He took ballet and tap when he was 5 and 6, and when he was 7 he started hip-hop. When we got to Long Beach, in July of 2001, it had its own culture, which was very, very athletic.
I don’t know how my knees didn’t blow out. We would put it on really loud and dance right in the living room. At night, I would be so tired of being alone that we would just, like, rock James Brown for a half an hour before their father came home. We were insulated in our own little family, for better or for worse. We played and rolled around the house and did Play-Doh and painted and built with Legos and did Brio trains and watched a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine videos. Oskar was 2 when Gus was born, so it was mostly just me and these two little boys. I was lonely because I didn’t know many people in Allentown. Liza Womack: Gus was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in ’96. As the conversation gets heavier, she pets Taz with greater and greater intensity. But when she pores over events from his early life, she is like any parent of a troubled kid, trying to connect the dots between issues in his home and school lives to figure out what exactly went wrong. At times, speaking calmly and deliberately, she sounds more like a historian expounding on the details of her subject of expertise than a mother talking about her dead son. She rattles off Peep song titles like an obsessive fan and she co-directed his most recent video. Talking about Gus, who once called his mother his best friend, is something Womack is doing a lot of these days: There is a documentary about his life in the works, executive produced by arthouse legend and family friend Terrence Malick, alongside a number of posthumous Lil Peep releases she is helping to put together, including this month’s Come Over When You’re Sober Pt.
They split when Gus was 14 in interviews, he said he did not have a good relationship with his father after that. Womack moved to Long Island with her husband in 2001, when he got a job teaching at Hofstra University, and their two sons were children. As she talks, the sound of explosions seeps through the walls her elder son, Oskar, is upstairs playing video games. She describes how her mother taking her to anti-war marches as a girl led to her organizing against her elementary school’s segregation of boys and girls sports teams, laying out her family’s pedigree of protest. In her 50s now, Womack has the long hair of a folk singer. She says she was excited to drink out of it at first, but whoever made it left the handle hollow, so it burns too much to hold. Going into the cabinet, she grabs a mug adorned with clay breasts that she calls “the boob mug.” It was her son’s. She offers me a friend’s homemade pumpkin bread and tea as we sit down on the couch to talk. When we finish dinner, she puts the plates on the ground for Taz to lick clean. She puts two plates on the counter, beside crayon drawings by the first graders she teaches, various back issues of The New Yorker, and a cutout story about opioid abuse from a local newspaper. Womack is cooking chicken with a chimichurri sauce, along with rice and mushrooms. It’s been a year since he died from an accidental overdose of Xanax and fentanyl in the back of his tour bus in Tucson, Arizona. Though he didn’t invent the form, he came very close to perfecting it. Though his career was brief, his songs helped establish a new musical vocabulary for angst, blending hip-hop and emo. One cluttered table is stacked with 10 copies of a recent edition of The New York Times with a story about the musical legacy of her late son, Gustav Åhr, better known as the rapper Lil Peep. She picks him up under her arm like a football as she lets me into her home in the Long Island town of Huntington. She says her dog, Taz, a silky little brown nugget, will be barking when I arrive, and he certainly is. Seuss trees out front and the Bernie Sanders sign in the window. Liza Womack tells me I should be able to recognize her house by the two Dr.
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