Cat Power (40 page)

“Look, if she's banging her head, if she's attacking you with furniture, you tackle her and put her in the padded room,” Dr. Ewing continues. “If in the padded room she's trying to scratch her eyes out, you tie her down with leather straps. If she cries and sits and rocks, you leave her alone. If she's not sleeping, you give her something to make her sleep. If she's withdrawing from alcohol, you check her blood pressure and pulse. A lot of modern-day fucked-up hospitals, they'd start her on one of every psychotropic known to man and charge money for it. I would start by just containing her. Something is wrong here. This is fucked-up. We don't want you to die. Tell me about it. What's going on here. Don't know what her diagnosis is, but a good working hypothesis is alcoholism. That'd be a really good start.”

During Chan's first night in the hospital and for most of the first three days of her stay at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, she was hearing voices and seeing visions. Chan has called it the most difficult night of her entire life. “I heard a lion growling in the corner of my room,” she has said. “I sat with that lion motherfucker in the corner and this vampire guy came over to my bed squeaking like he was really sick. I could feel the warmth of his breath. I asked God to please stay with me and help me.”

The delusions were so intense that Chan says she kept her eyes closed for the entire next day, during which she stayed in her room, refusing to eat or take the medication her doctors were prescribing, drinking glass after glass of milk instead. “Susanna would try to come in and try to feed me, but I was afraid the food had chemical drugs in it,” the singer has said. “I kept imagining I would barf the drugs up and I didn't wanna barf.”

Chan stayed awake for days preceding her hospitalization in part because she was afraid to sleep, worried that if she did the creatures she was
keeping at bay with incense and scotch would overtake her like body snatchers. By the second night in the hospital, Chan became convinced she had to escape. “It was like
The Exorcist,”
she has said. “I realized, ‘Okay, I've got to get my spirit out of here because I'm in hell.’ So I jumped off the bed and hit the wall, trying to let my spirit out, but it didn't work. That's when reality hit me: ‘You're in the hospital, dumb-ass.’” On the third day Chan started to reconnect with reality. She started watching the other patients in her ward, all of whom were in various stages of psychosis, and concluded that she wasn't sick in the same way.

That night, sitting quietly in the locked ward of a mental hospital while her fellow patients raved, Chan started thinking about how she got there. The singer knew she wasn't irretrievably crazy, but her circum-stances forced her to accept that she wasn't quite sane, either. “The third night, I opened the door and was like, ‘Okay, if I'm not in hell, then I'll leave it up to God to put me wherever I need to be and I'll accept that place.’” That's when Chan started working on getting better. “The doctor came in and said, ‘Please, can you tell me what's the most destructive thing in your life which causes you to be unhappy?’” Chan has remembered. “It took me a long time to say it, but eventually I admitted: ‘I think I have a drinking problem.’ When I heard myself say that, I was suddenly really awake.”

Although she has described facing her abuse of alcohol as a water-shed moment in treatment, she never quit drinking completely and doesn't consider herself an alcoholic. “It wasn't that I was an alcoholic, it was my lifestyle—the depression of drinking every day and not having a home,” she has said. “If you're an alcoholic, it's because you're depressed. That's it. There's something you're trying to avoid. And once you quit all that shit, you're looking at it, and you're forced
to remember things clearly. How you reacted, what you did … you're forced to be strong in a way.”

Once Chan decided she wasn't crazy and didn't belong in the hospital, she went about proving it to her doctors. She started showing up for meals, conversing with other patients and nurses, eating, and, as the singer has put it, demonstrating that she “knows how to open the utensils pack.” While these were all good signs, Chan was still unwell. She started to remember the events that led up to her hospitalization. Seeing visions? Hearing voices? Being dragged away by men in white coats? Could a person who went through all that ever trust her own mind again? “On the fourth day I woke up and was like, shit, Susanna is not coming back,” Chan has said. “Maybe Susanna is just part of your split personality. Maybe everyone is part of your split personality. Maybe your mom doesn't exist. Maybe you aren't really you. Maybe you're really seventy-five years old and you're homeless with cancer and you're on a respirator, and when you open your eyes you're going to see that you're dying.”

Chan was now well enough to understand that while she was locked away in her tomb of an apartment, much of what she perceived as real— the satanic demons and cackling voices—was only in her head. This brought comfort, but it also brought terror: Maybe even the progress she was making in the hospital was just another piece of an epic hallucination. “I got out of bed and went right up to the mirror,” she has said. “At this point I was raw. I hadn't seen myself. I hadn't brushed my hair. And I looked, and I looked like me. Like the inside of me. Like a little kid. When I saw my face, all I wanted to do was protect that person.”

Over the years, Chan has held her father more accountable for the mistakes he made as a parent and has become more forgiving of her mom.
“As an adult, as a woman, realizing my mom's position—when she had us and he left us. Left her. Now I'm really angry at him,” Chan said. “I've never been angry at him before, and I think he knows that I'm angry, and I think he thinks it's funny. It breaks my heart. My inner child, I'm almost petting her head and telling her, It's okay, that I'm gonna take care of you now, and that man really didn't love you and it's not your fault.”

Gazing into that hospital mirror, the singer was overcome with the urge to protect all incarnations of Chan Marshall—inner child and adult, sane person and insane person. “I was like, What would a sane person do?” the singer has remembered. “I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I went to the counter and I was like, ‘I think I'm supposed to ask for medication.’ And that was it. That was the day.” Chan considers this exchange between her mind and her reflection to be the turning point in her recovery. After that, she accepted treatment. “On the fifth day I actually gained happiness,” Chan has explained. “I felt excited to get up to go brush my teeth, excited to go have breakfast, excited to watch TV. The Super Bowl was on and the Rolling Stones were playing. I'd never seen them play before—I had tickets when I was sixteen, but I sold them for drugs.” For the first time in years, Chan was awake, coherent, and genuinely excited to be alive.

“On the sixth day the doctor's like, ‘How are you feeling today, Charlyn?’” the singer has said. “I said, ‘I'm feeling fine, I'm just, you know, a little scared because the people keep screaming at night and stuff.’” At this point Chan was mentally well enough to be terrified of her deranged wardmates. “I was literally scared shitless every day I was there. I was next door to this guy who was terribly, horribly, physically violent, and the doors don't have locks on them. I would always be last at breakfast,
and I'd always have to sit in front of him. Then he started sitting with me. He would say things like, ‘I'm going to make you suck my dick, you're gonna suck my dick.’”

Chan has said that her doctors initially thought she would be hospitalized for at least a month, but instead they discharged her within a week. “I learned really quickly: ‘Chan, you're not crazy. Remember?’ I just snapped out of it,” the singer has said. “Because I reacted so well to the medication, and thank God I did, on the sixth day the doctor said, ‘So are you having any strange thoughts this morning?’” Chan remembered. “I was like, No. He's like, ‘Okay. I think I'm going to let you go tomorrow.’”

While Chan was institutionalized, her record label and booking agent dealt with the professional fallout from her breakdown. The entire Greatest tour, meant to include months of dates in both America and the UK, was
completely canceled, costing Matador a reported $100,000 and putting the entire Memphis Rhythm Band out of work. Meanwhile,
The Greatest
was garnering the best reviews of Cat Power's career, which, combined with Chan's apparent collapse, put interest in the singer at an all-time high. Yet with no star available to promote the album, Matador had no way to capitalize on this perfect publicity storm.

Gerard Cosloy is reticent to discuss the label's specific reaction to Chan's hospitalization (“To answer that question would be like me publicly saying I think she has a problem,” he said when asked), and it seems clear that the label did not get involved in Chan's recovery beyond canceling the tour and giving her ample recovery time. But Cosloy has clearly given a lot of thought to what he considers the appropriate relationship between troubled artist and record label. “I've worked with a lot of artists over the years who had issues—personal issues, needle issues, alcohol issues,” Cosloy muses. “We always do the very best we can to help people out, but we can't force someone to do anything. It's all very tricky because our actual job description involves exploiting people. I mean, it says in the contract, ‘Exploitation of your likeness, exploitation of your masters.’ Exploitation, that's really what it's about.”

In the wake of Kurt Cobain's death, there was a lot of talk in the music industry about how far that exploitation should go. “After Kurt killed himself there was certainly a sense that he had been overly pressed by people who didn't have his best interest at heart,” Jim Greer remembers. “Every person is different,” Cosloy says, sighing. “I would never, ever want to see somebody continuing to perform, write, record, whatever, if they needed to do something else to get their stuff together. On the other hand, I'm also not sure it's our role to say, ‘Hey, you're in no condition to do this.’ I mean, who the fuck are we?”

Cosloy has dealt with plenty of self-abusing rock stars in his twenty
years in the music business and he has, on occasion, felt the need to confront them about destructive behavior. Cosloy and Lombardi once pulled aside Guided by Voices visionary and lead lush Bob Pollard to discuss his drinking. “There was a point in time where we thought that Bob's boozing was affecting the quality of the performances and was detrimental overall to getting business done for GBV,” Cosloy recalls. “He didn't take kindly to that suggestion, to say the least.”

The fact that Matador was willing to go there when they deemed it necessary lends credence to Cosloy's claim that he never really worried about Chan—or at least didn't worry that her substance abuse would affect her productivity (though it obviously did). Today Cosloy stands by the label's decision not to intervene. “At some point you have to make a decision: Are you in a partnership with a trustworthy, reasonable, rational adult?” Cosloy asks. “On that level of things, I feel pretty good about Chan Marshall as a rational, reasonable, responsible adult.”

When Chan left Mount Sinai, she was much closer to the coherent version of herself that Cosloy sees, but she was not cured. Her psychotic break was over, but the singer was just beginning to understand the circumstances that brought it on. When she got back to her apartment in Miami Beach, Chan discovered that Susanna Vapnek had purged the place of all remnants of the singer's breakdown. “Susanna had taken all my clothes to the Laundromat or the dry cleaners and washed every thing. It was like walking into my second chance,” Chan has said. She settled into her newly sparkling pad and was preparing to make a fruit salad when she realized that her kitchen knives were missing. “Susanna had hidden them the night I was cuckoo and had forgotten about them,” the singer said. “We started laughing hysterically. She was like, ‘Let me cut that for you.’ I was like, ‘I'm not going back there, don't worry about it.’”

Susanna stuck around for a few days, watching Chan for any signs of lingering danger. But eventually the painter had to get back to her life in New York, and Chan was alone once again. The singer hesitated to jump back into the chaos of her old life, and with all Cat Power business on pause, she was able to stay close to home and concentrate on taking good care of herself. “I remember contacting Stefano
a mutual close friend and photographer whose work appears in this book
and asking him, ‘What's going on?’ because I was concerned,” Thurston Moore says. “I said, ‘Well, is there anything I could do? Could I talk to her?’ He said, ‘She's not talking to anybody, but she does answer her text messages,’ so I texted her and asked if she needed anything. She wrote back, ‘Thanks, I'll be okay, I've just got to figure some things out.’”