Resurrection Song

Jessica Traynor | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023

My first memory of my cousin who went to jail is of him playing guitar at my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. One of my uncles had a job in RTÉ, so the party was in the canteen, a brightly lit wilderness of painted breeze blocks. The extended family were all there; party pieces were expected. I’d written a poem, because I hated being asked to sing – the idea of it made me sick with anxiety. The entreaties of increasingly drunken aunts and uncles to perform meant I had to keep roaming about the room on a circuit of perpetual avoidance until the time came for me to say my poem. I was maybe nine or ten years old and the poem I’d written was about a man coming home from a long time away to find his family gone and his house abandoned (it may have been heavily influenced by recent school readings of Walter de la Mare and Robert Frost). It was a stunning success, in that it was grim enough that no one knew what to say to me afterwards. My cousin had just come home himself, after a jail term for smashing a pint glass into another man’s face. He sat quietly in the corner, guitar in hand. At one point in the night we talked for a while. He was soft-spoken and at one point told me, conspiratorially, and in a way that felt like a compliment, that I wasn’t like the rest of my cousins.

*

The first time I remember talking about Screaming Trees, the grunge band fronted by Mark Lanegan, was around seven years later. An on-again-off-again ex was interested in rekindling things and he invited me to a free gaff with his group of friends, who were intimidating and a little hostile. I didn’t realise at the time that one of the girls had designs on the ex I spent most of the night avoiding. At one point, these girls surrounded me.

‘He told us how you like to wash his hair,’ one of them said. ‘Is that . . . is that like, some kind of fetish?’ (Shrieks of laughter.)

‘He had puke in it,’ I deadpanned. ‘I helped him wash it out.’

The ex and I had been drinking together a few weeks previously, raiding a series of flavoured liqueurs we’d found in his parents’ drinks cabinet, and he’d got smashed drunk. Although he’d made it to the toilet, he wasn’t adept in the art of hair-holding like we girls were. When he staggered back into the room, the front of his hair was drenched with sick. I’m nothing if not pragmatic, and I’d helped him wash it over the sink before he passed out on his bed. The reframing of this narrative as something sexual is kind of funny in retrospect, but that night I was massively pissed off with him. I retreated to the company of another uniformly disliked girl at the party. She had committed the crime of continuing to exist after a break-up with one of the boys in the group. She was now the butt of everyone’s jokes. I hung around with her for a while.

Most of us were seventeen, the girls with uniformly straight, dark hair and heavy eyeliner. We wore tank tops under dyed army surplus shirts. The boys cultivated little bum-fluff beards that crouched under their chins like frightened mice. They wore flared cords bought from the Eager Beaver in Temple Bar, which provided a public service by sweeping Dublin’s pavements clean of debris. There were two boys at the party who looked older, though; rather than mullets greased into varying stages of submission, they had proper long hair, halfway down their backs. One of the boys was tall and thin, with long, blonde hair. He looked like an extra from Lord of the Rings, which was probably the highest compliment I could have paid a boy in 2002. He didn’t talk much, mostly engaged in artfully rolling spliffs. The other older boy was stockier with darker hair – loud and funny in the way that gave energy to the conversation. They were sitting in a circle with a bunch of other longish-haired guys who were clearly a little in awe. A Soundgarden song came on.

‘Cool, “Outshined”,’ I said. The circle of boys rippled and I was met with a row of bemused faces. The dark-haired boy gestured suavely to a free chair. I merged. My ex-boyfriend hovered anxiously by my shoulder.

The dark-haired boy said, ‘Do you know Screaming Trees? They’re kind of like a mixture of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. You should definitely check them out.’

*

My cousin had gone to Mountjoy for glassing a man in Fibber’s, the metal bar on Parnell Street. I have no idea what he was doing there – it wasn’t really his kind of scene, although I know he loved Hendrix and Thin Lizzy. By this time, I suspect he already had a heroin habit. My aunt had been plagued by the local gardaí raiding their house, banging on the door at all times of the day and night, trashing the place. My cousin was not a drug dealer, but he was a problem, living in a middle-class estate on the Dublin–Meath border. He had been some kind of a problem all his life, prone since childhood to volatility. There was no badness in him, as my aunt would have put it, but his actions were entirely unpredictable. Things would get destroyed in ways that no one could foresee: Christmas trees accidentally set ablaze; bones broken. In family photos he is always smiling, but he is never, ever still, a part of him blurred in every frame. Nowadays, a diagnosis would be made. Then, it was just boldness.

My aunt and uncle had three children; he is the middle child. The youngest, a deeply loved daughter who didn’t live past her thirties, was non-verbal autistic and mostly lived in an institutional setting, except when my aunt and uncle would make doomed and unsupported attempts to care for her at home. Their eldest, another deeply loved daughter, lives abroad with her family now. My aunt is a small woman who reads the tarot and who has been known to threaten people with citizen’s arrests. My uncle is different from my other uncles. When I was a child, the men my aunts had married blurred into a big, bad-tempered, whiskey-drinking singularity. Children were invisible to them and, mostly, we knew to avoid them. But this uncle was different. He shared his son’s tendency to stare into space. He would wear rumpled polo shirts and tracksuit bottoms, always slightly askew. At the family parties, he would talk to the younger nieces and nephews hanging around the stairs, treating our little stories and dramas as meaningful. I would think, he must be the best dad.

*

I didn’t get into Screaming Trees until me and the funny, dark-haired boy broke up, two years after the party where we first spoke. I was nineteen and a bandmate had burnt me a CD of their final album, Dust, from 1996. I listened to it in a melancholy April on the 123 bus from his house in Crumlin into town, passing through sunlit exhaust haze, under the heavy green of horse chestnut trees. It’s grunge, but with a mellow tunefulness at odds with the more metal-inflected sound of bands like Alice in Chains or Soundgarden or Melvins. You can hear the influence of bands like the Small Faces. Mark Lanegan’s voice is what made the band interesting, Waitsean and hostile at times, tender at others. And of course, Mark Lanegan’s vocals had just been a prominent part of Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, the landmark album of those terrible early-2000s musical doldrums, when nu metal was ruining music for everyone. Songs for the Deaf was the soundtrack to every party I went to during my Leaving Cert year. It was the sound I heard thrumming through the floor as I slept on landings or on sofas or on some stranger’s unoccupied bed, the songs that lodged in my brain as I was pulling my school uniform from my bag the next morning to make the hung-over trip to school.

In my first year of college, I played Dust for a new boyfriend I’d met in Fibber’s. We’d bonded over a shared enjoyment of Dinosaur Jr and my willingness to view his Rush fandom as a charming quirk. He stood in his flat smoking out his window and nodding along to the music. I could tell he was little unused to being introduced to a band by a girlfriend.

‘It’s pretty good,’ he said, ‘but the way he rhymes “highway” with “highway” there – not so great.’

I bridled. Terrible lyrics are something rock fans have to put up with, but Mark Lanegan does not write terrible lyrics. And I was talking to a Rush fan. ‘I don’t think he’s rhyming “highway” with “highway”. He’s repeating the word for emphasis.’

The boy winced. ‘We’ll have to agree to disagree.’

I have to admit in retrospect, it was a red flag.

*

Dust was recorded in one of the darkest years of Mark Lanegan’s addiction, just before he gave up music to dedicate himself solely to heroin, becoming homeless, disappearing from public view. On YouTube you can watch the Screaming Trees on Jools Holland in 1996, playing ‘All I Know’. A very young and clean-cut Josh Homme is on guitar, between gigs in Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. The leather trousers Lanegan is wearing would soon become his only reminder of his rock-star status, and they’d eventually end up in a pawn shop. The owner took them, even though Lanegan was by this time crawling with lice.

*

Surprisingly enough to no one, prison did not cure my cousin of his heroin addiction. Over the course of my adolescence and teenage years it would peak and trough. My cousin would disappear and reappear. Another older cousin, bringing his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant during the Celtic Tiger years, was shocked to see my cousin begging by the door. My cousin would come home to my aunt’s house and litter the floor of his childhood bedroom with needles. He’d get into Coolmine, leave again. He’d spend months on a waiting list to get on a methadone programme. In an attempt to create some air of normality, his dad would bring him golfing – golfing – until one day he went ballistic with a golf club, attacking my uncle on the course. At one point, he said to my aunt that every time he stopped using, the voices would come back and he would realise there was no point to it, no point to his life. He got clean for a while, but had another episode, climbing onto the roof of the building he lived in in Rathmines, until the gardaí forcibly removed him. The news was never good. I am not sure exactly what my cousin’s mental health issues were – ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’ were mentioned, but I don’t know if any formal diagnosis was ever made, or if the intertwined effects of mental illness and drug abuse were ever effectively unpicked by any professional in a position to really help my cousin. In Ireland, heroin addicts are seen as an unfortunate public expression of an embarrassing private problem. We have failed them since the 1970s and we continue to fail them.

And then, when I was in my early twenties, my cousin got clean. He stayed clean for a year, then a year and a half. When I was twenty-three and doing my masters in UCD, he came back as a mature student to do his undergraduate degree. I ran into him often on campus. He looked healthy, his face clear, though he still had a tendency to stare into the distance above my head when he spoke to me. He was still into music and sometimes played guitar and sang at the open-mic nights where I would go to read poetry, although we always seemed to miss each other at these. They were always in pubs and he would come for his slot, wouldn’t hang around.

His Narcotics Anonymous group was across the road from the Abbey Theatre, where I had a part-time and then a full-time job as my masters drew to a close. Sometimes I would get phone calls from the staff in the foyer to tell me he was there. Inevitably, he would arrive just before I had a meeting or just as I was about to leave the building. I was a nobody in the organisation and my time wasn’t my own.

‘Shit,’ I’d say, ‘I can’t go for a coffee now – but when will you be around again? Let me know and I’ll make sure I’m free.’ I didn’t mention the NA meetings, but I figured he had some sense of when he planned to attend.

‘Dunno, dunno . . .’ he’d trail off. I’d make sure, again, that he had my mobile number, tell him to text me, tell me when he’d be in town.

I always looked out for him in the O’Brien’s sandwich bar beside the Methodist Church, where the NA meetings were held. People would sit there with their sponsors and I’d try not to listen to their conversations, where violence and the palpable presence of Jesus were discussed with a weird, wired lucidity. These were people seeking clarity and finding it in the strangest places on the thorny road to recovery. They clung to damaging and damaged illusions. Jesus spurred their actions, whether that was saying no to a drink or drugs or, in one instance I overheard, breaking a woman’s wrist.

My masters finished, but my cousin had another year of college left. His visits to the Abbey foyer became more frequent, but he wasn’t looking for me. A colleague who worked in the box office was on his course. One night my cousin went to a party in the shared house where this guy lived and left his amp behind. The amp went missing. He decided my colleague was responsible, even though my colleague told me he had no recollection of the amp or anyone taking it; there were a lot of people he didn’t know at the party. My cousin called in again and again, asking the same questions, stuck in some strange loop. He was obviously distressed, but one day he started making threats. When he was asked to leave, he told them to call me. I was at an off-site meeting. When I got back I had a panicked message from my colleague and an understandably icy message from his manager.

I went to the box office and apologised to the staff. I told them that my cousin wasn’t well, but that if he was being threatening, not to hesitate to call security on my account.

Due to the number of drug addicts who had been coming in to shoot up in the toilets in the foyer, a round-the-clock security guard was brought in. My cousin came to the door a few times, but didn’t enter.

My aunt rang my mother, distraught, to tell her my cousin’s version of the conspiracy to steal his amp. She had to believe him.

My cousin stopped getting in touch. He was using again.

*

Mark Lanegan’s autobiography, Sing Backwards and Weep, is a fascinating anatomy of drug addiction. There is a fair amount of macho rock ’n’ roll bullshit in it, but this in its way is symptomatic of the mentality of the addict. At its best it brings home to the reader the sheer, inexhaustible ingenuity of the addict – how despite physical and mental decline they will go to any length to get the next fix. One of the bleakest but funniest chapters details Lanegan’s repeated trips from a hotel into the middle of Amsterdam in the dead of night, in winter, to try and score, and his final, hysterical threatening of a beleaguered tour-merchandise guy for money after he’s sold some fake heroin. Lanegan is attacked, abused, arrested over the course of the book. He also attacks, abuses and verbally excoriates his many enemies, including rekindling a mid-nineties feud with Liam Gallagher, who has recently been more than eager to offer rejoinders on Twitter. The addict may move on, but the tunnel vision and the sense of victimhood remain. Not that Lanegan doesn’t have reason to feel like a victim – a product of a severely dysfunctional home, there is something disarmingly honest in his quest for self-destruction that manages to sidestep self-pity into a realm far more bleak and hopeless. The fact that he survived is a testament to his doggedness in all his pursuits rather than any real sense of revelation or the receipt of any kind of grace. There is no moment where he looks at the sun rising over the sea and becomes imbued with a sense of purpose: you must change your life. A cursed son of a cursed generation, his biography lists the many friends and enemies cut down by addiction during his own chaotic years – Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Kristen Pfaff. All these years later, his friends are still killing themselves, with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and TV chef Anthony Bourdain recent losses – two men who had seemed likely survivors. Lanegan doesn’t care to offer pop-psychology insights into what caused the implosion of his peer group, but the violence of his own upbringing and the hopeless nature of even his happier memories of his musician friends in their youth speaks volumes about the society which shaped them. I watched a long interview with Lanegan recently on YouTube, part of a series called ‘Come to Where I’m From’, where his bewilderment at the continuing death of his friends is clear. Nothing in his experience of addiction and recovery has taught him why he is alive and they aren’t. The honesty of this feels important.

*

When I was twenty-four, after six months of splitting our time between different shared houses, I moved in with the quiet boy with the long, blonde hair. We lived in Ballybough and I worked long days at the Abbey while he studied as a mature student and worked nights in an off-licence. Most weekends, we’d walk to the Botanic Gardens, stopping at the Drumcondra end of Clonliffe Road to get a coffee. It was around here that we’d often run into my cousin. He had a flat somewhere in Drumcondra; we never found out exactly where. He took to my partner, who is the kind of man other men seem to like. My cousin would talk about his plans to go back and finish college. Sometimes months would go by between our encounters, but the plans were always the same. He seemed to have stepped out of time. His stare was more distant, fixed on a point ever further away. The skin on his face was puffy, his hands cramped and arthritic. He looked older than his thirty-something years and sometimes he spoke so softly it was hard to hear him. His sentences meandered. We’d make vague plans to meet up; we never did. He was non-committal about his phone number, about exactly where he lived.

*

Almost every year, Mark Lanegan plays Dublin, usually around December. Me and my partner always go. We’ve seen him at the Electric Picnic, at Longitude, in Glasgow during a time spent living in Scotland, and then more recently at the Academy and the Button Factory. The crowd is a mix of older grunge survivors and younger long-haired boys wearing Nirvana T-shirts (they still exist). Lanegan stands at the mic, back stiff from an old injury, and offers not a word of banter to the crowd. Sometimes the quality of his backing musicians is not to his taste and he scowls at them. But he performs his songs with a serious and committed intensity, and it’s always a good night. One of his gigs is my first night out after having my first baby, and another is the last night out I have before the coronavirus pandemic hits and I get pregnant with my second.

My favourite of his solo albums is Field Songs, from 2001. There’s an eclecticism to the record, an unforced simplicity to the blues-chord progressions and sparse arrangements. It has the wonderfully witty ‘Don’t Forget Me’ and the soothing, yearning ‘Kimiko’s Dream House’, on which Lanegan allows us a rare glimpse of his gentler mid-range vocals. But my favourite song on the album is ‘Resurrection Song’, a study of how days spent in recovery become a never-ending spiral, the repeating vocal round haunting the song in real time.

Mark Lanegan was rescued by Courtney Love, who dropped a flyer for a musicians’ and artists’ rehab programme into a pawn shop he frequented while living as a street addict. She paid for the programme, arranged for clothing to be brought there for him and for his flight to LA. He decided to go not because he wanted to get clean, but because both the police and a local dealer were after him and he had to leave Seattle. In one disturbing section of the book, he helps Courtney to inject at a festival before her horrified minders descend and carry her away. The day of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, he ignores his friend’s calls because he doesn’t feel like bringing him drugs. Nevertheless, he is rescued by a deus ex machina – the kindness of an equally troubled woman whom he avoids because he is so wrapped up in the grinding busy-work of addiction. It is this aspect of his story – the sudden rescue – that sets it apart from that of the average addict; that shifts it into the realm of fairy tale.

*

In 2015, my cousin calls for an ambulance and tells them that he can’t breathe. ‘I feel that I am going to die,’ he says.

Three days later his mother calls his father because my cousin hasn’t been answering his phone. My uncle goes to his flat to check on him. His body is lying just inside the door.

His phone records show his calls to the emergency services. No one can understand why the ambulance hadn’t arrived. My uncle had to listen back to the recording of his call with the gardaí as a precursor to the inquest. ‘I feel that I am going to die.’

I think of myself as a child prattling my nonsense to this kind man, and I think of him having to listen to his son begging for help in his dying moments.

The ambulance had arrived twelve minutes after the call was made, but the control staff hadn’t known which flat my cousin was in. There were sixteen doors to choose from. They called my cousin again and he said he was coming downstairs. A passing person with a head injury approached the ambulance men, asking for help. My cousin had not yet appeared. The ambulance men said they rang all sixteen doorbells but no one answered. They weighed up the options of having to ‘break down sixteen doors’ and decided it was not worth it.

They decided my cousin was probably fine, even though he hadn’t appeared, because he had answered his phone. They took the passer-by with the head trauma to hospital instead. My cousin lay dead inside the door of his flat for three days.

My aunt said initially it couldn’t have been a heroin overdose; he was on methadone, he was getting clean, things were getting better for him. The toxicology report showed a mixture of drugs, including heroin. I think of how many times my aunt opened her home to him, how many times she fought his corner. Doubt and cynicism are a luxury for those of us who don’t have to watch their children suffer. Sometimes the truth helps no one.

My cousin’s Facebook page still exists, five years after his death. Friends post short messages on his birthday every year: ‘RIP, bud’; ‘I hope u found peace at last’. His sister, the only one of my aunt and uncle’s three children still living, posts childhood photos of them together. The online comments under the news reports of my cousin’s death were unbearably cruel.

Sometimes it’s as if people become ghosts before they’re fully gone. We continue to make our plans but some fundamental connection has already been broken. I think of mine and my cousin’s last encounters like this. Something in the haze of his late existence has coated those memories already. His Facebook profile picture is a grainy red-hued image of him playing his guitar at the Monday Echo, downstairs in the International Bar. I was there that night, had been the featured poet, while he’d come for the open-mic slot that started later in the evening. I had messaged him that I’d be there, but he couldn’t make it until late, and I’d had work to get to in the morning. We missed each other again.

‘Resurrection Song’ was first published in Issue One of Tolka (May 2021). Issue One is now sold out but may still be available from certain stockists. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.

Jessica Traynor is a poet, creative writing teacher and dramaturg from Dublin. Her latest poetry collection, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022.