Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  As the last light of day was fading, I frantically searched the pad for a lighter, candles, flashlight, spoons, and old rigs: the tools I was going to need to get high. I did my first shot in six weeks by candlelight and all the anxiety that had plagued me on the flight drifted away with the familiar blanketlike warmth of my true love.

  When I awoke, it was to the gray half-light of morning flooding the room like a dam had broken and hit the sewage treatment plant on its path of destruction. The reality of coming to on this same piece-of-shit couch where I’d spent so much time getting loaded as well as being sick made me ache with regret. I should easily have recognized it could just have been a one-time slip. I had the option and free will to climb back on the wagon. But that truth never occurred to me. Instead, I was overcome with a typically morose, unshakable feeling that I had blown my first, last, and only chance to get the demon of drugs off of my back. My only choices were to either do what already seemed impossible after only one night of getting loaded—start again and attempt to stay clean—or just to give in to my true dark nature and get high to the bitter end, however near that might be. I instantly decided on the latter.

  I called my accountant Laurie who put some of my dwindled-to-damn-near-nothing money in my account so I could withdraw the dough and buy a plane ticket to eastern Washington. After I carefully cleaned any evidence of drugs, I told my landlord Christian that someone had broken in to my place. I left him to deal with fixing the doorframe and replacing the door. I collected my money, bought some dope and a bag of rigs, and headed back out to the airport to make my dreaded Christmas appearance.

  I called my sister from the pay phone near the gate and told her to send someone to pick me up. To my disappointment, it was Mother who came driving up. As a young child, I quit wondering why she had such open contempt for me. All I knew was that she did. Every word, comment, or look at me made it so transparently obvious, it almost made me laugh.

  “So you finally kicked the drugs, I hear. Is that true?”

  Her addiction to belittling and trying to squash my personality and individuality had ceased to have any power twenty years earlier.

  “Yes, it’s true. I wouldn’t set foot into this messed-up situation if it wasn’t. I can’t believe you are letting him stay at your house, much less let him be around the kids.”

  I referred to my two-and-a-half-year-old and six-month-old nephews, the unfortunate sons of my sister. I couldn’t believe I was related to my brother-in-law, even if it was just by marriage. The whole thing disgusted me beyond words. As usual, my mother’s response was to minimize anything ugly she didn’t want to look at while diminishing any concern of mine.

  “Oh for chrissakes, he’s not even been charged with anything, we don’t know if he’s guilty!”

  “I sure as fuck do.”

  My mother pulled her pickup off to the side of the highway and offered to let me out if that was the type of language I was going to use.

  “Knock it off, Mom, just take me to your house so we can get on with this charade.”

  It all came rushing back as we drove through these wind-whipped agricultural lands I had grown up to despise. There had been two giant holes on the inside of the front door of my childhood home. One from when my mother threw a weighty, solid-metal statuette at my head as I ran out the door to escape her rage, the second a year or two later, from a heavy marble bookend.

  From the time I was seven years old, she had forced me to go house to house in our neighborhood asking for work. “You’re going to have to work to get any money around here. I’m certainly not giving you an allowance. That’s for spoiled kids and you are already spoiled enough.” I would occasionally be hired to mow someone’s large, unkempt lawn for two dollars.

  When I was eight, I slipped and fell off a bridge into a frozen-over canal. Crashing through the ice, I broke my femur bone. My friend, who had been unable to pull me up the steep sides of the canal, had run a couple of miles through the fields in thigh-deep snow to get help. I had bobbed, fighting to keep my head above the ice and freezing water for an hour with a leg that refused to help while my dog ran barking hysterically up and down the banks. A neighbor had waded up to his neck into the ice-water and hooked a rope around my torso, under my arms. He had then agonizingly pulled me out of the water and up the side of the bank with a snowmobile. They drilled a large metal screw through my knee, put me into a full body cast, and sent me home in it after almost two months in the hospital. While I was lying helplessly immobile on the bed they’d set up for me in the middle of our living room, practically mummified in the cast that ran from my chest all the way down one leg and halfway down the other, my mother had dumped an entire large cardboard box of hardbound textbooks over my head one day in another fit of rage. Months later, I was newly freed of the cast and on crutches when, not so sure how I could navigate it, she’d impatiently tried to shove me down an escalator in a department store. Another woman had seen it and intervened.

  She had friends with a vast amount of acreage filled with fields of tomatoes. She made me join the migrant Mexican farm workers, picking tomatoes in the baking summer sun. Forced out into the fields, half the time I picked a tomato, it would explode in my hand, the rotten backside out of view until it was too late. The acidic juice eventually burned the skin on my hands. By the end of the day, they were covered in an ugly painful rash since I didn’t have the gloves the men who did this for a living wore. I was paid maybe five or ten dollars for a day’s work, my mother refusing to allow her friends to pay me more than a pittance.

  While I picked tomatoes all day, she played cards and drank beer inside the air-conditioned house. In private, she would only rage at us, but while drinking, her verbal abuse took on a different tone. Instead of the harsh recriminations she repeated daily, she took evil, smiling delight in drunkenly ridiculing us kids. Whenever she ran into someone she knew in public, her kids immediately became objects of ridicule, as though everyone found her “jokes” hilarious. While driving under the influence of alcohol, she’d crank the car radio and attempt to sing along with it. Never knowing the words, she’d be halfway behind each line, tunelessly singing the lyrics after she heard them. When she once heard me quietly singing along to something on American Top 40, she had laughed and said, “Jesus, don’t they teach you kids to sing in school?” My entire childhood, my mother, who, unbelievably, worked as a college lecturer of early childhood education, had been a wholly detestable, damaged witch. I was now a grown man and the last person I was taking any shit from was her.

  We came to their property, an apple orchard of several acres. Shortly after I’d quit drinking as a teenager, my mother and stepfather had given me a job there. I had toiled on my hands and knees in the frozen snow of an iced-over winter past. The roots had come back up through the soil and surrounded the trees, “suckers” as they were known. With a tool something like a pair of bolt cutters, I dug beneath the snow and the frozen ground and then battled to cut these thick ropes of wood until my hands were cramped and bloodily blistered beneath my gloves, my pants wet and stiff from kneeling in the snow all day, my feet frozen to numbness inside my boots. And all for the shittiest wage. Outside the one-time gift of ten bucks’ worth of gas, my mother had not given me one single free dime my entire life and was loath to pay me anything close to a fair wage when I worked for them.

  When we arrived at my mother and stepfather’s ranch-style house in the middle of the orchard, the first thing I did was lock myself in a spare bedroom. As fast as I could, I did a large shot of heroin I’d already cooked up and carried with me in a full outfit on the plane to fortify, anesthetize, and sustain me through this dismal sideshow exhibition. My sister seemed relieved at my appearance. Her husband Pablo could not look me in the eye. He had been an older teammate on my high school football team. He had been so popular that he was voted homecoming prince one year. He had met my older sister after high school and they had married. A popular, extremely outgoing, and, on the surf
ace, very nice, charming guy, generally liked by everyone, myself included, his deep unseen darkness not to be revealed until much later.

  I had very little to say to him, disgusted that I was even here in my mother’s kitchen. His lawyer had made a deal with the place where he’d been working when he’d committed the assault that he’d not be charged for the time being under the condition he not leave the state. The company he’d worked for wanted desperately to avoid a trial, afraid they’d lose their license to operate and be forced to close. It was a rigged, dirty deal.

  Here I was, staying in a houseful of people I could not stand, guilted by the gesture of my father having traveled all the way here. Not that he’d be able to join in any kind of celebration at my mother’s; she was too vindictive to put the past aside and allow him that. He was sitting alone in a motel nearby so his kids and grandsons could visit him for short intervals. I blamed the entire mess on my brother-in-law Pablo. I held him responsible for this homecoming that felt like a jail sentence.

  Months earlier, my sister had shared with me some dark shit she’d discovered. She had been looking for something in the house and came across an ugly stash. Pablo had been clandestinely filling numerous notebooks and journals with bizarre sex-crime fantasies in which my sister was the star, the victim, and always ended up dead. Despite my own personal legal and consensual kinks, this clearly set off alarm bells. My sister’s obvious fear put me on edge.

  I had begged her to call the cops. With two babies to care for, she felt compelled to continue living with him, handcuffed by circumstance yet fearing for her life on a daily basis. Through my connections at a local pawn shop owned by a friend of mine, I knew I had at least one totally badass character in my corner and in a position to help. A huge, muscular, funny, and cool Seattle police officer named John Powers was a fan and a friend, an ace in the hole should I ever find myself in a real jam. I talked to him about my sister’s situation and he agreed Pablo’s hobby was troublesome. The notebooks filled with these scenarios where my sister was gang-raped and murdered could legally be considered plans he intended to carry out, not just simple fantasy stories. If I could get my hands on them and turn the evidence over to him, he’d do his best to make sure Pablo got what he had coming.

  I had made plans to meet my sister one day to get them from her. After taking the ferry over to her island home, to my amazement she said she had destroyed them. She had a talk with someone in the prosecutor’s office that Powers had hooked her up with and they said they would put her and the kids in witness protection, but such was her fear of being tracked down and killed by Pablo’s unbalanced mother that she decided to stick it out.

  His private writing habits had me convinced for certain this fuck had done what he’d been accused of: the physical assault of a heavily disabled man, a man with cognitive mental problems that made it difficult for him to communicate. If anything was going to save Pablo’s ass, it was that the victim couldn’t verbally make his case in an understandable way. Like many perpetrators of violent crimes, Pablo had hidden it for years with his gregarious, ultra-friendly exterior. Not only had Pablo’s mother vehemently blamed my sister for his crime, incredibly, sadly, predictably, our own mother had done the same. I felt genuine grief and sadness for my sister’s plight but also a seething, powerless anger toward her fearful, spiritless lack of dominion to escape and my own straightjacketed inability to help.

  In the midst of my own personal addiction hell, she had become so afraid of Pablo that at one point, she had begged me to come stay in her house to make sure nothing happened. Each afternoon for the better part of a week, I would walk down the hill, get on a ferry, and travel to their house. I would sit wide awake all night in their living room, stepping outside every hour or so to hit the pipe, just so my sister felt safe enough to sleep. Finally, she found some blood on her bathroom floor where I’d sloppily fixed in the middle of the night and thought better of having me around her kids. I knew I had to disengage before my homicidal impulse spun totally out of control. After Layne Staley spent hours one night patiently yet emphatically taking me step-by-step over every reason why murdering Pablo was a terrible idea, I had finally turned my back on the entire grotesque circus.

  This Christmas get-together was an obvious mistake. The “happiest” times were the couple of evenings I’d spent with my father, watching TV together in a sad, single-story roadside motel. I had to find a way out. I attended an evening AA meeting totally loaded just to receive a 30-day chip for being clean in order to falsely prove to my poor, loving, hopeful father I was no longer using. Then I announced that I had to return to Seattle the next day for a business meeting. I was, of course, taking the short, inexpensive flight to re-up on my stock of heroin and use the rest of a royalty check to buy some gifts for the family. Already shooting a gram a day and fully strung out again, I returned to play the part of the big shot. I came in wearing a huge, outlandish shiny silver coat I’d purchased and a pair of sunglasses you might imagine Elton John sporting onstage, acting the star in order to rub my mother’s face in the shit of my “success.” I turned a deaf ear to her ridicule and put-downs and, usurping her coveted spot as center of attention, lavished expensive gifts on everyone except her and my brother-in-law. The two of them received the exact same pair of the cheapest, ugliest, fucked-up Christmas mittens I could find, handed to them in plastic grocery bags.

  I was scheduled to be there five days. On three of them, I flew to Seattle and back. Finally, while taking me to the airport yet again, my mother called me out on my obvious bullshit.

  “You’re not clean, you goddamn liar. Don’t come back to my house!”

  “Gladly. But then you’d better turn around and take me back there so I can get my stuff out of your place.”

  “You are no longer welcome there. I’ll pack it up and send it to you,” she yelled, our confrontation escalating.

  “Let’s face it, Mom, I’ve never been welcome in your fucking house. The only reason I came was to see my father!”

  Slamming on the brakes about a mile from the airport, she screamed, “You get the hell out of my truck; I never want to see you again!”

  I immediately exploded in furious, dangerous anger.

  “You drive me to the fucking airport or I swear to fucking God, I will kill you right here in this truck and drive myself,” I said at the top of my voice, one considerably more robust and powerful then hers. I meant it. All the years of taking her shit, being constantly hammered with her tirades of what a useless, unintelligent loser I was, neglected, constantly ridiculed and physically abused as a child … it all came rushing to the forefront of my mind and her habitual negativity and hatred was by now far outmatched by my own.

  As we sat there screaming at each other, I suddenly became conscious of a third voice in the truck, that of my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew, who sat between my mother and me in the front seat of her pickup.

  “No! No! No!”

  As I heard his tiny voice, I realized he was punching me in the ribs with his miniature fist. I was instantly ashamed and the intensity of my anger was completely diffused. I had never felt like such a lost and lonely piece of shit. I had no idea what would happen next but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Not only had I quickly relapsed after what had felt like scaling K2 to get clean, but it took a baby child to stop me from physically attacking my own mother. Still, I had to get in the last word.

  “You demented hag. I spent my childhood having nightmares starring you every night, only to have to live them for real in daylight hours. This is why both your real children have always and will always detest you,” I said in a much quieter, calm, and steady voice. “You have never once in my entire life shown me an ounce of authentic love or kindness. I could give a fuck that you don’t give a damn about me, but you’ve always gone out of your way to make it your express mission to be sure I would never forget that I’m a fucking nobody and shit on your shoes. I’ve never known why and I no longer care. Fuck you, enjoy t
he rest of your pathetic, shitty life. Don’t bother sending me my stuff. You can shove it up your ass.”

  With that, I got out of her truck. She spun her tires on the icy pavement and fishtailed out of sight.

  I had long been aware that nothing was more unattractive to a woman than a grown man with mother issues, so I knew I would never share any of these events or secret residual childhood trauma with anyone. I would push it to the very back of my mind where it had always restlessly slept, and keep rolling.

  Overflowing with bitterness, I trudged a mile on the shoulder of the road through the snow and muddy sludge to the tiny 1950s-looking airport in Yakima, Washington, “The Palm Springs of Washington,” as the sign informed you when you pulled into town.

  33

  I SMOKED WEED—HIV-POSITIVE

  After my final, explosive showdown with my mother, I wound up back in my Seattle apartment a couple days after Christmas. I was not due back in Los Angeles to finish the long-suffered Screaming Trees record until January 10. Though I still had my place in California, as well as numerous drug connections there, I decided to stay in the Northwest.

  Out of the blue, I received a call from Anna one night.

  “Hey, mister. I was just thinking about you and wondered how you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing great, finally kicked dope,” I said, not mentioning that I’d just turned right around and begun using again. “I’m heading back to LA in a little while to finish a new Trees record we’ve been working on. How have you been?”

  She instantly broke out in tears.

  “Hey, hey, baby, what’s wrong?” I asked, suddenly concerned something was seriously amiss.

  “Goddamnit, I’m so lonely! I miss you, you bastard.”

  I paused for a moment. This was an unexpected shock. The final year of our relationship had been fraught with unhappiness, fighting, my secret doping, my lying, the whole nine. It had been me in tears the last time we spoke, but they were not tears of loneliness.