by Everett True
“Some hours later I woke up to her screaming – it was a common thing,” Cali grimaces. “Our rooms were connected and I ran in there and he was on the floor, dressed, with his eyes open, blood coming out of his nose. She was like, ‘Kurt took all these Rohypnol5 and Kurt drank champagne.’ ”
Courtney had woken up sometime between the hours of 4 and 6 a.m. to realise her husband was no longer in the bed next to her. He was fully dressed, with $1,000 in his pocket and a three-page note in his hand. “The note was on hotel stationery,” she told Spin in 1995, “and he’s talking about how I don’t love him any more and he can’t go through another divorce [a reference to his parents].”
The note quoted Shakespeare: “Dr Baker [Kurt’s doctor at a previous detox attempt] said, like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death,” Kurt wrote. “I’m choosing death.” It also mentioned the names of the people Kurt thought Courtney was cheating on him with.
An ambulance appeared at around 6.30 a.m. and took Courtney and the still-unconscious Kurt to the Umberto 1 Polyclinic Hospital in the city centre, where he was placed on a life support machine. He had the contents of his stomach pumped – 60 Rohypnol pills according to some reports, which he would’ve had to remove individually from their plastic containers – but slipped further into unconsciousness. By midday, stories had started filtering through in London about a suspected overdose, while CNN actually stated that Kurt had died.
Gold Mountain countered with a statement reporting that Kurt had, “Inadvertently overdosed on a mixture of prescription medicine and alcohol, while suffering from severe influenza and fatigue.”
“He was . . . it was scary,” says Cali. “Pat Smear was there, too, and he ran in. The ambulance came and took them away, and he was in a coma. I couldn’t believe how fast the press works. I couldn’t believe how fast they were knocking on my door. They were calling my room and knowing my name, people from everywhere. I think he had a bunch of cash in his pocket, he had written a note, but the note alluded to leaving. It said he was leaving and some people say it was another suicide note. As far as I could tell it was a ‘running away’ note. It was also bizarre for him to drink; he never drank alcohol. He really took a lot of Rohypnol.
“It was one of those things like, ‘Was it or wasn’t it?’ ” Cali continues. “You could mistake massed depressed consumption for a suicide attempt. I wonder why he was all dressed and why he had all that money. Maybe he just had all that money . . . you could speculate about these kinds of things all day and all night. It’s hard to say, although if I remember correctly she did hide that note.”
She burned that note . . .
“As far as I remember it, she didn’t burn that note until after he died.” She told me that something weird happened when she burned it.
“When she threw it in the fireplace it exploded,” Cali confirms. “That’s what people who were there tell me, some kind of thing – if you believe in stuff like that. I do, in a way. On my 21st birthday, when the real part of this journey started [when Kurt died], they had all fallen asleep and I was on the freeway. The biggest owl I’ve ever seen in my life flew straight towards the car and put its wings out. It flew right at the windshield screaming. I remember thinking, ‘I’m sure that’s a bad omen.’ ”
According to Courtney’s version, Kurt woke up the next day – on March 5 – after 20 hours of unconsciousness, wrote a note that said, “Get those fucking tubes out of my nose,” and, when he was well enough to speak, asked for a strawberry milkshake.
“He actually said, ‘Get this fucking catheter out,’ ” Cali corrects me. “It wasn’t his nose. It was a catheter. I came there right after and that’s what they said he said. It was crazy. Pat and I were trapped in our hotel room, but we decided to go out anyway. We put big coats on and stuck Frances under one of them and went to run around Italy. Kurt was in a coma, but it also didn’t seem that unusual that it was happening. We had fun. Pat dyed my hair pink. When we went to hospital Kurt just smiled and looked happy and was like, ‘Punk rock!’ It was sort of back to normal. Then we went back to Seattle.”
Can you remember Courtney’s reaction?
“She just talked about it like it was an accident.”
Janet Billig called me up that weekend to tell me that it wasn’t a suicide attempt, just an accident. “Kurt’s fine, he’s sitting up in bed, talking and joking.” Maybe he was by that point.
“He was,” Cali smiles. “He was happy to see me and Pat and Frances. The plane ride home was funny. Pat Smear and I both got hepatitis A around that point and we turned yellow, maybe on the plane ride home. We got sick.”
Kurt left hospital on March 8, and flew home four days later – on the plane, he could be heard arguing loudly with Courtney to give him a Rohypnol. She told him she’d flushed them down the toilet. He was carted off at Sea-Tac airport in a wheelchair.
Even after all this, it seemed like some of Gold Mountain were living in a dream world – Melora Creager reported being sent on to Prague on March 11 for the start of the second leg of Nirvana’s European tour and being told to wait there. “Even when I got back to New York, they still didn’t want to cancel anything,” she told Borzillo-Vrenna. “They finally said Europe’s not gonna happen, but be ready for Lollapolooza because we were still planning to do that.”
“ Cali called me when Kurt OD’d in Rome,” says Jessica Hopper. “It was the middle of the night, and he was crying and really upset. He said Kurt’s dead. He tried to kill himself. It was two or three in the morning, and then by the time it was light he called again and said Kurt wasn’t dead and he was going to be OK. After Rome, there was definitely much more of a pall, a much heavier vibe. There were a lot of things that people weren’t talking about. No one was capable of truly intervening; the status quo was already so fucked in the first place. Everyone felt that something bad was going to happen, that someone was going to die. There were a lot of quiet, unwritten rules. Everything revolved around Kurt’s moods, an eggshells kind of situation, much more so than before.”
You’ve been quoted as saying the final show in Munich was ‘totally amazing’. What do you remember about the show?
“Kurt and I were suffering from bronchitis,” replies Pat Smear, “and his voice became noticeably more trashed with every song. When we sang together we sounded like cats fighting. His voice was sooooo gone, but instead of trying to conserve it, he seemed to delight in pushing it to the, ‘I won’t be able to sing for days,’ limit. After a while it was a bit much.”
There’s been much talk about the sessions at Cobain’s residence on March 25, 1994 with you, Kurt and Eric Erlandson. What can you tell us about this?
“There was some jamming and some four-tracks made. Kurt played drums and sang, Eric played bass and I played guitar.”
Which songs were recorded other than ‘Do, Re, Mi’?6
“None that I remember.”
Do you know if Kurt was planning on making another Nirvana record? If so, had any songs been targeted for it?
“It was mostly all about touring at that point. Compared to what was left, we’d barely started . . . more Europe dates, Japan and the Far East, South America, Lollapalooza, etc. The only thing that I knew about the next record was that Kurt was writing for it and he’d mentioned some ideas about its direction. He sometimes asked me to help him write while we were touring Europe, but it was really intimidating for me and impossible for us to get acoustic guitars for our [hotel] rooms. I told him how good Dave’s tapes were, and that he should write with him, but I don’t know if he ever had the chance to ask him.”
During the final few months of Kurt’s life, how was the general vibe in the band? Critics argue that Kurt hated his bandmates and that Nirvana had essentially broken up.
“All bands go through the same bullshit. I’ve seen it over and over, and I try not to take it too seriously. I’d assumed we were just on a temporary break and that we’d finish up Europe and move on to Lollapalooza. Even when I h
eard it was cancelled, I didn’t believe it.”
What’s your favourite, or fondest, memory of Kurt?
“He cracked me up.”
(Interview by Rasmus Holmen, www.nirvanaclub.com,
September 2002)
“I talked to Kurt every night while he was in Europe,” says Rene. “I talked to him before Rome. I remember him waiting for Courtney to get there from London – he was asking me what was going on with her. I didn’t know. I was at the house by myself. I talked to Cali right after he found his body, and heard the madness going on. Cali didn’t know what to do, he had the baby and the baby was crying. Cali found the suicide note from Rome.
“I felt instinctively that maybe Kurt had found out Courtney had cheated on him,” Rene continues. “Knowing her, and the way she does things, who knows what happened? I know they loved each other and they had a crazy relationship. I was more worried about him finding some sort of peace. When they came back from Rome, I knew he was suicidal simply from the way he did drugs. I could sense the feeling of darkness, of death around him. If you’re a drug addict, you can tell when something is going to happen to certain people who are using. It was brewing. I didn’t think he necessarily meant to kill himself so much as he didn’t care. As long as he was on dope I knew he was OK, but I also knew there was a point where it stopped working.”
After Kurt returned home, Rene called Kurt’s mum, Wendy O’Connor, to come over to the house. It was decided Kurt needed some home-made cooking, to help him feel comfortable again. Wendy cooked a couple of dinners of Kurt’s favourite food – fish sticks.
“I didn’t talk about the suicide attempt too much,” says Rene. “ Cali and I talked about it, but we tried to keep everyone else cool. We tried to operate from a basis that everything was OK. If something heavy went down, Kurt would go into his room. The only ones that would go in would be Cali or myself or Eric [ Erlandson], and based on our demeanour people would judge what was going on. There wasn’t much time between that and when Kurt left with me – two days. It’s pretty blurry.”
“Once we got home, their fighting started again, really bad,” Cali says. “Nothing in particular, just a lot of hostility. Gold Mountain was pressuring the fuck out of him not to cancel Lollapalooza. [Kurt finally confirmed he was cancelling Lollapalooza in the second week of March. “The band was broken up,” Krist bluntly stated to Charles Cross.] In the middle of this turmoil, Courtney was yelling at him about money, like, ‘All the money you’re losing! How can you do this to your daughter,’ which is always a good one. He was only 27 years old, walking around with like the weight of the world on his shoulders. If you are sensitive and have all these people yelling at you, ‘Why are you ruining our lives?’ It doesn’t make you feel good. He felt backed into a corner.”
His father called up a couple of times. Do you remember taking those calls?
“I took the calls and said he wasn’t there, I’m sure,” Cali replies. (It’s been reported that his father did manage to get through to Kurt once, and had a ‘short, but pleasant’ conversation.) “I remember at the house before that on Lake Washington, his dad coming to the door, unannounced. Kurt was right there saying, ‘Not here.’ I felt really in a corner. I was just staring at his dad going, ‘He’s not here, you can’t come in.’ I don’t know him, but I know I’m in the middle of something I shouldn’t be in the middle of.
“But the bigger argument around that time was to do with guns,” he continues. “It was Kurt locked in his bedroom with guns, threatening to kill himself, saying, ‘Get away from me, just leave me alone.’ But even at that point I didn’t imagine that he was actually going to do something to hurt himself. I thought it was just bluffs and bad arguments.”
It was March 18, just two weeks after Rome. Courtney called 911 again, and police showed up within minutes. She told the cops that Kurt was suicidal. Kurt told them he had no intention of killing himself, and that he had just locked himself in his room to keep Courtney away. The police confiscated four of Kurt’s guns – a Beretta .380, a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and two Taurus’s – and 25 boxes of ammunition, plus a bottle of “assorted, unidentified pills”. Under further questioning, Courtney admitted to the police that she hadn’t actually seen Kurt holding a gun, but that she was concerned for his safety knowing he had access to guns.
(This version contradicts a more histrionic story Courtney told Spin journalist Craig Marks in 1995, that after she got inside the locked door, she saw guns, laid out around Kurt: “I grabbed the revolver and I put it to my head and I said, ‘I’m going to pull this right now. I can’t see you die again.’ He grabbed my hand. He was screaming, ‘There’s no safety. You don’t understand. There’s no safety on that. It’s going to go off. It’s going to go off.’ ”)
The police took Kurt downtown to the jail, but didn’t book him.
“He was always happy when the cops were there,” states Cali. “He would start joking. The cops were probably into it, too.”
There’s some missing days in the final weeks of Kurt’s life. One such period occurred a few days after Kurt and Courtney returned from Rome, some time between March 12 (when police received an anonymous 911 call from the Lake Washington residence, later rescinded) and March 18. Terrified more than anything by Kurt’s seeming indifference to his own fate, and knowing that the Rome incident was a botched suicide attempt (even if this fact was kept a secret until after Kurt’s death), Courtney ruled that no drug taking should be allowed inside the house. She even banned Dylan from visiting because she was worried that he was Kurt’s main drug connection. Ironically, Dylan also supplied Courtney.
His wife’s hypocrisy was the last straw for Kurt – how dare she lecture him over drugs. The couple had a violent argument and, accompanied by Rene, Kurt walked out. It was the last Courtney would see of Kurt for several days. The drug buddies skipped all familial responsibilities, and checked into various cheap hotels along Aurora Avenue – the Marco Polo, the Crest, the Seattle Inn.
“We were walking down Denny Way,” begins Rene. “It was like Kurt wanted his last run in the city. It was our little adventure out. It was night-time and he didn’t know where anything was. We went into [trendy Capitol Hill hang-out] Linda’s Tavern, which was still brand new, and everyone gawked at him. Seattle is a very tight-knit place. Then we saw Nils Bernstein and went and sat at his table, but it wasn’t like his home-town scene. Kurt felt alienated.
“We didn’t have any cash and all Kurt’s credit cards were cancelled, but we had a Western Union cheque from my mum for $100. I didn’t have any ID, so we had to use Kurt’s. We walked into this ‘all cheques cashed’ place, and it was like being in one of those ‘surprise’ TV shows when someone famous walks in. There was a stoner guy praising Kurt, but in a funny way that Kurt could appreciate. All of a sudden, it seemed like he was in touch with the city again, but it was short-lived.
“We were staying at a motel on Aurora, the Marco Polo. We’d been stopped a few times on Broadway. A group of kids scuttled around us. Kurt would always say how he wanted to be in touch with the kids, but when it came down to actual interaction he felt uncomfortable. We went into Urban Outfitters where Kurt bought some funny glasses and a hat and a funny coat – that was our disguise for the day.
“We’d left because he and Courtney had had a fight. Cali had just left with Jennifer [Adamson], and I was the only one home. Courtney arrived home, and then I heard this huge argument. It was the only time I ever saw Courtney punch Kurt. They were arguing over some pills. Someone had hidden someone else’s Rohypnol. I walked in on them punching each other, and before he went to reciprocate, I grabbed him, put him over my shoulder and walked away. I kept on walking, out the front door. When we got to the top of the driveway, I ran back and got his jacket, and we continued walking. We walked from the house to the city. We were out for five nights. First night, we still had the credit cards. The incident at Linda’s happened on the third or fourth night. It was a frustrating time for Ku
rt. He usually never wanted to be away from the house.
“We went to our friend Caitlin’s house [on the intersection of 11th and Denny]: usually, that was our main objective. We’d score there. We hung out there, scarfed up some food and took a cab to whichever hotel we were staying at. We stayed at three different hotels – motels – altogether. We were mainly walking around, like teenage runaway types. It was a lot of fun. After the first night, I was worried we’d get into trouble. I’d call the house and talk to Eric to try and get a feeling of what was going on, but he’d be like, ‘Don’t involve me.’ We ran into Dylan at Jennifer Adamson’s on Capitol Hill – she wasn’t dating anyone at the time. Dylan and Cali and myself would stay at her apartment and listen to records. We had a lot of fun there. There was the occasional visitor, but it was fairly private.
“I kept Kurt out that week because he reacted with such a good attitude. It seemed healthy for us to be away from the house, get some air. We were all trying to get him to wake up a little after he came back from Rome.”
“Jennifer Adamson was my girlfriend,” says Cali. “I had Jessica Hopper and Jennifer Adamson. Jessica was the good girl. Jennifer wasn’t a bad girl, she was a drug girl and Jennifer is dead. She died four or five years later [in 2000] of a drug overdose. I was living at the house and Jessica was there, but I would go and do drugs with Jennifer. I remember one very surprising night when I was at Jennifer Adamson’s house. All of a sudden Kurt showed up there, buzzing the buzzer. I looked, because I wouldn’t let most people in, and I was like, ‘What are you doing here?’ He was like, ‘I just had to get out of the house. There was a fight. Can I come in and listen to records with you guys?’ He was really into Elastica.7 I had just gotten their first single.”