by Greg Prato
JEFF GILBERT: Where it really went off the tracks for Layne was when his girlfriend, Demri, succumbed to heroin [in October 1996]. Those two were supposed to be together. That was a no-brainer for everyone that knew him. She was all he wanted to be with. She was such a small, little gal, and the drugs just shut her down. After that, he was never the same.
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: I think they met at a party. She was seventeen and he nineteen — about that. He was very shy, and she was a bright, shining little star flitting about. As time went on, she was part of the family.
KRISHA AUGEROT: [Layne and Demri] — another really cute couple that seemed very happy, but very destructive. Oddly enough, I worked at Espresso Roma in the University District on the Ave, and she was working there as well. I didn’t know her, and then later on, I saw her again — I think she went out with Paul Uhlir from Sweet Water first, and then she started dating Layne. Kind of went back and forth between those two guys a couple of times. She was like the sweetest, cutest, tiny hippie chick — just adorable and gorgeous. Never would I have ever imagined what happened to her happening. She started using heroin with Layne, I would guess. That was later on in their relationship, when it got really bad. They were both using, and they were both junkies, essentially. They stopped seeing each other — they went different ways. I know for a fact that she ended up prostituting herself, and doing all kinds of horrible things for drugs. And ended up in the hospital dying — cotton fever, or some kind of complications.
MICHELLE AHERN-CRANE: They were together forever. Finally they had broken up, because he took the attitude that she was worse than he was, but I think she had to do worse things because she didn’t have any money. When I would be over there at night watching movies, the doorbell would ring all the time, and he would be like, “Shhh, be quiet — pretend we’re not here.” Sometimes maybe it was her, and sometimes people coming to party with him. So I asked, “Are you guys totally broken up? What’s the deal?” And he said that she was pretty much [a] bottom of the barrel crackhead at that point, and was hanging out and sleeping in bad places — really struggling. I remember going over there in the afternoon once, and there was a note from her. It was like, “I love you — I hope you’re doing well.” He talked about her, and then when she finally died — even though they weren’t together — he was devastated. You’d go to the house, go to the bathroom, and it was scary — blood on the sink and stuff like that. I’d just grab garbage bags and start cleaning up. It was clear that he liked me, but we never fooled around because honestly, I was scared that he might have AIDS. It seemed like he was getting the wrong idea after a couple of months. I just said, “I can’t keep coming over here, and pretending everything is cool when it’s so not cool.”
JERRY CANTRELL: The thing about addiction is it’s got you well before you ever realize it’s got you. You’re fucked before you even know it. You can go for years without even knowing it — and everybody else around you knows it. And even if you do, you ain’t going to admit it. I’ve battled with that myself — at some point, you reach a point where you can deal with it, or you don’t. In a lot of cases, it deals with you, and you lose people.
MIKE INEZ: He was in a really dark place. It’s hard to see it. Kind of inaccessible to all of us. I’d stop by — me and Mark Lanegan would go by and beat on his door. It’s hard to get to people if they don’t want to be gotten to. I can’t really walk in Layne’s shoes, because I have not tried that drug. I was always “Mr. Pothead” — smoking the green bud and drinking Coronas. I’d never got into the depths of drug addition that heavy. He definitely wasn’t happy.
SEAN KINNEY: It wasn’t a mystery. Layne told me straight up, “I’m never coming back. I’m not going to quit doing drugs. I’m going to die like this — this is it.” I’m like the co-dependent girlfriend, “No, no! ” But I knew that was a fact. It was just horrible, it’s horrible to do that. I lost a lot of friends, and put myself in a lot of fucked-up situations. I hoped for it and put it out there every day, hoping that I’d get a call — “Hey man, I’m going to go get my shit back, I want to choose to do this.” The way he looked at me, and how he said it, I just knew that he had already made up his decision. And you can’t change people’s minds. People buy a record and read a magazine, and they think that they know you. They come up and give you, “You didn’t try to help him — you could have saved him!” It’s like, “You can’t save anybody.” And we did everything — we were as supportive as anybody could be. If somebody doesn’t want it, they don’t want it. He wasn’t, like, a bitter guy, and there wasn’t any hatred. He just made this decision. A lot of damage had been done. He seemed like he was good with it. I’m not good with it — I’m not good with it today, I never was then. I’ll probably never be.
KRISHA AUGEROT: Susan Silver was one of the people who tried to help him most. She was a constant in his life, trying to get him to get clean. Unfortunately, he just never accepted it.
SUSAN SILVER: He wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t answer the door. Every once in a while he’d let one guy [in] that had been friends with the Alice guys, who ultimately worked in my office. It was one of the only people he would let in to see him, and bring him things from the office. He was very much housebound. He came out for a recording session [a cover of “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2” for 1998’s The Faculty Motion Picture Soundtrack], and that was the last time I saw him. The session was supposed to start at four in the afternoon. He finally got there at midnight. And that’s just the way it was with Layne. You’d go pick him up to take him somewhere, and the next thing you know, four hours have gone by — he could pull you into “the world.” Shuffling around, getting something over here, and then getting something over there. Doing something on the Gameboy, and then doing something on the TV. Days would go by. He came to that session — I hadn’t seen him maybe since I went to his apartment to tell him that his girlfriend died. I wouldn’t hardly have recognized him. He looked different — he didn’t look like himself anymore. But he had the same sparkling wit. Looking at him, thinking, “My God, he’s physically changed,” and just as sweet, just as funny — quoting lines off silly Nick at Nite TV shows.
JERRY CANTRELL: [Two new songs on 1999’s Music Bank box set] was a really quick affair. We went in and banged it out. It’s music that I had, and Layne put down some lyrics — the songs are a little bit more rambling and open. But it still showed that there was something there — something that would be amazing to be continued. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
MATT FOX: He lived in a condo in the U District, and the District is a pretty pedestrian-oriented place. And you never saw Layne — ever — on the street.
DUFF McKAGAN: The apartment he had was not far from my house in Seattle — he lived probably twelve blocks away. Back in 2001 or so, Mark Lanegan and I were going to go up to his apartment and try to talk to him. I think Mark tried, and wanted me to go up. I didn’t — it wouldn’t have done any good.
JEFF GILBERT: He was a videogame freak, and he would just sit in this condo apartment, with the shades down. Just play videogames dawn to dusk.
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: He had a big-screen TV where you could have five different games going with five friends, simultaneously.
YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: I would always tell him, “Layne, why don’t you take off, go to some deserted island, hire the best counselors, and just kick this shit? Go for six months if you have to.” And his rebuttal was, “Johnny, I have celebrity status and I have a lot of money. I could fly planes out to deliver me the dope if I wanted to — and that’s what I would do. I can’t escape.”
EDDIE VEDDER: Getting attached to a drug or a drug attaching itself to you, it seems like the insidious part about it is it could happen to anybody. And some people are maybe more vulnerable to it than others. I don’t know if that came from him trying to exorcise or desensitize himself from certain things that were going on. Again, you’d hope that the music was enough to do that, or writing songs and being able to isolate
that stuff, and put it in its place creates something out of it. It could be just trying something a few times and it’s in you.
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: I would say that Layne’s form of addiction was virulent and aggressive. If it was a cancer, you sure wouldn’t say, “Well, you’ve got two more albums to complete … all these people are on your payroll.” I use this analogy — some people try recreational drugs and it acts as a single, unbarbed hook. It’s in, it slips out, and they walk away. Some people try recreational drugs, and they get hooked … it’s a single hook with a barb. They’re still able to slip free. Some people get hooked with a double-barbed hook, and over time, it does tremendous damage. Some people get hooked with triple double-barbed hooks, and there is no flipping that thing free. And the longer it’s in there without some outside help to extricate it, the more inevitable and severe the damage is. That “fish” is going to die. Every disease is like that … some people get cancer, they discover it early, the treatment works, and it’s rather noninvasive. Depending on the degree of the cancer and the kind of cancer, sometimes it’s treatable, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it goes into remission, sometimes it metastasizes.
Drug addiction comes in all different degrees, and in Layne’s case, it was a death grip. He needed to be cut loose from his financial responsibilities in order to get the help he required. And it needed to be mandated. Because of the way the laws are written, you can intervene with a meeting, but you can’t make an addict get help. That law was written so that someone’s estate can’t be appropriated unless you can prove that they can’t tend their business. It’s almost impossible to prove, because there are all degrees of sanity — and some of it borders on “in.” What kept us from helping Layne is the same law that protected his estate. Sadly, one is a human life being treated the same as accumulated goods. These cases need to be handled on an individual basis. We were not able to help our son. When you’re using drugs, you’re not an adult making adult decisions … the drug is thinking for you. Its fangs are a death grip.
MATT FOX: Sean came into the [rehearsal studio], and we jammed for a while — it was a lot of fun. And I said some dumb thing like, “Could you guys get Layne off heroin so I don’t have to hear Creed anymore?!”
MICHELLE AHERN-CRANE: He had open sores, and I heard he ended up losing some fingers, or his hand — I don’t know exactly what’s true. The last time I saw him, I was out for a jog, and this Trans Am with the Firebird painted [on the hood] had crashed into an ambulance. Layne and some white trash guy were fumbling around. Layne always wore this Australian big raincoat towards the end, and he was picking up all this shit that was falling out of the car and out of his pockets. And every time he bent over to pick something up, more paraphernalia would fall out of his pocket.
STEVE TURNER: It’s amazing what drugs can do to people, besides just kill you — they can kill you really slowly and completely destroy you, your friends, and your family. That said, drugs are pretty fun — that’s the problem. Therein lies the rub.
JEFF GILBERT: I ran into him out in the University District. He looked like an eighty-year-old version of himself. His skin was grey, dark circles under his eyes. He had already lost a finger or two from his veins collapsing and not getting enough circulation into his hands. He started losing teeth. I remember seeing him from a distance, and I thought, “That’s the oldest punk rocker I’ve ever seen.” He had Doc Martens on, pegged black jeans, black leather jacket. Stunk — oh my God he stunk. Barely recognized me, even though I’d known him for years. It was probably the last year of his life.
MATT FOX: I must have seen him in the U District, and he just looked really, really bad. He was all hunched over — he was usually taller than me, and he wasn’t really [anymore].
YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: There was such a cloud of depression over that house — because of the heroin. If you were to live with any heroin addict, you’re going to eventually … “enough is enough” type thing. What he would do is write me letters and put them on the base of my bed. I would wake up in the morning, and I would have a four to six page letter, handwritten, and he would explain everything that we talked about that prior night — regarding his life, how unhappy he was, and what was going on with him. He didn’t really speak about Alice in Chains. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even allowed to listen to Alice in Chains when I lived with him. There were two rules — no interventions, and no listening to Alice in Chains music.
He wasn’t getting any better — I felt like by me keeping the house clean, doing the laundry, and getting the groceries, I was making it real easy for him to be an addict. After talking to his mom and his stepfather Jim — even his sisters at the time — I came to the realization that I was enabling him more than I was helping him. And now, it was taking a personal toll on me, because coming home every night, it was not a happy household. He tried, and he wanted it to be — he gave it his all — but with the heroin in the calculus there, it just wasn’t going to be a happy household. I had to make a decision for myself to get out of that environment.
The depression came from the cycle of heroin. The lifestyle you lead, the diet — all he really ate was sugar day and night. So I don’t think he was getting a lot of nutrients. He wasn’t exercising at all. What I’ve learned from my experience is that it’s the lifestyle that kills you more than the heroin. The lifestyle is what causes the ultimate depression, and being chained to this horrible drug. Eventually, they turn on you, and now, you’re depressed — you may not know a way to get out of it. I had probably two phone calls [to Layne] in the last couple of years of his life. They were pretty short. There’s a time to talk to Layne, and there’s a time not to talk to Layne during that point. If someone’s using, that’s not the time to dive into stuff with them. You wanted to catch him at the perfect opportunity.
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: I didn’t believe that I would be doing much good poking away at him — “Layne, you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that.” I was trying to be extremely … almost like I had my arm linked in his, trying to stay really close in my thoughts and conversations with him. I didn’t want Layne to ever feel ashamed. All of us know that there are miracles around recovery. In Alaska, I was attending twelve-step meetings at an Al-Anon — for the family, friends, employers, employees, and concerned others of alcoholics and addicts. I was learning a lot — I probably read 200 books on the effects and studies of alcohol, addiction, and families.
I was trying to discover the key. I wanted to be a voice for that one little phrase that would be the “A-ha” for Layne. If it wasn’t me, I wanted somebody to find those magic words that would bring Layne back to himself. I never lost hope that I — or someone — would be able to do that. I educated myself about the disease so I could talk with Layne and understand. But a non-addict can never understand — they can only accept and believe that the addict is telling his truth. An addict and a non-addict don’t think the same — their brains are wired completely differently. Only an addict can help another addict through recovery.
SEAN KINNEY: I quit answering the phone for five or six years. I didn’t want that phone call. Let it ring and let the machine get it. That still even sticks with me to this day — slight phone phobia. It’s like, “Shit, bad news!” Just hoping that it’s never going to happen — knowing that chances are, that’s going to be “the call” coming in one of these days. Ironically, tomorrow is the day it all went down for everybody — April 5. When they found Layne, and the same day Kurt [eight years earlier] … just bizarre timing on that. By then, I had started going away from lots of drugs, and just started drinking — like that’s any better.
SUSAN SILVER: It was a call that we all feared for years. No one had heard from him, and the people that we were in touch with to let us know that he was still OK hadn’t heard from him. His little odd weekly habits had stopped. Sean got a call from one of those people, and said, “I’m going over there, and I’m going to kick down the door. I have this sick feeling in my gut.�
�� I said, “Sean, we need to get the family involved.” His step dad and his mom. When he didn’t answer the door or respond in any way, the police opened the door, and the rest is history.
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: Demri’s mom and I take solace in knowing that our children experienced great love from one another, and that they are no longer suffering.
MIKE INEZ: For me, I was run through the ringer, because my best friend, Randy Castillo — he was my drummer in the Ozzy band — caught smoking cancer. He ended up passing away, and this was right before Layne passed away. So we had just took Randy and his body back to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I came back to Big Bear, California, where I have a house. I was sitting in my kitchen, the phone rings, and it was Sean Kinney. He says, “Hey — sit down. Layne’s gone.” I mean literally, it was the same day, or the day after I got back from New Mexico. I just couldn’t believe it.
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: In order for Layne to have lived, he should have been released from his contract — with great love, acceptance, and respect. And yes, there was a contract, and yes, there was a commitment, but I don’t think that a person has to … he didn’t sign up to go to Iraq, for God’s sake. He signed up for fun and hard work, and he gave his heart and soul … and life. At some point, it was real obvious that he couldn’t go on, and that he needed freedom from the commitments. Maybe after several years of true recovery — not just cleaning up, going back out, cleaning up, going back out — maybe the band could have done what the band is doing now … with Layne still at the helm.
Layne Thomas Staley: August 22, 1967 – April 5, 2002
JERRY CANTRELL: All I can say about it is this, really — at this particular time, years have passed now, and the longer you end up sticking around, the more friends you lose one way or another. It’s a part of life. It’s unfortunate when it’s that type of an exit — because there’s a lot of life left to live. But I learned a lot from that guy — I owe a lot to him. Many fond memories and a lot of music to listen to that we created together. I’ve got a lifetime of memories about him that no one else really will have.