Cat Power (39 page)

In the thirty-four years Chan lived before her Miami hospitalization, the singer had been running from mental illness, alcoholism, and self-loathing. All it took was the right series of events to trigger a psychotic break. “It took a period
of two and a half years of touring around the world over and over and over,” Chan has said of the circumstances that finally did her in. The singer went straight from the road-warrior lifestyle into the studio, then back home to Miami. With eight members in Chan's Memphis Rhythm Band, the
Greatest
tour was shaping up to be the most ambitious of Cat Power's career. The singer could have used a quiet fall reading novels at the beach before getting back on the road in the winter. But Matador, eager to capitalize on what it saw as its marquee artist's crowning achievement, launched a major promotional campaign in advance of the album's January release.

“I was really stressed out from all the press that I told Matador that I didn't want to do for the album,” Chan said, looking back. “I wanted to take three months off to recuperate from destroying myself for the last three and a half years. Just let the album ride on reviews and kick-ass, outstanding performances. They said no. So I just got out of my mind, saying yes to every fuckin' interview they gave me from every fuckin' country. I also started doing cocaine.”

The singer has always had a habit of disappearing on friends and family, but this time she systematically cut off contact with everyone she knew and started making plans for what they would do without her. “I alienated everyone around me,” she has said. “I was becoming an alcoholic in Miami and literally lying in bed for a year. Getting out of bed was for getting the Mexican-food delivery, or receiving a shipment of boxes of alcohol—beer, wines, scotch, tequila …whatever.”

In a typical display of Chan's ever-conflicting personalities, as she was setting herself up for suicide by alcohol, she was also making preparations for surviving the depression. Before Chan cut off contact with her friends, she started distancing herself from those who had drug, alcohol, and mental-illness problems that triggered hers. “There was this girl, a
poet, a writer from Texas, that I knew that I had to stay away from,” the singer explained. “I knew her since we were fourteen years old. I was still drinking all the fucking time. She was still on drugs. I knew something was gonna happen even though I was in a bubble, sloppy and always drunk. I didn't say, ‘Look, you're on dope and I can't fucking hang out with you.’ But I said, ‘Look, you're on dope and it hurts me.’ I had to find that fine line.”

Weeks before her hospitalization, Chan was scheduled to do another round of press before beginning the tour. She had just returned to Miami from Nashville, where she shot the video for the album's first single, “Living Proof,” with her old friend, the reclusive film director and Marc Jacobs model Harmony Korine. On the plane back home, Chan got so wasted that a friend had to help her navigate the trip.

Back in Miami, she was met by her UK press representative, a British journalist from
Dazed and Confused
, and an American photographer sent to shoot the singer for a Cat Power feature. The plan was to have drinks at a local bar, then do the interview and photo shoot the following day. “We went to this bar, but I couldn't cope with being out of the house,” Chan later remembered. “I couldn't cope with life or people; I couldn't smile, talk, or bullshit; I couldn't fake it anymore, so I left. I said to myself, I'm just gonna go home, take all these new pills the doctor gave me to be happy, drink all of that shit in my home, then I'll be dead and I won't have to deal with the interview.” That's when Mary J. Blige showed up.

Chan has always been a Blige fanatic. She told one interviewer that if she were in a cover band, it would be a Mary J. Blige version. And it's not hard to see why: The two women have a lot in common. In addition to being beautiful and having vocal talent, a dark childhood, and untamed independence, Blige shares Chan's struggle with alcohol and drug
abuse. The R&B singer has been open in interviews about the horrors she's endured battling addiction, abusive relationships, and the prison of depression. Chan has described Blige as one of the most beautiful women on earth, and covered Mary's song “Deep Inside” during one of the Cat Power Peel Sessions. On this night in Miami, when Chan was calculating how much booze it would take to drink herself to death, she saw a flyer for Blige's 2005 record
The Breakthrough
. “Just because of that stupid postcard of Mary's face, I forgot about everything I'd been planning and started focusing on Mary,” Chan remembered. “I'd been reading interviews and she said she'd quit smoking pot, doing drugs, and drinking. That she'd fallen in love and was writing all these new songs. I love Mary so much, so I thought, I'm just gonna go home, go to bed, forget what I felt, and tomorrow will be okay.”

The next day, Chan got up and industriously prepared for the arrival of the British journalists by ordering from the liquor store she had on speed dial. The singer knew she would need to be drinking all day, so she wanted everyone else to be as well. Wine, she has said she remembers thinking, seemed more “socially acceptable” than her usual hard-liquor buffet, so she got a case of it. The
Dazed and Confused
team showed up along with Chan's UK publicist, and for a while everything was going okay. “I was giving everyone wine, so I thought it was okay for me to drink,” Chan has said. “The photographer was taking pictures and she was like, ‘Oh, could you play this harmonica?’ That was it. I just started bawling. I couldn't stand the camera being in my fucking face and my home was a mess because I didn't give a shit about myself. Something snapped and I was like, ‘I don't want to be a fucking monkey and play the fucking harmonica.’ I went into the bathroom, locked the door.”

At first Chan's guests waited. They had another glass of wine and spoke calmly to her through the locked bathroom door, trying not to
overreact to the singer's scary behavior. But when two hours had passed without Chan saying anything, the singer's publicist crouched softly in front of the door and made one last attempt to talk her down.

Chan continued to sit, knees to her chest, crying, but managed to find voice enough to ask everyone to leave. The singer stayed there, rocking back and forth on the cold, grimy tile floor, and listened to the muted, alarmed murmurs of her guests. Then she heard the gentle clangs of the photographer dismantling her lights and zipping up camera bags. When at last Chan heard the click of her front door lock sliding into place, the singer unwrapped her arms from around her knees, stretched out her stiff legs, and got up. She left all the lights off, waited until the sunlight faded from behind her shades, and, when it was fully dark outside, Chan went to get the newspaper.

This trip to the corner store was the last Chan saw of the outside world for ten days. The lead story in the
New York Times
that day reported that militant political group Hamas won the majority of parliamentary seats in Palestine's elections. Even for a sane person, this was not good news. But in Chan's fragile mental state, the idea that terrorists were the chosen representatives of a majority of the people in this volatile region seemed like a sure sign of the impending apocalypse. The singer went home, bolted the door, arranged her supplies of drugs and alcohol, and prepared to die.

“I decided I was going to fast and pray to God about Hamas winning,” Chan has said. “I closed my windows and shut my blinds. The coke I had was gone by day two. Then I started drinking all the alcohol I could find. By the last three days it was just water and no sleep at all.” At this point her behavior became increasingly ritualistic. Chan selected the proper music for her death, Miles Davis's soundtrack to Louis Malle's 1955 film
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
, which she played on repeat.
Chan then got dressed in what she has described as a “respectable” outfit. “I put on a dress. It was a Marc Jacobs dress from 1999,” she has recalled. “It was dark blue, and it was from the chest to just above the ankle.”

Next Chan put together a makeshift will. “I made piles of stuff for all my friends and family members,” the singer has explained. “Little pieces of me, little things I owned. I was preparing for when they found my body, that there would be a story for each friend who came to go through my stuff.” The last thing Chan had to do was attempt some sort of final peacemaking gesture toward her mother. “I sent my mom an e-mail that morning. I said, ‘I forgive you for everything, everything was so hard on you.’ That kind of spawned the ready-to-go feeling. I was ready to take all my antidepressants and OD.”

At this point Chan was mostly cut off from the world. Hundreds of e-mails sat unread in her inbox detailing the minutia of her forthcoming tour, she hadn't showered in more than a week, and she wasn't answering text messages, usually her primary form of communication with friends. On Chan's tenth day of isolation, however, her friend Brett Vapnek—the New York-based filmmaker who directed several Cat Power videos—managed to get through to Chan on the phone. What Vapnek heard on the other end of the line worried her so much she called her sister Susanna, who immediately got a cab to the airport. “The day I went down to Miami, my sister had talked to Chan in the morning and said she didn't sound totally coherent,” Susanna, a painter, has said. “I got a really bad feeling. I knew she was down there to isolate herself. That definitely seemed like a sign of depression to me.”

Chan has referred to the painter, also from Georgia, as her “Psychic Sis” because of their close connection. And the name seems appropriate considering that Susanna got on that plane based purely on intuition.
The old friends hadn't spoken in more than a year, and Susanna wasn't even sure where Chan's apartment was. All she had to guide her was the return address on a card Chan had sent. “Psychic Sis had a bad feeling the day I wanted to kill myself,” Chan has said. “She's the one that canceled the tour. She's the one that heard my prayers, basically.” When Susanna showed up at Chan's apartment, the singer was so far gone, she didn't recognize her friend's voice and refused to open the door. After the painter started crying, Chan relented.

Inside, Susanna was confronted with a death shrine. Chan hadn't opened the shades or windows in ten days and all her houseplants were withering from lack of sunlight. Every available surface was covered with empty liquor bottles and overflowing ashtrays, each butt smoked all the way down to the filter. The air inside the apartment was thick with the mingling smoke of cigarettes and incense, which the singer was furiously burning and waving at the evil spirits she saw in the room. Chan's hair was matted in clumps against her scalp. The pupils of her hazel eyes were wide and darted back and forth as she tried to reconcile her friend's real-life physical presence with the visions and voices that had been her only company for ten days. “I was thinking crazy thoughts,” Chan has said. “‘Satan's here, coming to take me to hell.’ I was really scared. I had been praying to God to send someone to help me.”

Susanna immediately realized that Chan would need to be hospitalized. Concealing her sorrow, she bathed her friend, changed the sheets on Chan's bed, and convinced her to sleep for a few hours. Then, quietly sobbing, Susanna called her mom. Chan heard the painter crying in the other room and started to worry that her friend was in trouble. “I was like, ‘Are you okay?’” Chan has said. “She was like, ‘Yeah, but my stomach hurts. Please will you come with me to the emergency room?’” Susanna and Chan took a short cab ride from the Miami Beach condo to
the Mount Sinai Medical Center. The voices in Chan's head told her that Susanna's illness was a ruse, but the singer's concern for her friend drowned them out. “I started focusing on her, like, ‘Oh my God, Susanna's going to die.’ I was holding her hand,” Chan has said. “The illogical part of me was still hearing voices: ‘You've lost your mind, you're suicidal, and Susanna knows.’”

Chan expected Vapnek to tell the attending nurse about her unbearable stomachache, but instead Chan watched Vapnek break down as she explained Chan's condition. “Susanna doesn't cry,” Chan has said. “I thought, Look how much pain she's in, and it's not because of her stomach, it's because of me. I felt like a kid, like I'd done something wrong, that I'd been bad.” Chan would spend the next few months thinking about how much pain her self-destruction had caused to those who love her, but at this point she was incapable of rationally comprehending what was going on. “The doctor came over and I just went with it, because I felt shameful and guilty,” Chan has said. The singer now realized they weren't at the hospital for Susanna, but she still didn't understand that she, Chan Marshall, was the only patient. “The doctor said, ‘We might need to keep you here for a few days,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, okay, we're both going to spend the night. It will be like a party,’” Chan has remembered.

After the singer was dressed in hospital clothes, her possessions catalogued and stored, Susanna watched as the nightmare Chan had been running from since childhood came true. “The people in white coats took me through these hallways,” Chan has said. “Through the security doors, with this bright light on, and through this doorway. I said, ‘There's only one bed in here. I'll sleep on the floor, Susanna can sleep on the bed. Do you have blankets?’ As I turned around, the doors shut and I saw Susanna waving. I was like, ‘The joke's on me.’ I thought I was in hell.”