Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (7 page)

Suggesting a more than average need to atone for remembered sins, on at least two occasions Welch wrote Elliott letters to offer explanations for his behavior, and to apologize, it seems, although he never quite says he’s sorry, at least not explicitly. He admits, however, that he realizes Elliott wasn’t happy in his early life in Texas. He’s unsparing in his self-appraisals, but there are moments when he retracts ever so slightly. He calls himself inexperienced, hot-tempered. He figures he must have come across as mean, and admits that in many ways he was. But he assures Elliott he’s changed, he’s a different person now. He laments the fact that Elliott won’t let him into his life more, give him the chance to show how he is not any longer who he used to be. He suggests the two of them sit down to talk at some point. He calls the letter important and very significant. It is signed with a flowing “Charlie.”

What Welch describes in the letters, undoubtedly wrenching to compose, and therefore praiseworthy, is emotional abuse. He never mentions any physical beating of any kind. More likely than not, most of these hurtful episodes occurred when he and Elliott were alone, out of earshot of Elliott’s mother, who wasn’t fully aware of the pain Charlie’s behavior engendered. But because of its intangibility, the fact that it never leaves bruises, emotional abuse can be particularly damaging. There’s the nagging possibility it didn’t even happen, at least not in the way one recalls. There’s retrospective doubt. It seems to be “all in the mind.” What results is a sort of self-undermining uncertainty, a sense Elliott was all too familiar with. As he says in the song “Abused,” recorded but never officially released by the family—the title alone was considered distasteful—the closer you come to the fact of the matter, the more confused you get. Childhood realities are memory; memory is distortion, at best reconstruction, part fact, part fiction. Early drafts of “Abused” show Elliott trying on different scenarios, being beaten, broken, raped, hated. Kids are pictured sleeping in their clothes so nothing shows. His soul might be bruised, he says, but it still contains love and care; he was thirty-two before he knew it was there, before he felt it at all, he writes. On one hand, he’s learned to defend himself; on the other,
he’s taken to attacking himself too. Whatever the outcome—he declares, wishfully—he is through reenacting a past that paints him black and blue. I feel I’m well, he adds, I dropped defenses at last.

It’s not known how Smith reacted to the letters. They did not bring about any sort of reconciliation, however. He never did let Charlie into his life, although the art was a different matter. He let him in there, constantly, both directly and indirectly. It’s possible to take any one Smith song, bend it ever so slightly, and point it in the direction of a presumed emotionally damaging childhood. When Elliott writes, in “Roman Candle,” “I want to hurt him, I want to give him pain,” the impulse is to link this “him” to Charlie. Sometimes Charlie even appears in name. “Flowers for Charlie” imagines a stoppage of the war. “I’m not a good G.I. Joe,” Elliott sings, “and I won’t fight you.” (Remarkably, the song’s melody recapitulates John Lennon’s “War is Over,” the popular Christmas-time tune, a fact Elliott was most likely aware of.) In life, too, Elliott’s tendency, according to friends, was to vacillate. Some days he’d espouse forgiveness, deciding he was done battling a long lost cause, working to reduce Charlie to just somebody whom he used to know; then he’d revert to calling him a “fucking asshole,” a “murderer.”
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In a kind of summary judgment, he once told Jennifer Chiba, “My childhood made me feel like I didn’t exist. I was nothing.”
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The two of them had regular conversations about the problem of “unpacked rage and the fear that goes along with it.” Victims of rage, they decided, “associate those feelings with violence—to express anger means ‘I am like the tormenter,’ ” so the anger got denied or rechanneled.
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Elliott is thoughtful, as always, on the subject of anger dynamics. In songs he refers to needing an enemy in order to focus rage’s confusing pathways, as in “Easy Way Out.”

In the last year of his life Elliott was besieged by all sorts of memories, as well as countless very frightening thoughts, some set in reality, some not, as he struggled to get off heroin and crack. As quickly as the material came, Elliott disowned it, sometimes in the same sentence. But once he did tell Chiba about a beating (although, here again, it is impossible to say whether any beating truly occurred). It took place, he seemed to feel, on the day Bunny and Charlie married (Elliott would have been four). It was the first beating, he said. And he didn’t tell his mother about it. He’d “witnessed her
being sad all the time, and when she met Charlie she was happy”—so he refused to ruin the very big day by risking destructive disclosures.
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In time Elliott would receive exceptionally adoring allies to help diffuse the psychological blows. Half-brother Darren Welch, Bunny and Charlie’s son, was born on July 15, 1975, and Ashley Welch on October 23, 1976, when Elliott was seven. There were several different family homes in total—two in Duncanville, Texas, one in Cedar Hill, a Dallas suburb. Elliott’s sixth-grade Duncanville home was on a U-shaped street called Park-side Circle, steps away from Lakeside Park. Town lines were sharp. When the Welches later moved to Cedar Hill—the home sat at the top of a steep street—the property just next door had a Duncanville address. Elliott’s Cedar Hill home featured four and one half acres, its prior owner keeping cows and horses. There were woods, a barn, stables, a corral. The kids built treehouses, played baseball in the front yard.

A friend with whom Elliott grew especially close was Steve Pickering, nicknamed “Pickle.” A skinny kid not usually found on ballfields, who wore braces and then-trendy Aviator-style glasses with Coke-bottle lenses that lent his eyes an owlishness, Pickle first met Elliott (whom Pickle calls Steve) in sixth grade at Byrd Junior High. They were in the same English class taught by a Mr. Brewer in Room 301, located along what was called “yellow hall” (the school hallways were color-coded). Elliott was the new kid; Pickering and others had not known him in elementary school. Eventually Elliott was seated directly in front of Pickle, and the two visited when Elliott passed back assignments and tests. “We unofficially competed for class smart-ass,” Pickering recalls, the two trading droll quips and insults.
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It was typical junior high–type stuff. Elliott was an excellent mimic; he could “do” just about anyone or anything, with changing voices and body postures. At one point he instigated a fake tough-guy routine lasting most of a week (one of Elliott’s favorite things to do, a habit lasting all his life, was run jokes into the ground until they became almost absurdly comical). “Meet me at the flagpole after class,” Elliott told Pickle in mock-bully mode. “Meet me at Lakeside Park this Saturday if you want an ass-whooping!” The conceit went on so long that Pickle took the silliness for a true invitation—not for a fight, exactly, but for a kind of play-date. So one weekend he rode his ten-speed to the park near Elliott’s home. Elliott didn’t show, but Pickle
managed to pinpoint his home after inquiring about him with neighbor kids. As it turned out, “Steve” had strep throat. But Pickle returned later, and the friendship blossomed.

The two boys shared a name, and they nearly shared a birthday (Pickle was born August 3). Both were also in band, a massively popular, very serious extracurricular. Pickle played sax, Elliott clarinet. In 1982 Elliott was elected Byrd Symphonic Band president, beating out Pickering, in fact, who wound up serving as treasurer. A yearbook photo shows the two posing with bright smiles in front of a brick wall; Pickering wears a tie, Elliott’s shirt is open at the collar. (There was, as it happens, another Steve Smith in band at the time; Elliott went by Steve P., the other boy was Steve E. Both played clarinet, Elliott first chair).

In the farm-style Cedar Hill house Elliott’s room was at the very back, the rest of the family situated on the other side of the home. Elliott and Pickle spent a lot of time in that room, doing what 1980s-era 12-year-olds tended to do. They were deep into Dungeons & Dragons, although they weren’t terribly advanced players. As a gift Elliott bought Pickle a “Dungeon Master’s Guide,” a sort of instruction manual for the game. Mainly it was just Elliott and Pickle, although once they invited a different boy to take part, only to discover he was at level 15—too good, too intense. They also spent hours riding their ten-speeds around aimlessly, bored and looking for stuff to do. Virtually every home had a basketball hoop where various Steves, Scotts, Marks, Mikes, or Davids—the likely boys’ names of the era—congregated. They would shoot around, play HORSE or 21. “Elliott was really good,” Pickering remembers. “I got beat by him all the time but we just kept playing anyway.” Elliott was on the junior high team. For kicks Pickle thought of trying out too, but the opportunity never materialized. Chess was another pastime; here again, according to Pickering, Elliott “always won.”
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Darren and Ashley were a constant oblique presence in the house, “two little kids just running around,” Pickering says. But one detail struck Pickle forcefully, even at the time. The three siblings were unusually close. There was zero rivalry, zero stepsibling pathos. Elliott was “surprisingly positive” toward his brother and sister, with none of the customary “get out of my room stuff.” He was always “very willing to include the younger kids
in whatever he was doing. It was obvious,” Pickering says, “that he liked being around them and vice versa. He had a great deal of affection for them.” Another friend, Kevin Denbow—a long-haired “dude” who wore Ozzie T-shirts and whom most people fancied a sort of metalhead, reached the same conclusion: “He was real parental toward Darren and Ashley. He had a real tight bond with both those kids. He was very protective. He’d always stop what he was doing and take care of them. He was very inclusive.”
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One particular night Elliott scheduled a “sleepover” in his room, with Darren and Ashley spending the night on the floor in sleeping bags.

Around this time Elliott also made the acquaintance of Mark Merritt, another band student. Merritt remembers his junior high years as “the worst of my life. Elliott and I met at a lunch table. Music came up, naturally. I played guitar, and found out ‘Steve’ did too. Our personalities just kind of matched.” At one point Elliott lent Merritt sheet music for Rush’s “La Villa Strangiato,” from the
Hemispheres
album. “Listen carefully to the bass line,” he told him gravely. From then on Merritt was a Rush-head; he even started experimenting on bass with an old guitar. “I discovered that bass players weren’t just some kind of third wheel,” he says.
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Merritt names Elliott “one of the reasons I survived junior high.” Once the two were sitting on a bench just after gym class, minding their own business. An “asshole jock” sauntered up and, with no warning, threw a basketball in Merritt’s face, shattering his glasses. Stunned, and not in the habit of aggressively sticking up for himself, Merritt understandably drew back, reaching for what was left of his frames. But Elliott went after the bully. “Fuck off,” he said. “That’s my friend.” There were no blows, as it turns out, but Elliott’s response, his courage and support, left an enduring impression. “He took my bullets,” Merritt explains. “He always stuck up for his friends. I was a dork, and he wasn’t. But still I knew he had my back.” Innocent victims of abuse elicited feelings of identification, it seems, and Elliott, rather than ignoring the violence, took strong action. His impulse was to sympathize; compassion came easily.

With its massive yard the Cedar Hill home needed a lot of tending to. It was on the subject of this tending that Elliott and Charlie clashed, the latter “always coming up with stuff for Elliott to do,” Pickering says. “When are you going to mow the lawn?” was a more or less constant refrain. Bunny,
Pickering says, was always “real friendly,” “positive and upbeat.” Charlie usually less so, in comparison. “There were raised voices. More than I would have tried with my dad,” according to Pickering. The sense was that Elliott was “more willing to engage in confrontation and talking back than most other boys.” Pickering does not recall any fights with Charlie, no physical violence of any kind. But tension was visible, an accepted norm. Denbow’s impression was the same. “Elliott always had chores to do. He didn’t take much to authority, period. He was rebellious against authority figures at school too.” As Denbow remembers, even back then “Charlie was not Elliott’s favorite person. I never saw anything that would lead me to think Charlie was abusive. But he was real strict. Charlie’s rules were Charlie’s rules. Elliott was far more of a freethinker than Charlie was.”
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Still, as Pickering is quick to acknowledge, he never had any problems himself with Charlie. Charlie never yelled or “said anything bad.” He was always real welcoming when Pickering stopped by, “and I was over there all the time.” To Pickering, the arguments were typical adolescent boy stuff. “I’m sure there was some stepchild dynamic too,” Pickering figures. “As in, ‘You are not my dad.’ But at the same time I didn’t see anything unusual.” When Merritt came by Bunny was almost always around—“an absolute sweetheart. She put up with a lot. She was what we’d call a cool mom.” Charlie, on the other hand, was typically out and about, working or “doing his own thing.” On occasions when Charlie entered the house, “I would have to be on guard,” Merritt says. “Be on my best behavior. We tried to do what little we could with that whole situation.” Charlie’s presence, in other words, fomented an aura of apprehensiveness. Everyone walked on eggshells, careful not to make too much noise.

Charlie was an athlete, so he pressed Elliott in a similar direction, to the point where he actually became, to some degree willingly, a bit of a jock. Pickering recalls Charlie “all the time pushing Elliott to go on weekend runs”—10Ks at seven A.M.., Saturday morning. Grudgingly Elliott complied, sometimes enjoying it more than he’d expected to. There was basketball, and Elliott actually made the team; there was also soccer and football. More than either Elliott or Darren, Ashley was especially athletic, a fast runner on the track team. She played softball all through her life, her position centerfield for a softball club team at University of Southern California, where she went to college. Elliott liked soccer, but the competition proved to be short lived. Charlie ultimately pulled him off the team in favor of Boy Scouts. He reasoned, Elliott later observed dryly, that it would be good for him to “wear a uniform and march around and learn how to tie knots.”