No one knows exactly when he arrived, but it seems to have been a year or two after the death of Cobain. There he began his final descent, even as he was becoming a hero to other wastrels and flowering among strangers. The pounding waves and big cumulonimbus clouds of the Pacific Northwest must have been a reprieve from the desert. There was no need to wait for rain, for a drink, a break from the crashing white light of the Mojave; Seattle was gray and any way you cut it, it was wet—there were people on the streets, in bars, on the pier, on the floor, coffee’d and junk’d up, making music, making art, saying no, saying yes—it all smelled like teen spirit. Through his friend Samantha, Jello had met kids who were on the grunge scene, which was still thriving although not as intensely since the loss of its biggest star and ensuing breakup of his band. Jello began hanging out at local clubs, and one thing led to another, and soon he found himself playing in a band called Fuckhole. He had also become friends with drug dealers, as well as bouncers such as Dave Oberweber, who worked security at a place called the Color Box. Dave was in his forties, and Jello was about twenty-one or twenty-two. As the nights unfolded, Jello laid out the bits and pieces of his life story—leaving home at thirteen because of abuse by his stepfather, getting beaten up by skinheads, and things that even some close friends in Riverside didn’t know about, such as a number of suicide attempts, like jumping off a truck with a noose around his neck or driving a car off a cliff only to end up in a tree. The stories were extreme, and possibly not true, but Dave realized early on that the kid was a handful and incredibly depressed. But he also noticed what everyone in his old crew well knew—that he was charming, brilliant, and, if his talents could be harnessed, someone who had a lot to offer the world.
Dave offered him a place to stay, and Jello took him up on it, staying with him for the next eight or nine months in his two-bedroom house in White Center, a neighborhood that was a mix of artists, musicians, and working-class people who had gigs at the docks or bars. “His room was a masterpiece,” a girlfriend named Ford remembers after I reach her on the phone one day, years after she had been with Jello. The walls were decorated with his poetry and art, as well as lyrics from favorite songs, including one that he had penned called “I Don’t Fit In.” On the ceiling was a poster of his idol, Cobain, and he often told Ford that he’d die by twenty-seven. What can you say when someone makes such pronouncements? Of course she tried to point out reasons to outlive the tormented rock star, and she wasn’t sure that he was serious. After all, he wasn’t the only one who wanted to follow in Cobain’s footsteps; many a bedroom was plastered with Nirvana posters, and especially those of its front man. In Seattle, and across the country, who didn’t want to go out like Kurt Cobain? Yet it was no secret that Jello was a junkie, and Dave knew he had been shooting dope off and on since about sixth or seventh grade. It wouldn’t surprise him if he turned up dead at some heroin hovel at some point. Still, Dave hoped that Jello would clean up, and became a kind of foster father to the kid who by then was calling him Dad. Along with a woman named Elaine Simons, the founder of Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets, he helped the lost boy from the Inland Empire start to make a change.
Elaine’s organization is a Seattle drop-in center for local homeless and at-risk kids and young adults founded in 1995, at a time when the city had become a mecca for the young and disenchanted, thousands of whom had converged on Seattle to join up with the kindred spirits of the grunge scene. Jello had been hanging out on Capitol Hill, an area favored by street kids who were mainly into heroin (as opposed to the university district, which was known for its meth freaks, or downtown, where older, hardcore derelicts gathered). There they would stake out their turf and ask for spare change from passing tourists. Elaine was a regular among the pedestrians, talking to the drifters and locals who worked the streets, hoping to throw them a towline. One day Jello stopped her and spun out a story about needing some new guitar strings. She gave him a couple of bucks and invited him to check out her center, just a few blocks away on Summit Avenue. “He seemed really decent,” she recalls years later. “I was hoping he’d come by.” He did, and by all accounts, he had doubled down on his fabled charisma. Within months, local kids viewed him as a hero.
Yet there was something genuine under the sparkle. For sure it came through when Jello was high, but when he detoxed through a methadone program that Dave got him into, even more so. He began helping Elaine with her group’s needle exchange program, at one point accompanying her to the state capitol in Olympia to testify at hearings about rampant teenage drug use in Seattle and what to do about it. His testimony was so impressive that he won an award. As he began moving away from heroin, he threw himself more passionately than ever into writing music and lyrics. And he became ardently involved in protests against the government, putting the words he had been writing and reading and tattooing on his skin into action. In 1998, a close friend of his named Megan died of an overdose. Jello was distraught, and helped her grandmother get through the grieving process. After that, he immersed himself head-on in the battle to rescue America’s flailing children, heading back out to the streets, planting himself at the bus station or abandoned warehouses where kids were living, counseling them in whatever way the situation demanded. In a way, he had become a parent, doing for all the young denizens of the street what his mother and father had not done for him, finding kindred spirits among America’s legion of castaways.
One of them was a street kid named Zoey. They met through some mutual friends in 1996 but fell out of touch, and then in October of that year, Zoey spotted Jello while she was panhandling, his hoodie up over his green Mohawk. It was her fourteenth birthday, although she told him she was turning sixteen. He gave her all the change in his pockets. They didn’t see each other again until the following summer, although Zoey had been writing to him and calling from a road trip. When she returned, she phoned him, went to his house, and moved in. “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she recalls. “And he didn’t want me to leave.” During the time they were together, Jello was trying to clean up, drinking mostly, and going every day to a methadone clinic. He didn’t tell Zoey much about his life, but she told him all about hers. She had run away from home because her father was a strict disciplinarian. She cried and cried and cried over the punishments he had meted out, and Jello would hold her and listen. In the way of young lovers everywhere, they promised each other they would never stray, and Zoey was convinced that she had met her Prince Charming. One day, they had a spat; Zoey went back to her parents’ house and was planning to bake a cake for Jello for his birthday, the following day. But her parents had arranged for her to be taken to a controversial “therapeutic boarding school” run by the Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, and that night several people whisked her out of her bedroom to Utah, then Florida, and finally Jamaica for seven or eight months. While away, she and the other teenagers were repeatedly told that their parents were always right and whatever their parents told them to do, they should do. Throughout her time at boot camp, she pined for Jello but told administrators her tears were for her mother and father, lest she say the wrong thing. Sometime after she returned to Seattle, she went to visit her old friend. He had a new girlfriend, and she herself had a new beau. Confused and broken by her experience, she was preaching the mantra she had learned at camp because she didn’t know what else to say: “Go back to California and visit your family,” she told Jello. “That’s what you need to do.” It was the last time she saw Jello, in 1998; to this day, she regrets not having been there on his birthday, with the cake she was not allowed to bake, figuring that Jello took it as one more blow from a cruel world. She was right; she didn’t know that on his eighteenth birthday, for instance, he had shown up in tears at the Smallwoods’ house, explaining that his mother had kicked him out of her house yet again. Today, Zoey is a self-made and successful career woman, far away from the streets of Seattle. But she still thinks of the guy with the green Mohawk as the best bo
yfriend she ever had.
Later that year, an anti-globalization action was planned for Washington, DC. There was a growing worldwide fury against multinational corporations, and in America nowhere was it more intense than in the Northwest. Jello joined a group of people in Seattle who rode an old school bus across country, heading for the nation’s capital, stopping en route at an anarchy camp in Pennsylvania for a baseball game pitting anarchists against socialists. Once in DC, they hooked up with others from around the country who had gathered to express their anger. Jello eagerly participated in the political mosh pit that was raging on the streets of the nation’s capital, and later chained himself to a rail at the Pentagon subway station, sending the crowd into a frenzy. Back in Seattle the skinny guy in the big Mohawk and Sid Vicious spikes commanded a lot of attention. Not a day went by that he wasn’t asked to speak at a rally for homeless kids or show up in defense of someone who was about to get kicked out of a shelter. As always, a lot of the attention came from girls. For all of his newfound stardom, he had not improved his personal hygiene; he was still slovenly and still gave off a rank odor. Yet it didn’t matter, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the streets, where there was always an audience—and money. While Jello sometimes worked at the Color Box to earn it, he couldn’t refrain from spare-changing tourists. They were easy marks, and many of them were attractive and well-heeled women. One of them, from Romania, took him back home for a month-long affair. When he got back, he was a junkie. Actually, he had never really cleaned up. What had happened in Seattle was a repeat of his old pattern—he’d detox and then relapse, and then it would all start over again.
Throughout his four years in Seattle, Jello had maintained an on-again, off-again relationship with Ford, who played guitar with him in Fuckhole. To her, he spoke of his hopes and dreams; some day, he said, he wanted to teach history. Some day, he said, he wanted to tour in a band. Some day, he said, he wanted to be a writer. Yet, as he told his friend Dave, he felt obligated to take care of his ailing father. In spite of the early abandonment and the later eviction, a tight bond remained. He never went into details in his conversations with Dave, but it was clear that he knew his father’s hold on things was tenuous, and that he may have been the last thing between the old man and oblivion. Maybe he should go back to the desert, he said. His father was incapacitated by chronic fatigue syndrome, he explained to friends. He was out there, all alone. . . . It was really a goddamn shame. But at the same time, as he well knew from counseling addicts or people in other sorts of trouble, you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to save themselves. Moreover, he was gripped by a fear that he was turning into his father and appeared to be fighting off a curse. “No way am I going back there,” he’d say sometimes. Not gonna happen. “Guess I’m stuck in Seattle,” he’d tell Dave. “It’s a punishment or a joke.” Whatever was going on, the general trend wasn’t good. He was writing suicide notes about once a month, and had been since his arrival. “Whoever finds me,” the notes usually said, “I want my belongings to go to—” and the name always changed but the words were the same and at some point, after all the times in and out of rehab, there was nothing anyone else could do, other than be there for Jello should he reach out.
In 2000, Jello returned to Southern California, possibly drawn by the blood tie. Back in Riverside, he immersed himself in the burgeoning arts and music scene, moving into the Life Arts Building at the corner of University and Lemon Street. The structure was once Scientology headquarters for the Inland Empire but had since gone through several occupants until it was finally abandoned—except for the homeless kids who were partying and hanging out there, giving their own meaning to the Scientology credo of “getting clear” and echoing Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, where Bukowski and many pioneering punks who followed his path had found sanctuary, and where Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon during a heroin blowout and then later overdosed himself. “Please bury me next to my baby in my leather jacket, jeans, and motorcycle jacket,” Sid had written in a suicide note. “Goodbye.” In the old arts building, Jello was shacking up in one of the rooms with a girlfriend, and both were shooting heroin.
One of the girls on the scene was Angela Asbell. Like the other kids in her community, she had a rough upbringing. When Angela was a young girl, her mother, reluctant to remain with her father in Texas where they were living, was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. Angela went to Riverside to live with her grandmother, a school-crossing guard who worked a second job cleaning downtown office buildings. Always creative, Angela was writing poetry as a kid and liked to hang out with the local artists and musicians. One night when she was fifteen, she went to a party at an old house on the banks of the Santa Ana River near the Riverside airport. There were bands playing in different parts of the house, plenty of booze flowing, and drugs being consumed every which way. At some point Angela began winding her way through swarms of people lining a hallway, trying to find a bathroom. A guy in a massive Mohawk stopped her and said, “Hey, do you have a pipe?”
“My friend has one,” she said. “I’ll go get it.” The pair wandered off to retrieve the pipe, and the kid handed Angela a beer. “I’m Jello,” he said, and from then on Jello and Angela kept running into each other at shows around town, soon exchanging phone numbers and becoming good friends, even more so when they learned that their birthdays were both in January, just a few days apart. As it happened, she was into making music too. Every now and then Jello would be back at his mother’s apartment, along with his friend Ian, a homeless kid who stayed with them until Jello would push the limits and get kicked out again. Asbell, a close friend of Ian’s, would visit the boys often, and Jello taught her to play bass.
Throughout this time, the desert was calling, and Jello had been traveling out to Llano, spending a few days here and there, trying to reconnect with his father. As the end of the year 2000 approached, he, along with countless citizens across the land, had an idea for a party. He wanted to ring in Y2K out in the desert, the land of new beginnings, and he wanted his father to join him. So he organized a shindig in a dry riverbed in Lake Los Angeles and invited about a hundred people. One of them was Don. It was a cold and beautiful night as midnight approached. All over America and around the world, something truly profound was unfolding. Contrary to the many predictions about the new millennium ushering in an apocalypse, resulting in an amped-up police presence in places of significant religious import such as the Holy Land—another desert, a million miles away—traditional enemies held their fire, and citizens of the planet appeared to celebrate as one community, as if a new and shining path had suddenly appeared and we could all live happily ever after. Under a twinkling Mojave sky in an ancient wash in Lake Los Angeles, Jello and his crew joined the world’s tribes and played their guitars and pounded their drums and drank and smoked intoxicating substances, beating out that rhythm that we all know, the one that mimics the heart-beat—the sound of life. Among the revelers was Jello’s devoted and younger half-sister, Sharon Booth. Although she was not feeling well, down with strep throat and two ear infections, the ever-charismatic punk wanted her to be there, and she followed. “After all,” she said many years later, “he was my older brother.”
And just as Jello had planned, his father was there too—manic and social, to the surprise of Sharon, who had never seen him “like that,” and at a party, no less. It crossed her mind that maybe he was on speed—as others well knew, he did have his manic episodes—but she also thought that maybe he was actually happy, or maybe it was the spillover effect of a mood that seemed to be sweeping across planet Earth, affecting even people who just wanted to be left alone. In any case, everyone was having a good time; it was one of those events that found its groove, and it was all because of the neutrons in that particular cell at that particular moment, all working and dancing and sparking in harmony, and maybe even fathers and sons could have some kind of life together along with all of the nations of the world. But wha
t good is a party, especially on Y2K, if the cops don’t show up? Arrive they did as the music and shouting had reached a crescendo, and then they told everyone that they were partying in a protected area and had to leave. To everyone’s surprise, Don stepped forward and presented himself as a chaper-one. “I’ve lived here all these years and can guarantee that we’ll clean up,” he said to a woman in uniform, handing her his driver’s license and asking her to hold it as a personal guarantee. “We know you’ve been here for a long time,” she said, obviously a person who was familiar with Don. “Are you sure you want to take the responsibility for all these kids?” He reiterated that as a local, he cared about the place, and insisted that he would make sure it was not damaged or harmed. As dawn broke on the New Year, Jello and his buddies began the task of cleaning up the wash, retrieving their cartons and plastic bags and bottles and whatever other paraphernalia and trash they had dropped. The sentiment was that Don had put himself on the line for them—“Your old man is cool,” someone said to Jello—and they wanted to help him make good on his promise. Also he needed his driver’s license back. Soon enough the party dispersed, and everyone headed back to the outside world, which no one was able to contact all night long because there was no cell phone service in that part of Lake Los Angeles. “Maybe the world ended,” Sharon and Jello and some of his friends had joked throughout the evening after they tried to make a few calls. “What if we get back and it’s gone?”
About a year and a half later there came another party. It was in January, and it was a joint birthday celebration for Angela Asbell and Jello, her twenty-fourth and his twenty-seventh, the magical year of death foretold. The party was at Angela’s house, the same one where she had been living with her grandmother. At the time Jello’s address was a place called “the cave” on Van Buren, a dive on a forlorn stretch of pavement near the Riverside airport. The ragged cave folk were fed up with Jello and his heroin habit, and tried to evict him by shutting him out of conversations. He didn’t leave, and finally they kicked him out. That night at their party, Angela sensed that he was at the far end of his long downward slide. Always a bag of bones, he looked worse than ever. She made falafel for him as people wandered in and out of her kitchen. He was leaving for Seattle the next day, he told her; he had to get away from Southern California, a place that was destroying him. At some point that night he slept with Angela’s roommate, shot up in the bathroom, erased everything from a board on its wall, and wrote a note that puzzled Angela when she discovered it the next day. “Dear Angela,” it said, and as she began reading, she smelled the smell that junkies leave behind, the acrid evidence of the thing that was coursing through their veins. She recognized it from a sense memory of a bathroom at another party, one where Jello had holed up in for hours. “I want you to know that no matter what happens, we’ll always be friends, in this world or next. I’ll always respect you no matter what happens . . .” Of course Jello had left a trail of such notes, and in a way, his life had been a series of sprints between these postings. At least one more would appear a few months later.
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