“Hey, do you go to AA meetings?” Layne asked her.
“No, I don’t. I know a lot of people that do. If you want, I could give you somebody’s number, a cool person’s number if you need to do that,” she offered.
“How about I take your number?”
She gave Layne her phone number. While flattered by the attention, she wasn’t attracted to him, fully aware of his drug problem. She thought that maybe because of all the coincidences, that might have been a sign she was supposed to help him. She had the impression Layne was interested in her for companionship, not sex.
Layne began calling her right away. They lived a few blocks from each other and began talking on the phone and hanging out on a regular basis. She would go to Layne’s apartment to watch movies. Although she would often spend the night and they would sleep in his bed, she said nothing sexual ever happened—she never even kissed him.
“His desire to want to spend time with me without wanting anything but some companionship was nice. Being invited into his rather isolated, private world was intriguing, to say the least. That, coupled with a fantasy that he might get over his addiction, or that I could play a part in him getting over his addiction, was intriguing and even exciting. He was a beautiful person under all of that sickness. But I wasn’t delusional, and I wasn’t about to express these thoughts to him because I guess I had decided rather quickly that ‘to hope’ would be ‘to be disappointed.’ So I remained rather ‘cool’ during our time spent together.”1
There were visible signs of his drug problem at home, although Layne never offered her any. In the middle of watching movies, Layne would excuse himself to go to the bathroom and stay in there. “Eventually, he’d come out. We’d hang out, talk, watch movies, and then he’d go back into the bathroom again.”
Layne mentioned the subject of drugs to her twice. During one of the first times she came over, they were watching TV in his bedroom. Layne was sitting on the floor; Ahern-Crane was on the bed. Layne looked up at her and said, “Hey, I want you to know I’m not going to be like this forever. I want to have a normal life, a good life. I want to get married, I want to have kids.”
Ahern-Crane was surprised. “Okay, that’s good,” was her only response. “Of course I hoped he would have a normal, happy life some day. I want that for anyone. But there was no evidence anywhere that suggested he was serious at that moment.”
“I thought what he said was sweet, I was flattered because I knew he was saying for my benefit … It was his way of saying to me, ‘I like you.’ ‘If you hang out for a while, I might be able to kick this with your support.’ ‘Give me a reason to stop doing drugs.’ That is what his words meant—at least to some degree. But how can you take someone so loaded on drugs very seriously? He may have thought that in that moment, and he may have considered it from time to time—but the fact is, just as quickly, he was back in the bathroom trying to find a vein.”
“I found his statement to be simultaneously sweet, flattering, hopeful, and manipulating at the same time.” The second time also happened at his apartment. He invited her into the bathroom, where his music equipment was set up. She walked in and saw Layne sitting on the windowsill. He didn’t say anything, and the two started making small talk. She noticed several plastic bags on a table. She didn’t know what they were at the time, but years later, with the benefit of hindsight, she realized they were full of heroin.
“I think he invited me back there to see if maybe I wanted to get loaded, but he didn’t offer it,” she recalled. “When he called me into that room and the drugs were in there, I almost feel like that was a test that I passed.”
Sometimes Layne would play her Mad Season songs he was working on. When they went out, sometimes it was to watch a show by Johnny Bacolas’s band Second Coming. When Ahern-Crane slept over, she remembers hearing knocking on the door at random hours. “Hey, who’s here at one o’clock in the morning?” she asked Layne.
“Shhhh … Be quiet, don’t answer it,” he said.
“Layne said it could have been Demri needing a place to crash or wanting to get high. It could have been fans coming over with drugs,” she explained.
According to Johnny Bacolas, Demri was a semiregular visitor at the house. He declined to comment on any specifics of what happened between them during this period but described their relationship as on-again, off-again.
Though Ahern-Crane got a small glimpse of his drug use during this period, Layne’s friend Ron Holt heard and saw more, because of their previous friendship and because Holt was also using heroin at the time. They had a mutual dealer. Holt was a regular, but Layne got VIP treatment. Sometimes the dealer wouldn’t let Holt up. One time he heard Layne was at the dealer’s house. Holt sent word upstairs: “Tell him that Ron Holt’s here.” Layne told him to come up, gave him a big hug, and told the dealer Holt was to be respected. “Fucking Ron doesn’t wait,” he said. The two also had candid discussions about their drug habits, which Holt called “junkie talk.” Layne told Holt he was using three grams of heroin a day. Based on that, in addition to roughly the same amount of crack he was using, Holt estimated Layne was spending between $250 and $400 a day on drugs.
“Every time I saw Layne, I always told him how proud I was of him, and he always treated me like an authority figure. He always treated me like my work meant something,” Holt said. He tried to take advantage of that respect to convince him to kick drugs. “We were having a candid talk about heroin and stuff. I was on methadone at the time, and I was trying to talk him into stopping. He had this thing where he said if I wasn’t meant to be one, I wouldn’t be one.
“He got mad at me. ‘Don’t bring heroin up. If you’re not going to accept it, don’t try to talk to me about it. Don’t try to talk me out of it.’ That was a bummer to me.”
While tens of thousands of fans were rocking out at Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties, New York—a show Alice in Chains was supposed to perform at and at which, instead, Jerry joined Primus onstage for “Harold of the Rocks”—Layne went on a camping trip near Winthrop, a small town in central Washington. His goal for the trip: to kick heroin. Also on the trip were Johnny Bacolas and two other friends, Alex Hart and Ian Dalrimper. He would try and detox on his own in the wilderness.
“He was using alcohol to help him with the withdrawal symptoms. During that trip, he was very depressed. I’m sure it had a lot to do with the withdrawal, because he didn’t bring any heroin with him,” Bacolas explained. While on a beach along Lake Chelan at two in the morning, Layne broke down in tears, crying on Bacolas’s shoulder.
“I need help. Would you consider moving in with me and helping me with this? I don’t trust anyone, and I can’t do this on my own,” Layne told Bacolas.
There was a bigger issue: Layne was suicidal. Bacolas said Layne wanted to jump off a nearby bridge. “He was at a very low point and dope-sick. He wanted to die at that time. I believed him.”
Shortly after, Layne and Bacolas met up with Hart and Dalrimper and went on a late-night run to a Safeway. “I remember some kid was giving [Layne] shit in the Safeway,” Bacolas recalls. “And Layne just fucking hauls off and clocks the guy.” Layne’s friends grabbed him and ran out of the store before anyone called the police. They wound up driving into a parking lot packed with partying kids. With Layne riding shotgun, Bacolas parked the car next to a pickup truck that was blasting “No Excuses.” Bacolas doesn’t know if this was coincidental or not—there may have been gossip that Layne was in the area. There were three or four kids in the pickup, and another dozen or so standing around nearby gawking at the celebrity in their midst. “They were cranking the song, and everyone’s like ‘No way, that’s not Layne Staley.’” Layne couldn’t resist. “All of the sudden, Layne just starts belting out the chorus of ‘No Excuses’ and nails it,” Bacolas said. “Right when the chorus kicks in, he just belts it, one chorus, and that’s it. It just shut everybody up. There was no question that that’s him now.”