Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (49 page)

Whatever the proximate causes—and depression alone is another, its mood-congruent delusions—the question was how to stop the fear, how to
not
stop the music. Elliott couldn’t do AA. He could not honestly take the first step, which required admitting he was at the mercy of a higher power. Power was an idea he had always rejected totally. So in August 2002 he latched on to a biological remedy, a decidedly fringe medical solution called Neurotransmitter Restoration, developed initially by William Hitt. It was
fast, it promised a ten-day detox. It claimed to produce substantially reduced withdrawal, decreased cravings, restored mental clarity. NTR, as practitioners called it, intravenously saturated the body with nutrients, naturally occurring amino acids, minerals, and buffers, stimulating, the theory said, a cell shift into repair mode, with drug-damaged neurons returning to normal functioning, brain receptor sites coated with a cool, wet blanket. Detox from crystal meth might require one amino acid and mineral solution, heroin and alcohol another. The tonic was determined by the specific case.

Elliott described the process to an interviewer, clearly, at this point, a believer. “What they do is an IV treatment where they put a catheter in your arm, and you’re on a drip bag, but the only thing that’s in the drip bag is amino acids and saline solution. I was coming off of a lot of psych meds and other things. I was even on an antipsychotic, although I’m not psychotic. It was really difficult … It’s usually a ten-day process, but for me it took a lot longer … It just bombards your system with amino acids that kick all the shit out of your nerve receptors.”
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He continued, “There’s such a taboo of even talking about drug use, and then there is the added problem if you play music. Then there’s this sort of melodrama that surrounds it, which wouldn’t necessarily surround someone who doesn’t play music. So, it’s kind of an off-limits subject. Actually, I thought I would just try to avoid it, but I’m not different from other people with drug problems. So, given the opportunity to speak, then I guess I will.”

Schoenkopf wasn’t a fan, nor was most anyone with an appropriately critical mind-set. “I think little of it,” he said. “They look at your history, then come up with a soup of amino acids.” His belief was that it was “essentially garbage,” at a cost of a thousand dollars per day, a minimum ten thousand dollars total. “Once you take the IV out, it’s bullshit. It doesn’t work.” Schoenkopf knew of Hitt. He was a big, good-looking, charismatic guy who spoke with confidence, employing soothingly scientific language that seemed, in his mouth, legit. He was persuasive; but questions dogged him. New Zealand’s
Listener
checked into his background in an investigative piece. They found a total absence of undergraduate or medical degrees, a fact Hitt admitted to in sworn documents filed with a court. He’d claimed, audaciously, to have won a Nobel Prize. That, too, was false, as was his claim
of an Eli Lilly award. There were also contentions that Hitt, now deceased, “doctored test results.”
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Elliott never questioned Hitt or his credentials. And despite the inherent illogic of the treatment, its flimsy conceptual foundations, he believed, strongly, that it had helped. It was grueling, for a time it left him reeling, but he did feel restored, rejuvenated, as if something deep had shifted in him. Did it cure the paranoia? No. The fears lingered, although they became less consuming. And his hope, now that he’d made an honest stab at getting clean, was that slowly, as the fog cleared, the creative capacity might return with fresh force. But something unexpected happened. In the midst of all this change, the effort to turn things in a promising direction, one consistent with life, a new conflict emerged.

Nelson Gary always felt “Coast to Coast” was a metaphor for Deerin and Chiba, for stability, which Elliott needed, and disorder, which he also needed. The two were vying for Elliott’s affections. When Deerin left—which she needed to do with some regularity—returning home to sign visa papers, Chiba and Elliott hung out (just friends with a mutual sense of growing affection). When she returned, she did so with understandable jealousy. Who was this woman, and what were Elliott’s intentions toward her? Deerin was mild mannered, sweet, kind, and helpful; she did everything she could for Elliott, the two even making efforts to start a foundation for abused children, an enterprise Schoenkopf was also peripherally involved with. But whenever the name “Chiba” came up, she’d turn suddenly irate. Occasions when they ran into each other, at shows or bars, devolved into drama. Once, according to Chiba, Deerin called her a “fucking whore,” and accused her of addicting Elliott to heroin. It was an ugly, contentious triangle. Even Elliott’s neighbor, Barb Martinez, told Valerie, “You’ve got to move on.” She struck Martinez as “a little young.” The sense was that she was in over her head. She encouraged Elliott, she “kept him from being lazy and reclusive,” Martinez says, but at the same time it was clear things were not working. Something had to give.

It’s more evidence of the effects of Elliott’s early relationships—the abandonment by his father, the idyllic interlude when he had his mother to himself
for a period of four years—when, in his mind, they needed no one else to be happy—his mother’s eventual abandonment, of sorts, as she remarried, and the damaging relationship with Charlie. What evolved for Elliott was a mix of strategies. There was self-sabotage—he ended relationships even when they were good. As he wrote in “Go By,” he’d “leave you even if” things were promising. In other words, he preempted relationship failures; he expected them to fail, so he torpedoed them, he cut them off before they reached their inevitable—in his mind—end. Nobody broke your heart, he sang in “Alameda”; “you broke your own.” But he also needed love; he hated to be alone. So he sought intimacy as he doubted its viability. In short, he resisted breaking up with anyone—as in the relationship with Bolme, which kept dragging on—and he didn’t want to risk being with anyone either, especially in the sense of needing them, coming to depend on them, tying his feelings up with them and in the process making himself vulnerable to painful disappointment. Yet finally, through a process not entirely clear (Deerin decided, after many invitations and one e-mail exchange, not to be interviewed for this book), Elliott ended things with Valerie. As Chiba put it, “he sent her back to Scotland.” Martinez recalls her leaving quickly, but in fact, she stayed around L.A. for at least a matter of weeks, if not months. Or, she left, then quickly returned. And as several people have described, in close detail, she seemed to fall apart. She was thrown into what appeared to be some sort of emotional tailspin—very sad, very unexpected, and very hard to watch. Elliott’s feeling—perfectly understandable in light of his own history—was that she did not deserve to be abandoned. But he found he couldn’t stay with her either, apparently. She quickly went from being, at baseline, extremely neat and tidy and well put together, to not bathing, not changing her clothes for days at a time, according to several people who were there to see the regression. More than once she allegedly, and vaguely, threatened Elliott’s life, saying, in effect, that something drastic was going to happen, and that she wasn’t talking about herself. Elliott, wisely, holed up in a studio he’d recently built, with the name “New Monkey,” in an office complex in the San Fernando Valley.

Calls were placed on Elliott’s behalf to his psychiatrist, Dr. Schloss—the “brain boss” with whom Gary Smith had set him up. At times he and Valerie had met with Schloss together—as had Bunny and Ashley and Jennifer Chiba, even Dave McConnell. Clearly his parents knew he was in
some degree of trouble emotionally; they also were learning, piece by piece, the extent and seriousness of his addiction history. At some point Schloss was told of Deerin’s condition and asked for advice about what to do. She obviously needed help badly; it was far from clear how things might turn out. Schloss, however, was apparently dismissive. He said he knew Valerie, and she couldn’t hurt a fly.

By this time she was telling people she was going to win her man back. She was on a mission, driven by a monomaniacal mind-set, now at a point—some believed—where she’d overstayed her visa. She slipped into shows in strange disguises, wearing white wigs. Those who knew her saw who she was; the fear, always, was that she might do something desperate. In late January 2003, several months after the breakup, the “get a backbone” episode occurred. This was the message she called out to Elliott in the middle of a performance—another rocky one—right after he finished the song “Pretty (Ugly Before).” She may have believed she would have gone undetected, unidentified—she was in disguise. Yet several people who were there that night positively indentified her, and although Elliott did not know, at first, that Deerin had made the remark, he did the next night, when he played the same venue again.

What everyone understood was that Valerie needed help, Schloss’s demurrals aside. They were sympathetic; they didn’t demonize her. It was understandable what she was going through. She had devoted her life to Elliott; she’d done all she could to support him, to the degree she knew how; she’d been there when he was at his worst, beset by nightmares in which he beat himself up, in which he “kicked [his] own ass for treating me badly,” and recognized he needed to “separate drug use from escaping my past and/or stupid ‘I don’t remember what happened’ saddened self.”
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The struggle had exhausted her, unhinged her; the result was some form of emotional breakdown. Elliott had deserted her; he’d rejected her perfect love. And it was a decision she simply could not and would not accept.

Still reeling mentally and physically from the ghastly Neurotransmitter Restoration, and deciding, reasonably, that it might not be a good idea to go home—he’d taken to sleeping in a drum isolation chamber in New Monkey—Elliott turned to Chiba. At the time he was weakened, she says, to the point where he found it hard even to get up. Still, he asked her to
meet him at the Roost. He told her he’d sent Valerie home, that he had finished up the ten-day treatment, and that he needed somewhere to stay because he could not take care of himself. The two had a natural bond. Their histories lined up—depression, thoughts of suicide, drug use, both legal and illegal. Chiba played music, and knew Elliott’s catalogue inside and out. She was a trained art therapist too, a counselor, with an MA from Loyola Marymount, so she had the requisite skills. She was in a position to understand Elliott’s psychology, and to apprehend the connection between his art and his moods, the role played by imagination in his overall well-being. At first there was little thought of becoming romantic. They were obviously attracted to each other, but that took a back seat to the main objective—getting well, trying to find some sort of mental clarity away from drugs, especially crack. As it would be to the last day of his life, paranoia was still present. It kept materializing just as Schoenkopf predicted it might—it found a foothold in Elliott’s brain, a residue of dopamine hyperactivity. The obsession with DreamWorks was an ongoing consternation, impossible to dismantle. He would tell Chiba, “Someone’s trying to kill me, you know.” While living with Valerie back at the Disney cottages, and even when recording with McConnell in Malibu, all Elliott ever seemed to want to eat was ice cream—Double Rainbow. It was the same with Chiba; he kept a healthy stock in the freezer. At times he refused to leave the house to buy it. He pleaded with others to do it for him. Once, deprived of food, he passed out and turned blue at the Greek Amphitheater. As always, if anyone tried questioning him, attacking, however gently, the irrationality of his beliefs, he’d reply with, “What?! Even my friends don’t believe me now?!?” His ideas were deeply entrenched; cutting them out through any sort of disputing process seemed mostly hopeless. Other possibly paranoia-related odd behaviors materialized too. Chiba says “he started taking computers and telephones apart and putting the pieces in the refrigerator.”
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As he moved with Chiba to a small home on a hill, at the end of a long drive behind another house out front, and next door to Roger and Mary Steffens (Roger Steffens was a world-renowned reggae expert who maintained a reggae museum), her feeling, one that others around Elliott shared, was that he “was already gone. It was just a shell of him then.” It was as if a part of his personality had been removed. He was dulled, mentally muddled,
tired, internally besieged. Even his compassion, his vivacity, his concern for others had leaked out invisibly. Naively, but just like most everyone else in Elliott’s life, especially women, Chiba thought she could save him. “I loved him,” she says, “but at the same time I wasn’t sure I had what it took to stay with someone so fucked up.” She did her best; she stuck with it, feeling as if she were doing the world a favor. But it was like three full-time jobs at once. Day and night she was on call, in the back of her mind realizing “people are going to do what they are going to do.”

Elliott in 2003. (Wendy Redfern/Getty Images.)

Her belief, no doubt correct, was that Elliott was “definitely insecurely attached.” Admirably, “he exposed his vulnerability immediately,” he was “very clear and open about how he felt,” yet when it came to relationships he tended to be “guarded and unsure,” or ambivalent, resistant. He told her succinctly “my childhood made me feel like I didn’t exist. I was nothing.” What Chiba focused on, apart from managing day-to-day needs for nutrition, getting Elliott back to some approximation of physical well-being, was the music, encouraging him to work when he felt up to it. New Monkey was set up; he had begun renting the Van Nuys space back when he lived in the Disney cottages. For a time, he kept equipment in the cottage loft, reachable via the circular stairway. It had functioned as his home studio. But he moved all he had to the new space, eventually, its name a hopeful inspiration, music a “new monkey,” a replacement addiction. Once he got it up and running he spent days at a time there, sometimes sleeping in the same drum isolation room, buying new gear, taking it apart when necessary and doing what he could to fix it. At first it was a total mess, but Elliott and Chiba got it organized. They put inspirational quotes on the board, tapestries on the wall (partly to dampen sound). Drawers and cabinets were painstakingly labeled.