For K, on the twentieth anniversary

Note: I wrote this nine years ago in 2014, on the 20th anniversary of Kurt’s passing. I wasn’t ready to share it then, and I’m still not sure I am, but here it is anyway. For Kurt.

Sometimes I think that if Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself, my whole life would’ve been different. The whole world would have been different. Maybe we wouldn’t feel like we need to protect ourselves by creating so much ironic distance between ourselves and our emotions, our passions. Maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid to feel.

It has been 20 years since Kurt died. Two decades. Nirvana is as far removed from now as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin were from Nirvana when Nevermind first came out. But I still feel so raw about it that I can’t listen to Nirvana much anymore, I haven’t been able to listen to it very much over the past twenty years. It’s too hard to hear his voice. I can’t bear to look at his face, still. It makes me too sad.

Nirvana was just inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. Some people said, “Oh, they got Joan Jett to sing with them, they got Kim Gordon, Kurt would’ve loved that,” but all I could think was, “Kurt would’ve fucking hated the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. Corporate shrines to rock music still suck.”

Not that I ever met Kurt. I did chase Courtney Love down Sunset Boulevard once, when Hole played the Palladium in support of Live Through This. November 1994. I had just turned 14. I wore dark lipstick and plastic barrettes in my hair. 

We were all so raw in our grief then, Courtney and his friends and all of the fans. Courtney came running out the back of the Palladium in a silver slip with no shoes on, and my friend and I ran after her, just steps behind, with a handful of fellow teenage girls and a few creepy older guys. We would find out later that she had been chasing Mary Lou Lord. That was the show where we stood in line waiting to get in beforehand and some guy walked up and down the line selling prints of a photo he had taken of Kurt at some red carpet event, a relic from a man who had seen Kurt with his own eyes. It was startling to see an actual photo of him, not something on a poster or the pages of a magazine. He was real. He looked small, his shoulders narrow. His fingers were laced together and he was gazing into the distance. His eyes were so blue and so, so sad. It made me feel weird to buy it, but I wanted that piece of Kurt. That almost-connection.

Part of me is still afraid to really feel this. It has been twenty years but part of me has been afraid to really feel the full intensity of sadness ever since he died. If I dive into the depths, will I get lost in them too? What if I never come up?

The first time I ever saw Nirvana was on MTV. It was the week the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video premiered, and they played it every single night and by the end of the week they were showing the lyrics on the screen so people could understand what he was saying, not that it helped me much because I was 11 and I still had no fucking idea what he was talking about. I had to look “mulatto” and “libido” up in the dictionary. But I did know what he was talking about, you know. I knew what he was talking about because I responded to it. It stirred something in me. Kurt was wearing a striped sweater and his hair covered most of his face. There were cheerleaders in black leotards with anarchy symbols over their breasts. I don’t think I even remembered to breathe whenever that video came on. I would move closer to the TV, staring at it, feeling, and thinking, and wondering. I felt so confused and so excited.

I bought a cassette single of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I wasn’t ready to commit to the full album yet because I was afraid to admit how much the band meant to me. I listened to the tape when I was alone in the house, slam dancing against the walls.

I remember having the strangest sensation when I realized I had a crush on Kurt, when I caught myself staring at pictures of him, every picture of him, even the ones where you couldn’t see his face because it was blurry or because his hair was in his eyes. I knew that if I chose to acknowledge it, my entire life would change. I realized this music was already changing the way I thought about myself. I realized that being who I actually was was actually an option.

Kurt did everything in a way that I had never seen before: He played guitar differently, he sang differently, he dressed differently, his hair was different. The way he talked was different. The things he said. He stood up for gay people, he stood up for his wife, he talked shit on the cool kids who acted like assholes, even if they were Guns’n’Roses and he was going to be sharing a stage with them at some awards show. He married a loud girl in a cool band. He told people – in the liner notes of a record! – “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us -- leave us alone!  Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.” He went on Headbanger’s Ball in a yellow prom dress and said, “I’m dressed for the ball.” Kurt was all about undermining homophobia, misogyny, the tyranny of nostalgia, and the capitalist coopting of the youth underground, and he somehow made it all look so casual and easy and fun.

He talked about bands I had never heard of, bands none of us had ever heard of at the time – none of us kids in the suburbs anyway. Kurt showed me that there was actual strength in being different. There was strength in kindness, vulnerability and anger. You could be strong that way – it didn’t have to end you. 

Listening to Nirvana made me feel ways I had never felt before. There was an energy that rose up into my throat from a primal place inside of me – an actual physical sensation. I felt it the first time the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff exploded. The chorus for “In Bloom.” When the vocals on “Territorial Pissings” transcend singing and become hysterical shrieking, primal screaming. 

I never met him, but Kurt was a friend to me. He was a friend to kids who felt weird, sad, angry and maligned. He showed me that you could be a grown-up but you didn’t have to be that kind of grown-up.

Now I am a grown-up. I am more than half a decade older than Kurt was when he died. I still can’t believe it. When I can bring myself to look at pictures of him, I still don’t see a kid. I feel like the kid. I feel like I’m in the car before school and my dad is telling me that Kurt overdosed and is in a coma and I’m trying to understand what that means, what it means to overdose. I’m asking whether he might die, and my dad says maybe. I feel like I’m turning on MTV News one day because they’ve been playing all this Nirvana back to back on KROQ, and then the DJ said that Kurt was dead, so I’m turning on MTV because there is no Internet and MTV News is my Internet, and when I see Kurt Loder I already know it’s true because Kurt Loder is the fucking Dan Rather of MTV and when you see him you know something serious is happening.

I remember seeing that picture of his leg and the Converse One-Star, taken through the window. You could tell it was him. This had really happened, all of it was really happening.

I remember feeling embarrassed that I didn’t have Bleach and going to Tower Records to buy it. I was one of those people, in the record store to buy the Nirvana back catalog the same week he died. I remember the guy who sold it to me poking a finger at the cover of the CD and saying, “You know, he died,” and me looking back at him like, What the fuck? No shit Kurt Cobain died. Hey man, did you hear about Kennedy?

I remember watching the vigil and the reading of the suicide note. Courtney’s voice as she read the note, shredded with grief. People holding white candles dripping wax and putting their foreheads in their hands to cry, shoulders shaking. “Just say fucker, you’re a fucker! And that you love him.” That really stuck with me; the idea that we were allowed to be angry with him too. That we were allowed to feel something other than just sorry, so sorry for him. And so sad that it was all over right when it was just starting to begin. 

Kurt made me feel like maybe I would be alright. That I could grow up and I would be alright. When Kurt died, I thought, Oh. It won’t be alright. Kurt couldn’t make it. He had money and he was famous and he had a family, and we loved him so much, and he still couldn’t make it. He couldn’t even make it to 30. 

It’s hard to think about Kurt. It gives me the most tragic ache to think of someone I love so much, even if I only know them through their art, feeling so alone and so without hope. 

I wonder sometimes, on the next plane, do we get to meet those we never knew on this one? I would say, Thank you. I would say, I’m glad I shared the earth with you, for a few years anyway. 

I would say, What you brought into the world, it meant something to me. And I wish I could get that feeling back, the way I felt before everything changed twenty years ago.