Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  As I sat up counting my change in my hotel room, Josh called from the bar, telling me to come down. My bag of clothes still lost courtesy of British Airways, I had poured by the handful fifty thick, heavy one-pound coins along with another ten pounds’ worth of smaller-­denomination coins into a doubled-up pair of sturdy, brand-new, unworn sweat socks I had recently bought and knotted up the top. I stuffed it into my coat pocket, tucked two rolled-up fifty-pound bills into my pants pocket, then left the room.

  I stopped in the crowded bar as promised to meet Martina. Straight off, I found her funny, friendly, and magnetically attractive. With a slight sting of regret, I knew I had to quickly leave, though I hoped to further explore this intriguing woman’s charms at some later date. After promising each other we’d do some music together someday, I headed out onto the street, toward the Tube station to King’s Cross to find some dope as fast as possible. Our lobby call was early and I could not allow my search to turn into yet another infuriating all-night slog, nor could I come away empty-handed.

  I got off the train and came up out of the station to an unusually empty street. It was cold but not freezing and I wondered who had hidden all the dealers in London that night. Finally, I spotted a suitably furtive-looking character across the street, hanging out on a shadowy corner. I walked up.

  “What are you looking for, mate?”

  “Some gear, brown,” I whispered back.

  “How much you want?”

  “I don’t know, I gotta see it first.”

  “Okay, follow me,” and he began leading me around a corner and into a dark alley.

  Not wanting a repeat act of my Amsterdam knifepoint disaster, I looked back over my shoulder a couple times to make sure we weren’t being followed in by another weapon-wielding scumbag. I held in my right hand the end of the tightly knotted socks full of the seventy-plus heavy coins shoved in my coat pocket. The other hand I curled into a fist inside its pocket to keep it warm.

  He stopped up ahead of me, turned around, and began fumbling in the inner pocket of his jacket as if to retrieve the dope while walking back toward me. Then he abruptly lunged forward and shoved his hand into my left pocket, thinking that was where I carried my money.

  “Wrong pocket, shithead,” I said.

  Grabbing his wrist with my left hand and pulling the sock out of my right pocket, I viciously clubbed him with it like a truncheon in the side of his head as he fruitlessly fought to pull out of my grip.

  “You stupid fuck!” I rasped as he fell straight to the ground. I leaned down to savagely pound him in the head twice more, taking out the frustration of years of affliction on this hapless dolt.

  Suddenly, all the repressed anger, pain, and extreme anxiety I’d held on to throughout this entire trying ordeal, one that had carried me way over what body, mind, and soul could handle, came pouring out. As I stood over where he lay, I began kicking him with machinelike repetition and maximum velocity in the head, ribs, groin, back, and face, over and over and over again. All the grief I’d put myself through, sadistically transferred to this desperate and foolhardy character who’d simply had the extraordinary misfortune of picking the wrong target. As I continued mindlessly unloading on the guy, my attack was fury-driven not by the fact that he’d tried to burn me, but instead because he’d not had the goods I’d been promised. All that ran through my head was that I had better end this beatdown soon because it was already past midnight and I would fast have to resume my wearisome, late-night search. I absolutely had to find heroin in order to make it home on the plane scheduled to leave at nine a.m., with a lobby call of five thirty that morning.

  As I persisted in the unrelenting beating, I became aware of a dull, cemetery-dead emptiness inside. I had stopped feeling anything at all. No rage, sadness, fear, nothing. I had finally crossed the line and ceased to give a damn about life, death, or any other meaningless thing in between. I only stopped robotically connecting my boot with his body when forced to by sheer, broken exhaustion.

  Unable to see clearly through itching, irritated eyes blinded by stinging sweat, without thinking, I rubbed at them with the socks full of coins still in my hand. I realized I had just wiped his blood onto my face when I glanced at the now scarlet-stained cloth. Under the burning, wet, bloodstained, jaundiced eyes of his torturer and would-be executioner, the unsuccessful thief slowly attempted to crawl away from his self-sought torment.

  Wiping the blood off my face with the sleeve of my coat, I croaked, “You goddamn idiot. I should fucking finish you.” Then I turned and walked back toward the station to seek out a real dealer. As I high-stepped it down the alley, I heard him groan in agony where he lay, inching away on the ground.

  41

  COTTON FEVER

  Not wanting to be alone following the death of his girlfriend Demri, Layne Staley moved into my place while I was acting the rat-on-a-wheel through a hell tour of Europe. He and my alleged-­statutory-rapist, cross-dressing protégé St. Louis Simon lived in my apartment smoking and selling crack and arguing with one another over junkie etiquette while I was gone. The first thing Layne said when I walked through the door was “Whoa, man. What the hell happened to you?”

  “Let’s just say it was a rough fucking ride,” I said and left it at that. I was relieved to have reliable sources of heroin at my disposal once more, and the three of us stayed awake for days on end, alternately hitting the pipe with Simon obsessively scanning the floor looking for what we might have dropped. Eventually he, like so many other addicts and transients who had lived with and worked for me in the past, went for a walk one day and simply never came back. Three weeks after my return from Europe, I got buzzed from the front door late one night and when I went downstairs and looked out, there was my traveling bag, sitting on the front steps to my building, courtesy of British Airways.

  Layne spent a few more months in squalor with me in my small one-bedroom apartment. He never stopped grieving Demri’s death. After a while, his father Phil, also an addict, took up Simon’s dubious duties as our runner, which made for a weird dynamic. Layne would often nod standing up, bent over at what appeared to be a painful angle with his head almost to the floor. Nonetheless, he became angry whenever Phil quietly caught a nod sitting on the couch. He would videotape his father, then force him to look at it, cruelly ridiculing his own dad for doing the same thing we all did every day. He obviously carried some resentment of Phil, a man I’d found to be just as sweet, funny, and smart as his son, as well as his physical mirror image. Finally, after almost four months, Layne began to crave isolation and moved back into the impenetrable penthouse condo in the University District he had bought and I was again by myself. As I’d come home with next to no money from my painful, fruitless tour, my phone and electricity were soon shut off. Before long I was cooking up my daily batches of crack to sell on a small old Coleman propane camping stove and shooting dope by candlelight at night.

  I still had a pager. One day, I received a page from Layne. I walked across Ninth Avenue to Harborview hospital, to the grimy, germ-covered pay phone at the bus stop I always used but hated to touch. I wiped off the receiver with the sleeve of my shirt and called him collect.

  “Hey, man, I heard from somebody that the cops are looking for you. Something about stolen property. Keep your head down.”

  I asked him where he had heard it and his answer was a bit vague but the story nonetheless gave me pause.

  After Layne’s warning, I stayed in my bathroom all day and night, waiting for customers. I had turned the buzzer off long before because not only did those street people I’d foolishly given my apartment number to harass me around the clock, I had run into Christian so often while meeting some shabby crackhead at the front door that it was way too obvious. Now I told them not to shout up at me anymore but to throw a small piece of gravel up to get my attention. Then I would quietly creep down the back stairs and do the deal at the door into the alley behind the building. I kept all the drugs on me so I could flush
them down the toilet if indeed the cops did burst through the door someday.

  After a week or so had passed, I started feeling like the coast was clear. I got some dough together to pay the power bill, eased up, and allowed myself to live in the rest of the apartment again. I started letting a young homeless dealer named Cyril I’d met on the corner of Third and Pine in downtown Seattle sleep on the mattress in my dining room in exchange for a few balloons of heroin a day. It was a boon for me. Unlike many of the homeless addicts who had shared my place in the past, Cyril didn’t aggravate me and kept quiet whenever he was around. Rather than having to hit the streets to hustle, Cyril did all that for me. Thanks to his efforts, I could stay home and focus on making and selling crack and staving off the dopesickness that constantly hounded me.

  Early one morning, I was nodding on the couch when there was a knock on my door.

  “Seattle Police Department! Open up!”

  “One minute,” I said, thinking, Goddamnit, you idiot! He told you they were coming!

  I scrambled to get up and flush what I had. Halfway through the bedroom, I tripped on a chair and ate shit, hitting the floor with a huge resounding thud that reverberated throughout the place, badly fucking up my knee. After flushing all the drugs I was holding, I limped back to the door. With the chain still hitched, I opened the door an inch or so.

  “Mark Lanegan?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “My name is Officer Davis. I’m coming in to have a chat with you.”

  “What about?” As if I didn’t know.

  “Listen, pal,” he growled through the crack in the door, “if you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut the fuck up and let me in.”

  After several long moments of hesitation, I unchained the door. One solitary uniformed officer strode in, straight past me. He peered at the crack pipes and spoons on the table I hadn’t had time to clean up and the mound of used syringes on the floor in the corner, probably two feet high.

  “Sit down,” he said. “I’m gonna take a quick look around.”

  Officer Davis stuck his head into the other room where Cyril was out cold, facedown on the bare mattress. A dirty mason jar half-filled with bright red balloons of heroin sat in a large flowerpot alongside a huge rotting cactus near his head. The cop looked back over his shoulder.

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, sir, just asleep.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat across from me at the coffee table.

  “I’m not here to bust you for whatever you guys are doing up in this place. I’m here to talk to you about a stolen laptop you pawned a couple weeks ago. I just need to get a statement from you about it.”

  My mind quickly went back to the computer I’d gotten for a ten-­dollar piece of rock from my former street colleague turned nemesis—the reckless, car-prowling Eritrean crackhead named Dawitt—and sold at the pawnshop for seventy-five bucks. I thought, You finally got me, motherfucker. Without intending to, he’d finally succeeded in bringing me to my knees.

  “Because Rob Chandler is a friend of yours, I’m not gonna hang you up on this. Instead, I’m gonna give you two options. Either go to rehab and get yourself cleaned up, or leave town. If I find out you’re still here or out on the street, I’m going to make what happened in San Francisco seem like Disneyland.”

  Rob Chandler was a longtime friend, the owner of Capital Loan, the pawnshop where I sold stuff, borrowed money, and used the phone daily. The cop was referring to my arrest in San Francisco a few months earlier for possession of crack cocaine and paraphernalia. I’d gotten popped early one morning in the sketchy, drug-ridden Tenderloin district while the Trees were in the Bay Area playing some shows. I spent a dopesick day in jail and the arrest was reported on MTV News and in the local Seattle newspapers. It had been a small nightmare, both immediate and sustained. But since an acquaintance of our tech Danny Baird was childhood friends with the prosecuting attorney, he’d simply dropped the charges and I’d walked away scot-free.

  The cop stuck a piece of paper in front of me.

  “I want you to sign this statement. Then I’m giving you a week to get lost. Either rehab or leave town, I don’t care which.”

  I sat there listening in silence. Without reading it, I signed the piece of paper he’d put in front of me. Without another word, he stood up and walked out.

  After the visit from the cops, things went downhill pretty quickly. I felt eyes on me everywhere. Unable to deal crack and not wanting to leave town, I attempted to go to rehab. With my health insurance from the musicians’ union, I checked myself into a grim detox facility in the Ballard neighborhood, northwest of the city. After filling out some forms, a gray-haired nurse led me to an uninviting ice-cold room. Without giving me meds of any kind, she handed me a hospital gown and told me to get in bed … at eleven o’clock in the morning. I undressed and put on the uncomfortable gown, then lay there under a threadbare blanket watching the incessant rain beat down on the cement sidewalk outside the window. After about thirty minutes, I knew I wasn’t going to stay. I said “Fuck this” out loud to nobody, put on my clothes, and slipped out a back door. I collect-called Danny Baird, who was functioning as my manager by that time. He came and got me in his old Ford pickup truck and drove me back up to First Hill.

  The first of the month was coming. I didn’t have rent and was plagued by a rotten wisdom tooth and an infuriating infestation of lice. I shoplifted tube after tube of Orajel and was continuously squirting it into the hole in the back of my mouth where the remaining jagged piece of bone made my jaw throb with pain. Still, my head pounded round the clock, making it hard to focus on anything, and I was constantly trying to brush off the vermin that I could feel crawling on my neck night and day. I stayed until the eviction notice was put on my door. Then I left with just the clothes on my back. Everything of value had already been sold or traded for drugs.

  I spent some nights on a couch in a house occupied by some impressionable young guys from my hometown of Ellensburg. Other nights, I crawled under a dingy blue tarp I had fished out of a dumpster and slept in an overgrown, bushy area next to the freeway populated by homeless people and addicts known as “the Jungle.” I sold heroin on the street for my former all-night connection, the agoraphobic black dude named Val. He had been my go-to 24/7 dealer for years, the guy I could score from day or night, although I mostly tried to avoid him when possible. He was a wannabe rock star who took perverse delight in the fact that I had made records as a rock singer. He forever grilled me with questions about the “music biz” and forced me to listen to him play his knockoff Fender Strat, something akin to unpleasant cock-and-ball torture. With his throwback processed hair and old-school-style nylon shirts and flared trousers, he looked like a parody of a seventies blaxploitation pimp. He lived in the Yesler Terrace projects nearby on First Hill and rarely if ever left his pad. Every morning, after my seven a.m. soup-and-sandwiches in the mission at Broadway and Jefferson, I would get five dollars from Val, go buy his coffee and donuts from a shop down the way, and bring it back to his apartment.

  I had been a singer and a dealer who used to have guys doing this for me, but now I was the gofer, the runner, the shitboy. It didn’t sit well with me. It started to wear on my mind like a foul, vicious thug. I began planning a way out.

  After my wake-up shot in Val’s bathroom, I would head off the hill with some heroin to sell downtown. Every day, after I sold out of product I would stop at Nordstrom’s department store and steal a bag of tube socks. I would tear the tops off to use as bandages for the huge, gaping, self-inflicted wounds on my forearms, and would use the bottom part as intended: a covering for my filthy, aching, open-blistered feet. After that, I’d stop at a drugstore and fill my coat pockets with double-A, triple-A, and nine-volt batteries, which I also peddled on the street. Cyril had hipped me to that hustle. It was amazing how many people would buy batteries, almost as many as would buy dope.

  Once, while standing on a street corner with my
mouth full of balloons, I heard someone say my name from inside a passing car. I had told myself no one would ever recognize me in my current state: skeleton-thin with huge beard, long dreaded hair, and greasy, unwashed clothes, still sporting the leather pants I’d bought in Europe, the only pair I owned. But someone had.

  I was wary of cops in the best of times but was now hypervigilant in case Officer Davis might make good on his promise to catch me out. I wore a dark gray hoodie even on the rare days of good weather and always kept my head down, looking the other way whenever I saw a police car.

  I stopped into the pawnshop one afternoon to hit Rob Chandler up for some dough. He had actually taken the filthy pants in exchange for a loan and found a pair of jeans in the back for me to wear. Then he had dropped it on me.

  “Davis knows you’re still here, still using. He said to tell you it’s on.”

  I was tired of the grind of working for Val and formulated a plan to rip him off. The chances of him actually leaving his place to come find me were needle-slim. He was so afraid of people that I had never once even seen him outside of his apartment. After delivering him his coffee one day, I took the balloons he gave me and just never went back. Instead of selling them, I did all of the dope myself over the next few days.

  I kept boosting and moving batteries and started getting my dope from a huge forty-something ex-con, a New Yorker named Donny who lived directly across the street from my old place. He’d gotten convicted on an armed robbery charge and spent his ten years in a New York state prison writing poetry. Donny often lamented the fact that nobody in penitentiary knew how to read or write, and he liked to show me his folder of writings. Sometimes he read me his poems aloud in a booming voice with a heavy East Coast accent. He nicknamed me “Red.” I enjoyed hanging out with him, primarily because he would always share his Marlboros with me. They were a thousand times better than the rollies I smoked, always made out of butts I collected off the sidewalk.