Mark Lanegan - Devil in a Coma

Dont wake me, Im sleeping

Idle hands are the devils workshop. Mark could not even be hindered by near death. The way I saw it, he bailed on America for literal greener pastures as a survival technique mentally, physically and spiritually, and presumably with the luck of the Irish. An existential global crisis was emerging with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and little did any of us know you couldnt escape it.

Mark is a prolific fellow. And anyone who understands artists knows that this attribute comes at a cost. Devil in a Coma is a memoir of the Covid experience that goes off the rails several times into other shit those are his words.

He is a fighter and death came knocking. Imagine: the Kerry countryside backdrop with an internal hell emerging. Needless to say, he caught the wretched thing. A three-month journey with a third of it being spent unconscious. The havoc a sucker punch to your being, oxygen, blood, failure, panic, insomnia, hallu-cinations, delusions, how real the dream is, tripping on a sick astral plane in the nether. This virus is also a disease of the brain which, if overactive, will naturally send you to far-off places, all while taking your breath away. It attacks tenfold. He was intubated, deaf, alone, and slipping away. There were end-of-life talks, a potential tracheotomy for one of the greatest voices of all time a universal cruelty. A recollection that is factual, fragmented, cursed and triumphant, and whose revival enriches the soul.

Wesley Eisold

I had been feeling weak and sick for a few days and then woke up one morning completely deaf. My equilibrium shaky, and my mind in a sur-real psychedelic dream-state, I lost my footing at the top of the stairs. Head over heels over head, I knocked myself out on the windowsill as I crashed down the narrow staircase at my house. Bang. My wife was out horseback riding for the day, and I came to hours later still unable to hear a thing, unable to move, two huge opened welts on my head, and my knee not supporting any weight.

For two days I tried to get from stairwell to couch, with no success. I could not move, nor could my wife support my two-hundred-pound body, so I lay suffering on some blankets on the hard floor for forty-eight hours. My ribs were cracked, my spine bruised, battered and sore, and my already chronically messed-up knee gone again, as if some tendons were ripped or a ligament severed. My leg was useless. Every attempted breath was a battle, no matter how hard I tried to take a natural one. Though I refused to go to hospital my wife finally called an ambulance behind my back and I was wheeled out of my yard on a gurney. I eventually ended up in intensive care, unable to draw oxygen, and was diagnosed with some exotic new strain of the coronavirus for which there was no cure, of course. I was put into a medically induced coma, none of which I remembered.

Six weeks later and still in the ICU, three-thirty a.m., wide-ass awake now, raw as fuck, still fighting for air. Wiped out from severe insomnia and the twin kicks to the nuts that were the virus and my injuries, I started wishing I were still in my medical blackout. It was beyond evident that as much as I craved some temporary oblivion, the woefully inadequate amounts of Seroquel, Xanax and OxyContin I was being given were not going to put me down for more than a few minutes at a time probably since Id been self-administering elephant-sized doses of the same shit on and off for years. I was a specialist at finding the doctors that would willingly write scripts for nearly anything I wanted, working psychiatric clinics, urgent care facilities and your average general practitioners and dentists. In California you couldnt throw a rock without hitting a medical facility. At the same time I cultivated a large circle of shady Craigslist amateur pharmacists who filled in the days between my legal doses with bottles of black market pills. To me it was second nature to eat tablets like candy and Id been doing it so long Id forgotten what they actually felt like unless I was caught without for a time and then started again. And, of course, it never occurred to me that there might come a time when I would legitimately need some. The myopia that largely dogged me my entire life kept me rooted in the here and now, and hardly anything else ever crossed my mind, especially if it was to take place in some far-off distant future never-never land. Such places did not exist in my limited scope of reality.

The older dude, Dennis, one of my three roommates, groaned and rolled around, tugging uncomfortably on his IV. Nobody was happy here, I could tell you that much. I was intubated, a breathing tube down my throat, for the first full three weeks after being dumped at the hospital by the ambulance workers that had rolled my damaged body on a stretcher through my front garden. They had put me in the back of the vehicle where I wheezed and fought to take a proper breath of air to no avail.

Now, a month later, having been visited by nothing but bizarre dreams, strange visions, shadowy darkness, untrustworthy memories and recurring hallucinations, all hallmarks of near-death experiences, I was conscious again. Still in intensive care, catheter shoved up my dick, every attempt at taking a deep breath even a yawn met with the unwelcome sensation of being slammed in the chest with a twenty-pound sledgehammer. Apparently my light had almost gone out permanently more than once, according to the doctors and nurses. I was asked three times a day if I knew where I was and rarely gave a correct answer. Sometimes I felt as though I were pulling steel high up on the skeleton of a stage, taking down one long, round, metal ceiling pole while standing on an identical one twenty feet off the ground. Or Id be driving miles to deliver drugs to someone in another city, or dismantling a stolen car after midnight for parts to sell or trade. Sometimes Id be boxing potatoes and stacking them on pallets in the spud factory or using metal hooks to buck hay bales onto a tractor under the intense eastern Washington summer sun, or Id be drunkenly cooking pancake and egg breakfasts in a busy restaurant after drinking and carousing all night; a few of the activities among many I had participated in in my youth. At times I felt I were on a tour bus in the States or the UK, and I remember thinking I was on a train, travelling through Australia for a while. China, the Middle East, the plains of Canada, and where I had grown up in the Pacific Northwest were all places I imagined I was holding court amongst the damned. I had no idea where these delusions came from but they were ever-present.

I was slightly aware as I came to that I was hooked up to medical equipment, but it felt as though the rooms where I lay were always radically different, always changing. A house, a backstage somewhere, etc., and while the rooms were forever different, the view out the window was always the same. In reality I was in hospital twenty minutes from my home in County Kerry, Ireland, and I didnt realise the view in my dream was the sight out of the window in the hospital room.

One night I dreamt I was living in a large, windowless basement apartment off a rain-wet main drag in Seattle with several of my ex-girlfriends and ex-wives, many of whom detested me in real life, all in harmony with each other, and I felt a peace come over me. Another night I dreamt I was back at my former home in California, a place I always swore Id never leave, magically flying above the fruit trees with my beloved little dog in my arms, pulling fragrant apples off the treetops and feeding them to him as he licked my face just as he had the day he died and broke my heart. I woke up from that one crying, with my shirt soaked in tears of despair.