Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (35 page)

At this point, although the timeline is sketchy and difficult to track
precisely, some time in late ’96 or early ’97 Elliott relocated to New York, having moved in, more or less, with Dorien Garry and two other roommates, both male—although to say he was “living” in this new space is a bit of an exaggeration. He didn’t have his own room. He slept on the living room floor. No one’s even sure exactly when he arrived. He was touring incessantly, mostly between cities, working hard to push sales of the solo material. He also tended to keep apartments or rooms in places after he’d actually moved out. It was a peripatetic time; he was out of New York performing as often as he was physically there. Dorien Garry he’d met at Maxwell’s, a music club in Hoboken, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan, where she sometimes moonlighted, serving and performing other odd jobs. That night he was playing with The Softies, whose debut record,
It’s Love
, had appeared on Calvin Johnson’s Olympia-based K Records; they’d also released, in January 1997, a seven-inch titled “The Best Days.” Elliott and band members crashed in Garry’s flat, a custom that repeated itself several times over ensuing months. When Elliott initially decided to leave Portland and relocate for real, it was Garry he turned to. They had become close; she was someone he could talk to, about things he found hard to share with others. A bit like Jason Mitchell, she was an excellent listener, and most important, she did not judge. Garry’s real job at the time was with Girlie Action, a PR/publicity firm hired by Kill Rock Stars to manage Elliott’s press. He chatted with her almost daily. It was mildly surprising when Elliott called one day to ask if he could move in, but without much hesitation Dorien said okay. As she recalls—although she can’t be sure—Elliott arrived on her birthday, May 27, with a “giant army duffel bag and a guitar.”
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The cliff jump, although there’s legitimate question about whether to call it that, occurred on June 22, 1997. Dorien and Elliott had driven ten hours from New York to Raleigh, North Carolina. The occasion was a tenth-anniversary bash for Tannis Root, a merchandising company specializing in T-shirts. Bands were set to play, including Mudhoney, Red Cross, and Sonic Youth; Garry was friends with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, having worked for a time as their child’s “touring nanny.” The night she and Elliott arrived, worn down by the long drive south, everyone rendezvoused at a bar called the Sting Ray in Chapel Hill. It was “really fun,” says Garry, everyone in a festive mood, the vibe distinctly celebratory. Elliott
too, for most of that night, seemed to be having a very good time. He was a huge Mudhoney fan, so there was much to look forward to in the days ahead. But then, with a transformation very sudden and, in the moment, startling, “Elliott flipped a switch. He went from fun to none,” Garry says. He’d been drinking, as had everyone. The booze, for most of the night, seemed to loosen him up; he was enjoying the buzz, laughing and cracking jokes. Yet, as Garry remembers it, one last drink pushed him past an imperceptible threshold. In an instant he was despairing and tearful, almost as if some chemical process kicked itself on. At the end of this transformation, Garry and Elliott climbed into the back seat of a car in order to give a friend a ride home. The night was very dark; out in the suburbs there were no streetlights, so it was nearly impossible to see much of anything. As they drove Elliott began to cry quietly; it was awkward and very sad, but Garry did her best to console him, asking him what was wrong and whether he was going to be okay, solicitations he didn’t much respond to. The friend lived at the end of a cul de sac; it was hard to make out the house, the black night dropping a cape over objects below. As they came to a stop Elliott threw open the back door and bolted. “He was incredibly drunk and embarrassed” by the crying, Garry says, “and I don’t think he even realized what he was doing.” The impulse was simply to run, to put some distance between himself and the car and the people in it. To be alone, in other words. Garry recalls, “There was a drop-off at the end of the cul de sac that Elliott did not even see, no one could see it.” So, without clear intention or any true sense of what he was in for, Elliott ran off the cliff, landing on a tree that stopped his fall and punctured his back badly.

Although in the interviews Elliott sometimes seemed to imply otherwise, Garry’s sense is that “by no means was that a suicide attempt. He didn’t know there was a cliff there, none of us did. It was just a mistake. I think he thought he was going down some kind of hill where he could be by himself and sit down and get things together.” Even so, what seemed obvious to Garry was that “Elliott was not in control anymore, of his emotions or even his physical body, his impulses.” She managed to track him down and free him from the tangle he was in, then took him back to their hotel where she tried cleaning his wound in the sink. He refused to go to a hospital, as she knew he would; for hours he apologized, saying all he wanted to
do was sleep. “I was extremely shaken,” Garry says. “I’d never seen anybody act like that, so emotionally and dangerously. It was really troubling me.” When Elliott gave the interview in which he mentioned the cliff episode, he called Garry to let her know it had come up. He “chose to tell that story,” Garry feels, chiefly out of what she always understood to be “an instinctual notion that he needed to be honest at all costs,” an attitude going back to Texas, where in his family honesty occupied the status of a cardinal virtue. Even when it wasn’t in his best interests, truth won out over lies.

There’s a minor and superfluous disparity between the two accounts—Elliott’s and Garry’s more detailed version. Garry says no one saw any cliff; Elliott said he did but didn’t care. What happened seems to be this: initially Elliott had no knowledge of a cliff, and only recognized the dropoff moments before he reached it. In the instant he made a snap decision to keep running anyway. As he said, his feeling was “who cares.” Anyway, details aside, the “jump” can’t be called a suicide attempt. It was more a
fall
. When he tumbled out of the car that night Elliott had no intention of trying to die. As far as he knew, up to the last moment there was no means, the cliff having materialized unexpectedly. Garry called the incident a “mistake.” That appears to be what it was—an accident. But although Elliott didn’t set out to die, the night exposes the state he now found himself in. For one thing, his drinking was a problem. He’d always drank, as had all his friends, but his use of alcohol was on the rise. He was drunk more often, and according to Garry, he was drinking during the day. This was the main reason for the road trip—to snap Elliott out of a pattern, to get him out of the house. By itself, the drinking might not have become the problem it eventually did had Elliott not also been taking antidepressants. At that time he was on one of the then-newer antidepressants, a selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. Garry isn’t sure which one, but in the past he’d used both Paxil and Zoloft. Typically patients are told not to mix these drugs with alcohol, something Elliott was doing to excess (an indication of the low regard he had at the time for his psychological well-being). Also, although such reports had not come out yet—chiefly because of repeated drug company denials—SSRIs are now known to cause, in small subsets of patients, a sudden increase in suicidal thoughts. On balance, it’s unlikely they did that to Elliott; his suicidal ideas predated his use of SSRIs. On the
other hand, the drugs might have exacerbated self-destructive tendencies. They also might have potentiated the effects of the booze. As Dorien recalls, it was as if a switch flipped. One second Elliott was in a happy space, the next he was morose. Part of the reason for the suddenness of the shift, the mood lability, could have been chemically based.

What the cliff mishap also shows is what Dorien says it did—that Elliott was beginning to lose control. He was in a bad way, and he’d stopped caring that he was. In fact, the question about the jump, its suicidal aspects, is minor in the broadest sense. At a July 16 show at the Crocodile in Seattle, Elliott was pointedly telling friends goodbye. He said he’d jumped out of a car; he also said that were he to disappear, he wanted them to know he loved them. The implications of statements like these were not lost on anyone. Suicide appeared dangerously likely, and calls were made to management and others, mostly to apprise them, Margaret Mittleman in particular, of the direness of the situation and to plan, if necessary, some course of swift action should there be a need for it. Things were not improving, clearly; there was no easy end in sight. And the demands made on Elliott weren’t helping. In the months leading up to the fall he was locked in a brutal tour schedule. In April there were seventeen shows, in May there were seven. Locations ranged from Boise to Chicago, Philadelphia to Tempe, San Francisco to Ontario. Over the first three weeks of April Elliott had exactly four nights off. Although he did not perform in June, he started up again July 15 in Olympia at Yo Yo a Go-Go, where he played a twenty-five-minute set, mostly of songs from
Either/Or
. Over the next two weeks there were five nights off, with still more dates, densely packed, right up to December.

As Leslie Uppinghouse and others have noted, performing was always a trial; it didn’t come without pain of self-confrontation or occasional very strong anxiety that Elliott sometimes lubricated with booze. Plus, the dark, undeniably lovely and accomplished songs he featured, the ones he was touring behind, kept striking him as worthless: “One or two of them sucked,” he said. “Then three or four of them sucked. Then they all sucked and everything I did was terrible.”
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He was in a gutter of catastrophic, irrational lines of thought, the kind one expects to find in a person very depressed, an avalanche of negative tunnel vision that to others made little sense in light of objective facts.

The odds are good, then, that Elliott was spent, if not exhausted, by June 1997. But the show beat on, near-death a temporary inconvenience. He’d go forward or burn out trying. Two writers Elliott admired, Kafka and Kierkegaard, addressed the pit he now found himself looking up out of. As Kafka put it, with characteristic precision: “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.” Then Kierkegaard: “A little pinch of spice. Here, a man must be sacrificed. He is needed to impart a particular taste to the rest.” Rimbaud, too, pursues the same thought train, arriving at the realization that he’s a poet, but his fate isn’t his fault. “Too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin.”
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There’s a price to pay for making art. Not always or inevitably, but often. It goes back to Mailer and the wound. But the cost can be high. On the list of priorities, for Kafka, Kierkegaard, Rimbaud, maybe for Elliott too, life came second. It was sacrificed to the gift, the calling, which felt more alive than life, far more valuable than its diviner.

There were several steps Elliott took away from his own self-interests in 1997. He was in a mode of escape, it seems. Portland was stale, a West Coast Texas where too many emotional bombs had exploded. As Krebs said succinctly, “There was too much shit there.” The local rock-god role was tough to take; everywhere he turned he knew someone who looked at him sideways with expectations, assumptions, requests. Early in the year he was of a mixed mind. First he’d just mulled over taking off for New York, but hadn’t foreclosed on the possibility. The idea was that, there, he could be just anybody. He craved anonymity, a nowhere man sort of existence. On the other hand, the prospect seemed doubtful. “My problems won’t be any different in New York that they are here,” he realized initially. Also: “I can’t pretend anymore like I could be just anybody. There are things about me that would be present in New York, just the same as here.” So the idea had been put on hold for a time. “This is where I’m from,” Elliott told Chandler and Wagner in 1997, referring to Portland, “and I’m going to stick with it.”

That decision reversed itself, however. The trouble was, although staying in Portland may have saved his life—it was a place that, on balance, checked his more dangerously self-destructive instincts, a place where guilt kept him sequestered from possibly disastrous dalliances, lures such as
heroin—it also locked him into various dilemmas. In Portland the “endless stream of reminders” he wrote about in “Last Call,” the ones he’d gotten so sick of, kept guard around any corner. But apart from desiring relative anonymity, another reason behind thoughts of taking off somewhere new, about as far as he could get in the U.S., had to do with girlfriend Joanna Bolme. Bolme is an elusive person in Elliott’s story. Although the two were very close, and although Bolme knew Elliott intimately for longer than most anyone else in his life and was thus an extraordinarily important person for him, one also deeply connected to the music side of things, she rarely has gone on record to talk about their relationship, or even about Elliott apart from the relationship. An understandably private individual, particularly on this subject, Bolme’s friends even mention her reticence, how she kept her feelings close. She always seemed, to some, hard to read, distant, occasionally abrupt, difficult to click with. In short, she was a mystery with what appeared to be a lot going on inside; and just like Elliott himself, she was not the sort of person who ever easily or readily opened up to others. She and Elliott first met in 1991, just after he moved back to Portland from college. A friend introduced them. Elliott “kind of waved and was shy,” she says.
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Still, she did not get to know him well until some time later, when she worked at a bar. “That’s when we became friends.” It was Neil Gust, in fact, who played matchmaker. “I made him talk to her,” he recalls, “I made him do it.” At the time he’d been aware of Bolme only from afar, and he didn’t come away with a comfortable feeling. Far from it. “She scared the shit out of me,” he says, “and I was totally intimidated.” According to Gust, Elliott figured Joanna was out of his league. He guessed she wouldn’t give him a second look. But Gust says, “I was like, ‘She is fucking hot. Don’t be afraid. She’ll love you.’ ” In truth he wasn’t sure himself that Elliott stood a chance, but Elliott had always encouraged him whenever he had a crush on someone, so Gust returned the favor. “It was his birthday, we were at La Luna [in Portland] where Joanna bartended, and I kept nudging him.” They ended up playing pool together. “They had this lovely chemistry,” Gust recalls. “He asked her out. It was so lovely.”
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