In Los Angeles Courtney checked into the Peninsula Hotel to begin a controversial treatment plan called “hotel detox.” She was to be seen several times a day by a drug counselor in a hotel suite, avoiding the glare of a more public treatment center. She tried calling the Seattle house but got no answer.
Kurt, as she suspected, was out doing drugs. He was now alone in the house with Cali. Kurt showed up at a local dealer’s house later that day, but had bought and used so much heroin that the dealer refused to sell him any more: They did this both out of feigned concern for his health and fear that if he overdosed on their dope, it might bring the police upon them. “He was on a binge,” reported Rob Morfitt, who knew several people who encountered Kurt that weekend. “He was going around and getting extremely screwed up.” Kurt’s normal carelessness was replaced by a death wish that frightened even the most seasoned, cynical junkies. The last few months of his drug use, he had wantonly shared needles with other users, ignoring public health warnings about HIV and hepatitis. Black tar heroin frequently caused abscesses from the impurities used to cut it. By March, Kurt’s arms had scabs and abscesses, which themselves were a potential health danger.
Later that day he bribed other users to score heroin for him, promising them drugs in return. When the drugs were split up in their apartment and cooked, Kurt prepared a syringe that was as black as coal— he had failed to use enough water to dilute it. His compatriots looked on in horror as upon injecting himself, he immediately began to suffer the consequences of an OD. A panic went through the apartment, as Kurt began to gasp for air: If he died there, the police would inevitably be involved. The apartment residents ordered Kurt to leave, and when he was incapable of moving, they dragged him outside. His Valiant was parked on the street and they planted him in the back seat. One person offered to call 911, but Kurt was conscious enough to hear this and shook his head. They left him alone, figuring that if he wanted to die, he was going to do it on his own watch.
This is what it all had come to: The most famous rock star of his generation was lying in the backseat of a car, unable to talk, unable to move, and one more time coming just inches away from dying. He had spent many nights in this car—it was as reliable and cozy a home as he ever had—and it was as good a place to die as any. The “for sale” sign on the back window, written on a piece of a cardboard, had his home phone number on it.
Kurt didn’t die that weekend. In yet one more feat that defied science, his constitution survived another dose of heroin that would have killed most people. When he woke up in the car the next day, his emotional and physical pain were back: What he wanted more than anything was to be free from all hurts. Even heroin wasn’t helping now.
When he returned home, there were numerous messages from Courtney, and also messages from a new psychiatrist named Dr. Steven Scappa, who Buddy Arnold had recommended. Kurt called Scappa back and began to have long conversations with him. He seemed to be softening and connecting with Scappa in a way that he hadn’t with some of the other doctors. That Monday, he also took a call from Rosemary Carroll, who tried to talk him into treatment. “You are making it easy,” she told him, “for a lot of these people that you want to stop controlling your life to paint a completely negative picture of you; for them to essentially maintain control, because of the drug issue. If you go do the treatment thing, you give them one less arrow in their quiver, you radically diminish their ammunition. It may not make any sense, and it may not be based in logic, but that’s the way it is. So you go, and deal with this. It will make solving these problems easier when you get out. It will give us a basis to stand on.” Kurt’s response was, “I know.” He told Carroll he would try treatment one more time.
That Tuesday, reservations were made for Kurt to fly to Los Angeles, and Krist was enlisted to take him to the airport. When Kurt arrived at Krist’s house, it was obvious he did not want to go. As they took the 25-minute drive, Kurt sobbed and yelled and screamed. On Interstate 5, near the Tukwila exit, Kurt tried to open the door and jump from the moving car. Krist couldn’t believe this was happening, yet with his long arms he managed to hold on to Kurt as he drove, even as his car swerved. They made it to the airport a few minutes later, but Kurt hadn’t improved: Krist had to drag him by the collar, the way a schoolmaster might escort a ruffian to the principal’s office. In the main terminal, Kurt punched Krist in the face and attempted to flee. Krist tackled him, and a wrestling match ensued. The two old friends brawled on the floor of the crowded airport terminal, cursing and punching each other like two drunks in an Aberdeen bar brawl. Kurt freed himself from his friend’s grasp and ran through the building screaming, “Fuck you!” as shocked passengers looked on. The last Krist saw of Kurt was his blond mop turning the corner.
Krist drove back to Seattle alone, sobbing. “Krist had such a huge, huge amount of love for Kurt,” Shelli recalled. “We both did. He was family to us. I’d known him for almost half his life.” As a teenager, Shelli had slipped Kurt free Big Macs from behind the counter at the Aberdeen McDonald’s. For a couple of weeks back in 1989, Kurt, Tracy, Krist, and Shelli had all shared the same double bed, sleeping in shifts. Kurt had once lived in a van behind their house, and Shelli would bring him blankets to make sure he didn’t freeze to death. Krist and Kurt had driven what seemed like a million miles together, and they had told each other things they had never told another soul. But that Tuesday night, Krist told Shelli he knew in his heart he would never see Kurt alive again, and he was right.
Later that night, Kurt talked on the phone with Scappa several times, and also had what Courtney remembered as a pleasant conversation with her. He nodded out during it, but despite his actions earlier with Krist, he again was agreeing to treatment. Arrangements were made for him to fly out the next day.
Having resignedly agreed to go, Kurt did what most active addicts do before heading into treatment: He tried to do so much heroin that some would remain in his system during those first horrible days of withdrawal. The next afternoon, Kurt drove to Dylan’s with a favor to ask: He wanted to buy a gun “for protection and because of prowlers,” since the police had taken away all his other weapons, and he wondered if Dylan would purchase it for him. Dylan accepted this logic, even though there was no registration in Washington for rifles. They drove to Stan Baker’s Sports at 10000 Lake City Way. “If Kurt was suicidal,” Dylan later recalled, “he sure hid it from me.” Inside, Kurt pointed to a Remington M-11 twenty-gauge shotgun. Dylan bought it and a box of shells, paying $308.37 in cash, which Kurt handed him. Having purchased the shotgun, Kurt went home.
That night Harvey Ottinger, a driver for Washington Limousine Service, arrived in his town car as scheduled at the Lake Washington house. He waited an hour, and Kurt finally came down carrying a small satchel. On the way to the airport, Kurt realized he had left the box of shotgun cartridges in his bag, and asked Ottinger if he’d dispose of them. The driver said yes, and as they pulled up to Sea-Tac, Kurt exited the car and hurried for his flight to Los Angeles.
Chapter 24
ANGEL’S HAIR
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA– SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
MARCH 30–APRIL 6, 1994
Cut myself on angel’s hair and baby’s breath.
—From “Heart-Shaped Box.”
Pat Smear and Gold Mountain’s Michael Meisel met Kurt at LAX on Wednesday evening and drove him to Exodus Recovery Center, part of the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital in Marina Del Rey. This was the same facility Kurt had attended in September 1992. It was a rehab favored by rock stars—Joe Walsh of the Eagles had left the day before, and Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was there when Kurt arrived. Kurt checked in for what was scheduled to be a 28-day program.
He was assigned room 206 in the twenty-bed facility. That first night he went through a 40-minute intake interview with a nurse. Afterwards, he came down to the common room and sat next to Haynes, who had been one of his idols as a teenager. “Everyone was going to a Cocaine Anonymous meeting, b
ut Kurt said he was going to stay at Exodus, because he’d just gotten there,” Haynes recalled. “He looked sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Thursday morning, Kurt began his course of treatment, which consisted of group therapy, meetings, and individual therapy with his substance abuse counselor, Nial Stimson. “He was totally in denial that he had a heroin problem,” Stimson said. “I asked him if he understood the seriousness of his Italy thing: ‘Man, you almost died! You have to take this seriously. Your drug abuse has gotten you to where you almost lost your life. Do you get how serious this is?’ ” Kurt’s response was, “I understand. I just want to get cleaned up and out of here.” Stimson had not been informed that Rome was a suicide attempt. As a result, Kurt was in a regular room at Exodus, though just a short distance away was the locked-down psychiatric unit of the hospital.
Courtney called Exodus several times that day and she argued with the staff when she was told Kurt was unavailable. In his sessions with Stimson, Kurt rarely mentioned his battles with Courtney. Instead, he said the worry of potentially losing a lawsuit with original “Heart-Shaped Box” video director Kevin Kerslake was what scared him the most. Kerslake had filed a suit on March 9, claiming he, not Kurt, had come up with many of the ideas in the video. Kurt told his counselor he had thought about almost nothing else since Kerslake’s suit had been filed and he worried the case would wipe him out financially. “He told me his biggest fear was that if he lost that suit, he would lose his house,” Stimson said.
During Thursday afternoon, Kurt was visited by Jackie Farry and Frances—Courtney did not visit because her physician had advised against it in the early stages of Kurt’s sobriety. Frances was nineteen months old at the time; Kurt played with her but Farry noticed that he seemed out of it, and she assumed it was because of drugs the center had given him to help with withdrawal. When talking with Farry, Kurt didn’t mention the Kerslake suit, but did bring up the battle with Courtney over Lollapalooza. Jackie and Frances only stayed a short while but promised to return the next day.
They came back on Friday morning at eleven and Jackie found Kurt looking surprisingly rested. “He was in this incredibly happy mood, which I just didn’t get,” Farry recalled. “I was thinking, ‘God, for one second, maybe he really is for real this time.’ He was laying it on thick, saying all these incredibly complimentary things to me and being really positive. And that wasn’t his deal—sitting around and trying to make the world look great. Usually he was kind of grumpy. But I just took it as a sign that it was a positive 24-hour turnaround.” Farry told Kurt about her plans for a television show and Kurt was uncharacteristically encouraging, telling her that she’d make a “great famous person” because she “wasn’t all screwed up.”
Kurt’s change in mood wasn’t enough to alarm Farry—she just assumed he was on pills provided by the rehab. Compared to the first visit, he was more physical with Frances, and threw her in the air to make her giggle. Farry went down the hall for a moment, thinking she would give the two of them time alone together. When she returned, Kurt was holding Frances over his shoulder, patting her on the back, and sweetly talking in her ear. Farry gathered Frances and told Kurt they’d see him the next day. He walked them to the door, looked his daughter in the eyes, and said, “Good-bye.”
In the early afternoon Kurt sat in the smoking area behind Exodus, chatting with Gibby. Most repeat-rehab patients—which both Kurt and Gibby were—approached treatment with a gallows humor, and the two of them gossiped about others with problems worse than their own. One drummer had developed such severe abscesses that his arm had been amputated. Gibby joked he was glad he was just the singer, and Kurt had a long laugh at this. They chuckled over a mutual acquaintance who had escaped Exodus by jumping over the back wall: This was completely unnecessary, since the front doors were unlocked. “Me and Kurt were laughing about what a dumb-ass he was for escaping over the wall,” Haynes recalled.
That afternoon, Kurt was visited by Pat Smear and Joe “Mama” Nitzburg. Mama was an artist friend of Courtney’s who had been through drug treatment before himself. The previous year, in an act of altruism never publicized, Kurt paid for Mama’s art school tuition when Mama’s financial aid was denied. Courtney had sent Mama to Exodus with a letter for Kurt, along with some candy and a fanzine she thought he’d like. Mama was surprised at how lucid Kurt was with just a day of sobriety. “You look good; how do you feel?” he asked. “I don’t feel that bad,” was Kurt’s deadpan response.
The three of them went to the back patio so Kurt could smoke. Gibby was still out there, and making the same jokes about jumping the wall. They chatted for almost an hour, but it was mostly small talk. Kurt had always wanted to go to art school and told Mama he was envious. Mama was left with the impression that Kurt was serene: “Whatever had troubled him, he seemed to have already made peace with it.” Pat and Joe left about five in the evening, and as they parted, Mama told Kurt they’d visit again. “He gave the impression that you want a drug addict in recovery to give you,” observed Mama, “the ‘I can’t-do-this-anymore-I-give-up’ impression.”
That Friday afternoon, Courtney repeatedly tried to reach Kurt on the patients’ pay phone. She finally called when he was near it, and they had a short conversation. “No matter what happens,” he told her, “I want you to know that you made a really good album.” She found it odd he would mention this, since her record wouldn’t be released for another week. “What do you mean?” she asked, confused at the melodrama in his voice. “Just remember, no matter what, I love you.” With that, he hung up.
At 7:23 that evening Michael Meisel’s roommate answered the phone. It was Kurt. “Michael’s out for the evening,” the roommate announced, “should I have him call you?” Kurt said he wasn’t going to be near a phone. Two minutes later, he walked out the back door of Exodus and climbed the six-foot wall he and Gibby had joked about earlier in the day.
He departed Exodus with only the clothes on his back. In his room, he left a couple of shirts and a recently started journal containing four embryonic songs. Over his 27 years he had filled two dozen different spiral notebooks that served as his journals, but by 1994 he was rarely writing down his thoughts. Yet sometime during Kurt’s stay at Exodus, he completed a Rorschach-like assignment that asked him to illustrate a dozen words; the results read like something from his diaries. It was the type of drill Kurt had excelled at his entire life, ever since his grandfather challenged him to draw Mickey Mouse.
When asked to illustrate “resentment,” he drew two angry eyes with red flames next to them. For “jealousy,” he drew a Nazi sign with legs. To express “lonely,” he sketched a narrow street with two giant skyscrapers dwarfing the sides. For “hurt,” he drew a spinal cord with a brain and heart attached to it: It looked a bit like the back of In Utero. For “safe,” he depicted a circle of friends. For “surrender,” he drew a man with a bright light emanating from him. For “depressed,” he showed an umbrella surrounded by ties. For “determined,” he drew a foot stepping on a syringe. And for the final page of the exercise, to show “abandon,” he drew a tiny stick figure the size of an ant on an immense landscape.
Two hours after he jumped the fence, Kurt used his credit card to buy a first-class ticket to Seattle on Delta Flight 788. Before boarding, he called Seattle Limousine and arranged to be picked up at the airport—he specifically requested they not send a limo. He made an attempt to call Courtney; she wasn’t in, so he left a message that he had called.
Courtney was already searching L.A. for him, convinced as soon as she heard word he’d left Exodus that he was going to score drugs and potentially overdose. “She was hysterical,” Joe Mama remembered. Courtney began phoning drug dealers and inquiring whether Kurt was there; she didn’t trust their word, so she visited. She also decided to spread the rumor that she had overdosed, assuming this deception would get to Kurt and he’d contact her. As a distraught Courtney—with three days of sobriety—found herself back in famili
ar dealers’ haunts, she fell off the wagon.
Meanwhile, Kurt was on the plane. He found himself sitting next to Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses. McKagan had begun his career in several Northwest punk bands, and despite all the bad blood between Nirvana and Guns, Kurt seemed happy to see Duff. Kurt admitted he had left rehab; Duff said he understood, as he was in recovery from heroin himself. McKagan could tell things were amiss. “I knew from all my instincts something was wrong.” The two talked about mutual friends, but there was also a wistfulness to their conversation—both were leaving Los Angeles and returning to the Northwest. “We were talking about what it feels like to be going back home,” McKagan recalled. “That’s what he said he was doing, ‘going home.’ ” Kurt announced this like someone who had been away for years, not three days. When the plane arrived in Seattle, McKagan went to ask if Kurt needed a ride, but when he turned around he was gone.
Kurt arrived home at 1:45 in the morning on Saturday, April 2. If he did sleep, it wasn’t for long: At around 6 a.m., as dawn broke, he appeared in Cali’s room on the first floor of the house. Cali was there with girlfriend Jessica Hopper, on spring break from her Minneapolis boarding school. Cali was simultaneously dating Jessica and Jennifer Adamson (he previously had been involved with Academy Award– nominated actress Juliette Lewis). Though Jessica was younger than Cali, and straight-edge (did no drugs or alcohol), she adored him.
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