Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  As Kurt and his two cohorts began walking down First Street—the fresh air had revived the drunk friend—it began to rain, and though that seemed like an ominous sign, before the sun would rise Kurt would lose his virginity. Already he was visibly shaking, his raging hormones mixing with anger, shame, and fear. It had been humiliating to dress in front of Jackie, still sporting an erection. As in his encounter with the retarded girl, lust and shame were equally strong drives within him, hopelessly intertwined and confused.

  They headed to Jackie’s friend’s house. But as soon as they walked in, so did Jackie’s boyfriend, just sprung from jail. Jackie had warned Kurt about the violent nature of her paramour, and to avoid a confrontation, Kurt pretended he was the other girl’s date. When Hagara and her boyfriend left, Kurt and the girl ended up spending the night together. It wasn’t the greatest sex, or so she would later tell Jackie, but it was intercourse, which was all that mattered to Kurt. He had finally walked through that door, the great vaginal divide, and he was no longer leading a life that was a sexual lie.

  Kurt left early in the morning to walk around Aberdeen in the pale light of dawn. The storm had passed, birds were chirping, and everything in the world seemed more alive. He walked around for hours thinking about it all, waiting for school to begin, watching the sun come up, and wondering where his life was heading.

  Chapter 5

  THE WILL OF INSTINCT

  ABERDEEN, WASHINGTON

  APRIL 1984–SEPTEMBER 1986

  It amazes me, the will of instinct.

  —Lyrics from “Polly,” 1990.

  Early that Monday morning Kurt walked the streets of Aberdeen sniffing her sex on his fingers. For a person who was obsessed with smell it was an intoxicating experience. To relive the act, all he need do was rub his fingers in his own crotch, and when he sniffed them, her scent was still there. Already his mind was forgetting the fact that his sexual initiation was a near catastrophe, and instead he was turning it into triumph in his memory. The actual circumstances didn’t matter—crummy sex or not, he was no longer a virgin. Being a romantic at heart, he also assumed this first sexual encounter was just the beginning of many pleasant romps with this girl; that it was the start of his adult sexual experience; a balm that he could count on, like beer or pot, to help him escape his lot. On the walk toward Weatherwax, he stole a flower from a yard. Jackie saw Kurt sheepishly heading toward the smoker’s shack outside the high school with this one red rose in his hand—she thought it was for her, but Kurt delivered it to the girl he had slept with, who was unimpressed. What Kurt failed to understand was that it was Jackie who had the crush on him. The other girl, in contrast, was embarrassed by her indiscretion, and further embarrassed by the flower. It was a painful lesson, and for someone as sensitive as Kurt, it further confused his need for love with the complications of adult sexuality.

  After school, there were more immediate concerns, the first being finding a place to live. Buzz drove with him to get his stuff. As Kurt had correctly surmised, this tiff with his mother was different from the others; they arrived to find her still in a rage. “His mom was just freaking out the entire time, telling him what a total fucking loser he was,” Osborne recalled. “He just kept saying, ‘Okay, Mom. Okay.’ She made it clear she didn’t even want him in the house.” As he gathered his precious guitar and amp, putting his clothes in a series of Hefty garbage bags, Kurt began his final emotional and physical flight from his family. There had been other flights, and his retreating as a habit began soon after the divorce, but most of those moves were his. This time he was powerless with a very real fear over how he might care for himself. He was seventeen years old, a junior in high school, but failing most of his classes. He had never had a job, he had no money, and all his stuff was in four Hefty bags. He was sure he was leaving, but he had no idea where he was going.

  If the divorce had been his first betrayal, and his father’s remarriage the second, this third abandonment would be equally significant. Wendy was done with him. She complained to her sisters that she “didn’t know what to do with Kurt anymore.” Their battles were exacerbating her conflicts with Pat, whom she was planning to marry, and she could ill afford to lose that relationship, if only for economic reasons. Kurt felt, perhaps correctly, that yet again one of his parents was choosing a new partner over him. It was a marginalization that would stick with him: Combined with his earlier emotional wounds, the experience of being kicked out would be something he would return to repeatedly, never able to completely free himself from the trauma. It would lie there just under the surface, a pain that would enshroud the rest of his life with a fear of scarcity. There could never be enough money, enough attention, or—most important—enough love, because he knew how quickly it could all vanish.

  Seven years later he would write a song about this period and title it “Something in the Way.” The “something” was unexplained by the oblique lyrics, but there was little doubt that he was what was in the way. The song implies that the singer is living under a bridge. When asked to clarify it, Kurt always told a story of getting kicked out of the house, dropping out of school, and living under the Young Street Bridge. It would eventually become one of the touchstones of his cultural biography, one of his single most powerful pieces of myth-making, the one piece of Kurt’s history certain to appear in any one-paragraph description of his life: This kid was so unwanted he lived under a bridge. It was a potent and dark image, made all the more resonant when Nirvana became famous and pictures began to appear in magazines of the underside of the Young Street Bridge, its rank fetid nature apparent even in photographs. It looked like something a troll would live under, not a child. The bridge was only two blocks from his mother’s house, a distance, as Kurt told it, that no amount of love could cross.

  The “living under the bridge” story, however, just like the “guns for guitars” story before it, was greatly embellished by Kurt in the telling. “He never lived under that bridge,” insisted Krist Novoselic, who met Kurt in school that year. “He hung out there, but you couldn’t live on those muddy banks, with the tides coming up and down. That was his own revisionism.” His sister echoed the same belief: “He did not ever live under the bridge. It was a hangout where all the neighborhood kids would go to smoke pot, but that’s all.” And if Kurt ever spent a single night under any Aberdeen bridge, locals argue it would have been the Sixth Street Bridge, a much bigger span a half mile away, stretching over a small canyon and favored by Aberdeen’s homeless. Even this setting is hard to imagine because Kurt was a world-class whiner; few whiners could survive an Aberdeen spring outdoors, where the weather is something just short of a daily monsoon. There is significance, though, to the bridge story, if only because Kurt emphatically told the tale so many times. At a point, he must have begun to believe it himself.

  The true tale of where he spent his days and nights during this period is more poignant than even Kurt’s rendition of events. His journey began on Dale Crover’s porch, where he slept in a cardboard refrigerator box, curled up like a kitten. When his welcome ran out there, his ingenuity and wiliness did not fail him: There were many old apartment buildings in Aberdeen with central heating in the hallways, and this is where he would retreat most nights. He’d sneak in late, find a wide hallway, unscrew the overhead light, spread out his bedroll, go to sleep, and make sure to get up before the residents began their day. It was a life summed up best by a line he’d write a few years later in a song: “It amazes me, the will of instinct.” His instinctual survival skills served him well, and his will was strong.

  When all else failed, Kurt and another kid named Paul White would walk up the hill to Grays Harbor Community Hospital. There they would sleep in the waiting room. Kurt, the more daring of the two, or maybe the more desperate, would brazenly go through the hospital cafeteria line and charge food to made-up room numbers. “There was a television in the waiting room, and we could watch that all day,” remembered White. “People always thought we were w
aiting for a patient who was ill or dying, and they’d never question you when it concerned that.” This was the real story behind the emotional truth captured in “Something in the Way,” and perhaps the greatest irony in his life—Kurt had ended up back where he began, back in the hospital with the territorial view of the harbor, back where he was born seventeen years previously. Here he was, sleeping in the waiting room like a fugitive, sneaking rolls out of the cafeteria, pretending to look like a bereaved relative of someone who was ill, but the only real illness was the loneliness he felt in his heart.

  After about four months of living on the street, Kurt finally returned to live with his father. It wasn’t easy for Kurt, and that he’d even consider moving back in with a parent shows his level of desperation. Don and Jenny heard Kurt was homeless and found him sleeping on an old sofa in a garage just across the alley from Wendy’s house. “He was very angry at everybody at that time, and he wanted everyone to think that nobody would take him, which was pretty much what was true,” Jenny remembered.

  Back in Montesano, Kurt returned to his basement room in the Fleet Street house. His authority struggles with his father escalated—it was as if the time away from Don had only made his resolve stronger. All parties knew Kurt’s presence there wasn’t a permanent arrangement— they had mutually outgrown their need or want for each other. Kurt’s guitar made life tolerable, and he practiced for hours. His friends and family began to notice he was becoming skilled at playing it. “He could play any song after listening to it just once, anything from Air Supply to John Cougar Mellencamp,” recalled his stepbrother James. The family rented This Is Spinal Tap and Kurt and James watched it five times in a row—soon he began to recite dialogue from the film and play the band’s songs.

  While Kurt was back with Don and Jenny, there was yet another suicide in the family. Kenneth Cobain, Leland’s only remaining brother, grew despondent over the death of his wife and shot himself in the forehead with a .22 caliber pistol. The loss was almost too much for Leland to bear: The cumulative effect of the tragic deaths of his father, his son Michael, and his three brothers tempered his bluster with severe melancholy. If you consider Ernest’s death a suicide by alcohol, all three of Leland’s brothers had died by their own hand, two by shooting themselves.

  Kurt wasn’t close to these uncles, but there was a mournful pall over the house; it seemed as if the family was cursed on all fronts. His stepmother made efforts to find Kurt a job doing lawn work, since that was the only work that could be found in Monte other than logging. Kurt mowed a few lawns, but quickly became bored. He looked in the want ads once or twice, but there weren’t many jobs to be had in Montesano. The county’s biggest economic enterprise—the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant—had gone bust before being fully constructed, leaving unemployment at fifteen percent, twice as high as the rest of the state. Things came to a head when Don announced that if Kurt wasn’t going to go to school, or work, he had to join the service. The next night, Don invited a Navy recruiter to talk to his son.

  Instead of a strong, willful man—who later in his life might have grabbed the Navy man by his collar and thrown him headfirst out the door—the recruiter found a sad and broken boy. Kurt, to everyone’s surprise, listened to the pitch. At the end of the evening, much to his father’s relief, Kurt said he’d consider it. To Kurt, the service sounded like a hell, but it was a hell with a different zip code. As Kurt told Jesse Reed, “At least the Navy could give you three hots and a cot.” To a kid who had been living on the street and sleeping in hospital waiting rooms, the security of shelter and food without a parental price to pay appeared tempting. But when Don tried to convince him to let the recruiter return the next night, Kurt said to forget it.

  Desperate for something, he found religion. He and Jesse had become inseparable during 1984, and this extended to going to church together. Jesse’s parents, Ethel and Dave Reed, were born-again Christians, and the family went to the Central Park Baptist Church, halfway between Monte and Aberdeen. Kurt began to attend Sunday service regularly, and even made appearances at the Wednesday night Christian Youth Group. He was baptized in the church that October, though none of his family members were present. Jesse even remembered Kurt going through a born-again conversion experience: “One night we were walking over the Chehalis River bridge and he stopped, and said he accepted Jesus Christ into his life. He asked God to ‘come into his life.’ I remember him distinctly talking about the revelations and the calmness that everybody talks about when they accept Christ.” In the next couple of weeks, Kurt displayed the tone of an evangelical born-again Christian. He began to chastise Jesse for smoking pot, disregarding the Bible, and being a poor Christian. Kurt’s religious conversion coincided with one of his many sober periods; his history with drugs and alcohol would always consist of a binge, followed by a fast. He wrote a letter to his Aunt Mari that month espousing his views on marijuana:

  I just got done watching Reefer Madness on MTV...It was made in the thirties and if people took one toke of the devil drug, marijuana, they spaced-out big time, killed each other, had affairs, ran over innocent victims in cars. They sent this teenager, who looked like the Beaver, on a murder rap. Wow, that’s more excitement than I can handle. It was like a big over-exaggeration. But I accept the whole idea behind it. Pot sucks. I know that from personal experience, because for a while there I became almost as lethargic as a moldy piece of cheese. I think that was a big problem with my mom and I.

  Yet almost as soon as he mailed the letter and found himself settling into the pattern of church life, Kurt discarded his faith like a pair of pants he’d outgrown. “He was hungry for it,” Jesse said, “but it was a transitory moment out of fear.” When fear subsided, Kurt started smoking pot again. He attended Central Park Baptist for another three months, but his talk, as Jesse remembered, “was more moving against God. After that he was on an anti-God thing.”

  Jesse’s parents had grown attached to Kurt, and since he was at their house so often, they suggested he move in. They lived in North River, a rural area fourteen miles outside of Aberdeen. At the time the two boys seemed to provide something to each other that was missing in their individual lives. The Reeds discussed the possibility of Kurt moving to North River, and Wendy, Don, and Jenny all agreed it was worth a try. Wendy told the Reeds she was “at her wit’s end,” a point echoed by Don and Jenny. “Dave Reed came to us,” recalled Jenny, “and said he thought he could do something for him. They were a religious family, and Dave felt he could discipline him when no one else could.” “We really loved Kurt,” explained Ethel Reed. “He was such a sweet kid; he just seemed lost.” In September, Kurt packed his belongings once again—this time he had a duffel bag—and moved to North River.

  The Reeds lived in a 4,000-square-foot home and the boys had the run of a huge upstairs. Perhaps the best thing about the house was that it was so remote, they could crank their electric guitars as loud as they wanted. They would play all day. Though Dave Reed was a Christian Youth counselor—he resembled Ned Flanders from “The Simpsons,” with his short hair and mustache—he wasn’t a square. Reed had been playing rock ’n’ roll for twenty years, and had been in the Beachcombers with Kurt’s Uncle Chuck, so he was known to the family. The house was stocked with amps, guitars, and albums. The Reeds were also less strict than Don: They let Kurt travel to Seattle with Buzz and Lukin to see the seminal punk band Black Flag. The Rocket called the show the second best of 1984, but to Kurt it was second only to the Melvins’ parking lot show. In every interview he did later in his life, he claimed that this was the first concert he ever saw.

  It was here at the Reeds’ house where Kurt first jammed with Krist Novoselic. Novoselic was two years older than Kurt, but he was impossible to miss around Grays Harbor: At six-foot seven, he resembled a young Abraham Lincoln. Krist was of Croatian heritage, and came from a family marked by divorce that could compete against Kurt’s for dysfunction (Krist had been known as “Chris” in Aberdeen; he changed the
spelling of his name back to his original Croatian birth name in 1992).

  Kurt had met Krist in high school and at the Melvins’ practice space, but their lives had also intersected in one place neither of them would ever mention again—the Central Park Baptist Church. Krist had been attending the church, but even the elders like Mr. Reed knew he was there “just for the girls.” Jesse invited Krist to his house one afternoon, and the three jammed. Krist was playing guitar at this point, as were Jesse and Kurt, so the session sounded like a “Wayne’s World” taping as they ran through the usual Jimmy Page imitations. Krist and Jesse switched guitars for a while; left-handed Kurt just stuck with his own. They did play a few of Kurt’s original songs with the three-guitar assault.

  Once Kurt moved in with the Reeds, he made several short attempts to return to school at Weatherwax. He was already so behind in his classes it was inevitable he wouldn’t graduate with his class. Kurt told his friends he might pretend to be retarded to get into special-ed classes. Jesse would tease Kurt and call him “Slow Brain” because of his poor grades. His only real participation in school was art class, the one place he didn’t feel incompetent. He entered one of his class projects in the 1985 Regional High School Art Show, and his work was put into the permanent collection of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Mr. Hunter told Kurt that if he applied himself he might be able to get a scholarship to an art school. A scholarship, and college, would have required graduating from Weatherwax, something Kurt didn’t see as a possibility unless he was held over an extra year (later in his life, he claimed falsely to have been offered several scholarships). Eventually Kurt dropped out completely, but not before first enrolling in Aberdeen’s alternative Continuation High School. The curriculum was similar to Weatherwax’s, but there were no formal classes: Students worked with teachers on a one-on-one basis. Mike Poitras tutored Kurt for about a week, but the boy didn’t stick with it long enough to complete the orientation. Two weeks later, Kurt dropped out of the school for dropouts.