by Mark Lanegan
Six months before heading to California, I had been alone in my apartment, trying yet again to kick on my own. I was on day two of no heroin, and the tiniest bit of methadone I had drunk did virtually nothing to hold back the intense pain of withdrawals. I suddenly remembered something: a stripper friend I’d had a casual relationship with for years had left a hit of weed in a bong in my kitchen cabinet. It had probably been there four or five months.
I had not smoked in several years but I started thinking, They give weed to chemotherapy patients for pain, it’s got to work for withdrawals. Having once read a detailed account of what radiation sickness felt like, I had always thought it sounded exactly like withdrawals. I went to the kitchen, got the bong, and took the biggest hit I could hold.
Unfortunately, no one had clued me in to how potent weed had become in the years since I’d last done it. Within a couple minutes, I was in unimaginable hell. I had kicked a big heroin habit cold turkey before and that was as fucked as it got. I had also suffered a terrifying, several-hours-long horrible acid trip. This was like an uncanny combo of the worst both experiences had to offer. Not only did the weed not relieve my pain, it intensified it a thousandfold. It was late at night and I had nothing, no Valium or benzos, no more methadone, no money to score dope, no opiates whatsoever, nothing at all to slow or stop the onslaught of this rocket ship of misery. The brutal physical discomfort of my worst kicking had always been accompanied with the most punishing black hole of indescribable hopeless depression. I began a downward spiral, a million-mile-an-hour fall. I started to sob uncontrollably, my body wracked with spasm after painful spasm with each sob. It was torment beyond description.
At the peak of this acutely unpleasant episode, the phone had rung. I jumped up off the floor and picked it up in hopes it was someone in a position to relieve my agony. But unable to stop crying, I could not talk.
“Hello? Hello? Mark! What in the fuck is wrong with you?”
On the other end of the line was Anna, who I’d not heard from in months. Realizing it was my ex who I still pined for made my sobbing raise to a fever pitch. I was still not able to say a word.
“What in the fuck, man?! You’re scaring me! What is happening over there? Talk to me or I’m going to call the cops!”
With every ounce of strength in me, I had managed to say, “Don’t do that please!”
“Then what is wrong with you? Should I call an ambulance?”
Anna had found me passed out drunk one night and, thinking I’d OD’d on heroin, had called an ambulance to take me the one block to Harborview, where I came to immediately when they’d given me a shot of adrenaline. When they realized I was just drunk, they gave me the option of getting up and walking out or being transferred down the street to county jail. Fifteen minutes and five hundred dollars later for the one-block ride, I’d stumbled back into the apartment.
“No!” I managed to get out through my still-out-of-control crying.
“Okay, man, you’ve got one minute to tell me what the fuck is wrong with you or I’m calling the cops and an ambulance.”
With all the effort I could find, I finally managed to spit out just three words.
“I … smoked … weed.”
That was it. All I could say through the off-the-hook convulsive gasping. There was a momentary astonished noise, part laugh and part stifled breath of disbelief, on the other end of the line. I cried on unabated.
After several long moments of silence, her voice oozing bitter sarcasm, she said, “Right. Ha, ha. Whatever, shithead,” and, click, she had hung up.
Now, it seemed, I was on the other side of the street. I recognized her tears as an opening through which I could slip and insinuate myself back into her life.
I had been having regular phone conversations with Selene, who was still in San Francisco. I could tell she instinctively knew there was something different now that I was getting loaded again. But Anna, who had not talked to me in months, was unable to tell.
“Where are you?” I asked.
Still crying, she said, “I’m at home. Do you want to come over?”
“I’ll be right there.”
I ended up spending the night. We fell into another desperate fling, one that ran head-on into Selene’s return to town.
“Hey, I’m here. I’ve got a few things to do and then I’m coming over” was the message I got from Selene when she arrived in Seattle just as I was coming home from another night spent with Anna. I could tell that both women knew something was up with me, but I had been lying to Anna for so long that she was obviously choosing to ignore it for the moment. She had been in another unsatisfying relationship since her original break with me and was extremely unhappy. I knew it was doomed from every angle, but I was willing to let go of Selene if it meant I could hold on to Anna just a bit longer. Selene, who I’d fallen so hard for and with whom I’d felt a such a heavy connection, like nothing I’d ever felt before. I inwardly grieved and doubted this decision, not only for the loss of that connection, but also with an aching sense of gratitude for the nonjudgmental way she’d accepted me. I was in my most natural element, between a cement slab and a boulder, both of my own fucked-up manufacturing, trying hopelessly to find a way out. Old habits die hard, they say. Mine were clearly going with me to the grave.
Selene showed up at my house that afternoon. I was glad to see her and greeted her warmly but could tell something was bothering her.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, thinking she was on to my using.
“I don’t know if I want to talk about it. I’m worried about something I heard but I’m afraid to make you mad.”
“Baby, you’re not gonna make me mad. What are you worried about?”
She must have heard I was getting loaded from someone. I was prepared to admit it as that would get me out of a relationship that I now wanted to end as painlessly as possible so I could spend as many days with Anna as I had left before she inevitably, unceremoniously, once again showed me the door.
“I was up on Broadway and ran into Jason Finn,” she said.
Jason Finn was a local drummer, an ugly-spirited toad of an irritant, a prick who was always spouting some wise-ass comment in a lame bid for attention. When Danny Peters had been drumming for the Trees, he had told me one night that while we were drummerless, Finn had told him, “Stay out of my way because I’m gonna drum for the Trees.” We had both laughed heartily at that, not only because Dan had clearly jumped that hurdle but because Finn was the last guy I would ever have played with. He had eventually struck it rich with a moronically named band, Presidents of the United States of America, who had a huge hit with some kind of comedy-rock tune. Not my cup of shit, but then again, I was not the record-buying public.
“Yeah. So you ran into Finn, what about it?”
“He heard I was dating you and begged me to have some coffee with him because he had something super serious he needed to tell me about you.”
“So how was the coffee?”
If what he had to tell her was that I was a junkie, who the fuck didn’t already know that?
“He said he knows for a fact and that it’s common knowledge that you are HIV-positive. That I better be very careful if I was having sex with you.”
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. She looked at me with her beautiful eyes with a kind of curious but slightly worried smile, as if to ask, “Is it true?”
My mind, with its computerlike propensity for recalling personal slights, promptly went back to a time a few years earlier when I had been leaving the Off Ramp alone. I’d innocently made eye contact with a good-looking woman I’d never seen before in my life. Without a single word, we began desperately making out like a couple of animals. We pawed at each other, dry humping and kissing in front of everyone leaving the show. She worked in some capacity in the Canadian music industry, in Seattle visiting none other than Mudhoney road manager Bob Whittaker, another chronic antagonist of mine. He had literally yanked her off of me and she
had stared back at me with a wide-eyed, crazy, lustful look, struggling to escape his grasp the entire time he physically dragged her down the long street to his car. I had stood there, watching them the entire way with my open hands turned upward toward the sky, wondering what in the fuck had just happened, swiftly and violently deprived of what for a second had seemed like paradise fallen into my lap. Was she Bob’s girlfriend? Relative? At any rate, he had successfully cock-blocked me and it gave yet one more reason to dislike the fuckhead.
I had unexpectedly run into her a few months later at her job as a promoter’s assistant when the Trees played a show in Vancouver. At first, she pretended we’d never met. I put it down to simple embarrassment, the regret of a night when she may have had one too many drinks. Finding her alone in an office, I walked in and said hello. After I brought it up, she admitted remembering our brief micro-encounter and we formally introduced ourselves to one another. After joking around for a couple of minutes, I got down to business.
“Hey, why don’t you come hang with me and have drinks at our hotel after the show?”
That suggestion received an Arctic-cold shoulder. After an uncomfortable stony silence that told me I’d not be fucking her that or any other night, she blurted out that Whittaker had told her this same lie: that I was HIV-positive.
Apparently everyone in Seattle had known I was dying of AIDS for years, yet not a single doctor had bothered to inform me of it. I finally stopped laughing and said to Selene in a deadly serious tone, “Jason Finn hates my guts and I’m sure he wants to fuck you. I’ve not been tested in a few years but I’ve not shared needles with anyone in a long time and the last ten times I was tested it was negative. So fuck Jason Finn and his fucking punk-ass bullshit. I’m gonna beat his fucking head in.”
In the anger of the moment, I forgot that my intention had been to try and end this thing painlessly. Now I was fighting to keep it because I didn’t care for the ramifications attached to this kind of out.
In all honesty, I had no idea if I was HIV-positive. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was at the free STD clinic every other month. I’d had them all, multiple times: crabs, chlamydia, scabies, genital warts, epididymitis that made my balls swell to the size of small peaches and caused me serious pain whenever I came. I’d had this nasty shit called molluscum that was like a cross between a genital wart and an open scabies sore but much larger, and that gave me a sudden panic when I found out it was mostly seen in HIV-positive people. Once, the Trees had been playing a show in Italy and my balls were so badly swollen from epididymitis I could barely walk. After two encores, I exited the stage through a door to the outside of the club and collapsed on the sidewalk in such pain I thought I might be headed to the hospital to get my nuts cut off. As I lay in the fetal position holding my groin, members of the hyper-enthusiastic crowd were leaving and spotted me there. They ran over and, despite my angry, anguished protests, actually picked me up and began to carry me back inside to the stage. One guy had yelled, practically spitting in my face with a thick Italian accent, “Who do you think you are? Liza Minnelli? You come to this dirty town and give us just two encores?” I couldn’t believe the absurdity of the situation. Couldn’t these dickheads see I was clutching my balls in agony? Did they actually expect me to just get up and sing some more? And where the fuck was a security guy or a fucking cop when you actually needed one? Eventually, a man of Pakistani descent realized I was in serious discomfort. He and some friends forced the mob to lay me back down on the ground, then they picked me up again and carried me to his car. He rushed me to the hospital where a nurse, struggling to translate for the doctor, told me what I already knew I had and “don’t wear such tight pants.”
I was at the clinic in Seattle so often, they began to let me freeze-burn the warts off my dick myself. They also began letting me swab the inside of my dick myself. Previous to that, some nurse’s aide would brutally scrape the inside of my dickhole with a thin metal stick with some kind of rough material on the end of it, something I found to be acutely fucked. Finally the doctor there told me it just had to lightly touch the inside of my dick and let me do it myself, with considerably less discomfort involved. But each time I was there, I had also been tested for HIV and come up negative, so I had always operated on the assumption that I was not.
Finn either really believed this bullshit of his because he’d heard it someplace else or was talking out his ass to try and fuck me over and fuck my girl. Probably both. I had always dated attractive women and had learned early on that when another musician found out someone was dating me, they would often pull out all the stops to try to fuck my girl, such was my unpopularity with my peers. It had worked more than a few times. Heavy attention from someone else combined with my shitty behavior made me a shoo-in for this kind of payback from girlfriends I’d neglected, burned, or fucked over. On the flipside, I was the easiest guy to have sex with ever: all you had to do was ask. I had no morals and would indiscriminately fuck anyone’s girlfriend, sister, whoever. I fucked the wives of acquaintances, friends, coworkers, and other musicians. I would rarely turn down an opportunity to have sex with anyone I considered remotely desirable: record company employees, photographers and music journalists, barmaids, bartenders, fans and promoters at clubs we played, the random pick-ups, the next-door neighbors, it just didn’t matter. I had stupidly, recklessly slept with friends’ revenge-seeking girlfriends, knowing they’d only chosen me because I was an indiscriminate whore and that our coupling was only designed to injure. They’d wait until the exact moment my pal was at his lowest, then lob the grenade of my complicity in this shittiest kind of betrayal at him to finish him off. I’d either get sucker-punched in the face, guilted to death, or exiled. Usually all three. Almost my entire sex life had been a self-fulfilling prophecy of negative consequences for an hour or two of pleasure. Or five minutes of pleasure, whichever the case may have been.
I admitted to Selene I was strung out again. For that reason, I told her that moving in to my place was a bad idea. I also used it as an excuse to put an end to our relationship while still vehemently denying the overt rumors of my alleged HIV-positive status. Now that she saw me through the prism of my active addiction, she had zero objections. Though it had been one of the most intensely magnetic experiences of attraction I’d had in my life, I was relieved. I hated to let her go and felt I was possibly throwing away the only chance at happiness I’d had in years, but my newly restarted obsession with Anna gripped me like yet one more drug I was unable to resist.
34
GOLD FOR GARBAGE
After a week or two, it was time to head back to California to finish the Screaming Trees record that was to become Dust. The night before I left, Anna finally dropped the bomb on me. She tearfully admitted she had been aware of my using the entire time we’d hung out. She asked me to please not call or try to contact her when I returned because she had to move on with her life and my presence in her world made that impossible.
When I returned to Los Angeles after my ugly Christmas experience, producer George Drakoulias knew I was loaded again the minute I walked into the studio. He had waited patiently for me to get clean to participate in the creation of this record. Now he exploded in an anger I had no idea he held within him. He grabbed me by the neck of my shirt and in a second flat dragged me from the control room out into the hallway. He possessed imposing height and girth and he pinned me against the wall, his furiously contorted face inches from mine.
“You son of a bitch! Goddamnit, I told you not to leave California! You motherfucker! I should beat your ass!”
He had told me it was not a good idea to leave Los Angeles at Christmas. And yes, he could have beaten my ass. George was a large individual but with the friendliest, funniest, and most fun-loving personality of anyone I knew. That’s what made this outburst so unexpectedly shocking. He was absolutely livid.
“What in the fuck am I supposed to do with you? Jesus Christ, Lanegan, I can’t fucking beli
eve you … I really can’t.”
After he’d exhausted his rage, he leaned heavily against me. With his hand, he gently patted my face, a gesture both friendly and menacing.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen, Lanegan. You are gonna sing your motherfucking balls off. I don’t give a damn what shape you’re in anymore, I swear to God you are gonna get the fucking job done. End of story.”
A couple of addicts from an Orlando, Florida, band who I’d known for years were staying in my apartment while I was out of town. The guitar player was an untrustworthy, thieving junkhead, the kind of guy who’d steal your dope and then spend a half hour helping you look for it. The bass player was a sweetheart but was under the other guy’s thumb, used by him as his toady. While the guitarist had been selling dope out of the place, he’d also been selling off any of my personal shit of value as well. I came home to find half my clothes, CDs, and books missing. When I questioned him, he played stupid, as though it were news to him.
“Dude, I honestly don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I swear I haven’t touched anything! Maybe someone broke in and took it.”
Trees had been looking for a second guitarist to help fill out the sound on the touring we planned to do after this record was done. The Floridian had put down a boring, by-the-numbers rhythm track on one of the tunes we’d recorded earlier. The lifelessness of his playing combined with his dope-fiending rip-off of my shit compelled me to tell the other Trees, “He’s definitely not our guy.” These two addicts hung around my neck like a pair of old shoes taken off a dead bum. I started making arrangements to kick them the fuck out of my place.
One of the last things to do on the record besides vocals were some keyboard overdubs. Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers came in to do a night of piano playing. The first thing he did was move both of the studio’s old ’60s Mellotrons—the huge, ancient string machines heard on so many records from that period—into the main room. He arranged them facing each other, one on either side of him. Everyone watched in awe as he played a long solo on both at the same time, one with his right hand and the other with his left. A real-deal virtuoso, the likes of which we’d never seen and certainly never had play on one of our records.