Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (42 page)

A gig at The Trees in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas on March 9, 1999, was an especially interesting evening. Pickle got word of the performance (not from Elliott; the two had long ago fallen out of touch); he’d been tracking Elliott’s success with a mix of pride and amazement. That night he, Denbow, Mark Merritt, Elliott’s old girlfriend Kim, and Denbow’s younger brother Kyle all took in the show, as did “Zott,” the older girl Elliott once made out with in the back of the high school band bus. Kim screwed up the nerve to ask a security guard to deliver a message to Elliott backstage, and he invited them all in. (A picture shows Elliott in an “88” T-shirt surrounded by his Cedar Hill bandmates, Kim blond and to his right in a fetching red dress.) Yet another friend on hand, Mark Pittman, recalled the night. “All of us who knew him back when were beaming uncontrollably, probably looking like idiots to the man on stage. Kevin Denbow was standing next to me, a few feet from the front of the stage, enthusiastically singing every word to every song back at Elliott.”
¹⁸
Pickle says Elliott “spoke to us all for about an hour, which was very nice.” He was gracious, kind, open to reminiscing a bit about the better parts of the Texas years, including the time he beat Pittman in a talent contest by playing an eighth-grade love song. Pittman suggested he should have won; Elliott happily agreed with him. All the same, to Pickle Elliott appeared “socially ill at ease.” He “didn’t seem comfortable,” most likely because the very idea of Texas always left him worked up. By this time, Pickle observed, Elliott had “fully adopted this thing, a permanent part of his personality later in life. When he didn’t want to talk about something, he’d just stop, and evaporate.” Whatever the case, it was a thrilling evening for the old gang. One of them, the person they’d sung with on “Outward Bound,” jammed with on “Inspector Detector,” rocked out with on “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Stairway to Heaven,” had made it big. It was impossible, but it was true. And they had been there when it all began. Their Steve Smith was now Elliott, a bona fide star in the making. The eight hundred or so kids in piercings and “unnaturally dyed hair” merely fantasized closeness to the shy guy on stage. Pickle and the others
knew
him. He was their
friend
. That night he proved what they always suspected—that Elliott was different, that for him the sky was the limit.

Around 1999, once
the touring trailed off and there was time to breathe again, to take stock and start imagining several possible futures, a signal event occurred that, retrospectively, many would point to as the start of a long train ride to Hell, the most recent beginning of a dreadfully anticipated end. Elliott moved to L.A. It was where he would die, four years later, and for some, it was
why
he would die, as though grimy, smoggy, shallow Los Angeles bore down on a fragile target. Crackerbash’s Sean Croghan, for instance, took this position at first. The feeling was that, had Elliott instead returned to Portland, his life might have been spared. Now even Croghan isn’t so sure. “I kind of call bullshit on [that] now. I don’t know anything. All I know is that I loved him very much, and there are people [in Portland] and obviously in L.A. who [loved] him a lot.”
¹

At first the relocation was meant to be temporary, a short-term necessity. Dorien Garry had moved into a four-bedroom apartment in New York with her boyfriend, and she took quite a bit of Elliott’s stuff to the new place. Elliott asked if he could rent one of the rooms. He helped with the security deposit, he paid several months’ fees, but he was almost never there. Finally Garry told him what he was doing made no sense. He was wasting money. New York was where he wanted to be, but as Dorien figured out, “he kept needing to stay in L.A.” for industry-driven reasons. At last, mostly out of inertia, he wound up living there. The decision was made passively. In New York, as he often said, and as others like Ashley noticed, “there’s just more people that look like I do. Not that … I don’t look any particular way, I don’t think. But I’m not the … People don’t stare at me. I don’t look outrageous at all. There’s always much bigger freaks than me in New York, on every block.” L.A. was different. At first he didn’t “feel quite right there.” It was full of “falsely tan people with great abs, that wear
impossible clothes, and I’m always the scrappiest person walking down the street, and it makes me uncomfortable.”
²
Famous people had always left him feeling “a little edgy.” He avoided places where up-and-comers networked, talked about their careers incessantly, perpetually on the make. He mostly sidestepped Hollywood, he said. But the L.A. cartoon intrigued him. As he told CNN, “that seemed like a good reason to check it out. ‘Let’s get the cartoon out of the way and see what it’s really like there.’”

Some of the impetus for the move came from manager Margaret Mittleman. She “really, really wanted him to live in L.A.,” believing that being close to her, and to husband/producer Rob Schnapf, might be good for Elliott, a change of scenery, a possible change of mood. She looked forward to him getting to know her young assistant, Alyssa Siegel, to whom Elliott would grow close. Mittleman figured Siegel and others, including photographer Autumn de Wilde, who later produced a sort of oral biography of Elliott, replete with hundreds of photographs, “would be a good influence in his life.”
³
Yet as she and others quickly realized, though L.A. did seem to help for a bit, manufacturing, for Elliott, a host of salutary music-focused distractions, the effect was temporary. Elliott “was always going to be drawn to a dark crowd,” says de Wilde, and “that was always going to be frustrating for the people who were looking out for him.” The crepuscular red-walled Roost was one typical hangout. Elliott spent hours there alone drinking beer and writing, bartenders protecting his privacy, just as they had done in New York. Schnapf recalls one exchange, a night he told Elliott he needed either to deal with his shit, accept the fact that it wasn’t working—the drinking, the habitually gloomy frame of mind—or go down “that other path.” On one hand, Elliott’s people radar helped him pinpoint the good souls he needed in his life. On the other, he sometimes felt as if he could not live up to his own expectations, a mind-set encouraging self- and relationship sabotage. “Everybody’s got a story,” de Wilde said. There was the funny point with Elliott, usually just after meeting him—he was very good with strangers, said de Wilde. There was the inspiring point, the dawning recognition of his uniqueness, his giftedness. Then there was the disappointing point, the moment he disappeared, flaked, failed to stick to the straight and narrow, made the destructive rather than the healthy choice. To Schnapf, the goal of steering Elliott toward the right path was almost
hopeless. He so often seemed, at root, to be dealing with “irreversible damage.” The damage might be momentarily muted, but that was about it. It came back. It fought through demonically. Some of this was Elliott himself, who he was, the strategies he had evolved for dealing with negative emotion—booze, psych meds, self-erasure. Some was the people crowding in on him, drawn like humming insects to the fame flame. Polymath Nelson Gary, a whirlwind of esoteric literary and philosophical knowledge, a writer and painter and rock aficionado, crossed paths with Elliott accidentally during these years, and later got to know him fairly well, even appearing in one of his songs (“Coast to Coast”). Gary was acutely aware of what he called the “sycophant, madding crowd of banditos” following Elliott around, yes men and women, self-obsessed enablers, one of whom, Gary says, “looked like Chico Marx.” When Elliott wanted to go dark, they were there, dimming the flashlight. When Elliott wanted to hear only what he wanted to hear, they said the right words.

In early 1999 Elliott responded to a set of questions for
NME
in a piece titled “Elliott Smith on the Couch.” His answers read like a mini-life review, touching on many of the experiences of the prior few years, along with their emotional sequelae. “Posh restaurants full of winners, I hate winners,” was his answer to the question “What is Hell?” The song he felt “described him best”—another question posed to him—was Quasi’s “Success Can Only Fail Me Now,” a reply italicizing his attitude toward mainstream acceptance and the constant ambivalence attending his pursuit of recognition for his music. Like the earliest memories recalled by most people who fight depression, his was less than positive, albeit comical. He remembered finding a turtle in Dallas that peed on his hand. At first it was cool, then it wasn’t. As for the worst trouble he had been in, he tracked back to the week he spent on the psychiatric unit in Arizona. Then, asked on whom he would most like to “extract revenge,” he named one of the doctors there, someone he’d “like to have incarcerated for a week,” a sentence fitting the one meted out to him, a turning of the tables. A year and a half later the intervention betrayal still stung. He wasn’t over it, nor would he really ever be.

By mid-May 1999 the arduous
XO
tour was concluding, the experience of “living out of an eight-wheel steel tube” near its end.
⁴
For some of these gigs—for instance, an appearance in Minneapolis at the 1st Avenue Club,
where Prince’s
Purple Rain
concert footage was filmed—Joanna Bolme was on hand, the on-again, off-again relationship temporarily back on apparently (although an article describes her as a “traveling companion”). In fact, it was never entirely off. For the next several years he would fly to Portland intermittently in order to see her. He felt, he told friends, that she was the woman he was “supposed to marry.” He wanted the relationship to work, but at the same time he doubted his ability to carry it off. Committing meant getting better—drinking less, primarily, and making positive life choices—for the sake of his partner if not for himself. It meant living, pushing self-harm stirrings decisively aside. But that was the rub. He was never convinced he had it in him to effect the necessary changes.

Throughout 1999 the older
XO
songs were slowly replaced by newer tunes during performance, many of which found spots on the next record, the one that would be Elliott’s last. The “couple killer” single “Son of Sam” entered the set list in Tokyo in January. One month later it was “Everything Reminds Me of Her” and “Easy Way Out.” (Even the comparatively old “Flowers for Charlie” showed up in late March.) The next night Elliott announced, understandably, that he was sick of playing his songs. Night after night it had mainly been the same old stuff, and it was getting exhaustingly formulaic. He abandoned the set list and took requests. But still more new tunes came to the rescue. There was “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud” in July in Olympia, the devastating “Can’t Make a Sound” and even more devastating “King’s Crossing” on the same October night in Portland at Satyricon.
XO
had been a definite game changer, but he was in the process of moving on, bringing in still more instrumentation, growing more lyrically adventurous, more imagistic and elliptical.

The songs, at any rate, always took care of themselves. They rolled on like a semi, headlights tearing through the night. They came out of their own sequestered life force, impervious to tumult, swimming in the flood and “counting the waves,” just like the female character in the song “Baby Britain.” Summer of 1999 brought with it a new main character, one who would play a key role in Elliott’s final moments. At Spaceland he first met Jennifer Chiba. He had wandered in just as she’d finished a gig—Chiba played bass in a band called The Warlocks. Mutual friend Steve Hanft was there too, and Elliott asked for an introduction. He and Jennifer talked
some, about compassion and Russian literature, about the Ferdinand story, one of Chiba’s favorites from childhood too, both staring at their shoes, both smiling shyly. To Chiba Elliott seemed “really uncomfortable,” his usual transient awkwardness showing.
⁵
He had just moved to L.A.—he didn’t even know his phone number—so he asked for hers, then gave her the number of Mittleman’s assistant. Chiba’s first instinct was to tell him to call her when he dropped out of the music industry. She’d recently ended a ten-year relationship with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, and in the moment she didn’t feel she could “deal with being in the public eye” again. She knew who Elliott was. She had seen him on the Oscars in his white suit, and she’d been blown away, finding his songs “amazing” and “breathtaking.”

Weeks later Elliott showed up at her next gig. There they talked more, discovering surprising commonalities. Chiba had grown up in Africa, but moved to Texas, graduating high school in Houston, where she was a standout student, and attending college at Trinity in San Antonio, finishing up in 1989. Her father was a NASA scientist in Zimbabwe. He remarried at seventy, Chiba’s mother having died in 1993. Like Elliott, Chiba had pushed through her share of emotional storms. She had been hospitalized for depression and suicidal thinking, and she shared with Elliott “all the medication cocktails I was on,” adding that “most made me feel worse.” In what she later understood to be a “fugal/medicated state,” an episode of altered consciousness, she had tried taking her own life, and Elliott “seemed extremely interested in the details.” She found she could talk with him without shame, and he told her of his own experience at Sierra Tucson. They agreed that hospitalization sucked; confinement, they felt, made things worse, not better. As for the drugs they spent hours comparing notes. Both concluded meds seemed at best fractionally helpful, their idiopathic nature a source of frustration. Even when they worked, no one knew why, or whether they’d keep working, or for how long. They also believed “that we had the right to live or not live, as we saw fit.” That was the problem with confinement. The freedom it limited included the freedom to die. It prevented the ultimate escape. In forcing life upon patients it seemed like a form of death, a curtailment of limitless possibility, suicide included. Moved by her candid descriptions of what she’d been through, sympathizing with her pain, Elliott told Chiba, “I hope you don’t try to hurt yourself again, because I’d like to
get to know you better.” For her, this was an “astounding” thing to hear, coming as it did from someone she so admired and respected, someone she instantly adored. On the spot they reached a provisional agreement: “Neither of us would hurt ourselves.” This came as a relief to Chiba, however fragile the pact turned out to be. At that time she felt she needed external motivation; she could not rely on herself “to provide the will to live” or even to take care of herself. She had no interest in bringing Elliott down with her, so the fact that he “had been there,” that he’d “spent a good amount of time feeling similarly” and therefore understood, provided “much-needed hope.” Here was someone who got it, someone who knew what it was like, someone in daily search of a reason to keep fighting.