Save Me, Kurt Cobain Read online

  An urn of complimentary coffee sat on a minibar by the washrooms. I would have to watch my money. Free was good. My thoughts from the night before had left me exhausted, each one a speeding train. Bending to pick up the creamer I’d dropped, I stood up too quickly. Head rush, then a wave of nicotine. A man was returning from the outside deck, where he had obviously been smoking. I saw his footwear first: brown leather 1964 classic Daytons, biker boots made in East Vancouver. They were originally logging boots, but then bikers and rock stars discovered them. Obe had been raving about them for months. He seemed to covet a pair even more than a girlfriend. The man wore a camel-colored jacket with the hood pulled over his head. He took strangely long strides for a small man. The jacket had funny fasteners on the front that looked like tiny elephant tusks. He wore sunglasses, which was odd since the sun would not return to the Pacific Northwest for weeks. He, too, was alone in a seat of four. We were the only ones on the top deck without company.

  The coffee was steaming hot but not strong enough. The man leaned against the ship window, resting his head as if it were heavy, filled with ball bearings. I pulled out my sketchbook, trying to watch him in my peripheral vision. He removed his sunglasses and set them on the table, then took out a sketchbook from his courier bag. When I saw his face, it was like a drawbridge slamming down for me to cross.

  I knew: I was sitting across from Kurt Cobain.

  I pulled out my pack of pencils, grabbed one, and scrutinized the page. I could not think. I could not draw. My brain had been flash frozen. All around me, families had spread out small feasts of cinnamon buns and cheese bought at Pike Place Market, or sealed tubs of snacks purchased from the Clipper staff. A young woman in the blue-collared uniform was making the rounds, taking orders. I watched her approach the man, who waved her away, averting his eyes.

  It seemed I’d been sitting there for hours, not breathing, when he stood up again, heading toward the lavatories. There were two small washrooms, unisex, side by side. I waited until he was locked in one, which reminded me of a cryogenics pod from a movie. I waited, pretending I needed to go next, despite the green vacancy sign lit up on the other one. I put my hand on the wall to steady myself. The earth’s tectonic plates seemed to be shifting.

  The door burst open, slamming against my hand. I fell back, surprised at the pain, and the man weaved forward to break my fall. As he caught me, his hood fell down and I saw what I had been expecting. The fine nose, the five-o’-clock shadow, but most of all the blazing blue eyes, now wide with alarm. As he grabbed my arms, he said something like sorry, sorry. I only heard a white sound, the way you do when you press a conch shell to your ears. The sound is not the ocean. It’s your own blood, roaring.

  The man held on to my other hand, perhaps afraid I would keel over. He stared at me, mouth half open. Was he too surprised to speak? Or did he see that my eyes were the same shade as his own? We both whispered, not wanting to draw attention. The loud chorus was my heart, which crashed against my chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning his face away. “Is your hand okay?”

  There was a thick cut like a puckered lip down my knuckle and halfway down the back of my hand, dividing it in two. Blood dripped out. He guided me into the washroom. We could only both fit because he was built like a ruler. Kurt Cobain had not changed.

  “Should I call someone over? Your parents? I didn’t see you there.”

  He turned the tap on and I placed my hand under the cold water. The sink was the size of a child’s play kitchen. It made us both seem large and clumsy. His wrists were pale and thin, with a branch of soft-blue veins running under the skin.

  He stepped back out of the bathroom, as if suddenly aware that he was standing there with a strange teenage girl. I wanted to say it was okay: I knew who he was, but I wouldn’t tell. How had he managed it? He’d made some key people believe he was dead, and then the news took off like a flock of pigeons. Not impossible. He was a performer, after all.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just a small cut, on the surface.” I felt woozy when I saw my own blood rushing down the drain. I wasn’t good with blood. I had my high pain threshold, though. It wasn’t my first choice of superpowers, but it could be useful.

  He looked relieved and nodded, leaving me to finish washing the cut. I quickly soaped it down with the pink liquid and pressed a brown paper towel against it. I worried he might bolt, disappear somewhere on the ship. I could not lose Cobain. It did not seem right to think of him as Kurt. I had known other Kurts but no other Cobain. In “Serve the Servants” from In Utero, Nirvana’s final album, Cobain professed to be bored and old, although he was still in his twenties. In his “suicide note” he wrote that the joy had gone from making music. I had never really believed that he killed himself, and now here he was, sailing away from Seattle, the city where he’d owned a large, drafty mansion with his wife.

  I returned to my seat, keeping my head down. This was tough, given my blue hair and bleeding hand. I watched him. He was sketching, occasionally glancing my way to see if I was looking. Cobain took out a bag of something, maybe mixed nuts, and scooped up a handful. It seemed a healthy choice for a man who used to survive on hamburgers and Kraft dinner and was staunchly against vegetables. Of course, he would have been thirty-nine, turning forty in February the next year, on the twentieth, to be precise. You couldn’t eat like a kid forever. But Cobain had always been thin—skinny, really. Even before he took up with the heroin, or heroine, as he spelled it.

  “Would you like to order any drinks or snacks?” The blond server from the Clipper peered down, trying not to stare at the bloody paper towel stuck to my hand.

  “Um, no thanks.” Gillian had packed me a ziplock bag of snacks, which I had not opened and could not possibly eat. I realized that my thoughts had not latched on to anyone or anything for a few minutes. It was as if I were completely untethered, suspended above the scene on the boat. Was that what heroin was like? Or was it more like riding a fast carousel, or pulling out the motor that makes you feel? Who did you love more, I could ask him: my mother, or heroin? I guess that answer was clear.

  It was too soon for all that. I had to watch and wait, two things at which I excelled. So I did a drawing of Cobain as he bent over his sketchbook, his hair falling over his still-beautiful face. He’d exchanged the sunglasses for a pair of thick-rimmed hipster glasses, the kind he wore in the video for “In Bloom.” I read that he’d kept the glasses after the shoot and worn them until someone said they made him resemble his father, Donald. Then he’d ditched them.

  His hair was still sandy, but it had darkened slightly over the years and fell to his jaw. He could tuck it back and look respectable. Perhaps strangers told him that he kind of looked like an older Kurt Cobain.

  I could hardly dare to think it: we held a pencil the same way, Cobain and I.

  Cobain had pulled a gray knit cap over his eyes to sleep. He was not traveling with a guitar case, of course. That would have been stupid. But there would be a guitar somewhere, for sure. If Kurt Cobain was alive, he would still be playing a guitar. He would have at least one stashed wherever he was hiding. The guitar would probably be a Fender, and a left-handed one, at that.

  I pressed my shoulders against the seat, hard, trying to stop the trembling that ran through my body. I pulled out my cell phone for the first time in two days and dialed, hoping we were close enough for reception. He’d be working until the last minute. Pick up, pick up, pick up. He answered.

  “It’s Nico,” I said, annoyed at how girlish I sounded.

  “Nico!” His delight at hearing my voice stopped me for a second, as if I’d just been whacked in the chest by a turnstile. “I’ve got a tree.”

  “A real tree?” I asked, despite myself. We hadn’t had a Christmas tree since I was six.

  “Yes,” said Verne, who never used two words when one would do.

  “Great,” I said. I loved the smell of Christmas trees, even though I hated the holidays. �
��Listen, the ferry is going to be late. We were delayed in Seattle. We’ll be about forty-five minutes behind schedule.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there earlier, though, just in case.”

  There was a pause.

  “I missed you, Nico.”

  “Me too,” I blurted out. My knuckles were white from clenching the phone. The cut on my hand stung, the paper towel damp with blood.

  “Okay.” I felt I had to say more. “I saw that restaurant that we went to once, the Chinese one at Pike Place Market. Remember, it had that amazing view of Puget Sound?”

  “I do remember,” he said. “Gillian took us there when you were nine. You tried hot-and-sour soup.”

  “That was a good day,” I said. My battery was low. I had to get off the phone.

  “See you soon, Nico.”

  I hung up, hoping he wouldn’t call the Clipper terminal to check on our arrival, because the sailing, despite the wind, was right on time.

  Cobain had opened his eyes and packed up his sketchbook and was now listening to his headphones. In my limited experience with ferries, the final moments were always tedious: the empty drink cups to be collected, the whiny children, the staff who looked as if they were thinking Get the fuck off already.

  What was Cobain listening to? Even almost thirteen years after his supposed death, meeting Kurt Cobain would have ensured my popularity for life if I had photographic evidence, or some kind of proof. I could have worn a diaper to school after that and it wouldn’t have nullified my status. Sure, your parents might have had Nirvana albums, but Kurt Cobain had left the earth young, like James Dean, when he was still charismatic, despite his hard living. He would never do a television special looking bloated and balding. He would never recite an infomercial, sell out by singing at an oil sheik’s wedding, or lend his name to a line of shoes at Walmart. It was better to burn out, and he did, at least on the public record.

  Cobain had shunned mainstream popularity on the one hand while rabidly pursuing rock stardom with the other, berating his managers for inadequate promotion, and dumping Seattle’s Sub Pop for a bigger label. Cobain was, it seemed, the most ambitious twentysomething slacker you could ever meet.

  Cobain had wanted out, obviously, since he faked his death by shotgun, perhaps by dishing out payments to the Seattle police, the coroner’s office, and the media. I was still putting the pieces together. I knew it sounded crazy. It was crazy.

  Based on his past preferences, I figured perhaps his music of choice these days was the Vaselines, Shonen Knife, the Pixies, maybe vintage pop like ABBA or “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, a childhood favorite of his that Nirvana once covered. It could be anyone, really, for Cobain had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop and rock; even his detractors agreed on that. And he had detractors. “Seasons in the Sun” was kind of an odd song for Nirvana to cover, since Seattle was not known for its rays. I looked up from my reverie.

  Cobain had disappeared. Damn it. The man was slippery.

  Canada welcomed me back, reluctantly, after many questions about my travels and purchases while in the U.S. of A. I dashed into the parking lot, panting. No one was waiting for me, which was what I wanted. In the thin winter light, a figure who looked like Cobain was striding away: gray knit cap, black courier bag, and suitcase. I buckled up my backpack, shouldered my smaller knapsack, and ran. Cobain loped along with purpose. I followed at a distance.

  His destination was the Greyhound bus terminal. I skulked by the ticket booths, as close as I dared, watching while he purchased a one-way ticket to Duncan, a town up the island in the Cowichan Valley. He then slumped into a hard-backed chair, crossing his Dayton boots at the ankle. I waited a couple of minutes and then bought my own ticket to Duncan. I had no credit card, so I paid cash. Gillian had given me a hundred dollars for my birthday to spend on new clothes.

  Once on the bus, I rummaged around in my knapsack until I found two withered fabric bandages and pressed them on my hand. The wound still throbbed, but the bleeding had stopped. I read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs on the bus ride. Tried to read it, at least. I couldn’t concentrate. I was electrified by what I was doing. Cobain didn’t seem to notice me the whole two hours. When he stepped off the bus at a sprawling mall, I did, too. I yanked my backpack down from the overhead storage area, clocking some old lady on the head. It seemed I suddenly had no idea how to do anything, as if I were a newborn.

  The mall was crazytown, crammed with families reuniting, people fighting for parking spaces. Mostly it was just cars and trucks slowly circling. Cobain kept his head down as he dodged them. I followed. I had expected him to get on another bus, but instead he located a rusty red-and-gray beater in the lot. He tossed his suitcase in the backseat and his satchel in the front and started up the car. This was unexpected. I had thought there would be more buses, or walking, or that he would turn around and recognize me. He jammed a CD in the player and cranked up the volume with a flick of his wrist, higher, higher, until the car was practically vibrating. The car rolled away, pointing toward the exit. Then he stopped and cut the engine, leaving the car parked at the angle of a backslash. Cobain slogged through the parking lot, hands jammed in his pockets. He appeared preoccupied, and I wondered what he could have forgotten. Then I realized he was being drawn to the yellow light of a doughnut shop.

  That was my chance. I ran to the car, clicked open the back door, wedged my packs onto the dirty floor mats, and then flopped myself down. There was a red-and-green-plaid blanket draped over the seat, so I pulled that over myself, the wool fringe tickling my nose. I heard him slam the door, swear at his plastic coffee lid, and crinkle some wax paper.

  He was trying to leave the lot at the same time as a bunch of other vehicles, either manic Christmas shoppers or drivers who had just claimed their relatives at the bus depot.

  “Fuckety fuckety fuck fuck,” Cobain pronounced. I willed my whole body, even my lungs, to be still. Then he started up the stereo again. I was in. Free of the parking lot, he peeled away while the car shook with the Pixies. The album was Surfer Rosa, oh my golly.

  After what seemed like hours, Cobain killed the engine, and there was three-ply silence for a moment. Then I heard a sound like a bird strangling as he yanked the parking brake. We had arrived somewhere. I had never known it was possible for a whole body to shake, but mine did as he slammed the car door, boots scraping on dirt. I’d always pictured him wearing Converse, as he did in the old days. But he would not want to be recognized; hence the Daytons. Every day thousands of people posted blogs about him, commented on online videos; there was talk of musicals, new documentaries, and on and on. It’s not as if anyone ever really let him be dead.

  I heard another door clack open. My stomach rocked to one side.

  “Holy shit!”

  A pause. Cold air blasted in. The smell of pine or fir, something green. Wind bashed the trees, an ominous supernatural howling. There would be a storm for Christmas.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “I can explain.” My voice disappeared into the plastic floor mat. I was lying on my packs, facedown. I had to shimmy myself along to get my feet out the car door so I could stand and look at Cobain. My hair fanned up, probably looking like a blue toilet brush. Cobain’s mouth hung open. He raised his hand to try to run it over his hair, forgetting he was wearing a hat.

  I had no idea where we were except that it was somewhere in the woods, somewhere near Duncan. The car was parked on a patch of gravel surrounded by towering trees, which were shaking like crazy in the storm. I almost wished I were back home with Verne and his Christmas tree.

  “Who sent you?” he demanded, slapping his thin arms around himself in a gesture almost violent in its suddenness.

  “What? No one. My name is Nico. I think you once met my mother.” I had a knot in my chest where I’d been lying on the packs.

  “Tell me why you were in my car before I call the police,” he said, taking a step back as if my mental disorder wer
e contagious.

  I dissected his syntax, a surprising calm enveloping me. Did he mean I had to tell him or he’d call the police, or that he needed to give the police my reason? It was unclear. But Cobain wouldn’t really call the police. He had too much to hide, possibly more than I was guessing.

  “I know that you knew my mother,” I said, almost shouting to be heard above the wind. At that moment his hat flew off and he chased it, pushed into action again, his shock interrupted.

  I lifted my packs out and shouldered them, prepared to follow. My legs wobbled under me. When had I last eaten? The rain started up, the kind that feels like thumbtacks firing down. Then I heard a roaring in my ears and I keeled over, as if I were a five-foot-five-inch sandbag. Someone snuffed out the lights, and that was it. When I regained consciousness, Cobain was carrying me somewhere along a gravel path. The rain pelted from above and fingers of wind tugged at my hair. I had forgotten where I was until I saw Cobain hefting me along, his blond hair flopping over his cheek. The grim look on his face, fixated and fierce, scared me. I told my body to move, but I hung there, limp.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “What happened?”

  “You passed out,” he said, still half carrying me, his arm slung under my rib cage. “A bad storm coming in. I have to get rid of you.”

  “Huh,” I said, wondering where I had left the food Gillian packed me. What time was it anyway? Was it Christmas?

  We approached a log cabin. Cobain unlocked the door. It took a long time, as if there were multiple locks, which seemed excessive in the woods. There was the smell of woodsmoke and something else, maybe Scotch, which Verne drank once or twice a year. “This where you live?” I asked in a raspy whisper. Cobain dumped me on a lumpy bed with a thick patchwork quilt. My brain was churning. All the signs pointed to danger. I didn’t know what to think, but I wanted to see it through, no matter what happened.