Save Me, Kurt Cobain

by Jenny Manzer

  “We’re going to a nice restaurant,” I said loudly. No one asked which one; possibly because nobody believed me. The others retreated to the living room. Janey waited. I had one more question. “What was her favorite Nirvana song?”

  “All of them,” Janey said. “Did you know she once had blue hair, too? Streaks, just for a few days.”

  “Yeah?” I zipped my jacket. Tugged my cap back on. One of the children was screaming again, some dispute over the new gifts.

  I shouldered my packs and turned to the door.

  “Nico? I’ll say this. Early days? ‘Sliver.’ Later, it was ‘All Apologies,’ the melody. She actually used to sing it to you.”

  “Thanks, Janey.” I was grateful that she didn’t wish me a Merry Christmas. “Sliver,” of course, is one of the songs where Cobain shows he knows how much a kid can hurt. The boy desperately wants to go home and says he wants to be alone, but I think really he wanted his mother. At the end of the song, the boy wakes up in his mother’s arms.

  If there were a pie chart showing survey results to the question “What is your favorite Nirvana song?” you’d find a big slice devoted to “Lithium.” There’s something about it. The song begins with Kurt saying he’s so happy. The bass makes you think of someone sneaking around, tiptoeing. By the time it gets to the serrated-edge “yeahs,” you can’t help but toss your head back and forth. I was thinking about “Lithium” while I sat on a Vancouver bus, listening to my CD player.

  The holiday schedule made it an agonizing trip from North Vancouver to Delta and the ferry terminal. The final push took us past shadowy farmers’ fields that in the summer would produce blueberries but in winter looked stark and foreboding. I exhaled when we hit the causeway, the ocean unfurling on either side. The manmade causeway punched into the ocean like an outstretched arm making a fist. We were almost there.

  I stepped off the city bus and faced the slap of freezing air, feeling relief and even a pinch of pride. I had made it that far. I would be early for the 10:45 p.m. sailing for Duke Point. Then I’d find my way back to Cobain’s cabin, somehow.

  I approached the ticket counter, putting on my friendly face, or giving it a try. I had my hair tucked under my hat again. Then the mannish woman at the ticket booth kindly told me that there were no more ferries that night to Duke Point. That 10:45 ferry I was counting on ran almost every night except Christmas. And I’d missed the nine p.m. sailing from Vancouver to Victoria by just two minutes.

  “Next sailing to Duke Point is at five-fifteen a.m. tomorrow. You have someone to pick you up, honey?” the woman asked, flashing me a stiff smile. I often feared people in uniform, even a BC Ferries worker. It was irrational. Verne wore a uniform, after all.

  “Yes,” I said, and turned away. “They’re in the parking lot, waiting to make sure I get on.” I was getting good at lying. That was the kind of thing relatives did, right? Saw you safely on board? Change of plans; I guess I’ll have to sleep on the spare bed after all.

  “Merry Christmas,” I remembered to say to the woman, still playing my part.

  “And you, too, dear.” She slid the window shut.

  I could feel the tears coming, so I whacked myself on the cheek. What would the young Cobain have done? He’d play his guitar until security came and told him to stop. Then he’d play some more. The terminal’s main commercial building, the Tsawwassen Quay Market, was like a well-lit airplane hangar, with shops selling pricey organic coffee, gelato, and fudges. It was closed for the night. I was alone and freezing at the end of a three-kilometer manmade causeway, surrounded by water. It would be the perfect night to jump to escape. I could just slip into the ocean as if it were layers of cold black silk.

  My other option was finding a place to hunker down for the night. There was the long stretch of beach on the causeway, but it was exposed and the winds were high, the temperature frigid. No tent and no sleeping bag, and my toes were already numb in my boots. I knew one thing for sure: I had to keep moving or security would be after me.

  I walked toward the parking lot, the muscles between my shoulders already throbbing. I marched for about fifteen minutes, trying to look as if I had somewhere to go. I stopped, unzipped my backpack, and took out a men’s wool sweater (thrift-store special) and a pair of wool skate socks. I yanked these on quickly, trying to avoid the car headlights flashing past. Don’t cry. I tried to think of a song to calm my nerves, landed on John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High.”

  I had to stay hidden from cops looking for a missing girl. The beaches were dark and shadowy. The rocks and driftwood resembled something on an X-ray, and I could hear the waves punching the shore. Putting my boots back on, I saw two figures huddled on the beach around a small fire of driftwood. One of them was shouting, as if trying to be heard over the roar of his drunkenness. I zipped my jacket up. I had packed for a city jaunt staying at a Seattle condo, not sleeping rough outdoors.

  One night. I could survive one night. Had my mother done this? Slept alone, swallowed by the cold? No, don’t think about that. Keep walking. Something whipped against my leg, and I nearly cried out. It was a black garbage bag, which I kept, tucking it under my chest straps. I wore my knapsack in front, which made me wobbly.

  My eyes watered. The wind scraped over the sand, making a high-pitched wail. I could see shapes bobbing on the water, likely buoys or deadheads, but I thought of bloated bodies.

  I hate myself and I want to die.

  Kurt Cobain was always threatening to use that line as an album title. I wondered where he was, if he was waiting for me. Perhaps he had even figured out who I was. I had almost thought of him as “my Cobain” but caught myself.

  I could see by a streetlight that there was some kind of structure at the edge of the beach, near the parking lot. Someone had made a lean-to out of driftwood, a rough A-frame. It was far back enough from the water to offer wind protection.

  There was no one in sight. The wind nearly snatched my hat, so I knelt down, and spread out the garbage bag in the lean-to. It was dry and didn’t smell, which was a good sign. After climbing out, I felt the first drops of cold rain hit my shoulder. My backpack wasn’t going to fit, so I set it next to the lean-to. If I got wet, I’d freeze to death. I knew that much. I tossed my knapsack down in the lean-to to use as a pillow and crawled in.

  The wind whipped through the gaps in the wood. It was like lying in a rib cage. Cars and trucks still passed now and then. At least I was hidden from the road. If I was caught, I wouldn’t get to see Cobain again. I couldn’t risk that. I tried closing my eyes. The wind sounded like a feral dog howling. Something thwacked against the shelter, maybe a beer can. I pressed the light on my watch: It was only ten-thirty. Still Christmas. Zut alors, I thought, which made me smile, thinking of Cobain and his strange ways.

  10:33 p.m. I was freezing. I thought maybe I should just keep moving, keep walking, but the rain was heavy. I needed someone to tell me what to do. I closed my eyes again, hugging myself.

  A couple more cars passed. Then there was just the sound of the wind meeting the ocean, like a knife being sharpened. The ocean is not peaceful. It tosses and wails. I didn’t hear the footsteps. I heard the shouting. A figure crawling into the lean-to, two hands pressing against my shoulders, pinning me to the ground.

  “This is my fuckin’ house. My fuckin’ house.” His face was over mine. A whiff of the dirty ochre smell of old nicotine. I could see only by the cracks of white from the streetlight shining through the wood. His nose appeared lumpy, as if fashioned from clay. He pressed harder on my shoulders. Thumped me once against the sand. My head bounced. I heard ringing in my ears, and I realized: I was already in a coffin. I tried to push him off, but it was as if a Dumpster had overturned on me.

  His knees were on either side of me, and he leaned forward, wringing the air from my rib cage. I will die on the beach, I thought. Here, on Christmas Day. The life was being squeezed from me. It was not how I had pictured dying.

  I pounded my hands toge
ther to make one fist, like in volleyball. I thrust my hands up, one sharp movement, as if swinging an axe. My fist hit his nose.

  “Whore!” he yelled, grabbing at his face. I raised my knee to his stomach and he was off me. I stomped and flailed my way out of the lean-to, as if doing a furious backstroke in the sand.

  The man crawled out and snatched at me as I grabbed my knapsack, his lank brown hair whipping in the wind. I raced up to the sidewalk, swinging my bag on my back. Sprinting down the highway, I heard him shouting, and I heard the wind and the buzz of my own blood rushing.

  Snowdrops are kind of a sad flower, because sometimes, like the robins, they come back too soon. They think it’s spring, so they nudge out, only to be smacked down by another frost.

  After Kurt Cobain died, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl eventually had to go on with their lives. Novoselic played bass in other bands, became active in politics, and married his second wife, an artist. Grohl founded the band the Foo Fighters, and people asked, “Who knew?” because Grohl sang and wrote songs and played guitar as well as drums. He did it all well.

  A crater opened up when Cobain supposedly shot himself. People tried to fill it in with vigils, and merchandise, and tribute songs, and there were bad, tasteless jokes, because nobody knows how to behave in the face of tragedy. People standing inside a crater, like me after my mother disappeared, have to act like they’re okay so everything else can carry on. I did; otherwise, who could stand to look at me? Me, the girl with the mother who might have been a druggie, or murdered, or God knows what. Me, the girl whose dad trimmed her bangs too short and made crooked braids. That girl.

  I ran down Highway 17, and if the few passing motorists noticed me, they didn’t slow, even for a girl on the road alone at eleven p.m. on Christmas. After a few minutes I was out of breath and realized that no one was going to stop me. I remembered then about the headlamp Verne had given me, dug it out of my knapsack, and pulled it over my head. It was tight around my forehead. Was that what the beginning of a migraine felt like? The causeway stretched behind me like an exposed spine. No one was following. I came to a turnoff for Tsawwassen Drive North and kept jogging, my feet still moving, my blood still pumping, the headlamp casting its beam along the rural road. I wondered if I was on the reserve yet, the Tsawwassen First Nation land. I heard a rustle in the bushes and scanned around with the headlamp. Cougars attack from behind, I had read. They were elite predators. I slowed to a walk, gasping. Running makes you look like prey.

  The fear seemed to reconnect the dial-up to my brain, and I remembered: my big backpack was sitting against the lean-to. Its contents would no doubt be gone. My clothes were gone, a gift I’d bought for Verne, and…the CDs. My mother’s CDs. Carefully surrounded by my socks and underwear to make sure they weren’t damaged. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I thought about going back for them.

  But I was not that brave, or crazy. Instead I cried, and tears ran down my jacket as I walked along the shoulder past rancher homes that had seen better days. After what seemed like hours, I came to a narrow white church with a white cross at the top of the steeple. My whole body shook with cold as I went around to the front doors, brown, with two white crosses. I considered sleeping under the steps but settled into a rusted old boat sitting next to the church. The boat was beached, probably forever, and left to decay. At some point I stopped crying. I shivered the whole night through.

  Lying in the starless black, I inhaled the smell of salt and wet rust and tried to summon a memory of my mother, but the one I pulled out was hazy. I could picture myself sitting in a yellow swing, and Verne giving me a push while Annalee held a camera and waved. No, that wasn’t it. There was a photo of us by the yellow swing. I couldn’t invent the memories. They had to be real. All I wanted was to sleep and not think, ever again, but my body was too cold to succumb.

  At four a.m., I strapped the headlamp back on to walk, stiff-legged, to the highway. I saw tall, shadowy figures standing by the church. Totem poles. I shined the headlamp on a stone plaque in the earth marking the Tsawwassen Indian reserve, circa 1879, and the Church of the Holy Ghost, built in 1904.

  I dreamed of hot coffee as I trudged. My nail beds had turned opal blue, and my legs throbbed with fatigue. I couldn’t believe I had walked so far in the dark, all on a tidal wave of fear and adrenaline. When I reached the lean-to it was empty, but there were prints all around from my boots and his. I shined the headlamp on the sand next to the lean-to. There was a depression, as if an animal had nestled there. My backpack and all its contents were gone. He had taken it as compensation for my time in his “house.” And I could never report it.

  I staggered onto the ferry, almost too burned out to care if I was identified. Perhaps the 5:15 a.m. to Nanaimo was not on the radar. I just wanted to get back to Cobain. I wanted his help. I needed his help. Verne would say no, but Cobain was crazy enough to agree. The coffee from the ferry vending machines tasted as if it were made from pennies and hot water. I tried to pry my mind away from those missing CDs. My fists kept clenching.

  Would Sean still like me if he saw me like this? Did he really like me at all? He wasn’t muscle-bound, but he looked fit and strong. He probably could have dealt with the guy on the beach and gotten my pack back. On the other hand, he might have already forgotten about me. Or had a girlfriend he didn’t mention. He didn’t seem like someone with a girlfriend, but that was what some dudes did, right?

  I bought a packaged cookie the size of a Frisbee from the vending machine, and the sugar hurtled into my bloodstream. I could feel my body rumbling back to life. I tried to think about Sean—that was what girls did, right? But I kept wondering about Obe. I fished out my cell phone and started dialing his number, an action as familiar as brushing my teeth. It rang and rang, the curling sound penetrating my eardrums. Where was he? Did he not know I needed to hear his voice?

  Of course Obe wasn’t there. He was in Winnipeg with his family, hopefully not waiting for his dad to call. Sometimes his dad tried to get in touch around the holidays, and it didn’t always go well. It was worse when his dad forgot, though. And worse yet when Obe’s dad talked to Nadia. Obe’s mother was all butterscotch and sunshine to everyone except Obe’s father, and with good reason.

  Not being able to talk to Obe made me lonelier. When we docked, I stood near a family of six and tried to appear as if I were with them and all their bumping tote bags and hand-holding and fussing kids. At least I was less conspicuous without my big backpack.

  I had become the textbook teenage runaway, standing at the ice-cobbled roadside with my dirty hair and my outstretched thumb. It took about an hour, but a station wagon that resembled a brown bread box on wheels slowed and stopped. The man and the woman were on their way from Courtenay, up Island, to visit their daughter in Victoria. They were settled into that midpoint of life when people get rounded and soft, before their edges sharpen and they become brittle with age. The couple was listening to a Top 40 radio station broadcasting some kind of best-of-the-ages countdown. The man tapped his hand on the steering wheel as he drove.

  “You really shouldn’t hitchhike, dear. Not everyone is friendly folk like us.”

  I murmured my agreement. “I didn’t want my grandma behind the wheel today, what with the ice,” I said. “You can drop me off up ahead. Her drive is pretty rough, and I don’t want y’all getting stuck.”

  Y’all? I said “y’all” now?

  “We don’t want to leave you by the roadside,” said the man, Dave or something. I had forgotten.

  “No, no, it’s fine. Look, the sun is even kind of shining.” Light was struggling to push through the steel-wool clouds. It was still cold, but the wind had died down. Just then, the radio played “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and I expected Mr. Dave to turn it off, but he just kept tapping his hand on the wheel. He’d no doubt heard it hundreds of times in grocery stores and shopping malls. The backseat was crammed with presents in festive gift bags with buttons and ribbons. There was an oblong baking pan c
overed in foil, then wrapped again in several layers of plastic. Clearly, these people had not gotten the memo from the environment.

  The woman had a paperback splayed open on her lap, the same silver-and-blue one everyone had been reading on the ferry: A Time to Cry. It was hard not to shake my head to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Sure, it was a megahit. I still liked it. Kurt Cobain had no idea that Teen Spirit was the name of a girl’s deodorant when he wrote that song. Kathleen Hanna, lead singer for the band Bikini Kill, had sprayed Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit on the wall of his apartment. Cobain was dating Bikini Kill’s drummer, Tobi Vail, at the time and was quite smitten. In fact, his love even made him sick, or so he wrote in “Aneurysm.”

  I jumped out of the car and waved, just as “Teen Spirit” was ending. I continued to wave, keen as a cheerleader, as they pulled away. They had called me dear. I was already planning to tell Cobain about them and the man on the beach. Cobain would say he’d warned me about that kind of thing, which was true, but how was I to know that the ferry wasn’t running? I walked down the country road, trying to figure out my way back to the cabin. The trip to Vancouver had been a nightmare, all in all, but it was done. I was ready to confront Cobain and use whatever emotional blackmail I could to secure his help.

  My boots crunched on the ice patches that had formed over the mud. The storm on the mainland the night before had obviously hit Vancouver Island as well. Big branches swept over the road like green shawls. If the road had a sign somewhere, I couldn’t see it. Cobain had called it simply Nameless Road. There were tire tracks in the thin dusting of snow. Someone had come or gone. I wondered if Cobain had company.

  The cabin seemed sturdier from the outside, hewn together with thick, smooth logs. The gravel drive ended at the cabin, and there were no neighbors in sight, nothing but trees. The birds peeped, flitting cautiously about the way they do the morning after a storm.