Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  “I keep that to remind me of where I’ve been. And where I never want to go again. I’m gonna take a Polaroid of you. Hang on to it so you never forget this day.”

  He gave me a hug and then sent me back to the muscular dude who drove me out to what was, unbeknownst to me, the Pasadena psychiatric hospital where I was to be evaluated and detoxed.

  It was late November and cold in California. I sat shivering in my thin, long-sleeved shirt and filth-encrusted coat near a fountain outside the intake office of Las Encinas Hospital for what seemed like hours, waiting to be admitted. To kill time, I started talking to an elderly lady who sat near me on the bench, chain-smoking cigarettes. She seemed perfectly comfortable, dressed in an ancient, ragged bathrobe.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but could I please have one of your cigarettes?”

  “You have one on your head, young man,” she said.

  I put a hand to my head and did indeed find a partially smoked butt stuck up in my disgusting, never-washed hair. I must have traveled all the way from Seattle with it there. I asked her what she was doing here.

  “I just finished electroshock treatment. I have been suicidal all my life and I’m trying to get better. It feels good out here; my room depresses me.”

  Electroshock? What kind of fucking place was this? Jesus, had they sent me to a goddamn psych ward? Still, as the hours dragged on and the dope wore off, I was too weak and exhausted by years of ritualistically nailing myself to get up and leave.

  It was nighttime before they finally ushered me down to the small substance abuse unit on the hospital grounds. The doctor on duty took one look at my arms and wanted to immediately send me to an actual medical hospital but I was able to talk him out of it. After being given a mercifully heavy dose of phenobarbital, I was led to a bungalow room with a single bed. I climbed in and fell into a bottomless well of sleep.

  43

  PSYCHIC STORMS, EPIPHANY, AND REBIRTH

  The next few days were lost in a hazy cloud of phenobarb-­induced dreamscape horizons. I was aware of crashing wind and rain, a huge, ceaseless storm outside shaking and pounding the bungalow I occupied. I kept having the same dream over and over. Sitting in a chair in this same room where I slept through my kick, it would burst into flames—the walls, ceiling, and floor all at once—engulfing everything in fire, myself included. I woke only to get another dose of meds and go back under. I would come to from time to time and see a plate of food on a stand next to the bed but would instantly roll over and pass out again. At some point, a nurse made me get up out of bed and get undressed. She put me on a stool in a shower where I sat dry heaving under the hot water for twenty minutes, so weak I was barely able to stay on the chair. Later, I became conscious of someone cutting my hair but it seemed more like an imaginary midnight-movie scene as I was sitting in a lawn chair, unable to lift my head off my chest.

  Late morning on the fifth day, I lay in bed in total darkness, slightly uncomfortable and unable to sleep all day now that I was being slowly weaned off the meds. There came a light knocking on my door.

  “Go away,” I said.

  Now a louder knock.

  “Go away, I’m sleeping!”

  The door opened a crack and a guy stuck his large round head in.

  “Hey, man, how you doing? The nurses told me your story and it sounds a lot like mine. I’m Keni.”

  I raised up in bed about to go off on this fucking jerk when I saw his profile in the light. He looked familiar, but in a way I couldn’t place.

  “I know you.”

  “Well … yeah, man, I’m a musician, too. I was in a band called Autograph.”

  That band name instantly cast my mind back to my high school days. I’d skip sixth period every day to go drink beer and smoke weed at Matt Varnum’s house, getting him to listen to cassette tapes of my punk rock records and watching MTV with the sound off. Of all the terrible hair-metal videos they aired, the one that particularly drew my ire was “Turn Up the Radio” by Autograph. I hated it so much that one day it had come on and I’d thrown a full can of beer at my friend’s mother’s TV set. I especially detested the horrible hammy mugging by the camera-­hogging drummer. Now, during arguably the worst stretch of my life, that same dude was actually in my sickroom. My mind was blown, the irony too cruel for my brain to process. I begged him to leave and he finally relented, only to return a week or so later, the beginning of an unlikely friendship between this still over-the-top character and myself. His name was Keni Richards.

  After the storm subsided, I was finally able to shake off the imaginary steel band that had been threatening to make my skull implode. The beautiful California sun had emerged from behind the storm clouds and an orderly had set me up in a lawn chair out on the impeccably groomed, endless expanse of gorgeous green lawn on the hospital grounds. I sat there alone, basking in the not-too-hot, not-too-cool air.

  My hair was short and clean, as were my clothes. I had awakened one day to find my room filled with several bags of brand-new clothes that Courtney had sent over. I felt more aware and alive then I could ever remember, although my arms looked as though I’d tried to kill myself, white bandages from wrist to elbow. I was no longer imprisoned by any drug, did not have to hit the streets and hustle. For the first time in years, I had nowhere to be at all. It was an exceptionally peaceful moment. I marveled at my incredible good fortune. I smiled, then began to laugh, then laughed maniacally. I had escaped. I had survived. They had failed to destroy me and I had woken up here in this paradise.

  “I’m still here, motherfuckers! You can’t kill me!” I howled hysterically at the sky.

  Before my sick crowing had even receded, an unwelcome truth lodged itself in my head: Anything that happens next can only be worse than what came before. That degree of suffering was beyond my imagination.

  My manic laughter turned instantly into uncontrollable sobbing. I hadn’t cried in a long time. It felt as though the tears were being ripped from inside whatever I had that passed for a soul, clawed out from that lifelong aching place. I moaned and gasped, unable to catch my breath.

  Suddenly, spontaneously, out of a moment of abject despair, I said out loud, “God, change me.”

  I had never believed in a traditional Christian God or in any supreme being. I had hated sitting through midnight mass, Catholic weddings, Catholic funerals, and especially those torturous Wednesday morning masses at the mission I was forced to endure before getting in line for soup and sandwiches. I didn’t know who I was calling out to … but the second I cried out for mercy, I was nailed by some invisible but overwhelming force, as powerful and sudden as a shotgun blast. A surreal, instantaneous, sixteen-hits-of-acid epiphany, as though I had pissed on an incredibly powerful electric fence.

  I was knocked from my chair and my life flashed before my eyes: my wasted childhood, my arrogant youth, my anger and obsessions, crime, delusions, self-loathing, paranoia, hopelessness, fury, and sad junkie downward spiral. I’d heard that cliché a million times—my life flashed before my eyes—but I finally understood what that meant. In that single instant, it had been powerfully, intensely true, the most authentic experience of my entire life in one second on the lawn of a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital.

  Lying there, sobbing in the grass for the first time ever, I stared directly and honestly into the mirror of my life. In an instant, I saw that my entire life’s way of thinking and behaving was the corrupted opposite of what it should be. My morbid thought process was the wrong side of right. I had grown up believing you took whatever you could from whoever you could and always looked out for number one, screwing anyone and everyone in the process. From my earliest childhood memories, I had been a thief and a flagrant, transparent, nonstop liar and cheat. Music, which I had loved, which I had lived for, which I credited with giving me a life, had long ago become just a means to an end: sex, money, drugs, a place to crash, a bargaining chip, a free ride, whatever I could milk from it. I had been a rank nihilist who lived each day w
ith an obsessive, burning need to pay back twice as hard anybody who fucked me, and spent hours in my mind digging the graves of my enemies, real and imagined. My extreme, retrograde sickness had cut me open and left me eviscerated. I had asked to be changed and now, in a second, I was changed. Maybe not by anybody else’s God but by some very real force that intervened in the life of one sad piece of human roadkill the moment it was asked to.

  In order to survive, in order to move forward, I would have to change every single fucking sorry thing about myself. I would have to start over again clean.

  Epilogue

  THE WOLF IN SEAL’S CLOTHING

  After almost a year at live-in treatment facilities and halfway houses in California, much of it funded through the continued kindness and generosity of Courtney Love, I was tracked down by detectives from the criminal branch of the IRS. Still newly clean, it was a shock to find out that I was facing significant prison time for tax evasion. The back taxes on those Mad Season royalty checks I had hidden from my accountants years before had ballooned, with penalties and interest accrued, to almost a half million bucks. A tax attorney got them to drop it to fifty grand cash and I was given a month to come up with the payment. I might as well have tried to swim underwater from Japan to Australia holding my breath as to get that much dough together. At zero hour, my producer friend from Houston, Randall Jamail, stepped in. His publishing company offered me a songwriting deal for that exact amount and the check went directly to the government.

  Several days before I was to be kicked out of the treatment house where I had been living, I came home from my job doing demolition on old buildings in East Los Angeles to find someone waiting for me on the porch. It was a fellow musician from Seattle I’d never met. He’d heard of my situation and, acting on impulse, had come looking for me. Before long I was functioning as caretaker of Guns N’ Roses bass player Duff McKagan’s homes.

  Still unwelcome in the houses of most people who had known me before, I was befriended by Duff, who took me under his wing like a guardian angel. I had been sleeping under an uncomfortable thin wool blanket on a bare canvas army cot in Keni Richards’s fume-filled art studio when Duff asked me to stay at his home to keep an eye on things. When his family was in Los Angeles, I’d live in and watch his house in Seattle. When they’d come back, I would go to Los Angeles and do the same thing there. I was with him at the Seattle house when he married his kind and beautiful girlfriend, Susan Holmes. I didn’t have any suitable clothes to wear to the ceremony, so Duff dug out a garbage bag full of clothes that the singer Seal had left at his house, stashed in the basement. From it, he selected a sweater for me to wear.

  In Los Angeles, my young friend Josh Homme who I’d bonded so tightly with and who had made my final days in the Trees bearable had started his own band, Queens of the Stone Age. Heading toward great success, he asked me to come along for the ride. By giving me another shot at music, he handed me a new lease on creative life.

  Some of the ghosts of my old life still haunted me. Nearly two years clean, I stopped at a Starbucks in Seattle to grab a coffee one day. While I waited in line to make my order, I looked down at the local paper. Its huge headline read “Joe DiMaggio Dies.” I glanced at the other of the two local newspapers, stacked side by side. Its headline read “They Were Victims of a Serial Killer.” There, in the middle of three mugshot photos of the African American women who had been murdered, was the face of my girl Shadow. Now I finally knew where she had disappeared to. Her body and two others, found in the Jungle.

  A few years later, I was recording in Houston with Randall Jamail, fulfilling my end of the bargain that had kept me out of tax debtor’s prison. One night in my room at the Holiday Inn, I got a phone call from Laurie Davis, my huge-hearted, long-suffering accountant, the only person from my time in the Trees who continued to care enough to work with me.

  “Mark, please sit down. I’m so sorry but I have some terrible news and it’s going to hurt. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Layne?” I asked.

  “Yes, honey. He’s gone.”

  It was a call I had expected for years but it destroyed me nonetheless. His loss left a void I’ve felt every day since. I expect I always will.

  Acknowledgments

  Shelley Brien

  Mishka Shubaly

  Ben Schafer

  Byrd Leavell

  Anna Hrnjak

  Dylan Carlson

  Ben Shepherd

  Jonathan Poneman

  Roger Trust

  Jerry Cantrell

  Jeff Barrett

  Dan Peters

  Rich Machin

  Gus Brandt

  Dean Karr

  John Powers

  Dean Duzenski

  Billy Walsh

  Paul Bearer

  Calvin Johnson

  Joshua Homme

  Duff McKagan

  Susan Holmes-McKagan

  Tom Hansen

  Alain Johannes

  Steve Gullick

  Kevin Gasser

  Charles Peterson

  Greg Dulli

  Mike Inez

  Trina Lanegan

  Courtney Love Cobain

  Roberto Bentivegna

  Paolo Bicchieri

  David Coppin-Lanegan

  Steven “Thee Slayer Hippy”Hanford

  Phil Staley

  George Drakoulias

  Kevan Wilkins

  Brian Benjamin

  Teo Bicchieri

  Jason Reynolds

  Laurie Davis

  Susan Silver

  Van Conner

  Eric Erlandson

  Brother Aldo Struyf

  Mike Johnson

  Hans Antonides

  Mark Pickerel

  Hutch

  Donna Dresch

  Barrett Martin

  Terry Date

  Jack Endino

  Sietse van Gorkom

  Selene Vigil

  Randall Jamail

  Peter Mensch

  Clay Decker

  Robert Chandler

  Cliff Burnstein

  Sue Tropio

  Bob Pfeifer

  Rosemary Carroll

  Michael Goldstone

  Donal Logue

  Greg Werckman

  Mike McCready

  Michael Jobson

  John Agnello

  Joe Cardamone

  Nick Marson

  Dean Overton

  Danny Baird

  Martin Feveyear

  Travis Keller

  Steve Fisk

  Sam Albright

  Matt Varnum

  Cleon Peterson

  Gary Conner Sr.

  David Catching

  Rob Marshall

  Patrick Conner

  Adrian Makins

  Gary Lee Conner

  Special thanks to D. W. Lanegan

  ALSO BY MARK LANEGAN

  I Am the Wolf: Lyrics and Writings

  Copyright

  First published in the United States of America by Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  This edition published in Great Britain by White Rabbit, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  Copyright © Mark Lanegan 2020

  Cover design by Alex Camlin

  Cover photograph by Anna Hrnjak

  Print book interior design by Jeff Williams

  The moral right of Mark Lanegan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is avail
able from the British Library.

  ISBN (eBook) 978 1 4746 1551 8

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  www.whiterabbitbooks.co.uk