Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  After having to endure his presence for half an hour, I oscillated unsteadily on the last raw edge of my nerves. When they called me back to see the doc, I was so grateful to be out of his insane, over-the-top, and obnoxious line of fire that I immediately said, “Goddamn, I’m glad to see you.” When the doctor looked at me with a puzzled expression, I said, “Never mind, just happy to be out of the waiting room.” I stayed off dope, and even though I was exhausted all the time and definitely didn’t get through it painlessly, after years of trying on my own to get clean, eventually I was off everything.

  I slept on the couch at my pad at the Oakwoods; there was something about one of the bedrooms that creeped me out. It was nothing I could put my finger on, just an eerie vibe I felt whenever I went in it. I shut the doors of both bedrooms and stayed out of them the entire time I lived there.

  One morning, I was awakened by a huge, sudden, celebratory outbreak coming from the apartment directly above mine.

  “He’s innocent!”

  “Not guilty!”

  I groggily realized it was my neighbors celebrating what could only have been O. J. Simpson’s acquittal. His trial had been the biggest news and topic of discussion in America for months and I had been aware that the jury was out, contemplating his guilt or innocence. Now they had obviously come back with a not-guilty decision. The large, friendly black family upstairs had always been very nice to me, various family members engaging me in pleasant conversation in the hallway, parking lot, or yard. Once, one of the sons had seen me struggling to get my key out of my pocket while trying to hold a large paper bag filled with cans of soup. He had grabbed it from me as it started to rip and patiently held it while I opened the door. Excellent neighbors, but the loud yelling and early-morning partying was a bit too much to take as I lay there, still aching on the couch, day four off everything.

  It seemed like Drakoulias knew everyone in Hollywood. He was a popular, sought-after friend, dinner guest, and all-around mover and shaker. Every other day he fielded invitations to this function or that. Being by nature decidedly nonsocial, I learned to be extremely cautious if accepting any sort of invite from him.

  “Hey, Lanegan, you wanna come to dinner with me tonight?” George would offer up.

  “Who else is coming, George?” I would ask.

  “Nobody, bud! It’s just you and me, boys’ night out!”

  When we arrived at some fancy eatery, I would inevitably find out there were one or two other people joining us and they would always be some sort of celebrity, popular musician, or actor, people I’d never met before. I’d sit in uncomfortable silence throughout the meal while George and his pals laughed it up.

  When I’d finally started feeling better in early December, George came and got me one day.

  “Let’s go, Lanegan. We’re going for a ride.”

  Sitting in his truck as we drove up the 101 freeway, north of Los Angeles, I asked him, “Where are we going, George?”

  “Never mind that, you just behave yourself when we’re there.”

  This cryptic message was unlike his usual playful banter. He seemed more serious than normal, as though on a mission of some kind. Finally, we pulled off the freeway in Van Nuys, a somewhat run-down suburb filled with auto shops, Mexican food trucks, and hookers walking up and down past the shady, decrepit motels that lined the street. We took Sepulveda Boulevard, a long, seedy street that ran north-south all the way through the San Fernando Valley, over the hills and down past LAX airport. We rounded a corner and I realized we were at Sound City, a legendary recording studio I’d been to once before to visit a friend.

  George got out of the truck and I followed him inside. The secretary just smiled at him, pointed to a door across the room, and said, “They’re in studio one, George.” As we entered through the greenroom, there was a tall gentleman dressed in black with his back to us, arranging a bowl of food on a table. He turned around and there I was, face-to-face with Johnny Cash. He immediately saw George and hugged him and then me.

  “George! It’s so good to see you again, and you too, young fella! Get yourselves a chicken biscuit before the rest of the guys get in here and clean them out!” he said, holding up the bowl full of sandwiches he’d obviously been making himself for his band. We each took one, then he turned to me.

  “I’m sorry I don’t recall your name, son, but I remember your singing. You almost put me to shame at those shows!”

  My detox program was considered a success. So much so that my doctor wanted me to accompany him to some medical convention to parade me around as one of the shining examples of the miracle of Buprenex. On my first day of treatment, my doctor had leaned in as though telling me a secret and said he was the same doctor who was infamous for shooting heroin into his dick, as characterized in Jerry Stahl’s book Permanent Midnight. I declined his invitation to play show pony at his convention.

  However, I always wondered how he’d managed to hit in his cock. For years, the huge vein running down the length of mine had tortured and taunted me as I sat searching, sometimes for hours, to find a usable vein. On one desperate occasion when I’d attempted it, the vein had immediately blown up the second I pierced it with the needle’s tip. My arms had already been covered with huge abscessed wounds and I knew that if that were to happen to my boneless cock, it would be game over, so I made up my mind to stay away from it after that.

  The next night, I had attended a concert by the angelic-voiced singer Jeff Buckley with a girlfriend of mine. She’d befriended another girl while playing pool who came with us to the show. I’d gotten backstage passes from the promoter and we’d watched from the side of the stage. When Buckley walked offstage between the end of his set and encore, he’d come straight to where we were sitting, and I was smoking, on large equipment cases. He reached out with eyebrows upturned and a look that said “Please?” I took one last drag off the newly lit smoke and handed it to him. He smiled, bowed, and shook my hand, grinning again as he gratefully took a long pull off the unfiltered Lucky Strike.

  Later that night when the pool-playing girl had gone down on me, she said, “Jesus! What happened to your dick? It’s totally fucking bruised!”

  31

  IS THIS LOVE?

  Lying on my couch at the Oakwoods one afternoon, I was talking with a friend on the phone and Selene Vigil, the singer of Seattle band Seven Year Bitch, came up in conversation.

  Years earlier, Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson and I had gone to see the all-female band play in Seattle. I was instantly attracted to their singer, Selene. Onstage, she was like a cross between a sexy cat and a female Iggy Pop. While we were watching them, Erlandson spotted the actress Drew Barrymore in the audience and in a break between songs he said, “I’m gonna date that chick.” I said, “I’m gonna date that chick,” and pointed to Selene up on the stage. While the show continued, Eric indeed approached and captured Drew Barrymore in conversation and they looked to be getting along famously.

  Another friend of mine introduced me to a friend of his: Selene’s husband. When she got offstage and came over to her husband, I was introduced to Selene as well. Her smile and incredibly smoky voice again reminded me of a big cat and now I was twice as intrigued, but sadly that was to be our last interaction.

  Newly clean and exceedingly horny, the memory of that night instantly sprang to mind.

  “Goddamn, she is hot. I would love to hang out with her.”

  “Dude, I’m pretty sure that could be arranged. She’s up in San Francisco making a record, split up with that husband a long time ago. In fact, I know for certain she’s single, lonely, and you are her type.”

  “What, the junkie type who’s been clean a week?”

  “No, the great singer type. A man.”

  I asked him to give her my number. To my surprise, she called me a day later. We talked nonstop for what turned into a several-hour marathon. Just like that, I was completely hooked. By the end of the call, we were both saying shit like “God, I wish you
were here right now!” and “I can’t fucking wait to see you.” Her laughter, openness, and slightly discernible melancholic edge made me want to have her as soon as possible. The ease of our conversation, the shit I’d told her that I’d never told anyone before. Throwing my usual suspicious nature to the wind, I knew she was going to be someone good for me. We made plans to get together that weekend. She was to fly down to Los Angeles and spend it with me.

  When she showed up that weekend, I found myself attracted to her in a way that had been a rarity in my world. I thought, Is this what love is? I had never felt such a powerful pull before. I fell hard and fast. In the vulnerable state of being clean for the first time in years, I gave myself over completely to this exotic, funny, and kind creature. I found everything about her irresistible, especially her laugh, her thoughtful sensitivity, the way she felt in my arms, and her voice. I found in Selene someone who had experienced deep sadness and loss, someone who wanted love and needed someone as much as I did.

  The next weekend, I went to hang out with her in San Francisco, where she was also in the middle of making a record. Lying together on the floor of her room listening to music one night, “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the M.G.s came on. She got up and began to dance in front of me. It was one of the most sensual and touching gestures I’d ever experienced. She came to stay with me again in Los Angeles, and as we sat together in the bathtub one night she said something that cut to my very core: “What happened to you to make you so sad?”

  It hit me like a hammer. I realized that, even at this moment when I felt as happy and comfortable with myself as I could ever remember being, the guilt and shame I wore like a noose around my neck was still obvious to this sensitive, intuitive woman. She saw right through me.

  “I’m not sure I can honestly answer that. There’s so much stuff I’ve buried away. If I gave it any thought, I might start crying or something.”

  Against my will, my mind spent a quick minute going down the long list of damage I’d done to not only innocent people I hardly knew but also those I’d known not at all but who had suffered the misfortune of crossing my path. I shut my eyes. I’d been such a negative, toxic influence—­I thought of all the things I did and did not do that hurt the people I’d loved the most, especially the people I’d lost. In a rare instant of raw, open vulnerability, I started to cry. She held on to me tightly as tears streamed out of my unopenable, burning eyes.

  In that moment, the rabid, disease-crazed dog I had carried for years inside of me tore its way out through every barrier I’d put up around it. I had never cried in front of anybody before. Grief over the years of pain I’d caused myself and others poured out in torrents. It was as much of myself as I’d ever shown anyone. Though I was gravely flawed with damage that ran as deep as the Mariana Trench, she accepted me without a moment’s hesitation. It made me think that, for the first time ever, maybe I had at last found the person who would understand, show me how to be human, and not judge me for all of my fucked-up, self-serving misdeeds. It was something I’d never thought possible. Maybe this was who I’d always been waiting for.

  32

  FAMILY REUNION

  As it neared Christmastime, my sister asked me to come out to eastern Washington state where my mother lived to see her. Not fucking likely.

  A few years earlier, my girlfriend Anna had insisted on meeting my parents. I had called my mother and she agreed to let us come over the Cascades and spend a night at her farm in the vast valley of apple orchards and grape fields south of the city of Yakima. Minutes after we walked in from the three-hour drive, Anna saw a copy of my first solo record sitting inside an open closet door.

  “Oh, I see you have Mark’s record. Isn’t it great?”

  “Yeah, his sister sent it to me but it’s so goddamned depressing I couldn’t listen to it.” And then to me, “Why does it have to be so goddamned depressing?”

  “Hey, Mom, good to see you. Would you happen to have twenty bucks for gas?”

  “No. But you can follow me to the station and I’ll put ten dollars’ worth in your car.”

  She was sure I wanted her measly $20 for drugs. We had stayed less than fifteen minutes. I drove in silence for five minutes on the way to the gas station behind my mother’s pickup truck, then asked Anna, “Do you get it now?”

  “Yes,” she quietly replied.

  My sister couldn’t travel because her darkly damaged husband had charges pending against him and could not leave the state. Pablo had been accused in an attack on a disabled man in a group home where he worked the night shift as an orderly. When the details of the accusation had been brought to my attention, it made me ill. I had begged her to leave him immediately but she had been trained through years of subtly escalated abuse to ride it out. If she chose to stay with this depraved man and expected me to travel to, of all places, my mother’s in the middle of winter, it was a no-go.

  What tipped the scales was when she told me my father, who had by now lived for several years in solitude in Alaska, was going to be renting a motel room nearby. It would be my first chance to see him in years. I had a long conversation with Selene, in which she urged me to endure my mother in order to see my sister and father. We spoke, too, of our rapidly expanding plans together.

  “When we’re done making these records, you can move into my place,” I promised her. She was just getting out of a failed relationship and had no place to live.

  “Are you sure? I want to be with you, but I need you to be sure.”

  “Of course, I’m sure,” I replied. “I love you.”

  So, at my sister’s request, against my wishes, against every instinct, I agreed to go north for the holidays. I got on a plane back to Washington for the first time since I’d gotten clean a mere six weeks earlier.

  Mike McCready, who I’d gone to a couple twelve-step meetings with in Los Angeles and who had played some guitar on the record the Trees were making, had offered to have a cleaning crew go into my apartment to remove any drugs or paraphernalia that might have been left behind. I thanked him for the gesture and declined. I wasn’t even going to Seattle, just catching a connector at Sea-Tac for the short flight to Yakima. I packed my wallet, keys, and anything else attached to my apartment in my checked bag, just in case I suddenly got a crazy idea and decided to make an unplanned stop there.

  On the flight, my mind drifted back to a week or so earlier, when I’d finally felt well enough to get physically active. Our studio was one block off Sunset Boulevard so, shirtless and shoeless, I took the studio bicycle and rode up and down the crowded street with no hands on the handlebars, just feeling the joy of being alive. As I passed one of the storefronts full of cheesy tourist-trap items, I heard Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” blasting out of the store from the stereo inside. It was a song I’d always loved, a song that always made me sad. A thought crossed my mind from out of nowhere: If this is living, why be alive? In that moment, I veered wildly from joy to extreme darkness as if someone had flicked a switch. This thought that had come from out of the blue, brought on by a song I loved, gave me a sudden chill. I rode back to the studio to put my clothes back on.

  Without warning, about an hour outside Seattle, I was gripped by an anguished, inexplicable fear.

  Who are you fucking kidding? said a voice from deep inside my head. You can’t stay clean.

  But I must, there’s so much left to do.

  Fuck that. You will never make it.

  I was caught in an intense, surprise anxiety attack. Only when I mentally gave in to the idea that I was getting off the plane in Seattle and going to score, did its heart-pounding, cold-sweat-inducing shortness of breath abate.

  Without so much as a sweater or a jacket in the cold Northwest December weather, without my apartment keys or even a fucking quarter in my pocket, I walked off the plane and got into a cab, headed for First Hill, Terry and Jefferson. When I arrived, I wrote down my info on the driver’s business card with a stub of penci
l I had in my pants pocket so he could be paid later. The cabbie wasn’t buying my bullshit. He crumpled it up, threw it back at me, and attempted to spit on me. Understandable.

  For years, I had fought almost daily with the abundance of cab drivers in my neighborhood, known as “bloodrunners.” They sat in a long line outside the hospitals, waiting to rush bags of emergency blood to hospitals all around the city. I had an ongoing battle with them for years and many refused to give me rides. I always had very specific routes to take that I knew were quickest and was constantly at odds with the drivers who wanted to go their own way. Once, a driver had taken exception to the pocketful of change I had attempted to pay him with. “I’m not accepting these nickels and dimes!” “Well, you’d better if you want to get paid,” I’d said, “this is the exact amount of the fare and the last time I checked it was legal fucking tender in this country!” That scene ended up with me throwing the entire handful through his open window with as much strength as I had, pelting him in the face and torso with a machine-gun blast of coins. So this kind of confrontational taxi-driver shit was old hat.

  I had skirted town owing my connection Val at the projects money so that wasn’t an option. It was getting late in the day and if I was going to score, it could only be by paging Tommy Hansen, hoping he would call back and then drive into the city to front me something. I bummed a quarter off a passerby and paged Tommy by memory. He called me back on the pay phone, I explained my predicament, and in a half hour he showed up with some dope. Thank God. Now to get into my apartment.

  With my keys on a plane to Yakima and my place on the fourth floor, there was only one way in. I waited impatiently until a resident came to the front door, then grabbed the handle as it was closing and followed them in. I looked furtively up and down the long hallway outside my place. Seeing it vacant, I quickly kicked open the door that came from the hallway into my kitchen, a door I never used. Once inside, I realized I’d not paid the electric bill for two months.