Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Iris’s husband and Kurt’s grandfather, Leland Cobain, wasn’t himself artistic—he had driven an asphalt roller, which had cost him much of his hearing—but he did teach Kurt woodworking. Leland was a gruff and crusty character, and when his grandson showed off a picture of Mickey Mouse that he’d drawn (Kurt loved Disney characters), Leland accused him of tracing it. “I did not,” Kurt said. “You did, too,” Leland responded. Leland gave Kurt a new piece of paper and a pencil and challenged him: “Here, you draw me another one and show me how you did it.” The six-year-old sat down, and without a model drew a near-perfect illustration of Donald Duck and another of Goofy. He looked up from the paper with a huge grin, just as pleased at showing up his grandfather as in creating his beloved duck.

  His creativity increasingly extended to music. Though he never took formal piano lessons, he could pound out a simple melody by ear. “Even when he was a little kid,” remembered his sister Kim, “he could sit down and just play something he’d heard on the radio. He was able to artistically put whatever he thought onto paper or into music.” To encourage him, Don and Wendy bought a Mickey Mouse drum set, which Kurt vigorously pounded every day after school. Though he loved the plastic drums, he liked the real drums at his Uncle Chuck’s house better, since he could make more noise with them. He also enjoyed strapping on Aunt Mari’s guitar, even though it was so heavy it made his knees buckle. He’d strum it while inventing songs. That year he bought his first record, a syrupy single by Terry Jacks called “Seasons in the Sun.”

  He also loved looking through his aunts’ and uncles’ albums. One time, when he was six, he visited Aunt Mari and was digging through her record collection, looking for a Beatles album—they were one of his favorites. Kurt suddenly cried out and ran toward his aunt in a panic. He was holding a copy of the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, with the infamous “Butcher cover,” with artwork showing the band with pieces of meat on them. “It made me realize how impressionable he was at that age,” Mari remembered.

  He was also sensitive to the increasing strain he saw between his parents. For the first few years of Kurt’s life, there wasn’t much fighting in the home, but there also hadn’t been evidence of a great love affair. Like many couples who married young, Don and Wendy were two people overwhelmed by circumstance. Their children became the center of their lives, and what little romance had existed in the short time they’d had prior to their kids was hard to rekindle. The financial pressures daunted Don; Wendy was consumed by caring for two children. They began to argue more and to yell at each other in front of the children. “You have no idea how hard I work,” Don screamed at Wendy, who echoed her husband’s complaint.

  Still, for Kurt, there was much joy in his early childhood. In the summer they’d vacation at a Fradenburg family cabin at Washaway Beach on the Washington coast. In winter they’d go sledding. It rarely snowed in Aberdeen, so they would drive east into the small hills past the logging town of Porter, and to Fuzzy Top Mountain. Their sledding trips always followed a similar pattern: They’d park, pull out a toboggan for Don and Wendy, a silver saucer for Kim, and Kurt’s Flexible Flyer, and prepare to slide down the hill. Kurt would grab his sled, get a running start, and hurl himself down the hill the way an athlete would commence the long jump. Once he reached the bottom he would wave at his parents, the signal he had survived the trip. The rest of the family would follow, and they would walk back up the hill together. They’d repeat the cycle again and again for hours, until darkness fell or Kurt dropped from exhaustion. As they headed toward the car Kurt would make them promise to return the next weekend. Later, Kurt would recall these times as the fondest memories of his youth.

  When Kurt was six, the family went to a downtown photo studio and sat for a formal Christmas portrait. In the photo, Wendy sits in the center of the frame with a spotlight behind her head creating a halo; she rests on an oversized, wooden high-backed chair, wearing a long white-and-pink-striped Victorian dress with ruffled cuffs. Around her neck is a black choker, and her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair is parted in the middle, not a single strand out of place. With her perfect posture and the manner in which her wrists hang over the arms of the chair, she looks like a queen.

  Three-year-old Kim sits on her mom’s lap. Dressed in a long, white dress with black patent leather shoes, she appears as a miniature version of her mother. She is staring directly at the camera and has the appearance of a child who might start crying at any moment.

  Don stands behind the chair, close enough to be in the picture but distracted. His shoulders are slightly stooped and he wears more of a bemused look than a legitimate smile. He is wearing a light purple long-sleeved shirt with a four-inch collar and a gray vest—it’s an outfit that one could imagine Steve Martin or Dan Aykroyd donning for their “wild and crazy guys” skit on “Saturday Night Live.” He has a far-off look in his eyes, as if he is wondering just why he has been dragged down to the photo studio when he could be playing ball.

  Kurt stands off to the left, in front of his father, a foot or two away from the chair. He’s wearing two-tone, striped blue pants with a matching vest and a fire-truck red long-sleeved shirt a bit too big for him, the sleeves partially covering his hands. As the true entertainer in the family, he is not only smiling, but he’s laughing. He looks notably happy—a little boy having fun on a Saturday with his family.

  It is a remarkably good-looking family, and the outward appearances suggest an all-American pedigree—clean hair, white teeth, and well-pressed clothes so stylized they could have been ripped out of an early seventies Sears catalog. Yet a closer look reveals a dynamic that even to the photographer must have been painfully obvious: It’s a picture of a family, but not a picture of a marriage. Don and Wendy aren’t touching, and there is no suggestion of affection between them; it is as if they’re not even in the same frame. With Kurt standing in front of Don, and Kim sitting on Wendy’s lap, one could easily take a pair of scissors and sever the photograph—and the family—down the middle. You’d be left with two separate families, each with one adult and one child, each gender specific—the Victorian dresses on one side, and the boys with wide collars on the other.

  Chapter 2

  I HATE MOM, I HATE DAD

  ABERDEEN, WASHINGTON

  JANUARY 1974–JUNE 1979

  I hate Mom, I hate Dad.

  —From a poem on Kurt’s bedroom wall.

  The stress on the family increased in 1974, when Don Cobain decided to change jobs and enter the timber industry. Don wasn’t a large man, and he didn’t have much interest in cutting down 200-foot trees, so he took an office position at Mayr Brothers. He knew eventually he could make more money in timber than working at the service station; unfortunately, his first job was entry level, paying $4.10 an hour, even less than he’d made as a mechanic. He picked up extra money doing inventory at the mill on weekends, and he’d frequently take Kurt with him. “He’d ride his little bike around the yard,” Don recalled. Kurt later would mock his father’s job, and claim it was hell to accompany Don to work, but at the time he reveled in being included. Though he spent all of his adult life trying to argue otherwise, acknowledgment and attention from his father was critically important for Kurt, and he desired more of it, not less. He would later admit that his early years within his nuclear family were joyful memories. “I had a really good childhood,” he told Spin magazine in 1992, but not without adding, “up until I was nine.”

  Don and Wendy frequently had to borrow money to pay their bills, one of the main sources of their arguments. Leland and Iris kept a $20 bill in their kitchen—they joked that it was a bouncing twenty because each month they’d loan it to their son for groceries, and immediately after repaying them Don would borrow it again. “He’d go all around, pay all his bills, and then he’d come to our house,” remembered Leland. “He’d pay us our $20, and then he’d say, ‘Hell, I done pretty good this week. I got 35 or 40 cents left.’ ” Leland, who never liked Wendy because he perceive
d her as acting “better than the Cobains,” remembered the young family would then head off to the Blue Beacon Drive-In on Boone Street to spend the change on hamburgers. Though Don got along well with his father-in-law, Charles Fradenburg—who drove a road grader for the county—Leland and Wendy never connected.

  Tension between the two came to a head when Leland helped remodel the house on First Street. He built Don and Wendy a fake fire-place in the living room and put in new countertops, but in the process he and Wendy battled increasingly. Leland finally told his son to make Wendy stop nagging him or he’d exit and leave the job half finished. “It was the first time I ever heard Donnie talk back to her,” Leland recalled. “She was bitching about this and that, and finally he said, ‘Keep your god damn mouth shut or he’ll take his tools and go home.’ And she shut her mouth for once.”

  Like his father before him, Don was strict with children. One of Wendy’s complaints was that her husband expected the kids to always behave—an impossible standard—and required Kurt to act like a “little adult.” At times, like all children, Kurt was a terror. Most of his acting-out incidents were minor at the time—he’d write on the walls or slam the door or tease his sister. These behaviors frequently elicited a spanking, but Don’s more common—and almost daily—physical punishment was to take two fingers and thump Kurt on the temple or the chest. It only hurt a little, but the psychological damage was deep—it made his son fear greater physical harm and it served to reinforce Don’s dominance. Kurt began to retreat into the closet in his room. The kind of enclosed, confined spaces that would give others panic attacks were the very places he sought out as sanctuary.

  And there were things worth hiding from: Both parents could be sarcastic and mocking. When Kurt was immature enough to believe them, Don and Wendy warned him he’d get a lump of coal for Christmas if he wasn’t good, particularly if he fought with his sister. As a prank, they left him pieces of coal in his stocking. “It was just a joke,” Don remembered. “We did it every year. He got presents and all that— we never didn’t give him presents.” The humor, however, was lost on Kurt, at least as he told the story later in life. He claimed one year he had been promised a Starsky and Hutch toy gun, a gift that never came. Instead, he maintained he only received a lump of neatly wrapped coal. Kurt’s telling was an exaggeration, but in his inner imagination, he had begun to put his own spin on the family.

  Occasionally, Kim and Kurt got along, and at times they’d play together. Though Kim never had the artistic talent of Kurt—and she forever felt the rivalry of having the rest of the family pay him so much attention—she developed a skill for imitating voices. She was particularly good at Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and these performances amused Kurt to no end. Her vocal abilities even gave birth to a new fantasy for Wendy. “It was my mom’s big dream,” declared Kim, “that Kurt and I would end up at Disneyland, both of us working there, with him drawing and me doing voices.”

  March of 1975 was filled with much joy for eight-year-old Kurt: He finally visited Disneyland, and he took his first airplane ride. Leland had retired in 1974, and he and Iris wintered that year in Arizona. Don and Wendy drove Kurt to Seattle, put him on a plane, and Leland met the boy in Yuma, before they headed for Southern California. In a mad two-day period, they visited Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, and Universal Studios. Kurt was enthralled and insisted they go through Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride three times. At Knotts Berry Farm, he braved the giant roller coaster, but when he departed the ride, his face was white as a ghost. When Leland said, “Had enough?” the color rushed back and he rode the coaster yet again. On the tour of Universal Studios, Kurt leaned out of the train in front of the Jaws shark, spurring a guard to yell at his grandparents, “You better pull that little towheaded boy back or his head will get bitten off.” Kurt defied the order and snapped a picture of the mouth of the shark as it came inches away from his camera. Later that day, driving on the freeway, Kurt fell asleep in the backseat, which was the only reason his grandparents were able to sneak by Magic Mountain without him insisting they visit that as well.

  Of all his relatives, Kurt was closest to his grandmother Iris; they shared both an interest in art and, at times, a certain sadness. “They adored each other,” remembered Kim. “I think he intuitively knew the hell she’d been through.” Both Iris and Leland had difficult upbringings, each scarred by poverty and the early deaths of their fathers on the job. Iris’s father had been killed by poisonous fumes at the Rayonier Pulp Mill; Leland’s dad, who was a county sheriff, died when his gun accidentally discharged. Leland was fifteen at the time of his father’s death. He joined the Marines and was sent to Guadalcanal, but after he beat up an officer he was committed to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He married Iris after his discharge, but struggled with drink and anger, especially after their third son, Michael, was born retarded and died in an institution at age six. “On Friday night he’d get paid and come home drunk,” recalled Don. “He used to beat my mom. He’d beat me. He beat my grandma, and he beat Grandma’s boyfriend. But that’s the way it was in those days.” By the time of Kurt’s youth, Leland had softened and his most serious weapon was foul language.

  When Leland and Iris weren’t available, one of the various Fradenburg siblings would baby-sit—three of Kurt’s aunts lived within four blocks. Don’s younger brother Gary was also given child-care duties a few times, and one occasion marked Kurt’s first trip back to the hospital. “I broke his right arm,” Gary recalled. “I was on my back and he was on my feet, and I was shooting him up in the air with my feet.” Kurt was a very active child, and with all the running around he did, relatives were surprised he didn’t break more limbs.

  Kurt’s broken arm healed and the injury didn’t seem to stop him from playing sports. Don encouraged his son to play baseball almost as soon as he could walk, and provided him with all the balls, bats, and mitts that a young boy needed. As a toddler, Kurt found the bats more useful as percussion instruments, but eventually he began to participate in athletics, beginning in the neighborhood, and then in organized play. At seven, he was on his first Little League team. His dad was the coach. “He wasn’t the best player on the team, but he wasn’t bad,” Gary Cobain recalled. “He didn’t really want to play, I thought, mentally. I think he did it because of his dad.”

  Baseball was an example of Kurt seeking Don’s approval. “Kurt and my dad got along well when he was young,” remembered Kim, “but Kurt wasn’t anything like how Dad was planning on Kurt turning out.”

  Both Don and Wendy were facing the conflict between the idealized child and the real child. Since both had unmet needs left from their own early years, Kurt’s birth brought out all their personal expectations. Don wanted the father/son relationship he never had with Leland, and he thought participating in sports together would provide that bond. And though Kurt liked sports, particularly when his father wasn’t around, he intuitively connected his father’s love with this activity, something that would mark him for life. His reaction was to participate, but to do so under protest.

  When Kurt was in second grade, his parents and teacher decided his endless energy might have a larger medical root. Kurt’s pediatrician was consulted and Red Dye Number Two was removed from his diet. When there was no improvement, his parents limited Kurt’s sugar in-take. Finally, his doctor prescribed Ritalin, which Kurt took for a period of three months. “He was hyperactive,” Kim recalled. “He was bouncing off the walls, particularly if you got any sugar in him.”

  Other relatives suggest Kurt may have suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Mari remembered visiting the Cobain house and finding Kurt running around the neighborhood, banging on a marching drum and yelling at the top of his lungs. Mari went inside and asked her sister, “Just what on earth is he doing?” “I don’t know,” was Wendy’s reply. “I don’t know what to do to get him to stop—I’ve tried everything.” At the time, Wendy presumed it was Kurt’s w
ay of burning off his excess of boyish energy.

  The decision to give Kurt Ritalin was, even in 1974, a controversial one, with some scientists arguing it creates a Pavlovian response in children and increases the likelihood of addictive behavior later in life; others believe that if children aren’t treated for hyperactivity, they may later self-medicate with illegal drugs. Each member of the Cobain family had a different opinion on Kurt’s diagnosis and whether the short course of treatment helped or harmed him, but Kurt’s own opinion, as he later told Courtney Love, was that the drug was significant. Love, who herself was prescribed Ritalin as a child, said the two discussed this issue frequently. “When you’re a kid and you get this drug that makes you feel that feeling, where else are you going to turn when you’re an adult?” Love asked. “It was euphoric when you were a child—isn’t that memory going to stick with you?”

  In February 1976, just a week after Kurt’s ninth birthday, Wendy informed Don she wanted a divorce. She announced this one weekday night and stormed off in her Camaro, leaving Don to do the explaining to the children, something at which he didn’t excel. Though Don and Wendy’s marital conflicts had increased during the last half of 1974, her declaration took Don by surprise, as it did the rest of the family. Don went into a state of denial and moved inward, a behavior that would be mirrored years later by his son in times of crisis. Wendy had always been a strong personality and prone to occasional bouts of rage, yet Don was shocked she wanted to break up the family unit. Her main complaint was that he was unceasingly involved in sports—he was a referee and a coach, in addition to playing on a couple of teams. “In my mind, I didn’t believe it was going to happen,” Don recalled. “Divorce wasn’t so common then. I didn’t want it to happen, either. She just wanted out.”