Love & Death (32 page)

Did you ever meet Courtney?

“I never met Courtney. [Laughs] Why don’t you ask her if she ever met me? That’s a better question. I think Courtney Love is the victim of some bad publicity on this one. I don’t think she’s going to have any problems because the great thing is that the story sounds so far-fetched that it sounds totally unbelievable. My thing about Courtney Love is that I think she’s being wrongly accused. I don’t have any problem with her whatsoever and I don’t think she has a problem with me. But you know, to you or me fifty thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money, but to a guy like El Duce, who thinks that if you have five dollars you’re rich, it would be a pretty appealing offer. But I don’t think he could ever do it. As far as hitting up Duce to knock somebody off, I don’t think anybody would think that he would do it. But logically, he knows a lot of people in the kind of guttery underground of L.A. He would probably know someone. So that would probably be the inclination, that would probably be the strategy if Courtney actually indeed approached him…. Duce wasn’t a professional hit man. I don’t think he would have the intestinal fortitude to pull that off. [Laughs]”

Again, we ask Wrench why Hoke would have named him as Kurt’s killer if he wasn’t involved. We also want to know exactly when he found out that he had been named.

“That was somewhat problematic. I found out about Duce naming me from a guy named Lomas [Divine Brown’s pimp], who’s an infamous crackhead. He called me up. When I found out that Duce named me in the documentary, it kind of concerned me a bit, so I went over and talked to him about it. After I found out I was named in the
Kurt and Courtney
movie—I mean, what a horrible thing to say—I said, ‘Hey, Duce, what the hell’s up?’ I wasn’t very happy about Duce naming me as Cobain’s killer. I wasn’t too pleased with that. We had little arguments back and forth. He apologizes. He didn’t mean to do it, things like that.”

Why did he say he named you?

“He didn’t tell me anything in particular. He just said it was accidental.”

If it’s not true, why would he say it?

“Well, you could argue the fact that he wasn’t even talking about me because he doesn’t mention my last name, he just says, ‘Allen.’ It could be any Allen.”

What happened next?

“Well, Duce being a total out-of-control alcoholic, he asked me for a ride to the liquor store. I drop him off at the liquor store around eight
P.M.
and then I took off. I never saw him again. Then I heard that he wandered into the path of a train.”

Wrench had referred to Hoke’s death as a suicide several times in the course of the conversation. We ask him whether he thinks Hoke was suicidal.

“He seemed fairly distraught when I dropped him off,” Wrench says. He bursts into a sudden maniacal laugh.

What was it that had made him so distraught?

“I think it was naming me in the
Kurt and Courtney
movie. I was fairly pissed off.”

Were things OK between you by the time you dropped him off at the liquor store? Had you forgiven him?

“After I got home and read the newspapers the next day, it was OK,” he says, laughing. “Problem solved.”

From the first, Wrench had engaged in this kind of creepy denial-cum-admission—a coy wink-and-a-nod display where everything was verbalized except the “I did it.” For some reason, he seemed to
want
us to believe that he had killed Kurt Cobain and Eldon Hoke. We still weren’t buying it. On the phone, he had admitted to us off the record that he was involved in Cobain’s death. Later, when we asked him on the record why he had told us this, he said he had been simply playing with our heads. Ultimately, we decided his near admission of responsibility in their deaths seemed just the type of prank this grand Guignolesque rocker would pull.

What was behind his bravado? To test his opportunism, we ask him how much money he wants to appear in our documentary. “I’m not motivated by money; you can buy me a case of Pabst,” he replies. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, we consult with our “bodyguard.” It seems we had all come to the same conclusion: Wrench was probably acting this way to gain notoriety for his band.

When he returns to the table, Wrench offers to take us outside and show us the exact location where Hoke had “bought it.” The restaurant is in a little strip mall situated in an industrial section of Riverside, just off the highway. As we exit the Spunky Steer, he points left to a small row of stores about fifty yards west, on the other side of the mall exit: “That’s where the liquor store used to be. That’s where I dropped Duce off that night.”

He then points to the tracks directly across a small field from the restaurant: “Say there was something underhanded going on here. Say there’s an investigating officer who suspects he was murdered. He would say, ‘Fuck, look at this parking lot. There would be a million witnesses.’ But if you come with me, I’ll show you something. Let’s walk up here.” He leads us about thirty-five yards east, past some trees onto the field next to the tracks. “Here’s a nice industrial area. With the noise of cars passing by on the highway, you wouldn’t hear any signs of a struggle.” We arrive at a section of the tracks. “That’s the spot. This is where El Duce committed suicide. You see, if you’re up there at the intersection waiting for the light to change, you can’t see us. On the other side, it’s all industrial. A nice little spot.”

He resumes where he left off inside, hinting strongly that Hoke’s death resulted from foul play: “You see, if it had happened at the lights up there at the crossing, there might have been witnesses to see what happened. But over here at night, nobody could have seen it. The thing about train wrecks is that they kind of make it difficult for a forensic investigation. It’s not like you have a body to examine. They can find no signs of a struggle. A lot of times when you’re hit by a train, they have to take a trash bag to gather the pieces because there’s nothing left of the fucking body. Then they call the fire department to hose off the train because there’s nothing left but fucking juice. Let’s say you have this alcoholic bum who gets hit by a train, who’s sleeping by the tracks drunk and just stumbles in front of it. Who’s going to ask questions? An investigator who’s investigating the death, they look at the blood alcohol level; there’s nothing left of the body, but they can take a blood sample from the tracks and still measure his blood alcohol level. An accident investigator would look at this, and everything would point to an accident.”

We are standing at least eighty-five yards from the liquor store where Wrench claims he dropped Hoke off that night. Between the store and this spot, there is an intersection and railroad crossing. If Hoke had been heading home from the liquor store, it stands to reason that he would have crossed the tracks at the intersection. We ask Wrench why he would have wandered an additional fifty-five yards past where, once over the tracks, he would have had to cross a busy highway.

He has a ready explanation: “You have to remember that as a homeless person you’re not going to have the same mind-set, where you say, ‘Hey, I have to get home because my fucking wife or girlfriend is waiting for me.’ The homeless lifestyle isn’t really—actually, Duce wasn’t really homeless; I think of him more as a hobo, kind of traveling, checking out the world. Here’s what people don’t understand. I’ve walked out of clubs a hundred times with Duce and we can’t find our car and he’s like, ‘Oh cool, let’s get a cardboard box and sleep right here.’ That was his mentality. That’s the beauty of it. Nobody will ever know if his death was an accident, suicide or murder.”

Wrench’s insinuations are starting to sound like the boastings of a severely attention-starved child. Whatever shock value they once achieved has now palled. We tell him straight-out that we don’t believe he killed Kurt Cobain or Eldon Hoke, but that we suspect he enjoys the fact that people think he did. He grins and says nothing.

The interview finished, we accompany him to his car. There, in the parking lot behind the Spunky Steer, is a white, late-model luxury Lexus. The three of us look at the car, stunned at the incongruous sight. Other than the fact that the Lexus sells for almost $60,000, it also happens to be Courtney Love’s favorite model of car—the automobile she demanded Kurt buy her in March 1994. Wrench climbs in, waves good-bye, and drives away, taking our certainties about the case with him.

Eldon Hoke began his last day on this planet the way he began any other day: by getting drunk. The night before, the Mentors had played a gig at Al’s Bar in Los Angeles. “Duce had been more or less sober for four days before the gig,” Mentors bassist Steve Broy recalls. “He would go into a kind of maintenance level before he performed, so that he’d be able to function onstage. He was an alcoholic, so he had to maintain a minimum level of booze in his system, but he was pretty straight. Then, as we were setting up our equipment before the show, somebody offers him a drink, and that was it, he just started drinking. He was superhammered that night to the point where the gig was a complete disaster. We got home at four or five in the morning. I crashed and then around eight
A.M.
, I get woken up by Duce playing loud music. “

After Broy told him to turn it down, Hoke went out to look for more alcohol. He returned an hour later with a twelve-pack of 32-ounce King Cobras, which he drank throughout the day.

Broy replays the chain of events that led to his friend’s death: “What happened was that I was asleep in the other room. I woke up in the afternoon, and Duce was gone. Allen [Wrench] came by and said there was a street fair going on in Riverside that day, so we went to the street fair and came back around five or six
P.M.,
and Duce was there. He was starting a barbecue in the backyard, and he was superloaded. I was just so tired, I didn’t have the time to deal with this superdrunk guy. So I just went in and hit the sack immediately, leaving them outside. When I woke up an hour later or whatever, I saw them pulling out in Allen’s truck. Then I woke up the next morning, and Duce wasn’t there. So I assumed he was over at Allen’s because lots of times that’s what would happen. He’d go over there and hang out at Allen’s house. So around noon, the coroner came over to notify me as to what had happened, that he had been hit on the train tracks the evening before. I was kind of confused because I had it in my head that he had gone over to Allen’s house, and I said, Hmmm, there’s no train tracks over there. I didn’t realize that what had happened is that Allen had dropped him off at the store.”

Does he believe that Wrench might have had something to do with Hoke’s death?

“No way,” he says. “He better not have. Duce was my friend. I think it was probably an accident.” Although still a member of the Mentors, Broy now plays bass in Kill Allen Wrench and considers himself Wrench’s friend. We ask whether he thinks Wrench could have killed Kurt Cobain.

“That’s another question,” he says. “I don’t really want to comment on that.”

We ask him what Hoke had told him about Courtney’s $50,000 offer. Did he believe the story?

“Naw. Why would anybody approach somebody like Duce and ask him to kill their husband? You just had to look at him to realize that he’s not your man. He was always drunk.”

Was he equally pathetic in the ’80s when Courtney was acquainted with him?

“That’s a good point,” he replies. “He definitely deteriorated in the last few years of his life. When she knew him, he was a lot more together. Maybe Courtney didn’t realize how bad he had become. I don’t know what to believe. He definitely hobnobbed with a lot of celebrities. Once he came back to the house and said, ‘You’ll never believe who I met and who I was hanging out with all night.’ I said, ‘Who?’ He says, ‘Tom Petty.’ I wouldn’t say he was a chronic liar or anything like that, but he could tell a tall tale here and there, so I wasn’t buying that story for a second. Then a few days later, he starts elaborating on the story and says, ‘We’re good friends,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ Then I found out it was completely true. Tom Petty comes over, and sure enough they’re friends.”

We do some sniffing around Riverside and find a man named Chris Potter, who claims to know Allen Wrench from the local bar scene. He says he has heard “rumors” of Wrench’s involvement in Cobain’s death.

“Who the hell knows if it’s true or not?” says Potter. “A few years ago, he starts driving around in this Corvette and waving around a lot of money. Then, all of a sudden, he has all this recording equipment, and he’s driving around in a Lexus and a truck. He never used to have a dime to his name. I don’t know where he got the money to buy that stuff. It’s not from his music, I’ll tell you that much.”

Indeed, not long after Hoke’s death, Wrench started a band, out-fitted his house with $100,000 in sophisticated analog recording equipment—which can probably be bought used for about $25,000—and recorded his band’s debut CD,
My Bitch Is a Junky.

By the time we returned to Canada, we were more confused than ever. Though we still found the story of Wrench’s involvement far-fetched, there had been enough coincidences in the case to sway even the most skeptical observer. Most puzzling of all was the new wealth Wrench seemed to have suddenly acquired. Where did he get it? We decide to call him up and ask.