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

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.” 27

Chapter Three
Raining Violins
    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.