Some people need happy music to buoy their serotonin. “Make that two pieces of cheesecake, please.” With his reaper/angel rasp, Elliott Smith crooned those first syllables of “Speed Trials”: “He's pleased to meet you underneath the hearse/In the cathedral with the glass stained black/Singing sweet high notes that echo back/To destroy their master.” In a darkly absurd fugue state, I streamed the record in the fluorescent shadow of a Forever 21, ducking into the dimly lit faux opulence of the Cheesecake Factory. It was almost a Drake lyric.įor almost the entirety of my adult life, I have reflexively listened to Elliott Smith when beset by bleak vertigo. This could be my grandfather's last supper, and all he wanted to set his soul at ease was something easily procured next to the food court. So I found myself wandering around a Westfield mall in Woodland Hills, searching for a Cheesecake Factory, assaulted by mall perfume and shrill pop-punk.

I told him that I'd honor his name and make him proud. I told him that I'd think of him every time I stared in the mirror and saw his slightly sunken mahogany eyes in my sockets.

Scripture, poetry and drugs failed to offer solace.

Show me someone who handles death well and I'll show you the spiritually delusional or the clinically sociopathic. This was January, as I clanked back and forth from Chatsworth, listening to Elliott Smith's Either/Or on loop, lunging for the right words to comfort my grandfather in his half-conscious fog - finding none. But tremors of hope briefly wobbled when he opened his eyes, gingerly slid the oxygen mask to the left, and whispered for dessert at 3 p.m.

My grandfather's final request was a slice of cheesecake.įor those last two weeks, he painlessly withered away in his retirement home, refusing to eat, waiting to die.

Elliott smith either or cd