Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (36 page)

In agreement with what most everyone says about Elliott, a collective effort to offset all the talk about his crippling depressions, Bolme alludes to how funny he was, his droll, straight-man sense of humor, his aslant take on
things, especially all things pompous or self-admiring. “He was pretty gregarious once you got to know him,” Bolme adds, “[and although] he was always uncomfortable with being human and getting through life, he was still a social person who cooked his own meals, made his own coffee, could wire a studio, that sort of stuff.”
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He was not completely undone by his afflictions, in other words, no “Mr. Misery.” He could be, and behave, like anyone else around the scene when he was in a good space, with people he cared about and trusted. Still, at bottom, he had, as Bolme said, that abiding lack of interest in his own life. Some hooked cane from hell kept pulling him down, and as Gonson had also said, when he got dark, he got very, very dark. Elliott loved Joanna deeply, friends say, but the relationship was rocky. Although she obviously really cared about him, he broke up with her several times—part of a compulsion, according to friends, to undo or destroy the good things or people in his life. By 1997 the relationship was off and on, Elliott’s interest in drugs the “main culprit,” says Bolme. When Krebs dated Bolme “I was a bastard,” he says. “And I don’t think Elliott improved on my record.”

Elliott goofing off near Portland’s Ladd’s Addition neighborhood. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

So, overcoming his ambivalences, his doubts about whether it would really improve things, and to get distance, from Bolme and from all that
Portland was starting to signify, Elliott finally did take off, months before the fall from the cliff in North Carolina. And what he said before leaving for New York, the goodbyes he distributed, were deeply alarming, weirdly prescient. Jason Mitchell recalls one conversation in the Space Room on Hawthorne, the night before he left. Elliott said, “Just so you know, if you get a call that something happened to me, don’t be surprised …” He went on, making sure Mitchell knew it would be no one’s fault, telling him not to feel guilty, telling him, again, as he did to more than one person, that there was nothing anyone could have done, nothing particular that could have made any difference in whatever outcome materialized. To Mitchell, New York morphed into a place where Elliott “felt freer to be self-destructive”—a judgment no one close to him would have disagreed with. Looking back, New York seemed, to Mitchell, like the first in a sequence of steps toward catastrophe. At the same time it could be hard to know what to take seriously, and what to dismiss, or what to assume any responsibility for. Over time feelings of resignation set in. As Gust said, “He made his own choices … When he bought the myth of being a rock star”—the one emblazoned by Cobain—“it was just unbelievably disappointing.” Gust compared the process to the kind of effortful posing people do in photographs: “It’s obvious when they are failing at what they are trying to be.”
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Sam Coomes tentatively and very diplomatically suggested the same dynamic. “Part of me is a little bit—this is weird, and I question whether it’s sort of petty—but I suspect … I mean, Elliott was sort of actively involved in his own sort of myth-making, and I think he was interested in that, and it was something that I kind of frowned on. I always felt like I didn’t want to facilitate that much … He wanted to be a certain way and be thought of in a certain way, and why not?”
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Coomes’s band Quasi, who toured with Elliott in 1997, went so far to record a song, “The Poisoned Well,” that seems to address Elliott’s no-win situation. After mentioning an artist’s documentation of suicide, Coomes sings, “You won’t live long, but you may write the perfect song.” Then, in reference to his reluctance to perpetuate Elliott’s myth, Coomes concludes, “Please excuse those who choose not to play along.” Later Elliott responded to this tune with one of his own, “From a Poison Well”; he accepted the appellation, then sent a message back.

* * *

In its essence, it’s hard to see the move to New York as anything but a semiplanned descent into darkness. Not that there weren’t good times too; there were plenty of those. But Elliott always courted demons, as Krebs suggested. Only now he was shaking their hands, getting to know them intimately, hoping they might rub off. The fall was alarming, in particular its impulsivity, how Elliott simply bolted from the car bound for who knows where. Yet that was just one of several strange episodes. There were also fights or near-fights in bars, news of which, when it traveled back to Portland, struck friends there as preposterous, bizarrely out of character. On occasion he actively looked for fights. This was definitely new. In Portland the most Elliott did in bars was play video poker or cry; in New York it was fisticuffs.

The one fight, mentioned before, was a reaction. As Garry, who was there, recalls, “Some guy made a shitty comment about a girl and Elliott just lost it.”
¹⁶
He called the guy out, told him he was an asshole. There was pushing and shoving, Elliott punched the guy, “and then he [Elliott] got pushed down and ended up falling on a pint glass,” which cut his back up badly (a photo taken by Autumn de Wilde shows this wound). As he did after the cliff fall, Elliott refused to go to the hospital. He went home with Garry instead and fixed the wounds up himself as best he could.

That altercation occurred at Max Fish on the Lower East Side; there was another run-in there too. Elliott had stepped out for a cigarette, and as it happened, Garry’s car was parked out front. Elliott “saw this guy taking a leak on my car. He said something like, ‘Go pee somewhere else!’ I think he got punched,” Dorien says. Later she told him: “That was sweet, and thanks for looking out for your friends and all, but for Christ sakes just let the guy pee on my car. It’s not worth getting punched on the street for.”
¹⁷
Elliott was looking for trouble and finding it.

Another confrontation had a similar vibe. It relates to a woman—Dorien, in fact—but it’s also excessive, in some ways comical. Elliott and Dorien were at another bar—it’s how they tended to spend most nights, going out and drinking, not always to excess, playing pool, hanging around with friends. Suddenly someone pulled her aside and told her she needed to go to the back—a fight was about to erupt. A “lame” guy she had been dating had entered the place. And without her knowing, while her back was
literally turned, “Elliott took it upon himself to go meet the guy … and tell him to drink somewhere else.” In this instance the guy in question “totally knew who [Elliott] was. He was a big fan of Elliott’s and got really embarrassed. It was very sweet and funny, but I was like, ‘You’re going to get hurt someday.’” Not, Garry meant, by this particular guy, who had the unusual experience of being ambushed by one of his idols, but by someone else, some day, who knew when. “He would pick little fights with people,” says Garry, implying that these three events were not exhaustive of every such run-in. “[And] some days Elliott would get hurt when he tried that stuff out.” There was something a little “big-brotherly” about it, Garry says. Elliott was super-aware, she adds, guessing that he saw the guy enter and decided he wasn’t going to let him bum Dorien out. But a lot of times, and she never knew quite when, Garry says “things would go tits-up and I would have to go pick up the pieces of the mess he had just made.”
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Not that bars were always sites of unwelcome—or welcome, as the case may be—violence. Elliott hung out in them not just to possibly get beat up—anger was always an issue, a leftover from childhood, but the fights were acts of self-destruction more than anything else—not only to drink, which he was doing at home, and alone, but to listen to music. Sometimes the music was live, but usually it was jukebox stuff. “If you went to a bar with him,” Garry says, “you always went to the jukebox, and you put your songs in, and you made sure your songs were coming pretty soon before you settled in somewhere for the night … kind of take over the jukebox.”
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On occasion he’d put as much as forty dollars in the machine. Selections might range from George Jones to Hank Williams, Jr., from “schmaltzy ’70s soft rock” like Chicago (“If You Leave Me Now”) and Seals and Crofts (“Summer Breeze”) to the Scorpions or Foreigner or Charlie Rich (“The Most Beautiful Girl”). As always Elliott’s affections could be surprising. He liked stuff uncool to like. He respected the expertly crafted tune. Stevie Wonder was another favorite. Garry went to high school with Wonder’s kids, and Elliott asked her over and over to tell the story about the blind man
driving a car
. “If I saw Elliott getting really bummed out,” Dorien says, “I would say, ‘Do you want to hear the Stevie Wonder drives a car around the parking lot story again?’”

Garry recalls one frequent haunt—a little neighborhood fisherman’s
bar called Harbor Casino in Jersey City, inhospitable to hipsters. It was torn down eventually, replaced by condos. She and Elliott were usually the youngest people in the place. They were gifted with their own nickname, the “Beatles kids,” since those were the songs they picked out most often. But they were both also really obsessed with Roy Orbison, the golden-voiced songsmith. One thing Elliott did more than once, touching and faintly sad, was select Orbison’s “Running Scared”—a song about rivals anxiously competing for a lover—then immediately leave. Garry recalls, “He would have to physically step out of the bar for it. I was always like, ‘Why did you play it if you were going to stand outside?’ He’s like, ‘It’s such a beautiful song. I’m waiting for the day I can just sit here and not let it totally destroy me.’ ”
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Outside he still got muffled, distant sounds of the music, but not the lyrics. There were plenty of funny times too. Once he and Garry discussed which song, however cheesy, however vile, made them both so upset, so overcome by sadness, that listening to the lyrics was a virtual impossibility. The answer: Phil Collins’s “Against All Odds.”

A different discussion centered on Joni Mitchell’s notoriously dark album
Blue
. One night by chance Elliott stumbled across the record in Garry’s collection. Immediately he asked if she’d listened to it. She said no, she hadn’t got around to putting it on and checking it out. Funnily, he was relieved. “He made me promise never to touch it. He said it would change me forever.” Stay away from it if you know what’s good for you, was the basic, partly comical, message. But one night, after drinking half a bottle of red wine, Dorien couldn’t help herself. She slid
Blue
out and stuck it on the turntable. Unexpectedly Elliott walked in. “Fuck! You did it!” he said. “You’ve now taken the irreversible journey of getting real bummed out on Joni’s
Blue
.”

One relatively unlikely subject was, of all things, clowns. Elliott had a hoax he talked about trying. He pictured driving to the Canadian border, ostensibly to play shows in Montreal or Toronto. As border guards stopped him, he’d step out in a clown outfit, proclaiming a desire to “break into the Canadian clown world.” He was prone to wearing squirting flowers, buying rough approximations of clown shoes wherever he could find them. Once he and Sean Croghan, visiting from Portland, rewrote lyrics to the Doors’ “The End” so the title character was a clown, his shoes “flopping on down
the hall.” “I think it’s kind of symbolic,” says Garry. “I think Elliott had a big inner clown that was dying to get out.”

It did get out, more often than most imagined. No one ever underestimated Elliott’s enormous talent for humor. It was a saving grace. But just like the stereotypical clown figure, when the face wasn’t smiling, it was riven by tears. It’s that duality, the clown’s hidden dark side, the grimace under the grin, that scares so many kids shitless. As nights at the bars dilated into morning, more times than not Elliott stayed on by himself after Dorien needed to take off. She was around twenty when she met him, and she wasn’t a major partier. So when she couldn’t extricate him in time for her to get them both home and to bed so she could wake at a reasonable hour in the morning before taking off for work, “he would just stay out until whenever.” More than once he was out all night, at Luna Lounge, Bar 88, Blue and Gold. More than once he was “shit-faced.” He’d read Jennifer Toth’s 1993 book
The Mole People
, an allegedly true account of interviews with tunnel dwellers, homeless people who lived in ordered tribes underground, in subways or abandoned structures. Legend had it that there were hundreds of these groups with cultural traits, formed complex societies, pseudofamilies with codes of conduct siphoning electricity from city grids. Toth took heat for the book. Claims were made that her stories were apocryphal. Attempts to verify met with little success. Still, Elliott was curious. Garry discovered that, on nights he was drunk and out alone, with no one around to keep him in check or look out for his best interests, he’d go down into the subways searching out these communities of people living in hiding. And “he did it shit-faced. It’s so dangerous. I can’t even fathom,” she said. “My worst nightmare is falling off a subway platform, let alone crawling down one and walking through the tunnels.” He never did find what he was after; he made no contact with tunnel dwellers. But, as Garry remembers, “there was so much like that, playing with fire, testing his limits, and testing fate down there.”
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The kind of thing, in other words, he’d told Mitchell he went to New York to do. In Garry’s view, all the critical attention, the push to sell records—still, at best, only very mildly successful commercially—the fans, the performances, the music itself—none of those things erased the fact that “he had all this stuff he just couldn’t … deal with. It didn’t make it any better; it didn’t make it any easier to go through
the day. Like, at the end of the day,
just let the people who bummed you out leave your head
.” That is what Elliott was not able to do. The people stayed in his head; they kept bumming him out.