Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (38 page)

At the designated time Elliott got on the plane, he checked into the glorified hospital, he started the program, but he did not stay. He bailed. By this time booze had become his primary mood stabilizer, his mood defeater. It was the one reliable path to his most cherished state—painless oblivion. As he’d put it in Heatmiser’s “Plainclothes Man,” alcohol was the only thing he “really needed,” “something that will treat me okay, and wouldn’t say the things you’d say.” Drink was a faithful friend. The booze abided, always, and it didn’t talk back, it was kind, dependable.

On a hot September day in New York Garry had gone to the beach with a friend. As she returned home and opened the door to the apartment, there, to her partial surprise, was Elliott, sitting in the living room. “Hey, I’m home,” he said. “I decided I couldn’t do it.” Garry’s response was disappointment mixed with fear about what might happen next, how the pattern might reinstate itself—that entrenched “holy trinity”—but as she’d insisted all along, from the plan’s inception, “I never had any belief that it was going to work.” He gave the “typical Elliott reasons” for discharging. He didn’t like the staff or patients. There was no rapport. And he found the group therapies, crafts and so on, occupational therapy–type interventions, “annoying.” Making collages from magazine pictures cut out with safety scissors, constructing “welcome mats” to take home for later use, building tiny painted jewelry boxes—all of it struck him as time wasting and ridiculous. He didn’t see the point. His natural bent was skeptical, and there was plenty to be skeptical about at Sierra Tucson. Nonetheless, Dorien sought whatever silver lining she could in the experience. “Maybe he knew now the jig is up,” she concluded hopefully. He’d gotten the message that people believed he was in trouble, so perhaps that would translate into internally executed change. It seemed like the most anyone could hope for, given how things had turned out. The plan that evening had been to meet Janet Weiss for drinks. Elliott asked to tag along, Weiss naturally surprised to see him. But the two had a long talk. “Elliott wanted to go and tell her what had happened,” Garry says, to try explaining the change of course.

As days went on Elliott was anything but contrite. His mode was not
apologetic. He expressed little guilt. What he was, for weeks and months thereafter, was angry. “What I had to do now,” Garry says, “was deal with his anger. He wasn’t angry at me at all, for some reason. But basically he felt like the whole response was too reactionary. Mostly he was angry at Slim. He wasn’t nearly as mad at anyone else. He needed to direct his anger somewhere, and Slim got it.” He would keep getting it too. That particular relationship never healed. Others would, without great difficulty, but from here on out Elliott cut Moon off. And in time his deal with Kill Rock Stars would also go by the wayside.

What, exactly, Elliott was into besides alcohol proved, in mid-1997, hard to figure out. Everyone smoked dope, of course, but in New York Elliott’s tendency was to abstain. Weed made him too paranoid, Garry recalls. As for harder drugs—speed, cocaine, meth, heroin—the ones he’d implied he might try upon leaving Portland, Garry wasn’t directly aware of those being any kind of issue. Vaguely she recalled Elliott mentioning sampling heroin even in college, but that was all he’d said. Never did she find him in a state suggesting more than drunkenness. Yet, as she explains, “I was really young, and I had no reference point for when things were getting out of control.” His attitude toward her wavered, too. On one hand he was comfortable in the friendship, inclined to confide freely. On the other he was protective, especially “as far as me knowing too much.” So he could have been using, for all Dorien knew, but keeping it secret. He wasn’t around a lot and she didn’t know all of his acquaintances, so what he was up to in the middle of the night as Garry slept was a bit of a mystery. Any drug use, she says, “he may have kept compartmentalized.” At any rate, he did not go to Sierra Tuscon for anything like heroin addiction. It was the drinking and the expression of suicidal ideas that led to the intervention, not a concern relating to harder drugs. Those would come soon enough. But in New York, he wasn’t a junkie.

As far as years in a short life go, 1997 may have been Elliott’s most eventful. He had signed with a new label (although that situation would quickly change).
Either/Or
was an artistic triumph—but no commercial juggernaut. He was back on the East Coast, heartbroken over ending a uniquely significant relationship. There had been the cliff fall, the intervention, the stint at Sierra Tucson. It was a bewildering mixture of very good
and very bad. But more good was imminent. Soon it would be Oscar time. As he stepped onto that worldwide stage, in his white suit, holding nothing but his guitar for protection, almost undone by the sight of rotund Jack Nicholson feet away, it could only have seemed, as it did to friends around the nation, like a moon landing. How did he get there? What did it mean? The crowd took in the nervous kid next door—someone they’d babysat, someone they’d coached on a soccer team. The lyrics might have been a tip-off, if anyone paid attention. But chances are no one inferred the “troublemaker below,” the inner demon whose taste in suits was anything but white.

The intervention’s failure
was not, obviously, a hopeful sign. Had he stuck with it, had he found some way of overlooking the deadening tedium of the inpatient routine, had he come to see the depression, the suicidal thinking, the drinking as a trio of enemies, the attitude shift might have saved Elliott. What it seems to come down to, for most people in a similar predicament, is a commitment to placing supreme value on one’s life and regarding all anti-life forces as egodystonic, in clinical terms—in other words,
not me
. Psychologically, the failure suggested a refusal to relinquish devices that weren’t working. Or, from a different angle, they
were
working, they
were
effective, but they guaranteed a larger, deeper, long-term failure. There was the alcohol. There was the longing for non-being, that fantasized escape from chronic feelings of worthlessness. But more important, there was the depression, Kierkegaard’s “faithful mistress,” which as Gonson had said, Elliott was in love with. He had a hard time imagining life without it, and he’d come to connect it with his creativity. Far from seeing it as an enemy, he clung to it as indispensable. He was a ghostwriter, he said, “for an ocean in a shell, from a poison well.” It was the poison he dipped into. What remained when the poison was gone? He knew the poison; what he didn’t know was what life might feel like without it. Fans, too, wanted the “sad song symphony.” The sadness was the act. They came to feel it, to mutely observe, to find themselves vicariously redeemed, just like Kafka’s hunger artist’s groupies. They weren’t there for new songs or happy songs. They wanted Elliott to “go down.” They were there for the torment saint. It was his job to deliver them from evil, to share his vulnerability genius.

The intervention had another negative side effect. In its aftermath different long-term friendships began eroding slightly. It was difficult to stick by a person with so little interest in self-preservation. There was scant faith
he’d get any better. He’d asked in songs why anyone kept faith “with this disaster.” Friends started wondering the same thing. Most stuck it out, but with a building feeling of hopelessness and dread. Happy endings were hard to visualize.

So after leaving Arizona, bailing out on Sierra Tucson and dropping back down almost magically on Dorien’s couch, Elliott’s existence got even more peripatetic, not unlike the days in Portland when he lived, unofficially, at JJ’s while he kept a room in the Heatmiser house. His habit, in fact, had always been to keep spaces as he relocated. He was usually spread out all over, in a state of metaphysical homelessness. Eventually the arrangement with Dorien came to a natural end. The entire time he was there he kept insisting he needed to find his own place soon. “He was hyper-aware he was in somebody’s space,” Dorien says. And although her two male roommates “really liked him in the beginning,” after many months “they were like, ‘How long is he staying?’ ” One roommate was a merch guy, on tour a lot, “so that bought Elliott more time.” Still, it was not a setup built to last. At some point, then, he moved to Park Slope in Brooklyn, to a flat including his own room (something he did not have at Garry’s), with a very sweet couple, Shawna and Pierre, who were friends with Ellen Stewart. Soon the couple moved to a different apartment in Park Slope, and Elliott tagged along. Later he’d also live for a time with artist and college friend Marc Swanson, and with a woman, Jackie Ferry, whom no one knew well but who had some sort of job in the music industry, according to friends of Elliott’s.

In New York Elliott’s sister Ashley reentered his life on a semi-regular basis, although there had never been any real estrangement to speak of. She’d started college at University of Southern California, so she was on the other side of the country. But they made a mutual promise to always be together on Thanksgiving. It was their special holiday. She would travel to wherever he was to spend the week with him, wherever he happened to wind up on the holiday, Park Slope, Jersey City, or Hoboken. For the first time she got to know his newer friends, including Dorien and others. “He opened up this whole new world to me,” she says. “I was pretty rigid and math-minded”—this was the primary subject she studied in college, although later she also developed a strong interest in primate, specifically
chimpanzee, research. “I had blinders on,” she adds, “it was an awakening for me … He was totally different than all my friends and how I’d grown up. He was open-minded and really compassionate … just the open-mindedness and the artistic side, his activist mentality, his fairness, he totally turned that on in me.” The meals put together always made for happy, positive, festive occasions, everyone chipping in with entrées or side dishes. Often the combination of people present was slapdash, more or less accidental. Once Elliott was in charge of carving the turkey, which they’d named Tom. On another occasion the turkey seemed to be undercooked. Everyone started panicking, calling mothers for advice. “So it took hours,” Ashley says. “There was me, his little sister, like a little dork visiting from California, but I had such a blast!” After finally getting the turkey figured out, essentially slow-cooking it, Ashley, Elliott, and Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead took off for the video store, at last deciding on
Austin Powers
. Ashley recalls, “We got back and put in the movie, and within half an hour all of us were just like snoring, asleep.”
¹

Ashley and Elliott also toured the art museums, despite the fact that Bunny, the average concerned mom, kept telling her “Be careful in New York!” (Venturing out, even to museums, was apparently some slight cause for concern.) It was actually more pleasant than usual to be there with her brother. Outside New York he’d get stared at a lot—“He looked kind of grimy and, you know, well, unkempt.” Store personnel targeted him for a thief sometimes. But in New York, Ashley says, “he was just another guy. He said he never felt scared in New York because if you walk around and you don’t look like you have anything, no one bothers you.” In the museums his knowledge of art and artists—their culture, the period, their place in art history—astounded her. He read a huge amount, she says, and as they looked at various paintings he provided a kind of running tutorial. Once he gave her a Rothko book—an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and
Simpsons
creator Matt Groening). The two did their share of dumb, goofy things too. In bars Elliott liked to play Ms. Pac Man, for instance. “He was so good,” Ashley remembers. “He looked up the highest scores online one time and his score was way higher than the highest-scoring Ms. Pac Man champion.”

Having Ashley back around, involved in his life, watching out for him as best she could, was a major gain for Elliott. She was someone to trust implicitly. He knew he could turn to her; he knew she loved him enormously and wanted the best for him always. She was a little sister first and foremost, so his relationship with her had always been similar to the one he’d formed with Dorien, also several years younger. But more and more she also assumed the role of default caregiver, especially after the New York years ended and Elliott moved to L.A., where Ashley would also eventually live in order to provide much-needed support. She had not been present at the intervention, according to Garry. But she knew of it, and she was keenly aware of the nature and the depth of his struggles.

It was, despite Elliott’s travails, a hugely exciting time.
Good Will Hunting
premiered in Westwood on December 2, 1997, then played again two days later in New York, a screening Elliott attended along with Garry and others. Wide release of the film occurred January 9, 1998. The lead-up to Oscar night included numerous performances, some low-key, some high profile. Elliott played Largo twice in L.A., with Jon Brion sitting in. This was a collaboration that would deepen over the years, yet end unhappily. He also played Spaceland in Silver Lake, a gig including the first live performance of the JJ Gonson–inspired song “Pitseleh,” with its gorgeously tasteful, dancing piano interlude trailing the line “no one deserves this.” It wasn’t the first time, nor the last, that Elliott employed piano brilliantly as embellishment, a stately guest in songs consisting mostly of finger-picked acoustic guitar. On March 4, 1998, Elliott appeared on Conan O’Brien. He would not be allowed to sit down for the Oscars, but this night he did, in a T-shirt emblazoned with the state of Texas—a rich symbol if ever there was one—and a light blue stocking cap that would become, over the next several months, a trademark accent. Sounding a little hoarser than usual, he sang the expected tune, “Miss Misery.” It is a soulful performance, with little trace of nerves. At the song’s conclusion the audience erupts spontaneously, Elliott’s softness and subtlety having apparently won them over, as it tended to do in the small clubs, where he had that ability to render everyone instantly, expectantly silent. It’s easy to see his coiled power.