Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith by William Todd Schultz

trotting it out there like ‘poor me.’ ” Peterson recalls arriving at Elliott’s house one morning, just after he had awakened from a dream “that troops were storming up the stairs, coming to get him. He was in a state of panic. It was genuinely terrifying. He wasn’t making the shit up.” 25 The dream, Peterson believed, had some connection to a fearful history, if not, in specifics, to Charlie particularly. And as other friends confessed, there were things they knew about Elliott’s time in Texas that they will never tell; it would not do anyone any good, they say. At the same time, Elliott’s memories of mistreatment tended to enlarge themselves, his disclosures growing more and more extreme, more unguarded. Even he expressed doubt on occasion—Was he recalling accurately? Was he reconstructing more than remembering veridically? Depression has a way of pushing memoriesaround, like a blindfolded person gets steered when struggling to pin the tail on the donkey. It is impossible to say. Maybe Elliott had it right; maybe he was, in some form and to some degree, abused. Or it may be that he elaborated on a past in order to make it more effectively explanatory. It had to be bad, he figured unconsciously, because that’s what the present was, and that’s what the future promised to be.
    The songs treat Charlie as an irritant, like an obscure, dissonant sound one intermittently hears and tries tracking to its origin. He always seems to be there, in name or in effigy. Poet Sylvia Plath had her “bee sequence,” a set of poems devoted to the subject of her long-dead father Otto (a bee expert), her own restive poltergeist. Elliott has his Charlie sequence, equally urgent, equally drenched in pain and loss. Charlie is not by any means the lyrics’ preeminent theme, he’s not ubiquitous. But he also refuses to sit still. And Elliott’s attitude vacillates; he’s not sure how to dispatch the Charlie haunter, or how, exactly, Bunny figures in the equation. As noted in one song—yet another waltz—he brings him a flower, declares the war over; he’s got enough trouble, he figures, just trying to stay alive in the present. (As he told one probing interviewer, he didn’t see much point in putting his thoughts about Texas out in print because “the person” has apologized.) Elliott wants to move on, to forget—something he talked about often—to put it all behind him. Yet Charlie modulates into nameless, spreading menace, always trying to get Elliott alone, the cause of “sick confusion headaches.” Elliott’s a “bastard,” a “little boy in blue” in the song “Plainclothes Man.” “Someone’s going to get to you,” he says, “and fuck up everything you do.” Even his feelings for Bunny start qualifying themselves. People tell him he’ll rediscover his love for her, “But I don’t know/I don’t think so …”
    Another of Elliott’s least disguised songs, one that never made it on to an album, probably with good reason, is titled, with apparently intentional obscurity, “Some Song.” Here both Charlie and Dallas are named outright, Charlie a one-note symphony—of denigration, one guesses—who beats Elliott up over and over, turning him into a freak who pines for a violent girl, someone who’s unafraid, who might exact a surrogate revenge. Elliott pictures himself heading to Dallas with murder on his mind, TV having taught him how to kill. Notorious murderer John Wayne Gacy even comes to mind—the so-called “Killer Clown” targeting young boys. It’s a strikingreference. If Charlie is “Cathy’s Clown,” then a clown killer seems especially poetic. (Gacy was beaten by his father, who repeatedly verbally assaulted him.) The song includes no murder, but it ends with the realization “I’ll never be fine.”
    “2:45 AM” is still another Charlie/Bunny number. Like “Some Song,” it’s unusually direct; friends see it as almost anomalous in its open expressions of feeling and