with an unkempt mop of black hair on his head and a bushy black beard. Had you not known him or heard him talk, you could have imagined him shouting orders on the deck of a pirate ship or chopping up meat behind a butcher’s counter, but his gregarious, bigger-than-life personality fit his large frame perfectly. He was forever springing shit on us in the studio with some kind of surprise or joke, and all of us loved him from the moment we met him. Although he was a year younger than me, he was a highly successful and well-known record producer who comported himself with the self-assured grace, humor, and smarts that made me feel like he was several years my senior. He was also a patient and understanding friend and had made it clear that everyone was to leave me alone, not exert any pressure, and allow me to heal from detoxing before I was expected to participate in the recording.
I was determined to get clean in order to do my best work so I started going to a Beverly Hills clinic every other day to get a shot of Buprenex. It was a drug that kept you from withdrawals. In theory, you would wean down and eventually off of it, painlessly. It was being touted as the new “safe” methadone. Shortly before he died, Kurt had given me an entire case of small glass vials of the stuff. I’d never used it. Instead, I’d peddled it around Seattle, selling it to junkies who wanted to kick, explaining how to use it like a low-rent house-call doctor. Now I was the patient. I disliked being driven from the infamous Oakwood apartments in Burbank where I lived all the way out to Beverly Hills, a task that most often fell to our guitar tech Danny Baird, but the treatment seemed to be working.
There was rarely anyone in the waiting room of the office shared by three doctors of different unknown specialties, but one day I walked through the door and ran into Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland. We’d met for the first time through a shared drug dealer. I’d gone to let her in one day and instead of her, he’d burst headlong through the door like a rag doll, knocking me to the floor with him on top, kissing my face and telling me how much he loved me. We’d hung out a few times getting fucked up and I had even sung on one of their songs for an album that was never released, but now that he and I were going through the same routine to get clean, he was a different animal. While loaded, he’d been kind of crazy and fun to be around, but when he wasn’t high, he was not nearly as enjoyable, super serious, carrying the weight of the universe on his shoulders. Way too unhappy for me; I had my own unhappiness to battle.
On day three of the Buprenex treatments, I was dropped off at a Hollywood comedy club where daily twelve-step meetings were held. I wore a heavy coat inside the club as, despite the Buprenex, even in the warm weather of California in November I still felt the pain and chills of withdrawals. The place was nearly empty. I’d gotten there early, about thirty minutes before the start of the meeting. I sat in the farthest seat from the front, intending not to participate, just to listen and learn. I was smoking a cigarette and staring mindlessly at the floor when someone put their hand on my shoulder. A familiar voice said, “Hey, Lucky.”
Only one person in my life had ever called me by that nickname. He had called me that consistently in our time together but I’d not seen him in years. I looked up and the leader of the band Social Distortion, Mike Ness, was standing there with a concerned and slightly sad smile.
“How you been, Lucky? You don’t look like you’re doing so hot.”
Years earlier, the Trees had opened for Social D for three months around the country. We traveled in our carpet-cleaning van while they traveled in a brand-new tour bus. He’d seen me making out with an attractive girl on the second day of the tour. On day three of the tour, he had nicknamed me and it had stuck. From then on, I was Lucky. It was a good-natured and ironic nickname because Ness himself had a clutch of the hottest chicks at his disposal. Wherever we went, there was a gang of beautiful, sexy women practically fighting one another for his attention. He hooked up with the most badass, jaw-dropping beauties daily.
His band came out of soundcheck unhappy every day as he apparently led the band and conducted his business with an iron fist. “Chopping block, always a motherfucking chopping block in there,” said the bass player as he exited the venue one day, pouring sweat and shaking his head in consternation. Yet Mike was always extremely kind to me, going out of his way to make me a daily espresso from the machine on their bus, sharing his private thoughts, and asking my opinion on a variety of subjects in a personal manner. Had I been watching their sets? Had I seen the bit where he pulled a comb out of his back pocket and ran it through his already perfectly greased-back, rockabilly-style haircut onstage? Was it cool or lame? (It made the huge contingent of hot girls in the audience go crazy, so …) Mike was so completely down-to-earth, honest, and totally sincere, it was impossible not to dig him. I enjoyed his company, looked forward to hanging out, and sincerely liked him a lot. He was naturally funny, cool as hell, and fearlessly wore his heart on his sleeve. And unlike many other musicians whose paths I crossed through the years, there was zero entitled-rock-star bullshit to his personality. What you saw was what you got.
Ness had a few years clean at the time and attended meetings in nearly every city we visited. He became aware that I had the exact same amount of time as him, but with zero meetings or program of any kind.
One day, he said, “Hey, Lucky, c’mon with me down to the store, I need some Choke-a-mocha.” Choke-a-mocha was his favorite drink. He would mix Swiss Miss instant cocoa drink with Folgers instant coffee. As we walked to the store together to get the ingredients for his novel beverage of choice, he said, “I don’t get it, man. How do you not drink or use
without going to meetings?”
“I don’t know how you can stay clean going to meetings, Mike,” I replied in my usual ignorant, cocky manner. “If I had to talk about drinking and using every day, I’d get loaded for sure.”
He had shaken his head incredulously at me and patted me on the back in a gesture that seemed to imply he understood my misguided backwoods thinking and felt compassion for it.
Years later, at this nearly empty meeting in Hollywood, I saw the same look in his eyes.
“I always thought I’d find you here someday, Lucky,” he said gently. “Welcome home.”
He sat next to me and we shot the shit until the meeting was starting.
“I got somewhere to be,” he said, “I just wanted to get a feel for the place since I can’t catch a meeting today. So good to see you here. Stick around, it will change your life.”
He slipped me his number, and with that, he split. I was tore the fuck up but he had remained clean all those years since I’d met him. Looking back, I was acutely aware of how wise he had been then and how recklessly, willfully unintelligent I was.
On another trip into Beverly Hills for my shot, I found myself alone in the waiting room with two other people: the actor James Woods and a girl who looked young enough to be his granddaughter. I highly doubted Woods was there to see my doctor. In a loud voice verging on yelling, he endlessly harangued his unfortunate young companion with nonstop, rapid-fire sentences, telling her some story obviously meant to impress. I felt sorry for her, and then, quickly, for myself. Gesturing dramatically with his hands while turned completely sideways in his chair and looming over the girl, he talked so loud and so fast, never taking a break or letting her say a word, that I started to get a pounding headache. I nearly said, “Hey, man, shut the fuck up!” but I bit my tongue.