by Mark Lanegan
But they were already gone. I heard the smaller man let out a triumphant laugh as they ran down the cobblestone street. I walked out in time to see them running around a corner, already so far ahead that chase was futile. Besides, I could barely walk two feet without gagging on the pre-vomit snot that filled my throat. I bent over and again put my hands on my knees. I had no alternative than to go back and, hell or high water, get the rest of my merch money from that fuckhead James.
I walked back up to the square and got into one of the cabs that sat idling near the now-empty tourist area.
“American Hotel, Leidsekade,” I croaked to the driver.
Without a word, the small, dark, and angry-looking man threw his transmission into drive. He hauled ass over railroad tracks and then up onto the high raised median that ran parallel to the tracks to get around a tram, then straight back onto the rails in front of it, sharing the roadway with the train now directly behind us for a harrowing roller coaster of a ten-minute drive back to the hotel. I sat right behind him, every second teetering sickly atop the edge of a bottomless abyss, at the verge of puking onto the back of his head.
“Six guilders,” he hissed when we arrived.
“Hey, man, I’m really sorry that this happened, but I was just robbed at knifepoint. I thought they’d missed the ten I had left in the bottom of my pocket. I just realized that they got that, too. If I could get your info, I promise you I will get it back to you later today.” And then, pulling out the dubious rock-star credentials, “I’m an American rock singer named Mark Lanegan. I’m playing tomorrow night at the Paradiso. I swear to you, I will pay you back,” I strongly stressed. “Please, man, I did not mean for you to give me a charity ride.”
“You are not getting any charity from me and I don’t care if you’re Engelbert Humperdinck, you are not leaving this car without paying me, mister.”
“Are you not hearing me, man? What part of no money did you miss?”
I tried to unlock my door but he’d locked it with the master switch.
“Unlock this fucking door, man. Don’t you get it? I was robbed! I’m broke! Let me the fuck out! I have an armed robbery to report to the police. I will fucking hit you with an obstruction charge, kidnapping, and accessory after the fact to armed robbery!”
I quickly lay on my back across the seat and began methodically attempting to kick out the side window with the bottoms of both my feet, a powerful double-footed attack with my heavy boots, threatening to explode the glass with each thrust of my legs.
“Hold on! Hold on!” the driver yelled, unlocking the door. He got out into the frigid, freezing, foggy night air and quickly walked around the back of the cab to hover over me.
“Get out of my car, con man!” he yelled as I climbed through the door. As I glared at him, considering whether or not I had the strength left in me to sucker-punch this fool, he said, “Okay, now go up to your room and get my six guilders.”
“I told you, man! I don’t fucking have it! Figure it the fuck out! I can pay you later today!” I yelled menacingly, my face two inches from his, and started walking up the stairs into the lobby.
The cabbie ran up behind me and tried to grab a handful of my coat. I clubbed his hand painfully away with my fist. My mind was racing. I’d been ripped off twice already that night, the extreme hurt in my body had me on the edge of a vomiting, pants-shitting trip to the critical care unit, and how the fuck was I going to get more cash out of that prick James? It all flooded over me at once, more than I could take. Then the driver started a loud commotion in the lobby.
“I have a theft to report! This customer of your hotel has robbed me of the fare from the ride I gave him. Please call the police.”
My head began to simultaneously melt down and swell up as if it were being microwaved like a fucking bag of popcorn. I couldn’t believe this fuck would still not let me slide. Instead, he was hell-bent on escalating this time-wasting scene to the utmost degree while I still had to get more money from that bitch James and locate some dope!
“Yes! Please do call! Call the cops! This man kidnapped and held me against my will. I was held up at knifepoint and my money was stolen twenty minutes ago. I told that to this man before he offered me a ride to the police station and now he’s trying to fucking blackmail me on top of it!”
In the middle of this screaming match that I was a second away from turning into a physical confrontation, the girl behind the counter suddenly said, “Mr. Lanegan, if you need money to pay this man, I am authorized to provide you with a cash advance on the card that was left to pay for the rooms.”
News to me, but I instantly seized on the opening.
“Oh yeah, my road manager told me that. Five hundred guilders, please.”
And just like that, she began counting it out.
I couldn’t believe that, just when it appeared my painful race had been run, by some totally unexpected hand of mercy, I had been given a sliver of light to grab on to. I had managed to navigate this bent and twisted, desperate maze so far, but I knew it couldn’t last forever. Death was on my heels, and I felt sure Death would have my head.
After collecting my advance of five hundred guilders off Wilkins’s band credit card, I asked for change of a ten guilder note. I counted out six guilders in coins, dropped it on the floor in front of this rotten cunt of a cab driver, and ran down the stairs and into another cab that drove me back to the square.
The square. Where I had painlessly scored good, powerful dope several times in the past yet in this frozen-over wasteland of a brutally cold November hell night-turned-early-morning, with me at the outermost limits of physical and psychic pain that a human body could endure, was now vacant. It had been sixteen hours, a television appearance, two rip-offs, and a couple hundred painful miles since my last tiny, do-nothing hit. I had been on the verge of an incapacitating breakdown the entire time. As the gray light of day began to slowly appear, the taxi dropped me off. I paid the driver, and as weak and sick, cold, and tired as I’d ever recalled being, I stumbled out onto the empty street at the now-empty square. I began walking at as brisk a pace as I was able, as if that would prevent or slow the nightmare that was soon to come unless I got some heroin into my bloodstream.
I walked up to the statue in the square’s center, then circled it. I walked the streets on the perimeter of the square, each time around increasing my circle, finding not a single soul out on a bitterly cold and now increasingly windy morning in November. Totally, hopelessly sick at this juncture, at nearly seventeen hours since my last puny shot, I began to walk up one side and down the other of the canals running through the red-light district. I hoped to catch a girl still working or heading home after work and pay her for a fuck she’d not have to endure in exchange for a reliable hook-up. That strategy had worked famously in other countries. In Australia once, I had been in the room of a brothel with an attractive young hooker. She’d been shocked that I hadn’t wanted to fuck, just pay her to go score heroin for me as I’d stayed waiting alone in her room. She ran out, got two rigs and a couple grams that we shared in her room. “Oh my God, I wish every customer was like you,” she’d said, and had asked me if I wanted to get together after she was done working.
In the smoky, gunmetal light of an icy, fog-covered early Amsterdam morning, I prayed against hope into the void for a similar angel to appear out of the mist, but one would not materialize. Not one single person crossed my path. I stopped and puked. Here it comes, motherfucker. Get ready, it’s go time, I thought. I have given it everything I possess against impossible odds and have been found lacking. There is no shame in defeat.
If I was honest, there was nothing but shame in the way I lived my life. I was nothing if not an abject failure, a fucking shitbag liar, a junkie loser if ever there was one. As I stood, hands hanging on to my shoulders like a human self-straightjacket as I attempted to keep my body from collapsing into a heap on the ground vomiting, I heard a strange, birdlike sound coming from out of the thick f
og behind me.
I looked across the canal and saw a thin, very tall, probably six-foot-seven-inch man with straight pitch-black shoulder-length hair riding a bicycle triumphantly over the cobblestone with no hands on the handlebars. He was making loud, strange whooping sounds and turning his head from side to side like a giant wild bird of prey, riding exuberantly as if from the scene of some successfully committed bank robbery. I watched as he crossed the bridge coming toward my side of the canal, took a left, then headed directly toward me on the small, narrow street on my side of the water. As he got closer, I recognized that the noises and throwing of his head side to side was not a bird imitation at all. As I watched him twitch and turn all the way down the fifty yards in front of me with a nonstop series of verbal clicks, ticks, grunts, and expletives to go along with the bizarre whoop-whoop sounds invoking some huge prehistoric bird, it was a textbook display of Tourette syndrome.
When he neared, I jumped in front of him, blocking his path with arms held up, money in hand.
“Stop!”
He slammed on his brakes.
“I need some dope, man. Some real dope. Now! Where can I get some?” I croaked in excruciating pain before puking on the ground between my feet and the front wheel of his bike.
He quickly looked side to side with the nervous, head-spinning, wide-eyed stare of a gigantic Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Seeing no one, he looked me in the eye and spit three balloons into his fingerless-gloved hand. So great was my exhaustion and relief that I almost collapsed on the street.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“I’m staying at the American, on Leidsekade.”
“Too far. We go to my place.”
He told me to get on the hard, unpadded metal book tray behind his seat and, facing backwards, we rode for about twenty minutes. My bony ass bounced painfully on the uncomfortable tray and I puked what seemed like every minute as he banged over train track after train track I never saw coming, which I absorbed with the painful compression of my already-bent spine. We finally stopped at one of the thousands of identical Dutch row houses in the city. After he locked his bike to a rack and stole another unlocked bike right in front of his apartment building, we entered the steep winding staircase. We climbed five flights of stairs to his apartment, he carrying the heavy old-school bicycle up the narrow, claustrophobic set of steps, me following behind. I was painfully out of breath, fighting the urge to void the poison in my stomach, bowels, and throat every step of the way.
Once inside, he put the bike he’d stolen on top of a big pile of other bikes. The tiny place was completely packed with them, as well as pile upon pile of bicycle parts. While I vomited uncontrollably into his shitter, he got out a clean rig from a new bag of them, grabbed a clean spoon and a glass of clean water. He pulled out a piece of a cotton ball for a small filter and, tearing open a small bag of the store-bought citric acid needed for the dope, cooked and drew me up a very large shot.
Seated now on yet another stranger’s toilet with explosive sick, slick black water firing out my asshole, I shakily found a vein. Not only did the shot get me well, I actually got fully loaded for the first time in over a week.
My savior finally introduced himself as Bram.
“I’ll take you to meet my connection at eight and you can get as much as you want,” he said while making his whooping, clicking, clacking, grunting, and tongue-popping array of incredibly authentic birdlike sounds. With each verbal tic came a physical contraction, convulsion, herky-jerky motion, or hand gesture. I felt for this guy who was plagued with such a painful condition and who had been my unlikely hero. I thought about the lonely, solitary existence he must lead in this place, stuffed to the gills with a bicycle-and-parts hoard, cut off from society because of his affliction. I also couldn’t believe that after the nightmarish events of the previous seventy-two hours, I’d finally done a proper shot, not the tiny amounts I’d been forced by circumstance to limit myself to. I closed my eyes, still not believing my incredible lucky streak. I finally, gratefully, fell into a nod.
After again riding on the back of Bram’s uncomfortable bike downtown a couple of hours later and scoring at eight a.m., I took a cab back to my room at the American Hotel to catch a few hours of much-needed rest. My personal journey through Hades had taken me to the limits of what I had previously thought I could physically and mentally endure. Yet endure it I had.
I came awake with a start at four p.m. from a generic wake-up call I’d not ordered. Wilkins must have arrived with the band and our soundman Hutch, who rode with us everywhere.
I loved Hutch. He knew, of course, as did everyone in band and crew, what terrible shape I was in. But he always went out of his way to put an arm around my shoulder, offer his love and encouragement, one of the few consistent beacons of light in what was an overwhelmingly dark thousand miles of midnight I’d forced myself to travel.
“Mark, did I ever tell you how much I love to run your sound and hear your voice every day? You are my favorite singer, brother. You can do this, you are master, don’t forget that.”
He went out of his way to lift me up daily. A genuine, lifesaving grace.
When I met the band in the lobby for the short walk to the Paradiso in order to set up and soundcheck, Wilkins scowled, came up next to me, and whispered in my ear.
“You’ve done it this time, buddy. All that money is coming out of your final pay for this tour. And I hope you’re proud of yourself; James quit today. He wouldn’t even come out of his room to talk to me or let me in. You scared the shit out of him, buddy. I’m ashamed of you. James is a family man with two young children.”
“Then he shouldn’t have gone out of his way to fuck me over and provoke me. I swear to you, Kevan, not only would he not give me my money like you said he would, he wouldn’t even open his door to talk. He sat behind his locked door, taunting and threatening me, called me a dirty animal, while I was a completely respectful professional. I was a total gentleman, Kevan. You know me! Who are you going to believe? This prick or a guy you’ve known for years? We both know I have issues, but when have you ever seen me be abusive or rude to a crew member? Or anyone, ever? Besides Lee, of course … Fuck James, I swear he’s mentally ill, and on top of it, he’s a pure mean-spirited dickhead. Excuse my language, but this pisses me off. Fuck his false fucking accusations, dude. Someone should seriously report this to the merch company and get his ass fired so he doesn’t rip them off or fuck them over again by being such an out-of-control prick to the next band they put him out on the road with.”
“Don’t worry about reporting it, buddy. The company already called today and said we are responsible for finding local vendors to sell at the rest of the shows. They weren’t very happy with you.”
“Weren’t happy with me? Are you fucking joking? I hope to fuck you told them this was on him! I’m glad that piece of shit is gone; I would have kicked the fuck out of him if he wasn’t. He should be fired. He was completely out of line and out of hand. I’ll never use this fucking merch company again, sending us this fucking amateur to do a man’s job.”
Character assassination being a lifelong hobby of mine, I skidded wildly out of my lane while trying my damnedest to send that motherfucker James a personal love-letter of a parting gift.
Back in the UK at the end of the month, we were scheduled to appear on the hugely popular television program Later … with Jools Holland. When we got in the night before, I took the Tube from our hotel across town to King’s Cross, found a street dealer pretty quickly, and bought everything he had. It was enough to see me through that night and would hopefully see me through the day of filming, but it wasn’t enough to see me through the next night, nor would it get me all the way back to Seattle. I would have to come straight down to King’s Cross after the show was finished and procure enough to get that job done.
Starting in the daytime, Jools Holland’s show ran well into nighttime, with a format different than any other TV show. Five or six comp
letely different acts all set up in a circle in the huge studio soundstage where it was filmed and then, in front of a small live audience, he went around the circle announcing the bands one by one. I was psyched because a band called Electronic was also on the show. They were a group with Bernard Sumner, guitarist of Joy Division and singer of New Order, both bands I considered to be among the greatest ever; and guitarist Johnny Marr of the Smiths, another heavy favorite of mine. I was deeply disappointed when their tunes turned out to be the weakest of tea. After a couple times around the room, each act had played two songs apiece. In between acts, Holland would also play a boogie-woogie song or two on the piano, something he’d done before his television career as an early member of the beloved British pop band Squeeze. After running through our songs and enduring the half-baked witticisms of the scripted banter between host and guests, we headed back up to our hotel. As we arrived, Josh said, “Hey, Scratch, a good friend of mine is a huge fan and wants to meet you at the after-show in our hotel bar; I told her I’d introduce you.”
“I’m sorry, dude, but I’ve got somewhere to be. I don’t have time for it.”
I planned on counting out the huge collection of British coins and a few bills I’d managed to accumulate and making one last score at King’s Cross to see me through the night and home.
“Just ten minutes, please. She’s a cool chick and a great singer. Her name is Martina and she sings with Tricky.”
Damn, I thought. I had purchased a copy of Mojo magazine in the airport when we’d first hit England and the free CD that came with the issue had been my only soundtrack on this exploratory trip through the hinterlands of hell and deep into its darkest corners. The track “Christiansands” by Tricky had been my favorite tune on it and I had played it obsessively, over and over again, listening to it through cheap headphones on my piece-of-shit portable Discman CD player the entire tour. It had been one of my only sources of comfort.
“I love her singing. Yeah, I’ll meet her, but it’s gotta be really fast.”