Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Once Kurt stopped going to school altogether, Dave Reed found him a job at the Lamplighter Restaurant in Grayland. It paid $4.25 an hour, and he worked as dishwasher, prep assistant, relief cook, and busboy. It was the winter season and the restaurant was usually deserted, which suited Kurt fine.

  It was through exposure to Dave Reed, along with his Uncle Chuck and Aunt Mari, that Kurt first began to imagine that one day he might have a future in the music business. Dave and Chuck had recorded a single with the Beachcombers in their early days—“Purple Peanuts,” backed with “The Wheelie”—and it was a prized possession in the Reeds’ home. Kurt and Jesse played the record constantly, mimicking it on their guitars. Kurt himself was writing songs faithfully—he had several Pee Chees stuffed with sheets of lyrics. Some of the titles were “Wattage in the Cottage,” “Samurai Sabotage,” and a tune about Mr. Reed called “Diamond Dave.” Kurt even wrote a song mocking a fellow Aberdeen classmate who had committed suicide. The boy’s name was Beau; the song was called “Ode to Beau” and was sung in a country and western style.

  A former member of the Beachcombers had gone on to become a Capitol Records promotion person in Seattle. The instant Kurt found this fact out, he clung on to it for dear life. He hounded Dave to introduce him, not knowing at the time that a promotion person was not a talent scout. “He always wanted to meet him because he thought it would catapult his career,” recalled Jesse. This was the nascent beginning of Kurt Cobain, the professional musician, and his constant pleading for this introduction—which never came—is evidence that, at seventeen, he was imagining a career in music. If Kurt had admitted his major label ambitions around the Melvins’ rehearsal shack, he would have been treated as a heretic. He kept his ambition to himself, but he never stopped looking at ways to move beyond his circumstances.

  Life with the Reeds came close to recreating the family he’d lost in the divorce. The Reeds ate dinner together, attended church as a group, and the boys’ musical talents were encouraged. A real affection and love was obvious and tangible among all members of the household, Kurt included. When Kurt turned eighteen in February 1985, the Reeds held a birthday celebration for him. His Aunt Mari sent him two books: Hammer of the Gods, the Led Zeppelin biography, and a collection of Norman Rockwell illustrations. In a thank-you note Kurt wrote his aunt, he described his birthday party: “All the kids from the church Youth Group came over, brought cake for me and Jesse, then we played stupid games and Pastor Lloyd sang some songs (he looks exactly like Mr. Rogers). But it was nice to know people care about ya.”

  Yet even with a church youth group, Pastor Lloyd, and the surrogate family of the Reeds, Kurt could not psychologically escape the abandonment he felt from his own fractured family of origin. “He was hard on himself,” Dave Reed observed. Though Kurt had little contact with his mother, Dave Reed would update Wendy monthly. In August 1984 she had married Pat O’Connor, and by the next spring she was pregnant. During her pregnancy Kurt stopped by the house once, and when Wendy saw how lost he looked, she broke down crying. Kurt got down on his knees, embraced his mother, and told her he was fine.

  And he was, at least for the moment, but then crisis returned. In March 1985, Kurt cut his finger washing dishes at work and quit in a fit of panic. “He had to get stitches,” remembered Jesse, “and he told me that if he lost his finger and couldn’t play guitar, he’d kill himself.” With no job and an injury that kept him from the guitar, Kurt hibernated in the house. He convinced Jesse to skip school, and the two of them would spend all day drinking or doing drugs. “He withdrew more and more,” remembered Ethel Reed. “We tried to draw Kurt out, but we just couldn’t. As time progressed we decided that we weren’t helping him, and that all we were doing was providing a place for him to withdraw further from people.”

  Kurt’s dissociation came to a head in April, when he forgot his key one afternoon and kicked in a window to get in. That was the last straw for the Reeds, and they told Kurt he had to find another place to live. It was a rainy April that year in Grays Harbor, and while most kids his age were concerned with going to the prom or preparing for graduation, Kurt was once again looking for shelter.

  Back on the streets, Kurt resumed the endless cycle of crashing in friends’ garages or sleeping in hallways. Desperate, he finally turned to the mercy of the government, and began receiving $40 a month in food stamps. Through the local unemployment office, he found a job working at the YMCA beginning May 1. It was part-time and administered by a local “Youth Work” grant, but he would describe this brief employment as his favorite day job. The job was a glorified janitorial position, but if other employees were sick, he was the substitute lifeguard or activity instructor. Kurt loved the work, particularly working with kids. Though Kurt wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer himself, he enjoyed filling in as a lifeguard. Kevin Shillinger, who lived a block away from the YMCA, observed Kurt teaching five-and six-year-olds to play T-ball—during the entire lesson there was a huge smile on Kurt’s face. Working with children, he could find the self-esteem he lacked in the other areas of his life: He was good with them, and they were non-judgmental.

  He also took a second part-time job, though this one he rarely discussed. It was a position as a janitor at Weatherwax High School. Each evening he would don a brown jumpsuit and push a mop through the hallways of the school he had dropped out of. Though the school year was almost over by the time he began, the contrast between his peers’ preparing for college and his own particulars left him feeling as diminished as he ever did in his life. He lasted two months before quitting.

  Once Kurt left the Reeds’ household, Jesse followed. For a while the pair stayed at Jesse’s grandparents’ house in Aberdeen. Then, on June 1, 1985, they moved into an apartment at 404 North Michigan Street. By any standards this tiny $100-a-month studio—the walls of which were painted pink and thus earned it the name “the pink apart-ment”—was a dump, but it was their dump. The apartment came with some modest furnishings, which they supplemented with lawn ornaments, Big Wheel tricycles, and backyard recliners stolen from the neighborhood. A picture window faced the street and Kurt took this to be his public easel, writing “666” and “Satan Rules” on the glass with soap. A blow-up doll hung from a noose and was covered in shaving gel. Edge Shaving Gel was everywhere in the apartment; samples had been given away in the neighborhood and Kurt and Jesse discovered they could suck the fumes from the cans and get high. One night they had taken a couple of hits of acid when a Grays Harbor County sheriff knocked at the door and told them to remove the doll. Luckily, the officer didn’t enter their apartment: He would have observed three weeks of dishes stacked in the sink, numerous pieces of stolen lawn furniture, Edge Shaving Gel wiped on all the walls, and the booty from their latest prank—stealing crosses from headstones at the graveyard and painting them with polka dots.

  This would not be Kurt’s only run-in with the law during the summer of 1985. Kurt, Jesse, and their buddies would wait like werewolves for nightfall and then go forth to terrorize the neighborhood by stealing lawn furniture or spray-painting buildings. Though Kurt would later claim that his graffiti messages were political (“God is Gay,” “Abort Christ,” he listed as a few of his slogans), in fact, most of what he wrote was nonsensical. He enraged a neighbor with a boat by painting “Boat Ack” in red letters on the ship’s hull; on the other side he lettered, “Boat people go home.” One night he painted graffiti on the wall of the YMCA; in no small stroke of poetic justice, the next day he was assigned the job of cleaning it off.

  On the night of July 23, 1985, Detective Michael Bens was patrolling Market Street—just a block from the Aberdeen Police Station—when he observed three men and a blond-haired boy in an alley. The men fled as Bens’s car approached, but the blond kid stood frozen, looking like a deer in the headlights, and Bens saw him drop a graffiti marker. On the wall behind him was the prophetic statement: “Ain’t got no how watchamacallit.” Typographically, it was a work of art, as the let
ters were in random upper and lower case, and every “T” was four times larger than the other characters.

  Suddenly, the boy bolted and ran two blocks before the patrol car caught up with him. Once it did, he stopped and was handcuffed. He gave his name as “Kurt Donald Cobain,” and was a picture of politeness. At the station, he wrote and signed a statement, which read in full:

  Tonight, while standing behind SeaFirst Bank in the alley by the library talking to three other people, I wrote on the SeaFirst building. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. What I put on the wall was, “Ain’t got no how watchamacallit.” Now I see how silly it was for me to have done this, and I’m sorry that I did. When the police car came into the alley I saw him, and I dropped the red marker that I had used.

  He was fingerprinted, had mug shots taken, and was then released but required to show up in court for a hearing a few weeks later. He received a $180 fine, a suspended 30-day sentence, and was warned not to get into any more trouble.

  For eighteen-year-old Kurt, that was easier said than done. One night when Jesse was at work, the usual “Cling-Ons” came over and everyone jammed with their guitars. One of the neighbors, a large man with a mustache, pounded on the wall and told them to be quiet. In Kurt’s later telling of this story, he said the neighbor mercilessly beat him for hours. It was one of the many tales Kurt told about his constant abuse at the hands of Aberdeen’s rednecks. “It wasn’t like that,” recalled Steve Shillinger. “The guy did come over, told him to be quiet, and when Kurt wised off, the fellow punched him a couple of times and told him to ‘shut the fuck up.’ ” Jesse wasn’t there that night, but in the entire time he knew Kurt he recalled only one fight: “He was usually too busy making people laugh. I was always around to protect him.” Jesse was short like Kurt, but he had lifted weights and was heavily built.

  During the pink apartment period, Jesse probably would have killed for Kurt, a fact Kurt took full advantage of. One day, Kurt announced they were both getting Mohawks. They marched down to the Shillingers, hair clippers were produced, and Jesse soon had a Mohawk. When it came time for Kurt’s shave, he declared it was a dumb idea. “One time, Kurt said if he could write something on my forehead, I could write something on his,” remembered Jesse. “He took permanent ink and wrote ‘666’ on me, and then he took off running. I was always the nitwit who everyone used to experiment on. If there was a chemical or a drink, they’d always want me to try it first.” There was a dark side to Kurt’s torment of his best friend. Despite all his goofing off, Jesse had managed to graduate that spring. One night when Jesse was at work at Burger King, Kurt ripped the pictures out of Jesse’s yearbook, pasted them to the wall, and marked red crosses through them. It was more of a display of his own self-hatred than it was a reflection of his feelings for Jesse. Perhaps in a fit of shame over his rage, Kurt decided to kick Jesse out of the apartment. Never mind that Jesse had been the one who had put down the deposit. Soon Jesse was living with his grandmother, and Kurt was on his own. Jesse had plans to join the Navy anyway, and Kurt felt threatened by this. It was a pattern he would play out his entire life: Rather than lose someone he cared for, he would withdraw first, usually by creating some mock conflict as a way of lessening the abandonment he felt was inevitable.

  Kurt continued to write songs while living in the pink apartment, and though most were still thinly disguised stories of the characters and events around him, many were humorous. That summer he wrote a song called “Spam,” about the meat product, and another called “The Class of 85,” which was an attack on Jesse and the graduating class he missed. It went: “We are all the same, just flies on a turd.” Though his songs were about an insular world, even at this stage Kurt was thinking big. “I’m going to make a record that’s going to be even bigger than U2 or R.E.M.,” he bragged to Steve Shillinger. Kurt loved both these bands, and he talked unceasingly of how great the Smithereens were, though these were influences he was careful not to mention around Buzz for fear of breaking the punk code that no popular music mattered. He read every fanzine or music magazine he could find, which in Aberdeen wasn’t many; he even wrote out lengthy imaginary interviews with himself for nonexistent publications. Kurt and Steve talked about starting their own fanzine, going so far as to draft up a sample issue; Steve bailed on the project when he realized that Kurt was writing positive reviews of records he had never listened to. Kurt also talked about starting his own record label, and one night he and Steve recorded a friend named Scotty Karate doing a spoken word monologue. Like so many of his ideas at the time, nothing ever came of it.

  There wasn’t money for fanzine publishing or record labels, and even paying the rent was hard. Two months after Jesse’s departure, Kurt was evicted. His landlord came to the apartment when Kurt wasn’t home, boxed up the few belongings he had, including the stolen crosses and Big Wheels, and left them on the street.

  For the third time in two years, Kurt was without a home. Once again, he considered the Navy. Trevor Briggs was signing up for the service, and he urged Kurt to take advantage of the Navy’s buddy system, where they could be placed at boot camp together. Unemployment had grown even higher in Grays Harbor, and options for an eighteen-year-old dropout were limited. Kurt went to the Navy recruiting office on State Street and spent three hours taking the ASVAB vocational aptitude test. He passed, and the Navy was willing to take him; later Kurt claimed he received the highest score ever registered on the test, but this could hardly be believed since the test included math. At the last minute, as he had before, Kurt balked when it came time to join.

  Most nights Kurt would sleep in the backseat of Greg Hokanson’s mother’s beat-up Volvo sedan, jokingly called “the vulva.” By the time October rolled around, and the weather turned bad, nights were miserable in the car seat. Kurt soon found a new benefactor in the Shillinger family, who, after intense lobbying from Kurt, agreed to take him in.

  Lamont Shillinger was an English teacher at Weatherwax, and like Dave Reed, he came from a religious background. Though he’d left the Mormon church years before, Lamont still attempted to be, as he described it, “a freelance decent human being.” There were other similarities to life at the Reeds’: The Shillingers ate dinner together, spent time as a family, and their sons were encouraged to play music. Kurt was accepted like family and put into the rotation of chores, which he did without complaint, grateful for being included. Room was a bit short in the Shillinger household—they had six kids of their own—so Kurt slept on a sofa in the living room, storing his sleeping bag behind it during the day. He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas morning of 1985 with the Shillingers. Lamont bought Kurt a much-needed new pair of Levi’s. Later on Christmas Day, Kurt visited Wendy’s house— she had just given birth to his half-sister Brianne. The new baby made the O’Connor home a happier place, though there was no talk of Kurt moving back in.

  In December 1985, Kurt began to rehearse some of the songs he’d written with Dale Crover on bass and Greg Hokanson on drums. He called this grouping Fecal Matter, and it was his first real band. He convinced Crover to accompany him on a trip to Aunt Mari’s to tape some of the songs. “He arrived,” Mari remembered, “with a huge notebook full of lyrics. I showed him how to adjust a few things, how to record with the reel-to-reel, and he went right at it.” Kurt recorded his voice first, and then he and Crover would track the guitar, bass, and drum parts over the vocals. Mari was troubled by the lyrics to “Suicide Samurai,” but wrote it off as typical teenage behavior. The boys also cut “Bambi Slaughter” (the story of how a boy pawned his parents’ wedding rings), “Buffy’s Pregnant” (Buffy from the “Family Affair” television show), “Downer,” “Laminated Effect,” “Spank Thru,” and “Sound of Dentage.” When Kurt got back to Aberdeen, he used the Shillingers’ tape deck to dub off copies. Having the actual tape in his hand was tangible proof to him that he had talent—it was the first physical manifestation of the self-esteem he found through music. Nonetheless, Fecal Matter broke up without eve
r playing a single gig.

  Despite his external circumstances, Kurt’s inner artistic life was growing by leaps and bounds. He continued making movies using the Super-8 camera. One short silent film from this period has Kurt walking through an abandoned building wearing a KISW “Seattle’s Best Rock” T-shirt and trying to look like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, with his wraparound sunglasses. In another he puts on a Mr. T mask and pretends to snort a huge quantity of what looks like cocaine, a special effect he created with flour and a vacuum cleaner. Without exception, these films were inventive and—as with everything Kurt created—disturbing. That spring he attempted to start a business decorating skate-boards with graffiti. He went so far as to put up flyers around town, but only one teenager ever hired him, asking for an exploding head. Kurt gladly drew this—it was his specialty—but the customer never paid and the business failed.

  On May 18, 1986, Kurt again fell under the care and supervision of the Aberdeen Police Department. At 12:30 in the morning, police were called to an abandoned building at 618 West Market, and Officer John Green found Kurt climbing around on a roof, seemingly intoxicated. Green remembered Kurt being a “nice kid, if a little scared.” Kurt was charged with trespassing and being a minor in possession of alcohol by consumption. When the cops found that he had an outstanding warrant for malicious mischief (he had failed to pay the fine for the graffiti arrest), plus an earlier alcohol arrest from Seattle, and he couldn’t come up with bail, they put him in jail. The cell he stayed in was straight out of an old gangster movie: iron bars, concrete floor, no ventilation. On his statement, Kurt listed a “bad back” under “medical conditions,” and described himself as “19 years old, 135 pounds, five-foot nine inches, brown hair, and blue eyes.” He exaggerated in describing both his height and weight.