Night Beat (71 page)

But I also know this: Allen Ginsberg
won
—against the formidable odds of his own madness-scarred childhood, against all his soul-crippling doubts of self, against all those stern, bristling, authoritarian forces that looked at this man and saw only a bearded radical faggot that they could not abide. Ginsberg won in a very simple yet irrefutable way: He raised his voice. He looked at the horror that was crawling out from the American subconscious of the 1950s—the same horror that would later allow the nation to sacrifice so many of its children in the 1960s to a vile and pointless military action—and he called that demon by its name: “Moloch!” He looked at the crazed and the despairing, those people hurting for a fix, for a fuck of love, for the obliteration of intoxicated visions, and he saw in them something to adore and kiss, something to be treasured and learned from. And Ginsberg looked at himself, and for all his hard-earned pride, lust, vanity, and audacity, he would not shut up even in the face of his own vulnerability. In one of his best poems, 1992’s “After Lalon,” Ginsberg wrote:

I had my chance and lost it,
many chances & didn’t
 take them seriously enuf.
Oh yes I was impressed, almost
 went mad with fear
I’d lose the immortal chance,
 One lost it.
Allen Ginsberg warns you
 dont follow my path
 to extinction

In an evening, long ago—an evening caught between two Americas, the America of the past and the America that was to follow, an afternoon where America was truly found, realized, and celebrated—a nervous, scared young homosexual Jewish man stood before a crowd, and he raised his voice. He said things that nobody had ever said before in quite the same terms to a crowd in this nation—filthy things, beautiful things—and when he was finished, he had become a braver man. He had, in fact, in that hour, transformed himself into the most eventful American poet of the century. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti—who was in the room that night and who brought “Howl” to the world—heard that his old friend was dying, he wrote the following: “A great poet is dying/But his voice won’t die/His voice is on the land.”

Ginsberg’s voice will never leave us. Its truths and purposes will echo across our future as a clarion call of courage for the misfits, the fucked up, the fucking, and the dying. And we—all of us, whether we understand it or not—are better for it.

Good-bye, Allen Ginsberg. Thank you for illuminating our history—thank you for the gentle yet fierce slow-burning flame you ignited on that afternoon so long ago. Thank you for what you brought to our times, our nerve, and our lives.

Go in peace, brother. Your graceful, heavy, loving heart has earned it.

kurt cobain’s road from nowhere: walking the streets of aberdeen

I
t is early on a rainy Saturday night in Aberdeen, Washington, and nearly everybody in this small tavern off the main drag is already drunk. Aaron Burckhard is considerably less drunk than most—he’s only on his third beer—though, in truth, he has fair reason to be drinking. It has been just a little over a week since the body of his old friend, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, was found in Seattle, the victim of a suicide, and Burckhard is still reeling from the news.

Burckhard, who was Nirvana’s first drummer, had not seen or spoken with Cobain in some time. Though the two of them had their share of disagreements—which came to a head when Kurt fired Aaron for being too hungover to show up for a rehearsal—Burckhard still had friendly feelings for his old bandmate, and for what he had seen Nirvana accomplish. “Kurt was the coolest person I knew, and still is,” says Burckhard, staring straight into his beer glass. “I loved him.”

Burckhard, who is now thirty, begins to tell how he heard the news of Cobain’s death on the radio—how he began shaking so violently that he had to lay his five-month-old daughter down on the sofa next to him so that he would not drop her in his grief—when a guy in a jeans jacket comes reeling through the tavern door and stumbles across the room, toppling tables on his way. He staggers to the bar, orders a beer, and then sees Burckhard and edges our way. He begins telling Aaron about a mutual friend who recently began shooting heroin again, until Aaron, visibly pissed, cuts him off. “That’s just
fucked,
man. That guy just got clean. Why would he start using again?”

The other man shrugs and sips from his beer. “You’re right, that shit’s bad. But then, hell, I’m strung out on it right now myself.” The guy in the jeans jacket grips his beer and lurches to the other side of the tavern.

Burckhard shakes his head, then turns back to me. “Man, that is
so
fucked. There’s been an epidemic of that shit around here lately.”

He sits quietly for a few moments, until his thoughts return to Cobain. “You know,” he says, “I never really understood why Kurt was so
down
on this town. I mean, everybody talks about what a depressed place it is to live, but I don’t see what there is to
hate
about it. Except, maybe . . . ” Burckhard pauses and glances around him—at the people staring with hard and angry looks into their beer glasses; at the woman who is talking in a loud and obnoxious voice and slapping ridiculously hard at the hands of her stymied boyfriend, who is mumbling incoherently to himself; at the junkie in the jeans jacket, who is talking quietly to a man in a cowboy hat over in the corner; at the bartender who is glowering at everybody who orders a drink. “Yeah,” says Burckhard, “I don’t know what there is to hate about this place. Except for, you know, the people who live here.”

And then Aaron laughs and returns to his beer.

ABERDEEN IS A hard-hit lumber town, located midway up the Washington coast, and nestled at the deepest cut-point of a seaport called Gray’s Harbor. The town is about three miles long and a mile wide, and it is flanked on its northern and eastern borders by a ridge of steep hills, where the richer folks—who have run the local sawmills—have traditionally lived, in lovely and ornate Victorian-style homes. Below those hills is a poorer part of town called “the flats,” and it is here that Kurt Cobain grew up. His mother, Wendy O’Conner, still lives there, in a small, greenish house, with a tidy yard and drawn curtains. It is one of the better homes in the area. Many of the nearby houses are marred by faded paint and worn roofs, and the necessary neglect that is the result of indigence.

Stand in the heart of the flats—or in Aberdeen’s nearby downtown area, where empty industrial structures stand like haunted shells—and the frequent fog that pours off the rich folks’ hill can feel like something that might bog you down here forever. Move to the other end of town, where the main drag, Wishkah Boulevard, looks out toward the Chehalis River and Pacific Ocean, and you feel like you’re staring at the end of the world—that if you kept walking or driving, you would simply drop off the last edge of America.

This is the town that Kurt Cobain could never repudiate enough. It was here that he was scorned and beat upon by both those who should have loved him, and by those who hardly knew him but recognized his otherness and wanted to batter him for it. It was here, no doubt, where Cobain first learned how to hate life.

YOU WOULDN’T know it now, but Aberdeen was once a hopping place, supported by thriving lumber companies and dozens of the West Coast’s most popular whorehouses. But the prostitution was killed off decades ago, and the lumber boom started coming to a halt a few years back, as the economy fell and the land was depleted. These days, there is widespread concern that the northwestern logging industry can never fully recover, and as a result, that a town like Aberdeen is marked for a slow and ugly death.

To make matters worse, in the days following Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Aberdeen became an object of national scrutiny and fast judgment. In large part, that’s because Cobain had been outspoken in his dislike for his hometown—describing it essentially as a place of redneck biases and low intelligence. That disdain has influenced the media’s recent depiction of the city as a dismal, hopeless place, in which those with an artistic sensibility—particularly the young—are regarded with disapproval or outright hostility. It’s as if the town were being held in part accountable for Cobain’s ruin—which is not an entirely unfathomable consideration. When you are confronted with the tragic loss of a suicide, you can’t help sorting backward through the dead person’s life, looking for those crucial episodes of dissolution that would lead him to such an awful finish. Look far enough in Kurt Cobain’s life, and you inevitably end up back in Aberdeen—the homeland that he hated and fled. Maybe there was something damaging and ineradicable that he bore from this place, and that he could not shirk or annihilate until those last few moments, in that apartment above the garage of his Seattle home.

Certainly, there are some grim truths about the town that cannot be ignored. In April 1991, Aberdeen’s local newspaper, the
Daily World,
ran an article chronicling the relatively high death rate in the region—especially in its suicide index. It is difficult to measure these things with any definitive accuracy, but Aberdeen’s suicide rate would appear to average out to something like 27 people per 100,000—which is roughly twice the national suicide rate (though bear in mind that the town’s population itself is something less than 17,000). Mix this news with high rates of alcohol and drug usage, as well as a high incidence of unemployment and domestic violence and a median household income of about $23,000, and you emerge with the not-so-surprising conclusion that Aberdeen can be an unusually depressing town to call your home.

One doesn’t have to look much beyond Cobain’s own family’s history to see evidence of this truth. In July 1979, one of Cobain’s great-uncles, Burle Cobain, committed suicide by way of a self-inflicted gunshot to his abdomen. Five years later, Burle’s brother Kenneth also committed suicide. There are rumors that other relatives and ancestors may have committed suicide in previous years—making for the legend that Courtney Love has referred to as the Cobain curse.

It is hard to know what impact, if any, the suicides of his great-uncles and others may have had on Cobain—whether he mourned these deaths, or in fact saw in them the glimmer of a dark promise: a surefire prescription for release, come the day that any further days of pain or torment would be unbearable. In any case, there was something clearly kindred in the manner in which the young artist chose to end his life, as well as something horribly ironic. For all the ways that Kurt Cobain reviled what he saw as this area’s redneck mentality, in the end he chose for himself the same sad style of death that others in his family and hometown had opted for: a gun to his head, obliterating his very identity, ruining the part of him that made him knowable to the outside world. As one friend, who had known him when he lived here, put it: “I hate to say it, but it was the perfect Aberdonian death.”

THERE IS LITTLE doubt that Kurt Cobain did not have an easy time of life in this town. He was born in nearby Hoquiam in 1967, the first child of Wendy Cobain and her auto mechanic husband, Donald. The family moved to Aberdeen when Kurt was six months old, and by all accounts, he was a happy and bright child—an outgoing, friendly boy who, by the second grade, was already regarded as possessing a natural artistic talent. Then, in 1975, when Kurt was eight, Don and Wendy divorced, and the bitter separation and its aftermath were devastating to the child. Instead of the sense of family and security that he had known previously, Kurt now knew division, acrimony, and aloneness, and apparently some light in him began to shut off. He grew progressively introverted, and to others, he seemed full of shame about what had become of his family. In the years that followed, Cobain was passed back and forth between his mother’s home in Aberdeen and his father’s in nearby Montesano. It was in this period that the young Kurt became sullen and resentful, and when his moods became too much for either parent, he was sent along to the homes of other relatives in the region—some of whom also found him a hard kid to reach. (There are rumors that Cobain may have suffered physical abuse and exposure to drug abuse during this time, but nobody in the family was available to confirm or deny these reports.)

In short, the young Kurt Cobain was a misfit—it was the role handed to him, and he had the intelligence to know what to do with it. Like many youthful misfits, he found a bracing refuge in the world of rock & roll. In part, the music probably offered him a sense of connection that was missing elsewhere in his life—the reaffirming thrill of participating in something that might speak for or embrace him. But rock & roll also offered him something more: a chance for transcendence or personal victory that nothing else in his life or community could offer. Like many kids before him, and many to come, Kurt Cobain sat in his room and learned to play powerful chords and dirty leads on cheap guitars, and felt the amazing uplift and purpose that came from such activity; he held music closer to him than his family or home, and for a time, it probably came as close to saving him as anything could. In the process, he found a new identity as a nascent punk in a town where, to this day, punks are still regarded as either eccentrics or trash.

The punishments that he suffered for his metamorphosis were many, and are now legend. There are numerous stories that make the rounds in Aberdeen about how Cobain got beat up for simply looking and walking differently than other kids, or got his face smashed for befriending a high school student who was openly gay, or got used as a punching bag by jocks who loathed him for what they saw as his otherness. Hearing accounts like these, you have to marvel at Cobain’s courage, and even at his heroism. It’s a wonder he made it as far as he did without wanting to kill the world for what it had inflicted on him for so many and long seasons.