Just Another Man
I can remember the first time it happened.
It was the summer between my seventh and eighth grade years in junior high. Since it was the summer, I was cutting the grass for my parents. My dad has always been big on me being productive at all times of the year. His constant fear of me falling away, becoming lazy and pathetic has always been prevalent on his face. So, starting in the sixth grade, he decided it was time for me to obtain my first summer job-- cutting the grass.
With sweat dripping down my face in pools, I pushed the mower ahead of me. My hands were beginning to become red and raw from pushing the unwieldy mower for the past hour as they always did each week. My mind was moving from thought to thought, wandering aimlessly as I continued my meaningless manual labor. It was a year before I fell in love for the first time but that didn’t mean that girls were not fresh from my mind. No, I thought about Alex Barrazza and how I wanted to lose all my weight just so I could ask her out. In two years, I would ask her to the ninth grade graduation dance over the phone. She asked if I could call her back and spent the entire day crying over the thought of actually having to go to a dance with me. Finally, she called me back and rejected me in the softest way that she could. It hurt at the time but, in the end, it didn’t really matter much. I thought I was in love with her but I knew I wasn’t once I felt what that felt like for real.
When my mind wasn’t on Alex and others like her, it rambled and switched from subject to subject. It was here that it first happened. I had just bought Nirvana’s watershed album Nevermind earlier that week. Back in the seventh and eighth grade, my musical taste was still being honed. I had to go through a lot of really bad music like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit before discovering where I really stood on the musical spectrum of things. Nevermind was one of my first solid musical purchases. As I picked up the album in Bebop’s Record Store, little did I know how much it would change my life. Now, cutting the grass on a sweltering, summer day, the change started to take hold.
In the haze of my mind, the beat and lyrics of the song “Lithium” began to form and take hold.
“I’m so happy because today I found my friends-- they’re in my head.
I’m so ugly but that’s okay because so are you-- we’ve broke our mirrors
Sunday morning is everyday for all I care-- and I’m not scared
Light my candles in a daze because I’ve found God.”
Never before had I heard lyrics so strange and yet so powerful. As I strained to push the mower through my front yard, I found them repeating over and over in my head. I found myself singing them. By the time I finished mowing, I had gone through a couple of songs on the album that I had only listened to twice by this point.
I didn’t know it yet but this was only the beginning of something much deeper. I didn’t know about the greenhouse. I didn’t know yet that I wanted to be in the room. I had thought I had just purchased a rock n’ roll CD. Little did I know that this was the beginning of my relationship with Kurt Cobain-- a man who had killed himself seven years before I had even heard his music.
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It was years after my obsession with Nirvana and Cobain that I finally picked up Charles R. Cross’s incredibly detailed and personal biography Heavier than Heaven. The book had come out in the pinnacle of my obsession but, for some reason or another, I had chosen to not buy it. After reading it years later, I wish I had. It would have put me at peace at a time when I needed it more than ever.
Cross starts his book out with a metaphorical and striking sequence. It gives a detailed description of Cobain overdosing on White China heroine in a trashed, repugnant hotel room while his wife Courtney Love tried to bring him back to life by pounding on his chest and splashing him with cold water. The irony of the situation is that Cobain did this on the very night that he truly achieved fame: he had just finished performing on Saturday Night Live, his album was at the top of the Billboard Record Charts and he had just been asked by Weird Al Yankovic if he would allow him to do a parody of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Despite all of this, Cobain lay facedown in a dirty pile of clothing with his skin an aqua green color and his lungs no longer expanding or contracting.
When Love finally revived him, he coughed and began to smile. It was almost like he had been born again. In a room full of squalor, decay and drugs, he had been born ironically into the world of fame. By opening with this incident, Cross not only shows one of the many near death experiences that Cobain had before his eventual suicide but also shows how he was stuck on a path of self-destruction before fame even hit him.
As irony would have it, I was on my own path of self-destruction until I heard Cobain’s music for the first time.
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It was because of Kurt Cobain that I picked up my first guitar.
It was a week before eighth grade had started and I was sitting in Lakeland Music, thumbing the sun-burnt colored acoustic in my hands. I didn’t know any chords or notes but still I was persistent on making it make some kind of noise. I sat in the small, shabby room in the back corner of the store for about five minutes doing this before Elliot walked in.
Elliot was a big burly man with hair down past his shoulders. He had a wild black beard, wore a tie-dye t-shirt and torn jeans. He wore glasses that John Lennon himself would have fashioned back in the day. He looked like he was right out of the 1960’s and even had a beat down stoner van in parking lot to further that point.
“Hey man, what’s happening? I’m Elliot,” he said, reaching down to shake my hand.
He even talked and sounded like a hippie. Instantly, I was intrigued. However, I don’t think in the back of my head that I ever thought that this guy was going to become one of my closest friends over the next two years.
It was during that thirty-minute lesson that I learned my first song. It was really simple and made up of the chords E, G, D and A. My fingers were still soft back then and the strings were incredibly painful to press down on. However, once I got through the initial aches, I managed to form the chords and, to my surprise, heard my music for the first time.
It was unbelievably freeing.
Over time, I got pretty good at the guitar and Elliot and I became pretty close. He would teach me any song that I wanted to learn. I would make mixed tapes, bring them to the lesson and we would listen to them. Afterwards, he would teach himself how to play all the songs by ear and then would teach them to me. The first Nirvana song I learned was “Come As You Are.” I was always bothered by the fact that, even though I knew the song note by note, I could never make my guitar make the exact sound that Cobain managed to make his produce. All I was doing was nothing but an imitation. As Elliot caught on to my fascination with Cobain and his music, he always attempted to give me words of wisdom. First, he always told me to never do drugs. He himself had a past with drugs and he told me that, looking back on it all, it just wasn’t worth it. He always ended with, “Never end up like Cobain.”
I always told him to never worry about that but, to be honest, I guess there was some justification behind that worry.
A lot of people tend to say that high school was terrible for them but, for me, it was junior high. I don’t think I’m very special in my experience there but, from what I can remember, it was pretty awful. I was painfully shy and, because of that, I was a target to any and all bullying. Because I was rather large back in those days in both weight and stature, most people seemed to be fixated on angering me to the point that I would become engaged in a fight. However, I wanted nothing to do with that and therefore the torment was unending. I was beat with sticks, pelted with ice, had chalk dust-filled easers chunked at me, was verbally abused in every way possible, had my pants yanked down and was humiliated in a variety of another manners.
The experience was quite a culture shock. I had spent most of my elementary days happy and without much conflict. Now, suddenly, everyone was going through changes and they wanted to take all their frustrations out me because I was quiet and awkward. It was all so sudden and without warning. I was caught in a storm and there didn’t seem to be any way out of it.
I was absolutely miserable and didn’t really have any outlet for release. I can remember going home everyday and my mother asking me if I had a good day. With a fake smile, I lied and told her I did. I never did though. I wasn’t happy. I was dying. And, for some reason or another, I couldn’t tell anyone why. I had no venue for release. I had no catharsis. I had nothing.
That’s when Cobain and my guitar came in.
Once I started listening to Nirvana, a lot of the pressure began to fall away. I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps it was the urgency of the music, the anger involved in making it and behind it, the understanding that Cobain seemed to have with human nature or maybe even something else. Honestly, I’m still not sure what it was. I just know that, for some reason or another, I connected to it. I felt something when I listened to it. I felt alive.
When I began playing the guitar, the same thing would happen. Only this time it went even further. Now, not only was I playing the music that freed me, I was creating it. I would come into lessons with a smile on my chubby face and my right foot twitching with excitement. As Elliot came in and sat down, I would play him my latest song. He would sit, listen and then teach me how to make it better. He never put me down though. He understood what this meant to me and how important it was. It was my only outlet and release. I’d come home from a terrible day of school, do my homework and then play the guitar late into the night. I played the thing religiously, causing my finger tips to become as hard as rock. In between jam sessions, I’d sit down and listen to Nirvana, further completing my recovery after an arduous and painful day.
Little did I know that my escape would soon turn into a strange and seemingly unquenchable obsession.
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As Heavier than Heaven unfolds, Cross presents Cobain as painfully human. There were times where I could identify with him and there were others times when I was disgusted with his actions and unending amount of mistakes that he made. The man was simply a massive contradiction and flawed in every way possible. And he was doomed from the start.
Although Cross presents Cobain’s childhood in Aberdeen, Washington, as mostly warm and typical, he shows how the future rock star’s world was completely shattered when his parents got a divorce when he was just nine years old. The divorce was a massive culture shock to the hyperactive and optimistic Cobain, turning his world upside down. He came to resent his strict and often cold father mostly for this and their relationship would be mostly nonexistent and strained from here on out. It was not until shortly before his suicide that Cobain phoned his father to make amends. The relationship with his mother was also fairly rocky as he got kicked out of her house more than once.
Cross shows Cobain to be obsessed with the concept of suicide from an early age. In 1982, a few years after his parents’ divorce, he made a short film entitled Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide. In the film, a fifteen year old Cobain pretends to cut his wrists with a torn in half coke can complete with fake blood. He once joked to friends at school that he would become a superstar musician, kill himself and go out in a flame of glory. His great uncle, Burle Cobain, committed suicide when Kurt was just twelve. When he was in the eighth grade, Kurt discovered the body of a classmate who had killed himself hanging from a tree. He stared at the hanging body for thirty minutes before he was ushered away by adults. As Kurt said himself, suicide was basically in his genes.
During his eighth grade year, along with finding the dead body of one of his classmates, Kurt began to use drugs in social situations. He also began to use them as an escape from the pain that was still hanging over from his parents’ sudden, bitter divorce. As time went on, Kurt continued to use drugs as an alternative to treat his very serious stomach problems. Cobain suffered from unending stomach pain and nausea throughout his life and could barely keep food down. Although he went to many doctors, the exact problem never was officially diagnosed. Cobain turned to heroine and very quickly became an addict as his pain got worse and worse.
Although Cobain struggles with drug use and a fixation with suicide, he is also presented as very identifiable young man. Cobain was just someone trying to get through a troubled adolescence with the pain of a divorce hanging over his head constantly. Much like others and myself, he initially had a lot of trouble with women and had many misadventures in the process. His first sexual experience was a misfire as it was with the friend of a girl that he was actually in love with. After the awkward experience of losing his virginity, Kurt met the girl the next day with a flower in hand, thinking that they were a couple. She just laughed him off, right in front of the girl who he was in love with the entire time. Much like myself, Kurt escaped into music during his adolescent years. His aunt had introduced him to the world of music at a very young age and it had always stayed with him. In his teens, he began to take music more seriously, writing his own and playing his guitar for hours on end.
Despite all of this, Cobain still remains a strange, contradictory figure that is nearly impossible to decode at times. In high school, he was a both jock and a cigarette-smoking and drug-using burnout. He rescued injured birds that he found on the sidewalk and then later killed a cat for no apparent reason. Although he was shy around women and seemed to have a lot of respect for them, he almost ended up forcing a mentally handicapped, female classmate to have sex with him (an incident that haunted him for the rest of his short life). He constantly struggled to balance his aspirations to be a punk rocker and a writer of pop songs. He dreamed about performing on Saturday Night Live for years, bragging to friends and family about how it would happen someday. When it finally did, he refused to take a limo to the event and did not attend the after party. He yearned for fame all his life, calling in to radio stations constantly to try to get them to play Nirvana’s early demos. When it finally hit, he acted like he never planned for it to come and made it out to be the worst thing that could have ever happened.
He began to separate himself further from existence, creating his own version of things. He talked about how he had lived under a bridge after being kicked out of his mother’s house, dedicating the song “Something in the Way” to this myth. However, it was never true as the section under this bridge was often flooded and uninhabitable. At times, it feels as if Cobain were aware of his coming fate to the point that he almost planned it out himself. Other times, it feels as if he is just as blind as the rest of us to our own coming ends.
Despite how deep Cross delves into the man, Cobain still manages to keep a wall up between himself and the rest of us. By reading the novel, I felt that I got a sense of who Kurt Cobain really was but not the entire picture. No, Kurt was just too secretive, manipulative and clever for that. Thinking about it now, I don’t believe he really let anyone completely in. But that’s the kicker-- no one really truly knows who this man was. Kurt Cobain, unwilling leader of the grunge movement and a whole generation of youth, was a complete mystery.
And that was the thing. That’s why so many become obsessed. That’s why I wanted to be in the room.
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My brain was sweltering and throbbing underneath my eyeballs. The New Orleans’ sun was beating down on me, causing the pressure that was forming in my skull only to get heavier than it already was. Everything felt as if it were moving faster than it should have been moving. The air didn’t feel the same. Everything was off. I was losing my mind.
I was in New Orleans with my family for a vacation. It was the summer between my ninth and tenth grade years. By this time, Elliot was gone. He had been fired by Lakeland Music for missing too many of his guitar lessons. Apparently, he was so laid back in his lifestyle that it sometimes even affected his work. There were a few times when even I showed up, waiting around for thirty minutes only to find out that he wasn’t going to show up.
Perhaps his life style wasn’t the only thing getting in the way. A few times after he missed lessons, Elliot told me in confidence that he was sorry but that he had family problems to deal with. Eventually, he told me that his long-time girlfriend was bi-polar and that she had been having breakdowns so bad that he had to take her to the hospital. This image was so surreal to me at the time that I don’t think it even registered. It was so strange to me to imagine laid-back Elliot dealing with someone with such a difficult disorder to live with. Imagining him gently loading her into his stoner van while whispering that it would all be okay as she spiraled out of control was all together bizarre, touching and devastating. Still, the matter was that, family problems or not, Elliot could not be relied upon as a businessman and therefore was given the boot.
He started giving lessons out of his dirty, cigarette smoke stained home but, considering it was forty minutes out of the way from my house, I only went to three lessons. I hate to admit it but the cigarette smoke was another factor in my departure. While Elliot wasn’t allowed to smoke while giving lessons at Lakeland Music, he could light up anytime he wanted in his home. My obsessive-compulsive nature was starting to kick in at this time in my life and the prospect of coming home after a lesson smelling like a chimney was not very appealing. I can even remember wiping down my guitar and Febreezing the strap for days after each lesson. It was ridiculous on my part but I have to admit that it was very much a deciding factor. I have to admit-- I really hate myself for it.
The last lesson was particularly painful because I knew it was the last one but I didn’t know how to tell him. I ended up playing him one of my new songs that I had actually written in honor of him. I never told him this. Then, it was over. I left his house, congratulating him on his recent engagement to his girlfriend who may or may not have been a factor in his firing. In passing, I told him I was thinking of taking the rest of the summer off. I never saw him again. I felt like shit for leaving him like that but it just had to be done. I started up taking lessons at Lakeland Music again from a new guy named David but it wasn’t the same anymore. I only stayed around for another month. Last I heard, Elliot had quit giving lessons and was working at Home Depot.
I had never really liked New Orleans. I’ve always found the city incredibly filthy, hot and full of people that I honestly could do without meeting. Still, my family loved to go there whenever possible so I accompanied them on this trip to humor them. That and I really had no choice in the matter. Earlier that day, we had stopped by an antique record shop and I had seen something that I never thought I would see on my trip down: a guitar used and signed by Kurt Cobain. It could be mine for only $5,000.
Obviously, I couldn’t buy the guitar but just seeing it set something off in my mind. I was close to something he had used and even signed. By being next to something so physical as his guitar, I began to realize that I really knew nothing about Cobain. I didn’t know exactly who he was or exactly how he died. Upon getting into Cobain and his music, I had stumbled upon the vast amount of conspiracy theories that pointed to his death as being a murder and not a suicide. After all, how could he pick up a shotgun if he had a fifth of heroine coursing through his veins (a deadly dosage)? These conspiracy theories pointed to many different culprits but most centered on Courtney Love, Cobain’s much-hated wife among fans due to her media whoring and overall greediness when it came to Kurt’s legacy.
With a lack of understanding over Cobain’s life and even his death, I always felt like I was missing something myself. This was a man who had helped me get through some pretty hard times with his music and I knew absolutely nothing about what really made him tick. Not knowing him was maddening.
After seeing the guitar, I roamed around New Orleans with my family, desperate to find anything related to Cobain. When we stopped at the Tower Records Store, I searched the CD aisles, hoping to find a rare bootleg Nirvana CD somewhere. I already owned all of their major release albums but I had learned that there were many bootlegs floating around record stores filled with unreleased demos and rare tracks. I figured that New Orleans would be the place to find such an item. However, that turned out to not be the case. I searched the Tower Records upside down but found nothing but Nirvana’s major releases. Frustrated, I left the store with my family.
Following this fruitless visit to Tower Records, I walked with my family around New Orleans, my head throbbing. I must have looked ridiculous. My head was hung over and my hair was matted to my oily forehead. It was too long back then, forming a mushroom shape around my head. I held the skin of my forehead in a constant strain, never allowing it to relax. Perhaps this is the reason why I already have a giant crease over my forehead at the ripe age of twenty-one. I only answered my parents in little short sentences, never using the full force of my voice. I only grunted at them. In a way, I wanted them to know how miserable I was despite the fact that I didn’t exactly know why I felt that way. I told myself it was the way I was treated in junior high but that had mostly leveled-off by now. The truth was that I didn’t know what it was. Nothing really made sense anymore except for figuring out Kurt.
In a way, I had managed to gain Kurt’s physical stature and image. I was no longer overweight by this point. In fact, I was almost sickeningly skinny. It had just all fallen off of me without much effort. Still, Alex Barrazza wouldn’t go out with me. But that didn’t matter anymore. No, all that mattered was Kurt. I just wanted to know. I had to know. I wanted to know exactly who this man was. I wanted to know what made him up and everything he did. I wanted to know what lead to his downfall and why I was no longer able to buy new CDs from him. Most of all, I wanted to know how he died. I wanted to be in that greenhouse with him on that overcast Seattle morning. I wanted to sit in the corner of the room and watch it all unfold in front of me. Not knowing for sure was driving me insane. I just had to know what happened.
I just wanted to know what happened to Kurt Cobain on April 5, 1994.
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Reading the second to last chapter in Charles R. Cross’s biography many years later, I was finally put at peace.
In this chapter, Cross does something that angered many Nirvana fans-- he fictionalizes Cobain’s suicide. Obviously, no one knows exactly what happened on that overcast morning in Seattle. Still, after studying police reports, Cross does his best to present his interpretation of what could have been Kurt Cobain’s final moments in this world. To many, it was offensive. To me, it was freeing and quite beautiful. He put me in the room.
Cross presents the process as fairly peaceful and almost normal. He describes Cobain waking up early that morning in his bed, already fully dressed in jeans and a corduroy jacket since his house was rather cold. Cobain got out of bed, turning the TV on to MTV and putting R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People album in his CD player. He set the player’s volume to low so that the music only hummed in the background. It was this one detail that Cross added that killed me inside. It just felt so everyday and relaxing that it made what was going to occur in just a few minutes time much more painful. This becomes even more tragic when one learns that Cobain was set to do a musical project with R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe in the near future, as the two had become good friends over the years.
After turning this music on, Cobain got back in his bed and began to write his suicide note by the light of MTV. Cross adds that it takes three cigarettes to draft this suicide note. It’s this little detail that makes the whole scenario seem more intimate and personal. He also states that Cobain has had the words to the note in his head for days, months and possibly years. Obviously, this is just his opinion but it is a notion that makes the whole scene much more fatalistic.
Cobain began to collect the necessary tools for the act after finishing the suicide note. He grabbed a box of Mexican black tar heroine, a Remington shotgun, shells, two towels, the suicide note and a can of Barq’s root beer. After collecting these things, Cobain carefully and quietly opened his back door and went out across the patio. Cross manages to create a strange, comical image with this section. He tries to let the reader imagine Kurt waddling out across the patio while trying to balance all these items in his hands. It may seem out of place but it just makes the whole act and process of carrying it out so much more human.
As Cobain arrives to the greenhouse in his backyard (which is above his garage), he begins to organize all the items. The two towels were not for Kurt but for who ever found him. Yes, they were there to help clean up the mess. That’s a point Cross keeps making in this chapter-- although Cobain was killing himself and possibly destroying the lives of all those who loved him in the process, he still wanted to make sure that the death wasn’t too bothersome. He killed himself in the greenhouse that was separate from the rest of the main house. He brought towels for cleanup. His blood and brains would be spread out over a linoleum floor, which would make it easier to clean up. He grouped all the items he brought to the room in a very specific and organized manner, making it easier to find everything. It was just a larger part of Cobain’s contradictory nature-- he wanted to make everything easier for everyone yet he was still destroying everything in the process.
After organizing all the items, Cobain sat on the floor and took a sip of the Barq’s root beer. Again, just this everyday notion makes the event even more human. Cobain seems to try to attempt to make the whole thing seem ceremonial with his placement of all the items but just the image of him sitting on the floor sipping from the soda can seems to dissolve all of that. He’s just like all of us. He’s just a human being.
Cobain put the can away and shot a heavy dosage of heroine into his veins. Instantly, he began to feel lightheaded and started to float. It was a lethal dosage. Cross portrays Cobain as fighting the wave of euphoria, fumbling with the shotgun and trying to get the barrel into his mouth as quickly as possible. As he does this, Cross talks about how, in one of his journal entries, Cobain described his first alleged memory. In this memory, Cobain describes being born, seeing the aqua-green floor of the hospital and instantly feeling unsafe outside of the comfortable womb of his mother. Cross has already used the imagery of the color aqua-green in the first section of biography as Cobain overdosed on heroine in a hotel room, his skin turning this shade. In a way, that near-death experience was a new birth for Cobain. Now, as he steadies the shotgun, Cobain begins to see aqua-green shades on all the objects around him in a heroine haze. Everything comes full circle. Birth, near-death, re-birth and, finally, suicide. Then, it was all over.
But Cross doesn’t stop there. No, he describes the bloody mess that was left behind in the greenhouse by Cobain’s actions. He describes how Courtney Love came into the police scene, hysterical, managing to collect a piece of Kurt’s skull that still had hair matted to it. He describes the scene in the funeral home in which a broken-down Krist Novoselic, the bassist of Nirvana, and Love pay their last respects to Cobain. In a quick description, Cross says that Cobain’s eyes have been sewn shut by this point. This one detail is utterly devastating, turning Cobain from a talented musician that lead a musical revolution into a piece of meat on a slab. But that’s the point-- Cross shows how awful the act that Kurt committed was. It was terrible. It ended and destroyed everything. Cobain left this world, leaving a two-year-old daughter without a father, a wife without a husband, a band at the height of their success without a leader and thousands of fans without a voice. But he did leave us some towels to clean up the mess he made.
Reading these last two chapters, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat empty inside and yet at peace at the same time. Cross managed to put what Cobain had done into perspective to me finally. Even though the scenario he imagined was not exactly how it went down, it was real enough to give me an impression of what it could have been like. Cobain wasn’t on the floor, crying his eyes out and acting out in an unbalanced manner. There was no gunman who came in while he was getting high to whack him. No, it was just him moving slowly and methodically. He had been planning this his entire life. I was angry with him and yet, in a way, I understood him. After all, what right did I have to be angry with the man? All he had done was create some music. I was the one who connected to it and found something that helped me get by. That wasn’t his fault. He was just creating. He never intended to a symbol for anything. He never meant to be spokesperson for a generation. He was just a human being. He wasn’t God or Jesus like so many Nirvana fans make him out to be. No, that wasn’t the case at all. He was just an incredibly flawed young man like many others and myself. He was not perfect. No one is.
Still, I got to be in that room with him. I got to see who the man that had been helping me get along all this time really was. I got to see him. I got to see.
He was just another man.
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