Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

The other story of how they met comes from Layne’s friend Sally Pricer Portillo, who says she was the one who introduced them. Pricer Portillo was at a party the first time she met Demri. Pricer Portillo isn’t certain, but she thinks Demri knew about her friendship with Layne. “My feeling on it—I mean, I can’t say for sure—is that she knew that we palled around together: I was always with him, he was always with me, I was always at Music Bank.” Demri asked her, “Tell me a little bit about Layne. Will you introduce me to Layne?”

Another time, Pricer Portillo and Demri were out in Pioneer Square, when Demri asked, “Will you please invite me to this party, because I know he’s gonna be there, and I want to hang out.” Pricer Portillo agreed to bring her along. At the time, Layne was twenty-one or had just turned twenty-one. Demri would have been eighteen or nineteen—too young to get into bars, as Pricer Portillo recalled. Based on Layne’s age and birth date of August 22, this would have happened in the late summer or early fall of 1988, but Demri may have already been in the picture before that. Regarding the women Layne had been with or dated before, Pricer Portillo says, “No one ever was serious until it came to Demri, and then when it came to Demri, it was all about Demri, which I was happy about because that got rid of some of the riffraff.”

Not long after, Demri asked Austin to come to her apartment north of Seattle and give two friends—Layne and Sean—a ride into the city. This was the first time Austin met Layne. “I knew they were hanging out,” Austin recalled. “Layne was very respectful. I don’t think I formed a first impression at the time. These were two guys who I picked up that are burned out. They’ve probably been partying all night long. They get in my car, and we drive to Seattle. They tell me where to go, and I let them out.” Demri saw Layne’s talent immediately and did not hesitate to say so. “Mom, Layne’s going to be a star,” she told Austin.

Austin was skeptical, although she didn’t say it out loud. “I’ve known a lot of musicians who were going to be stars, and just a few who actually made it.” She humored her daughter: “‘Well, that’d be nice,’ ‘I hope he is,’ things like that.” The first time Austin ever saw Layne perform was at the Pain in the Grass concert at Seattle Center in 1990. Austin brought along Demri’s brothers—who were sixteen, ten, and eight at the time—and they wound up becoming part of the show. “Layne took them up onstage, and they were so thrilled.”

“They loved their sister and they loved Layne. These boys were little—he’s giving them piggyback rides, they’re playing. Layne was a funny guy. He was a sweetheart.”

“The two of them together, before drugs, were always laughing. They were always happy,” Austin says of this period. “They’d go to clubs. They would go see their friends.”

According to Darrell Vernon, there was a joke going around the Music Bank at about the time they started dating—that Layne had found the woman of his dreams with the body of a twelve-year-old boy, a reference to Demri’s small stature. According to her mother, Demri was barely five feet tall and never weighed more than a hundred pounds. Though they didn’t have much in terms of money or possessions, both of them were generous. During Thanksgiving of 1988, David Ballenger said several girls showed up and brought Layne a huge dinner, but that nobody had brought him anything. Layne and Demri shared their dinner with him. On another occasion, Ballenger asked Layne to take him shopping for nice clothes, because Layne was a good dresser. Layne took him to a mall in Bellevue, where Ballenger spent about five hundred dollars. He still has the Capezio shoes and Armani clothes from that shopping spree. Ballenger had a folding metal chair in his office at the Music Bank, which Layne decorated with Jackson Pollock–style splotches of paint. Ballenger was annoyed that it took so long to dry, but he still has the chair.

Jamie Elmer, who was about ten years old at the time, visited the band at their rehearsal room. “I remember sitting on the couch with the girlfriends or the wannabe girlfriends at the time and watching them practice. I mean, it was fun for me. I was the little tagalong sister that got to see a whole world most people my age didn’t get to see,” she said. “I remember [Jerry, Mike, and Sean] being like older brothers to me in the best sense of the term. They were taking me under their wing, and I never felt like I was a bother. They were always cool with me hanging out or watching, and were always really nice to me. Growing up, to me it felt like they were extended family. They felt like … siblings that were part of our family.”

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