Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (53 page)

Finally, as for Chiba specifically and her possible role in Elliott’s death, Scheinin said emphatically, “The Undetermined mode is NOT an indictment of the girlfriend” (caps in original).

Of course, that has been precisely the unintentional effect of the ruling. Chiba was never charged, but in the minds of a minority of vociferous fans, she’s guilty, or at least under very serious suspicion. It’s an attitude she still confronts almost daily. (As did Scheinin herself once, when a “completely dishonest” fan saying she was “clearing things up for a friend,” in effect misrepresenting herself—to Scheinin’s “great irritation” when she later found out about it—asked for an interview the results of which she posted on a website, in the process “misquoting” Scheinin and getting various things she said “completely wrong.”)

As an aside, it is worth noting that after decades of scientific research into precursors of violence, one variable reliably surfaces: history of violence.
Recent violent acts predict—albeit not especially powerfully—future violent acts. Chiba had no history of violence. Alternatively, some fans have proposed, on message boards and blogs, an intruder theory, based on a hackneyed “drug deal gone bad” scenario. Scheinin finds that possibility unlikely for a host of interconnected reasons. There would have been signs of a struggle in the home, as well as clear defensive wounds. Also, even though she had locked herself in a bathroom, Chiba would have heard something and told the police about it later. Finally, any hypothetically ticked off drug dealer would have brought his or her own weapon—a gun, for instance—rather than making random use of a nearby kitchen knife.

Jennifer Chiba in her home, Los Angeles, May 2008. (© Samuel Kirszenbaum/Modds.)

As for Chiba, when Elliott died she had every reason to believe she might be pregnant. She was in love, and she had no reliable means of support. Elliott was everything to her. She’d devoted her life to keeping him
alive. As Shon Sullivan put it, “She was solely committed to him. She got him to doctor’s appointments. She kept him going. She’d drive him from rehearsal in his little black Passat. If it was not for Jen, it would have happened two years before it did.” Plenty of people told Chiba the same thing, she says. For Sullivan, the idea that Jennifer Chiba murdered Elliott Smith is “totally retarded.”

Others, very few in number, and including not a single person interviewed for this book, with the sole exception of Jerry Schoenkopf,
⁵
felt inclined, at least initially, to imagine otherwise. Chiba says Gary Smith made a call to her therapist, Abigail Stanton. He asked her, “Do you think Jennifer could have killed my son?” She said no, absolutely not, Chiba maintains. “The only person Jennifer is capable of killing is herself.”

If Chiba made any mistake, it was understandable and hardly murderous. She locked herself in the bathroom. She wasn’t available in that moment; she wasn’t responsive. “Elliott was afraid of losing me on several different levels,” she says. “He had formed this almost unhealthy attachment to me. He’d say, ‘Chiba, you’re the only reason I’m alive. If you leave me, I’m killing myself.’ ” The breakup with Deerin had been traumatizing. He could not endure any similar ordeal. It was too much to contemplate. Suicide therefore equaled pain cessation. It was a kind of preemptive strike, a world killer, leaving preferable to being left. And as Elliott always liked to imagine, it was, paradoxically, in the fractured logic of hopelessness, a gift. “I can’t prepare for death any more than I already have,” he sang in “King’s Crossing.” It’s true. He’d practiced. He’d come close. He possessed the requisite courage. He was, in this way, fearless. But he was also scared of being alone. He couldn’t make it on his own; he’d burned too many bridges. Friends did not know him anymore, they said. They felt stupid for trying to help. They just wanted everything to be normal. “We should have left all his records playing on his doorstep,” Autumn de Wilde says. “He wrote all the right lyrics for our complaints.”
⁶

Death was the final unburdening, a formula Elliott always espoused. There was no good reason not to do it. There never really had been.

In Elliott’s car a CD was found after his death, with fifteen different versions of the song “Stickman.” It’s a buoyant, upbeat number, beginning with guitar that almost seems out of tune, like his life by this time. He sings
over and around a constantly repeating, bending single chord. He shoots blanks at emptiness, he says, the ammo dead, the world dead. He reloads to make a silent sound, killing nothing but time, spinning the world on its flipside, listening backward for meaning. In one version the song’s a dirge for a depth that dropped even lower. Remember that when you hear some sad song, he suggests. It’s a print he shot in reversal, a reverse shot, as in film technique, when two people appear to be reacting to each another, one onstage, one off. The frames, he sings, go one by one. But if you speed them up, it’s clear he’s on the run, “from some monster off-screen killing sons.” This is the fear that never left him, revisited in slow-mo in a movie he draws from memory.

“Mental pain,” he concludes, “is the sharpest knife.” It’s the one he always carried. It sharpened itself. And in the end, by a means far more plausible, far more clear, far more unavoidable than any other, and far less open to any serious question, it killed him. There were two knives. One, the sharpest, was always in his heart. The second was almost a redundancy.

I’ve been very
deeply touched by the kindness of Elliott’s friends, many of whom devoted more than twenty hours to my questions, and helped out in ways far too numerous to try listing. This book has changed my life. The reason why has largely to do with the people in its pages—smart, talented, compassionate, creative, sweet, protective, and real. One never enjoys finishing a book. The process, so magical, ends. But here there is an added element of mourning. I will miss my interlocutors.

Some people I want to thank with special emphasis, for a generosity of time and spirit that was truly extravagant: JJ Gonson, Denny Swofford, Steven Pickering, Jennifer Chiba, Dorien Garry, and Jason Mitchell. In a sense these six people span the years of Elliott’s life, in a chain from beginning to end, from Texas to Portland to New York to L.A.

My deepest thanks also to Pete Krebs, Tony Lash, Brandt Peterson, Garrick Duckler (for kindly fact-checking assorted details), Sean Croghan, Christopher Cooper, Scott Wagner, John Chandler, Sluggo, Mark Baumgarten, Luke Strahota, Tom Johnson, Leslie Uppinghouse, Matt Schulte, James Ewing, Mark Merritt, Kim (who asked that I not use her last name), Kevin Denbow, Dave Leto, Neil Karras, Barb Martinez, Dan Eklov, Ethan Lewis, Nelson Gary, Lisa Scheinin (M.D.), Jerry Schoenkopf, Shon Sullivan, Roger and Mary Steffens, Jimi Jones (archivist at Hampshire College), and Lewis and Clark College Library.

Over the years I’ve worked with students on a number of Elliott Smith–related projects. For helping me sharpen my thinking, I thank Sarah Marker, Kerry Roche, Josh Pruden, Katie Castillo, Mariellen Thomas, Peter Safran, Christian Demko, Maria McLaughlin, Nick Kelly, and Denea Reopelle. Thanks also to Pacific University for two travel grants to Los Angeles.

Laura Eckstein was a resourceful on-call research assistant.

Julia Speicher was helpful in securing Lincoln High School yearbooks for me.

Bobbi Baker, Andrew King, and Julie McNamara, all Elliott Smith fans, all unknown to me personally, reached out with kind support and interesting ideas to share, some about song interpretation.

At points along the way, I discussed the book with quite a few people who weighed in here and there enlighteningly: Andrew McCarron, Yishai Seidman, Don Cohen, David Morrison, Josh Shenk, Abby Gross, and Lori Stone.

Shar Deisch was on hand for almost every single word.

Whatever I’ve managed to accomplish in the world of writing and publishing I owe to my magnificent agent, Betsy Lerner. I extend to her a warm-water tsunami of thanks. I’ve been lucky, too, to work with Kathy Belden at Bloomsbury USA. I am grateful for her support, patience, and astute counsel on countless details related to the refinement of the manuscript. I also appreciate Nick Humphrey’s encouragement from across the sea at Bloomsbury UK.

Sweet Adrienne: Thanks for unintentionally pointing out the path. This book is for you.

Sweet Henry: I appreciate your love and patience, and from now on may you only ever hear “Angeles” or “Everything Means Nothing to Me.”

Theresa: With endless love, thanks for everything, all the time.

I never knew Elliott Smith, though I’m guessing we silently crossed paths more than once at Django’s, the Space Room, or 1201. It is presumptuous and faintly delusional to say, but for the past several years he has been my best friend, thoroughly alive in my mind. As I suppose all properly obsessed biographers do, I dreamed about him more than a dozen times.

I set out to make a book as beautiful as the music. That goal was impossible, of course. But I’ve done everything in my power to come as close as I could.

1
. There were two stab wounds, but as I explain more fully in the final chapter, just one of these was likely to be fatal, according to L.A. coroner Lisa Scheinin.

2
. McConnell makes this statement in the Gil Reyes documentary
Searching for Elliott Smith
.

3
. See “I Think I Was There: An Oral History of Satyricon,”
Willamette Week,
accessed June 6, 2011,
http://wweek.com/portland/article-12560-i_think_i_was_there.html
.

4
. For an immensely informative history of Portland rock, see SP Clarke, “History of Portland Rock,”
http://www.spclarke.com/?page_id=22
.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Ibid.

7
. Ibid.

8
. SP Clarke, “History of Portland Rock,”
http://www.spclarke.com/?page_id=22
.

9
. Ibid.

10
. Smith interview, accessed June 7, 2011, on
YouTube.com
:
http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDm588bHCxA
.

11
. Accessed June 7, 2011, from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnqjZzMscFo
.

12
. Jeff Giles, “Everybody Hurts Sometime,”
Newsweek
, accessed June 7, 2011,
http://www.newsweek.com/1994/09/25/everybody-hurts-sometime.html
.

13
. “I Think I Was There: An Oral History of Satyricon,”
http://wweek.com/portland/article-12560-i_think_i_was_there.html
.

14
. Ibid.

15
. On the other hand, Drake’s music was at times far more orchestral than Smith’s.

16
. I once talked to a psychiatric patient who tried, mainly out of curiosity, to remove her own appendix. She explained that it was an “unnecessary organ.” I mentioned that she could have died. She told me something I will never forget: “You don’t understand. I don’t care whether I live or die.”

17
. In terms of intelligence, lyrical complexity and depth, and melodicism, the closest comparison would be Aimee Mann. Like Elliott, she was an “Oscar loser” (her own description on Twitter, as of August, 2011). Phil Collins took the statue over Mann’s truly stunning work for the equally stunning film
Magnolia
. Mann and Smith were friends. They played at Largo for the Acoustic Vaudeville nights, overseen usually by Jon Brion, who also worked with Elliott on the album
From a Basement on a Hill
. Here’s Mann on the Oscar disappointment, from
http://www.avclub.com/articles/aimee-mann,13687
:
“I was playing a show in New York with Michael Penn. It was part of the Acoustic Vaudeville tour, and we had a comedian come with us to do our banter. So it was that show, and at some point somebody yells out, ’What’s your Oscar speech going to be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s my Oscar speech: Phil Collins sucks. How about that?’ It was just a gag. And then I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if he wins and I boo him?’ I thought it would be so funny, not that anyone would do it, but I’m always waiting for someone to be a sore loser. That would be so hilarious. Anyway, some jackass from
Newsweek
takes that quote—‘I’m going to be the first
person to boo one of the winners; when [Phil Collins] wins, I’m going to boo him’—totally minus the sarcasm and irony, and reports it as straight reportage. Like I’m announcing that I’m going to boo this guy and that he sucks. Of course, it was like, ’Well, that sucks, because I’m not a Phil Collins fan, but he does what he does and I don’t want him to think that I think he’s some kind of asshole. How creepy is that?’ So I sent him a fax that said I was just joking, and that
Newsweek
is a bunch of morons. So I ran into him backstage, and he was really nice. They had a little meeting—him and his people—and decided I was joking.”