Save Me, Kurt Cobain Read online

  Realizing that Verne would never broach certain subjects, I tried to stay one step ahead of the game. I learned about girl stuff from paperback books. Verne didn’t like to talk. He liked to play road hockey (I indulged him sometimes) and watch movies (this I actually enjoyed, too). Our finest evenings spent together began with spaghetti and garlic bread, followed by a movie, using one of North America’s last remaining VHS players. (“Hey, it still works” would be Verne’s catchphrase on a sitcom.)

  Verne rarely went out when he had time off. He probably couldn’t afford a babysitter, or maybe he had nowhere special to go. We generally stayed home at night. The house was in a sketchy part of downtown that was neither hip nor cosmopolitan, next to a business that laundered service uniforms and shipped them off in green vans. Most people in the neighborhood were decent, but one morning in the playground, Obe and I found broken glass planted right at the bottom of the slide. That sucked.

  Verne loves movies, whether they rate two stars or five. So instead of going out, we watched and rewatched masterpieces like Mrs. Doubtfire, E.T., and Lady and the Tramp. He had no problem indulging my cinematic whims. He would sit peacefully and watch Desperately Seeking Susan or The Breakfast Club as long as I didn’t keep asking him “Tell me how you met. What was she wearing the last time you saw her?” All I knew was that they had met at Mayfair Mall. My mother was a part-time environmental studies student at the university. She also worked in the mall at a candy store called Sweet Dreams. Verne used to stop and make small talk on his breaks until he worked up the nerve to ask her out. That’s about all I got out of him.

  “I can’t talk about it anymore, Nico,” he’d say. “Please, don’t ask me.”

  Verne wouldn’t give me answers, but he was diligent in providing what he could. By the time I was in middle school, his wages had increased enough that I never lacked for pencil cases and protractors or new jeans in September. He even made my school lunches until I declared myself a vegetarian and begged that he cease and desist with the ham and cheese, ham and cheese, ham and cheese.

  Inspired by my new Nirvana album, I decided to go grunge by hacking my best jeans into cutoffs and wearing them with long johns and a Salvation Army plaid shirt. I previewed my new look at Thanksgiving, which was just the two of us, since Grandma Irene was off visiting her sister. I knew the dinner would be pumpkin pie from the bakery, a turkey breast for Verne, and soy sausage for me, because meat is murder. We still had the same white kitchen table from when my mother left. I’ll bet four out of five therapists would recommend that my dad trade it in.

  “Isn’t that a guy’s shirt?” he asked, nodding to the blue-gray flannel.

  “It might be. It’s the fashion these days,” I lied.

  I stabbed at the veggie sausage he had cooked for me. It reminded me of a pet’s chew toy, fake and rubbery, but I didn’t care as long as it wasn’t real meat. I had been nagging Verne to cut out the meat. He had some kind of cholesterol problem that he refused to discuss.

  “This is good, Verne,” I told him. I’d recently started calling him Verne instead of Dad; it was a thing. He hadn’t pressed me about it.

  Verne had made steamed broccoli and brown basmati rice, too. The rice was still crunchy in places, but Verne did his best. I was no cook, either. We both looked forward to pizza night.

  “Are you excited to go see Aunt Gillian?” He sounded hopeful then, his big square face widening, preparing to smile. He worried that there was no one around to teach me how to be a girl.

  “Yeah, I’m stoked,” I said. Verne and I usually went together twice a year to visit his sister in Seattle. As a fifteenth birthday present, I was going to be allowed to take the Clipper ferry over on my own, with my aunt meeting me on the other side. The trip was booked for the beginning of the Christmas holidays just after school ended. I would return for Christmas Eve.

  Whenever we visited, Gillian kept me overscheduled and overcaffeinated. Despite being siblings, Verne and Gillian weren’t much alike. Gillian was a nurse, a redhead, a doer, and a talker. My dad was hesitant and quiet. He kept to himself. They say the test of an introvert is whether you find it energizing or draining to socialize with big groups of people. Dad and I both found it difficult, one of the things we had in common. After a day out in the universe, Verne and I would collapse on the faux-leather couch and watch a movie together, grateful not to talk. Me: with my flat, wheat-colored hair and tiny hands. He: with his paws like dinner plates, his thinning curly red hair. We looked nothing alike. The one thing I had of my mother’s was a slight gap between my teeth. Aunt Gillian told me that one day it would be the height of charm, as it was on my mother. My mother’s eyes were a soft velvety brown, like bulrushes. Mine are blue and bright, almost garish, like the center of a ring from a gumball machine.

  The idea of my mother was a pebble against my heel. Every step forward dug the pebble deeper. I would torture myself, racking my brain for any memories of her. Winter was the worst season, with Christmas, of course, and then February marking her disappearance. When December hit, I would think of her almost nonstop. She talked softly but liked loud music. She wore almond-scented hand cream that came in a white bottle with pink letters. She had a fondness for owls, and collected mugs, candles, cookie jars, and stuffed animals featuring them. But that’s not a memory; Aunt Gillian told me that.

  Sometimes, though, I still searched thrift stores looking for owl designs, picking up pendants or batik wall hangings with the money I made babysitting a kindergartner up the street. I stored the owl tea towels and other items in a flat box under my bed. Then I bought another box and I filled that, too. If I met my mother again, I would be ready. I wondered why people made so many things with owls. In the west we make owls cute, putting glasses on them in cartoons, but in other cultures they’re a bad omen. Associated with sorcery and death. They’re scary and beautiful at the same time.

  I used to have this dream in which I got to ask my mother questions: Why did you leave? Where did you go? My dreams could be so thick, so sticky, they were like a spiderweb that covered me and pulled me in and under, and sometimes I didn’t want to let them go. I was given Tylenol 3s once, when I was seven, after my tonsils were taken out. The pills made me feel as if I had fallen through an ice-fishing hole and was looking up at the world from a deep, numbing cold. They slowed everything down: all feeling, all memory, all sensation. There was danger in that feeling.

  Once I had my copy of Bleach, I listened to the song “About a Girl” over and over. It turns out Kurt Cobain wrote it for a girlfriend named Tracy Marander. She helped pay his bills while he was trying to make records but got annoyed with him because he never cleaned the apartment they shared in Olympia, Washington. The two kept turtles and rabbits, because he loved animals, if not always people.

  I used to shuffle down the school halls with a little half smile on my face just to show everyone that I was okay, everything was good. Then, in the gym locker room, I overheard a girl say that I must be a pothead or something, with that constant silly grin. So I geared down to neutral. When my fifteenth birthday dawned on December 4, nobody at Victoria High School took notice. I didn’t see Obe all day, and no one offered to buy me a carton of chocolate milk or share a celebratory toke. After school, Obe and I walked home, not saying much, an icy rain sputtering. I pulled my hood over my head. When we reached my doorstep, Obe held out a square package wrapped in a copy of the free alternative newspaper.

  I glanced at the package, then back at Obe. Kids at school thought he was gay, but I knew he had crushes on girls. Verne also seemed to suspect Obe was gay and hence didn’t mind if we spent hours on end together. Plus, it was hard not to like Obe once you got to know him.

  Obe was wearing a wool cap that suited him, a small stud in his ear, gaucho-style gray pants that looked like something a Depression-era milkman would wear, and a Mr. Rogers cardigan from his team of stylists at the Salvation Army.

  “Hey, Obe, thanks,” I said. He had made the card
himself. He was no artist, but he did enjoy drafting a rude cartoon. It was of two beavers hanging out in a dam wearing coveralls and ball caps, as if they were mechanics. On the wall was a calendar that said Real beavers. I unwrapped the newspaper. Inside was a Sonic Youth T-shirt. It was soft and pilled, with tiny dots, as if it had a slight rash. It had a woman like a cutout paper doll on the front and outfits next to her to wear, except they were grunge style, my style. Don’t try; don’t care.

  “Obe, this is vintage.”

  “Yep. So are you. Fifteen.”

  “You’re fifteen, too.”

  “I’ve had six months to become much cooler than you, December baby.”

  I’d been hearing it all my life. I was often the youngest in my class, always the smallest. Some sociologists have said that it’s better for girls to be underdeveloped and start school at a younger age; otherwise they’re restless and promiscuous and, uh-oh, get pregnant, as my mother did at twenty-four. Which is really not that young, I guess, compared to fifteen. I’ve read up on all these things, thanks to my intermittent counseling sessions over the years, all intended to take the pulse of my mental health. I’ve read articles in Psychology Today and on parenting websites, always trying to stay one step ahead of the therapists. So far, I’ve managed to score “prone to anxiety but doing remarkably well,” with the inevitable caveat “all things considered.”

  “Obe, you’re the best,” I said, trying to sound like a plucky girl Friday, except my voice quavered.

  “I know.” He touched my shoulder lightly. The few kids at school who didn’t think Obe was gay might have thought something was going on between us. I regularly crushed on boys, but they never liked me back. My latest secret crush was named Bryan. He had regal bone structure and an English accent, because his parents were from Manchester. He called soccer football, which was cool. Best of all, he drew, like I did. I had noticed him doodling. He would smile at me, but I don’t think he even knew my name. No one at Vic High noticed me most of the time, and that was almost the best I could hope for.

  “When do you leave for Seattle?” Obe asked. He said Seattle in a funny way, as if it ended with “tell.”

  “December twenty-first, just after school’s out. Three nights there, then back home for Christmas Eve.”

  “Do you want to do homework together?” he asked, dragging the back of his hand over his face. He claimed the acid in rain made him itchy. Doing homework usually meant listening to CDs, or making lists of albums we wanted, or poring through library copies of NME magazine. Obe knew I always got sad on my birthday. He said it sometimes seemed as if I blamed Verne for my mom leaving, but I didn’t, not really. I just wondered, What if? Isn’t that what people do? What if I’d been born taller? What if I we’d won the $50,000 grand prize in the grocery store scratch-to-win? What if I’d been good at basketball? Would people have liked me more?

  “I’d better not. Verne’s making a birthday dinner, I think.” I had this secret hope that Verne would buy me a dog. I had been pining for one for years. Verne always said it wasn’t fair to the dog. It would be alone during most weekdays. Plus, it was against our lease. Still, I sometimes brought home library copies of Dogs in Canada magazine, hoping the photo spreads of the handsome, noble breeds would win him over. It’s not so much that I was hopeful; it was more that I was refusing to give up, which is slightly different.

  It was impossible to enter our rental quietly. The house was like an eighty-year-old woman with arthritis. The front door stuck and the oak floorboards creaked. The house was dark and largely fashioned of wood—the floors, the railings, and even a ledge around the ceiling that was meant to display china. An old lady lived in the first-floor suite, which she rarely left. It was strange knowing she was down there, listening. Our absentee landlord lived on the mainland in Vancouver and took advantage of Verne’s good nature. We had an old fireplace but could never use it because the chimney needed fixing and the landlord never got around to it.

  “Nico, that you?” called Verne from the kitchen. He was listening to a traffic report on the radio even though he had driven home already and it didn’t matter.

  “Yes, Verne, it’s me.” Who else would it be? We rarely had visitors.

  I could see from the hall that vegetable shrapnel was splayed on a cutting board. The fat red pasta pot was out. I knew he wouldn’t want me to help with my birthday dinner, so I went to my room and tried on the Sonic Youth T-shirt. It was a bit long but felt soft against my arms. I listened to the Breeders on my headphones. Obe generally humored my retro tastes, sometimes politely pointing out that it was 2006, not 1996. I’d say, “I’m always three steps behind in everything else—why not in music, too?” I didn’t want to talk to other kids, besides Obe, about the music I liked. I had to keep something sacred.

  My birthday dinner was vegetarian fusilli, romaine-lettuce salad, and a vanilla cake from the Dutch Bakery downtown. Verne had the cake iced with Nicola, then scraped off the last two letters. Even after all these years, he still sometimes used my full name.

  “What will you do when I’m in Seattle?” I asked him as our forks scraped our plates. The cake was good, spongy and light, with thick Bavarian cream piped in the middle.

  “I’ll be working, mostly, cruising around the campus. A few kids stay every year.”

  “That’s sad,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that my father was one of those lonely drifters, driving around an empty campus. “International students?”

  “Yes and no,” said Verne, one of his favorite expressions. If we’d been another kind of family, we would have had those students over, shown them a real Canadian Christmas with a glut of gifts and platters of fattening food—but we weren’t.

  “Nico, you know I’m hopeless at choosing gifts,” Verne began, looking up at me, his eyes shining. “But I got you this.”

  He slid a white envelope across the table, his hand a big pink mitten. Inside was a card that read For You, Daughter, on Your 15th Birthday in puffy gold letters. I ran my fingers along them. I always did that, in case one day I went blind. I wanted to shake the envelope but knew it would be rude. Verne and I could be shy around each other that way.

  “Look in the envelope, Nico.”

  There was a square card with a thirty-dollar gift certificate for Lyle’s Place. I kept the card in my pocket while we watched movies that night, and the next day I finally bought Nevermind, a full fifteen years after its release, and the follow-up, In Utero, for good measure. I holed up in my room all weekend listening to them, only surfacing for bathroom breaks and bowls of Life cereal. The music filled all the cracks in my brain, at least for a time. I put every book about Nirvana on hold at the library and stayed up until my eyes felt as if they’d been through an Easy-Bake oven. When Kurt Cobain played his guitar, he looked weightless, like a blond marionette. I can still picture the black-and-white concert photos of him. Rising up, slamming down the chords, and then smashing stuff.

  The Monday after I bought Nevermind, I learned a new trick. I was walking the hall between biology and French class, keeping my head down. I looked up and saw a tall, big-shouldered guy, Liam, veering toward me like a barge. He was old enough to drive and his last name was Tuck, I knew, but he was mean, so nobody bugged him about what it rhymed with. There were rumors that he’d slipped “roofies,” those knockout pills, to a younger girl at an end-of-summer party. There were worse things than not being invited to anything, I was learning. I saw him notice me, which was not good. He wore a red-and-white-striped soccer shirt, or football, whatever.

  “Dogs in Canada,” he said, looking at the magazine I had sitting on top of my books. “That makes sense, ’cause you’re a real dog.”

  I could feel my face get hot, processed the sound of his friends laughing, lockers slamming. Then I heard it: the guitars—Nirvana’s “crunchy chords,” as music writers called them. Then drums pounding down, and a bass that made you feel like your whole head was reverberating. Then I was in French class, and t
he moment was over. The music in my head had filled the space where I needed to hear anything or say anything. I knew I was on to something better than Tylenol 3s, those prescription painkillers that make all the edges blurry. I had found something to help me forget myself.

  After French class, I shuffled to the girls’ bathroom, careful to hide my magazine under my notebook. My army surplus bag tapped me on the hip as I walked, whup whup whup. I had written God is gay on it, a line Kurt Cobain claimed he used to graffiti around Aberdeen, Washington, the dumpy town where he grew up. On the other side of my pack: Nirvana, in black ink. Kurt Cobain toyed around with various band names, including Pen Cap Chew and even Fecal Matter, which I probably would not have scrawled on my bag.

  While washing my hands, I did a review of the graffiti. Lisa Pick eats dick was gouged into the towel dispenser, perhaps with an X-acto knife. That was old news. I lingered too long at the sinks, which were covered in strands of hair. Anyone who thought females were instinctively clean had never seen the girls’ room at Vic High. There was water slopped all over the floor tiles.

  “Oh, God. Who let a boy in here?” It was a senior and two of her friends, their hair all flat-ironed into silky submission. Pants were snug again, I could see. I observed fashion from a safe distance. All three of them were wearing the same tight dark-denim jeans and cropped sweaters, as if they’d gotten a three-for-one special. They all had belly piercings. The smell of their body spray hit me then, a combination of cream-soda float and composting flowers.

  I looked at their faces to avoid the wink of their navels. I wore a gray-and-red flannel over the Sonic Youth T-shirt, ripped jeans, suede ankle boots from Value Village.

  “What I’m wondering is how a lumberjack got boobs,” said one of them, orange-red hair, black top. They all snickered.