Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Kurt watched countless hours of television. This was a running battle with Don and Jenny; they wished to limit his hours in front of the tube, but he begged and screamed for more. When he was denied this freedom, he’d simply visit his best friend, Rod Marsh, who lived a block away, and watch television there. Though “Saturday Night Live” was past his bedtime, he rarely missed a week, and the next Monday at school he’d be imitating all the best skits. He also did a wicked impression of Latka, the Andy Kaufman character on “Taxi.”

  The previous summer Kurt had dropped out of Little League, but when winter came, he joined the junior varsity wrestling squad, which pleased his father. Don attended every match and endlessly quizzed Kurt on his progress. The coach was Kinichi Kanno, the Monte art teacher, and Kurt joined the team as much to spend more time with Kanno as to wrestle. In Kanno, Kurt found a male role model who encouraged his creativity, and he became Kanno’s favorite student. One of Kurt’s drawings was featured on the cover of the Puppy Press that Halloween: It showed a bulldog, Montesano’s mascot, emptying a trick-or-treat bag on a doghouse. In a typical Cobain touch, he hid a can of beer among the candy. For a Christmas card that year, Kurt drew a pen-and-ink portrait of a small boy who was attempting to fish but had cast the hook into his back—it was as good as most Hallmark cards. As classmate Nikki Clark remembered it, Kurt’s artwork was “always very good. Kanno never had to help him since he seemed like an advanced student.” Even when he wasn’t in art class, Clark recalled, Kurt was never far from a pen: “He doodled constantly in every class.”

  His doodles mostly were of cars, trucks, and guitars, but he also began to craft his own crude pornography. “He once showed me this sketch that he’d drawn,” said classmate Bill Burghardt, “and it was a totally realistic picture of a vagina. I asked him, ‘What’s that?’ and he laughed.” At the time, Kurt had never seen a vagina up close, except in books or the adult magazines the boys traded. Another specialty of his was Satan, a figure he sketched in his notebook during every class.

  Roni Toyra was Kurt’s girlfriend in seventh grade, but it was an innocent first crush that never got serious. He gave her a piece of his art to tie their union. “There were kids in school that clearly were troubled or were outcasts, but he wasn’t one of them,” she said. “About the only thing that was different was that he was quieter than most kids. He wasn’t unsociable, just quiet.”

  At home, he was anything but quiet, complaining vociferously over what he felt was unfair treatment from Don or Jenny. Few second marriages with children ever meld perfectly, but this one was always on delicate ground, and issues of favoritism and fairness would haunt the family. Kurt’s complaints usually led to arguments between Don and Jenny or increased his parents’ rancor, which continued to simmer over issues of visitation and child support. Don complained that Wendy made Kim phone if his support check was late by a day.

  Toward the end of seventh grade, the school nurse called and said Kurt’s proportions were what they considered borderline for scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Don and Jenny took Kurt to a doctor, and after a thorough examination, the physician determined that Kurt didn’t suffer from the syndrome—he simply had longer arms than most kids his size, which made the original measurements seem askew. But this didn’t reassure Wendy. Through the family system of communication— which resembled a bad version of the children’s game of telephone— she had heard Kurt had scoliosis. She was shocked Don wasn’t alarmed and that Kurt wasn’t in a full-body cast. Kurt decided to believe his mother’s diagnosis, and in later years claimed he had “minor scoliosis in junior high.” Though his assertion is at odds with the facts, Kurt used it as one more example of how his father had failed him.

  Like many children of divorce, Kurt masterfully played each parent off the other. In 1980, Wendy was working in Monte at the County Commissioner’s Office, and Kurt frequently visited her after school, if only to report on some new torture put upon him by Don or Jenny. As things became worse for Kurt in Monte, he hoped Wendy would take him back. But his mother had her own problems at the time with Frank Franich. She told Kim she feared that if Kurt witnessed the dys-function in her home he would turn gay. Years later, when Kurt brought up the topic with Wendy and Kim, his mom told him: “Kurt, you don’t even know what it was like. You would have ended up in juvie or jail.”

  One of Kurt’s repeated laments to Wendy was that Jenny’s children were favored in the household. When Jenny’s ex-husband would give Mindy and James gifts, Kurt felt jealous. Kurt assumed any discipline meted out to him was because he wasn’t Jenny’s biological child. He told his friends he hated Jenny, complained about her cooking, and claimed she rationed how much soda he was allowed to drink. He asserted Jenny could “hear a Pepsi can open from three rooms away,” and for lunch he was allowed “only two slices of Carl Buddig ham per sandwich, and two Grandma’s Cookies.”

  Leland Cobain would lecture Don about what he also thought was a prejudice against Kurt: “There could be fruit sitting on the table, and Mindy or James could go up and take an apple and start eating it. Kurt would go get one like that, and Donnie would give him hell for it.” Leland speculated Don was so afraid Jenny would leave him, like Wendy had, that he sided with Jenny and her children. Don admitted discipline was more a problem with Kurt than with Jenny’s kids, but argued it was because of Kurt’s personality, not favoritism. But Don did worry that Jenny would leave him if Kurt became too much trouble: “I was afraid that it was going to get to the point of ‘either he goes or she goes,’ and I didn’t want to lose her.”

  Kurt’s relationship with his siblings and step-siblings became more balanced as he grew older. He adored his half-brother Chad because he loved babies. He’d punch Mindy, but on occasions when there was no school, he’d spend the day playing with her. Yet when Kurt’s school-mates would mention his family—several of his buddies thought Mindy was cute—he was quick to correct them if they called her his “sister.” He described Mindy to his friends as, “not my sister—my dad’s new wife’s daughter,” speaking the words as if she were some torture he was forced to endure.

  He and James got along better, perhaps because Kurt was never overshadowed by the younger boy. When another boy slugged James, who was the bat-boy on one of Kurt’s baseball teams, Kurt stepped in and threatened the attacker. They also shared an interest in movies. In the summer, the family would go to a two-screen drive-in. Don and Jenny would each take a car, then park one with the kids in front of a PG-rated movie, while they’d watch a more adult film on the other screen. Kurt taught James that rather than having to sit through another Don Knotts comedy, they could walk to the bathroom and view more adult fare—like Heavy Metal, which Kurt loved—by standing just outside the lot. Kurt enjoyed describing films he had already seen to his younger stepbrother. He had watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind the previous year and could recite all the dialogue from the film. “He used to play with his mashed potatoes at dinner and make them into the shape of the mountain from that movie,” James recalled.

  In 1981, at fourteen, Kurt began to make his own short films, using his parents’ Super-8 camera. One of his first productions was an elaborate Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds rip-off that showed aliens— played by figures Kurt sculpted with clay—landing in the Cobain backyard. He showed the alien film to James in a successful attempt to convince the younger boy that their house had been invaded. Another film he made in 1982 shows a far darker side of his psyche: He titled it Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide, and in it, Kurt, playing to a camera held by James, pretends to cut his wrists with the edge of a torn-in-half pop can. The film is complete with special effects, fake blood, and Kurt dramatically playing out his own final death scene in a manner he must have seen in silent pictures.

  This gruesome film simply added ammunition to concerns his parents already had about a darkness they saw inside him. “There was something wrong,” Jenny argued, “something wrong with his thought process even from the beginning
, something unbalanced.” He was able to calmly discuss the kinds of events that would give most young boys nightmares: murder, rape, suicide. He wasn’t the only teenage boy in history to bring up self-slaughter, but the offhanded way he joked about it struck his friends as odd. One day he and John Fields were walking home from school when Fields told Kurt he should be an artist, but Kurt casually announced he had other plans: “I’m going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory,” he said. “Kurt, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard—don’t talk that way,” Fields replied. But Kurt was steadfast: “No, I want to be rich and famous and kill myself like Jimi Hendrix.” Neither boy was aware at the time that Hendrix’s death wasn’t suicide. Fields was not the only friend of Kurt’s from Monte who reported such a story—a half dozen other acquaintances tell similar versions of the same conversation, always with the same dark outcome.

  That Kurt would be talking indifferently about suicide at age fourteen didn’t surprise anyone in the family. Two years earlier, Kurt’s great-uncle, 66-year-old Burle Cobain, Leland’s oldest brother, had used a snubbed-nose .38 pistol to shoot himself in both the stomach and head. Leland had discovered the body. There were allegations that Burle was about to be charged with sexual molestation. Burle hadn’t been as close to the family as Kurt’s other uncles, but Kurt talked about it incessantly with his friends. He would casually joke that his uncle had “killed himself over the death of Jim Morrison,” though Morrison had passed away a decade before.

  What had been a joke to Kurt was a devastating blow to Leland. The year prior to Burle’s suicide, in 1978, Leland’s brother Ernest had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. While Ernest’s death, at 57, was not officially ruled a suicide, it came after he’d been warned he would die if he continued drinking. He persisted, and eventually fell down the stairs, causing the aneurysm that killed him.

  These weren’t the only deaths that affected Kurt. When Kurt was in eighth grade, a Montesano boy hanged himself outside one of the elementary schools. Kurt knew the boy; it was Bill Burghardt’s brother. Kurt, Burghardt, and Rod Marsh discovered the corpse hanging from a tree as they were walking to school and they stared at it for half an hour before school officials finally shooed them away. “It was the most grotesque thing I ever saw in my life,” recalled Marsh. From Kurt’s own family history, and from this incident, suicide became a concept and a word that was no longer unmentionable. It was, instead, simply part of his milieu, just like alcoholism, poverty, or drugs. Kurt told Marsh he had “suicide genes.”

  Kurt’s experimentation with drugs commenced in the eighth grade when he started smoking marijuana and using LSD. He began smoking pot at parties, then with his friends, and, finally, smoking daily by himself. By ninth grade, he was a full-on pothead. Marijuana was cheap and plentiful in Monte—most of it homegrown—and it helped Kurt forget his home life. What began as a social ritual became his chosen anesthetic.

  At the time he began using drugs, he also started cutting class regularly. When he skipped school with his friends, they would buy weed or steal booze from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet. But Kurt started skipping school by himself, or going to school but leaving after the first period. He saw less of his friends and appeared alienated from everything except his own anger. Trevor Briggs ran into Kurt on New Year’s Eve 1980 sitting in a park in Monte by himself, swinging on a swing and whistling. Trevor invited Kurt to his parents’ house, and the two got high while watching Dick Clark on television. The year ended with both of them throwing up from smoking an excessive amount of home-grown.

  What just a couple of years earlier had seemed like an idyllic place to go to school soon became Kurt’s own kind of prison. In conversations with his friends, he now slammed Monte along with his parents. Having just read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” he declared the book a perfect description of the town. By the beginning of 1981, a different Kurt had begun to emerge, or not emerge, as was more often the case: He spent increasing amounts of time in isolation. In the Fleet Street house, he had moved to a remodeled basement bedroom. Kurt told his friends that he felt the shift was a banishment. In his basement room, Kurt spent his time with a Montgomery Ward’s pinball machine he’d gotten for Christmas, a stereo Don and Jenny had handed down to him, and a stack of albums. The record collection included Elton John, Grand Funk Railroad, and Boston. Kurt’s favorite album that year was Journey’s Evolution.

  His conflicts with Don and Jenny had reached a breaking point. All their attempts to get him involved with the family failed. He had begun to boycott family night and, feeling internally abandoned himself, decided to outwardly abandon his family. “We had chores for him, just typical stuff, but he wouldn’t do them,” Don remembered. “We began trying to bribe him with an allowance, but if he didn’t do certain chores, we’d subtract from the allowance. But he refused to do anything. It ended up with him owing us money. He’d get violent, slam doors, and storm downstairs.” He also seemed to have fewer friends. “I noticed that some of his friends were dropping off,” said Jenny. “He was home a lot more, but he wasn’t with us even when he was home. He seemed to become a lot more introverted. He was quiet and sullen.” Rod Marsh recalled that Kurt killed a neighbor’s cat that year. In this incident of teenage sadism—that would be in striking contrast to his adult life—he trapped the still-alive animal in his parents’ chimney and laughed when it died and stunk up the house.

  In September 1981, Kurt began his freshman year of high school in Montesano. That fall, in an attempt to fit in, he turned out for the football team. He made the first cut, despite his small stature—an indication, more than anything else, of how tiny a school Montesano was. He practiced for two weeks, but then dropped out, complaining that it was too much work. That year he also joined the track team. He threw the discus—an amazing feat considering his frame—and ran the 200-yard dash. He was by no means the best athlete on the squad—he missed many practices—but he was one of the faster boys. He was pictured in the yearbook photo of the squad, squinting into the sun.

  In February of that year, in a moment of serendipity, Uncle Chuck told Kurt he could have either a bicycle or an electric guitar for his fourteenth birthday. To a boy who drew pictures of rock stars in his notebook, it was no choice at all. Kurt had already destroyed a Hawaiian lap guitar of Don’s; he had taken it apart to study the internal workings. The guitar Chuck bought him wasn’t much better: It was a cheap, second hand Japanese model. It often broke, but to Kurt it was the air that he breathed. Not knowing how to put the strings on it, he called up Aunt Mari and asked her if it was strung alphabetically. Once he got it working, he played it constantly and carried it to school to show it off. “Everyone asked him about it,” remembered Trevor Briggs. “I saw him with it on the street, and he told me, ‘Don’t ask me to play any songs on this; it’s broken.’ ” That didn’t matter—it wasn’t as much an instrument as it was an identity.

  Athletics were also part of his identity; he had continued with wrestling, moving up, as a freshman, to the varsity squad. The Montesano Bulldogs won the league championship that year, with a record of twelve wins and three losses, though Kurt wasn’t a significant part of the effort. He’d begun to skip more practices and matches, and on the varsity team his size was a huge disadvantage. The attitude on the JV team two years earlier was that wrestling was a fun way to roughhouse; the varsity team, in contrast, was deadly serious, and practices required him to wrestle boys who instantly pinned him. At the end of the season, Kurt sat for the team picture wearing knee-high striped socks—among the behemoths of the team, he looked more like the trainer than a member of the squad.

  It was on the varsity wrestling mat that Kurt staged one of his greatest battles with his father. On the day of a championship match, as Kurt told it, he went out into the ring intending to send a message to Don in the bleachers. As Kurt later described it to Michael Azerrad, “I waited for the whistle to blow, just staring straight into [Don’s] face, and
then I instantly clammed up—I put my arms together, and let the guy pin me.” Kurt claimed he did this four times in a row, was pinned instantly every time, and Don walked out in disgust. Don Cobain asserted the story was false; Kurt’s classmates don’t recall it and argue that anyone who intentionally lost would have been shunned, if not pummeled, by their teammates. But Leland Cobain remembered Don telling him the story after the match, saying, “That little shit just laid there. He wouldn’t fight back.”

  Kurt was a master at exaggerating a yarn so as to tell an emotional truth rather than an actual one. What most likely happened was that Kurt had a match against a better opponent and decided not to fight back, which was enough to anger his perfectionist father. But Kurt’s telling of the tale, and his description of the look that flashed between him and his father, is evidence of just how much their relationship had deteriorated in the six years since the divorce. They had once spent every spare hour together, and on the day Don bought the mini-bike, Kurt had never loved anyone more. Just down the street from Montesano High was a restaurant where they used to sit—the two of them alone, a singular entity, a family—and eat a quiet dinner together, joined in their loneliness; a little boy who wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with his dad, and a father who only wanted someone to love him with a love that would not fade. But six years later, father and son were locked in a wrestling match of wills, and like all great tragedies, neither combatant felt he could afford to lose. Kurt desperately needed a father, and Don needed to be wanted by his son, but neither could admit this.