PLEASE DO NOT BEND OR PLACE NEAR HEAT: A Review of William Todd Schultz’s Torment Saint



“There is really no next Elliott Smith.”



Let me confirm that I am one of those notorious Elliott Smith fans. I am destined to be disappointed in any book about Mr. Smith, simply because nothing short of bringing the man back to life would satisfy me. Well, Schultz had me on page 11 with the above quote. Just as I was about to complain about the Nick Drake/ Kurt Cobain references, because they trivialize a uniqu

PLEASE DO NOT BEND OR PLACE NEAR HEAT: A Review of William Todd Schultz’s Torment Saint



“There is really no next Elliott Smith.”



Let me confirm that I am one of those notorious Elliott Smith fans. I am destined to be disappointed in any book about Mr. Smith, simply because nothing short of bringing the man back to life would satisfy me. Well, Schultz had me on page 11 with the above quote. Just as I was about to complain about the Nick Drake/ Kurt Cobain references, because they trivialize a unique and uniquely brilliant man, Schultz affirms that no one can or will come after him. And no one came before him. He was sui generis. Schultz gets that.



Anyone attempting to unravel this short, cryptic life needs to address three mysteries: Was he abused as a child? Did he intend to kill himself when in 1997 he jumped off a cliff? And finally, was his death murder or suicide?



No one may know the answer to the first question until a key person in his childhood—maybe, perhaps, the whole family—has died. (Naturally, the Smiths and Welches were not interviewed. That family has too much to hide. Even Elliott’s devoted half-sister Ashley Welch, who has had the most involvement with the media, sets boundaries for her own peace of mind. And to be fair, it would be cruel to force her to take a side between her father and her brother.) No one will know the answer to the third question as long as the case remains unresolved. But Schultz gets one out of three, by answering the second question in a way that makes sense but will not be very pleasing (if that is the word) to fans.



Much of this book is shaped by the negative space of what was left out. I wish Schultz had had more time to research this book. I wanted to know more about the “s***” jobs Elliott had to work, especially the baking and drywall. These had to be dispiriting at times, but in some of them he seemed to take a certain pride. Besides the family, Schultz was unable to interview Joanna Bolme (by all accounts the love of Elliott’s life) or Valerie Deerin (whose relationship with Elliott ran concurrently for a while with his relationship with Jennifer Chiba). He did interview Jennifer, eliciting the premature rage of many, but she was a part of Elliott’s life, and her words and her presence in the book seem right.



What is included in the book is frequently amazing. It’s the little details that I like the best. Tony Lash describes how little opportunity the members of their high school band Stranger than Fiction had to play, often cramming in fifteen minutes at a time before SCHOOL band practice. James Ewing, a Portland roommate, says he and Elliott watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War together while both had the flu. Leslie Uppinghouse says her pet boxer Anna loved Elliott so much she had to be restrained (or at least tired) so Elliott could record. According to Jennifer, the man born Steven Paul Smith would have been named Monday had he been a girl. (Had they had their own child, it would have been Tuesday if a girl and Harmony if a boy.)



The Dallas and Portland chapters are the most rewarding. As Elliott’s life became more complex and out of control, the people he loved but pushed away become more reticent. The Dallas friends-- Steve “Pickle” Pickering, Kevin Denbow, Mark Merritt, and Elliott’s first girlfriend Kim— describe an honor student who dearly loved his half-siblings, “stuck up for his friends,” and was far more advanced musically than even those who had more formal training. They remember only good times.



The word “depressed” does not appear until page 84, when Garrick Duckler describes himself, Tony Lash, and Elliott as “three slightly depressed people.” None of the Dallas people recall ever seeing any abuse or dysfunction. However, this was the ‘Seventies, when child abuse was still a dirty little secret. Later, at Lincoln High in Portland, Elliott was known to “live up inside his head.” It’s not a stretch to believe he did the same at an earlier age in Texas, keeping family secrets. The argument that someone abused him has to stand, given such songs as “Bastard John,” “No Confidence Man,” and “Abused”—all of which “disentangle the same hairball of abuse,” as Schultz so poetically puts it. Why would anyone even be coughing up this hairball if abuse never took place?



The Portland of the 1990’s appears in all its danger and dreariness as a character in its own right. The music culture is described vividly: the all-important, two-song 7” vinyl “calling card,” the grubby one-word-named bands, the democratic posters giving no one act top billing, the booze, the drugs, the endless rain. Homophobic politicians tried to push through Measure 9, which further encouraged the already out Neil Gust to stay out, giving Heatmiser its “queercore” rep. Elliott as always took the side of the underdog, saying that if the band members had to be one or the other they were all going to be gay. Such colorful personalities as Pete Krebs, Tony Lash, and the Cavity Search founders abound.



Best of all in this section is JJ Gonson, who as Heatmiser’s manager should have kept a professional distance but found it “impossible not to fall in love with Elliott.” He called her “Pitseleh” (yes, the song is about her), and she called him “little bird”— which may explain why Elliott seemed to have a thing about birds. They would break up over his growing fascination with the very drugs she had struggled so hard to abandon. He would turn to Joanna, only to leave Portland in the belief that he had ruined her life.



Many interpretations of Elliott Smith lyrics are based on misunderstandings, which makes the title of this book especially apt. Schultz makes it clear on page 31 that he knows the phrase from “Go By” is “torn main sail.” He chose “torment saint,” a mishearing of the phrase widely prevalent on the internet, not only because it suits the way people viewed Elliott Smith but also because it fits Elliott’s attitude toward pop music. “True songs for me are about mystery.” A pop song could mean nothing, or it could mean anything; it could have as many meanings as there were ears to hear it. (I am reminded of so-called nonsense Appalachian songs like “Nottamun Town,” popularized by Jean Ritchie. These songs contained magic, it was said, and to try to comprehend them would be to break their spell.)



He lived for the music, even inside it. For someone who “internalized everything,” this was often a painful choice. His friend and confidante Dorien Garry recalls him selecting Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared” on a jukebox, only to leave the building and stand outside as it played. When she questioned him about it, he replied, “I’m waiting for the day I can just sit here and not let it totally destroy me.”



To a great extent, it was Elliott Smith who fashioned the “Smith Myth,” the public's image of him. He would come to say things like “I jumped off a cliff,” instantly changing the subject. Dorien was an eyewitness to this mishap, and describes it in detail. It wasn’t a jump. It was barely a cliff. No one else went off this this drop-off in a cul-de-sac with him, as is often claimed in other accounts. It wasn’t even an alcoholic freak-out in the sense that he was out of touch with reality. He was sitting in a car weepy-drunk and, humiliated that people were seeing him this way, got out and ran— and fell, impaling himself on a tree branch. Since a “jump” is more dramatic than a “fall,” he tinkered with reality to make it better suit his own reality.



So, does this make him a drama queen? Does this support Kevin Denbow’s theory that unhappiness makes for a “better backstory” than happiness? Does this make Elliott a liar? On the contrary, he was obsessed with honesty. He would later talk of carving the word “NOW” into his arm and hemorrhaging at the piano while he wrote “Everything Means Nothing To Me.” This may never have happened. But it was METAPHORICALLY true. “It was pain made beautiful: stoic, ‘saintlike’ torment.”



He created his own image, as we all do. But unlike most of us, he was an artist whose image was a work of art. He resented the critics’—i.e., the world’s—reaction to that image, reducing his multi-layered self to a caricature.



“…the conflict was internal, a clash between authentic self-definition and role-playing.” “Throw-uppy nervous” about going onstage, and not even certain he belonged onstage, he compromised: he didn’t present himself as an artist. He wrote and performed not to flaunt himself but to show “what it’s like to be a person.”



Schultz does not candy-coat times when Elliott comes off as anything but saintly. The book’s most startling revelation is the extent to which Garrick Duckler’s original lyrics remained in some of Elliott’s revisions as late as 2000. Garrick had consented to this arrangement as living proof of the depth of their bond, but it was less noble of Elliott to take advantage of it. (A version of “Junk Bond Trader,” co-written by Garrick, goes back as far as 1986.) Then there was the way Elliott pushed Brandt Peterson out of Heatmiser (he “could be mean,” Brandt stresses). Toward the end of his life Elliott saw this quite differently, but by then accuracy of memory was not a skill he seemed to possess. Then there was the time he tried to worm his way out of having to pay Nelson Gary for his collaboration on “Coast To Coast”…



After the white-hot creativity of the years 1996 and 1997, he began to unravel. The book, and Elliott, become increasingly ugly from this point on. From 2000 to 2002 Elliott made a career of addiction. The Brooklyn and L.A. chapters present a grisly phantasmagoria of what even Jennifer is forced to acknowledge was a “shell” of Elliott’s former self. A passive desire not to exist, which was always there, was beginning to look like self-fulfilling prophecy. Although Elliot succeeded in kicking illicit drugs, the ending of this book is still excruciating to read.



Jennifer steps in, though not exclusively, to describe the last days. Most of what she says sounds authentic, but I wondered about one of her assertions. She took credit for driving Elliott to his appointments, although on the morning of the last day of his life it was he who drove her: she had gotten a DUI. When did this happen? And how lucid a driver was Elliott at this point? I have a hunch the long-suffering Ashley was chauffeuring both of these characters.



This leaves us with the third question, and we may always be left with it. Elliott placed himself in self-destructive situations that when they went bad he just thought, Oh well. Ground coming up. Valuing music over his life, he even fantasized that it could go on as he himself ceased to be. In keeping with Elliott’s handling of the Smith Myth, even if he didn’t literally wield the knife, he had placed himself in a position by October 21, 2003 that put his life at risk. This comes very close to “blaming the victim,” but this isn’t what Schultz is saying. A “victim,” for lack of a better word, is a person whose life experience gives him the only perspective he can have. Therefore, that perspective is the only frame of reference he can have.



Is it possible to stab oneself more than once in the heart? Yes. In fact a young man named Kipp Rusty Walker did it in Oregon a few years back, in front of an open mic night audience that at first thought it was part of the act. Elliott could have written a suicide note on one of the Post-Its Jennifer left all around their home, and then “dissociated.” That is, he could have disconnected from reality in an unconscious, anxiety-driven reaction to the situation. Schultz didn’t say this, I’m saying it, so therefore I digress. It’s easy to do.



Torment Saint is a book that has incited debate even by those who haven’t read it yet— especially by those who haven’t read it yet. My advice to them is to read it now.















