Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  The Melvins had started a year before, naming themselves, mock-ingly, after another employee at the Thriftway. Buzz claimed to have taught himself to play guitar by listening to the first two Clash records. In 1983, the Melvins had no real fan base—they were heckled and ridiculed by most of the metal-heads in Grays Harbor. Yet a dozen impressionable boys would gather around their practice space behind drummer Dale Crover’s house at 609 West Second in Aberdeen. This motley crew of fans were called “Cling-Ons,” a name coined by Buzz to describe both their “Star Trek”-like geekiness and habit of clinging to every word he uttered. Buzz himself looked more like Richard Simmons, with his white-man’s afro, than the fellow in Air Supply.

  Buzz dispensed advice to the “Cling-Ons,” made them tapes, and acted as the Socrates of Montesano, an elder statesman spouting off his views on all things worldly to his band of followers. He decided who was allowed at practices and who was banned, and he made up nicknames for all accepted. Greg Hokanson became “Cokenson.” Jesse Reed, who Kurt had met in class at Weatherwax and quickly befriended, became “Black Reed” after the band Black Flag, though like all of the crew, he was Caucasian. Kurt never had a nickname that stuck. His friends from this time period always called him “Cobain.” His lack of a nickname wasn’t a sign he was afforded any special status. In fact, it was the opposite—he didn’t have a nickname because he was thought of as this runt who didn’t deserve the recognition.

  Like Kurt, the Melvins stretched geographically from Monte (where Buzz lived with his parents) to Aberdeen (Crover’s practice space). The Melvins’ bass player was Matt Lukin, also from Monte, whom Kurt had known from wrestling and Little League, and he soon became a friend. Anytime Kurt traveled to Monte, he was more likely to look up Buzz or Lukin than visit his father.

  One particular trip to Monte that summer was fueled by something other than his new love for punk rock—it was motivated by a girl. Andrea Vance was the younger sister of Kurt’s friend Darrin Neathery, and she was baby-sitting in Monte one afternoon when Kurt unexpectedly appeared. “He was darling,” she recalled. “He had really great blue eyes and a killer smile. His hair was really pretty and soft. He wore it medium length. He didn’t talk a lot, and when he did, he was soft-spoken.” They watched “The Brady Bunch,” and Kurt played Sock-and-Bots with the kids. Like clockwork, he returned the next afternoon, and Vance rewarded him with a kiss. He returned every day for a week, but the romance never progressed beyond necking. “He was very sweet and really respectful,” Vance remembered. “I didn’t feel like he was a walking hormone.”

  But underneath the surface, his hormones were raging. That same summer Kurt had what he’d later describe as his “first sexual encounter,” with a developmentally disabled girl. As he reported in his journal, he pursued her only after becoming so depressed about the state of his life that he planned suicide. “That month happened to be the epitome of my mental abuse from my mother,” he wrote. “It turned out that pot didn’t help me escape my troubles too well anymore, and I was actually enjoying doing rebellious things like stealing booze and busting store windows....I decided within the next month that I’ll not sit on my roof and think about jumping, but I’ll actually kill myself. And I wasn’t going out of this world without actually knowing what it is like to get laid.”

  His only avenue seemed this “half-retarded girl.” One day Trevor Briggs, John Fields, and Kurt followed her home and stole her father’s liquor. They had done this numerous times, but this time Kurt stayed after his friends departed. He sat on the girl’s lap and touched her breasts. She went into her bedroom and got undressed in front of him, but he found himself disgusted both with himself and with her. “I tried to fuck her, but I didn’t know how,” he wrote. “I got grossed out very heavily with how her vagina smelled and her sweat reeked, so I left.” Though Kurt retreated, the shame would stick with him for the rest of his life. He hated himself for taking advantage of her, yet he also hated himself for not seeing the scenario through to intercourse, an almost greater shame to a virginal boy of sixteen. The girl’s father protested to the school that his daughter had been molested, and Kurt was mentioned as a suspect. He wrote in his journal that only a bit of serendipity saved him from prosecution: “They came with a yearbook and were going to have her pick me out, but she couldn’t because I didn’t show up for pictures that year.” He claimed he was taken to the Montesano Police station and interrogated but escaped conviction because the girl was over eighteen, and “not mentally retarded” by legal statutes.

  Back in Aberdeen, Kurt began his junior year at Weatherwax by starting up a romantic relationship with fifteen-year-old Jackie Hagara. She lived two blocks from his house, and he timed it so they would walk to school together. He was so behind in math, he’d been forced to take a freshman math class, where they’d met. Though many of the kids in the class thought Kurt was weird for being kept behind, Jackie liked his smile. After school one day, he showed her a drawing he’d made of a rock star on a desert island. The man was holding a Les Paul guitar with a Marshall stack plugged into a palm tree. For sixteen-year-old Kurt, it was his vision of paradise.

  Jackie said she liked the drawing. Two days later he approached her with a gift; he had redrawn the same image but in poster size, complete with airbrushing. “It’s for you,” he said, looking at the floor as he spoke. “For me?” she asked. “I’d like to go out with you sometime,” he explained. Kurt was only slightly disenchanted when Jackie told him she already had a boyfriend. They continued to walk to school together, occasionally holding hands, and one afternoon in front of her house, he pulled her close and kissed her. “I thought he was so cute,” she said.

  During his pivotal junior year even his appearance began to transform from what had universally been described as “cute” to what some of his Weatherwax classmates would call “scary.” He grew his hair long and it was rarely washed. His Izod shirts and rugby pullovers were gone; now he sported homemade T-shirts with the names of punk bands. One he wore frequently read “Organized Confusion,” a slogan he fantasized would be the name of his first band. For outerwear, he always had a trench coat—he wore it year round, whether it was raining outside or a 90-degree summer day. That fall, Andrea Vance, his Monte girlfriend from that summer, ran into Kurt at a party and didn’t even recognize him. “He had on his black trench coat, hi-top tennis shoes, and his hair was dyed dark red,” she recalled. “He didn’t look like the same boy.”

  His circle of friends slowly shifted from his Monte pals to Aberdeen buddies, but with both groups their main activity was getting intoxicated in one way or another. When they were unable to raid a parental liquor stock, they would take advantage of one of Aberdeen’s many street people to help buy them beer. Kurt, Jesse Reed, Greg Hokanson, and Eric and Steve Shillinger developed a regular commerce with a colorful character they dubbed “The Fat Man,” a hopeless alcoholic who lived in the run-down Morck Hotel with his retarded son, Bobby. The Fat Man was willing to buy them alcohol as long as they paid and helped him get to the store. This was a laborious process that in practice looked a bit like a Buster Keaton skit and could take all day: “First,” said Jesse Reed, “we had to push a shopping cart to the Morck. Then we’d go up to his room, and we’d get him up. He’d be in his crusty underwear, and it stank and there were flies and it was awful. We’d have to help him put on these tent pants. Then we’d have to help him downstairs, and he weighed about 500 pounds. He was too fat to walk all the way to the liquor store, so we’d put him in the cart and push him. If we just wanted to drink beer, we’d push him to the grocery store, which, thankfully, was closer. And all we had to do for him was buy a quart of the cheapest malt liquor.”

  The Fat Man and Bobby, an odd couple if there ever was one, unknowingly became the first subjects of some of Kurt’s storytelling. He wrote short stories about them, crafted imaginary songs about their adventures, and sketched them in his journal. His pencil drawing of the Fat Man looked like Ignatius J. Reilly, the
anti-hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Kurt loved nothing more than to imitate Bobby’s squeaky voice, eliciting fits of cackling laughter from his friends. His relationship with the Fat Man and Bobby wasn’t completely without affection; there was a level of empathy Kurt felt for their seemingly hopeless situation. That year for Christmas, Kurt bought the Fat Man a toaster and a John Denver album at Goodwill. Upon grasping these presents in his giant mitt-hands, the Fat Man asked in disbelief: “These are for me?” He started to cry. The Fat Man spent the next few years telling everyone in Aberdeen what a swell fellow Kurt Cobain was. It was a small example of how at times, even in Kurt’s shadow world, a sweetness would emerge.

  With a regular supply of booze from the Fat Man, Kurt continued to abuse alcohol that spring, and his conflicts with his mother increased as a result. The arguments were worse when Kurt was stoned or frying on acid, which became a regular occurrence. Greg Hokanson recalled going to Kurt’s house with Jesse Reed and hearing Wendy yell at Kurt for an hour, as Kurt tripped on LSD, completely unresponsive to her shouts. “Wendy was awful to him,” Hokanson said. “He hated her.” As soon as they could escape, the trio left the house and went to climb the water tower on “Think of Me Hill.” Jesse and Hokanson made it to the top, but Kurt froze halfway up the ladder. “He was too afraid,” Hokanson remembered. Kurt never managed to climb the tower.

  Trevor Briggs recalled one evening at the Cobains when the battle between Kurt and Wendy went on all evening: “I think she was a little intoxicated, and she came upstairs into his room. She was trying to party and get loose with us. He got pissed off at her about it. And she said, ‘Kurt if you don’t watch it, I’m going to say in front of your friends what you told me.’ And he loudly yelled, ‘What are you talking about?’ She eventually left. So I asked him what was she going to say. He said, ‘Well, I made a comment to her once about how just because a guy gets hair on his balls, doesn’t mean he’s a grown man or mature.’ ” This singular issue—having hair on your testicles—was a monumental point of embarrassment for Kurt. His pubic hair arrived later than most boys’, and he obsessively inspected his testicles daily, repeatedly watching his friends cross this threshold before him. “Pubes,” as he called them, were a frequent topic in his journal. “Not enough pubes yet,” he wrote. “Lost years. Gained ideals. Not yet developed. Much past the time in which our pubes fail to grow.” In gym class he would dress in a bathroom stall rather than open himself up to the inspection of the boys’ locker room. When he was sixteen pubes finally appeared, though since his coloring was light, even these weren’t as obvious as those of other boys.

  Around the time Kurt turned seventeen, Wendy became involved with Pat O’Connor. O’Connor was Wendy’s age and earned $52,000 as a longshoreman. His salary was a matter of public record because soon after he and Wendy became involved, Pat was the subject of one of Washington’s first palimony lawsuits. It was filed by his ex-girlfriend, who charged he’d convinced her to quit her job at the local nuclear power plant and then dumped her for Wendy. It was a nasty case, stretching on for the next two years. In court documents, Pat listed his assets as a small house, a few thousand dollars in savings, and a gun rack with three guns—these guns were, oddly, to play a role in Kurt’s career. Pat’s ex prevailed, winning $2500 in cash, a car, and her attorney’s fees.

  Pat moved into Wendy’s house that winter. Neither of Wendy’s children liked O’Connor, and Kurt grew to hate him. Just as he had with his biological father and Franich, Kurt made Pat the ridiculed subject of many of his songs and cartoons. And almost from day one, Pat and Wendy had arguments that made the battles between Don and Wendy look mild in comparison.

  One particular blowout served to provide one of the cornerstones of Kurt’s own musical mythology. After a big fight, Wendy went out looking for Pat and found him, according to Kim, “cheating on her. He was drunk, as usual.” Wendy stormed home in a fit of rage, mumbling about how she might kill Pat. In a panic, she had Kim gather Pat’s guns in a big plastic bag. When Pat returned, Wendy declared she was going to murder him. Kurt claimed, in telling this story himself, that Wendy tried to shoot Pat but couldn’t figure out how to load the gun; his sister doesn’t recall that twist. Upon Pat’s exit, Wendy and Kim dragged a bag of guns two blocks from their house to the banks of the Wishkah River. As they pulled the guns along the ground, Wendy kept repeating to herself, “Got to get rid of these or I’m going to end up killing him.” She tossed them into the water.

  While Pat and Wendy reconciled the next morning, Kurt quizzed Kim on the location of the guns. With his thirteen-year-old sister pointing the way, Kurt and two of his friends fished the rifles out. When Kurt would later tell this story, he’d say he traded the guns for his first guitar, though he actually had owned a guitar since he was fourteen. Kurt was never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story; the tale that he’d pawned his stepfather’s guns for his first guitar was simply too good for the storyteller in him to resist. In this one story were all the elements of how he wished to be perceived as an artist—someone who turned redneck swords into punk rock plowshares. In truth, he did pawn the guns but used the proceeds to acquire a Fender Deluxe amp.

  The “guns in the river” incident was just one of many of Wendy and Pat’s blowouts. Kurt’s technique to avoid these fights—or to avoid becoming the subject of them, since Pat loved nothing better than to lecture Wendy on what should be done with her errant son—was to beat a quick path from the front door to his room. In this way, he was typical of most teenagers, though his entrances and exits came at a furious pace. When he needed to surface for some household task—like using the phone or raiding the kitchen—he tried to time his excursions to avoid Pat. His room became his sanctuary, and his description a few years later in his journal about a trip back home was as much emotional as it was physical:

  Every time I come back, it’s the same déjà vu memories that send a chill up my spine, total depression, total hatred, and grudges that would last months at a time, old Pee Chees with contents of drawings of rocker dudes playing guitar, monsters, and sayings on the cover like, “This Bud’s for you,” or, “Get high,” intricate sketchings of bongs, alterations of sexual puns on the happy tennis-playing girl. Look around and see the Iron Maiden posters with ripped and hole-filled corners, nails in the walls where tractor hats are still displayed today. Dents in the table from five years worth of playing a beer game called quarter bounce. The stained rug from snoose spittoon spills, I look around and see all this fucking shit and the thing that reminds me the most about my worthless adolescence is, every time I enter the room I run my finger across the ceiling and feel the sticky residue from a collection of pot and cigarette smoke.

  During the spring of 1984, his conflicts with the adults in the house grew to a boiling point. He loathed Wendy for her weakness when it came to men, just as he had found issue with his father’s desire to remarry. He hated Pat even more, since the older man provided advice in a manner designed to point out Kurt’s inadequacies. The two males in the household also differed on how they thought women should be treated. “Pat was a womanizer,” Kim said, “and Kurt wasn’t. Kurt was very respectful of women, even if he didn’t have a lot of girlfriends. He was looking for someone to fall in love with.” Pat’s lectures on how “a man needs to be a man and act like a man” were unending. When Kurt repeatedly failed to live up to Pat’s standards, he’d be called “a faggot.” One Sunday in April 1984, Pat’s epithets were particularly vehement: “Why don’t you ever bring any girls home?” he asked Kurt. “When I was your age, there were girls in and out of my bed all the time.”

  With this nugget of manly advice, Kurt went to a party. There he ran into Jackie Hagara. When she and a girlfriend wanted to leave, Kurt suggested they retreat to his house—perhaps he saw an opportunity to illustrate a point to Pat. Still, he snuck them upstairs without disturbing the adults. The girlfriend was quite drunk and proceeded to pass out on the twin bed i
n the playroom outside of Kurt’s bedroom. With her friend incapacitated and unable to walk, Kurt told Jackie, “You can crash here.”

  Suddenly the moment Kurt had been waiting for arrived. He had long yearned to leave behind his adolescent sexual fantasies and to honestly declare to his high-school classmates that he was no longer a virgin (in fact, like most boys his age, he had been lying about the matter for several years). Growing up in a world where men were rarely touched except with the occasional slap on the back, he was starved for the feel of skin on skin. In Jackie, he had picked a more-than-willing compatriot. Though only fifteen, she was already experienced and on the night she found herself in Kurt’s bedroom, her steady boyfriend happened to be in jail. She knew what was going to happen next as they moved into Kurt’s room. There was, as Jackie remembered, a moment when they looked at each other and lust filled the room with all the power of an internal combustion engine revving up.

  Kurt turned off the lights, the pair pulled off their clothes, and they excitedly jumped into bed and held each other. It would be Kurt’s first embrace of a fully naked female, a moment he had long dreamt about, a moment that in many nights of adolescent masturbation, on this very bed, he had imagined. Jackie began to kiss him. At the moment their tongues touched, the door flew open, and in walked Kurt’s mother.

  Wendy was not, by any stretch of the imagination, happy to see her son in bed with a naked girl. She was also not pleased to see another girl passed out in the hallway. “Get the hell out!” she yelled. She had come upstairs to show Kurt the lightning outside—the fact that a major storm was raging had been lost on the young lovers—only to discover her son in bed with a girl. As she marched down the stairs, Wendy yelled, “Get the fuck out of my house!” Pat, for his part, was completely silent on the matter, knowing any comments from him would further enrage Wendy. Hearing a commotion, Kurt’s sister Kim ran in from the next room. She observed Kurt and Jackie putting shoes on a girl, who was passed out. “What the hell?” Kim inquired. “We’re leaving,” Kurt told his sister. He and Jackie dragged the other girl down the stairs and they went outside into one of the biggest storms of the year.