Sing Backwards and Weep Read online

  We stayed strung out the entire tour. The effort it took to stay well was a full-time job. We were entering a new country almost daily and clearing customs could be a several-hour affair. Drug-sniffing dogs were brought on board our busses to go through every bunk and snuffle around in every corner while their handlers emptied out our pockets and went through our wallets. Sometimes we were compelled by border agents to unload everything out of the trailers—equipment, personal stuff, everything—and have customs officials with dogs search through it all, looking for contraband or unreported merchandise. It became a regular practice for us to try to finish as much of the drugs we had on us before leaving one country and entering another. We’d stop a few miles before a border crossing so we could dump anything we still had: drugs, paraphernalia, syringes and spoons, etc. Unless we had a connection already lined up, this meant hitting the streets to score immediately upon arriving in the next city. Since my junkie pal John Hicks from Tennessee was still traveling with us at the time, it meant we needed heroin and works for all three of us. It was often easier to find the dope than the needles and we were loath to snort the powdered dope. We’d become so accustomed to shooting the black tar heroin we used back home that unless it was going straight into a vein, you were just wasting good gear. Not only did we need outfits and dope but you also had to use citrus to break down European dope before injecting it. It was rumored that if you were to use lemon juice instead of the powdered citric acid found in shops, you risked fucking up your eyesight, possibly losing it altogether. Nonetheless, there were several times we arrived at a hotel late at night with no bar or room service open and we found ourselves prowling the hallways, looking for a slice of lemon left in a glass on someone’s room service tray placed outside their door.

  Eventually, I found a hiding place. Inside one of the bus’s bunks, there was a tiny, unnoticeable crack in the wall of the huge vehicle’s interior where I was able to conceal just one syringe, carefully bleached to remove any scent. It was a good thing, because due to timing or circumstance, we were unable to procure any new rigs for several days. Layne, Hicks, and I used that same syringe often enough that it became so dull we took to sharpening it on the rough part of a matchbox before every use, like an ancient knife on a primitive whetstone. It was critical we were never caught with it while going through a border. Getting caught meant probable incarceration, a permanent ban from the country, and the confiscation of the bus and all the equipment by the state authorities—­­a massive fuck-up with the most serious consequences.

  One late night after arriving in a new European country, the three of us quickly found some heroin on the street, then went back to my bus to retrieve the syringe. We used my key to get in, but as the bus wasn’t connected to any electrical source, the interior lights didn’t work. Carefully, and out of habit, quietly we fumbled and felt around inside until we finally found the bunk by illumination of a cigarette lighter. Hicks had the skinniest arms so he got up in the bunk to try to fetch our needle. Though he tried and tried, his sweating, trembling dopesick fingers just could not latch on to the rig in the darkness. Several minutes passed with mounting anxiety: we needed to get well. Finally, Hicks succeeded in extracting the outfit from the tiny crevasse and took the cap off to confirm the needle itself was intact. We collectively let out a yell of jubilation. From the bunk directly below our hiding spot came a blood-­freezing scream as the bus driver, who unbeknownst to us had been sleeping there, awakened in fright. Startled, Hicks swung his arm out and buried the needle in my upper arm.

  “Goddamnit, Hicks!” I shouted in pain.

  “The fuck’s going on in here?” yelled our British bus driver in the darkness of the hallway.

  “Nothing, man, so sorry to wake you,” I said through clenched teeth while pulling the needle out of my arm, relieved to find it still usable.

  Our Benny Hill routine finished, we got off the bus, went inside, and proceeded to get well, once more holding at bay the sickness that now dogged us every minute of every day.

  Like any traveling addict trying to stay ahead of the devil of withdrawal, we found ourselves in many situations where, due to our obvious need, we spent what sometimes felt like an eternity in the company of unsavory, damaged, or borderline dangerous people, some of them legitimately out of their minds. People we’d not willingly have hung out with under any other circumstances, like the couple of elderly hoarders who sold dope out of their council flat in the UK, so impressed to have musicians in their place.

  “So you lads are musicians, then, how exciting it must be. You know, we have nearly every Cliff Richard record ever made. Sweetheart, sweetheart! Go find the Cliff records to show these lads.”

  “Oh, piss off, Johnny. You go find them. I can’t find a bloody thing in this house!”

  No surprise there. I grew more and more dopesick as we were forced to sit among the huge piles of squalor for an hour and a half, drinking tea out of filthy cups before they finally broke out their wares. They let us do a shot in their utterly disgusting, never-cleaned bathroom, then tried to entice us to stay even longer with the promise of some “surprise” supposedly on its way. We did not hang around, as I felt it might end up being like the surprise Lincoln got at Ford’s Theatre. And so we split.

  There was the surreal, comically entitled Swedish couple we forced ourselves to sit with in the back lounge of the Alice bus outside a concert hall in Ghent, Belgium. A nonstop stream of pretentious, mind-­anesthetizing drivel poured from their mouths like the putrid liquid poison you simultaneously shit and puked while kicking dope cold turkey. In agony, we listened to the young blond girlfriend, as narcissistic as she was physically beautiful, work slowly through the incredibly long list of bands she’d partied with who were, in her estimation, so much better than us. I nearly lost my shit, my personal patience well exhausted by the time they finally produced a bag of heroin and another of coke to sell us. Our disdain for them was so great that, when we were finally rid of them, we nicknamed them “the King and Queen of Sweden” and they became our touchstone for the worst Europe had to offer. It was people like these—two sides of the same agenda-ed, opportunist and condescending, cat-shit-encrusted coin—that we were forced by our circumstances to spend time with on a regular basis, along with every other stripe of hustler, hipster, huckster, or street person.

  Back in London after playing around the continent for a few weeks, Layne, Hicks, and I spent a day in a hotel room relaxing and getting high. It was an unseasonable heat wave in the UK and we were happy to be able to hang out in the relative coolness of the room together, no commitments or show, no trust-fund drug-dealing snobs or degenerate freaks to endure. We were free to just lie around, catch a nod, and listen to British TV shows playing quietly in the background. In between doing the odd shot of dope every now and then, we cleaned all of our rigs out in the same glass of water that, after a while, turned pink with blood. We thought nothing of cleaning our syringes in the same water. We had been sharing needles for so long that if one of us had something, we all had it by now.

  Out of the hazy blue came an unexpected knock on the door. Hicks got up to see who it was and, not bothering to put anything away, Layne and I continued to nod while sitting at a table together. John opened the door just a tiny crack. Suddenly, the King and Queen of Sweden, the same couple of Swedish assholes we’d been unable to tolerate in Ghent, came bursting through the door, pushing Hicks’s slight, skinny frame out of the way. The pleasant high I’d been carefully nursing all day was instantly eradicated.

  “Oh my fucking God! It’s SO hot out there! We’ve been out there for hours!” the unbearable blond said.

  “Thank FUCK we finally found you guys!” she continued, fanning herself for dramatic effect. She stormed into the room as though she owned the place. Her pompous, sweaty dealer boyfriend followed behind, carrying several bags of what looked to be newly purchased women’s clothing.

  “Oh my fucking God! I’m so thirsty!” she squawked. She scann
ed the room till her eyes locked on to the tumbler of pink water sitting on the table between Layne and me. To my slow-to-unfold surprise, she charged across the room in a blur of motion, reached right past me, and grabbed the glass filled to the brim with tepid, rancid boutonniere-­colored fluid, tainted with the blood of three hardcore international junkies.

  It all took place so quickly, I couldn’t find my voice. High as fuck, I tried and failed to form words, then began to raise my arm to stop her. Layne clocked my look of horror, then grabbed my arm and squeezed it tight in a gesture that was unmistakable: Let her drink it.

  In a flash, she had raised the glass straight to her lips. The Queen of Sweden was clearly someone who took whatever she wanted when she wanted it. As we watched in shock, horror, and macabre delight, she slammed the entire contents of the glass in a matter of seconds.

  When we finally managed to get rid of these two extreme irritants an hour later, it felt as though we’d been held hostage in our own home by a party of drunken ex-rugby-players-turned-crooked-politicians. The three of us looked at each other, exhausted by their mood-destroying unwanted company and rude, boorish behavior. We slowly began to chuckle at what had transpired, at first quietly shocked and relieved, worn down, yet quietly amused. Eventually we began to howl, falling around the room in hysterics, laughing ourselves sick, tears of comedic joy pouring out in unceasing pleasure, like survivors of a grenade attack. The astounding crescendo of this unexpected reunion with these arrogantly grandiose, know-it-all dickheads had been indelibly stamped in our brains. Playing it out over and over in our mind’s eye caused round after round of spontaneous spasms of laughter. Just when I thought I was too exhausted to laugh anymore, we would look at one another and start howling again over what we had silently watched happen as the Queen of Sweden bum-rushed our private party and then what she’d so ignorantly, indulgently, and recklessly helped herself to. The revenge was so perfect, so poetic, it was like a Greek myth. We laughed for what felt like hours until we were completely spent. It was the first thing that came to mind when I woke up the next day and again I laughed until my guts were aching. You could not have scripted a more fucked-up scene, complete with perfectly cast character actors, if you tried. If I’d ever met someone more deserving of a drink of water, I couldn’t remember who.

  12

  STRUNG OUT AND EXHAUSTED

  We were, even in our midtwenties, still wild, unruly children, a gang of misfit toys basically rampaging across the world, enjoying the success of the concerts, the adoration of the audiences, and the joy of making music. After years of playing shows, it was the first time I was singing music I believed in for large crowds, and I took pride in singing as powerfully as possible every night. Whether it was an up-tempo rock song at the top of my range or a quieter number that took some nuance, I finally felt like a legitimate rock singer, singing songs I’d had a part in the creation of, singing lyrics I’d written that had personal meaning to me. The fact that it was a tour in support of a great band who were my friends and whose music I loved and whose audiences reacted enthusiastically to our music made me that much more grateful. Experiencing it all with the Alice guys as crazed, like-minded companions made it an unforgettable good time.

  After a concert in Zurich, we had several days to travel to Helsinki. We got on a ferry; where, I couldn’t say. It was a long, slow ride to Finland, well over twenty-four hours. The three of us heroin addicts on the tour had procured some methadone in Switzerland, and although it didn’t get you loaded, it kept you well. Anticipating a potential nightmare, we had made sure we’d brought enough to get us there and back to wherever we played next.

  The boat was impressive, with several large casinos, a dance hall, shitloads of bars, even an auditorium filled with seats raked back from the stage to the ceiling, just like a rock venue. They used it to film a popular TV game show for live broadcast; in what country, I hadn’t a clue.

  After a few hours of boredom and no private room rented in which to chill, I began to drink. I was disinterested in all of the ship’s “luxuries.” I drank in the bars, I drank in the disco, in the casinos, everywhere else possible. I even watched a bit of the game show as they filmed it in front of an audience filled with rowdy, drunken idiots. Many of the passengers rode back and forth on the ferry just to get smashed and raise hell. They’d purchase round-trip tickets, party all the way over, then get right back on the returning boat just to do it again. I watched a drunken disabled girl drink dry a beer bottle full of urine someone had snuck onto her table, a drunken man fist-fighting his drunken son, a man filling his hat full of puke, and a parade of further sickening, B-movie house-of-horror scenes.

  I suddenly came to—how much later, I didn’t know—in a tiny, unfamiliar room to the piercing shriek of an intermittent alarm coming through a speaker hidden somewhere in the place. Then, through the same speaker came first a message in one unknown language, then another, and finally in English.

  “Alert! If you are still on the ferry, it is time to disembark. This is your final message!”

  I got up, my head pounding with a godforsaken, bell-ringing hangover. I fought my way through a maze of hallways until I ran into a uniformed member of the crew who pointed me in the direction of the foot-traffic exit and said, “Hurry!”

  I walked off the boat into the blinding sunlight of the far northern spring and saw my entire band and crew standing in the distance. As I slowly approached the guys, I could see that they were clearly none too happy, pissed off, I assumed, because they’d been forced to wait for me.

  “We’ve been out here for two hours waiting on your ass,” said my road manager.

  “Why didn’t someone come get me?” I asked.

  “Because we had to hide you in a cabin last night, and then we couldn’t remember where it was. The ferry cops were trying to catch you and put you in the boat’s jail.”

  “Ferry cops? Boat jail? What the fuck?” I asked with incredulous confusion. “What for? What’d I do?”

  I braced myself for an embarrassing, unpleasant reply.

  “You punched a couple guys out on the dance floor of the disco.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—(a) I was never a dancer, and (b) I had zero recollection of dancing or fighting or any of it.

  “Yeah, man, we got you out just in time. They actually have cops on this boat and they were looking all over for you. You’d be in jail here in Finland right now if they’d caught you.”

  Glad to have escaped the ignominious fate of being busted for belligerently harassing dancers, I only hoped none of the Alice guys were privy to this knowledge. If they were, I’d never hear the end of it.

  We played in a smallish club called the Tavastia in Helsinki that night, and after our set I cruised the crowded bar looking for female companionship. I caught sight of a hot black-haired girl dressed in fishnet stockings and short shorts and made my way toward her. She opened a beer and handed it to me with a devilish smile; we started making out minutes after we made eye contact, openly, in plain view of a gang of people, at least some of whom I presumed had just seen me singing onstage. I never gave a fuck; I’d foolishly do anything I felt like within full sight of the public or anyone else.

  After Alice in Chains were finished and the place began to clear out, my new friend told me she had to split if she was going to catch the last tram home.

  “Don’t worry about that, you’re staying with me in my hotel.” She wasn’t so sure but I did my best to convince her. “Don’t you want to fuck? You can take the tram home in the morning.”

  She smiled and reached down to squeeze my cock through my jeans and said, “Okay, let’s go fuck.”

  “Wait a minute, I’m not even sure where we’re staying yet. Let me go find my guy and figure it out.”

  “You better be staying—I just missed my last ride home!” she said, sounding concerned all of a sudden.

  “Don’t worry about it, baby, just a second!”

  I went
inside and searched the place until I ran into my road manager.

  “Where’s our hotel? Do you have my key?”

  He looked at me as though I were an idiot.

  “Hotel? What are you talking about, dumbass? We’re leaving in five minutes, we’re going to the airport.”

  “Fuck, man! Can I stay and catch another flight? I’ve got the hottest chick outside waiting to fuck me!”

  “No fucking way, dude, you are coming with us. Now.”

  As we piled into a passenger van, my final memory of Helsinki was of the girl, standing on the now dark and empty street, screaming, “You fucking asshole! You fucking liar! How am I supposed to get home now, you prick?!” I asked my road manager if he had any local dough I could give her for a cab but he had none. We drove away with her still standing in the street, flipping me off until we’d turned a corner and she disappeared from sight.

  In Oslo a couple days later, Layne caught sight from the stage of some large, obnoxious man forcing his way through the crowd, physically throwing girls around on a mission to get to the front of the stage. Once he’d arrived there, leaving a few injured people in his wake, he began to yell at Layne in Norwegian. I watched from the side of the stage as Layne stopped the show and, through the microphone, invited the man onstage so he could share his very important news with the entire audience. Layne reached down his hand and pulled the lumberjack-sized prick out of the crowd and up onto the stage. The minute the Neanderthal got onstage, he raised his arms in the air and began to parade around like a buffoonish version of Muhammad Ali. I went on high alert, in case some violence was about to go down and Layne might need my assistance. When the huge lug turned toward Layne, he was met with a vicious straight right to the face that knocked him clean off his temporary podium, back into the packed audience. Layne Staley, victorious by knockout. No assistance necessary.