Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [111]
That’s the day I came home and found him.
DAVID DUET I saw Andy that day, at the Denny Street House. There was a drug dealer that lived there. I saw him copping. That was really weird. He was one of those people you did not expect.
MIKE STARR That day I walked into Kelly Curtis’s basement, and Andy was there. I said, “What’s up Andy? How ya doin’?”
“I got 40 days clean, man.”
I was like, “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Clean off heroin.”
I was like, “What?” Back then, I didn’t know anybody that ever did heroin. Then he goes, “Can you give me a ride home?” I gave him a ride, and we passed his apartment by about three blocks and he goes, “Just drop me off right here.” I dropped him off, and he went up to this Mexican guy when he got out.
GREG GILMORE Jeff and I and Kelly were out to dinner with a prospective tour manager. Kelly had called Andy about coming, but Andy, apparently with a froggy voice, said he wasn’t feeling very well.
XANA LA FUENTE Andrew was supposed to meet that night with the guy that was supposed to be his chaperone on the road. He called Kelly and said, “I’m sick,” and he said, “Xana is going to think I did drugs.” And Kelly said, “Did you?” He said, “No.” Well, he was lying.
KELLY CURTIS We had just had dinner with the tour manager that we were gonna hire. I went home and there was a note on my door from my then-wife Peggy that said, “Andy’s in trouble. He’s at Harborview.” I had just left Jeff, and I knew where he was, at a bar downtown, so I drove back down there and yelled at him, and he got a couple of the guys, and we all showed up at Harborview, and Andy was in a fuckin’ coma.
XANA LA FUENTE I just happened to have a work meeting that night, and my boss was really pissed off at everybody; there was stealing going on at the store. Two coworkers asked me if I could drive them home, and I had to take them way past my apartment.
When I got home, Andy was on the bed facedown unconscious, so I called 911 and they were trying to tell me how to give CPR. I tried, but they got there pretty fast. When they got there, they had me sign this paper. They pronounced him dead at the scene, but they told me to go to the hospital, so I went to the hospital—and then he was alive again. He was in a coma, and he immediately looked totally different. He was swelled up like a balloon, unrecognizable, and all his organs just started to shut down, his brain wouldn’t stop swelling.
That work meeting was about 30 or 40 minutes, and then taking my coworkers home was probably another 30 to 40 minutes. The nurse at the hospital said if I would have been home 10 minutes sooner …
GREG GILMORE When me and Jeff went in to see him, it was brutal. Andy had not been on the respirator very long. If you have ever seen someone on a respirator, in the beginning it’s very unnatural. After a while your body seems to relax into the rhythm of it so it doesn’t look so freakish, but at that point it was still very mechanical. It just makes someone look more dead.
REGAN HAGAR I went down immediately with my girlfriend, now my wife. Andy looked really bad. His hair was really messy. My wife had a brush, and we brushed his hair out because there was a lot of people gathering and people coming in, and I remember being mad at people for letting him look like this. It seems so stupid now. I was concerned about Andy and how people perceived him.
There were a bunch of people there that were friends of friends. It wasn’t very family to me. I remember going down a hall and finding Brian Wood, who was going through the same kind of thing. He was very angry. It was frustrating. Actually, like three people had overdosed that weekend, so there were hangers-on around for other people, too. It was a total scene.
BENJAMIN REW My keyboard player from my band at the time, Sleepy Hollow, had also OD’d that same night, potentially off the same stuff. It was the first time that Billy had ever shot up heroin; he ended up being in a coma for four and a half months at Harborview,