Sing Backwards and Weep Read online

  All this at seven in the morning? I was confused at her hostility because, although I’d been absent during much of her class the previous semester, I was never one to cause problems, raise hell, or even talk in class. Sure, I had received an F on my end-of-semester project, the easiest thing to make. It consisted of simply sewing two pieces of nylon material of the exact same length together. But it, like almost anything that involved some bullshit skill I knew I would never need to know, proved to be beyond my capabilities. Somehow, I had rubbed her the wrong way and she took delight in the payback. I was no math wizard but I easily added up the score to this one. She’d agreed not to help me, but to inflict pain. And to make it impossible for me to comply. She may as well have been my own mother.

  I felt an unfamiliar sadness welling up in my chest. My lifelong dream of playing baseball was done. Besides punk rock and getting loaded and laid, it was the only thing in life I cared about. Once again, here I was, a piece of detritus, destined for the shit heap.

  “Thanks for opening my eyes to your kind intentions, Mrs. Stevens. I guess I have no option other than to decline your generous offer.”

  I turned and left.

  When I showed up late to practice that day and handed my coach my carefully folded uniform, he looked like he was going to cry, or maybe I just felt like I might myself.

  “I’m sorry, Coach,” I said, “but the deck is stacked. I can’t do it. She never intended for me to be able to.”

  I barely squeezed out of high school with a below-D-minus average on a phony diploma cooked up by some of my dad’s sympathetic coworkers. I completed my year’s drug-and-alcohol program and a court-­appointed attorney then petitioned the court to have my entire juvenile and adult record expunged. I moved into a college-housing duplex project, working for the owner shampooing carpets all day and selling weed and acid and partying all night. One late afternoon, I ate way too much acid and had an extremely long, extremely bad trip. My friends had to roll me up in a carpet to restrain me. The next morning, I took a bong hit and it catapulted me right back into my LSD nightmare. After that, every time I attempted to smoke weed, it would instantly thrust me back into that same terrifying place. My routine of staying off alcohol by constant use of marijuana and LSD went out the window. I submitted wholly to alcoholism.

  I blacked out nearly every time I drank. I owned a Yamaha 750. I’d originally had my eyes on a used Triumph chopper but was short the cash to get it, and consoled myself with what I considered an inferior Japanese bike. I loved that 750 anyway, the sense of freedom it gave me while riding. I often rode my motorcycle hundreds of miles while blacked out and, with no helmet law, no helmet. I would come to in some unfamiliar rundown motel, stagger to the front desk, and ask, “What time is it?” and “What day is it?” and then “What town is this?” Head pounding with a terrible hangover, I’d wander around some shitty town I had zero recollection of until I found my bike. Somehow, I pulled off the miracle of this crazed routine over and over again without dying. The only time I’d dump the thing was when I had to stop at a red light. Too drunk to hold it up, my machine and I would fall harmlessly to our side.

  My high school girlfriend Deborah had quit college, come back to town, and moved in with me. I resolved to quit drinking and then spent a hellish year attempting to quit and failing. I couldn’t get past Friday night. I would drink for twenty-four hours, no drugs, just drinking and not sleeping. Then I’d be unconscious for twenty-four hours. Then forty-­eight hours of the DTs. I’d lie on my back in bed with the big black rotary-­dial telephone sitting on my chest, just waiting to call an ambulance because I was sure that at any moment I was about to die.

  Come Friday, despite my best efforts to maintain sobriety, as the day went on I would find myself coming out of my skin until, at some agonizing point, I’d inevitably fold and do it all again. It was an unbearable roller-coaster ride that took such a toll, mentally and physically, that I actually contemplated suicide. If this was how life was going to be, I’d be better off dead.

  While working as a mechanic’s assistant during harvesting season in the local pea fields, I made up my mind to leave for Las Vegas, where my cousin said he had a job for me at his restaurant. The day before I was to escape my life of drudgery in redneck rural Washington, my legs got crushed by a tractor in an industrial accident. I was bedridden, in excruciating pain, lost in anger. I’d never make it out of Ellensburg alive.

  Deborah had suffered enough by now and left me for her boss at a pizza place. In a fury, I knocked out all the windows in my apartment with the end of one of my crutches, then fell into brooding despair. After three days of no sleep and constant, silent rage, I realized that I’d made it past Friday night. I had been trying to do that for a year.

  I had been reviled as a town drunk before I could even legally drink. I’d had a full beard at eighteen years old and started drinking in bars, always blacking out and bringing unwanted attention to myself in ways that often resulted in violence. More than once, I woke up in jail and had to gingerly pull the pillow off my face, stuck to it with my own blood. Now that heartbreak had gotten me sober, I developed a bad case of insomnia and spent my nights wandering around Ellensburg on foot, chain-smoking. At times, I’d be stopped and questioned by the police. They had been on my back since day one and it gave me some small satisfaction when they saw I was not drunk or guilty of anything and had to let me go. Shortly before I turned twenty-one, I found myself in the unlikely role of rock singer in an up-and-coming underground band with plenty of opportunity for female companionship. Thank God Deborah left me.

  The first time I saw Van Conner, he was just a little kid lying in a wading pool in his front yard, smiling at me as I walked to grade school. In a town of eight thousand, I always knew who he was after that, but we didn’t interact. We met again by chance during a stint I did in detention hall during my final year of high school. He was only a sophomore, but in six years he was the only other person I’d encountered in Ellensburg who appreciated punk. He and his brother Lee were both gigantic, over six foot, maybe three hundred pounds. Van would come to my apartment, buy and smoke some weed, and we’d laugh and listen to records.

  I ran into him again after I had quit drinking.

  “Hey, man, good to see you! What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing, really. Just looking for a job. I need to make some dough and get out of here. I don’t sell weed anymore. I don’t even smoke anymore. Or drink.”

  “Hey, you know what? Just today my dad said we needed to hire someone to do repo work for the store. You’re perfect for it.”

  “What do you mean?” He had my interest.

  “We need someone to go and take back the TV sets and VCRs from the trailer trash who don’t make their payments.”

  “Fuck yes, I’ll do that. When can I start?”

  “You can start today. Let’s go talk to Gary.”

  I found it slightly odd that Van only ever referred to his parents by their first names, but they were known around town as an eccentric family. Seven kids and four of them abnormally large for their ages, or any age, for that matter. Gary Conner was an ex-grade-school principal who now ran the most popular video store in town, renting all manner of videos and selling electronics to mostly lower-income people on a rent-to-own plan. He hired me on the spot.

  My dad had given me his truck when he’d become a hermit and moved to a cabin deep in the Cascade Mountains, a place he had to snowshoe in and out of in order to reach the road. The truck was a ’53 Chevy with three on the tree. I began making daily trips all over the county, taking back what people did not want to give me. I was a pretty big guy, six foot two and a hundred and eighty-five pounds. In rural Washington, violence was just something you grew up with, as common and banal as fast food. I’d learned quickly not to take shit from anyone. As a kid, my friend Duzenski had taught me to throw a punch the minute anyone attempted to bully you. As a loner with few friends, an outcast, and a frequent blackout
alcoholic, that lesson served me well. That crucial first punch didn’t always settle it, though, and violence became just another way of communicating, a second language I quickly became fluent in.

  The rednecks and poor people whose stuff I had to take, they were also made of pretty rough stock. I carried with me on the job an aluminum bat and a stolen .22 pistol with a bad pull to the right. I had confrontations with people almost daily but I usually got what I came for. There were a few times I let discretion be the better part of valor and had to return to Gary empty-handed. He’d have to take the delinquent buyer to court and I’d lose my commission, but fuck it, it wasn’t worth killing someone over a TV set.

  I would enter the store through a door in the rear that led into a huge back room where Van and Lee, his older brother by several years, rehearsed with their band: Van on vocals, Lee on guitar, a wholesome young churchgoing kid named Mark Pickerel on drums, and some other kid on bass. One night, I stood outside the door and listened to them running through an Echo and the Bunnymen song and thought, Not fucking bad.

  Eventually Gary offered me a job behind the counter, as I had mainly cleaned up his repo sheet for him and he found it difficult to entice his own kids to work in the store.

  “Hey, man, do you still have that drum set?” Van asked one day when it was just me and him in the store. It wasn’t a complete kit, only a floor tom, a ride cymbal, and a high hat that a guy I’d worked with at a restaurant had traded me years before in a weed deal.

  “No, dude, I got rid of it. Why?”

  “Me and Pickerel are sick of playing with Lee. We want to start a new band. He’s gonna sing and I’m playing guitar. We want you to be the drummer.”

  “Van, I can’t play the fucking drums. Are you crazy? Sorry, bud, but no thanks.”

  “It’ll be easy. Pickerel can teach you. You’re the only guy we know who is into the kind of music we dig.”

  Young Mark Pickerel was already a very good drummer and a very good singer. Van and Pickerel didn’t like Lee and wanted to play without him.

  “I’ll think about it, man, but I can’t promise you it’s going to work out.”

  Their previous covers band had played punk and new wave tunes to indifferent crowds at school functions, church events, and other local self-made gigs. I saw no benefit in that. It led nowhere.

  On a night I had to go to their family home to bring Gary something from work, his gregarious wife Cathy insisted I sit down and have dinner with the family even though my friend Van wasn’t around.

  “Mark, do you enjoy working at the store? I hear that you’re a fan of the same music the boys like.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I like it very much, thank you for hiring me. Before Van, I never met one person who liked the same music as me. So it was a pretty big deal for me to become friends with him.”

  “Well, you know that Lee writes his own songs, don’t you? I think they’re very good. Lee! Lee!” she yelled from the kitchen table.

  An angry voice came from somewhere in the house.

  “What? Leave me alone. For fuck’s sake, I’m doing something!”

  I presumed the voice belonged to Lee. I’d seen him around but we’d never spoken.

  “Lee! You get out here and take Mark into your room and show him your songs!”

  Lee came stomping into the kitchen. Without looking me in the eyes, he said, “C’mon, then.”

  I followed him into his bedroom. It was decorated with cartoonish psychedelia like the set of the show Laugh-In, ornate hippy tapestries hanging off walls painted purple and green. What was the deal with this guy—was he a fucking Deadhead?

  “So I’m working on this tune right now, you wanna hear it?”

  I did, but first I asked, “What kind of cassette player is that?”

  I’d never seen someone recording their own music.

  “It’s not a cassette player, it’s a Tascam, a four-track cassette recorder. I record a different instrument on each track and then mix them together and it ends up being a demo.”

  “What about singing? Do you put that on there, too?”

  “Yeah, I can bounce shit over to give myself more tracks, and then use one for vocals,” he said, going straight over my head. “Anyway, here’s my new one.”

  He handed me the headphones, I put them on, and he hit play. The music was up-tempo, guitar heavy, raw. The tune was filled with hooks and the vocal part was surprisingly catchy. I couldn’t understand many of the words but from what I could make out, they were a bit corny. It wasn’t punk or even modern like the tunes I’d heard them rehearse in the back room, but it was rough and aggressive. Despite the silly lyrics, I recognized the demo as something pretty cool, something with rugged potential. I was impressed this weird dude had created this in his bedroom.

  “That’s great, man! How many of these have you done?”

  “Probably fifty to seventy-five so far. I’ve been recording for a couple years.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d written so many songs by himself. Van had never mentioned this aspect of his brother’s life.

  “Can I hear some more?”

  I spent the next couple hours alone with Lee in his room, listening intently to a shitload of catchy, rough-hewn ’60s-garage-band-styled tunes. I’d had no inkling he or anyone in town was capable of this.

  “Hey, man, let me play you this new piece of music.” He proceeded to play me one more song in the same vein as the others.

  “Do you wanna sing something on it? Van told me about your first band.”

  When I was fifteen I’d worked as a janitor in a place called the Hi-Way Grill and had been drafted to sing in a lame band with the two cooks. I’d lasted exactly one gig before I’d been fired, a drag of a party where we’d covered Styx, Van Halen, and even “My Sharona.”

  I laughed when Lee suggested I sing something over his music, but I was intrigued with this four-track machine, this weirdo, and his songs. Over the next hour, he and I wrote cheesy words and a vocal part that felt appropriate for the garage-y throwback tune. We recorded my vocals in his bedroom, an embarrassing song we called “Pictures in My Mind.”

  I rolled over the experience on my drive home. Van and Pickerel wanted him gone, but I had enjoyed writing and recording vocals for a song with this strange, mostly mute dude. Why were they ditching the only guy making original music, the only guy who wasn’t content playing covers like every other stupid band in town? Lee was on to something, and I wanted in on it.

  “So I heard you and Lee wrote a song together last night,” Van said when I saw him at work the next day. “Are you his new pal? Because you would be the first one he’s ever had.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. He’s not very easy to talk to. But you guys are crazy to kick him out. Why didn’t you ever say anything about the songs he’s written? Seventy-five fucking songs? I listened to a bunch of them, dude. He’s got talent. The words need a serious upgrade but besides the questionable ‘lead’ guitar over everything, the songs are pretty cool. He can write the fuck out of a hook.”

  Van looked perplexed.

  “I never really thought about it,” he said. “I always thought of it as his hobby and playing covers was our serious thing.”

  “You got that backwards, man. Playing originals is the only way to be a serious band. Tell you what, I’ll be in a band with you and Pickerel, but only under the condition that you let your brother back in and we play his originals.”

  Van didn’t say anything for a minute.

  “Okay. My mom hit the roof anyway when she heard we were kicking him out. You’ll have to sing. I’ll have to play bass. Pix will stay on drums.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  We took our name from an old Electro-Harmonix guitar pedal called the Screaming Tree. The irony was that it was a treble booster and Lee already had the thinnest, most piercing, and shittiest-sounding guitar tone.

  In time it became clear that Lee and I could not get alo
ng. I tried my damnedest to be friendly with him, but it was like talking to a stone. His only two speeds were mute or enraged. I would often hear him screaming “Fuck you, Gary!” at his dad on the phone. He treated the store till like his own private bank. He would come walking in, grab a couple hundred dollars, tell his dad to fuck off, and walk out again.

  Despite how much we’d enjoyed hanging out and recording that first evening, I was never again asked to contribute a vocal part or lyrics to a song. Although I recognized his gift for writing catchy hooks, everything else began to get on my nerves in a big way. His lyrics were the furthest thing from good, filled with phony lines about butterflies, rainbows, smiling cats, just meaningless garbage of the worst kind. I tried every way possible to steer him toward something cool, something of our time, but it was an impossibility. The words were already completely embedded in the song, hook, and melody. Time and again, I tried to change them into something that fit phonetically but that held some sort of personal meaning to me. It was a maddening battle, one I rarely if ever won.

  But if Screaming Trees could get me out of Ellensburg … From my earliest memories, I had hated this dead-end redneck town, hated the ignorant right-wing, white-trash hay farmers and cattlemen talking constantly about the weather, hated the constant battering wind that blew the putrid smell of cow shit everywhere. I knew there was a world outside waiting for me and repeatedly tried to escape. At age fifteen, I’d signed up for the National Guard and labored through the eight-hour test that may as well have been written in hieroglyphics. I left page after page completely blank, totally unable to understand a goddamn thing. Then I begged my father to rescind his approval after I found out I qualified for only the lowliest jobs, the bottom rung on the ladder. I joined a traveling circus but was quickly fired for, bizarrely, refusing to cut my hair. Poor grades and my prison sentence had destroyed my baseball career to prevent me from leaving. Then my mangled legs had done it again. I felt cursed, trapped in an endless cycle of pointless work and petty crime, circling around town endlessly with a thousand-yard stare, desperate to escape my hometown and the diseased darkness it bred and festered in me.