Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  That didn’t stop him from quietly steaming. Though he continued to tell reporters he was in support of the Litt remixes and thought Albini did a great job—two contradictory statements—in his journal he outlined plans to release the album exactly as he wanted. He would first release the Albini version as I Hate Myself and Want to Die, but only on vinyl, cassette, and eight-track tape. His next phase of operations would come one month later. “After many lame reviews and reports on curmudgeonly, uncompromising vinyl, cassette, eight-track-only release, we release the remixed version under the title Verse, Chorus, Verse.” For this, Kurt wanted a sticker reading, “Radio-Friendly, Unit-Shifting, Compromise Version.” DGC, not surprisingly, declined to follow Kurt’s plans. The remixed version of In Utero was slated for release in September.

  On the first Sunday of May, at 9 p.m., King County’s 911 emergency services center received a report from the Cobain house of a drug overdose. When police and an aid car arrived, they discovered Kurt on the living-room sofa babbling about “Hamlet.” He was suffering, the officers observed, from “symptoms associated with an overdose of a narcotic.... Victim Cobain was conscious and able to answer questions, but was obviously impaired.”

  Just a few minutes prior to the arrival of police, Kurt had been blue and appeared, once again, to be dead. Courtney told officers Kurt had been at a friend’s house where he had “injected himself with $30 to $40 worth of heroin.” Kurt had driven home, and when Courtney confronted him about being loaded, he locked himself in an upstairs bedroom. Courtney had threatened to call the police or his family, and when he didn’t respond, she followed through on the second threat. She reached Wendy on the first ring, and Kurt’s mother and sister immediately got in their car and “bombed our asses up there,” as Kim remembered.

  In the two and a half hours it took Kim and Wendy to speed from Aberdeen to Seattle, Kurt’s condition deteriorated. By the time Wendy and Kim arrived, Kurt was vomiting and in shock. He did not want 911 called, he told them in his slurred voice, because he would “rather die” than see it in the paper that he overdosed or got arrested. Courtney threw cold water on Kurt, walked him around the house, gave him Valium, and finally injected him with Narcan, a drug used to counteract heroin, but none of these efforts fully revived him (a supply of Narcan, itself illegally obtained, was always kept in the home for this purpose). Wendy tried to rub Kurt’s back—her way of comforting her son—but the heroin made his muscles tighter than a plaster mannequin. “It was horrid,” remembered Kim. “We finally had to call paramedics because he was starting to turn blue.” When police arrived, they found, “his condition gradually deteriorated to the point that he was shaking, became flushed, delirious, and talked incoherently.”

  Once Kurt was in the aid car, the crisis seemed averted. Kim followed the ambulance to Harborview Hospital, where events took a farcical turn. “There he was hilarious,” she recalled. “He was laying out in the hallway of this packed hospital, getting IV fluids, and the stuff to reverse the drugs. He’s laying there, and he starts talking about Shakespeare. Then he’d nod out and wake up five minutes later, and continue his conversation with me.”

  Part of the reason Kim had been sent to chase the ambulance was because Courtney wanted to throw away the rest of Kurt’s heroin but couldn’t locate it. When Kurt came back to consciousness, Kim asked him where he put it. “It’s in the pocket of the bathrobe hanging on the stairway,” Kurt admitted, right before he passed out again. Kim ran to the phone and called the house, though by then Courtney had already discovered it. When Kim returned to Kurt’s side, he had woken again and insisted she not divulge the location of the drugs.

  After about three hours of Narcan, Kurt was ready to go home. “When he was able to leave the hospital, I couldn’t light his cigarette fast enough,” Kim said. There was a huge sadness for her in witnessing what at times had seemed like an almost comic brush with death: Overdosing had become ordinary to Kurt, part of the game, and there was a normalcy to this madness. Indeed, as the police report noted, Courtney told the officers the larger, sadder truth about this one episode: “This type of incident had happened before to Victim Cobain.”

  “Heroine” was now part of Kurt’s daily existence, and sometimes, particularly when he had no band business and Courtney and Frances were gone, the central part. By the summer of 1993, he was using almost every day, and when not using he was in withdrawal and complaining vociferously. It was a period of more functional dependency than in the past, but his usage still surpassed most addicts’. Even Dylan, an addict himself, found Kurt’s dosage level dangerous. “He definitely used a lot of dope,” Dylan recalled. “I wanted to get high and still be able to do something, but he always wanted to do so much he couldn’t do anything. He always wanted to do more than he needed to do.” Kurt’s interest was in escape, and the quicker and the more incapacitating, the better. As a result, there were many overdoses and near-death situations, as many as a dozen during 1993 alone.

  The increase in Kurt’s habit ran counter to an effort Courtney was making to sober up. In late spring, she hired a psychic to help her kick drugs. Kurt balked at paying the bills from the psychic and laughed at her advice that the couple both needed to rid themselves of “all toxins.” Courtney took it seriously, however; she attempted to stop smoking, began drinking fresh-squeezed juice every day, and attended Narcotics Anonymous. Kurt taunted his wife at first, but then encouraged her to attend N.A. meetings, if only so he had more free time to get loaded.

  The first of June, Courtney staged an intervention in the Lakeside house. In attendance were Krist, friend Nils Bernstein, Gold Mountain’s Janet Billig, Wendy, and Kurt’s stepfather, Pat O’Connor. At first, Kurt refused to leave his room and even look at the group. When he finally left his room, he and Courtney began screaming at each other. In a fit of rage, Kurt grabbed a red Sanford Magic Marker and scrawled “None of you will ever know my true intent” on the hallway wall. “It was obvious there was no getting through to him,” Bernstein remembered. The assembled group went through a litany of reasons Kurt should stop doing drugs, one of the most repeated being the needs of his daughter. His mother told him his health was at risk. Krist pleaded with Kurt, talking of how he had limited his own drinking. When Pat O’Connor shared stories of his struggles with alcohol, Kurt was silent and stared at his sneakers. “You could see in Kurt’s face that he was thinking, ‘Nothing in your life relates to anything in my life,’ ” Bernstein recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘this is so not working.’ ” When Kurt returned to his bedroom in a huff, those assembled began to argue among themselves about who was to blame for Kurt’s addiction. For those closest to him, it was easier to blame each other than to put responsibility at his feet.

  Kurt began to increasingly isolate himself that summer; friends jokingly called him Rapunzel because he so rarely came down from his room. His mother was one of the few people he’d listen to, and Courtney increasingly made use of Wendy as mediator. Kurt still desperately needed mothering, and he regressed to an almost fetal state as he retreated from the world. Wendy could soothe him by stroking his hair and telling him everything was going to be fine. “There were times when he would be nodded out upstairs, and nobody, neither Courtney or anyone else, could go near him,” observed Bernstein. “But his mom would wander in, and he didn’t shut her out. I think it was chemical depression.” Depression ran in Wendy’s family, and though several of Kurt’s friends suggested he be treated, he chose to ignore their pleas and to self-medicate with drugs. Truth be told, it was hard for anyone to get him to do anything: If the world of Nirvana could be considered a small nation unto itself, Kurt was king. Few dared challenge the king’s mental health for fear of being banished from the kingdom.

  On June 4, after another horrible day of drama, Courtney called the police on Kurt. When officers arrived, she told them they had “an argument over guns in the household,” she had thrown a glass of juice in his face, and he had shoved her. “At which time,” the
police report states, “Cobain pushed Love to the floor and began choking her, leaving a scratch.” Seattle law required police to arrest at least one party in any domestic dispute—Kurt and Courtney began to argue over who would be the one arrested, since both wanted this distinction. Kurt insisted he go to jail—for someone passive-aggressive, this was a mother lode of an opportunity to both emotionally retreat and play the martyr. He won. He was transported to the North Precinct and booked into the King County Jail. Police also seized a large collection of ammunition and guns from the home, including two .38 pistols and a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

  But the real story of what happened that day illustrated the increasing strain within their marriage. Like two characters in a Raymond Carver short story, their fights increasingly included digs at each other’s weak points, and on this day Kurt was flaunting his drug use in front of Courtney and her psychic. “He had to find, of course, the one drug that would drive me insane,” Love recalled. “He decided he was going to try crack. He made this big insane production out of how he was going to acquire and try ten dollars’ worth of ‘rock.’ ”

  To bait his wife, Kurt acted like “he was pulling down the drug deal of the century” with repeated phone calls to a dealer. Visions of him free-basing crack cocaine in their house enraged Courtney, and instead of throwing a glass at him, as the police report states, she actually threw a juicer. It wasn’t much of a fight—physical battles between the two ended in draws, just like their first wrestling match on the floor of the Portland club. But Courtney called the police anyway, figuring that having him go to jail was better than having him burn down their house free-basing. “I’m sure Kurt got his crack eventually, somehow, somewhere, but I never did find out about it,” she said. He spent only three hours in jail, and was released that night on $950 bail. Charges were later dropped.

  They patched things up after the arrest, and as happened repeatedly in their relationship, the trauma brought them closer. On their bedroom wall she wrote the graffiti, “You better love me, you fucker,” inside a heart. A month after the fight, Kurt described their relationship to Gavin Edwards of Details as “a whirling dervish of emotion, all these extremes of fighting and loving each other at once. If I’m mad at her, I’ll yell at her, and that’s healthy.” Both were masters at pushing and testing limits—it was all Kurt did in childhood—and whenever he made Courtney angry, he knew he had to woo her back, usually with love letters. One such note began: “Courtney, when I say, ‘I love you,’ I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever, ever come close to intimidating, persuading, etc., me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock, yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head.” The prose was self-deprecating, describing himself “as dense as cement,” but also reminding her of his marriage commitment: “I parade around you proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral.”

  Two weeks after the domestic violence arrest, Neal Karlen arrived at the Cobain house to interview Courtney for the New York Times. When he knocked, Kurt answered, holding Frances, and announced his wife was “at her N.A. meeting.” He invited Karlen in, and they sat and watched television. “It was this huge house,” recalled Karlen, “but there were cigarette butts put out on plates, and this ugly, shitty furniture. In the living room was this huge, eighteen-foot television. It was as if someone had gone to the store and said, ‘I want the biggest television in the catalog.’ ”

  On TV was the latest episode of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” MTV’s popular show. “I know Beavis and Butt-Head,” Kurt told Karlen. “I grew up with people like that; I recognize them.” In a grand bit of serendipity, the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on the program. “All right!” Kurt exclaimed. “Let’s see what they think about us.” When the two cartoon characters gave Nirvana the thumbs up, Kurt seemed genuinely flattered. “They like us!”

  As if on cue, Courtney arrived home. She kissed Kurt, bounced Frances on her knee, and with only a mild hint of sarcasm announced, “Ah, the perfect family—just like a Norman Rockwell picture.” Even Karlen was struck with a domestic image. “I kept thinking of them as Fred and Ethel Mertz,” he recalled. “He was more like Fred, with his hands in his pockets, while Ethel was running the household.” Karlen also had caught Kurt on a day his eyes were clear. “I’d seen enough junkies to know he was straight.”

  As it was, Love didn’t want to talk to the New York Times, but she did wish to voice her opinions for a book Karlen was writing on the band Babes in Toyland. Their interview went on for hours, and Kurt frequently chimed in when Courtney would prod him. “He was not as passive as people said,” Karlen observed. Courtney used Kurt as she would a resident punk historian—when she made a point, and needed a date or a name, she would query Kurt, and he would inevitably know the answer. “It was like watching a quiz show where they would go to the professor to verify facts,” Karlen noted.

  Kurt had one quandary of his own: He was pondering whether to buy a guitar that once belonged to Leadbelly. It was for sale for $55,000, but he couldn’t decide whether buying it was a “punk move” or an “anti-punk move.” The only tension Karlen noticed between the couple was when Courtney stumbled upon a Mary Lou Lord album in Kurt’s record collection. This set Love off telling a story of how she’d chased Lord down the street in Los Angeles, threatening to beat her up. Kurt was silent, and it was the only time Karlen thought Kurt acted like “the long-suffering husband.”

  Courtney’s discourse on the history of punk rock went on for hours after Kurt went to bed. Karlen eventually spent the night in a spare bedroom. The morning brought the only evidence this wasn’t the typical household: When Kurt went to prepare the morning meal, there was no food. After looking for several minutes, Kurt put some sugar cookies on a plate and announced it was breakfast.

  On July 1 Hole played their first show in several months, at the Off-Ramp in Seattle. Courtney had retooled her band, and they were preparing to tour England and make a record. Kurt came to the show, but he was a mess. “He was so wasted he could barely stand up,” recalled the club’s Michelle Underwood. “We had to help him move around. It seemed like he was very nervous for her.” His nerves were exacerbated by the fact that the day of the show, the Seattle Times published a story on his arrest the previous month in the domestic violence incident. Courtney joked onstage: “We’re donating all the money you paid to get in tonight to Domestic Violence Wife Beaters Fund. Not!” Later she came back to the topic: “Domestic violence is not something that’s ever happened to me. I just like to stick up for my husband. It’s not a true story. They never fucking are. Why is it that every time we have a fucking beer, it’s on the fucking news?” Despite the drama, her performance was riveting, and it was the first time she’d won over a Seattle audience.

  Hole’s set ended at fifteen minutes past one, but that wasn’t the end of the evening for the Cobains. Brian Willis of NME came backstage and asked if Courtney might want to be interviewed. She invited him to their house but she spent most of the interview promoting Kurt’s record. Love even played In Utero for Willis, the first time a journalist had heard the album. He was overwhelmed, writing, “If Freud could hear it, he’d wet his pants in anticipation.” He called it “an album pregnant with irony and insight. In Utero is Kurt’s revenge.”

  Willis’s listening experience was interrupted when Kurt came into the room to report: “We were just on the news, on MTV. They were talking about the story in the Seattle Times and how Hole have just started their world tour in Seattle at the Off-Ramp.” With that, Kurt made a snack of English muffins and hot chocolate, and sat at the counter watching the sun rise. When Willis wrote the late-night events up for the NME, he ended his piece with a bit of analysis: “For someone who’s been through so much shit in the past two years, whose name’s being dragged through acrimony once again, who’s about to release a record the whole rock world’s desperate to hear and be faced
with astonishing attention and pressure, Kurt Cobain’s a remarkably contented man.”

  Chapter 21

  A REASON TO SMILE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  AUGUST 1993–NOVEMBER 1993

  God damn, Jesus fucking Christ Almighty, love me, me, me, we could go on a trial basis, please I don’t care if it’s the out-of-the-in-crowd, I just need a crowd, a gang, a reason to smile.

  —From a journal entry.

  Like every other American family with a young child, Kurt and Courtney purchased a video camera. While Kurt could construct a guitar out of a block of wood and spare wires, he never figured out how to install the battery, so the camera was used only when they were near an outlet. A single videotape charted the period from their first Christmas together in December 1992, through to images of Frances as a toddler in March 1994.

  A few of the scenes on the tape were of Nirvana shows, or were footage of the band offstage, hanging out. One short fragment captured Kurt, Courtney, Dave, Krist, and Frances sitting in Pachyderm Studios listening to the first play-back of “All Apologies,” collectively appearing battle-weary after a week in the studio. But most of the tape documented the development of Frances Bean and her interaction with their friends: It showed her crawling around Mark Lanegan and talking while Mark Arm sang her a lullaby. Some of the tape was humorous, as when Kurt lifted up the baby’s butt and made fart noises, or the footage of him serenading her with an a cappella version of “Seasons in the Sun.” Frances was a beatific child, as photogenic as her parents, with her father’s mesmerizing eyes and her mother’s high cheekbones. Kurt adored her, and the video documents a sentimental side of him the public rarely saw—the look he gave both Frances and Courtney during these tender moments was one of unadulterated love. Though this was the most famous family in rock ’n’ roll, much of the footage could have been from any household with a Toys “R” Us charge account.