Save Me, Kurt Cobain

by Jenny Manzer

I rapped on the door, hard, thinking that Cobain could still be asleep. He was known to be lazy in matters pertaining to anything but music. I pounded again, growing impatient. After all I’d been through, he could at least open the door.

  “Come on, Cobain. Wake up.”

  Shit, I had said it. Cobain. There was silence except for snow melting off the trees and onto the ground, a slow, soft sound like a hand being patted. I went around to the side of the cabin and noticed an empty wooden crate by the woodshed. I positioned it under the bathroom window, which was high above the toilet. The window slid open with three or four hard blows with the side of my bandaged hand. Caulking and other pieces of debris rained down. I lowered myself backward and managed to get both boots on either side of the toilet lid.

  I could see right away that Cobain had left his turtles behind, which meant he was coming back. He did love the turtles. I wondered what they ate and if I could feed them. I opened the medicine cabinet, but all I found were pills, and lots of them: orange ones, blue ones, and white ones, all in prescription bottles. All them were prescribed to different people, including a couple made out to John Simon Ritchie. None of them were made out to a Daniel. I wasn’t educated enough about pills to know what the medicines treated or what they did to you. I could see no methadone. You usually had to go to a clinic every day for that. I’d learned that much living in my neighborhood.

  When I went into the main part of the cabin, things didn’t look right. Cobain’s laptop sat on the table with the lid pulled down but not shut. It glowed and ebbed slightly, as if it were sentient but dozing. A brown paper cup of shitty convenience-store coffee sat next to it. Couldn’t Cobain even make his own coffee? I touched the cup. It was full but cold. Cobain had left in a hurry. I placed my hands on the silver top of his computer and lifted the case, slowly, as if checking under a manhole. He’d been in the middle of writing something.

  He realized then that he was going to have to kill her. The days had grown long and bloated, and he had put off the task long enough. He paused for a second and wound up his toy monkey, which always helped him think. How to do it was the question. His bag of tricks was nearly empty.

  I heard the door latch rattle and slammed the computer closed, jumping up.

  “Nico, what the fuck?” said Cobain. He was wearing the hunting cap again. He had also broken out long johns and boarder shorts, an outfit that suggested he had taken some of the pills in the cabinet. “What the fuck?” seemed to be Cobain’s version of “Que pasa?” so I answered accordingly.

  “I just got back from Vancouver now. I had to stay overnight, missed the last ferry.” I backed away from the computer toward the kitchen knives. Cobain had always written disturbing things in his diaries, I knew; I had read about them, if not the actual journals. These days, he was using a laptop instead of a Mead notebook. I knew he couldn’t have been writing about me. They were just words, a dark story, like the song “Polly,” about a woman who is abducted and tortured, although that was inspired by a real case Cobain heard about in the news.

  “You stayed with that Janey friend in North Van? Did she have any answers?”

  He swung his right arm around and produced a carton of plain doughnut holes, the kind that look like golden golf balls.

  “No, not really. I thought you had gone.” I was still shaken. He might have left for good. Then how would I find him?

  “I thought you had disappeared. You said you’d be back, so I was worried. But I did buy you a coffee. Hmm, I left it in the car.”

  Cobain disappeared out the door. I flipped the laptop up.

  Today was the day, he thought, feeling neither melancholic nor euphoric. It simply was. The time had come.

  I closed it again. I must have looked guilty.

  “Shit, I left that on. I had to go make a phone call. I wasn’t getting cell reception again. It comes and goes.”

  “Who were you calling?”

  “Someone I know.”

  “Figured that.”

  “Did the trip help?”

  “Not really. Sort of.”

  “So now what?”

  “I need you to help me find my mother.”

  “What? I can’t keep doing this Nancy Drew stuff. I have deadlines. And I’m not a very nice man.”

  “You don’t have to be nice. Please. No one’s really helped me before. They’ve just told me lies. I feel like I could…find her.”

  “We need to call the police,” he declared, enunciating as if he were auditioning for a play.

  “Okay, how do you think that will go for us?”

  “Nico, I could go to prison as a child abductor.”

  “Please help me. You’re smarter than the cops. We’ll be careful,” I said, trying to appeal to his vanity and his dislike of cops.

  He considered, rubbing the stubble on his chin. Tears tugged at my eyes, which were the same color blue as his, but not lit from behind like his.

  “Then, after, I’ll go. I won’t bother you anymore.” I was counting on Cobain having one of his mood swings.

  “That will be it?”

  “Yes. That will be the end.”

  “Okay, andiamo,” he said. “Right after we feed the turtles.”

  When everyone was writing off Kurt Cobain as a junkie and pretty much sticking a fork in Nirvana, Cobain fired back at his critics by kicking off their set at the Reading Festival in a wheelchair, wearing a fright wig and a hospital gown. Some critics had predicted he wouldn’t even show up. By all accounts, the show was electrifying. Cobain had come back swinging, and so would I. The bad news was that he and I would have to catch a ferry, which would be risky.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Nico, but I’m not a burly man. I would not do well in prison.” Cobain twitched a bit as he drove. I wondered if he had an actual driver’s license. He wore big white-framed sunglasses, as if that were a real disguise.

  He flipped on the radio to the news channel. Manic ads for Boxing Day sales. Power outages due to the storm, and a public appeal for information on one Nicola Cavan, age fifteen, missing since Christmas Eve. I was officially gone, but it was unclear whether I’d fled or been taken.

  “Oh, scheisse!” said Cobain. “We’ve got to go back. This is serious.” He said that, yet kept driving to the ferry terminal.

  “I’ll hide in the trunk. No one will see me. I’ll stay in the car the whole ferry ride if I have to. I will. I’ll stay in the fucking trunk.”

  “Nico, I am making a mistake here. And I’m doing this for one reason only: I don’t want you to go alone, and I know you will.” He thought for a second. “The other reason is because I have a daughter about your age.”

  I knew better than to point out that he’d given two reasons, or maybe to him they were really the same. He stared at me hard and then cranked up the Pixies. Here comes your man.

  He demanded that I stay in the trunk until we arrived in Vancouver. Maybe he thought the cops wouldn’t believe that I’d gone with him of my own free will, and that they would think I had schadenfreude or Stockholm syndrome or whatever it was called. I had wanted to get out and email Obe and Sean using the Internet on the ferry, but Cobain forbade it. If we got caught, our mission was aborted. (Actually, he said it would be “fuckered.”) The trunk was freezing and dark and smelled like winter boots, moldy rugs, and wet dog. Maybe he’d had the turtles in there. After the first fifteen minutes, I got freaked out, so I hummed softly to myself like some of the homeless people do.

  Cobain had gone into the passenger lounge and the warm cafeteria. “If you get a Nanaimo bar, you’d better get me one,” I told him. I was really in no position to make demands, though.

  Once we’d rolled off the ferry and cleared the terminal, Cobain let me out of the trunk and into the backseat, where I was to lie down. We listened to the news as he negotiated his way through the downtown core. He seemed a nervous driver. Of course, I was used to being in a car with Verne, who was cautious but confident. Cobain drove too slowly, whi
ch I knew was also a hazard. Cars honked. Vancouver had a high ranking for bad traffic, and I wished Cobain would step on the gas. We couldn’t afford to attract attention. While he fiddled with the radio, I wondered if I should tell him about the older man in the station wagon who gave me the ride, and how he kept time to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” No, he wouldn’t think it was funny. Plus, Cobain was getting old. Older. I wondered if he had a hang-up about turning forty, which would be soon—in February. I wondered if he secretly saw his daughter. I mean, his other daughter.

  Maybe there was some way he could reclaim his fortune. His fingerprints and dental records would be on file, and the authorities could test, what, his DNA? Many fans, some of Cobain’s circle of friends, Cobain’s grandfather, and even a determined private investigator believed that his death was murder, questioning how someone could ingest as much heroin as he did and still pull the trigger of a shotgun. And why were there no fingerprints on it? It might not be that hard for Cobain to convince the authorities that he was alive. It would get the conspiracy theorists to back off Courtney Love, at least. Most of the stories made her seem pretty coco loco, but if she’d made Cobain happy, who was to judge? As long as she didn’t try to stop me from seeing him, I had no problem with her. And Frances. She was beautiful. I wanted to meet her so badly, in Seattle or Los Angeles, wherever she was. Then she would have a sister and I would have a sister. We would have each other. How had Cobain kept this all secret? Anything was possible, right? Anything was possible if you had heaps of money.

  I could only dream about what it would be like to have the kind of money Cobain had, or once had. “We do fine,” Verne would say, except he didn’t have to eat the toast and runny peanut butter at the school breakfast club, or wear secondhand boots with another kid’s name on the heels in marker. Or wonder how you could ever hope to go to art school when there were no savings. How you could even ever hope. Funny, there’s a place in British Columbia called Hope. It had a big-time natural disaster, a landslide, in the 1960s. People died. Then, years later, the first of the Rambo action movies was filmed there, and that became the other thing that brought the town fame.

  “Nico, listen!” Cobain had finally settled on a radio station. I hadn’t seen him wash, brush, or otherwise groom his sandy hair (except raking it with fingers), yet somehow it still looked good.

  “No, stay down,” he yelled, when I sat up to hear the newscast.

  “Nicola Cavan, fifteen, has been missing since Christmas Eve, when she disappeared sometime after leaving the Clipper ferry terminal in downtown Victoria. In the third day of her disappearance, her father, Verne Cavan, is appealing for the public to help find his daughter. ‘Please, if you know where she is, pick up the phone. Keep your eyes and ears open. Any information is good information. We want her home. And, Nico: I don’t know what you had to do, but just come home. Come home now.’ ”

  Then the female broadcaster talked about my mother, how she went missing at age twenty-eight, leaving me behind. They called my mother a cold case.

  “Detective Sergeant Del Stanton, of the Victoria Police, said he has never stopped thinking about the disappearance of Annalee Lester,” the reporter said, voice earnest yet smooth, the same neutral tone used to give updates on the stock market.

  Then a recording of the officer, Stanton: “She was young and beautiful, and she had a lot of reasons to live, including her little girl, who, on a personal note, is now the same age as my own daughter. We always held hope that new information would bring the pieces together.”

  The officer sounded as if he was getting choked up at the memory. Why had I never heard of this guy? Then they gave a description of me, complete with the blue hair. Gillian might have emailed some recent photos, too. She had taken a few snapshots in Seattle.

  “Nico,” said Cobain. “People are really worried. I think it’s time you went home.”

  “No. You promised you’d help me look. It’s not too late to tell everyone you kidnapped me. Who would they believe? A helpless girl or a guy with a cabin packed with pills?”

  The news report had shaken me. I was talking tough, but my voice quavered. Why hadn’t I ever heard about that police detective, Stanton? It was strange that he’d used my mother’s maiden name, Lester.

  “Those are all prescription meds, Nico. Perfectly legal.”

  “Yeah, but they’re not prescribed for you.”

  “I think I need a hamburger.”

  We had made it over the Lions Gate Bridge and were heading into West Vancouver. I sighed. I wished he would give up meat once and for all. I desperately had to pee. I’d heard there was construction under way on the Sea-to-Sky Highway to make it safer for the tourists coming to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler. Please, let the construction be on a Christmas hiatus, I thought. I was scraping the rind of my patience.

  “I’m going to stop in Horseshoe Bay,” he said. “There’s a stand.”

  If I asked Cobain how he knew the Vancouver area so well, he’d just lie, so I didn’t.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  I waited until he’d parked the Phoenix, crookedly, and left in pursuit of his burger, then bolted from the car, looking for a washroom. I spotted one by the children’s playground. There was snow on the ground, a few inches, which I somehow hadn’t expected so soon. We were heading up Highway 99, the Sea-to-Sky, en route to Whistler. There would have to be snow at a world-famous ski resort in December.

  I lingered at the taps to splash my face and my armpits with water, which only ran icy cold. I badly needed a hot shower and fresh clothes. I was still wearing the floral dress with the men’s sweater and black leggings, now torn at the knee.

  I’d told Cobain I forgot my backpack on the ferry after seeing Janey, which he’d believed. I was running out of everything. Time. Money. Lies. It was Boxing Day, and pretty soon my regular life would rumble back into action. But I had a feeling my mother had come out this way, and I had to see the area. I’d never traveled down Highway 99, also called the Killer Highway because of all the rockslides and fatal accidents it had witnessed. On one side: rock face; on the other: Howe Sound. Under the bald white light in the women’s bathroom I could see my skin was blotchy and greasy. The Kool-Aid dye was fading, leaving strange mottled patches. My eyes were so red that I looked like a speed freak. I dawdled too long, and Cobain beat me back to the Phoenix.

  “Nico, get in,” he hissed. “What if someone sees you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, getting in the backseat and crouching down. Cars dotted the parking lot, but the cold had driven most travelers inside. There were a few visitors roaming the snowy grounds and snapping photos of the ferries coming in, or of the big brass anchor, which had a plaque to explain some kind of historical significance. “It’s probably better not to make a scene, don’t you think?”

  “Here,” he said. “I got you a veggie burger.” He passed me a round disk wrapped in foil.

  “Thanks. Um, was it cooked right next to your meat burger? Did you see?”

  “Shut it,” he said, backing up the car in a herky-jerky way. “I said I would take you to Whistler, but we’re not staying. Or I’m not. I’ll get you there, and then you’re on your own.”

  He cranked up the car radio, which happened to be playing Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” The song, the burger with pickles, and being safe in the backseat made me feel happy. There was no one I would rather have been with, except my mother, than crazy Cobain. I think he liked having me there, too.

  “Can I move up front now that we’ve left Vancouver?”

  “No,” he said, chewing and nodding along to the song. “Too dangerous.”

  “I need to see the area,” I said, in something close to a whine. “That’s how I’ll know.”

  Somewhere past Lions Bay (I’d been studying the map during the ferry ride), Cobain stopped the car and let me out.

  “You can sit in front,” he said. “But wear these.” He held out his hunting cap and his big sungl
asses. That made me laugh, which annoyed him. While we drove, I thought of myself, of my mother, wondering if she had seen everything I was seeing. A small, less selfish part of me was aware that Cobain was taking a big risk for me.

  “So why don’t you want to go back? Is your high school that bad?” He turned to me. A scrap of sun shone over Howe Sound, making the highlights in his hair glint and his eyes pop like two topaz marbles.

  “You know how bad high school is,” I said. “People are simpletons. I once got a detention from a librarian who actually believed my name was Anhedonia. That’s a medical term for…”

  “I know what it means,” he mused, shaking his head. He seemed pleased by this story, and smiled. His slender fingers were wrapped loosely around the steering wheel. I wondered if I should remind him that Highway 99 had a rap sheet for being deadly. Cobain was always hunched over, his comma posture even more tragic than my own.

  “No, seriously. I told her it was Greek,” I said, milking it. The librarian had worn tight burgundy leather pants. She hated kids and had enjoyed using what power she had to hand out detentions. She really should have known the medical term for loss of pleasure in life.

  All around us, there were jeeps and vans with chipper bumper stickers, skis strapped to the roof racks, families heading to Whistler for a ski weekend. I knew the Sea-to-Sky Highway was always crawling with people taking off to bike or ski or hike, but not usually with runaway girls trying to find a psychic connection to their missing mothers.

  “You’re smart, Nico. And you’re a pretty good artist. High school’s not forever.”

  “You never told me your real name,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your real name?”

  “Daniel Orion.” Traffic was growing heavier. People were driving too fast and passing too close. Cobain became agitated, shifting around in his red leather seat. The car smelled of hamburger: pickles, onions, ketchup. He’d thrown his wrapper on the floor.