Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  “I didn’t really notice,” Kurt said, pausing for a moment to search for the classic “Cling-On” comeback that would disarm this condition of fame, as if words alone could halt something that was now unstoppable. “I don’t know about that,” Kurt replied, sounding very young. “I don’t have a TV in the car I live in.”

  Chapter 16

  BRUSH YOUR TEETH

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON OCTOBER

  1991–JANUARY 1992

  Please don’t forget to eat your vegetables or brush your teeth.

  —From a letter Kurt’s mom wrote the Aberdeen Daily World.

  The real substance of the courtship of Kurt and Courtney commenced during November 1991, when Nirvana began another tour of Europe, and Hole followed two weeks later, playing many of the same venues. The two lovers would talk on the phone every night, send faxes, or leave cryptic messages written on the dressing room walls. Their inside joke was that when he called her, he pretended to be funk-rocker Lenny Kravitz. When Courtney called, she claimed to be Kravitz’s once-wife, “Cosby Show” actress Lisa Bonet. This led to much confusion for hotel night managers, who might be instructed to immediately stick a certain fax under the door of a room that they knew very well did not contain Lenny Kravitz. “That’s when we started really falling in love—on the phone,” Kurt told Michael Azerrad. “We called each other almost every night and faxed each other every other day. I had, like, a $3,000 phone bill.”

  Yet while this love affair by fax was evolving, Kurt had unfinished business to attend to, something he was always wretched at. After Nirvana finished their first U.K. show, in Bristol, he was astounded to find Mary Lou Lord backstage. She had flown over to surprise him, something she did with aplomb. She knew from that instant something was wrong: He was different, and it wasn’t just his level of fame, though this too was in marked contrast to even a month before. A month prior, in Boston, Kurt could walk around without being bothered; now he had someone tugging at his sleeve every minute. At one point, a record company rep grabbed Kurt to announce: “We’ve just sold 50,000 units this week.” For the United Kingdom, it was a remarkable statistic, but Kurt responded by looking perplexed: Was there something he was supposed to do about this?

  The next day Lord inquired: “Have you met someone else?” “I’m just tired,” he lied. She chalked it up to his stomach, which he was complaining about famously, asserting it hurt worse than ever. That night, the phone in his room rang at three in the morning: It was Courtney, but Kurt never announced this. A DJ had told Courtney that Kurt’s “girlfriend” was Mary Lou Lord. “Kurt’s girlfriend?” Courtney had yelled back, close to tears. “I’m Kurt’s girlfriend.” The first words out of Courtney’s mouth on the phone were, “Who the fuck is Mary Lou Lord, and why are people saying she’s your girlfriend?” Courtney’s voice swirled around Lord’s name as if it were a particularly bad case of parasites. Kurt managed to deny having a relationship with Mary Lou without mentioning her name directly, since she was four feet away as he spoke. Love told Kurt, in no uncertain terms, that if she ever heard about a Mary Lou Lord again, they were history. The next morning, Kurt coldly asked Lord how she was getting to London—she discerned that in asking, he was as good as announcing they were kaput.

  A day later Lord was watching a television program called “The Word,” where Nirvana were making a much-touted appearance. Prior to playing an abbreviated 90-second version of “Teen Spirit,” Kurt grabbed the microphone and, in a dry monotone that sounded like he was ordering lunch, uttered: “I just want everyone in this room to know that Courtney Love, of the pop group Hole, is the best fuck in the world.” His words, as he well knew, went out far beyond the room. A British television audience of millions gasped, though the loudest sounds had to come from Mary Lou Lord, who was beside herself.

  Kurt was already the subject of considerable media coverage in the U.K., but this one declarative statement got him more attention than anything he uttered in his career—not since John Lennon had asserted the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ had a rock star so outraged the British public. Kurt’s intention wasn’t to increase his infamy—instead, he had simply chosen this television show to tell Lord it was over, and to pledge his love to Courtney. His review of Love’s sexual abilities accomplished something he most certainly didn’t intend—it moved him from the front page of the music weeklies to the front page of the daily tabloids. Combined with the phenomenal sales of Nevermind, what he said now became news. He both embraced this turn of events and cursed it, depending on whether it was working to his advantage.

  Three weeks later, on November 28, the day Nevermind hit sales of one million in the U.S., the band appeared on another highly rated British television show, “Top of the Pops.” The producers had insisted Nirvana play “Teen Spirit,” and the program required performers to sing live vocals over a backing track—just a step up from lip-syncing. Kurt hatched a plan with Novoselic and Grohl to make a mockery of their performance. As the backing track played, Kurt sang the vocals in a slowed-down, almost Vegas-like lounge version; he was attempting, he later claimed, to sound like Morrissey.

  The producers were furious, but Nirvana escaped their wrath by quickly departing for a gig in Sheffield. As they drove away, Kurt smiled for the first time that day. “He was highly amused,” observed Alex MacLeod. “There was no question that they were the biggest thing happening in music. And he took advantage of that. He knew he had the power.”

  If audacity was Kurt’s occasional vice, it was in daily orbit around Courtney. In this came a small part of his adoration for her. She walked into most social settings with all the grace of a wolverine thrown into a henhouse, yet simultaneously she could be witty and funny. Even those in the Nirvana crew and organization who disliked her—and there were many in this category—found her entertaining.

  Kurt was by nature a voyeur and loved nothing better than to create a ruckus, sit back, and watch it unfold. But when Courtney was in a room—particularly a room backstage at a venue—people simply could not take their eyes off her, least of all Kurt. Few were foolish enough to take Courtney on in a game of verbal one-upmanship, and those who did found she could sarcastically skewer even the quickest-witted opponent. Kurt had a major attachment to being a bad boy, and thus required a bad girl. Even though he knew at best Courtney would be but a dark hero, he loved her all the more for it. “He worked out some of his aggression through her,” explained Carolyn Rue, Hole’s drummer. “He got off on it, vicariously, because he didn’t have the courage to do it himself. He needed her to be his mouthpiece. He was passive-aggressive.” Love, for her part, was simply aggressive, a characteristic that earned her many cruel reviews in a punk rock world that, despite declarations of equality, was still male-dominated and had defined roles for how even liberated females were to act. When Courtney coupled with Kurt, the press accused her of hooking up to a rising star. And while that charge was essentially true, the gossip failed to note that Hole’s early reviews were as glowing as Nirvana’s. Kurt was more famous than she was in November 1991, and Courtney’s friends had warned her not to get involved with him because of the likelihood his career would overshadow hers. But being self-possessed, she didn’t consider that possible, and was offended when such suggestions were offered. Truth was, they were both ambitious, which was part of their attraction toward each other.

  Though theirs was an unusual love story, at points it touched on traditional sentiment. Some of the faxes they sent were X-rated, but others were straight out of a dime-store romance: As writers, they were attempting to win the other’s heart. One fax of Courtney’s from early November read: “I want to be somewhere above you with all the candy in my hands. You smell like waffles and milk....I love and miss your body, and your twenty-minute kisses.”

  Both parties in this union were also self-effacing to a degree that approximated stand-up comedy. Close intimates told tales of their debauched senses of humor, something the public rarely saw. That fall Courtney wro
te a list of Kurt’s “most annoying traits,” and her insights were both wicked and flirty: “1. Plays cutesy with journalists and they all fall for it all the time. 2. Plays helpless cutesy punk hero for teenage fans who already think he is a God anyway, and don’t need anymore convincing. 3. Has the entire world convinced that he is humble and shy and modest when, in fact, he is a secret big-mouthed narcissist which is why I love him anyway but no one knows but me. 4. Is a Pisces, and the object of my intense desires and repulsions at once.” She ended another fax by promising to buy him flowers every day when she hit it rich. Many of her faxes contained lines that years later ended up in her best-known songs. “I am doll parts, bad skin, doll hearts, it stands for knife, for the rest of my life, peel my little heart off and soak it in your left hand and call me tonight,” she faxed on November 8. Other messages were simple and sweet: “Please comb your hair tonight, and remember I love you,” she wrote one night.

  He sent her copies of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and faxes that were equally romantic, though owing to his essential strangeness, much of what he wrote was also just plain weird. He frequently obsessed on his favorite off-color topics: human waste, “butt-fucking,” birth, babies, and drugs. He reveled in the possibility that their indiscretions might make the tabloids. One fax he sent in mid-November spoke to a greater truth. It began with Courtney’s name inside a heart and read:

  Oh, stinking, bloody cum. I’m hallucinating way too often. I need oxygen. Thank Satan, we’ve found a script-happy doctor who’s willing to call-in prescriptions whenever the handler can’t score on the street. I think I’m getting some kind of clammy mold, skin disease because I keep passing out in the wee hours of morning covered in little boy blood and wearing the same sweaty clothes that I had worn from the show the night before. Little Oliver, the Indian boy I bought last week, is becoming quite the professional nurse except the needles he uses are so big that it makes my arms swell up like golf balls. I mean, snooker balls. He’s also a lot better at sucking my cable now that I’ve bashed his teeth out. Guido is sending that receptionist at the hotel a fish tomorrow. I hope she’s a good swimmer. I love you. I miss you. P.S.: I’ve convinced Lenny Kravitz that the baby is his and he’s willing to pay for the abortion. Love me.

  He signed the letter with a fish. Of course, he didn’t have an Indian boy love-slave, and there was no November pregnancy. The addiction he spoke of, though, was real and he had found a British physician to prescribe pharmaceutical morphine.

  Courtney was infatuated enough that by the end of November, after not seeing Kurt for two weeks, she uncharacteristically cancelled a Hole gig and flew to Amsterdam. There, they bought heroin and spent the day nodding out and having lazy sex. Courtney didn’t do drugs just because she loved Kurt—she had her own demons worthy of running from—but she rarely did drugs when he wasn’t around. Around Kurt she dropped all boundaries as she was well aware that to be in an intimate relationship with him meant living in an opiate-soaked world of escapism. She chose Kurt and, in doing so, chose drugs.

  After Amsterdam and a brief stop in London she rejoined the Hole tour, and Nirvana continued their U.K. dates. Not since the Sex Pistols had a band on the road gotten so much attention. Every show contained something newsworthy, or at least something that got them in the papers. In Edinburgh, they played an acoustic show to benefit a children’s hospital. In Newcastle, Kurt announced from the stage, “I am a homosexual, I am a drug user, and I fuck pot-bellied pigs,” another classic Cobainism, though only one of his three claims was true. By the time the tour hit London again, Kurt was incapacitated by stomach pain and decided to cancel six dates in Scandinavia. Considering the state of his health and the increasing state of his addiction, it was a wise call.

  While Kurt was in Europe, his mother had written a letter to the Aberdeen Daily World. It represented the first mention of Kurt in his home-town paper since his Little League team won the Timber League championship the year his parents divorced. The letter ran under the headline LOCAL “TWANGER” MAKES GOOD, MOM REPORTS:

  This letter is directed more or less to all of you parents out there who have kids bangin’ or twangin’ away on drums or guitars out in your garage or up in their rooms. Watch what you say, for you may have to eat every one of those concerned parental lecturing words. Like, “Get a life.” “Your music is good but chances of making it are slim to none.” “Further your education, then if you still want to play in a band you can, but if it doesn’t work out you’ll have something to fall back on.” Do those words sound familiar?

  Well, I just received a phone call from my son, Kurt Cobain, who sings and plays guitar with the band “Nirvana.” They are presently touring Europe. Their first album with Geffen Record Co., just went “Platinum” (over one million sales). They are No. 4 on the Top 200 albums in Billboard. Well, I know the chances of making it are still slim-to-none for many, but two boys who never lost sight of their goals, Kurt and [Krist] Novoselic, have something to really smile about these days. The hours and hours and hours of practice have paid off.

  Kurt, if you happen to read this, we are so proud of you and you are truly one of the nicest sons a mother could have. Please don’t forget to eat your vegetables or brush your teeth and now [that] you have your maid make your bed.

  —Wendy O’Connor, Aberdeen

  Kurt didn’t read the Aberdeen Daily World, rarely in his entire life did he eat vegetables, and his drug addiction was so bad by December 1991 that he usually taped a note to his hotel room door warning the maids not to enter—if they did, they frequently found him passed out. He also, strangely, did not brush his teeth, one of the reasons he had a gum infection during the Nevermind album cover sessions. “Kurt hated to brush his teeth,” said Carrie Montgomery. “Still, his teeth never looked gnarly and he never had bad breath.” Carrie recalled Kurt telling her eating apples worked as well as brushing.

  On December 21, Kurt, Carrie, and a group of friends planned a trip to Portland to see the Pixies. Kurt had rented a Pontiac Grand Am for the long drive, worrying his Valiant wouldn’t handle the distance. He rarely drove the Valiant, putting only 3,000 miles on it the first year he owned it. Instead, he used it as a mobile hotel room, occasionally sleeping in the backseat and storing all his possessions in the trunk. His friends met up with him in Aberdeen, where Kurt had gone to get a meal of his mother’s pot roast.

  The dynamic within the house on First Street had undergone a continental shift since Kurt’s last visit to Aberdeen: He was being treated, for the first time since early childhood, like the most important person in Wendy’s life. Even Kurt was struck by the hypocrisy of the situation, especially when he saw his stepfather, Pat O’Connor, kiss up to him: It was like a bad episode of “All in the Family,” where Meathead is given Archie’s beloved La-Z-Boy. When his friends arrived, they stayed long enough for Kurt to give his six-year-old half-sister Brianne some art supplies—he adored her—before they quickly departed.

  The next day Courtney arrived in Seattle, and Carrie was recruited to act as a buffer when Courtney went to visit Kurt’s family. They first met at Maximilien’s, a fine French restaurant, in the Pike Place Market to strategize how to handle this important introduction. When Courtney got up to go to the bathroom, Kurt asked Carrie what she thought of his new love. “You guys are like a natural disaster,” she replied. Carrie was one of Kurt’s only female friends, so she had a rare perspective on their union. “I enjoyed being around them in the way it was interesting to watch a car crash,” she observed.

  When Courtney returned, another diner inquired, “Are you guys Sid and Nancy?” Kurt and Carrie looked at each other, both knowing that Courtney was about to erupt. Love stood up and yelled: “My husband has the number-one record in the entire country, and he has more money than any of you people ever will have!” He was, of course, not her husband, and he also didn’t have a number-one record—it was at No. 6 that week—but her point was clear. T
he waiter came running, and the sarcastic patron ran for cover. Despite this outburst, and in part because of it, Carrie found Courtney bright and funny, and thought they made a sweet couple. The trip to Aberdeen went well, and Wendy liked Courtney and told Kurt she was good for him. “They were like clones, glued to each other,” Wendy later told writer Tim Appelo. “He was probably the only person who loved her totally and completely unconditionally.”

  One week later, Kurt and the other members of Nirvana headed back out on the road, with Courtney in tow, for another tour. They were playing their biggest arenas to date—20,000-seat halls—but since the tour was booked before the album exploded, they had the middle slot on a three-band bill. Pearl Jam was opening—they were just beginning to become stars themselves—while the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlined.

  Before the December 27 date at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Kurt conducted an interview with BAM magazine’s Jerry McCully. McCully’s piece caused a sensation, if only because his description of Kurt was consistent with the rumors that had begun to circulate about drugs. McCully wrote that Kurt kept “nodding off occasionally in mid-sentence.” The article never mentioned heroin, but the writer’s description of Kurt’s “pinned pupils; sunken cheeks; and scabbed, sallow skin” was concerning. He described Kurt as looking “more like 40 than 24.”

  When he wasn’t nodding off, Kurt was surprisingly lucid about his career. “I wanted to at least sell enough records to be able to eat macaroni and cheese, so I didn’t have to have a job,” he declared. He mentioned Aberdeen—he rarely did an interview without discussing the city, as if it were a lover he’d left behind—and pronounced, “ninety-nine percent of the people [there] had no idea what music was, or art.” He claimed the reason he didn’t become a logger was because “I was really a small kid.” While he didn’t manage to get his “punk rock is freedom” line in print, he did assert, “To mature, to me...is to wimp out....[I] hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend.” He was making a play on Townshend’s “I hope I die before I get old” from “My Generation,” and perhaps in a nod to this, he opened the show with the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”