I Don't Want To Be Here Anymore

Despite the the soft lull of Elliott Smith’s vocals and the music being set by glittery piano melodies and an acoustic guitar, Smith wrote some angry fucking music. And no, I’m not referring to Heatmiser, I’m referring to his solo work. If you pick apart his lyrics, Smith was a man who held a lot in and released when he wrote a song. Tracks like “Roman Candle”, “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”, “Pictures of Me” or “Pitseleh” are so angst filled:

I want to hurt him

I want to give him pain

I’m a Roman Candle

My head is full of flames

There is a cruelty to his lyrics. Maybe he won’t get into a fist fight with you, but he will cut you down to size with his words. There’s a talent to that, one I don’t really have, but maybe why I find Smith’s music so relatable is the reserved anger he had. When you’re a sensitive soul and hold everything in, it has to come out in some form.

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I was so angry in my teens, a lot of it for good reason but also because I was just a teenage asshole. I kept a lot of it to myself. There was a lot of shame surrounded by the things that made me angry—the reverberation of multiple sexual assaults, being stuck to solely take care of an alcoholic mother who relapsed every other week and the resentment I had towards my family for leaving me to hold the bag with that mess (I don’t think that resentment has gone away, it’s just gotten quieter). I had no outlet to release this anger where anyone could remotely understand how I felt or what I was experiencing. Added to this anger was the need to present myself as put together, a strong face, the illusion of control.

When I bought Either/Or for my seventeenth birthday, I had no idea how one dead man could understand me so well. It was soft, quiet, yet angry—it was me in LP form. I played the album obsessively for months. It gave me so much comfort during the winter months, specifically in December during winter break, when I was home with my detoxing mother. Nowhere to go, and no one to turn to, I was stuck at home making sure my mother didn’t have a seizure while trying to complete 100 unit circles for my pre-calc class, wishing I was anywhere but home. My friends could never understand the loneliness I felt during that period and I couldn’t tell my father. All he would do was just convince me to move in with him, which was out of the fucking question, and my brother was too far and too busy with college living to listen to my frustrations. But Elliott knew.

The track “Alameda” always reminds me of the one rainy day in the aftermath of an overly dramatic, humiliating evening that has been forever burned in my memory. If I were to ever suffer memory loss, this would somehow be the one to never fade from the recesses of my mind, even though sometimes I wish it would just evaporate and leave me the fuck alone. During my mother’s detox, she realized she couldn’t do it by herself and she needed assistance but thanks to the shittiest health care system in the world, she was uninsured and too broke to enter a rehab facility. Any state run facilities had wait lists ten miles long; her addictions would kill her before she could even reserve a bed. In a desperate attempt to get some sort of medical attention, she had me call 911 and tell the operator my mother was suicidal so they could put her in a 72 hour psych hold.

The cops first showed up, the scummiest pigs you have ever seen. They rummaged around the apartment looking for drugs. They found expired Prozac and stupidly asked me if I stole any of the medication to take myself, sell, or share with friends. Confused, emotional, and crying profusely, I told them “no” as they made a mess of the apartment still foraging while my mother was in shambles. The pigs asked if she took anything. I guess in an attempt to give the performance of a lifetime to convince everyone she was suicidal, she downed half a bottle of vodka with Vicodin. She was slurring, blurry eyed, and incoherent. Eventually they came to the conclusion she was a mess, something that could have been figured out pretty quickly had they made any effort to assist her when they first showed up rather than search for something that wasn’t there to make the trip worth it, I suppose. For one of the pigs, it was—he would show up at our apartment days later to ask my mom out on a date (she declined but not before mulling it over as a tactical move to get out of any tickets she had unpaid).

EMT eventually came, and I had to witness my mother being put on a stretcher as they brought her to the ambulance. Every one in my apartment building came out of their domiciles as my mother was being carried away. I stood in the doorway, sobbing from fear. Neighbors asked me what had happened but I was too distraught to answer and too angry that this was the moment they decided to reach out—not the multiple times she fell off the wagon prior to this incident. It was shameful, and the spotlight was on me to clean up the mess left behind. Answer questions, talk about something I so desperately tried to hide from the rest of the world. I didn’t want to be this person, I didn’t want my family to be the family that was fucked up despite my awareness of it all. All I wanted was to not be seen. I didn’t want to be there.

My dad picked up me shortly after the EMTs left. I packed an overnight bag and stuck Either/Or in my knapsack. The following morning we had to go to the mental institution in the outskirts of LA county to answer some questions about my mother’s well-being. It was cold, dark and wet. My dad had a portable CD player in his truck and he let me pick out the music. I associate “Alameda” with rainy freeways, rain drops on my dad’s windshield, the grey landscapes of Los Angeles County. My mental exhaustion had reached a breaking point and I didn’t have a thought in my brain other than “I don’t want to be here".

Only visitors who were eighteen years or older could enter the institution but I was the only person who could vouch for my mother because I was the one that had this shit put in her lap unfairly at a young age, and since I was close to turning 18, my dad managed to convince the nurses to let me in as long as I didn’t advertise my age. As the years have gone by, my memories of being in the ward are a little fuzzy. I remember thinking during that time period how this was going to be one memory that would never leave me, but I think over the years I’ve tried to desperately to get rid of it. My only accomplishment was forgetting the small details I would much rather keep in the memory bank than the overarching story.

We went into some interrogation looking room. It felt cold. Not in temperature, but in vibes. I remember the room looking blue, but that may be a figment of my imagination remembering it as blue. The doctor, my mother, and my father were in the room as the doctor asked about my mother’s mental health—if she had been suicidal before, how often she talked about hurting herself and some other very personal inquiries. The questions were so clinical compared to how emotional I felt. I remember playing “Speed Trials” back in my head throughout the entire meeting. It was the only thing that I could comfort myself with since no one else was going to do it. I could feel my dad seething with anger knowing my mom had put me in a situation that was damaging my psyche, I could feel my mother’s shame putting me in this predicament, and I silently kept my anger and resentment towards both of them to myself as I politely answered the doctor’s questions.

A few days later, my mother was released from the hospital. Shortly after her release, my mom and dad sat me down, trying to convince me to move in with my dad who lived in the next county over. I didn’t want to leave the place I called home, my friends, my school. I didn’t want this change at all and it was unfair I was the one who was going to have to make major sacrifices when the predicament I found myself in was hardly my fault. The reserved anger I held in for so long was overflowing with no where to go but out. I screamed at both of them. I may have said I hated both of them or the very least told them they were both fucked up and awful parents—I just remember vomiting out any cruel thought that came to my head, without abandon. I wanted to hurt them, I wanted to give them pain. I was tired of being the only one burdened with these feelings, I needed them to be in as deep as I was in these emotions. I went scorched Earth, which is my default reaction when I am that angered. I cut people off, create distance. Call it a coping mechanism, or the inability to express my anger in a healthy way. I’ve lost so many people in my life because of this button they unknowingly pressed repeatedly.

They viewed me as an adult at that point, free to make this choice myself, but my dad tried so hard to get me to change my mind. My mother reluctantly agreed with him even though she wanted me to stay with her. The conversation didn’t go well, I holed myself in my room, playing Either/Or, telling myself I just had to hold out a little bit longer until I could go to college and get away from these people.

Years later I still hold on to this bitterness that has manifested into my soul. I have been so angry these days at so many things, so many people. I want to go scorched earth, delete all my social media, disappear and cut myself off from the rest of the world. But it’s a New Year, and I’m 33 years old now. I realize this isn’t a good way to handle my anger, and I’m trying desperately to change. So instead, I find myself here: writing my anger out as I listen to Elliott Smith, keeping my distance while I work out these complicated feelings I have in a constructive manner rather than ruin all of the relationships I have managed to maintain for this long.