“He seemed tired, very tired, like he finished two forty-hour workweeks with no days off kind of tired.” He also remembered Layne smelled bad.
Mike Korjenek, a waterproofing-company employee, recalled seeing Layne twice at the Rainbow Tavern, a bar that was a less-than-five-minute walk from Layne’s building at the time. “He would hang out and sit in the corner” by himself in the late afternoon. He thinks this was in late 2001 or early 2002. Although Korjenek said other people spotted him at the bar during this period, calling him a regular would not be accurate.
“He looked ghostly. He looked very emaciated,” Korjenek said. “I remember us thinking that we shouldn’t be gawking at him.” Despite his appearance, he was still recognizable. Layne was sitting in a booth by himself about thirty feet away, slightly hunched over and looking downward, but not asleep.
An employee at a local comic book store, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, said Layne would come in the store “semiregularly” between 2000 and 2002. The owner at the time told him, “That’s Layne Staley. He’ll spend a lot of money, so might as well stay open late for him.”
“He’d kind of wander around, look at stuff, leave stuff all over the store, every now and then knock stuff over. No big deal,” the employee said. “He looked pretty high. He was always kinda out there. So I figured he was just wandering around and go, ‘Oh, let’s look at this stuff!’”
According to the employee, Layne would typically buy comic books and action figures and paid with cash, but he could not recall what specifically Layne would buy, only that the selections were random. “Whatever caught his eye; there was no normal pattern,” he said. Layne had people with him when he came to the store. “There were usually a couple of people with him. They would kind of prop him up and help with him a lot.” He did not know who they were. The last time he saw Layne was in February or March 2002.
Layne went to Jim Elmer’s home in Bellevue in Christmas of 2000 or 2001 to spend the holidays with his family. There was a minor snag—he showed up one or two days late.
“He was funny,” Jamie Elmer recalled of this holiday. “For him to show up, and get himself together enough to show up and be out, and be in front of the family—I don’t know what it was like for him to mentally … go through that process. But when he did show up and was out and about, he was funny and on his game, and sweet, and just like I remember him to be.”
“I remember he arrived with bags of little Christmas presents—some stuff that he had bought for us, and some stuff that he made, like little craft projects that he had made for us with our names on them. He looked sick, but his mood and his energy and his whole disposition was as I remember him to be.” Jamie never saw him again.
A major family milestone happened in early 2002: Liz had given birth to her first child. Around Valentine’s Day 2002, Layne went to Jim Elmer’s home to meet his nephew, Oscar. He brought a camcorder for the occasion, although Jim doesn’t recall if he actually filmed anything that day.
“We hadn’t seen Layne for a while, and he looked pretty good. He certainly was shy about his teeth issue, but he looked good, and you could tell that he had a little spark in his eyes when he saw Oscar, because he hadn’t been through this before,” Jim said. “So it was kind of like he knows what life is and he knows what the next generation is and he can be a part of it or maybe not be a part of it, but it was a touching moment, and it didn’t last very long, but it was touching [to] see that next generation come up.”
A photograph was taken of Layne holding Oscar. This is the last picture the family has of him and is the only image that is known to exist of him from the final months of his life. It is likely this was the last photograph of him ever taken.
Jamie Elmer—who was not there but has seen the photograph—said of Layne’s appearance, “He looked like I remember him looking when I had seen him last. He was smiling and looked like Layne, but he looked older than he really was, and he looked like he was sick. He did not look well. He looked sweet, and he looked happy.”
Despite his poor shape, Jim Elmer said that the general mood surrounding Layne’s visit was hopeful and optimistic. “He was smiling, he was talkative, so there’s a good sign that either he was doing better or he was trying to do better, that there’s a more hopeful thing as compared to ‘We’re going to lose him in two days’ or something like that. I didn’t get that feeling at all.” Jim, Nancy, Liz, and Greg never saw him alive again.
His mother told Greg Prato, “I think Layne knew he was dying, but he didn’t plan on it. He had just gotten his driver’s license renewed, and he was in the middle of art projects. I really expected that Layne would survive this ordeal.”4
In late March or early April, Toby Wright was in a Los Angeles studio producing Taproot’s sophomore album Welcome. The band had written an instrumental song with the working title “Spacey” because “it had a dark, spacey/ethereal feel to it,” Taproot bassist Phil Lipscomb wrote in an e-mail. Being fans of Layne, they wanted him to sing on it. According to Wright, “It was a really good song, and Layne really liked it, and he really wanted to sing on it. I had sent him some demos of it, and he said, ‘Yeah! Come on, let’s do this!’”
Wright said Layne’s mood seemed good during their phone conversations. “I think he was excited about the track, for sure, and honored that they wanted him to sing on it.” The members of Taproot wanted to be there for the recording session, but Layne requested Wright come alone, because “he wasn’t looking or feeling great, and he didn’t want to be seen.”
The plan was for Layne to “do his thing” and write his own lyrics, and then have Taproot singer Stephen Richards work off whatever Layne did. “Obviously anything he would’ve done would have been magical,” Richards said in a quote relayed by Lipscomb via e-mail.
Wright booked time at Robert Lang Studios in mid-April to record Layne’s vocals. Although he had set up Layne’s home recording studio, and Layne was known to prepare his vocals on scratch recordings, Wright doubts he recorded anything ahead of time. “I think it was all just in his head; it was going to be on the fly.”
Based on the available evidence, the last person to see Layne alive was Mike Starr. On April 4, 2002—Mike’s thirty-sixth birthday—they met at Layne’s apartment. “I’m sick,” Layne told his friend. In addition to the toll years of addiction had taken on his body, Layne also had hepatitis C, presumably the result of his intravenous drug use.
Layne was channel surfing and stumbled on the John Edward program Crossing Over, in which the psychic medium did readings for audience members. He turned to Mike and said, “Demri was here last night. I don’t give a fuck if you fucking believe me or not, dude. I’m telling you: Demri was here last night.” Demri’s mother, Kathleen Austin, heard this story from Mike Starr after Layne’s death and relayed this story. She said she believes her daughter was there that night “to be there with Layne as he’s doing his transition.”5 Jason Buttino, who also heard this story from Mike, corroborated Austin’s account of Mike and Layne’s conversation.
Mike, who was high on benzodiazepine, later said he was with Layne that day “trying to keep him alive” and offered to call 911. Layne refused and threatened to never speak to him again if he did. Layne got agitated, telling Mike he was too high. Layne would get mad at him when he took the drug. “You’re an idiot on these pills,” Layne told Mike.
Mike had had enough. “Fine, I’ll just leave,” he told Layne.
Layne, perhaps thinking he had made a mistake, said, “Not like this—don’t leave like this” or “Not like this. I can’t believe that.” Those would be his final words to his friend he had known for nearly fifteen years. Mike went to his mother’s house and blacked out in the basement. This final encounter would haunt him for years afterward.6