Come As You Are Read online

  Eventually, Kurt met a guy named Jesse Reed, who “was the only nice friend that I could find in Aberdeen.” Besides a handsome kid named Myer Loftin.

  Kurt met Loftin in art class and the two hit it off after discovering they were into the same music—everything from stuff like AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Led Zeppelin to punk rock. To Loftin, Kurt “looked like your average blue-jeans-and-nice-neat-haircut, kind of straight-laced kid.” It really surprised him that Kurt was a musician. “He was kind of mild-mannered and quiet,” says Loftin. “Very nice, very sincere.” They became good friends.

  What Kurt didn’t know at first was that Loftin was gay. Loftin mentioned it to Kurt soon after they started hanging out. “He said, ‘Well, that’s okay, you’re still my friend, I still love you, it’s no problem,’ ” says Loftin. “And we hugged.”

  Loftin would sometimes stay over at Kurt’s house and Wendy, a “cool mom,” let them “party” in the house as long as they didn’t drive anywhere until the next morning. Once, Wendy came home drunk and caught them smoking pot. In a futile attempt to psyche Kurt out of smoking pot, she ate his stash and got terribly stoned and sick afterward. On less eventful nights, they’d hang out in Kurt’s room and Kurt would teach Loftin Led Zeppelin licks on the guitar.

  But hanging out with an openly gay friend was a little more risky than Kurt had anticipated. Soon, says Kurt, “I started to realize that people were looking at me even more peculiarly than usual.” He started to get harassed. It always seemed to happen in P.E. class. After everybody got dressed, somebody would inevitably call Kurt a faggot and push him up against a locker. “They felt threatened because they were naked and I was supposedly gay,” says Kurt. “So they either better cover up their penises or punch me. Or both.”

  Life in high school just got harder for Kurt. Often, jocks would chase him on the way home from school. Sometimes they caught him. “Every day after school,” says Kurt, “this one kid would hold me down in the snow and sit on my head.”

  “After that,” says Kurt, “I started being proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t. I really enjoyed the conflict. It was pretty exciting, because I almost found my identity. I was a special geek. I wasn’t quite the punk rocker I was looking for, but at least it was better than being the average geek.”

  But the social pressures eventually became too strong and one day, Kurt walked up to Loftin, visibly upset, and told him that he couldn’t hang around with him anymore. He was just getting too much abuse for being the friend of a “faggot.” Loftin understood completely, and they parted ways.

  Kurt had started smoking pot in ninth grade and got high every day until senior year, when he at least waited until nightfall. “I was getting so paranoid from it that I couldn’t be as neurotic as I already naturally was and have it intensified by pot,” Kurt says.

  He did badly in school and began skipping classes in eleventh grade; moving around so much between schools was only part of the problem. “The biggest reason I flunked out of certain classes was because I hated the teachers so much,” says Kurt. “There was this one guy who was a religious fanatic, an apocalyptic racist. He taught social sciences and he would do nothing but waste our time by incorporating Revelations into history. He was part of the mid-eighties Cold War scare—the Russians are coming, one of the crusaders for that Reagan mentality. Son of a bitch. I wanted to kill him every day. I used to fantasize how I’d kill him in front of the class. Because the rest of the class were completely buying it hook, line, and sinker. Totally swallowing this garbage. I couldn’t believe so many people were just taking it.”

  Kurt was rebelling at home, too. “He didn’t want to be part of the family but he wanted to live in the family house,” says Wendy. “He complained about everything I asked him to do, which was very minimal.” Meanwhile, Wendy acknowledges that her patience with Kurt wore thin because she was also angry at Pat for his drinking. She often transferred some of her anger to her kids.

  For a few months, Kurt went out with “a stoner girl,” a very pretty young woman named Jackie. According to Kurt, “she was basically using me until her boyfriend got out of jail.”

  One night, Kurt sneaked Jackie up to his room. Kurt was psyched—he was about to lose his virginity. They had just gotten their clothes off when Wendy suddenly burst into the room, flicked on the lights, and hissed, “Get that slut out of here!” Kurt ran away to a friend’s house and stayed until his friend’s mother called up and said, “Wendy, I think your son’s living at my house.”

  Kurt stopped smoking pot “in an attempt to try to turn my life around.” Then Kurt’s stepmother called up and asked Kurt to live there again. Right away, Don said that if Kurt were to stay there, he’d have to stop doing music and start doing something constructive with his life. He somehow persuaded Kurt to pawn his guitar, then got him to take the Navy entrance exam. Kurt got a very high score and an excited local recruiter came by the house two nights in a row. But on the second night, right on the brink of signing up, Kurt went downstairs to his basement room, found some pot, smoked it, came back upstairs and said “No thanks,” then packed up his stuff and left. He’d been there only a week. He wouldn’t see his father again for another eight years.

  To this day, Don collects all the magazine articles on Kurt that he can find. He’s got a big scrapbook and a cupboard full of memorabilia. “Everything I know about Kurt,” says Don Cobain, “I’ve read in newspapers and magazines. I got to know him that way.”

  Wendy sent Kurt off to live with his buddy Jesse Reed, whose parents were born-again Christians.

  Kurt was broke and told a local drug dealer that he would sell him his guitar and left it at his house on good faith. After a week Kurt changed his mind, but the dealer kept the guitar anyway and Kurt went without it for months until he and Reed snatched it back.

  Kurt wasn’t quite the ideal house guest at the Reeds’. “I was a bad influence on Jesse,” Kurt says. “I smoked pot and I didn’t like to go to school.” Once, Kurt spent a long phone conversation insulting Mrs. Reed, then hung up the phone only to realize she had been listening in on an extension. The final straw came one day when Kurt, locked out of the house, did the only logical thing and kicked in the door. Kurt says that Reed’s father hit the roof and told him, “Kurt, we’ve tried really hard to turn you into a good citizen but it’s just not going to work. You’re a lost cause. So I’d appreciate it if you packed up your stuff and left.” Mrs. Reed explained to Wendy that “Kurt was leading Jesse down the wrong road.”

  A special remedial program for school didn’t work out. Six months before graduation, Kurt realized he had almost two years of credits to make up. Mr. Hunter, his art teacher, had entered him in some college scholarship competitions and Kurt had won two, but he still decided to drop out in May of 1985, just a few weeks short of what should have been his graduation.

  Kurt had decided to make music his life’s work, but Wendy felt he was wasting his time. “I told him he better get his life going,” says Wendy. “If you’re not going to finish school, you better get a job and get your life going, because you’re not going to stay here mooching off of us.”

  But Kurt did continue to mooch off his mom and one day, she laid down the law. “I told him ‘If this doesn’t get better, if you don’t get a job, you’re going to be out,’ ” says Wendy. “ ‘You’re going to come home one day and you’re going to find your stuff in a box.’ ” Sure enough, Kurt came home from hanging out at the Melvins’ practice space one day to find all his belongings packed in cardboard boxes stacked on the dining room floor. “I played the ‘tough love’ thing,” says Wendy. “That was when ‘tough love’ was first coming into being and I thought ‘Well, I’m going to try this on him.’ ”

  Using some of Don’s child support money as a deposit, Kurt moved into an apartment in Aberdeen with Jesse Reed, paying his rent with money he earned working at a restaurant at one of the resorts on the Washington coast. He tried to enlist Reed to play with him.
They would talk about guitars all the time when they first met, and Reed’s dad used to play in a surf band that had actually put out some singles. When Reed mentioned that he had just got a bass guitar, Kurt got very excited. “We started playing together one night and it turns out he’s one of the most musically retarded people I’ve ever met,” says Kurt, the disappointment still plain in his voice. “He couldn’t even play ‘Louie, Louie.’ ”

  Soon, Kurt got a job as a janitor back at Aberdeen High, spending most of his days scraping gum off the bottoms of desks. It was the last place on earth he wanted to be. One day, he smuggled home a sample case of shaving cream and decorated a doll with it so it looked like something out of The Exorcist, with the green, slimy goo hanging out of its mouth. He hung the doll by its neck in the window that overlooked the sidewalk, just to freak out the rednecks.

  “I had the apartment decorated in typical punk rock fashion with baby dolls hanging by their necks with blood all over them,” says Kurt. “There was beer and puke and blood all over the carpet, garbage stacked up for months. I never did do the dishes. Jesse and I cooked food for about a week and then put all our greasy hamburger dishes in the sink and filled it up full of water and it sat there for the entire five months I was there.” People would party at Kurt’s place all the time and the bash would invariably peak with an all-out shaving cream war.

  While hanging out at the Melvins’ practice space, Chris Novoselic and Kurt had struck up a friendship. Chris mentioned that he played guitar and they would hang out and listen to music, drink, and make little movies with Chris’s super-8 camera. Sometimes Chris’s girlfriend Shelli would come over to the apartment and party, too. They were outcasts and weirdos, but at least they were outcasts and weirdos together. “We all had so much in common,” Shelli recalls. “It was like us against everybody else. It was great to have our own circle and we were really close-knit and nothing bugged us. If one person would do something, we wouldn’t hold grudges and we were less jaded and more accepting of other things. It was really fun.”

  After three months, Jesse Reed moved out to join the Navy.

  One day, Kurt was acid tripping with a friend who had come over to Kurt’s place on a scooter. When the friend went downstairs to get something from his scooter, Kurt’s redneck neighbor began beating up his friend because he had parked the scooter on his property. Kurt heard the commotion and dashed downstairs as his friend ran away. The neighbor settled for Kurt instead, eventually pushing Kurt into his apartment and punching and manhandling him for two hours like a cat playing with a mouse.

  Eventually he stopped punching Kurt and sat down to rest. Then he looked around the room and noticed the mutilated Barbie dolls and the paintings of the three-headed babies and the graffiti and the garbage. And a flicker of fear and confusion crossed his face. “He started asking me questions,” says Kurt. “Why did I do all that stuff to my room?” He started to shove Kurt around again and Kurt screamed until the landlady hollered upstairs that she was going to call the police. The bully ran away. Eventually the police came, but they advised Kurt not to antagonize his neighbor by pressing charges.

  Kurt got his revenge. For a month afterward, his friends would come over and pound on the neighbor’s walls and scream obscenities and death threats while the bully cowered in his apartment. Kurt says he left little presents on his doorstep, like a six-pack of beer with acid in it or a painting of a redneck hanging from a tree.

  Kurt stayed on for a couple of months after Reed left. At first he could sweet-talk the landlady into letting him pay his rent late, but she began to notice the condition of the apartment. Kurt’s friends would write all over the walls in the stairway. The apartment itself was a shambles.

  Kurt couldn’t keep up with the rent and eventually moved out in the late fall of 1985, owing several months’ rent. Unemployed and virtually penniless, he passed the time that winter by hanging out in the library reading books and writing poetry. At the end of the day, he’d buy a six-pack of beer and bring it over to a friend’s house, where they would drink and eventually Kurt would crash on the couch. Other times, he’d sleep in a cardboard box on Dale Crover’s porch, Chris and Shelli’s van, or sneak back into his mother’s house while she was at work and crawl up into the attic or sleep on the deck of the house overnight. And sometimes he’d sleep under the North Aberdeen Bridge, which crosses the Wishkah River near Wendy’s house.

  As a single male, Kurt qualified for forty dollars’ worth of food stamps a month, but he rarely bought food with them. Instead, he and his friends would fan out around town and buy Jolly Rancher penny candies with the food stamps and use the change to buy a case of beer. The operation was an entire day’s work.

  He was rather proud of himself for being able to survive without having to have a job or a home. His only worries were being able to steal food, catch fish from the river, and get food stamps. And bum the occasional macaroni and cheese from his friends. “I was just living out the Aberdeen fantasy version of being a punk rocker,” says Kurt. “It was really easy. It was nothing compared to what most kids are subjected to after they run away to the big city. There was no threat of danger, ever.” Kurt would have moved to Seattle, but he was too intimidated by the big city to do it alone—he’d barely been out of the Aberdeen-Montesano area—and nobody else in Aberdeen was brave enough to make the move.

  Sometimes he’d stop by Wendy’s house and she’d make him lunch. “For my guilt over letting Kurt go and live with his dad,” says Wendy, “I have always pampered Kurt. He would come to visit—‘You want some lunch?’ Fix, fix, fix. Because I was guilty, I was feeling horribly guilty.”

  Wendy became pregnant and was feeling depressed about what had become of Kurt. “I’ve really screwed up my first kid, so what am I doing having another one?” she remembers thinking to herself. “And he came home at one point when I was very pregnant and I was crying about it,” she says. “He asked me what was the matter and I told him I felt so awful having one in the oven and one out on the streets and he just knelt down and put his arms around me and said he was doing fine and not to worry about him and that he was going to do just fine.”

  That winter, Kurt got together with Dale Crover on bass and Greg Hokanson on drums and began rehearsing some of his material. Once, the trio, which Kurt dubbed Fecal Matter, opened for the Melvins at the Spot Tavern, a beach bar in Moclips, a remote little town on the Washington coast. After a while, they ditched Hokanson, whom they didn’t like much anyway. The two began rehearsing intensively in preparation for recording a demo tape. With Matt Lukin behind the wheel of the trusty blue Impala, they set out for the Seattle home of Kurt’s aunt Mary, the musician, who had a four-track tape recorder.

  Mary was taken aback by the aggressiveness of Kurt’s vocals. “She didn’t have any idea that I was such an angry person,” says Kurt. He recorded the guitars directly into the tape machine, a classic low-budget punk rock technique that he used again years later on Nevermind’s “Territorial Pissings.” They recorded seven tracks with titles like “Sound of Dentage,” “Bambi Slaughter” and “Laminated Effect,” which sounds like a cross between Nevermind’s “Stay Away” and the MTV theme, as well as a slowed-down, instrumental version of “Downer,” which would later appear on the Bleach album. The Fecal Matter tape contained some of the ingredients that would distinguish Kurt’s later music—mainly the ultra-heavy riffing sparked by an ear for the hook, but it also had thrashworthy tempos and a gnarled sense of song structure as reminiscent of the Melvins as it is of Metallica. There were not yet any strong melodies to speak of and Kurt’s vocals range from a gruff bark to a blood-curdling howl.

  Later, Kurt rehearsed the Fecal Matter songs for a while with Buzz Osborne on bass and former Melvins drummer Mike Dillard, but then Dillard lost interest and the project evaporated completely when, as Osborne remembers it, “Kurt got disgusted with it because I wouldn’t buy a bass system and so he said that I wasn’t dedicated enough.”

  Kurt ha
d met a hardcore partyer named Steve Shillinger at Aberdeen High, where his father Lamont was (and still is) an English teacher. Shillinger had first noticed Kurt because he had written “Motorhead” on his Pee-Chee folder. Shillinger remembers tapes Kurt would make of his music—“really cheesy heavy metal songs,” as he recalls—with titles like “Suicide Samurai.” The first time Shillinger and Kurt made plans to hang out together—at a Metal Church concert—Shillinger ditched him because “there wasn’t enough booze to go around and I didn’t know him that well.”

  Shillinger’s friends had worn out their welcome with his parents, so when Kurt needed a place to stay, he befriended Shillinger’s brother Eric. The Shillingers had five sons and one daughter, so another mouth to feed wasn’t a big deal. Kurt wound up staying there for about eight months, beginning late that winter of 1985, and faithfully did his chores just like everyone else.

  Eric also played guitar, and Steve Shillinger swears that Eric and Kurt would plug their guitars into the family stereo and play a particularly tasty section of Iron Maiden’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” Both Eric and Kurt totally deny this, but as Shillinger says, “People often deny their past.”

  The Shillingers had taken in several “strays” over the years, and usually a day or two later, a concerned parent would call the house and ask whether the kid was there. Not this time. “We didn’t hear word one from Kurt’s mom the whole time he was there,” says Lamont Shillinger.

  That summer, Kurt intensified his long career as a graffitist. He’d been a vandal ever since he started getting drunk in seventh grade, but this summer’s work was, as Kurt says, “the focused statement.” He’d play the Bad Brains’ Rock for Light album over and over by day, then drink and eat acid by night throughout that summer. He, Osborne, Steve Shillinger, and others started with marker pens, prowling the alleys behind the main streets of Aberdeen, writing provocative things like “ABORT CHRIST” and “GOD IS GAY” or spray painting “QUEER” on four-by-four pickups (preferably with rifle rack) to annoy the rednecks. Other times they wrote deliberate nonsense like “AMPUTATE ACROBATS” or “BOAT AKK,” just to baffle people.