Part 17 (1/2)

Oh yes I was impressed, almost

went mad with fear

I'd lose the i warns you

dont follow o-an evening caught between two Americas, the America of the past and the America that was to follow, an afternoon where America was truly found, realized, and celebrated-a nervous, scared young homosexual Jewish man stood before a crowd, and he raised his voice He said things that nobody had ever said before in quite the sas, beautiful things-and when he was finished, he had become a braver man He had, in fact, in that hour, transformed himself into the most eventful Ahetti-as in the rooht ”Howl” to the world-heard that his old friend was dying, he wrote the following: ”A great poet is dying/But his voice won't die/His voice is on the land”

Ginsberg's voice will never leave us Its truths and purposes will echo across our future as a clarion call of courage for theAnd we-all of us, whether we understand it or not-are better for it

Good-bye, Allen Ginsberg Thank you for illuentle yet fierce slow-burning flao Thank you for what you brought to our times, our nerve, and our lives

Go in peace, brother Your graceful, heavy, loving heart has earned it

kurt cobain's road fro the streets of aberdeen It is early on a rainy Saturday night in Aberdeen, Washi+ngton, and nearly everybody in this s is already drunk Aaron Burckhard is considerably less drunk than h, in truth, he has fair reason to be drinking It has been just a little over a week since the body of his old friend, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, was found in Seattle, the victi from the news

Burckhard, as Nirvana's first druh the two of theree too hungover to show up for a rehearsal-Burckhard still had friendly feelings for his old bandmate, and for what he had seen Nirvana accomplish ”Kurt was the coolest person I knew, and still is,” says Burckhard, staring straight into his beer glass ”I loved hiins to tell how he heard the news of Cobain's death on the radio-how he began shaking so violently that he had to lay his five-hter down on the sofa next to hiuy in a jeans jacket coh the tavern door and stuers to the bar, orders a beer, and then sees Burckhard and edges our way He begins telling Aaron about a ain, until Aaron, visibly pissed, cuts hiot clean Why would he start using again?”

The other ht, that shi+t's bad But then, hell, I'uy in the jeans jacket grips his beer and lurches to the other side of the tavern

Burckhard shakes his head, then turns back to me ”Man, that is so fucked There's been an epidemic of that shi+t around here lately”

He sits quietly for a few hts return to Cobain ”You know,” he says, ”I never really understood why Kurt was so down on this town I mean, everybody talks about what a depressed place it is to live, but I don't see what there is to hate about it Except, lances around hiry looks into their beer glasses; at the wo ridiculously hard at the hands of her sty incoherently to hi quietly to a man in a cowboy hat over in the corner; at the bartender who is glowering at everybody who orders a drink ”Yeah,” says Burckhard, ”I don't knohat there is to hate about this place Except for, you know, the people who live here”

And then Aaron laughs and returns to his beer

ABERDEEN IS A hard-hit luton coast, and nestled at the deepest cut-point of a seaport called Gray's Harbor The town is about threeand a mile wide, and it is flanked on its northern and eastern borders by a ridge of steep hills, where the richer folks-who have run the local sawmills-have traditionally lived, in lovely and ornate Victorian-style homes Below those hills is a poorer part of town called ”the flats,” and it is here that Kurt Cobain grew up His reenish house, with a tidy yard and drawn curtains It is one of the better homes in the area Many of the nearby houses are lect that is the result of indigence

Stand in the heart of the flats-or in Aberdeen's nearby don area, where empty industrial structures stand like haunted shells-and the frequent fog that pours off the rich folks' hill can feel like so you down here forever Move to the other end of tohere the , Wishkah Boulevard, looks out toward the Chehalis River and Pacific Ocean, and you feel like you're staring at the end of the world-that if you kept walking or driving, you would sie of America

This is the town that Kurt Cobain could never repudiate enough It was here that he was scorned and beat upon by both those who should have loved hinized his otherness and wanted to batter him for it It was here, no doubt, where Cobain first learned how to hate life

YOU WOULDN'T know it now, but Aberdeen was once a hopping place, supported by thriving lumber companies and dozens of the West Coast's most popular whorehouses But the prostitution was killed off decades ago, and the lu to a halt a few years back, as the economy fell and the land was depleted These days, there is widespread concern that the northwestern logging industry can never fully recover, and as a result, that a town like Aberdeen is ly death

ToKurt Cobain's suicide, Aberdeen becae part, that's because Cobain had been outspoken in his dislike for his ho it essentially as a place of redneck biases and low intelligence That disdain has influenced the media's recent depiction of the city as a dismal, hopeless place, in which those with an artistic sensibility-particularly the young-are regarded with disapproval or outright hostility It's as if the toere being held in part accountable for Cobain's ruin-which is not an entirely unfathoic loss of a suicide, you can't help sorting backward through the dead person's life, looking for those crucial episodes of dissolution that would lead hih in Kurt Cobain's life, and you inevitably end up back in Aberdeen-the hoing and ineradicable that he bore from this place, and that he could not shi+rk or annihilate until those last few e of his Seattle horinored In April 1991, Aberdeen's local newspaper, the Daily World, ran an article chronicling the relatively high death rate in the region-especially in its suicide index It is difficult to s with any definitive accuracy, but Aberdeen's suicide rate would appear to average out to sohly twice the national suicide rate (though bear inless than 17,000) Mix this neith high rates of alcohol and drug usage, as well as a high incidence of unemployment and domestic violence and a e with the not-so-surprising conclusion that Aberdeen can be an unusually depressing town to call your home

One doesn't have to look much beyond Cobain's own family's history to see evidence of this truth In July 1979, one of Cobain's great-uncles, Burle Cobain, counshot to his abdomen Five years later, Burle's brother Kenneth also committed suicide There are rumors that other relatives and ancestorsfor the legend that Courtney Love has referred to as the Cobain curse

It is hard to knohat ireat-uncles and others may have had on Cobain-whether he limmer of a dark promise: a surefire prescription for release, come the day that any further days of pain or tor clearly kindred in theartist chose to end his life, as well as so horribly ironic For all the ways that Kurt Cobain reviled what he saw as this area's redneck mentality, in the end he chose for himself the same sad style of death that others in his faun to his head, obliterating his very identity, ruining the part of him that made him knowable to the outside world As one friend, who had known him when he lived here, put it: ”I hate to say it, but it was the perfect Aberdonian death”

THERE IS LITTLE doubt that Kurt Cobain did not have an easy time of life in this town He was born in nearby Hoquiam in 1967, the first child of Wendy Cobain and her auto mechanic husband, Donald The family moved to Aberdeen when Kurt was six ht child-an outgoing, friendly boy who, by the second grade, was already regarded as possessing a natural artistic talent Then, in 1975, when Kurt was eight, Don and Wendy divorced, and the bitter separation and its after to the child Instead of the sense of family and security that he had known previously, Kurt no division, acrian to shut off He grew progressively introverted, and to others, he seemed full of shame about what had become of his family In the years that followed, Cobain was passed back and forth between his mother's home in Aberdeen and his father's in nearby Montesano It was in this period that the young Kurt became sullen and resentful, and when histo the hoion-some of whom also found him a hard kid to reach (There are rumors that Cobainabuse during this time, but nobody in the family was available to confir Kurt Cobain was a ence to knohat to do with it Like e in the world of rock & roll In part, the music probably offered hi elsewhere in his life-the reaffirht speak for or e more: a chance for transcendence or personal victory that nothing else in his life or community could offer Like many kids before him, and many to come, Kurt Cobain sat in his room and learned to play powerful chords and dirty leads on cheap guitars, and felt the a uplift and purpose that came from such activity; he held music closer to him than his family or ho hi could In the process, he found a new identity as a nascent punk in a tohere, to this day, punks are still regarded as either eccentrics or trash

The punishments that he suffered for his end There are numerous stories that ot beat up for siot his face say, or got used as a punching bag by jocks who loathed hi accounts like these, you have to e, and even at his herois to kill the world for what it had inflicted on hi seasons

THOUGH COBAIN IS now Aberdeen's habout his presence here that proves shadowy and inscrutable to the locals Lalish department, saw as much of Cobain asthe time he played music with the teacher's sons, Eric and Steve, Kurt slept on shi+llinger's front-room sofa, and in thosepain that torer would head out to the local Safeway and retrieve some Pepto-Bismol or antacids to try to relieve the pain But for all the time he spent with the family, Kurt remains a er, ”that I knew him well either I don't think my sons knew him well In fact, even to this day, I suspect there are very few people that really knew Kurt well-even the people around him or the people he was near to I think the closest he ever ca as inside was in his artwork, in his poetry, and in his music But as far as personal back and forth, I seriously doubt that he was ever that close to anybody”

Another Aberdeen High teacher, Bob Hunter, affirer's view Hunter, who is part of the school's Art depart his freshman year, and worked with hih the two of the remarks from his student ”I really believe in the idea of aura,” says Hunter, ”and around Kurt there was an aura of: 'Back off-get out ofBut at the sa I wanted to knohere he was getting the ideas he was coer-it was evident even then”

Hunter lost track of Cobain for a while after Kurt dropped out of school, until he had Cobain's younger sister, Ki tapes of her brother's work to the teacher and keep hiress Says Hunter: ”Even if Ki it as a ht thousands of students now, but he would have been up there in h esteem as artists Later, after I heard the contents of his suicide note, I was surprised at the part where he said he didn't have the passion anyht the ideas would always be there for hi a visual artist and he would have reot out of Aberdeen alive-at least for a while In 1987, he formed the first version of the band that would eventually become Nirvana, with fellow Aberdonians Krist Novoselic on bass and Aaron Burckhard on drums A few months later, Cobain and Novoselic moved to Olympia, and eventually Burckhard was left behind Nirvana played around Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle, and recorded the band's first albuh a coupleits groundbreaking major label debut, Nevermind, for Geffen in 1991 With Never-resisted punk aesthetic at both its harshest and smartest, and did so at a time when many pundits had declared that rock & roll was effectively finished as either a mainstream cultural or commercial force It was a remarkable achievement for a band froration-froton's coast to ide faly short period of time Back at home, many of the kids and fans who had shared Cobain's perspective were heartened by his band's accomplishment

But when Cobain turned up the victim of his own hand in Seattle on April 8, 1994, those same kids' pride and hope took a hard blow ”After the suicide,” says Brandon Baker, a fifteen-year-old fresh up to us and saying stuff like: 'Your buddy's dead What are you going to do now?' Or: 'Hey, I've got Nirvana tickets for sale; they're half off' ”

Baker is standing with a few of his friends in an alcove across the street froh school, where soe fro what it's like to be seen as grunge kids in the reality of post-Nirvana Aberdeen Baker continues: ”I realize that Kurt Cobain had a fewthis, it kind of cheated us in a way We figured if someone like him could ht have paved the way for the rest of us But noe don't want people to think that we're using his path as our guideline It's like you're al now People around here view us as freaks They see us walking together in afor trouble They'll throw us off the preether I don't know-it's sad how adults will classify you sometimes”

The talk turns to the subject of the su Lollapalooza tour In the last few days, Aberdeen's Daily World's headlines have been given to coverage of a anizers have proposed using nearby Hoquiaton show, in part as a tribute to all that Cobain and Nirvana did for alternative h, are incensed over the idea They are worried about the undesirable eleht be attracted by such an event, and even though the stopover would bring a big boon to the badly ailing local econo such a show happen in this area

”You would think,” says Jesse Eby, a seventeen-year-old junior, ”that they would let us have this one thing-that the city council would realize welike this show co for the kids around here”

”Yeah,” says Rebecca Sartwell, a freshhout her blond hair ”Ito do, just one day out of the year? I o to Denny's and drink coffee?”

Everybody falls silent for a few ain ”I don't kno to explain this,” she says, ”but all I want is out Maybe I'll et there I don't intend to say, 'Hey, I' to assuh having to live here I don't want to take the reputation of the place with reement with Rebecca's words

NOT FAR FROM the place where Kurt Cobain's e It reaches across the narrow Wishkah River, leading into the part of town called North Aberdeen In the winter of 1985, during a time when he had no place to live, Kurt Cobain used to spend his afternoons at the local library and his nights sleeping on a friend's sofa, or on the porch deck of his h, he slept under the North Aberdeen Bridge, in a space up the sloping bank of the bridge's south side, just feet below the overhead pave my last rainy afternoon in Aberdeen, to take a look around There's a hollow cleared into the brownish-red soil, close to the concrete buttresses, and it is here that Cobain slept Indeed, there are ns of him in this one place than in any other spot in Aberdeen, outside of his mother's home The coluraffiti, bearing the naans like fuck and STOP VANDALISM

I sit down in the hollow of the dirt for a few minutes and stare out at the Wishkah River From here, its water doesn't appear to flow Rather, it just seereen I hear a clatter behind me and I turn around A rat? The wind? I sit there and I think what it would be like to hear that sound in the dead of a cold night, with only a sine what it was like to be a boy in this town and turn to this bridge as your haven Who knows: Maybe the nights Cobain spent here were fun, drunken nights, or at least times of safety, when he was out of the reach of the town that had already harmed him many times But in the end I have to lapse into my own prejudices: It seems horrible that this was the kindest sanctuary a boy could find on a winter night in his own ho scrawled on a rail overhead It is hard tolooks much like the examples of Cobain's penmanshi+p that I have seen recently in books and news articles The scrawl reads: WELL, I MUST BE OFF IT'S TIME FOR THE FOOL TO GET OUT

Maybe it is indeed Cobain's writing, or maybe it's the script of another local kid who ca Cobain realized: To save yourself from a dark fate, you have to reht not reh, and when that happens, the darkness leaves with you It visits you not just in your worst ht that those occasions have to offer It visits you and it tells you that this is where you are from-that no matter how far you run or how hard you reach for release, the darkness, sooner or later, will clais when you are e in your hos can stay with you until the day you die

PART 7