Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (11 page)

As Elliott got older and more aware, more antiauthoritarian, more cognizant, also, of the alternative Gary Smith embodied, the clash with Charlie intensified. In Pickle’s words, Charlie’s attitude was “You’ll do it because I said so; I’m the adult, you’re the kid.” It was typical strong arm parenting stuff. My way or the highway. But by twelve, thirteen, and fourteen Elliott was feeling less like the kid, and more independent, more assertive. Everyone who knew the two of them offers the same observation about Elliott and Gary. Friends saw them as weirdly similar souls; they could see the two loved each other immensely. Pickle says, “They looked alike, talked alike, had the exact same mannerisms … He was clearly his father’s son.” Jennifer Chiba recalls breaking down in tears when she first met Gary. “He looked just like Elliott. It was haunting how similar they were. He was very careful in the words he chose, just like Elliott was.”
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So Elliott made what must have felt like a bit of a jailbreak, after months of discussion and deliberation, no doubt, about which he kept secret, withholding details from Pickle and others up to the last possible moment. It was decided he’d move to the place he’d written about so gushingly in “Outward Bound,” the Northwest he loved best; he cast his lot with a mirror, an adult version of what he might one day become, an approximate future self Gary embodied. It was a tough spot to be in. He wanted to stick around for his mother. He knew he’d deeply miss his siblings, toward whom he’d always felt very protective. Yet he also understood he and Charlie could not coexist. By the day it got worse. The conflict was constant, no end in sight. He had to stay and keep silently taking it, or he had to disappear. Years later he filled Chiba in on the circumstances of this winter 1983 departure. What he said and how he said it amounts to a chilling testimony.
“He called his dad and asked if he could live with him full-time,” Chiba recalled being told. “His dad said he had a new family now (a wife, Marta, and one small girl, another coming along soon). He had to talk it over with them first. Then Elliott said, ‘Dad, if I can’t make the move, someone is going to die. And I’m going to die too.’ ” The threat, extreme and desperate, summed up years of feeling, years of fear and anger. The situation in Cedar Hill was dire, at least so far as Elliott described it. It could not last. Elliott would not allow it to last. One way or another, it was going to be over. He’d made up his mind and he’d let his father know about it in frighteningly clear terms.

For Pickle and others, the news came as a shock, like a late arriving, month’s dead letter. Elliott dropped it on them casually, almost as an afterthought. And he never went into the reasons behind the decision. As Pickle put it, “in divorce, the family you are not with always seems to be more desirable,” so in that respect the change of scenery made immediate sense. Instantly everyone wanted to spend as much time with Elliott as possible; his leaving was a tremendous blow, to Darren and Ashley especially, who loved him enormously. But “center circle” was an untenable permanent home, some sort of dangerous blow-up likelier by the day. Therefore halfway through his freshman year of high school, after what must have been scores of anguished conversations between the two sets of parents, Elliott traveled north to Portland, Gary’s new home. The idea of it would have been immensely appealing, a relief from inner and outer torment. Whether reality matched expectation or not, Portland altered Elliott completely.

Denny Swofford, who with Christopher Cooper brought out Elliott’s first solo album, put it plainly: “Portland was the foundation that allowed Elliott to become the person he was.”
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Portland in the
early and mid-1980s was a very small big city, with one upscale shop, Nordstrom’s, featuring personal shoppers, long glass perfume counters, and “tasteful” classical piano to buy to, and down the street a more affordable, low-key Meier and Frank’s with eight or nine floors reached by escalator, and that staged, at Christmastime, a Santa’s Village on the top level. Bug-eyed toddlers rode a monorail along the ceiling. In display cases mechanical elves shifted slowly in winter scenes. One could easily walk most of downtown via Broadway or 10th, starting at Portland State University, to the south—near Hot Lips Pizza, where Elliott first met good friend Sean Croghan of the band Crackerbash—and ending at the famous Powell’s Books on 10th and West Burnside.

There wasn’t a lot to do if the goal was to kill time. Adventures had to be fabricated. Cable TV was new; only the rare home had it, or the MTV that came with it. And video stores were hard to locate—one had to rent not only the movie, but the machine to play it on. The chief way kids got around, before acquiring licenses to drive, was the bus system, called Tri-Met. One bought a ticket, good for several hours, then transferred from line to line. Malls were the main hangout. There was Eastport Plaza, with Tower Records, Lloyd Center, in northeast Portland; Washington Square, in the southwest; and Clackamas Town Center, which Elliott and his dad sometimes jokingly called Tackamas Clown Center, with its second floor food court and ice rink below (later made famous by Tonya Harding, who practiced there). Kids took buses to all these destinations, then simply wandered around, out of the rain, chasing girls or boys or eating free food samples at Hickory Farms, or going to movie matinees. There was another semi-mall downtown, the Galleria, with its central escalator one took to the second or third floors, and an “alt” place called the Metro, a circular set of
restaurants with a piano just inside the front door, played by a tall, self-taught African American named Dehner Franks. The Metro was where street kids gathered, new-wave/punk devotees with Mohawks and chains and nose rings, some of whom were homeless, some of whom hailed from rich Portland Heights families. They stood around in clusters and smoked, or wandered across the street to the Pioneer Courthouse Square, which boasted, for several years, one of the city’s first Starbucks. People traveled some distance just to buy the bitter brew. It was like a destination resort.

Still, in the early 1980s coffee shops had yet to dominate the downtown landscape, as they do today; instead there were bookstores, all independent, like the Green Dolphin or Holland’s Books, selling mainly used hardbacks at good prices. And of course there was Powell’s, the mother lode, to some the very best used bookstore in the world. In it one could easily burn hours, trolling for first editions, leafing through magazines, shuffling among the color-coded sections.

Rain was a constant sidekick; it fell in relentless and thorough drizzles, and no local carried an umbrella. One got used to it. It came with the territory. Portland was almost never not wet. The saying was: If it isn’t raining now, just wait 15 minutes. Sun came reliably in August and September. Between those months the day typically dawned gray, even for much of July. Parades on the Fourth were just as likely to be rainy as not.

For kids into records like Elliott was, Django’s downtown on a corner at 11th Street was a source of endless amazement. It sold hard-to-find used vinyl in room after labyrinthine room—rock, folk, punk, everything imaginable. There were T-shirts and posters too, the latter all over the walls, of Marx, Freud, Einstein, Jim Morrison, Bowie, Pink Floyd, Sid and Nancy. Elliott spent a lot of time at Django’s. In fact, it was where he sold some of the first cassettes he’d later make with friends Garrick Duckler and Jason Hornick. And to his utter astonishment and, in some measure, terror, people actually bought them. He checked the supply and watched it dwindle, not quite certain he wanted the tunes in circulation. Part of him thought they sucked, part thought they were cool.

Like most other cities, Portland was class segregated, a fact kids recognized implicitly, if not with full awareness. No average white teenager traveled with any degree of regularity to North Portland, a kind of mythical
shadow land inhabited by mostly poor African Americans, and decades away from the hip gentrification of today. The southeast, between 52nd and 82nd, from Division to Duke, was the land of poorer, working-class whites who smoked and wore “wife-beaters” and listened to Van Halen, Def Leppard, and AC/DC, and who bought and sold bad dope most high schoolers referred to as “ragweed.” One never knew how much to smoke in order to get high. It was a sort of guessing game. The West Hills, where rich kids lived, was almost unknown to kids from the other side of the river, who never went there, except for sports. To a southeast teenager, kids from private schools like Jesuit, Catlin Gabel, or Oregon Episcopal School secreted a bewildering, hard-to-name mystique. They dressed differently, talked differently, and moved in an atmosphere of prideful assumption. They weren’t you, and they wanted nothing to do with you. They played effete sports like tennis or golf, took spring break in France, spoke foreign languages, and got ferried from one enrichment class to another by moms who didn’t work, in cars that did work, unlike cars in the southeast.

Elliott started at Lincoln High School (the Cardinals) in the middle of his freshman year. As he did in Texas, he joined band, again on clarinet. Evidently too late for the class picture, band is the one photo he appears in 1984’s yearbook. The class was taught by Mr. Glen Fernley, a young sideburned man with glasses. Also in band that year was Tony Lash, who played flute. Lash was one year ahead of Elliott, a tall kid with brown hair parted in the middle. The two didn’t meet immediately. A mutual friend made introductions, knowing both were “huge Rush fans.”
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There wasn’t a lot of talk about Texas, or the subject of why Elliott had moved to Portland, such lines of conversation “not the sort of stuff you talk about when you’re fifteen,” according to Lash. What they did talk about, and eventually make together, for more than a decade, was music. There was also a fair amount of goofing off, Elliott’s absurdist sense of humor on immediate display. Lash and Smith “got a big kick out of driving everyone crazy by playing ‘Hot Tamales’ in a very dissonant fashion.”
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During band they’d break into it at various inopportune moments, to the point where drummers threatened to beat them up if they didn’t stop.

Lincoln was (and still is) a downtown west-side public high school, bordered by Jefferson and Salmon streets, not far from Burnside, with a view of the West Hills above and the Jim Fisher Volvo sign to the north. Just up the
street stands the exclusive MAC club, which wealthy west-siders sometimes waited years to join, with its athletic courts and bars, its aura of cloistered privilege. If you belonged, as many of the families of Lincoln kids did, then you
belonged
. It was a clear mark of social standing, it denoted wealth. Lincoln students were a dignified cohort, a confederacy of white kids from the southwest hills, who for whatever reason opted not to attend one of the town’s private high schools, like Catlin or OES (although some did spend time at those schools in elementary or junior high years). In the minds of other kids scattered around the city, Lincoln equaled “rich”—the kids were soft, you could beat them in sports. Jefferson was the black school; Franklin, Cleveland, and Marshall were home to middle-class and poorer whites.

Despite the fact that he’d occasionally visited over the years, to Elliott, the Texas freshman, Portland and LHS in particular provided jarring atmospherics. There were fewer boys named Scott, Mark, Mike, and David—all Texas generics in the 80s. Now, in quixotic contrast, boys announced themselves as Garrick, Flemming, Dawson, and Jubil. And the families owned second homes—at Gearhart or Cannon, on the coast, or at Black Butte or Sun River, to the east, which was hot in summer and snowy in winter. The world was damp, hilly, with rivers, and beaches one and a half hours away, and mountains to ski. Classmates drove not trucks but BMWs. The aspirations were Ivy League, kids had parents who had gone to Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and they were aggressively groomed for the same outcomes. The aura of Republicanism and Christianity, of regular churchgoing was replaced by high-minded agnosticism, and politics that ran to the liberal. It was a better fit for Elliott, no doubt, but it also took some getting used to. No one wanted to beat him up anymore, which he felt as a big relief. And maybe most fundamentally, he was simply less bored. “I realized there were other people living differently, that the world was more interesting and more wealthy than the south suburbia of Dallas,” where you “live and die in a few square miles without ever going outside, and meet [only] people who look like you.”
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Perhaps to smooth the transition and prolong a friendship that was pivotal and deep, Pickle came to visit over spring break in March 1984, just a few months after Elliott started at Lincoln. Both sets of parents arranged
things, the two breaks—in Texas and Oregon—overlapping. For Pickle there was instant culture shock. The greenness was neon. All the kids had a nasal accent. And their relative freedom, busing around town on Tri-Met, was a revelation. “We went all over the place,” Pickle exclaims.

It was a busy household Pickle discovered. There was Gary, Elliott’s older facsimile, and Marta, Gary’s wife, trained as a clinical social worker. But there were also two very young girls, new sisters, Rachel first, followed by Sophie. It couldn’t have been an ideal time to add an introspective and emotionally complex fourteen-year-old into the mix, one coming from a home he had felt to be oppressive. It’s not clear whether any overt or covert resentment came Elliott’s way—he never spoke (on record, at least) about feeling unwanted, and most outward signs were encouraging. Elliott was quickly making friends at Lincoln, like Tony Lash and others. “He had obviously adapted,” Pickle recalls thinking. “He wasn’t the outsider at school or anything like that.” But there were signs of unease, some even large. “It wasn’t like I moved out into nowhere,” Elliott says, “but it was a difficult move. It took some getting used to. I didn’t sleep at all for about the first six months I lived there.” The situation back in Texas with Bunny—Charlie’s temper, that is—was fresh in his mind; he remembers—with just cause or not—feeling “very worried” about his mother, imagining something might happen to her. But in the end “everything turned out okay.”
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