Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (37 page)

Initially Dorien was Elliott’s “first and only friend” in New York. They were never more than friends, but as she says, “I was a little confused on occasion about his feelings for me.” Mainly he assumed the role of big-brother protector. He watched out for her, offered advice. He had her back always. At the same time he “hated every boyfriend I ever had,” she says, an attitude suggesting he may have felt an attraction of some sort, or else simply distrusted the motives of men. He was an exceptional “people-reader,” according to Garry. He had an acute sense of what people were thinking or feeling at any given moment; he sized them up quickly and often unerringly. So the guys trying to get close to Dorien he judged, more often than not, to be suspect. He wanted closeness; he was feeling alone. Perhaps, then, a part of him wondered whether he and Dorien might grow to be more than friends. After all, the breakup with Joanna had been devastating. They’d agreed to separate, Garry recalls, and to seek a distance aimed at guaranteeing the relationship’s demise. As Elliott had taken off for New York, Joanna relocated to Chicago. They committed, mutually, to not seeing each other. It was too difficult otherwise. But Elliott “was desperate for love,” Dorien says. And at some point while touring in the Northeast he managed to find it, at least temporarily. At a show he met a girl named Amity. Garry never knew her well, and can’t remember her last name; she seemed to be from somewhere in New England. One day Elliott phoned to ask whether she could stay for a while in New York, and as she always did, Dorien said “fine.”

This new girl was extremely cute, “lovely and adorable,” very sweet but also, Garry and most others felt, very “young.” She was “bright-eyed” and eager yet obviously unsophisticated, a kind of high-def version of the callow innocent. A virtual Joanna antithesis, Amity’s dissimilarity from Bolme instantly struck Dorien as “totally insane.” She made no sense; she wasn’t the kind of person anyone imagined Elliott being into. Whatever the case, he was smitten. Pete Krebs recalls him flashing around a photograph proudly, almost in disbelief at his good fortune in nabbing her. She’d never been to New York, Garry recalls, so when she arrived she wanted to do all the usual
touristy things which Elliott, very uncharacteristically, tried arranging, working hard to put together an itinerary. This wasn’t the sort of thing Elliott was good at or ever did; that he put the effort in indicates his degree of devotion. They toured the city, checked out all the obligatory sights and scenes. It was puppy love, cute and surprising to see, but it did not last long, nor did it end at all badly. For one thing Elliott was too busy touring. “His life was still way too up in the air,” Garry says. He hadn’t yet made serious money, so he scrambled always to make ends meet. He was therefore “hardly in a position to commit to anybody,” as Dorien saw it. The flirtation, however exciting and affirming at the time, ran its course. Love came, but in the moment it was impossible to imagine a way of turning it into something viable. What remained, in the end, was what often remained—a song titled, simply, “Amity.” In it Elliott notes Amity’s “Hello Kitty” cuteness. She catches stars in her arms, and as they walk New York City together she feels “like a lucky charm,” her freshness contrasting his own inner “junk” made by God. The lyrics are succinct, hopeful, and rapt. But the song never comes off. In fact, it may be one of Elliott’s few failures. As he said, he liked to write when unhappy. Happiness, this time, derailed the music. What he seems to want to do most in the tune is repeat her name, which he does on two separate occasions, a lucky seven times each.

In interviews Elliott laughed the song off, although not without adding an element of pathos. “It’s just a big rock song,” he told Pamela Chelin, “it’s a pretty simple song. It’s not so much about the words themselves, but more about how the whole thing sounds.” Friends saw through to the tune’s true meaning, suggesting “it sounded like I was trying to get something romantic going with someone.” Elliott confided “It’s a person I know,” then added, with a painful honesty characteristic of his approach to even the most superficial interviews, “It was supposed to be—‘You’re really fun to be with and I really like you a lot because of that, but I am really, really depressed’—but I don’t think it came across when I said, ‘ready to go,’ it was supposed to mean ‘tired of living.’ ” The interviewer stopped short. “Oh,” she replied, apparently startled, “like, ready to check out of this world?” “Yeah,” Elliott answered, “I was saying, ‘I really like you and it’s really great to hang out with someone who is happy and easygoing, but I don’t feel like that and I can’t be that way.’ ”
²²
This was the usual posture. His feeling, one eternally
returning, was that he ought not commit to lovers, ought to refuse their love even, no matter how promising or sincere, because his plan was to not be around for long. It was a painful attitude to adopt toward relationships, but at least it was fair and honest, driven by a desire not to cause more hurt than necessary. But it more or less guaranteed isolation.

The hoped-for incantation therefore brought no lasting, revivifying genie from the bottle. Amity was a sweet distraction, an unspoiled partial antidote, but true cure was too much to risk imagining. There would be more Joanna replacements, but these were years off, and marked, as always, by extreme approach/avoidance conflicts. Lacking someone in whom he might locate some small degree of solace, some possibility of comfort, intimacy, and affection, Elliott’s mood darkened even more. Without quite knowing it, he was on a track to rock bottom and to a life-altering confrontation. The touring kept taking its toll, different cities every night, different hushed audiences to gauge and win over. And because Dorien was available and sympathetic, willing to listen even if she didn’t always quite know what to say, Elliott fell into the habit of calling her almost every night, usually late, from phone booths in whatever city he happened to find himself. These talks could go on for hours, well past the time when Garry needed to be in bed sleeping, resting up for work the next day. Her role, it seemed to Garry, was pseudo-therapist, and it was rarely easy; she felt uncertain, out of her depth. But she did what she could. Elliott was in a tough spot emotionally, and he needed someone in whom he could confide, someone he trusted who would not find fault. The subjects were Joanna, his darkening mood, his drinking, and often, to a degree that was becoming routine, the possibility of suicide. To hear all this was sad and frightening. There were times, no doubt, when Dorien wasn’t sure Elliott would survive to see the next day. At last, after many such conversations circling around the same painful nuclei, Elliott sent Dorien an e-mail. He laid out where he was at, saying, in the end, that he could not take it any longer and that he was not sure how much longer he could be in the world. What the message seemed to say was goodbye. There was a conclusiveness to it. Freaked out and feeling as if something needed to be done, feeling, also, that things had progressed to such a point that she could not shoulder the burden on her own, Garry shared the e-mail with her boss at Girlie Action, Felice
Ecker. The immediate question was what to do. Should they take action, or should they hold off for the time being? Ecker panicked, as Garry recalls. Her impulse was to contact Slim Moon at Kill Rock Stars, Elliott’s label, and Margaret Mittleman. Dorien wasn’t on board. “I knew that wasn’t going to sit well with Elliott. He didn’t like being told what to do, ever. He was very stubborn. He also was extremely mindful about what he needed.” Instantly she regretted showing Ecker the e-mail. “I was conflicted,” says Garry. “It seemed like a betrayal of trust. At the time, as far as I knew, he was only talking about these things with me. I worried he’d never confide to anyone again. Plus, I had no faith in what the ‘adults’ in this situation, those on the music industry side of things, were going to decide to do.” Business interests, represented by people who weren’t first and foremost Elliott’s friends, had one set of concerns; those he was truly close to, who knew him best and understood what kinds of reactions might backfire, had different, competing loyalties. Yet now, although the two groups didn’t see eye to eye, they were in league. Garry felt like a kid who had told on a friend to grown-ups.

Moon was “very much on high alert,” says Garry. He’d seen other musicians die, so he took the news extremely seriously; he did not want a repeat. The decision, chiefly his, was to stage an intervention, the one occurring four or five months prior to Elliott’s Oscar nomination, the storm before the calm. Moon reached out to a Long Island specialist named Lou Cox who had also worked with Aerosmith years before. Pressure was applied to Garry to be there, but at first she was reluctant. She didn’t think it would work, for one. She also doubted it was the right thing to do. Still, for Elliott’s sake, and despite her fear that he’d see her as a betrayer, she finally relented. Others from the friend faction were also convinced to join in. Sam Coomes’s new band Quasi had been playing dates with Elliott, so he and Janet Weiss were approached. Joanna, Neil Gust, and Rebecca Gates, another Portland friend who had sung backup on the song “St. Ides Heaven,” all agreed to be present as well. From the business end there was Moon, Felice Ecker, and, as Garry recalls, Ellen Stewart, Elliott’s booking agent. The process was typical. Everyone spent two days with Cox prepping. He laid out what he felt needed to happen, the timing, the organization, the requirement to be firm and direct but supportive. In short, the basic intervention
algorithm. Per custom there was a strict secrecy element no one felt particularly comfortable with. Elliott would not know in advance what was going on. The event was to be, by its very nature, an ambush. Garry says, “We were supposed to say all the things he had done that had worried us, to share our stories. It was supposed to include stuff he’d done in Portland too, not just in New York. The whole time I was like, ‘This is going to fucking backfire colossally.”

The event, lasting several hours, was staged in the middle of the ’97 tour, in Chicago, some time in late July at the home of Rebecca Gates. Everyone assembled in Gates’s kitchen, waiting. What Elliott had been told—Garry isn’t sure by whom—was that he’d be having lunch there. At no point did he apparently suspect what was in store. Yet as he walked into the room he instantly recognized “what was up,” Garry says, “and he was not happy.” Cox took the lead as planned. He gave the equivalent of an introductory speech. He told Elliott everyone was there because they loved him. He outlined the format of the proceedings. He gave an overview of the timeline and of the goals for the meeting. And at the end of this no doubt shocking and, for Elliott, infuriating prologue, Elliott decided to stay in the room and listen. The friends present had talked beforehand. They all agreed they were there for support only, not to dogmatically declare Elliott needed to do anything specific, not, in other words, to strong-arm him, because they knew that was a tactic he’d reject categorically. Their message was: “Whatever you choose to do, we love and support you.” They also told him, in words that made an impact, Garry felt, since they spoke to a major portion of the conflict, that if he were feeling “shitty”—exhausted emotionally and physically—he didn’t need to keep up the tour. “We said he could put the whole thing on hold. He could just stop the train. For now or for forever.” This was a sentiment Elliott appreciated, Garry believes. “It made him more responsive and a little more able to listen to the rest.”

Then the stories came. Industry people weighed in first, friends at the very end. As people spoke Garry felt unanticipated relief. She realized that what had been happening was not new. Everyone recounted experiences similar to hers. In some vague way that fact made her feel less alone. All of it—the depressions, the suicidal thoughts, the recklessness, the low
self-regard—“had been happening off and on for years,” she now recognized. It wasn’t a New York thing. It wasn’t specific to her. The burden was no longer hers uniquely to make sense of and absorb.

It was anything but easy, and Elliott was very angry, incensed at being blindsided, enraged by the various sets of motives in play and the presumptuousness of people thinking they knew what was best for him or what he somehow needed to do, as if he couldn’t deal with his own inner torment, something he’d been living with and managing, not always well of course, for nearly a decade. But at the end of the ordeal, as a plan was presented, Elliott agreed to try following it—which shocked Dorien—although he was unwilling to promise complete compliance. Cox had already selected a hospital, a place in Arizona called Sierra Tucson, a residential program founded in the mid-1980s, specializing in what it called “coexisting disorders”—addictions combined with trauma, mood disorders, chronic pain, eating disorders. That angle had seemed appropriate. Sierra Tuscon was not only a detox center. It was, in essence, a glorified psych unit with a less institutionalized veneer. The twin targets would be Elliott’s depression and his drinking, a combination usually referred to as dual diagnosis. He was dealing with what clinicians sometimes refer to as the “holy trinity”—addiction, suicidal thinking, and mood disorder. Length of stay at the facility varied according to individual circumstance, but the minimum required commitment was thirty days, which might stretch to ninety or more in rare cases. Most rooms were doubles. There was breakfast at the ungodly hour of six forty-five (earlier for eating disorder patients), then lectures, groups (crafts, relaxation, twelve-step, and so on), community meetings, one-to-ones, and family work, if necessary, followed by dinner at five and the end of programming at nine or nine thirty. Everyone knew, except maybe Cox, that this was precisely the sort of top-down, imposed structure Elliott detested. It was foreign to his nature. He almost never did anything “on schedule.” The odds he’d shift the experience into a turning point, a personal epiphany, were slim at best. As Garry said, and she was hardly alone, “I didn’t think it would work to begin with.” But he agreed to go, he agreed to try. The deal was that he’d play a handful of additional dates, up to a Knitting Factory gig in New York, then fly to Arizona along with Joanna some time in early September 1997. It was unusual—typically interventions conclude with the
patient flying to treatment immediately, leaving no opportunity for backsliding—but it had to do. It beat the alternative—doing nothing, extending the status quo.