Come As You Are Page 6

  One night they noticed a huge, ornate Pink Floyd mural which someone had painstakingly painted in one of the alleys. Its minutes were numbered. “We were freshly punk,” Shillinger explains. “And we had spray paint.”

  Kurt had silver spray paint and Shillinger had black, and right over the “Pink,” Shillinger wrote “Black”; over the “Floyd,” Kurt wrote “Flag.” “We had hippies who just wanted to kick our fuckin’ asses the whole rest of the summer,” says Shillinger, still gleeful. “We were like hunted underground figures.”

  Kurt was out on a graffiti raid with Osborne and Chris, who had just spray-painted the words “HOMO SEX RULES” on the side of a bank wall when a police car appeared out of nowhere and caught Kurt in its headlights. Chris and Osborne ran away and hid in a garbage dumpster, but Kurt was hauled in to the police station and took the rap. A police report detailed the contents of his pockets: one guitar pick, one key, one can of beer, one mood ring, and one cassette by the militant punk band Millions of Dead Cops. He got a $180 fine and a thirty-day suspended sentence.

  Vandalism wasn’t anything new to Kurt. While he was still in high school, he and his friends would find an abandoned house, or one that was in the midst of being vacated, break in and destroy everything in sight. Kurt had always wanted to rent one particular house that stood in a field because it was a perfect band rehearsal pad but the owners repeatedly refused to let him rent the place, always renting it to somebody else. Late one night, Kurt was walking home from a party with a friend and they noticed the house was vacant again. They broke in and went berserk, throwing the appliances around the house, taking care to break every single window and smashing everything else to bits with a weight set. “I got my revenge,” says Kurt.

  Eventually, he took a job as a maintenance man at the YMCA about a block away from the Shillingers’ house, mostly so he could afford some musical equipment, should he suddenly find a band. In the morning, he’d walk over to work, check in with his boss, then go back over to the house and sit around and watch TV and drink until quitting time. Sometimes he’d have to clean off the graffiti that he himself had written the night before. A little later, Kurt got the only regular job he’s ever really loved—as a swimming instructor for kids age three through seven.

  Kurt’s first live performance was with Dale Crover on bass drum, snare and cymbal, Buzz Osborne on bass, and Kurt essentially rapping his poetry over improvised heavy rock at GESCCO Hall, a barnlike performance space in Olympia associated with Evergreen State College. The trio was originally called Brown Towel, but a misspelling on the poster made it Brown Cow. Kurt was extremely nervous. “I had to get drunk,” he says. “I got totally wasted on wine.”

  Attendance was sparse and the reaction was lackluster, but two people in the audience—Olympia scenester Slim Moon and his buddy Dylan Carlson, a self-made intellectual who played guitar in several bands around town—were blown away. The two knew Kurt as a member of the Melvins entourage, but now he was something more. “That’s when our perception of Kurt changed from the dweeby trench coat new waver that hung out with the Melvins,” says Slim Moon, “to realizing, ‘Wait, this guy has talent.’ ” Carlson, now one half of the ultra-heavy guitar noise duo Earth, walked up to Kurt afterward and told him the show was one of the best things he’d ever seen. They began bumping into each other at cool shows in Olympia and soon became fast friends, as they are to this day.

  Meanwhile, Kurt had begun to hang out with a drug dealer named Grunt (not his real name). “He was this total drug fiend stoner,” says Kurt. “He was like the overlord king of drugs.” Grunt was a despicable person, but people hung out with him because he could get practically any drug. No one knew it at the time, but he got his wares by burglarizing pharmacies along with his lover, sidekick, and whipping boy. Grunt began bringing Kurt handfuls of Percodans, an opiate-derived painkiller, each in their little foil and plastic pouches, charging him only a dollar a day. Kurt liked Percodans because they made him feel “relaxed.” “It just felt like the best euphoric state that I’d ever been in,” he says. “It was just like sleeping. It was as close to sleep as I could get without actually having to sleep.”

  Kurt was so naive about drugs that he didn’t know Percodan was addictive and got hooked without even realizing it. He eventually took up to ten Percodans a day and was “getting real itchy.” After about two months, Grunt’s supply ran out, and Kurt had to go cold turkey. “It wasn’t that bad,” he says. “I had diarrhea and I sweated in Eric’s bed for a couple of days.”

  One night that summer, Grunt and Kurt did heroin together. Grunt shot Kurt up. “It was really scary,” says Kurt. “I always wanted to do it—I always knew that I would.” He’s not exactly sure why he was so sure he’d eventually do it. “I don’t know,” says Kurt. “I just knew.”

  Besides, by then he’d done just about every drug except PCP (“I’d always heard about people freaking out and jumping off of buildings after they did it”). Heroin was the final frontier. Another attraction was the decadent, outlaw glamour the drug had acquired through its association with rockers such as Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. “Iggy Pop, he was my total idol,” says Kurt. “I just wanted to try it because I knew that I liked opiates. It was such a scarce thing to find heroin in Aberdeen that I just thought I would try it.” Kurt knew there was no chance of getting hooked on the drug because it was impossible to get a steady supply in Aberdeen.

  Heroin’s illusion of euphoria may also have had something to do with it. Euphoria of any kind was in short supply in Kurt’s life. Beginning in high school, he had become so angry at his surroundings that he developed nervous tics like popping his knuckles, scratching his face, and flipping his hair compulsively. His eye twitched. He thought he might be becoming schizophrenic.

  “It was a mixture of hating people so much because they didn’t live up to my expectations and just being so fed up with being around the same kind of idiot all the time,” he says. “It was obvious in my face and how I reacted toward people that I couldn’t stand them. I had this personal vendetta toward them because they were so macho and manly and stupid. I started to become aware of this—that people were noticing that I had this hatred toward a lot of people.”

  Kurt was convinced that everyone knew he felt this way, which only made him feel more neurotic. He grew more and more paranoid because he was sure everyone knew he could freak out at any time. “They thought I was the kid who was most likely to succeed—to bring an AK-47 to the school and blow everybody away,” Kurt says. “I just had this air about me that I would eventually explode one day. People eventually just stayed away from me.”

  Opiates like Percodan gave Kurt a sense of relief; on opiates, he didn’t hate people so much. “I had a little bit of affection for them or at least could see past the superficiality of their personality and think of them as a real person,” he says. “Maybe they had a fucked-up childhood or maybe it’s their environment that’s making them this way. It relieved some of the animosity that I had toward people. I needed to do that because I was tired of hating people so much and being so judgmental toward everyone. It just allowed me to have a few days of peace of mind.”

  Meanwhile, although Kurt and Eric had started off as friends, their friendship had begun to disintegrate, perhaps because of a musical rivalry. The antagonism built and built until one night, eight months after Kurt arrived at the Shillingers’, when Kurt, Eric, and Steve Shillinger came home from three different parties, all quite drunk. Steve says it was over a frozen pizza pie, while Kurt thinks it was because he wanted to sleep and Eric wanted to watch TV, but for some reason a fight broke out between Kurt and Eric. Kurt declared a cigarette break and then the fight resumed in the backyard. “There was actual blood on the wall,” says Steve. “I don’t want to get involved in who won the fight—all I’ll say is, it was a very bloody and terrible battle.”

  Kurt beat a hasty exit after it was all over. The next day, he paid Steve Shillinger ten dollars to put his stuff
into garbage bags and take it to Dale Crover’s house. Kurt stayed at Buzz Osborne’s house for a few days, then briefly moved back in with Wendy.

  Mr. Shillinger asked Kurt to come back, but he refused and went back to the bridge, where every once in a while he’d catch fish and eat them until one day someone told them they were poisonous. Other times, he slept in the apartment above Chris’s mom’s beauty parlor. He’d have to wake up by seven in the morning so he could get out of there before she came to work.

  In the fall of 1986, Kurt got Wendy to put down money on 1000½ East Second Street in Aberdeen, a decrepit little shack a few hundred yards from her house. It rented for only a hundred dollars a month, perhaps because the porch was falling off the front of the house. “It was the bottom of houses,” Kurt recalls, but at least it was his. It had two small bedrooms and two small living rooms. His housemate was Melvins bassist Matt Lukin, who was also a trained carpenter. Lukin had to do a lot of work on the house before it was even livable.

  As usual, hygiene was not a priority. If you drank a beer, you could just throw the can on the floor. And with all the partying going on at the shack, the floor was covered with festive detritus. They didn’t have a fridge, so they kept all the food in an unplugged old icebox out on the back porch. They cooked in a toaster oven. Wendy stopped by occasionally with care packages of food.

  One day Kurt bought about half a dozen turtles and put them in a bathtub in the middle of the living room; a terrarium attached to the tub took up most of the rest of the room. For irrigation, carpenter Lukin drilled a hole in the floor and drained the smelly hamburger meat-and-turtle-poop-fouled water into the floor underneath the house. But the foundation was so rotten that water would rise up into the floorboards. “It was, needless to say, a very smelly, very odorous place,” says Kurt.

  Kurt felt a special attraction to turtles. “There’s a fascination with them I really can’t describe,” he says. “Turtles basically have this ‘fuck you’ attitude—‘I’m stuck in the tank, I’m miserable, I hate you, and I’m not going to perform for you.’ ”

  Then there are those protective shells. “Actually those shells really aren’t that helpful,” Kurt says. “It’s part of their spine and it’s real sensitive—if you knock on the shell it hurts them, so it really isn’t the protective covering that everyone thinks it is. If they fall on their back, it’ll split open and they’ll die. It’s like having your spine on your outside.”

  Kurt got a job at the Polynesian Hotel in Ocean Shores, a coastal resort about twenty miles from Aberdeen, as a janitor, fireplace cleaner, and “maintenance butt-boy.” Once again, he didn’t exactly strive to be an ideal worker. Instead of cleaning or fixing things in the hotel rooms, he’d just walk into an unoccupied room, turn on the TV, and take a nap.

  Kurt was always on the lookout for a cheap new high. “Back then, none of us had any money so you don’t want to spend a bunch of money on coke and stuff,” recalls Lukin. “There was a lot of people who got into cough syrup to get high. I remember this guy I went to high school with who ate handfuls of aspirin and got high off of that.”

  At the time, a lot of kids in Aberdeen were doing acid, not to mention the powerful local marijuana, inexplicably nicknamed “affy bud.” Lukin, Jesse Reed, Kurt, and a few other stoners were sitting around one night bemoaning the fact that they were tired of all the usual highs. Then Reed remembered all those cans of shaving cream that Kurt had hung on to ever since they shared an apartment together. The shaving cream came with a little rubber stopper on the bottom of the can where the propellant was pumped in. Inhaling the propellant produced a buzz not unlike that of nitrous oxide. The manufacturers of the shaving cream have since altered the stopper on the can to discourage such abuse.

  The problem was, a lot of it would escape, so Reed showed them how to tape a toilet paper roll onto the bottom, poke a hole in the side, and insert a screwdriver in it to pry the gasket loose, then inhale it like a bong. They all ran down to the 7-Eleven and each bought more shaving cream. There was a brief panic when they found the gas lowered their voices—but not permanently—and the high was decent. “We were all yelling at Kurt that he shouldn’t have wasted all that shaving cream on decorating the doll that summer,” says Lukin. “We could have been getting high off it!”

  And then in the wee hours of one winter morning, Kurt came to Wendy’s house. “Mom,” Kurt called up to her, his voice weak with fear, “I’ve lost my hand. I’ve burnt my hand and it’s just gone.” He burst into tears. Kurt had been making french fries, his staple food, and severely burned his hand on the hot grease. “It was horrible,” she says. “It was burned clear down—it was the most sickening thing I ever saw and I had to bandage it twice a day and peel off the—it was horrible.”

  Kurt had already been to the hospital, where a doctor had bandaged it up and told Kurt he’d never play guitar again. But then Wendy took him to a specialist she knew from working at the Grays Harbor College nursing program. Now, you can’t even see a scar.

  While he recuperated, Kurt stayed home and tried to play guitar. Without any income from work, he was forced to live on little else but rice for several months. Every once in a while he’d splurge on a frozen Salisbury steak. “I was starving to death, living in this pigsty,” Kurt says, “not being able to play guitar, with the threat of the landlady calling me up every day reminding me that I owed her money. It was just a real sketchy scene.” Kurt didn’t know where he was going to live pretty soon.

  Kurt badly wanted to form a band with Chris, but Chris didn’t seem interested. “I kept always making it obvious that I wanted someone to play with in a band,” says Kurt, “but still Chris never wanted to.” Kurt even lent Chris his amplifier for a week and a half to try to butter him up. But Chris didn’t respond to Kurt’s overtures and even made Kurt come to his house to retrieve his own amp. “It sounded really nice,” says Chris, “but I decided to give it back to him.”

  Kurt would slide Chris a copy of the Fecal Matter tape now and then as a not-so-subtle hint, but Chris never said a word about it. Then, a whole year after the demo had been recorded and three years after they first met, Chris told Kurt, “I finally listened to that tape you made. It’s pretty good. We should start a band.”

  Kurt had a guitar and a Peavey amp. Chris used to have an amp, but he had to give it to Matt Lukin in return for bailing him out of jail after a scuffle with some rednecks in the parking lot of the Aberdeen 7-Eleven. For a P.A., they used another guitar amp and a cheap microphone with the diaphragm taped to it—it was a wreck, but it worked. There was an empty apartment above Mrs. Novoselic’s beauty shop and they’d play there for hours, with Chris on bass and Kurt on guitar and someone named Bob McFadden whom Chris recalls only as “some jock guy” who happened to own a drum set. Unfortunately, the place soon became a hangout just like the Melvins’ practice space and Chris eventually had to post a sign which read “This is not a big crash pad. So just get out of here because we want to rehearse.”

  The underground scene was so small in Aberdeen that even Cure fans with their trendy quiffs and goth clothes would hang around the practice space. Chris and Shelli called them the Haircut 100 Club. “We weren’t tight with them because they were more concerned with the fashion aspect of it,” says Shelli. “We were just concerned with fucking around.”

  The band worked up a little material but for some reason, the project eventually fell apart after about a month and all three went their separate ways. Chris and Shelli went to Arizona to look for work.

  Kurt didn’t like the guys who would hang out at the shack. They tended to be underage drinkers who used the house as a place to get trashed. Lukin’s work as a cabinet maker was far from steady, so more often than not he and his drinking buddies would be up until all hours, while Kurt had to get up to go to work at the resort. After five months, Lukin realized he should move out.

  Dylan Carlson mentioned that he was unemployed, so Kurt told him about these great jobs they could get
laying carpet in a hotel out at Ocean Shores. Carlson was going to take Lukin’s room at the shack, but he stayed only two weeks because the carpet-laying job never panned out. They went out to Ocean Shores early one morning to find that the boss was so drunk that he couldn’t get off the floor to unlock the door. When they went out there a second time, the door was unlocked, but the boss had passed out in front of it, blocking the way. Carlson gave up, but Kurt tried a third time. He got in, but the boss went out to a bar and got falling-down drunk. The great carpet-laying job never materialized.

  Kurt had been going more and more frequently to Olympia, about fifty miles east of Aberdeen, with the Melvins. The state capital, Olympia, is the home of Evergreen State College, a haven for bohemians and misfits of all stripes and a hotbed of adventurous independent music. Kurt went there most weekends to check out bands. Olympia was a small town but it had national indie scene connections that extended from Evergreen’s KAOS radio station, Op magazine (which has since metamorphosed into Option magazine), fanzine publisher Bruce Pavitt, and Calvin Johnson’s K Records.

  The youth culture there wasn’t into hard rock, but instead favored a kind of naive music, pigeonholed as “love rock,” made by the likes of Jad Fair and the group Beat Happening, led by Calvin Johnson. Johnson dominated the scene and inspired a legion of clones—whom Kurt calls “the Calvinists”—who talked and dressed just like him, aspiring to an innocent child-like state.

  It was a whole community of geeks—they were even dismissed by punk rockers. The Calvinists didn’t take drugs—at least they said they didn’t—and wore their hair short. Everyone played in each other’s band, everyone slept with one another. They had their own coffee shop, their own record store, and, practically speaking, KAOS had become their own radio station. “They started up their own little planet,” says Kurt.