I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

by Crystal Zevon

  So, there were like two ends of the night, and Warren was right there and he was a part of the group and we had a terrific time. But in the middle, there were canapés and conversation and, during that, he drifted away all by himself. I went over and sat with him and we talked for quite a while, but it was just the two of us. It was almost like we were invisible—like there was an invisible cloak over the two of us, and I had a sense that that was a lot of what he was about, too.

  November 21, 1997

  …Down to Dave’s for dinner. Nice crowd. Stephen asks me when I’m going to write a book, then tells a couple of James Joyce jokes. I ask him if Beckett really wore too tight shoes to be like Joyce—Steve’s happy with the question. We go to a bar and play a raw set. The crowd loves it. I told Dave I felt great afterwards, sweltering heat notwithstanding.

  DAVE BARRY: He stayed for four or five days. We played a gig in a bar. In we came and there was barely room for the band to sit in this crowded little hole in the side of the bar, and I got to announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Stephen King. Here’s Warren Zevon.” Approximately a third of the bar didn’t believe it, but what I remember is that I was used to the rest of us doing this. We’re not good musicians. But, Warren was just so happy. He liked us. We liked him. He fit right in with the band.

  He was so literate and sharp and, God, he was more self-deprecating about his talent than we were about ours, and we genuinely stink. We just had a great time that weekend. We played two gigs—that night and then the Miami Book Fair the next night. Everybody loved Warren and it was good.

  November 22, 1997

  …Show day. Now I feel shitty—headache. Met up at Dave’s, ate, then went over to the open-air Bayside Mall stage for sound check. Waited for show time on a boat, after meeting Angus McSwain from Reuters (I’d called yesterday, nicely, to say that I couldn’t do an interview). He gave me an old zippo from Ho Chih Min City. Show was fine. Lots of fun. Splendid climactic “Werewolves of London” by Steve. We ate at Hard Rock where I sat next to him and some sex/crime novelist I’ve read, Vicki Hendrix, who I flirted mercilessly with. Later, food, movies, headache. Okay G.I. Jane.

  November 23, 1997

  …Headache gone. Found Carl…Attended his amusing talk. Good-byes to Dave, Michelle, Kathi—who explained to me, modestly, that she was only an escort. Now I like her. Great dinner in South Beach with Carl.

  The Rock Bottom Remainders: (L to R) standing—Warren, Janine Sabino (Mitch’s wife), Mitch Albom, Michelle Kaufman (Dave Barry’s wife), Carl Hiaasen, Kathi Goldmark, Big Lou (accordion player), Nestor Torres (flute), Scott Turow, Josh Kelley (drummer), Ridley Pearson, John Nations (juggler); kneeling—Erasmo Paolo (sax); sprawling—Dave Barry.

  STEPHEN KING: He was a guy who kept himself to himself. He may have had people that he opened up to, and obviously he was somebody who was under a lot of pressure because some of the music is really furious. But he, at one time or another, had a lot of bad habits. But, I never saw him take a drink. I never saw him take a cigarette. At that point, I used to smoke at night. I’d have like five cigarettes a night, and I would ask him, “Warren, do you want a cigarette?” And, he would just look at me. He wouldn’t say anything, and he wouldn’t take one, but he would just look. You could tell that he wanted a cigarette, but he wouldn’t take one. So, that was Warren. There was no explanation. I talked with him a little bit about booze because I don’t drink anymore and I have no idea to this day how Warren dealt with not drinking. All I know is that he didn’t drink. That, to me, is really the story of Warren Zevon.

  December 17, 1997

  …Sang “Happy Birthday…Klook-Mop” to Jorge’s machine. Worked a little. Jackson called; doesn’t want to catch my cold. “Advance bat signal” message from Stephen King about a Remainders gig in May. Cut off by my machine, he resumes, “I wrote ‘The Stand’ and ‘It’—you know I’ll have my goddamned say!”

  December 24, 1997

  …Jordan called, we ate, then came back here. I gave him his Gucci clock & Polaroid slide thing (“Gadget & Gucci,” he said.) He gave me a DVD player and “Bullitt.” He hooked it up, of course. Ariel never called—neglected to return my call from yesterday evening (we’d said we’d get together today—she told me she’d be at her mother’s this year). I was very hurt—called Crystal’s around 4:30—Ariel was there, all right. Merry Christmas. Got dressed for Linda’s party. Very nice. Stan told me his friend Susan has been asking about me—a great looking redhead I’ve been noticing & admiring (we met at the old tanning place once). So, I asked her out.

  December 25, 1997

  …I slept late, hurried to Crystal’s, gave them their presents. Crystal and I exchanged our gifts, but Ariel had forgotten mine…Ben had gone to get it—could I wait? No. Met Ray for lunch.

  ARIEL ZEVON: There was one Christmas in L.A. when Dad and I weren’t speaking to each other. I don’t really remember all of it, but he dropped off gifts and I refused to speak to him. He’d given me a check as part of my Christmas gifts and I ripped it up. It was one of those things where he’d given me stuff and he’d decided that I was not grateful enough…I decided I didn’t want his money or his gifts.

  On the one hand, I was enamored of him; at the same time I was intimidated by him, and always trying to impress him. I was always listening to him and observing him and noticing the ways that I’m like him—controlling and obsessive, temperamental. We were both stubborn and set in what we believed to be right. The things I disliked most about him are the things I inherited some of. I was seeing him more and getting closer to him, and I became very critical of his selfishness. He gave me very expensive, grandiose gifts from Maxfield’s or he would fly to Marlboro College to see a play and then just leave after he’d seen the play. Not spending real time with me. I do think his intentions were generous, but there was always, to me, this sense of “Look what I’ve done. I’m Warren Zevon. I have arrived.” I have definitely, at times, had very harsh opinions about that and been fairly unforgiving.

  December 27, 1997

  …I called Ariel & said I was glad she called but “I disagree—I don’t think we ‘need to talk’ as you put it—I think you owe me an apology.”

  SUSAN JAFFY, “Disney Girl,” girlfriend: I’d recognized him at a tanning salon. He thought that I was a fan. “I met you at Stan’s birthday party a few years ago,” I said. “I’m sorry I don’t remember,” he mumbled. I felt like a child in his presence. I was awkward and insecure. He had cut his hair and looked older and more worn. Up close, his face had deeper lines than I remembered, but his smile was warm and inviting.

  For years, I thought about him, fantasizing what it would be like to be the girlfriend of a rock star. Stan invited me to another party at his house. I had just quit smoking and was very antsy. Warren was there with a loud and obnoxious woman. She was the president of a perfume company and felt that the entire room needed to know about her latest trip to Paris…“The French are just SO civilized, don’t you agree, Warren?” I think he was embarrassed.

  I smiled at him from across the room. At some point, she went to the bathroom and he came over to me. “She’s really something, isn’t she?” he said of his date. “I’m not sure what,” I replied and we both laughed. We talked for a few minutes until she came back. “Darling, I think it’s time that we left.”

  It was at her Christmas party that Stan drank too much and told Warren I’d had a crush on him for five years. Stan called me from his cell phone and said, “I have an international call from Mr. Warren Zevon.” I couldn’t believe that he was that drunk. But then Warren came on the line: “I’m not sure if Stan has just had too much to drink tonight, but he thinks that we should get together for lunch,” he whispered into the phone. “I would love that,” I told him. I didn’t sleep all night.

  January 4, 1998

  …Made date with Susan. Message from Paul Shaffer. Well. Just say no. His mother passed away—can I come to New York—tonight? Tomorrow, I said, and gently brough
t up the subject of not getting paid for the last gig. We talked about money—that was horribly awkward. Anyway, Susan came over. She said, “No one has ever turned down Letterman to be with me before.” It was a good choice.

  SUSAN JAFFY: He got a call from David Letterman’s office that the musical guest had cancelled, could he fill in for him? He didn’t go to New York because he didn’t want to cancel our date. “How many guys have you gone out with that turned David Letterman down for you?” he asked. We went to an Italian restaurant on Sunset. It was the place that Dwight Yoakam most liked the Caesar salads. It was so romantic. We sat in a corner booth with candlelight, and laughed and kissed. People kept staring at us, and for one of the first times in my life, I felt like a part of a happy couple.

  January 9, 1998

  …Our first spat—Susan wants kids, and she insists on hearing why I don’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have said I’d rather cut my throat and hold a bowl under my neck. Anyway, we made love later. She’s an amazingly quiet sleeper.

  January 13, 1998

  …Lunch with Jordan at Hugo’s. He said, sagely, that kids don’t think their parents have “hurt feelings” necessarily—Ariel might just think I’m “pissed.” I called Crystal’s for Ariel’s address & Ariel answered. Instant reconciliation. I’m so relieved. Porny Neighbor over.

  January 14, 1998

  …Lunch with Ariel. She gave me one of her hand-painted flower pots (gray). I congratulated her on tearing up the check and gave her another. Visited Susan.

  Warren was in debt to the IRS once again and, with no album coming out and tour bookings that didn’t do much more than keep his head above water, he was forced into the position of taking gigs for the money. The current fad was for corporations to hire rock stars as the entertainment at their conventions and banquets. Warren understood that the corporate gigs he was offered were from organizations who wanted a name, but weren’t in a league to put up the big bucks it would cost to get the Eagles or the Beach Boys.

  January 21, 1998

  …$20,000 for solo gig for JBL.

  January 28, 1998

  …David Keith’s annual Super Bowl Party. Enjoyed the lap dances more this year.

  January 30, 1998—Show Day

  …All dressed up in Prada: “You sent for an overdressed folk singer?” I knew when the Clinton sex scandal jokes in “Mr. Bad Example” fell flat (Senator Steve’s sage suggestion) I was in for a long 45 minutes. The sound was bad; the guy we hired was a LOT short of Duncan’s mark, sadly. I resented Susan’s cheery presence after her callous lack of supportiveness. We came home & after a tense hour, with my encouragement she went home. I want to be alone.

  SUSAN JAFFY: One of the many times he stopped speaking to me was after a show for JBL. They really wanted someone else they couldn’t get, and Warren wasn’t the headliner, but they paid him twenty-five thousand dollars to do a one-hour set. But it wasn’t a Warren Zevon crowd. He got the little shitty dressing room, and he was annoyed by that. I was supposed to wear something he had in his head. I had a million girlfriends trying to figure out what I should wear.

  I distinctly recall that I wore a short black skirt and a black sweater set. I figured I could hide the sweater around my stomach, which I felt was bulging. After the fact, he said, “You wore a fucking sweater set!” Which was the worst thing I could do.

  The audience was not receptive. I wasn’t allowed to stay for the main act. After the show, he was dead silent with that awful, nasty, devastated look on his face that you don’t know what it means, and you think you’ve done something wrong because he’s acting like you’ve killed someone.

  It was just hideous, hideous, horrible. We go back to his house. Of course, I have to go out and get him food. I do. We get back, and he dismisses me after he yells at me for a while, and then he won’t speak to me. He stops calling me. This is when we broke up the first time. I later came to understand he was mortified that the only time I ever saw him play, he was not warmly received.

  February 5, 1998

  …Fax from Susan—rather extraordinary sentence: “I know that I haven’t felt for anyone the way I feel for you after one month in over two or three years.”

  SUSAN JAFFY: I wrote him this long letter. It was heartfelt and, of course, he won’t answer the phone, so I faxed it. He doesn’t respond. It was a good month that he wouldn’t speak to me. Then, I finally got him to pick up the phone one time when I called. I guess enough time had passed, and he figured I was punished enough.

  February 7, 1998

  …I like “Ourselves to Know” tape today. Indebted to John O’Hara and Alexander Pope.

  February 15, 1998

  …Susan’s call. Closure.

  NINE

  LIFE’LL KILL YA

  You’ve got an invalid haircut

  It hurts when you smile

  You’d better get out of town

  Before your nickname expires

  It’s the kingdom of the spiders

  It’s the empire of the ants

  You need a permit to walk around downtown

  You need a license to dance

  The failures that marked the mid-’90s were swept aside as Warren scrambled for higher ground at the close of the millennium, but the ravages of hard times remained. He had never taken success for granted, however. Where he once nurtured hope that the notice he received in the 1970s would set a standard for years to come, he now looked at his recognition with a kind of suspicious scorn. He spent the last years of the ’90s writing one of his finest, and certainly most prophetic, albums, Life’ll Kill Ya. By this time, he had no illusions of grandeur; he was just grateful that someone let him record it.

  April 15, 1998

  …Saw “The Spanish Prisoner” with Ariel & Ben. It was wonderful. I turned to Ariel at one point and said, “This is the best movie I’ve ever seen.”

  May 4, 1998

  …Dropped in on Ariel in the cute coffee place in Culver City where she works now. Older waitress (cute, too) impressed: for a few moments I’m Robert Redford–Dad. Read remarkable passages in “Dr. Zhivago.”

  May 5, 1998—Bangor, Maine

  …Steve [King] met me at the gate. We got the rent-a-car then he led me to the Holiday Inn where we sat on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette and choosing a pay movie suitable for my headache (“Sphere”).

  STEPHEN KING: He always wanted to go to video stores and have a stock of headache movies. Kingdom of the Spiders. He even wrote a song about that. Empire of the Ants and all that. He was big on that.

  May 6, 1998

  …I finished “Dr. Zhivago.” I loved it very, very much. Steve & Tabby picked me up for lunch. She’s funny, quite delightful. Mentioned interviewing a metal rocker, a “Satan wannabe kind of guy”—I added, “devil manqué” & later Roy Blount said, “Would be Be-elzebub,” so this got passed around. Everybody’s here but the Barry’s, Albom’s and crew. Big take-out Chinese dinner at the Kings’. Behind the bat & spider strewn wrought iron gates, it’s sort of a modest mansion: historical, tasteful, of course. The library’s a real library & the vaulted ceiling pool room is Ritz Carlton size. I had lots of fun.

  STEPHEN KING: Warren was a shy man. He was very quiet and unassuming. I’ve known a lot of writers like Warren, but I have not known a lot of performers like him, and so he was hard for me to get a handle on. He was very unusual, and in a lot of ways he was really more like the way you’d think of a poet or a novelist—that temperament, rather than a show person. Although when he got onstage, he lit up. He did. And, I have to remember, too, that when I saw him, when he was performing, he’d been doing it for a long time. I don’t think his fires were out, but I think he’d banked his fires. The “Stand in the Fire” Warren had metamorphosed. He was different guy by the time I saw him.

  May 7, 1998

  …Called at 9:00 so I staggered to the Kings around 10 for breakfast. Back here I had two fine lobster cocktails & a salad while reading the copy of Steve’s new “Bag of Bon
es” he gave me, signed and numbered “0.” Rehearsed at Bangor Auditorium—there is an immense Paul Bunyan statue just like Ben described. The band’s filled out with Amy Tan, critics, et al, although I guess it’s still as Roy described the band’s style once, “hard listening.” Dinner from the only place left open: happily McDonald’s.

  MITCH ALBOM: Warren didn’t take his music as seriously as we did. He didn’t care who sang it, and he didn’t care who played it. I was playing keyboards, which was really Warren’s instrument. So I felt a little like maybe I should get out of the way. Warren’s a keyboard player, and we’re going to do “Werewolves,” and maybe he wants to play that. But he said, “No, no. You play piano. I’ll just play guitar here with my little buttons.” I ended up playing that little riff, dun dun, dun dun, and I was really nervous. I remember thinking, “I’m playing this, and the guy who wrote it and played it is standing two feet away from me.” Stephen King ended up singing. Warren stood off to the side playing this really weird guitar stuff on these buttons.

  We just all fell in love with him because he was fun to be around. He was very self-deprecating, and he was very, very smart in an offhanded way. Warren would sit there with a smirk on his face while we were all fumbling around, and he’d throw in a little line that made everybody laugh. Of course, we were begging for stories about life on the road with rock and roll…tell us what it’s really like…and Warren would say things like, “Well, you know, a lot of it’s a blur. I don’t really remember about five or six years of it.” That kind of thing.

  May 16, 1998

  …102 degree fever hits—Shaking almost to pieces—thinking I ought to put on a gray T-shirt just in case.