Me in 1993, near the Space Needle in Seattle, in my old neighborhood. It was then called the Regrade and is now called Belltown – Photo by LQ – Owned by the author
I had just left my job at the Off Ramp Cafe and Lounge, an infamous club that had helped the early 1990s Seattle music scene rise, explode, and burn out all in a very short period of years.
There at that venue, I had formed a family with a pack of fantastic long-haired, tattooed, and pierced young miscreants. We partied late into the morning, made music and art when we came out of our haze, and saw as many bands as humanly possible under the damp, gray skies of the Northwest.
Bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden had already become arena-rock-huge in 1993. But many brilliant musicians and bands of the scene were still performing every night around the city. I was one of them. But record labels were moving on, and Boeing and Microsoft were moving in.
As the scene began to crumble that spring, I booked a flight to Amsterdam, expecting to find new adventures and new opportunities as a young musician. I wanted more marvelous music, curvaceous women, and cavernous late nights.
But buried beneath my pretentious and naive desire for experience at my tender age of twenty was a mental and emotional fragility. That spring, my mind was starting to crack apart, and I wasn’t fully aware of my cracks splitting at the seams more and more each day.
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In 1990, I had escaped the Midwest a week after I turned eighteen, then I studied for nine months at the University of Oregon in Track Town and hated it. Afterward, I went to Alaska and worked on the docks for the summer. Then, I made Seattle my home and worked at Pike Place Market as a barista. It was a seasonal gig, so when it ended, I ended up down in the Florida Keys.
I hitchhiked to Key West and spent the winter there. That’s where I learned to bartend and how I later found myself behind the bar at the Off Ramp at the age of nineteen during the roaring and raucous, beautifully punk rock, debaucherously artistic, and brilliantly self-destructive early ‘90s music scene.
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My plane from Miami landed in Seattle on the same night that the West Coast was set on fire during the Rodney King riots. It was a night of necessary action for the rampant racism in the U.S, but I was not a part of it. Instead, I was on LSD and watched the downtown blaze while standing on Capitol Hill. But it was fuel. A conflagration that only served to ignite my inner fire to create music.
The morning afterward, I was awakened from the floor of poet Steven Jesse Bernstein’s office by his girlfriend. She asked me to leave because Jesse had committed suicide the previous year, and I didn’t know I was in a holy space. I was sleeping in his well-deserved shrine. So, I immediately left out of respect and because I was a fan of his work.
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Within days, I procured a job at the Off Ramp, first as a security guard and floor scrubber, then as a bartender. It was a miraculous time of drugs, drink, and all forms of music. Rock, punk, metal, grunge, hip hop, acoustic, jazz, instrumental, noise, industrial, goth. It was happening, and everyone worked together. There was no musical segregation in Seattle then.
The music was surrounded and suffused with the alternative literature, vintage fashion, and street art of the time. And piles of beautifully bruised young adults with long ’70s hair, Bettie Page bangs, baby doll dresses, combat boots, Doc Martens, black leather jackets, tattoos, and body piercings created all of it. I was one of them, and it was home.
When near-prehistorically strummed guitars, scratched records, and battered drums were our soundtrack, I looked for my soul in the art, music, fashion, and fornicating we did. And I found it mirrored in the rhythms, melodies, words, body art, and graffiti of the time.
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Sadly, the scene began to die in the spring of 1993, and I decided to look for a new scene across the Atlantic. I was a scene-chaser, untethered by anything except what lurked inside me. My unseen nightmare.
That March, I booked a one-way ticket to Holland. I expected to find another gig at a club or bar, and, hopefully, playing music. I would worry about making my way back to the States later.
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A week before my scheduled flight on April 1st, I went mountain biking just outside Seattle with my buddy, Bob, the drummer for Soul Museum. On a mountainside, we stopped to take turns on a makeshift rope swing that was tied from a branch that hung over a rapidly descending cliff.
I grabbed the rope and decided to give myself an extra boost and swing out wide in a circle, which was a terrible idea. By circling out, my body swung out and then back toward the tree the rope was tied to, rather than straight out and back.
It all happened quickly. When I saw that I’d need to collide with the tree or drop to my death down the ravine, I accepted my fate, turned my body, and let it smash into the giant cedar. My head snapped back into it. It knocked me out, and I fell fifteen feet. Luckily, I slid to a stop on the steep mountainside and momentarily lost consciousness.
When I regained awareness, I heard Bob calling, “Gentry, bro! You all right?! You all right, man!?”
I called up weakly, “Yeah, bro. I’m good. Coming up.”
After I gathered my senses and climbed out of the steep ravine, Bob and I sat down next to each other near the ridge and laughed about my choice to circle-swing.
Then, Bob asked me, “You excited about your trip to Amsterdam next week?”
I said, “I’m not going to Amsterdam next week, Bob.”
I had no memory of my flight happening in six days.
Then, I went black.
Photo by Cherry Laithang
The next two days were a blur between my apartment and the emergency room.
During my amnesiac state, I felt like I was on Gilligan’s Island in a dream sequence.
During that time, I kept repeating, “I feel like I’m Gilligan.” Then, I would ask:
“Where’s Bob?”
“Where’s my backpack?”
“When am I going to Europe?”
It happened on repeat for 48 hours.
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After those two days, my amnesia lessened, I began to have a continuous string of consciousness, and my concussion got better.
There was a going-away party for me where I felt very out of sorts, as if I was in a murky dream. It seemed like only moments after the party ended, my girlfriend and roommate were taking me to SeaTac airport early one morning in a haze of hangover, lack of sleep, and rising anxiety.
A leviathan was coming without my knowledge. So I boarded, and the plane took off bound for Boston and then Amsterdam.
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The domestic part of the flight east was fine. It was six hours to Boston, and when I landed, I called an old friend in Minneapolis. I boasted of my rock ’n’ roll adventures, hanging out with rock stars, back-stage antics, near-death experiences, and my European journey ahead.
Back on the plane again, we took off over the Atlantic Ocean, and I began to think. And think. And think. My thoughts didn’t stop.
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Having time to think was both a blessing and a curse. I had not given myself time to think for a while, so in the beginning, I mused about my misadventures. Soon, though, there were few blessings bestowed and only curses were cast.
My mind began as a stream. Then it was a river, flowing gently. Then rushing. Rushing over rocks and down waterfalls. Faster and faster until my mind became a cursed, raging river. A dangerous, seething rapids. And my emotions were being torn apart on the rocks.
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Thoughts came in one on top of another without any sense of direction or purpose. A chaotic machine gun of memories and feelings.
So many different names and then faces with names I’d forgotten. Women. So many memories of women. Hearts smashed. Doctors’ rooms. Abortions. Pennyroyal tea. Tubes. Fire. Pain. Piss. Eviction. Police. Lies. Handcuffs. Death. So many lies. Friendships eradicated. Loss. Screaming and fear. Violence. Broken glass. Broken everything.
I had no idea what was going on.
My heart wasn’t racing, and my breath wasn’t sped up. It was just my thoughts. My mind was a Speed Racer cartoon inside a horror movie watched in an empty, white room while snorting cocaine. Complete insanity. I realized I might be going crazy, so I rang the bell for the flight attendant.
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She came over and was very polite to the young man in his black leather motorcycle jacket, Doc Martens, long pointed goatee, and pale face that had seen little sun in a year. I may have looked like a silly rock star, or I was just playing the part. She didn’t care.
“What can I get you, sir?”
“Wild Turkey. Two bottles and a 7UP, please.”
“Absolutely, sir. Right away.”
My drink of choice. It’s an international flight, so it’s free. Fantastic. It seemed like the most logical way to quell my feverish mind, and the attendant had no qualms about giving it to me.
However, throwing back airplane bottles of 101-proof whiskey did nothing to ease my inner suffering. I ordered two more and two more and two more.
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Frantically looking around the plane, wondering what was going on, eyeing the sleeping passengers, I was wide awake and asking myself questions.
Why do they look so calm? Why am I flying to Amsterdam? Why am I leaving people I love?
I answered myself back.
Because you can’t go back. You burned too many bridges. You’re a liar, a cheat, a criminal, and a fucking conman.
Then, more memories would swim through my head. Charlotte and Lisa and strippers and pills. Hash browns and Bloody Marys and GG Allin and Rage Against The Machine. A torrent of weirdness blew through my brain.
Ecstasy and music studios and dark bedrooms and blue-water bathtubs with naked women laughing. Port wine and police cars and little people and sirens. Pioneer Square and ice cream cocktails. Crucifixes and Buddhas. Egyptian scarabs and tear gas and Mudhoney and madnesses that doubled over each other.
Photo by Jeremy Perkins
I came to. I’d finally passed out. Now, I had a headache the size of a small moon. I had managed to throw back at least ten airplane bottles of strong whiskey during my trip across the sea, finally passing out and waking up at Schiphol airport on the taxiway.
Outside the plane, I was met by Ruari, an old British friend, who had come over for a holiday to meet me. He had no idea what was going on inside my brain; he just wanted to smoke some hashish.
We took the train into the city and walked out of the station into the bustle of Amsterdam. It was a city I would later call a home, but not that day. That day it was a hell.
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The cold and rain bristled my skin, and every person I saw drew me in. Animal-shaped faces in a convex lens, using languages that grunted out like woodland creatures. The scowl of a homeless man magnetized me, and he leered in, asking me for money in five different languages, all spoken in a row.
Near the homeless man’s corner, we settled into a cafe and ordered some hash. At first puff, I knew something was wrong; I couldn’t swallow. Drinking beer or water was impossible, and I knew we had to go to the emergency room. My second emergency room in two countries in one week.
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At the Dutch emergency room, the nurses explained I had pneumonia and gave me pills. My next five nights of insomnia and panic were mixed with fear, fever, and an inability to swallow. This should have sent me home with a one-way ticket back to Seattle, but I never bought that ticket.
I had no understanding of what a panic attack was, but I’d been having them during my flight and my illness. Despite my nightmare, I made it through those hard, cold nights in Holland and took a ferry with Ruari to Newcastle in Northern England. From there, we hitchhiked to Glasgow, Scotland, in the mid-April rain.
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It was not until I was in Prague several months later that I began to think I was dying. The extreme months of travel and what followed put me on the road to discovery.
My life changed after that first panic attack on a one-way flight to Amsterdam from Seattle in the spring of 1993. I wasn’t aware at the time, but my dark plunge into what felt like insanity began my road to mental health, calm, and well-being.
My long road to becoming mentally healthy and spiritually aware had begun.