by Mark Lanegan
When I came to three days later, phone ringing, head pounding, alone on the hotel bed, I plunged deep into immediate regret. Both myself and the bed were covered in hundreds of pieces of broken glass from a mirror I must have smashed, but I had no memory of what had transpired in the preceding days. I was to find out much later it had been broken not by me, but by Anna. She’d thrown an ashtray at my head when I’d inevitably gone into a blackout and become dark and threatening. The unfortunate consequences of my fucked lapse in judgment and moment of weakness had only just begun.
A warning sprang instantly to my muddled mind, one I’d heard so many times during my year of court-ordered drug and alcohol treatment. The voice of Hoppy, the man who had run our group, rang suddenly in my head: When you are an alcoholic and quit drinking, even if you stay sober for years, if you begin again, it will be as though you’d never stopped. Meaning you would not just start off at the level you were at when you quit; instead, you would be at an advanced state of addiction, at the level you’d have sunk to had you never quit at all. Judging from this first experience of drinking again after so many years, that seemed to be true. I had been an advanced, hardcore blackout drunk when I’d quit at age nineteen. At twenty-four, I was already so much worse off that it scared me.
I choked down the last two miniature bottles of vodka left in the minibar in an attempt to steady myself enough to collect my shit. I had to get down to the van in time to leave for the next city on our tour.
5
MEATLOAF
I continued to drink almost daily. Both Van Conner and Dan Peters were also daily, heavy drinkers but they were comical, playful. I was a wild-card drunk, blacking out through entire shows, entire days and nights lost in the haze of my unquenchable, around-the-clock thirst for booze and chaos. I drank throughout our shows, then walked straight up to the bar to drink with the audience. I came to while having sex in a bed/in an alley/in a car with women I had zero recollection of ever meeting, total strangers whose names I never knew, whose faces I forgot the minute I left their company.
One night after our set in a tiny bar in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before I could even get off the maybe half-foot-high stage tucked into the corner of the quarter-full place, two young-looking girls approached me.
“Hey, man, what are you doing right now? Do you wanna come party with us at Blackie’s?”
I considered these girls for a moment. They seemed too cute to be eighteen, let alone twenty-one … but then they had to be of age to be inside the bar.
“Sure. Who’s Blackie?”
The better- and older-looking of the two grabbed me by the hand and pulled me impatiently off the miniature stage. She led me to a table where a mustachioed dude who seemed at least fifteen years older than me sat alone with a drink.
“Hey, man, cool tunes,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m Blackie. You ready to go?”
I looked around to see if anyone else in the place was coming along to this “party.” Nope. I guess it was just gonna be me, these two possibly underage girls, and this strange older guy. I got our road manager to write on a bar napkin the phone number and address of the hotel where the rest of the band were staying, then followed my three new friends out to the parking lot. The younger of the two girls hopped in shotgun, and I got into the backseat of Blackie’s large American sedan with the older of the chicks. She held my hand tightly and squeezed my thigh as we drove. Finally, we pulled up to an old, impressive, foreboding house, large but just shy of a mansion.
“Hey, Blackie, cool pad. What do you do for a living, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I do some acting,” he said, and left it at that.
I didn’t recognize him but, then again, I was no fan of Broadway plays or anything like that. He could very well have won a Tony Award for all I knew. As we followed the guy into his place, I thought, How weird is this gonna get?
“C’mon, let’s drink in the library,” Blackie said as he turned on the lights and led us up a flight of stairs into a circular room with shelves of books covering three-quarters of the walls. The only section that wasn’t covered with bookshelves was covered with photos of Blackie himself. I always found it gross whenever I encountered someone who adorned their place with odes to themselves. Our boss at Peaches, the Seattle record store where I worked, had maintained in his office what we called his “Wall of Shame.” It was covered with photos of himself, smiling with lame musicians, including not one but two large framed pictures of him with Billy Joel, easily my most vehemently disliked singer ever.
I again asked myself, Who the fuck is this dude? Some kind of dealer, criminal, famous actor … what? He obviously had some dough if he could afford to live in this huge old house, even slightly run-down as it was. I looked at the books on his shelves and didn’t recognize any of the titles, but that was no surprise since I was not much of a reader. I didn’t expect to find Cormac McCarthy, Peter Matthiessen, or Robert Lowell, or any of the predictable French poets whose works I’d devoured: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Corbière. Nor did I see any of the beat poets I’d become enamored of: Burroughs, Norse, Ginsberg. I continued to slowly circle the room, silently perusing his large collection as he put on some music and began to pour drinks for the four of us.
When I finally sat down, the girl who’d been next to me in the car sat herself uninvited on my lap while the other sat on Blackie’s lap. Blackie looked up and with a huge, toothy grin, lifted his drink and said, “Cheers!” We all clinked glasses.
Before I could even take a drink, the girl on my lap grabbed my dick through my pants and shoved her tongue into my mouth. Out the corner of my eye, I could see the other young girl and Blackie also making out passionately. Okay, they brought me along for a fuck-fest. That was fine by me.
For a half hour, my girl and I fumbled like teenagers in a car outside a school dance … except we were in a brightly lit room with no beds or couches, just a couple of uncomfortable chairs. And I was painfully aware that the forty-something owner of the house was making out with a girl who struck me more and more as a child. Was something going to happen? Was anything going to happen? Did I even want anything to happen?
“Hey, man,” I said to Blackie, interrupting his reverie, “where’s the pisser in here?”
“Right through that door.”
He pointed to a door directly off the room. I pulled the girl off my now nearly asleep legs, stood up, and gingerly walked over to take a long-overdue piss. I entered the closet-sized toilet, pulled the light string hanging from the ceiling, and was instantly overcome by a profusion of photos plastered on all four walls of the claustrophobic restroom. Childhood photos, family Polaroids, grade-school class pictures, all of the same boy. A boy I instantly recognized as Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis. I knew nothing of his personal history but he was a well-known rock star and I quickly realized that there was a family connection between him and my gracious but weirdly creepy host. When surrounded so oppressively with this huge multitude of photos in such a small, enclosed space, I finally recognized the strong physical resemblance between the two.
Confronted by Blackie’s tribute wall to himself, I had winced at his unseemly narcissism, but now I found it much sicker that he’d chosen a tiny, cabinet-sized room dedicated to the excretion of human waste to display the photos of his son. I got the eeriest feeling that this would be the exact place my own mother would stash pictures of me, except that I knew she had none. There were childhood photos of my sister around her house and many of my stepbrothers and their families but none of me. This fucked-up, ghoulish photo gallery and the fact that I was apparently meant to fuck this girl under the bright lights where this slippery dude could watch snapped me to my senses. I needed to leave. I was normally up for anything—the weirder, the more shameful and depraved, the better—but something about this struck me the wrong way.
I walked out of the restroom, closed the door behind me, and said, “Hey, it’s been great meeting you folks bu
t I gotta run. Take care.”
Blackie didn’t stop kissing and groping his girl, just raised his hand and made a dismissive action with his arm, sort of a “Shut up, already! Begone!” The girl I’d been halfheartedly making out with hung on my arm the entire time I made my way down the stairs, begging me to stay. Finally, I shook her off and stepped out into the now sub-zero night wearing only my still-damp black denim jacket for warmth. I ran down long, endless streets, shaking uncontrollably from the cold, searching for a pay phone I was never to find. Just when I thought, This is it, you’re gonna freeze to death for bailing on a weird orgy, a taxi pulled around the corner, hustled me in, and cranked up the heat for the ride back to my hotel.
I had been to many more questionable parties than that one and had participated in much heavier scenes. But something about that toilet shrine to his kid had stitched cold fear into my soul. This cat was a different breed of freak and somehow I felt I had gotten out in just the nick of time.
As the tour progressed, so did my drinking. My wild, unhinged alcoholism had always been a source of deep shame and heartache but now that I’d stepped back on the merry-go-round, I found it impossible to step back off. I was out of control but I usually had a slight awareness that I was among friends, not foes, so we were spared the violence that had often accompanied my blackouts in the past. I would drink to escape the brutal hangover and the demoralization from the preceding night’s bizarre behavior and unsavory situations. I would wake up and walk into my hotel-room bathroom to take a piss, only to come to the realization that I was standing barefooted in a puddle of piss that covered half the bathroom floor, a by-product of yesterday’s blackout. I would come to nude on the floor of some unfamiliar room and, hearing voices from another room, would silently pull my clothes on and, carrying my boots, quietly sneak out without ever knowing where I’d been or who with. After a show at Saint Andrews Hall in Detroit, I stood in a blackout at the window of the upstairs dressing room throwing beer bottles and screaming insults at the audience members as they were leaving the gig. Someone had shouted, “Hey, Mark! We love you! Why are you doing this?” Only then had I come to and realized where I was and what I was doing. I drank myself blind every day, only to emerge from a blackout into a new variation on the same nightmare. It was an obsessive, crazed cycle: waking in hollow, booming pain, then seeking relief where there was only more emptiness and pain to be found.
One night, I was met after the show by a pretty blond German girl now living in the US. Her boyfriend was the singer in a band that had opened for us a year earlier and he and I had become friends. The boyfriend was out of town doing a gig and had sent his girl down to say hello. She asked me out for drinks, one thing led to another, and I soon found myself following her up the six flights of stairs to their apartment at the top of an old row-house-style apartment building in some Midwestern city. We began having sex in their one-room pad with the ceiling slanting down hard, echoing the angle of the roof. After we’d been messing around for an hour or so there was a loud knock on the door. In my inebriated state, I struggled to stand up to get dressed. She grabbed my arm and pulled me back down.
“Please! Don’t say a word! Quiet, please!” she whispered frantically in my ear in her sexy German accent.
“Is that your boyfriend?” I drunkenly whispered.
“Yes. We just moved in and I have the only keys. He’ll leave in a while.”
“Okay,” I whispered and lay back down.
But the knocking didn’t stop. This is fucked, I thought. Her boyfriend had been so friendly, so genuine. We’d become such good buddies the first time we’d met, I could only imagine what would happen if he were to find me in his place right now, doing this. The blond sat there naked, holding on to me tightly, sometimes putting her hand over my mouth when she thought I was about to blurt out some alcohol-fueled profanity and get us busted. After a half hour of intermittent knocking, the phone began ringing, from a pay phone on the street below, I assumed.
“He’ll give up soon and go to a friend’s. I’ll tell him I was at my girlfriend’s all night,” she said. Yet the ringing continued for a very long time. Sobering up, I looked at the clock. I was able to focus enough to see it was five a.m. I needed to get out of there, our ride was due to roll out at seven a.m. How was I gonna get past her boyfriend without some confrontation? She had informed me as we were climbing the stairs that there was no way out other than the way we’d come in.
Finally, the phone quit ringing for twenty minutes or so. I knew I had no other choice than to go for it. I carefully crept down the stairs to the ground level, then burst through the door and sprinted drunkenly down the sidewalk and across the street to where a row of cabs sat sleepily waiting for the early-morning crowd. I got back to our hotel just in time to grab my shit and hop in my seat in the van, pull my watch cap down over my face, and fall asleep.
When I came to around five hours later, still en route to our next show, Van was looking at the tour book. He turned around and said, “Hey, Lanegan, remember last year when we played with that band and you became such great pals with their singer and he dragged you along while he went out hell-raising all night? They’re opening tonight. Better get ready for a party!”
I woke up immediately, realizing that when we arrived at the gig in less than an hour, I’d be in the company of the very guy who’d spent the night before trying to get into his place where I was fucking his girl. Jesus Christ. This thing could only turn out one of two ways. Either my friend was going to attempt to beat the fuck out of me, or I was going to be forced to drink and make merry with my old pal all night, sick with guilt the entire time. I would have signed up for a beating but I knew that my bent-backwards pride wouldn’t allow me to tank a fight, even when I knew I was dead wrong.
When we arrived, I slowly trudged up the prodigious stairway to the venue, still slightly hungover. As soon as I stepped into the dressing room area, there was my good buddy. I tensed up in case I was gonna have to defend myself. He looked at me. Then a huge grin spread across his face and in two seconds he had me in a tight bear hug, swinging me around, kissing me on the cheek and overjoyed to see me again. We played our sets that night and then, at his insistence, we went to a popular bar, filled with many of the kids who’d attended the gig. One tall, hot blond had taken a shine to me and sat uninvited on my lap, much to my friend’s delight. Happy that I was now drinking, he egged me on to take this chick somewhere to fuck but I was too twisted up by the previous night’s escapades. A black cloud of exhausting guilt lurked over me as I sat with the friend I’d burned less than twenty-four hours earlier. Finally, I told him I had to go. He followed me outside, a friend to the end. The evening was knocked on the head with the two of us drunkenly throwing a garbage can full of empty fifth bottles, one by one, against a brick wall near some railroad tracks. Mine had a little extra juice on them as every one I threw, I imagined I was throwing at myself.
He and I were staying in different hotels so as I burned with guilt, he gave me a long embrace and we went our different ways. Depending on how angry he made his girlfriend someday, I gave myself a fifty-fifty chance that he’d be much less enthusiastic to see me the next time. Or more enthusiastic, if it was an enthusiasm born from a furnace full of betrayal-induced anger to kick the holy fuck out of me.
The tour ended early, abruptly, in Florida. It was clear to me and everyone that I was too fucked up to continue. My old friend Gus Brandt, who had promoted our shows and put us up whenever we played Pensacola in the ’80s, took me to a small airport somewhere in Florida to send me home.
Once, years earlier, Gus had taken the whole band to the Pensacola Interstate Fair on a day off. The fairgrounds featured a booth where, for a couple bucks, you could be recorded singing to backing tracks of any number of popular songs and then receive a cassette recording of your efforts to treasure forever. Of course, Lee Conner couldn’t wait to get behind a mic for his star turn. The minute he locked the door to the see-through-
plastic-walled booth, I went into carnival barker mode, yelling, “Meatloaf! Come see international recording artist Meatloaf sing! Meatloaf! Hey people! Come hear Meatloaf!”
Within minutes, a large crowd of adolescents and then adults gathered around the fairground booth. When Lee stepped back into the bright sunlight after finishing his ecstatically applauded and enthusiastically received performance, he was swarmed by the crowd, clamoring for a moment with Meatloaf. Though he glared daggers at us, we couldn’t hold back our laughter as Lee stalked away clutching his cassette, ignoring the requests for autographs. Being mistaken for Meatloaf was a semi-common occurrence, one that he hated more than anything.
Florida was darker this time around. Gus drove me to the airport during a massive storm. I lay on the grass outside his car for half an hour, puking violently in the pouring rain.
“C’mon, bud. Please, Mark, you’ve got to get up or you’re gonna miss your plane.”
“I can’t do it, Gus. Can’t I just sleep here for a while?”
“Mark, it’s freezing out here and you’re completely soaked. C’mon now, let’s get you up off the ground,” he said, trying to gently coax me up.
“Gus?”
“Yes, Mark? What, buddy?”
“Can I just stay here in Florida and live with you?”
“You’ve seen my place, man, you know there’s no room for you. Where would you sleep? In the kitchen?”
I said nothing. I was drunkenly heartbroken he had denied me. I loved Gus.
“All right, that’s enough of this horseshit, now I’m drenched. Get the fuck up or I’m leaving you here for the cops to pick up.”
