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

attitude. It starts with Elliott sleepwalking, his memories no longer muted, but talking. Almost sympathetically, Charlie is described as the boss who “couldn’t help but hurt you”; and he turns Bunny into a deserter. Pain of abuse is coupled with love loss. It may not always show, but Elliott is cracking up, he says, and looking for someone—some hard, tough ally—to erase past harm. The song ends with him walking out on “Center Circle”—a place, one assumes, of isolation, and also danger. “Both of you can just fade to black,” he sings. “Been pushed away and I’ll never come back.” Drums kick in as the song fades, blunt snare runs that sound like gunshots.
    So the music, the many waltzes, took Elliott toward a difficult childhood, but it also took him away, recording on Pickle’s dad’s four-track, or listening to Beatles records in his back bedroom. It was reminder and escape at once, as art so often is. But there was a different dad, a real dad, too. Far from the vantage point of Texas, Elliott at first found Gary Mac Smith an “enigma.” He had taken off, he was a concept, a mental structure—part deserter, part potential solution. As Elliott recalls, his father had come back from Vietnam a hippie, living in Los Angeles initially, writing songs “about the things he knew—horse racing, drug dealers.” He was, maybe more than anything else, a contrast, an antidote. To Elliott, Dallas was religious, constipated, essentially “white-trash,” a place where ambitions stopped at earning more money than your neighbors, buying bigger cars. At age five Elliott stayed with Gary for the first time, he says, and did so for a week or two on subsequent summers. That was the regular routine, the set-up for visitations. The impression was of his oddness—“I even thought he looked kind of weird.” There was some anxiety as well, not so much about how he and his father would get along, or about being disappointed with what he saw in his father’s world, but about Bunny, leaving her alone with Charlie, believing, rightly or wrongly, that something might happen to her. Gary collectedrecords, Elliott recalls, and while on one of these early trips he fell in love with the Beatles’s
White Album
, a crush he’d never get over. “On my mother’s side of the family,” he notes, “nobody was listening to that kind of music.” Instead it was “Gershwin, jazzy ballads, old stuff like ‘Moon River.’ ” Gary taught Elliott guitar, showing him chords for Dylan tunes, Beatles too. Everywhere Elliott turned there was music, it seems—the kind his mother’s family played, and the kind, far more exciting, that his father made available. It was in his blood, and it was a fundamental aspect of whichever family he happened to be with, in Texas or anywhere else.
    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.” 26
    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