Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (48 page)

What led at
last to some slight shift in the direction of better health was a Google search. At wit’s end, Elliott tapped in the word “heroin.”
¹
That took him to a
Heroin Times
essay on Lou Reed, about Reed studying poetry with mentor Delmore Schwartz, an “alcoholic speed-addict” for whom he wrote two songs (“Our House” and “European Son”). Sections described Reed shooting up on stage, acting as a sort of “poster boy for heroin chic.” Others noted his “fine blend of street wisdom and book knowledge,” the way he gave voice to the “downtrodden and repressed,” how he kicked his habit through the help of Alcoholics Anonymous: “The Velvet Underground may have started Reed’s adulthood, but AA saved it.”
²
“It’s my wife, it’s my life” Reed had written, tersely summing up what heroin had become for him; Elliott captures the same sentiment in “King’s Crossing—“All I want to do now is inject my ex-wife”—the “ex” adjective more wish than reality, in all likelihood. (Also, by all accounts, Elliott never shot up.)

Reed, the essay continues, dons his blue mask to simultaneously reveal the “raw vulnerability and live-wire sensitivity beneath it.” The theme of compassion emerges, its necessity for true healing, especially in a form directed toward the self. In the end Elliott’s beloved Nico even appears, saying “I find it hard to believe you don’t know the beauty you are.”
³

Elliott read on with building interest, even a sense of hope. Here was, first of all, a writer who seemed to know what he was talking about, someone who had been there and crawled out. Here, also, was the prototypical addict, heroin’s New York hero. If Reed could do it, if Reed had found something useful in AA, of all places, then why not him? After all, Elliott was decidedly minor league compared to Reed. Reed
was
heroin, a kind of living symbol. On the other hand, maybe it was all bullshit, Elliott figured, hyperbole, wishful thinking. Did Reed really do this? Was he really clean?

So with Valerie along for the ride Elliott showed up at the
Heroin Times
offices in Malibu. He wanted to know who had written the article, who had made these claims. He was on a kind of fact-checking mission. As it happened, Nelson Gary sat at the front desk. He was the author, he said, and all of it was true. At first Elliott was skeptical. But Gary knew people who knew Reed; he wasn’t making anything up. He’d done his homework. It was all fact. Besides, Gary wondered, why doubt it. Why the incredulity?

When Elliott arrived he was pissed off. Gary had no clue who he was. He looked homeless, and to Gary he seemed, at first, delusional. Sounding like some two-bit wannabe with nothing to show for himself, a faux artiste, a faux songwriter, he railed against the radio and why he wasn’t on it more, he complained about the need to tour. As for fame, “he wanted it”; it made him sick but at the same time “he felt he had been overlooked.” “I don’t think he was coming from a narcissistic place,” Gary said. “He just heard people on the radio sounding like him and making lots of money. He was interested in acknowledgement in the broadest possible sense.”
⁴
As the two talked Elliott finally cooled down some. At one point someone whispered in Gary’s ear, clueing him in on whom he was speaking with. It caught Gary off guard, but he quickly realized that one of the reasons Elliott listened, maybe the only reason, was that Gary hadn’t recognized him. He wasn’t some sort of star fucker. He was, for all he knew, talking to a complete nobody. Elliott found something instantly endearing about that.

“We hit it off,” Gary says. “But it was an edgy relationship. He was cerebral and I’d be contrary for the hell of it.” Elliott adored the Beatles, Gary figured out, so he dissed them cajolingly, telling Elliott he was living a much more Rolling Stones life. They argued about who was better, and Elliott “was a scrapper, he was a junkyard dog. I wouldn’t say he was mean, but he could defend himself. He had all the intellectual subject matter but he was doing stuff too,” not just talking about it. “He wasn’t an encyclopedia with shoes,” Gary recognized.

Over time they met about once or twice per month—as friends, not as therapist/patient. Gary was a painter, writer, poet, and exuberant, inventive spoken-word performer, his lexicon impressively large; he quoted easily from Kierkegaard to Hinduism, Nietzsche to Coltrane. His mother, Jan Fuller, was a feminist who’d appeared on numerous talk shows, and his
wife worked in the music industry, so he knew his artists inside and out, a major Dylan, Bowie, and Stones fan. His job revolved around addiction treatment; he counseled at Malibu Ranch and then transitioned to program director at the Malibu Coast Treatment Center. He was well versed in the vicissitudes of detox, and he understood intimately the complications of dual diagnosis, Elliott’s struggle. Depression engendered drug use, drug use magnified depression. The former had to be treated just as aggressively as the latter. It was a multipronged attack or it was nothing.

Alhough he’s not sure what kind of direct impact it had, one idea Gary introduced to Elliott was Tamil Siddha, or tantric twilight language, also called “intentional language.” At the time Gary was “mesmerized” by it—the idea of expanding the mind by deliberate use of opposites, a dialectical synthesis achieved through paradoxical juxtaposition. Gary isn’t certain it had anything strictly to do with him, but Elliott wound up retitling the song “Somebody’s Baby” “Twilight,” and it does, in the recorded version, include several Siddha-like antitheses—laughing so hard he cries, being with someone only to disappoint her in the process, and loving two dissimilar women at once. But if the idea ever reached an apex, it was with the song “Coast to Coast.” What Elliott was after, Gary believes, was a specific, complex healing, “catharsis without resolution,” or as Elliott himself put it in the song’s two opening lines, confused resolution. He told Gary his character was a preacher, a circuit rider, traveling from town to town, in love with two women, one stable and boring, one signifying chaos, the final detail duplicating the theme of “Twilight.” Gary goes on: “Elliott sings repeatedly about doing something for a certain ‘you,’ feeling that he has already done things for this ‘you’ a number of times and he has nothing new for them. Every reviewer I’ve read misinterpreted this. They were too focused on the artist, not the art. They wrote things such as ‘I’ve got nothing new for you’ is a joke; it’s silly. That’s true. But as an artist he was attempting to get people to pay attention to the art, not him ultimately. The ‘you’ he is addressing is one fictionalized romantic love interest (the road girl), a second romantic fictionalized love interest (the stay-at-home girl or wife), God, and to some degree, the general audiences he seduces going from revival tent to revival tent. It shows the speaker’s disillusionment about what has life has brought him in terms of relationships …” Elliott was at a crossroads, Gary suggested, of
the sacred and profane. He often told him “the intermingling of the two is the only place true holiness can exist.” The “lowness of the high, the low in the high, the profound, even potentially holy relationship between them. That’s one of the major things Elliott was investigating.”

For the song Gary was brought in to provide a “waterfall of words” or “John Coltrane sheets of sound.” They recorded on Good Friday in Hollywood. Steven Drozd was on drums; so was Autumn de Wilde’s husband, Aaron Sperske of Beachwood Sparks. Gary had a poem in hand. He recorded it in voice-over numerous times, take after take. Elliott wanted a range of personas, different accents, different attitudes. He would say “miss it, but be late” or “miss it, but be early.” His intent was for the words to sound obliquely off, never managing to find any sort of groove or rhythm. “I went by the lower notes of his guitar playing,” says Gary.

But the song begins with machine whining, industrial mine-shaft scraping. Drums awake fumblingly at first, hibernating large animals resentful at having their slumber interrupted, then crash in obligingly aside electric guitar. Elliott says two words—
preachy
and
pushy
—as piano chords tumble. There’s nothing new, Elliott says, no new act to amuse, no desire to use. Anything he does would not be good enough anyway. He figures he’ll just forget it; it’s really easy to do. “If you can’t help it, just leave it alone.” He introduces the circuit rider, who comes “every fifth Sunday.” And Gary, in two different studio-altered voices, appears over a tinkling piano tracing a high, haunting melody, in some ways the most powerful moment in the song. For reasons Gary never understood, Elliott recorded himself saying “that’s why” as the piano fades. He seemed to mean it as a reaction to some line in the poetry, but it’s hard to say. It may be more randomness, more meaningless noise.

Everything done, the subject of money arose, awkwardly. Gary had assumed he’d be compensated, and he was, a total of fifteen hundred dollars. Elliott said, initially, “I thought we were doing this as two artists.” Gary’s impulsive reply: “Tell that to David Geffen.” It wasn’t a serious disagreement, however. Things ended on very good terms.

Besides, there was a lot more to talk about, namely emotional pain and drugs, and what to do about each, how to move past them somehow, if possible. Gary’s sense, based on hashing the subject out with Elliott in detail,
was that childhood trauma had permanently changed him, that there was little chance of reversing its effects. He had tried “being okay with himself,” being “accepting,” but radical acceptance only went so far. It didn’t change the facts, obviously; and more important, Elliott continued to feel angry. Although he tried, his attitude was not always one of equanimity. There was shame too, self-hatred, confusion, loss. The two discussed how drugs functioned as an extension of trauma, a form of self-abuse, of “administering the torture on yourself.” One becomes his own destroyer, in other words. Gary was also aware of cutting incidents, occasions on which Elliott harmed himself superficially. It was another piece of it, more marks of self-loathing. None of this was new to Elliott. He knew what was going on. The question was, did he really want to change it. Did he want to take it on, or did he want to let it slowly destroy him?

The answer, currently, though tentatively, was no. Then it was back to Lou Reed, AA, the best path to take. Gary put Elliott in touch with Jerry Schoenkopf, an addictions specialist with a history of working with rock-star junkies. Schoenkopf’s memory is that he first met Elliott in 1996, under unclear circumstances. At any rate, the connection was made, and it deepened. Jerry and Elliott never went more than one month without talking.
⁵
They met consistently, although somewhat sporadically. To Schoenkopf, Elliott was smart, a true intellectual, and very sweet, but also “very depressed,” and using drugs “to get more depressed”; as he saw it, “just like depressed people do, he used alcohol, heroin, any downer. To deepen the depression.” The two reviewed Elliott’s abuse and detox history, how he’d get better, stop getting better, then get worse. There was a sense that he was fragmenting, that he was tired, that the drugs for depression weren’t cutting it. In fact, as Schoenkopf examined Elliott’s drug regimen, he began to feel “this is not the right stuff.” “Psych drugs can be a problem,” he said. “We had long talks about psychiatry. Psych drugs can only take you so far. I don’t want to say it was wrong, what Elliott was on, but it didn’t work”—a hardly uncommon reality, with anywhere from one third to one half of depressed patients treatment refractory (i.e., drugs don’t help them at all).

What Schoenkopf counseled was complete abstinence—“it’s playing with matches, heroin, and you’re a baby.” Elliott’s “center was fragile,” Schoenkopf felt, “and he couldn’t afford to wobble. It’s not like he could try
to become a weekend heroin user. His core was too unstable.” You can’t compete with these drugs, he’d say, and Elliott agreed. He was “obsessively interested” in them, on one hand, but he also “knew he was losing his capacity to be creative.” Elliott had said something similar to Jennifer Chiba, once telling her “I think I’ve destroyed that part of me that can make music. I feel like I’m already dead.” This was, in many ways, a do-or-die realization. Destroying any other part wouldn’t have mattered in the least. It was what Elliott was busily doing, tempting fate with overdoses, with murderous drug combos. He placed little value on his life. He was sick of it. But the music was something else. It was the one thing, maybe the only thing, he did not want to disappear. Losing it was losing the last bit of hope he had, his one reason for trying. If, in some crazy, magical reality, he could die and the music could go on—that would be fine. He’d be good with that. Yet there was no magical reality. As he’d figured out long ago, to keep making music he needed to sacrifice; he needed, that is, to give up death, his attraction to ending everything, to numbness, emptiness, isolation; he needed to choose life, whether he wanted it or not. This was the perpetual struggle. Why not kill yourself? The question rarely left him. And the answer, the only answer ever, was music. For now at least, he could not lose it. He wasn’t ready to let it go too.

There was something else at work, something that made daily life a living hell. The drugs had fomented a fierce paranoia, in some respects more destructive than the substances themselves. Some days Elliott believed in these fears, others he saw them for what they were—side effects of continuously damaged chemistry. The one way out, he realized during saner moments, was to stop using. Shon Sullivan recalls a late night-trip to a Burger King drive-through. The truck behind was revving its engine, and Elliott latched onto the idea that it was following him. “He began to see all these coincidences,” Sullivan says. “It was standard, textbook stuff.” He thought his car was bugged. He thought DreamWorks was tracking him, breaking into his home and stealing songs. Once he decided scores of people were hiding in the grass outside his home, invisibly spying. At four A.M. he headed to an all-night Home Depot, his plan to buy a machete and cut the grass back. But the main fixation was white vans. He saw them everywhere, and white cars. As he drove around L.A. he took pictures—of license
plates, of suspicious vehicles—then uploaded them into his computer as evidence, scores and scores of arbitrary images. He also recorded a running monologue, documenting what he was seeing, making imaginary connections in his head. Clearly fear was rendering him psychotic. Everyone around him knew he was out of his mind, the paranoia erupting over and over, hard to predict. Most of the time it was fruitless to talk with him about it. It pissed him off to be questioned, and he sometimes folded the questioner into the delusional mind-set, saying, “You are part of it too?” Deep down, however, he held on to slipping insight. He’d say to friends, “I sound like I’m totally batshit crazy, don’t I?” Schoenkopf discussed with him the chemical aspects. First off, crack caused delusions. This was amphetamine psychosis, a dopamine-driven paranoia. To stop it, he’d need to stop the drugs. It was simple. But there was more too, an additional difficulty. “If you take these drugs long enough,” Schoenkopf explained, “and then you stop, the paranoia stays, and finds a home in your brain.” So there were chemical elements, and psychological ones. Combating the fears required a multidimensional approach—no more drugs combined with psychological insight into their sequelae. Nelson Gary chimed in too, his sense of things a bit more nuanced, more emotional than clinical. “He certainly had depression—that’s for sure,” said Gary. “In terms of the paranoia, Elliott was a cutter—you become very raw. What happens is you can get into a very sort of oceanic experience and a lot of uncertainty, and it’s scary. He opened himself up to a lot of stuff in the music, in songs like ‘Coast to Coast’ and ‘King’s Crossing,’ and it ripped him apart. His strengths were also his weakness. He was stepping out and taking a chance as an artist. The new songs were different and his fans weren’t prepared for it. That fear, with drugs, with abuse, with depression, led to the paranoia.” In the end, “Elliott’s sensitivity was his undoing; paranoia is really just hypersensitivity.”