Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Before leaving for the tour, Kurt called his mother to tell her the news of the pregnancy. His sister Kim answered the phone. “We’re having a baby,” he declared. “I better give you to Mom,” Kim replied. When Wendy heard the news, she announced: “Kurt, you can’t shock me anymore.”

  The first few concerts in Australia went smoothly, but within a week Kurt was suffering from stomach pain, forcing the cancellation of dates. He went to the emergency room one night, but walked out after overhearing a nurse say, “He’s just a junkie.” As he wrote in his journal, “the pain left me immobile, doubled-up on the bathroom floor, vomiting water and blood. I was literally starving to death. My weight was down to about 100 pounds.” Desperate for a solution, he went to an Australian doctor who specialized in rock bands. On the office wall, proudly displayed, was a photograph of the physician with Keith Richards. “I was taken to a doctor at the advice of my management, who gave me Physeptone,” Kurt wrote in his journal. “The pills seemed to work better than anything else I’ve tried.” But a few weeks later, after the tour hit Japan, Kurt noticed the label on the bottle: “It read: ‘Physeptone—contains methadone.’ Hooked again. We survived Japan, but by that time opiates and touring had started to take their toll on my body and I wasn’t in much better health than I was off of drugs.”

  Despite his physical and emotional struggles, Kurt adored Japan, sharing the nation’s obsession with kitsch. “He was in a completely foreign country, and he was fascinated with the culture,” recalled Virgin Publishing’s Kaz Utsunomiya, who was on the tour. “He loved cartoons and ‘Hello Kitty.’ ” Kurt didn’t understand why Japanese fans gave him presents, but announced he would accept only “Hello Kitty” gifts. The next day, he was deluged with trinkets. Before a gig outside Tokyo, Utsunomiya had to help Kurt buy new pajamas. When Kurt told the salesman he wanted the pajamas to wear onstage, the staid clerk looked at the singer like he was truly insane.

  In Osaka, on a rare night off, Nirvana reunited with one of their favorite touring partners, Shonen Knife, a pop group made up of three Japanese women. They gave Kurt gifts of toy swords, a new motorized Chim-Chim monkey, and took him to dinner at a bratwurst restaurant he had selected. He was disappointed to learn Shonen Knife had a gig the next night, as did Nirvana. Uncharacteristically, Kurt ended the Nirvana set early and announced from the stage he was planning to go see Shonen Knife. Leaving the venue, his cab was mobbed by Japanese girls grasping at the car, just wanting to touch it. At the Shonen Knife show, things were just as surreal, because as the only blond, blue-eyed boy there, he was easy to spot. “He was still wearing his pajamas,” remembered Shonen Knife’s Naoko Yamano.

  Courtney had rejoined the tour in Japan, and they spent Kurt’s 25th birthday flying to Honolulu for two scheduled shows. On the plane they decided to get married in Hawaii. They had fantasized about a Valentine’s Day wedding, but didn’t finish their prenuptial agreement in time. Kurt had suggested a pre-nup after strong lobbying from manager John Silva, who never liked Courtney. The pre-nup was mostly to cover future earnings, because at the time of their marriage they were still “fuck poor,” as Courtney described it. When Kurt filed his 1991 taxes, owing to the arcane way the music industry pays royalties so late and the huge percentage taken by managers and lawyers, his gross income was just $29,541. He had deductions of $2,541, giving him a taxable income of $27,000 during a year he played before hundreds of thousands of fans and sold almost two million records.

  Courtney was negotiating her own record deal with DGC, which gave Hole an advance of a million dollars and a royalty rate considerably higher than Nirvana’s, a matter of great pride to her. She still had reservations about how she might not be perceived as an artist in her own right married to someone as famous as Kurt. In Japan, she had jotted her melancholia in her journal: “My fame. Ha ha. It’s a weapon, kiss my ass, just like morning sickness.... Could it just be the commercial effect of too many sales and a semi-freak accident, semi-meant to be, but I’m starting to think I can’t sing, can’t write, that esteem is at an all-time low, and it isn’t his fault. God, how could it be.... Don’t you dare dismiss me just because I married a ROCKSTAR.”

  They were married on Waikiki Beach at sunset on Monday, February 24, 1992. The ceremony was conducted by a non-denominational minister found through the wedding bureau. Kurt had done heroin before the wedding, though he told Azerrad he “wasn’t very high. I just did a little teeny bit so I didn’t get sick.” Courtney wore an antique silk dress that had once belonged to actress Frances Farmer. Kurt wore blue-plaid pajamas and a woven Guatemalan purse. With his gauntness and bizarre clothing, he looked more like a chemotherapy patient than a traditional groom. Yet the wedding was not without meaning to him, and he cried during the short ceremony.

  Since the wedding was hastily arranged, most of the eight guests were from the band’s crew. Kurt had Dylan Carlson fly in to serve as best man, though this was partially precipitated by Kurt wanting Dylan to bring heroin. Dylan had not yet met Courtney, and his first encounter with her was the day before the wedding. He liked Courtney and she liked him, though neither would be able to get over a belief that the other party was a negative influence on Kurt. “In some ways, she was very good for him,” Dylan recalled, “and in other ways, she was terrible.” Dylan brought his girlfriend, and the two were the only attendees not on the Nirvana payroll.

  But of more significance were those missing: Kurt hadn’t invited his family (nor had Courtney), and Krist and Shelli were noticeably absent. The morning of the wedding, Kurt had banned Shelli and a few crew members because he felt they were gossiping about Courtney—the effect of this edict was to also uninvite Krist. “Kurt was changing,” recalled Shelli. That month, Kurt had told Krist, “I don’t want to even see Shelli, because when I look at her, I feel bad about what I’m doing.” Shelli’s analysis of this: “I think looking at me was like looking at his conscience.”

  Shelli and Krist left Hawaii the next day, assuming the band was broken up. “We thought it was over,” recalled Shelli. Krist was just saddened and felt shunned by his old friend: “Kurt was in his own world at that point. After that, I was pretty estranged with him. It was never the same. We talked about the direction of the band somewhat, but there really was no direction of the band after that.” It would be four months before Nirvana would perform again in public, and almost two months before Krist and Kurt would see each other.

  Kurt and Courtney honeymooned in Hawaii, but the sunny island was not Kurt’s idea of paradise. They returned to Los Angeles, where his drug habit was easier fed. Kurt later downplayed his increasing abuse as “a lot less turbulent than everyone thinks.” He told Azerrad he decided to continue being an addict because he felt “if I quit then, I’d end up doing it again for at least the next couple of years all the time. I figured I’d just burn myself out of it because I hadn’t experienced the full junkie feeling yet. I was still healthy.” His chemical and psychological dependency were so great at this stage, his comments were an attempt to minimize what had become a debilitating addiction. His own description of himself in his journal was anything but healthy, at least as he imagined others saw him: “I’m thought of as an emaciated, yellow-skinned, zombie-like, evil, drug-fiend, junky, lost cause, on the brink of death, self-destructive, selfish pig, a loser who shoots up in the backstage area just seconds before a performance.” This was what he imagined people thought of him; his own self-talk was even darker, summed up by a line that would repeatedly show up in his writings: “I hate myself and I want to die.” By early 1992, he had already decided this would be the title of his next album.

  Heroin became, in many ways, the hobby he’d never had as a child: He methodically organized his “works” box the way a small boy might shuffle his baseball card collection. In this sacred box he stored his syringe, a cooker to melt the drugs (West Coast heroin had the consistency of roofing tar and needed to be cooked), and spoons and cotton balls used in preparing the heroin for injecting
. A seamy underworld of dealers and daily deliveries became commonplace.

  In the spring of 1992 he did virtually nothing involving the band, and refused to schedule future shows. The band was offered outrageous sums to do a headlining arena tour—Nevermind was still near the top of the charts—but Kurt turned down all overtures. Though Courtney had kicked drugs during their January detox, with Kurt buying heroin daily and filling their apartment with the smell of it cooking, she found herself falling down a slippery slope again. The combination of their weaknesses helped pull each into a spiral of abuse, and their mutual emotional dependence made breaking that cycle nearly impossible. “With Kurt and Courtney, it was like they were two characters in a play, and they’d simply switch parts,” observed Jennifer Finch. “When one would get sober and better, the other would slip. But Courtney could control herself more than Kurt. With him, it was this train wreck that was going down and everyone knew it, and everyone just wanted to get out of the way.”

  In early March, Hole’s Carolyn Rue visited their apartment to get high. When Rue asked for an extra syringe, Kurt replied, “We broke them all.” In an effort to control their addictions, Courtney would frequently destroy every syringe in the apartment, which only had the effect of forcing Kurt to buy new ones when he bought his daily heroin. Even to Rue, who had her own struggles, Kurt’s addiction seemed full-throttle. “Kurt talked about taking drugs like it was so fucking natural,” she recalled. “But it wasn’t.” Even within the confines of drug culture, Kurt’s level of use seemed abhorrent.

  The prospect of the baby gave Kurt a small beacon of hope in what had become an increasingly bleak existence. To ensure the fetus was properly developing, they’d gotten several sonograms, pictures of the baby in the womb. When Kurt saw them he was visibly shaken, and wept with relief that the child was developing normally. Kurt took one of the sonograms and used it as the centerpiece of a painting he began working on. When a second test produced an ultrasound video of the fetus, he asked for a copy and watched it obsessively on his VCR. “Kurt kept saying, ‘look at that little bean,’ ” recalled Jennifer Finch. “That’s what they were calling her, ‘the bean.’ He would point out her hand. He knew every single feature of that graphic image.” Early in the pregnancy, after determining the child’s gender, they had selected a name: Frances Bean Cobain. Her middle name was their nickname, while her first name came from Frances McKee of the Vaselines, or so Kurt would later tell reporters. Her sonogram photo later was reproduced on the sleeve of the “Lithium” single.

  By March concern over Kurt’s increasing dependence on drugs and its effect on Courtney pushed his managers to attempt their first formal intervention. They brought in Bob Timmins, an addiction specialist whose reputation was built on working with rock stars. Courtney recalled Timmins being so starstruck by Kurt he paid little attention to her. “He literally ignored me, and was drooling over Kurt,” she said. Timmins suggested Kurt consider an inpatient chemical dependency program. “My advice was taken,” Timmins said. “Why I recommended that particular one was because it happened to be Cedars-Sinai Hospital, and I felt that some medical issues presented themselves in my evaluation. It wasn’t just a simple ‘go to treatment, get clean and go to meetings.’ There were a lot of medical issues going on.”

  Initially, Kurt’s stay at Cedars-Sinai helped considerably, and soon he appeared sober and healthy. But though he agreed to continue on methadone—a drug that stops withdrawal without producing a high— he ended treatment early and balked at 12-Step meetings. “He definitely wasn’t a joiner,” observed Timmins. “That part of his personality probably got in the way of the recovery process.”

  In April Kurt and Courtney traveled to Seattle, where they shopped for a house. They appeared one evening in Orpheum Records and caused a scene when they seized all the Nirvana bootlegs in the store. Courtney rightly claimed that the CDs were illegal, but the clerk protested that he’d be fired if the owner found the CDs were missing. Ironically, Kurt had come in the store searching for a CD by the band Negativland that itself had been ruled a bootleg after a lawsuit. The clerk asked if they could write a note to his boss, so Courtney wrote: “I need for you not to make money off my husband so I can feed my children. Love, Mrs. Cobain.” Kurt added: “Macaroni and cheese for all.” The note was so odd, the worried clerk asked Kurt, “If I lose my job can I work for you?” The next day the store received a phone call from a man who asked, “Is that guy with the long hair who was working there last night still employed?”

  While the couple were in Seattle, the Fradenburgs threw a combo wedding reception/baby shower for them. It would be the first time many of Kurt’s uncles and aunts would get a chance to meet Courtney, but several left before she arrived: The party had been scheduled for 2 p.m., but the guests of honor didn’t show until seven. Courtney told Kurt’s relatives they might purchase a Victorian mansion in Grays Harbor. “Then we can be the king and queen of Aberdeen,” she joked.

  Marriage seemed initially to mellow both Kurt and Courtney. When they were away from the spotlight, and away from drugs, their relationship had many moments of tenderness. Stripped of their fame, they both turned back into the scared lost children they’d been prior to being discovered. Each night before bed they would pray together. Once in bed, they would read each other books. Kurt said he loved to go to sleep listening to the sound of Courtney’s voice—it was a comfort he had missed for much of his life.

  That month, Courtney returned to Los Angeles for Hole business; Kurt stayed in Seattle and even did a short one-day recording session with Nirvana, at Barrett Jones’s home studio. They cut “Oh, the Guilt,” “Curmudgeon,” and “Return of the Rat,” the final song slated for a tribute album for the Portland band the Wipers. The day after the session, Kurt drove his Valiant to Aberdeen for his first visit to Grays Harbor in months.

  Two days later Kurt drove back to Seattle to retrieve his sister and bring her to Aberdeen. He had a subtext to this long day of travel, a six-hour round trip, which he did not announce to Kim until the car drove past “Think of Me Hill” just minutes from Wendy’s home. “You know your best friend Cindy?” he asked. “She told Mom you and Jennifer were having an affair.”

  “It’s not an affair,” Kim answered. “We’re girlfriends. I’m gay.” Kurt knew this, or at least suspected it, but his mother had not. “Mom’s kind of flipped out right now,” he told his sister. Kurt told Kim to pretend as if their mother didn’t know. Kurt, like Wendy, preferred a nonconfrontational style—Kim, however, told her brother she would do no such thing.

  As they drove into Aberdeen, Kurt decided they needed to confer before walking into the house. He drove to Sam Benn Park, where they sat on a swing, and he decided to use this moment to drop his own bombshell. “I know you’ve tried pot, and you’ve probably done acid and cocaine,” he told her. “I’ve never touched cocaine,” Kim argued. “Well, you will,” her brother replied. Their conversation devolved into a debate about whether Kim, just two weeks away from turning 22, would end up using cocaine. “Well, you will use cocaine,” Kurt insisted. “But if you ever touch heroin, I’ll go get a gun, and I’ll come find you, and I’ll kill you.” It did not sound like he was joking. “You don’t have to worry about that,” Kim told him. “I’d never stick a needle in my arm. I’d never do that.” Kim realized that in the way Kurt had constructed the warning, he’d been broadcasting a message about himself.

  After the kind of long silence only natural among siblings, Kurt finally announced, “I’ve been clean about eight months.” He didn’t specify what he’d been clean from, but Kim had heard the rumors just like everyone else. She also suspected he was lying about having eight months clean-time—it was actually less than a month, and he was still on a daily dose of methadone.

  “I don’t know much about heroin,” she told her brother. Kurt sighed and it was as if a door had opened, and the brother Kim had always loved came through and revealed himself to her once more. He didn’t hide behind hi
s constructed self or lies or fame as he told her about the pain he felt trying to kick heroin. He described it as similar to cigarette smoking, where each progressive attempt at quitting becomes harder and harder. “The more you do it,” he explained, “and the more you quit, the harder it gets to quit on the third, and the fourth time, and the fifth, and the sixth time. There is a little monster inside your head that says, ‘You know you’ll feel better, and you know I’ll feel better.’ It’s like I have another person in my head who is telling me that everything will be okay if I just go and do a little.”

  Kim was speechless. She knew from his mentioning how hard it was to quit the “fifth” or “sixth” time that he was far more gone than she had supposed. “Don’t ever worry about me, Kurt, because I’m never touching that shit,” she said. “I’ll never get near it. You’ve been clean for eight months—that’s great. Please continue.” She was running out of words, and reeling from the shock of “finding out your brother is a junkie,” as she remembered it. Despite the rumors, Kim had a difficult time accepting that her brother, who had grown up with her and suffered many of the same indignities, was an addict.

  Kurt moved the topic back to Kim’s sexuality and the prejudice he knew she would encounter on the harbor. He tried to talk her out of being a lesbian. “Don’t totally give up on men,” he urged. “I know they’re assholes. I would never date a guy. They’re dicks.” Kim found this hilarious, since despite keeping her secret from her family, she had always known she was gay, and felt little shame. Even with all the “Homo sex rules” graffiti Kurt had spray-painted around Aberdeen, he struggled to accept that his sister was gay. As the conversation wound down and they headed toward home, he gave her a long brotherly embrace and pledged he’d love her forever.