by Mark Lanegan
That idea seemed reasonable enough to me, so somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, I prepared to hit the pipe. I put a medium-sized piece of rock into my pipe, took a good-sized hit, and after holding it as long as I possibly could, I forcefully blew the smoke down into the toilet just as I pushed the button and flushed. To my horror, instead of being sucked down, the huge cloud of smoke went straight up to the ceiling, right up against the smoke detector. I stepped out as quickly as I could and, in the darkness of the plane, busted ass back to my seat. I slunk down low and, with my heart pounding like a jackhammer and a thick coating of ice-cold sweat covering my face, pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head and feigned sleep, mind racing as I waited for the alarm to go off. After a minute or two, there was still no alarm. I realized I had lucked out this time.
I sat restlessly wide awake the rest of the flight. I wasn’t going anywhere near the toilet. I had to save the other two syringes full of dope—one possibly for our layover or short second flight, the other for our arrival in France. The first flight was landing at London’s Heathrow where we were to catch a connector to de Gaulle in Paris.
During our two-hour layover in London, I went directly to Heathrow’s smoking area. There were three or four other people in the large room, one of them Van Conner. He sat next to me while I smoked an unfiltered Lucky Strike, my preferred brand of cigarette since I’d begun smoking at fifteen, buying them out of a machine at the truck-stop restaurant where I washed dishes during the eleven p.m. to seven a.m. shift one summer. He began clowning on my PJs again.
“You’re gonna freeze your ass off when we hit Paris, Lanegan.”
“I’m gonna put my pants on as soon as they come down the chute in baggage, dumbass,” I curtly replied.
While he was staring sleepily off into nothingness, I pulled my crack pipe out of my pocket in the near-empty room. I shoved a piece of rock in it, took a huge hit, and when he turned around to give me some more shit, blew it directly into his face. We both instantly sprang to our feet and got stuck in the door like Laurel and Hardy as we attempted to run through together at the exact same moment, each of us wanting to escape the scene of the crime. After a quick and comedic tussle, he shoved me out the opening with his giant hands and the immense weight behind them.
As we walked quickly down the hallway side by side, he whispered, “Thanks a lot, you sick son of a bitch, now I stink like crack.”
“You always stink like crack … dirty asscrack” was my half-witted comeback.
In the baggage area at de Gaulle, I waited for what seemed an eternity for my bag to come down. After everyone else had retrieved their shit and left, just three people still stood waiting: our road manager Kevan Wilkins, Josh Homme, and me.
I guess I am gonna freeze my ass off, I thought as it became apparent our bags weren’t coming any time soon. Kevan went to the counter and was informed that my bag containing all of my clothes and toiletries, Josh’s bag, and one of his guitars had failed to make the flight. Thank God I have my dope and methadone on me was my first thought. My second thought was My fucking cigarettes are in my bag. I had three cartons stashed in it but had brought one in my carry-on. My third thought: I need some fucking clothes.
As we joined the rest of the guys outside in the bitterly cold air, Van couldn’t stop laughing as his prediction had come true.
“Yeah, really funny ain’t it, Nostradamus,” I said.
It was early on a Friday afternoon and we weren’t due to play until the next day. As we rode into the city, Josh and I decided our first order of business was to go clothes shopping. I sure as fuck wasn’t going onstage or anywhere else in my goddamn pajamas. We got the keys to our hotel rooms when we arrived, I stashed my two still-full syringes and backpack in my room, and then the two of us went out walking to find some threads. Within a block of the hotel, we came upon a place that sold all leather products. Since I didn’t have nearly enough dough for dope, much less a complete new wardrobe, I decided to go full rock star and buy a pair of leather pants, knowing I’d never take them off, the only pair of pants I’d need. Josh decided he would do the same and we each got fitted for a pair, his brown and mine black.
As soon as I got back to the hotel, I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door, absentmindedly admiring my new pants. I’d shorn my head of the stupid-looking extra-long hair ages ago, thrown away the flannel shirts I’d worn my entire life, given away the chained trucker wallet I’d worn for years to my Eritrean pal Mikey … I had basically removed everything from my appearance associated with the fashion joke “Seattle grunge movement.” Grunge being a term I, and everyone else I knew who had been shitstained with the moronic, media-generated term, bitterly detested. I was thin but not skeletal, my hair its natural bright red, shoulder length and greased back. With my shiny black combat boots and shiny black leather trousers, I now looked the part of the rock singer more than at any time in my career.
I was also imprisoned by the largest drug habit of my life. While on the road, it far outweighed my ability to pay for it. I had, luckily, brought the bottle of methadone in my carry-on backpack. You were still allowed to bring liquids onto a plane back then and no one had ever even looked into any of my shit anyway. I found it strange and fortunate that the most plainly obvious addict seemed invisible to security people, customs officials, and cops everywhere I traveled in Europe. It was if I were a ghost. In the US, outside of the airport, it was a completely different situation. I was shaken down by the police while out on the streets on a regular basis. My cop pal John Powers had once given me some good-natured but truthful shit. Elbowing me in the ribs slightly, he’d said, “Man, you have to do something to tone down your look. You’re too obvious to us. Eat a meal once in a while, take a shower, wash your clothes every now and then … and brush your fucking teeth at least once a month!”
There was a knock on my hotel-room door. I looked out the peephole and saw Wilkins on the other side, unlocked the door, and let him in. By the sad, beaten-down look on his face, I knew he had bad news.
“Hey, buddy, I’m sorry to tell you this but Demri has passed away. Layne would like you to call him as soon as you can.”
Fuck … not again, I thought. This was going to destroy Layne. He had loved her so passionately that after their final break-up, one of many in their tempestuous years-long off-and-on-again relationship, he had made a conscious decision to never date another woman. If not with her, he preferred to be alone. My heart was broken for him. I called and left a message with my room number and the phone number to the hotel, and he called right back.
“Oh man … I can’t believe it. She’s gone” were his first words. Then he broke down in tears.
“Goddamnit, brother, I am so fucking sorry, I don’t know what to say. I’m just incredibly sorry this is happening to you.”
Even though I’d had plenty of experience with loss, I was still a piss-poor comfort to those in pain. I had never developed the necessary skills to verbally express any real words of wisdom to help anyone in that way. My first public response to the death of a friend was stoicism. Privately, I might cry like a baby.
Through his tears, Layne said, “I can’t stand to be alone right now, when are you coming back?”
“I just got here today. We’re not back for six weeks.”
“Fuck,” he said, “I wish you were coming back sooner, I need to hang out with someone. This is tearing me up.”
“I’m sorry, bro … St. Louis is at my place, go stay there. I need someone to keep an eye on him anyway. Kick him the fuck out of the bedroom and you take it. He can sleep on the couch or the mattress. You’d be doing me a favor, man.”
Layne had been around Simon and I knew he could tolerate him. He even found him slightly amusing, shooting me a sly, side-eyed grin when he’d seen him dressed in women’s clothes once when the three of us had been together. Simon’s generally quiet nature made him easy to be around, and I trusted him.
“Okay, I’m going over there,�
�� he quickly said.
“Just let me know when; I should call Simon and give him a heads-up.”
“Right now.”
I quickly did the math. Two thirty in the afternoon in Paris meant it was five thirty a.m. in Seattle, but I knew my protégé was most likely still awake from the day before. I also knew Demri’s mother lived just a block from my apartment because she had harassed me on a semi-regular basis when she’d been staying there. I wondered if Layne might drop in there to offer his condolences, or get a tiny sip of relief in sharing their pain of loss, even though they’d had a bit of a strained relationship.
After calling St. Louis to tell him that Layne was moving in for a while, I began to think about the reality of what lay ahead. Taking stock of the multitude of possible difficulties I might likely run into, I tried to mentally brace myself for what I knew was going to be a difficult tour. Because I had come with so little cash, I was dependent on our pitifully small per diems and, at some point, my cut of merch sales to pay for the dope I would have to score on the streets every day to keep from going into withdrawals, a nightmare scenario.
Years before, I’d had to kick a large habit cold turkey in a Denver hotel room. We’d traveled there from Salt Lake City in a blizzard and barely made it. Our show scheduled for the following night was cancelled and postponed for three days due to the severity of the massive, days-long storm. Denver had always been a place where it was very easy to buy heroin on the streets, but not under these conditions. Hicks had gone out into the storm to attempt to find some dope but not surprisingly had found the streets totally empty. He had hardly any habit at the time and was fine. I was not.
By day two, I was shooting the blackest, most foul fluid I’d ever seen out of both ends at once. I lay on the bed tossing and turning in agony, my legs kicking out as I spasmed uncontrollably. After the first twelve hours, my shoulders, knees, and back were already raw from the constant contact with the sheets and mattress as I convulsed. There was zero possibility of sleep, zero possibility of any relief forthcoming. Hicks had called Kurt who had immediately FedExed some heroin to me hidden in a bag of coffee but, of course, it couldn’t make it there through the intense blizzard. Everything was shut down. Short of going out into the shit and making my way to a hospital, I was on my own.
During the blissed-out Dilaudid run on tour with Alice in Chains, I’d spent an evening with a beautiful young Mexican American girl named Antoinette in Denver. For this snowed-out concert, she had come up to Colorado from Florida, where she worked playing Pocahontas at Disney World in Orlando, intending to surprise me at our show. Finding it cancelled, she had located us by chance in the midst of this huge raging storm when she’d seen a tour bus outside our hotel. John had been having drinks and taking pictures of himself with Watergate bad guy G. Gordon Liddy, who happened to be stranded in the same hotel. When Hicks brought her up from the bar where he’d run into her, I was ashamed to be seen in the throes of a full-force cold turkey kick. I was completely helpless to do anything besides suffer and moan in agony. Antoinette was incredibly kind and loving and attempted to nurse me through this anesthesia-free botched brain surgery, this wide-awake quadruple amputation, an experience that I felt must be akin to being gang-fucked nonstop by Satan’s hordes for three full days and nights … and not in a good way. She massaged my aching legs when I could stand to be touched, even praying quietly over me as I agonizingly tossed and turned, thrashing about nonstop. She and Hicks turned my thin mattress over only to find I’d actually sweated completely through it to the other side, at which point John gave me his bed and slept on the couch. It was a physical and mental ass-beating the likes of which I had never been prepared for. I had always had methadone to see me through an emergency but not this time. The indescribably unbearable physical torture combined with a dark, unending black hole in my mind was a double whammy of the most confounding kind. I felt like I had no future, like I’d never been born.
On day four of the kick, our rescheduled Denver show was to take place. The storm had let up but there were still no dealers on the streets. Although I was still hurting badly, the worst was over so I made a conscious decision to try and stay off heroin for real. During the show that night I had to rush sidestage three or four times to puke in a garbage can barely out of sight from the audience. I drank my way through that night and all the way to and through our next show, in Lawrence, Kansas. Then we had a long drive to Florida. I opted to fly by myself instead of sitting uncomfortably on the bus for two days.
I was passed-out drunk in the back lounge of the bus when we stopped at the St. Louis airport where I was to catch my flight. I picked up my bag and stumbled outside into the five a.m. dark. When I arrived in Fort Lauderdale later that day and got to my hotel, I realized that in my alcohol-soaked, still-slightly-sick-from-the-kick, hazy state of mind, I’d grabbed our soundman Brian Rat’s bag instead of my own and left mine behind. At the time, I had no idea whose shit I’d taken with me to Florida, I just knew it wasn’t mine. It had been Brian’s first day on the job and we’d not even had as much as a hello yet. By the time the bus carrying everyone else arrived, I had actually fallen asleep and slept soundly through the night without booze or the aid of drugs. I had actually kicked.
The next day, I went out to the bus to get my stuff and then sheepishly found Brian in his room to return his bag. He was gracious and funny and we were to become close friends after that. I took my bag back to my room and started digging through it to find some clean clothes when I came across my toiletries bag. Curious to see what was in a side pocket, I unzipped it. Inside were four months’ worth of cottons. I had compulsively stashed them away after every time I’d gotten loaded. Since I hadn’t run out of dope that entire time, I’d never had to go into the stash to stay well. Through the entirety of my nasty, traumatic withdrawals, my stash of cottons had been a mere couple of feet from me, totally escaping my mind.
Two things flashed through my head at once. My excruciating, nightmarish kick had been totally unnecessary as I could have easily stayed well and gotten high for at least three weeks off the cottons alone. And, now that I had this bounty of dried heroin-soaked filters in front of me, fuck stopping. I was going to get loaded immediately. The entire demented merry-go-round began to spin once more.
Here in Europe, years later, in the shitty, bitter, cold-ass winter, I shuddered involuntarily as I recalled that horror show from the distant past. The thought had invaded my mind that I may very well have to face a similar situation at some point during this current icy hellride. No fucking way, I told myself. Never again. And thus began the most intensely stressful and strenuous, balls-caught-and-twisted-in-the-vise-grips-of-absence-and-hardship, fucked-up trip of my entire life.
40
ICE-COLD EUROPEAN FUNHOUSE
I’m waiting in the freezing rain at an uncovered bus stop after a show in Sheffield, England. The moment I left the stage, I walked out the back door of the club, down a long, dark alleyway, and around the corner to this cold and empty spot. I was dopesick, I was cold and wet. I had tried to scare up some heroin between soundcheck and show but had come away from my search with no joy. The band had no show the next day, yet Wilkins had refused to drop me off in London en route to the next city we were playing in because it was inconveniently out of the way. So I’d stayed behind while they rolled on. I had to fix sooner than that or else it was going to be disaster.
We were scheduled to be in Europe and the UK for almost another month and things were looking grim for my prospects of staying well. I had already run out of my meager supply of methadone and there were still many more shows to be played. Wilkins was long over me. I had routinely woken him (as well as Josh Homme once and even Lee Conner) at all hours of the night and early morning to hit him up for cash. A cash advance in order to stay well. The last time I’d done it, he’d told me, “This is it, buddy, the last time. You have reached your limit. If you wake me up again, you’re going to be sorry.” I believed him.
Kevan was a good guy but tough. After years of tour-managing Alice in Chains, getting them out of jams and shepherding their crew all over the world, he was tired. The last thing he wanted to deal with was yet another junkie, especially one in the aggravating habit of knocking on his door in the middle of the night.
As I stood there in the rain, a young couple huddling together beneath an umbrella walked up. They had seen the show and wanted to talk.
“Hey, Mark, just wanted to tell you how beautiful the show was, we love your music. What are you doing out here?”
“I’m trying to get a bus to Heathrow … but, hey, can I ask you guys a sensitive question? Where can a guy get some brown around here this time of night?”
“Brown? Do you mean heroin?” the girl gasped.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
They quickly found a reason to flee. My desperation to obtain relief so great that with zero care about what it looked like, what I looked like, I had taken to asking innocent young concertgoers where I could score. It was time these kids grew the fuck up anyway, got with the motherfucking program, and faced the cold, hard reality of life. I had done my last, tiny hit at seven thirty that morning and it was now ten thirty at night.
Four days earlier in Manchester, I had been welcomed into the council-flat home of a dealer I’d met on the street. He was overly generous, excited to have an American rock singer in the house. It was exactly three weeks and one day until my thirty-second birthday but I looked at least ten years older, worn down from the demands of touring while battling the years-long, exhausting imprisonment of my crippling addiction. The balding man and his not unattractive blond wife, both in their midforties, had let me stay up all night in their flat shooting dope and occasionally taking a hit off the crack pipe. Shortly before midnight, the man had said, “C’mon, let’s go grab some cigarettes from the shop.” When we returned to the modest-sized public housing apartment, I was greeted by the sight of the wife lying on the couch, dressed in lingerie, her bare breasts exposed, pretending to be asleep. The man had walked over to her and started squeezing and rubbing her tits while I stood there uncomfortably in the middle of the room. She began to quietly moan and he said, “Nice, huh? Come on over here and get yourself a feel.” It was an obvious setup, exactly the kind of situation I had lived for in my youth, but as an old man of thirty-two, sex was the last thing on my mind. I shook my head, said, “No thanks, man, I’m good,” walked past them into the kitchen, put a small rock in the pipe, and hit it.