by Mark Lanegan
When the tour neared its end in California, we played a pair of shows in Irvine, just outside Los Angeles, close to the metropolitan area of a large city for once. I had been filled with the electricity of childlike excitement as the last few shows had included one of my favorite bands ever, Devo. Originally from Akron, Ohio, Devo were absolute originals, underground legends who had also hit the mainstream. Their records were classics. With a sound unlike anything that came before and an outrageous stage act that included synchronized moves and trademark bright-yellow janitor suits and plastic hats resembling dog food bowls, their version of the Stones classic “Satisfaction” took it apart, put it back together, and made it completely their own. As an underage high schooler, I’d taken the Greyhound to Seattle and snuck my way into their concert. I’d spent the night in a frat house with some college-aged Devo enthusiasts I’d met during the concert who had taken a liking to me and admired my moxie for having gained entrance. The singer of Devo, a short bespectacled man named Mark Mothersbaugh, was the main focal point and sang in a high, semihysterical-sounding voice. The band included him, his brother, and a second set of brothers. I absolutely loved them.
After playing our set at Irvine Meadows, I had waited patiently for Devo’s show. It was as incredible and entertaining as their previous shows on the tour had been, even as great as the one I’d seen as a teenager. Afterward, I’d stayed on the side of the stage to see the next act and about halfway through had become bored and started walking down the ramp from the stage area to the dressing room area. Suddenly, Mark Mothersbaugh had come running up the ramp wearing a post-gig costume of silky-looking shorts and white T-shirt, with a Heineken in his hand. As we came face-to-face, he stuck out the flat of his hand to high-five me as he ran by, just as Rick Nielsen had when I was a teenager. As we slapped hands, in his high-pitched, excitable-sounding voice, he yelled, “Great singing, man!”
That single act lifted my spirits skyscraper-high and made the entire shitty tour worthwhile. In a weird way, I’d come full circle.
37
SECRET DEATH GAMES
Shortly after returning home from the tedium of Lollapalooza, I got buzzed one day. I went downstairs and, to my surprise, there was a guy I’d never expected to see in Seattle: St. Louis Simon.
A year or so earlier I’d been in St. Louis, out on the street in daytime trying to score. Some street person I’d hit up showed me a house and said there were guys there that had dope but that they were dangerous and not to go walking up and knock on the door. After an hour or so of watching this place for any sign of activity, a tall, young, handsome blond guy wearing a woman’s skirt had come out of the house and walked up the sidewalk directly toward me. I stopped him and asked where the dope was.
“Not at that place,” he said, “those guys are fucked. Let’s get a cab and I’ll take you somewhere better.”
We went to the house of a young couple who had a baby sleeping in a cradle, scored, and, he not being an addict, exchanged numbers and went our separate ways. I called him the next day and again he took me to the same place to re-up. I had taken a liking to this helpful, strange dude and had given him not only my phone number but also my address in Seattle and told him to look me up if he were ever in the area.
“Hey, man! What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, wondering what had brought this kid more than halfway across the country and to my apartment.
“I hitchhiked out here, it took almost a month. I’m ass-kicked. Can I come in?”
I opened the front doors to the building and said, “Sure, man, c’mon up.”
Once inside my apartment, he laid his backpack on the floor and then lay down on the floor himself, using it for a pillow.
“Hey, dude, go on in through those French doors, there’s a mattress there.”
He slid apart the heavy wooden doors that separated the living room from the dining room. The dining room was just a nearly empty room that held one small round table where I’d often sit in the morning looking for a vein for my first hit of the day, a couple of hard wooden chairs, a stereo and some vinyl records, a few books, my phone and answering machine … and the mattress where Shadow and I had ripped off so many guys who had come in thinking they were gonna get some pussy.
After Simon had slept for a few hours, he woke to the sound of me cooking up a batch of crack in the kitchen. He looked around the corner.
“Is that for you or to sell?”
“Both,” I replied. “Why? You want a hit?”
“I’d love one.”
I knew I had yet another homeless crackhead on my hands.
Almost the entire time since Anna had left me, there had been sometimes one, sometimes two other drug addicts staying with me rent-free. They were naturally expected to do all the shit I didn’t want to do in order to earn their keep: running crack down to customers, running to the dope house for me, etc. St. Louis Simon was a perfect runner. Sending a heroin addict out to score your heroin was an invitation to get burned. They’d return with dope, but only after raiding the bag and then bringing me in a light package. Slayer Hippy had been the king of that move. Dylan and John Hicks were the only two honest junkies I ever knew, who I totally trusted to bring me back what they went out to get.
Simon was not a junkie, just a crackhead, and the crack was the one thing in my house I always kept a strict handle on. If he wanted a hit, it could only be handed out by my benevolent goodness. After a couple weeks, he admitted he had left Missouri to avoid a statutory rape charge. According to his story, he’d met a young girl on the same street where I’d first met him. She had invited him home and, in the middle of their sexual encounter, her father had walked in. He’d beaten the shit out of him and called the cops, who took him in. She’d said she was eighteen, but she was fifteen, and he was twenty-three. After his mom secured his bail, he’d immediately stuffed his backpack full of both the men’s and women’s clothes he wore depending on his mood, and split. My place was his intended destination from the drop.
We fell into a routine where I manufactured crack, he delivered it and brought back the dough, and we both smoked all day. Sometimes I’d realize five or six full days and nights had passed without either of us sleeping. It was a dangerous drill, but the hold crack cocaine had on me was a totally different beast than anything I’d gotten hooked on before.
I was born a garbage-can of a fiend and was fairly confident I would die one just the same. From the time I’d been a kid, as soon as I came down from whatever drug I’d just done for the first time, I instantly did it again. The first time I came to after drinking, I drank again. When I came off my first acid trip, I immediately took it again. Weed, heroin, powdered cocaine, meth, prescription opiates, everything I’d ever done, I’d turned around and compulsively done it again right away. But after two or three runs on those drugs, I’d always taken a short break and a breath at some point before starting again. With the exception of heroin (which by necessity I had to do every day to avoid the horrors of withdrawals), I could leave everything else alone for a day or even a week at a time. Not crack.
From the very first hit, crack was the executioner destined to take me down. For a very long time, Layne had tried to entice me into smoking some with him but I’d always declined, saying, “No thanks, bro, I got enough problems already.” I was a perfectly functional junkie for years, but crack quickly took me to my knees. I would smoke all day, all night, every day, every night. The hold it had on me was unlike anything else in my experience. It had to come first before everything else. I could wake up dopesick, have dope on hand, and I would not get well until I had a hit of crack to smoke at the same time. It was like a hillbilly speedball. I did not like to shoot speedballs because the coke kept me from catching a nod, but that notion went directly out the window once I’d started smoking crack.
Fucking around one day, I had discovered my preferred method of consumption. I would take a foot-long piece of rubber tubing like some junkies might tie off with (I
always used a sock, belt, or nothing at all). I would then cure the Chore Boy, blackening a piece of it with a lighter, burning the copper covering off the common household dish-scrubbing ball used as a screen in a crackpipe. I’d stuff the screen into the pipe, stick a huge piece of rock into the thin glass tube, and finally fit the other end of the pipe in the end of the rubber tubing. Then I’d take a previously prepared outfit full of dope and search until I got it in a vein. I’d register, drawing some blood into the syringe to make sure I was in, and then, careful not to jiggle the rig out of my by now nearly impossible-to-find veins, hold the tube out at arm’s length and melt with a butane torch the biggest hit of crack rock my lungs could take. I’d hold it until I would begin to seize up, on the verge of stroking out. The ringing in my ears was as if my head were inside a church bell being slammed with a sledgehammer. Just before my eyesight went totally black, I’d jam the plunger on the rig, shooting the dope into my arm as quickly as I could. The heroin would bring me back.
It was a sick, potentially deadly practice, yet I could not help myself. I was compulsively hooked on this dangerous routine of my own invention. It was something I never shared with even my closest friends. I imagined it was like those guys who would choke themselves out while jacking off, the combination of those two sensations coupled with the thrill of going right to the cusp of oblivion was something they could not resist. How many of those guys had miscalculated their sex thing and gone past the point of no return, ended up in a morgue? I was hooked on something similar. I’d go right to the very edge every time.
This was a secret death game I was compelled to play as often as possible, but only by myself. It was not to be shared. The only way someone was gonna discover my covert activity was if the stench of my decomposing body brought the cops in someday.
38
SEE YOU IN MIAMI, MATE!
In September of 1996, Screaming Trees were booked for an arena tour of the East Coast. We would be the middle band on a three-band bill with British superstars Oasis headlining. I liked their music and hoped it would a good time, an opportunity to become friendly with a couple bands whose music I enjoyed. Popular Welsh band the Manic Street Preachers were to open, and I was particularly fond of leader James Dean Bradfield’s singing. But from the drop, the tour was fraught with tension, mainly between myself and Oasis’s ignorant, loudmouthed, and obnoxious lead singer, Liam Gallagher.
On the first day, Josh Homme and I were sitting at a table in catering, drinking Cokes, eating some food, and talking quietly. Minding our own business. Gallagher burst through the door with an entourage of two large sweat-suit-wearing bodyguard/toady types and some other pussy, maybe a journalist or press guy. He came straight up to where we were sitting.
“Howling Branches!” he shouted.
I continued eating a bowl of soup and said nothing.
“Howling Branches?” he demanded, wild-eyed, affecting unhinged intensity.
I realized he was addressing me and attempting a weak joke with the over-the-top intensity of a put-down. The corny play on our band name and rude intrusion mildly irritated me.
“Fuck off, you stupid fucking idiot” was my brief blasé retort, spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.
I was sure it was the first time a member of an opening band had dared to speak what every one of them must have thought when forced to share the same air with this low-rent tyrant. Having dismissed this wannabe badass, I turned back to my soup and conversation with Josh.
“What did you say?” Gallagher yelled. “Are you mad?”
He launched into a bizarre, lurching half dance, lunging forward as though to physically attack only to back up again while gesticulating crazily. He intended for it to look intimidating. He looked fucking pathetic.
“You’re fucking mad, mate!” he yelled. “I’ll put you through that wall!”
I finally looked up at him and while still seated, soup spoon in hand, said, “What are you waiting for, tough guy? I’ll fuck you up.”
This brought on an incredibly bad reaction. He shook his head side to side, palsy-like, as if in disbelief that anyone would have the balls to speak to him that way, and turned to glare at his bodyguards as if to say, “Are you going to let him talk to me like that?” Josh stood straight up, hands tightly curled into fists in anticipation of what looked like was about to turn into an all-out brawl at any moment.
“You’re gonna be sorry, mate! Very fucking sorry, you daft cunt!” Liam yelled as he pretended to struggle while allowing his bodyguards/paid pals to pull him out the door of the cafeteria.
Josh howled with laughter.
“Damn, he went white as a sheet! He was scared shitless when you stood up to him!”
“What a fucking moron,” I agreed.
The next day, our tour manager Kevan Wilkins, who we had inherited from Alice in Chains, no longer touring due to Layne’s aversion to travel, pulled me aside.
“Hey, buddy, watch your step around Liam. Those big guys with him are thugs he uses as bodyguards. They’re gunning for you.”
I took Wilkins’s warning to heart, but if it was a fight Gallagher wanted, a fight he would have. I was not accustomed to taking unwarranted shit off anyone, especially not this entitled “rock star” who had introduced himself by animatedly spitting an insult into my face.
On day two, he had made it a point to stand directly on the side of the stage while we performed, straight in the sightline of everyone in the arena crowd. Arms folded, glaring, in a weak, childish attempt to rattle me. This douchebag clearly didn’t have the smarts to quit while he was ahead. His public show of limp-dicked intimidation and disruption of our show was the tipping point. Now I was legitimately pissed off.
During the instrumental break in the first song, I let go of the mic. Turning to face him with a dark, expressionless look on my face, I mouthed an unmistakable “Fuck you.” A second later, I mouthed “C’mon, motherfucker” and motioned for him to come out onstage, extending him an invitation to his own public ass-kicking party. If he was hell-bent on receiving a beating, I could think of no more appropriate place to administer it than in front of fifteen thousand of his fans. He declined my invite, of course, because he’d left his chaperones backstage so the crowd would think he was a rough-and-tumble lone wolf. Nothing could have been further from the truth. At no other time did I see him unaccompanied by his two huge sweat-suited goons, uncanny clones of 1970s British wrestler Giant Haystacks but for their bald domes instead of Haystacks’s huge, wild bush of crazy hair.
Liam continued to stand there like a petulant child trying to look menacing at the very edge of the stage so he was clearly in plain view of everyone who’d come to see his band. Van Conner was the closest to where Liam stood, practically onstage himself. When the second song began, Van started walking in ever-widening circles, passing closer and closer to Liam with every revolution. Finally, as he passed by the fourth or fifth time, he clubbed Gallagher directly in the face with the head of his heavy Fender Precision bass with vicious intent. The force of the impact nearly knocked Gallagher to his knees. In obvious pain and furious anger, Gallagher began to dance around in a comical manner, as if he were fighting the urge to actually storm the stage and attack Van. Had he done so, our gigantic bass player would have publicly annihilated him.
This circus played out in front of the 15,000-plus audience. It made me laugh out loud, his humiliation witnessed by the entire huge crowd. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. This dickhole had stood right next to our stage, trying to mad-dog me the entire time we played our stupid fucking set, just begging for a beatdown. Of course, once I walked offstage looking for him, he was nowhere to be seen.
It would take more than one blowhard singer to intimidate the Trees. I was a veteran of violence foreign and domestic, onstage, backstage, rural countryside, big city, barroom, parking lot, pool hall, and alleyway. I’d been an active participant in bus stop, trailer park, housing project, public sidewalk, pri
vate party, crack house, dope house, and jailhouse violence that stretched back fifteen years or more. I had always had trouble getting along with Lee Conner, and my once close friendship with Van had burned itself out in his resentment over my role in destroying the band’s momentum via my addiction and my indignation over his rightly placed blame, yet we had been conditioned through a lifetime of unending conflict to take every threat as a serious one. We had learned to always strike first whenever an insult had been thrown or a threat insinuated, and to always have each other’s backs. We had shut people’s mouths onstage and off while this dude Liam was still shitting in his diapers. Win, lose, or draw; good, bad, or indifferent—the Trees never backed down from anybody, particularly not from some bad actor who exuded fake violence and crybaby fear.
This clown had accidentally stumbled into the high life, courtesy of his talented older brother, Noel Gallagher. Noel was the one-man hit factory and true genius behind Oasis, writing all of their great, classic tunes. He had been friendly and respectful, treating both our band and crew with common courtesy. The limelight of popularity Liam basked in had evidently uncaged a monster, one without teeth or claws, but a small, irritating monster nonetheless. Success looked to have unleashed his inherent narcissism, his look-at-me-ism, his transparent deep-rooted insecurity. But what the fuck did I know? He had probably been a lowlife cocksucker his entire life. Maybe he’d been a bedwetter, shit his pants at school, or been cut from football squad as a youngster and never gotten over it. I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable facade. Where I was from, a person wouldn’t last a week behaving as he did. One day, they’d simply disappear, their mangled body discovered years later, haphazardly tossed into a shallow grave somewhere deep in the woods.