Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (45 page)

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This 2000 tour included one other fresh development, less musical, more personal. In the long run it would alter Elliott’s life, not always for the better. His tour manager was a man named Miles, Shon Sullivan recalls; but also working the cause was a woman named Valerie Deerin, who chipped in with all manner of tasks, doing “a little PA stuff” and managing sales of merchandise, a “merch girl.” Deerin was Scottish. Sullivan recalls her as a “really nice girl, kind of fun, definitely outgoing, and very un-L.A.” The last bit might have appealed to Elliott; she wasn’t L.A., far from it, but she’d done a decent amount of work in the music business. She knew bands and band members. She was connected and in the scene. Whatever the case, she and Elliott started going out, yet not, according to Sullivan, “really heavily or seriously.” In fact, for Elliott it was no more than a tour hook-up at first. In most ways he and Deerin had very little in common. Unlike JJ and Joanna, unlike Chiba, with whom Elliott was still only “friends,” she was not artistically inclined. She also lacked the sort of inner chaos Elliott was usually attracted to. She wasn’t troubled, at least not in the beginning, and she was no introspective brooder. She was, as Sullivan said, upbeat, high energy, apparently well put together, the product of an idyllic childhood that could not have been more different from Elliott’s. As it was, the last thing Elliott wanted was a relationship—he had already told Chiba he was too depressed for it—or all the baggage and responsibilities sure to follow. Yet Deerin pursued him, she wanted badly to be his girlfriend. She wanted, as many people around him did, to save him, to somehow buffer him against his demons. This was yet another psychological function of Elliott’s depression and suicidality. It mobilized support. It made people care. It drew people to him, people, usually women, who believed, usually erroneously, that their love could turn him around, heal him once and for all.

Before Elliott, Deerin dated Flaming Lips drummer Steven Drozd, according to Dorien Garry. Drozd himself first met Elliott in 1996. “We hit it off,” he said, “but he was always in his own world.” By 2000, Drozd says, “I got to know him really well. I knew he was struggling just to get through the day. For me,” he adds, “my fondest and most disturbing memory of him was when we did ecstasy together one night … That song ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ came on and he started bawling his eyes out.”
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To this point numbing alcohol remained Elliott’s drug of choice, although like most everyone
else, he experimented now and then recreationally. Drozd, however, was notorious for serious addiction problems, including heroin. In an intense, candid six-minute clip from a Flaming Lips documentary, he actually shoots up on camera, describing the entire process, how the drug fills his body slowly. He talks, also, about his addiction history, how he started with alcohol, speed, Ecstasy, and how he finally turned to heroin in London during a tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the end, he says, as the addiction deepened and took him over entirely, he lost all his money, all his equipment, even his car. His expectation, then, was that he’d either kick somehow or the drug would kill him.
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It’s a frank assessment. It’s not pretty to watch although, at the same time, Drozd’s honesty is admirable. The segment morphs into a sort of anti-addiction commentary. The feeling some people got from Deerin, more a sixth sense than anything else, an intuition, was that she may have been drawn to drug takers like Drozd. The role she perfected was helper and healer.

It’s not as if Deerin was evil. She adored Elliott, she says, and would have loved him no less had he worked as a plumber.
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The music, to her, was secondary. It’s also not the case that she, or anyone for that matter, was to blame for Elliott’s crash, which began, in a kind of slow-motion fashion, before the European gigs concluded. He had made a so-called “heroin record,” the self-titled album, when he wasn’t even on heroin, employing the idea of the drug intellectually, metaphorically, as a symbol for dependency. Back in the Portland days, when heroin was in the scene and easily available, he had mused about the prospect of trying it out, to the dismay of people like JJ Gonson. There was also that idea, suggested to him by others, that it might qualify as unorthodox treatment for intractable depression, a notion he did not dismiss. But now, in fall of 2000, what finally happened was what seemed, always, to be in the process of happening—a
fait accompli
, a delayed enticing inevitability. Whether out of boredom, hopelessness, exhaustion, defeat, self-hatred, or because, in the back of his mind, it had been the plan all along, a way of stopping pain once and for all, and in some respects stopping life itself, Elliott signed up with evil, as he wrote in the song “Angeles.” As if turning to look in the face of someone perpetually standing directly behind him, he caved in, he tried heroin, the “devil’s script.” He did, in effect, exactly what Drozd had done—graduated from
party-atmosphere drug use to drugs as full-time occupation. He was now, and for the rest of his life, an addict. He became, in a way that must have felt, in a sense, like a relief, the junkie everyone had erroneously assumed him to be before. He would never be the same. He would never crawl back out. Whoever he was, he was irreversibly someone else, a diminished, degraded version of an original identity. This was to be
the
turning point—very real, and in the long run, very catastrophic.

What he told select friends—and he wasn’t bragging about it, or the least bit proud of it, or romanticizing it in line with the rock star mythos—was that he had picked the habit up on tour, while far away. Rumors circulated as to who was to blame. Some contended, without clear evidence, that Chiba was the culprit (she denies this, and in fact, she wasn’t even there; she was back in L.A., merely a friend). Others floated different names. In any case, the fault-finding made no sense. Heroin had always been a lure, a sort of waving siren, a last-ditch option, and whoever made it available, Elliott took it. He was a grown man; he made his choices. He alone elected to succumb. And once he did, an effect was the solidifying of Deerin’s position in his life. From here on out he needed her just as much as she needed him. Being alone was always difficult, and now more than ever. So when he finally returned to L.A., to the cottage complex on Sutherland Street, not far from where the
Figure 8
cover shot had been taken, Deerin tagged along. The idea was to kick, with Deerin’s help. There was urgency, he had to do it, chiefly because of a string of dates in Japan in early December. He needed to be clean before taking that trip. The flight itself was long, and the prospect of dealing with addiction so far away seemed impossible to contemplate. Where would he get drugs? He couldn’t take any with him, obviously. At first he tried managing the process at home, a do-it-yourself detox. He was extremely ill—vomiting, his bowels giving out—in the throes of his very first massive withdrawal. It didn’t go well. It wasn’t working. In the end, against what he had hoped might happen, against his initial plan, he sought medical treatment, and got on methadone. Slowly, then, he dug his way out over the last week of November and the first few days of December. Throughout the agonizing several-week ordeal, Deerin to her credit was completely sober. She was not, herself, a drug user. She took her role as nursemaid seriously. It was a 24–7 engagement—as it would be years later
for Jennifer Chiba—and she was there for all of it, a true asset, Elliott coming to realize that, whatever his misgivings, he could count on her. She proved instrumental in getting him past the worst of it.

Morbidly, as the closer for many of the fall shows, Elliott sampled “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” a secret admission of the road he was on, a coded message to himself. Heroin equaled escape, but it also equaled death, the escape of death, and as he declared back on
Figure 8
, “I don’t feel afraid to die.” The reaper, he was prepared to face. Far from fearing death, it sometimes seemed, as it virtually always had, like long-awaited relief. He made it to Japan, where he played on December 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8, a grueling string in light of his condition, but he stopped a number of songs, finding he could not get through them. This had always happened. He’d always stopped songs, just cut them off when they weren’t flowing the way he wanted them to, or when he’d forgotten lyrics. But from here on out it was to become a regular occurrence. On any given night, with a set list of, say, fifteen tunes, he might abort six or more. Crowds never seemed to mind. They called out encouragement. They marshaled supportive and understanding patience, telling him to try again, telling him he could do it. Sometimes he listened, sometimes not. Shows turned into tests of endurance. Was he going to make it through?

If there was a point at which, after numerous intimations, life became slow dying, this was it. Everything collapsed into addiction, the dreadful grind of days dealing with the realization that his life didn’t belong to him, that he was chained to a chattering monster. He’d made it through Japan, but when he returned, it was back to zero. He’d been getting by on metha-done, managing passably well, but he’d started sharing his supply with a friend, also addicted, so he wound up in withdrawal, then, in no time at all, back on heroin. In the moment there seemed to be no other way of controlling the situation. Friends pleaded with him, urged him to stop, saying they loved him and wanted him in their life, but his answer, now, always seemed to be the same. He did not want to do drugs, he said. But his feeling, one that never seemed far off, was that the world had a gun to his head. Heroin was the only way he could stand it. To stay around, to keep living, as everyone seemed to want him to do, even if he did not, he needed to be high. Otherwise, he’d kill himself. It was that simple. It was one or the other. Death or drugs.

With that sort of self-justification firmly established in his mind, it was full steam ahead, complete surrender. At this point, several people self-enlisted to devote nearly every waking minute to the job of keeping Elliott alive. It was exhausting, a nonstop anxiety attack, but the alternative was losing him, and nobody wanted that. Deerin took the lead. She was, as usual, bright and cheerful, a natural extravert, clean and sober, and most important, utterly devoted. Elliott accepted her care more passively than anything else. Privately he kept telling friends he was not into her, that he wasn’t sure he loved her, but he didn’t want to hurt her, he didn’t want to ruin her life by sending her away, and he fell into the habit of introducing her as his girlfriend, making their pairing more or less official. Besides, he couldn’t manage without her. She bought his food, ran his errands, cooked for him, nursed him, fawned over him, and although she insisted she wanted him off drugs, she kept striking many as a “quintessential enabler.” She accepted Elliott’s state, and by not pointedly confronting him, avoiding ultimatums, she abetted it. Taking care of every last task of daily living, she freed Elliott up to stay addicted. It was, as most everyone agreed, a messed up situation, a textbook instance of codependence. But she wasn’t alone. A confederacy of helpers was on call, including Alyssa Siegel, who was close to the situation, Jennifer Chiba, who at this point mainly watched from afar, Autumn de Wilde, Margaret Mittleman, and Ashley too, who made the decision around 2001 to move to L.A. to be close to Elliott, understanding all too clearly the dire condition he was in. She’d remain there through to the end, doing her best, like all involved, to prevent him from throwing his life away.

Elliott, however, was not on board. He wasn’t in a recovery mode. He had not made any true commitment to getting clean. In fact, his habit was about to extend itself in ways that, even under the circumstances, no one anticipated. But first there were practical matters to deal with, some quotidian, some relating to new and surprisingly powerful music. Strangely, when just on heroin Elliott could seem marginally functional. He smoked it, he never shot up—he was petrified of needles, and once after pricking himself accidentally, he completely freaked out—so the threat of death by overdose was not as pronounced. He still went out, he still performed, although less frequently. There was, for instance, a February acoustic show at the Silver
Lake Lounge in L.A., where he played a set of seven songs, including “Strung Out Again,” “Fond Farewell,” and “True Love,” all newer tunes, all preoccupied, directly or indirectly, with heroin or death or both. The first, “Strung Out Again,” is a dark, crashing meditation with guitars banging in forebodingly, full of disturbing imagery befitting his mind-set. He spies an “evil emperor” wearing his clothes, the new person he had become, in charge of him, in control. He hates the look of his own face. The tide’s coming in, he says, he’s strung out again, a floating body, face down.

“True Love” fashions heroin a lover. On the surface, in fact, the song seems to be about a destructive relationship. It’s a companion piece to “Say Yes”—the same ambivalences, the same unpredictability. Will “she” stay or will she go? Will she love him as he needs to be loved, or will she screw him over? Far from accidentally damaged, his heart’s been “attacked,” shattered by “tough love, bad love.”
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Real love, true love, lives behind glass, locked and kept closed. So he finds it on the street instead, marries himself to “heavenly bodies above.” With his new love he steals away to some hideout. He finds she’s either madly in love or else mean, it’s always one or the other; he can’t make any sort of stand. She’s got him where she wants him and there’s nothing he can do about it, he “has to cause harm.” To get back on his own somehow, he must go to rehab. Doctors write him new prescriptions as he swallows his sword. The song concludes with some of the most depressing sentiment Elliott ever mustered, an impressive feat considering the melancholy infusing so many of his tunes. In soft, dreamy, high vocals while wishing he were “no one,” he asks his “lover” to take him home, to take him out of this place, to take him up with her today. What he seems to be requesting is a sort of silvery, astral death, an ethereal ascent into nothingness. He felt like a liar telling this “girl” he loved her—a possible reference to Deerin—but he can’t say no, he can’t resist, and he wishes she’d free him at last, a final intervention by the same “Miss Misery” who had once transported him to a very different ether. The song is a death fantasy; the job is assigned, wishfully, to heroin, the last love available to him.