by Mark Lanegan
Donny usually held court while lying on a bed with his edema-swollen feet and legs elevated, but sometimes he’d get up and we’d go out and do what he called “the creep.” The two of us would take the city bus up Broadway to Capitol Hill, where I would go into random stores and stroll through the place looking furtive. With my dirty clothes, long unkempt hair and beard, wild-staring Charles Manson–esque eyes, pronounced limp, and herky-jerky way of walking around, I cut a crazy-street-person, wraith-like figure and any employee in the shop immediately locked down on me with a suspicious gaze. While all eyes were on me, Donny would go in through the door at the other side of the shop and walk straight into the back room, where he would search until he hit the petty cash box. More often than not, he would come straight out again with a coat pocket full of stolen bones. I would shortly thereafter wander out, talking to myself, still drawing attention. It was an incredibly successful routine. Soft, mushy legs but balls of cold blue steel, that Donny.
Late one rainy night, I was camped out in the Jungle when I was roused by Donny’s unmistakable voice.
“Red! Red! Where are ya, Red?”
“Shut the fuck up, man.” Another resident of the Jungle.
“You telling me to shut up? I’ll break your fucking neck, mister.”
I quickly got up and followed the sounds of the commotion. The situation was immediately defused when Donny saw me.
“Hey, Red!” he boomed with a big smile. “I got a job for ya.” A deadly serious look quickly replaced his smile.
An hour earlier, Donny had just re-upped and was walking down the street with a small canvas bank bag full of heroin in his pocket when he noticed a police car slowly following him. He’d cut behind a fenced-in building site and, out of their view for an instant, tossed the bag over the tall chain link and barbed wire. Seconds later, they turned the corner, hit the lights, and got out of the car to shake him down. Not finding anything, the cops had to let him go. Now he needed me to climb over and retrieve the dope.
We walked the quarter mile or so back to the unfinished building in the dark. After a couple tries, he managed to throw his long black duster over the wire, then hoisted me up onto the twelve-foot-high fence. I almost got hung up and sat shakily straddling the top for a minute, temporarily unable to get my leg to the other side.
“For fuck’s sake, Red, get on with it.”
I swung over and climbed down a couple feet. Then my cold fingers lost their grip on the rain-wet chain link and I fell eight feet the rest of the way down. I picked myself up off the muddy ground and quickly located the bag behind a large pile of two-by-fours. Easy money.
The instant I picked up the bag, a bright white motion-sensor floodlight came on. With a howl that sounded like it came from the depths of hell, a huge Rottweiler came galloping out of the shadows. I tried to sprint for the fence, bit ass on the slippery ground, and fell backwards in the mud. Here was not death, but deformity: this dog would chew my face off. At the last possible second, the Rott snapped back on a heavy chain attached to its collar, snarling and snapping at the air, its jaws clicking like a dry-firing pistol, just inches from my face.
“Jesus Christ. Throw me the bag!” Donny hissed.
I ignored him, stuffing it down the front of my pants instead. I’d be damned if he split before I got out and was paid in dope for performing this wretched task. I picked up a wooden pallet, leaned it against the fence, and used it as a stepladder to launch myself back up to the top and over. We left his coat hanging on the barbed wire and took off across the lot to the street and back up the hill, the Rottweiler barking at the top of its lungs and throwing itself against its chain in a frenzy all the while.
I was on the pay phone in my old First Hill neighborhood hitting up Laurie, the Screaming Trees’ accountant, for nonexistent royalties when a rental car pulled up. The window rolled down and a man stuck his head out.
“Hello, Mark.”
My father? He hadn’t left his home in Alaska in a couple years, not since our depressing Christmas vacation together.
“Hey, son, I thought I’d come stay with you for a couple weeks. If that’s okay.”
“Dad, I’m sorry, I can’t have visitors right now.” I didn’t have it in me to tell him I no longer had an apartment. “My place is a total wreck right now.” Not so far from the truth.
I told him to take the ferry across to Bainbridge Island where my sister Trina lived with her kids and husband, that I would visit him there in a couple days.
“Um. Okay, Mark. That’s fine.” After giving me twenty bucks, he took off.
I had the distinct feeling he knew I was full of shit. The look in his eyes as he drove off hurt me a little, but I had the business of survival to attend to and quickly put it out of my head.
I had been estranged from my mother ever since I’d threatened to kill her in her truck. The last time I had seen her in Seattle had been before that, while she was in town visiting my younger stepbrother. Brendan had lived only four blocks from me on First Hill for years but I rarely visited him. While in my active addiction, I was persona non grata there.
I had knocked on the door and Brendan answered. I had asked for my mother.
“Wait a second,” he said, not inviting me in. He shut the door and a few moments later my mother had emerged. After one quick glance at her twenty-eight-year-old junkie son, she gave me a disdainful look.
“What do you want, Mark?”
It had literally been decades since she had given me money for anything, but I thought, What the hell, give it a shot.
“Hey, Mom, good to see you. Is there any way I can borrow twenty dollars?”
“I’m not giving you any money for drugs,” she flatly said.
No shock there.
“Okay, but can you give me a ride to the other side of the Hill? Five-minutes’ drive, that’s all.”
To my surprise, she agreed. But the minute her car started moving, I was suddenly stricken with cotton fever, a muscle-tightening, jaw-cramping, debilitating malady that caused uncontrollable shaking. Cotton fever happened when, to get one last shot, a junkie squirted some water on the old cottons or cigarette filters used to strain the heroin while drawing it up from the spoon and then, with the pusher end of the rig, squeezed out what dope he could. Sometimes it released microscopic, sickness-causing bacteria in the cotton that were then injected into the vein. Fifteen minutes later, you were having a major fucking drag. For years at that point, my first shot of the day always came from pounding out the previous days’ cottons. On the few occasions the fever hit me, it was a crippling nightmare, complete with crushing headache and a severe clenching, cramping of the jaw that made it nearly impossible to speak.
“What in the hell is wrong with you? Are you having an overdose?” she yelled.
“No, Mom, just keep driving,” I stammered.
With some difficulty, I was able to convey that I needed her to roll up the windows and crank the heat, which she begrudgingly did. It helped mitigate my unhinged shaking until we arrived at a dope house where I hoped to get something fronted to me. She stopped the car and stared icily straight ahead. With some difficulty I managed to sit up straight and then crawled out without so much as a “See you later” from her.
The very next day after my sad encounter with my father, I was walking down an empty street when I glanced up and saw a middle-aged couple shuffling tentatively in my direction. As they got closer, I was stunned to discover it was my mother and stepfather coming toward me. Both parents in two days—it felt like a cruel joke. In the couple of years since I’d last seen her, we had both aged what looked to be twenty. As we met on the sidewalk, she stuck out a trembling hand with a piece of paper she wanted me to take. I grabbed it without a word and she stumbled and collapsed into her husband’s arms as I kept walking. It was a pamphlet for a rehab facility in eastern Washington. I immediately crushed it in my hand and dropped it into the gutter.
42
LAST RUNGS
After working for Donny for a while, I gained his trust. I became his confidant, friend even, and began selling on the street for him. It was the same as I had done for Val: getting a couple handfuls of balloons in the morning, selling them downtown, and bringing him back the proceeds in the afternoon. At one point, when his legs were too fucked up to walk on, Donny sent me out to meet his Mexican connection Julio to re-up for him. I was waiting on a corner with five hundred bucks in my pocket when an old primer-gray Plymouth Duster pulled up.
“Red?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Well, get in, homie. Ain’t got all day.”
I handed him the dough and he gave me back three times its street value in tar. Before getting out, I asked him for his number, looking forward to a time when I could go back into business for myself, and he gave it.
“Thanks, man,” I said. “Let’s keep this to ourselves, okay?”
“No problem, man, see you around.”
After a couple weeks of meeting with Julio on Donny’s behalf, I began skimming some of the dope off the top and keeping it for myself. Just a gram or so, not so much that he’d notice. But in time, I became more brazen. One day, after I brought the package back to Donny, he looked at it hard, then at me.
“This is light, Red. Are you ripping me off?”
“No way, Donny.”
“You’d better hope not, pal.”
“This is what he gave me.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’m gonna fuck you up. Empty your pockets, motherfucker.”
I could feel beads of sweat forming on my face as I turned my pockets inside out. All I had in them was some change, a used outfit, a Reese’s peanut butter cup, a packet of Zig-Zag papers, and a couple cigarette butts. Luckily, I had stashed the dope inside a small open seam in the waistband of my jeans where I always hid shit. Donny calmed down and then started cooking up a couple shots for us, to my profound relief.
But suddenly there was a different dynamic at play. Donny made little attempt to disguise his newfound suspicion of me. His edema was blowing up and caused him excruciating pain. Leaving the bed was torture for him. His condition reminded me of the kid Tim the day before he died, unable to get up off the ground, his legs swollen to twice their normal size. Donny no longer trusted me with his livelihood … but I was his only option to pick up the shit from Julio. I saw the writing on the wall and knew my days were numbered.
The next time Donny sent me out to re-up, I made a desperate, foolhardy decision. I met Julio on the corner with the grand Donny had given me, got the dope, and instead of returning to Donny’s, hopped on a city bus headed to the far side of Capitol Hill. I holed up in the house of some using acquaintances for a few days, sharing some dope with them in exchange for a bed.
After a week or so, I ran into Patrick Conner, the younger brother of my Screaming Trees bandmates Van and Lee. Pat invited me to stay at the large house in the Central District he shared with some other kids from Ellensburg, a house I’d crashed in before. It was a huge, comfortable, three-story house. I slept on a couch in a closed-in balcony on the top floor with my old piss-yellow corduroy stadium coat I still had from 1993 as a blanket, my only worldly possession left from my thirty-three years on earth.
Early one morning, I was awakened by a loud disturbance.
“I know he’s in there, you pissants! Get the fuck out of my way!”
I got up in a hurry, recognizing Donny’s robust, angry voice from the street below.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Pat’s roommate Adrian. “He’s not here, mister. Get off my property or I’m calling the cops.”
Then all four of the kids who lived there started yelling.
“Yeah, man! Get lost! The cops are on the way! Get outta here, mister!”
How had he found me? I’d been careful to never tell him about the place. Well, find me he had, and now I was deep in the shit. His big, booming voice tore through the crisp, still morning air.
“You fucked the wrong guy, Mark,” he was now shouting at the top of his lungs, using my real name for the first time ever. “You fucked the wrong guy! I see you, motherfucker! I know you! You’re dead, Red! You’re fucking dead!”
I descended after I was sure he’d left. The guys were visibly shaken. Turns out they had stood together in a line to prevent him from getting into the house. I was heartened, proud of the balls my young eastern Washington homeboys had shown. But I’d put them in danger, and now I’d have to leave. If we’d won the battle, we would lose the war. Donny was not someone to be fucked with. I’d once seen him mercilessly beat down a large, tough-looking homeless guy who had spit at him. And though it was illegal for a felon, he kept a pistol under his mattress.
At long last, I was face-to-face with the dilemma I’d been desperately avoiding forever. I was thirty-three but looked twice as old. I weighed a skeletal one hundred sixty-five pounds with huge open wounds on my arms. I had no money, no safe place to stay. I had burned every bridge from both ends and every church from floorboard to ceiling. I was the ghost that wouldn’t die. When I first hit the city, I would have climbed Mount Everest for a shot of heroin. Now I barely had the strength to climb a single flight of stairs. With trouble in every direction—the cops, Donny, Val, countless other friends and foes I’d ripped off and fucked over—there was no possible way I could remain on First Hill. But the ten-block radius around it was the only home I’d known for years. But for those years, my existence had been brutally, dysfunctionally hopeless. It reminded me of a cartoon I’d seen in Cracked magazine as a kid: my life there was like standing in front of a shit-throwing machine in a white suit 24/7, continuously pushing the button with my own shaking hand. With an unfamiliar sadness, I admitted to myself I had to get the fuck out of Dodge. It was time to disappear.
As I stood shivering, dopesick, on a corner, waiting for the inevitable hammer to fall, my mind went back to something that had happened months earlier. During my daily trip to Capital Loan to use the phone and pawn something, Rob had asked me to come into the back room.
“Hey, Mark, a weird thing happened yesterday. Courtney Love came into the shop and asked if I knew how to get a hold of you. She gave me some literature from a program in California that helps musicians with drug problems, puts them through rehab.”
“Fuck that shit. You can tell her to shove her rehab.”
Rob was a good guy, a family man with wife and kids, a successful businessman who owned two pawnshops. He had a soft spot for me, always taking the dirty stuff I brought in, believing or at least pretending to believe my bullshit excuses for where I had gotten it. He had also, on occasion, offered to take me to a twelve-step meeting. I always declined. After knowing him for years, I easily owed him upward of twenty grand. At different times, besides all the stolen shit I sold, I had handed over my 1996 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy, reels of unreleased Screaming Trees tapes, boxes of rare silver dollars, and a Fender Jaguar Kurt Cobain had given me to attempt to pay off my debt. Now, with nowhere else to turn, I remembered Rob and what Courtney had offered. A way out.
I trudged the long mile down to the shop, eaten up with worry I might run into Donny or Val or Officer Davis now, in the eleventh hour, but I got there without incident.
“Hey, Rob,” I called out to him the instant I made it through the door, “what was that thing Courtney left here for me?”
He gave a little smile and reached under the counter and retrieved a thick folder full of information about the Musicians’ Assistance Program, MAP as it was commonly referred to.
“I’ve been hoping for a long time that you’d ask about this,” he said.
I spent less than a minute looking it over.
“Will they take me somewhere warm out of town?” I asked, the only thing I cared about.
“Let me get in touch with them and see what the deal is,” he said.
In less than ten minutes, Rob had me booked on a flight to Los Angeles the very next day w
here the MAP people had a bed in a rehab for me.
“Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it, man.” We shook hands and I left.
I had no intention of going to a rehab or anywhere else these people might want to take me. My plan was to get off the plane and hit the streets. Yes, I was sick, and yes, I needed help, but the only kind of help I wanted was help getting out of town and then getting loaded.
The next day, Rob met me on an agreed-upon street corner to pick me up. I convinced him to put one last loan on my tab and drive me to a dope house where I cooked up four shots and put the full rigs in my socks. I had him pull over on the way to Sea-Tac airport and let me smoke a couple hits of crack in his truck, then he dropped me off at the check-in counter. I hit the bathroom twice during the three-hour flight, doing two full shots both times.
I hadn’t planned on getting so loaded, but I was suddenly overcome by exhaustion from all the previous years of running and gunning that by the time we landed, I was so high and worn out I had trouble walking. I also hadn’t planned on the huge security guy waiting to pick me up. Unable to get free, I unhappily followed him to his SUV, got in, and immediately passed out.
“Hey, pal, time to get up, let’s go.”
I groggily rubbed my eyes and got out of the truck onto the sidewalk outside what looked to be a nondescript office building in Hollywood, not the rehab facility I had anticipated.
“Buddy wants to see you before we send you to the hospital.”
“Who’s Buddy?”
“Buddy Arnold, man!” The driver laughed. “The guy who brought you here!”
We went upstairs where a friendly woman smiled at me.
“Hello, Mark, we’ve been expecting you. Please take a seat.”
About fifteen minutes later, a thin gray-haired dude in his early seventies bounded through the door.
“Jesus Christ,” he said with a big grin. “Look at you, man! We got you just in time! You are definitely in the right place.”
He took me back into his office and told me a little bit about himself. He had been a professional jazz saxophone player who had played with Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, among others. His career had been derailed several times due to his heroin addiction and he had been in and out of the penitentiary for years. After getting clean during his last stint in prison, he and his wife had started the Musicians’ Assistance Program and had helped many musicians and other music-business people get free of their addictions. He pointed to a large, almost unrecognizable photo of himself on the wall. Shirtless and emaciated with eyes closed and long greasy hair, he had obviously been deep in his crippling dependency.