Praise for Heavier Than Heaven

    “The narrative moves like the best Nirvana anthems. Smells

    like the real deal.”

    —Time

    “Until someone writes a book that is more daring in its

    psychological and social analysis—and as thorough in its

    reporting—Heavier Than Heaven will be the place to start the

    dark journey into Cobain’s claustrophobic inner world.”

    —Rolling Stone

    “What emerges...is the life story of someone who never grew

    up, someone whose maturation was half done before he was

    twenty-one, someone who extracted art from a perpetual

    adolescence that was over much too soon.”

    —The New Yorker

    “The results of Cross’ assiduous reporting show through in

    every chapter. A remarkable portrait.”

    —Entertainment Weekly

    “One of the most moving and revealing books ever written

    about a rock star. An invaluable look at the life of a

    troubled artist.”

    —Los Angeles Times

    “In his early teens, Cobain told a friend, ‘I’m going to

    be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of

    glory.’ This well-reported book... provides the most

    grounded account of how Cobain, not too many years later, did

    just that.”—The New York Times Book Review

    “The biography that the most important rocker of his

    generation has always deserved: exhaustively researched, full

    of insight into the ‘real’ Cobain as opposed to the

    manipulated media image, and written in a clear and

    compelling... voice.”

    —Chicago Sun-Times

    “A cautionary tale of a talented, lucky musician who became

    fatally confused about whether fame was a reward or a death

    sentence.”

    —People

    “No other book on Kurt Cobain matches Heavier Than Heaven

    for research, accuracy and insider scoops.”

    —The New York Post

    “By keeping a steady eye on the facts, Cross mostly pierces

    the rumors, hype and conspiracy theories that have long

    confounded Nirvana’s place in history...At last, perhaps,Cobain’s ghost can find some peace.”

    —The Miami Herald

    “Charles R. Cross takes readers deeper into the life of the

    brilliant, troubled Kurt Cobain than anyone thought possible.

    The result is more than just an excellent book... Cross helps

    reset the standards of what biographies—not just rock bios—

    should be.”

    —The Rocky Mountain News

    “Shakes up the prevailing conceptions of Cobain...A

    compelling biography.”

    —Biography

    “A fascinating, if sometimes frightful, read, a full-scale

    work that manages to be respectful of Cobain’s unlikelytriumphs from poverty and also critical of his stunning

    excesses.”

    —The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

    “A standout among rock bios and deserves its place in pop-

    culture collections.”

    —Booklist

    “Cross treats the strange, unhappy life of musician Kurt

    Cobain with intelligence and an insider’s perceptiveness.”

    —Kirkus Reviews

    “A thorough, cogent look at Kurt Cobain...No other book

    matches Heavier Than Heaven for research, accuracy, and

    insider scoops.”

    —The Seattle Times

    “Cross transcends the other Cobain biographies...A carefully

    crafted and compelling tragedy.”

    —Library Journal

    “Dozens of books have been written about Cobain and his

    band, most of them ridiculously lurid or worshipful or

    uninformed. Heavier Than Heaven is the best, by far...

    Excellent.”

    —The Portland Oregonian

    “Insightful, painstakingly researched...A tremendous gift to

    those who love Kurt Cobain’s artistry.”

    —The Seattle Weekly

    “A closely researched, clear-eyed look at the complicated,even mystifying character that was Kurt Cobain.”

    —The Associated Press

    “Heavier Than Heaven is a book that gives shape and depth to

    a story that has so often been related as a series of loadedanecdotes... Heavier Than Heaven is a trove of rigorous

    detail.”

    —The Boston Phoenix

    “Charles R. Cross has cracked the code in the definitive

    biography, an all-access pass to Cobain’s heart and

    mind....The deepest book about pop’s darkest falling star.”

    —Amazon.com

    “Exhaustively researched... Unexpectedly vivid. More

    riveting and suspenseful than a biography has the right to

    be.”

    —Blender

    “Fascinating. The most vivid account yet. Will enthrall even

    the most casual reader.”

    —Mojo

    “Superbly researched and harrowing. Cross has painstakingly

    accumulated a wealth of telling detail.”

    —The London Sunday Times

    “Leaps to the front of the class....If you can read only one

    Kurt Cobain book, Heavier Than Heaven is definitely it.”

    —The Montreal Gazette

    “A sublime, uncanny portrait. The way Cross recreates

    Cobain’s final hours is beautifully written and paced....By

    the end of the chapter I had my face in my hands, helpless

    against the tears.”

    —The Globe and MailDedication

    FOR MY FAMILY, FOR CHRISTINA, AND FOR ASHLANDContents

    Praise for Heavier Than Heaven

    Author’s Note

    Prologue: Heavier Than Heaven - New York, New

    York: January 12, 1992

    Chapter 1: Yelling Loudly at First - Aberdeen,Washington: February 1967–December 1973

    Chapter 2: I Hate Mom, I Hate Dad - Aberdeen,Washington: January 1974–June 1979

    Chapter 3: Meatball of the Month - Montesano,Washington: July 1979–March 1982

    Chapter 4: Prairie Belt Sausage Boy - Aberdeen,Washington: March 1982–March 1983

    Chapter 5: The Will of Instinct - Aberdeen,Washington: April 1984–September 1986

    Chapter 6: Didn’t Love Him Enough - Aberdeen,Washington: September 1986–March 1987

    Chapter 7: Soupy Sales in My Fly - Raymond,Washington: March 1987

    Chapter 8: In High School Again - Olympia,Washington: April 1987–May 1988Chapter 9: Too Many Humans - Olympia,Washington: May 1988–February 1989

    Chapter 10: Illegal to Rock N’ Roll -

    Olympia, Washington: February 1989–September

    1989

    Chapter 11: Candy, Puppies, Love - London,England: October 1989–May 1990

    Chapter 12: Love You So Much - Olympia,Washington: May 1990–December 1990

    Chapter 13: The Richard Nixon Library -

    Olympia, Washington: November 1990–May 1991

    Chapter 14: Burn American Flags - Olympia,Washington: May 1991–September 1991

    Chapter 15: Every Time I Swallowed - Seattle,Washington: September 1991–October 1991

    Chapter 16: Brush Your Teeth. - Seattle,Washington: October 1991–January 1992

    Chapter 17: Little Monster Inside - Los

    Angeles, California: January 1992–August 1992

    Chapter 18: Rosewater, Diaper Smell - Los

    Angeles, California: August 1992–September

    1992

    Chapter 19: That Legendary Divorce - Seattle,Washington: September 1992–January 1993

    Chapter 20: Heart-Shaped Coffin - Seattle,Washington: January 1993–August 1993

    Chapter 21: A Reason to Smile - Seattle,Washington: August 1993–November 1993Chapter 22: Cobain’s Disease - Seattle,Washington: November 1993–March 1994

    Chapter 23: Like Hamlet - Seattle, Washington:

    March 1994

    Chapter 24: Angel’s Hair - Los Angeles,California–Seattle, Washington: March 30–

    April 6, 1994

    Epilogue: A Leonard Cohen Afterworld - Seattle,Washington: April 1994–May 1999

    Source Notes

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    Picture Section

    About the Author

    CopyrightAuthor’s Note

    Less than a mile from my home sits a building that can send a

    graveyard chill up my spine as easily as an Alfred Hitchcock

    film. The gray one-story structure is surrounded by a tall

    chain-link fence, unusual security in a middle-class

    neighborhood of sandwich shops and apartments. Three

    businesses are behind the fencing: a hair salon; a State Farm

    Insurance office; and “Stan Baker, Shooting Sports.” It was

    in this third business where on March 30, 1994, Kurt Cobain

    and a friend purchased a Remington shotgun. The owner later

    told a newspaper he was unsure why anyone would be buying

    such a gun when it wasn’t “hunting season.”

    Every time I drive by Stan Baker’s I feel as if I’ve

    witnessed a particularly horrific roadside accident, and in a

    way I have. The events that followed Kurt’s gun shop

    purchase leave me with both a deep unease and the desire to

    make inquiries that I know by their very nature are

    unknowable. They are questions concerning spirituality, the

    role of madness in artistic genius, the ravages of drug abuse

    on a soul, and the desire to understand the chasm between the

    inner and outer man. These questions are all too real to any

    family touched by addiction, depression, or suicide. For

    families en-shrouded by such darkness—which includes mine—

    this need to ask questions that can’t be answered is its own

    kind of haunting.

    Those mysteries fueled this book but in a way its genesis

    began years before during my youth in a small Washington town

    where monthly packages from the Columbia Record and Tape Club

    offered me rock n’ roll salvation from circumstance.

    Inspired in part by those mail-order albums, I left that

    rural landscape to become a writer and magazine editor inSeattle. Across the state and a few years later, Kurt Cobain

    found a similar transcendence through the same record club

    and he turned that interest into a career as a musician. Our

    paths would intersect in 1989 when my magazine did the first

    cover story on Nirvana.

    It was easy to love Nirvana because no matter how great

    their fame and glory they always seemed like underdogs, and

    the same could be said for Kurt. He began his artistic life

    in a double-wide trailer copying Norman Rockwell

    illustrations and went on to develop a story-telling gift

    that would infuse his music with a special beauty. As a rock

    star, he always seemed a misfit, but I cherished the way he

    combined adolescent humor with old man crustiness. Seeing him

    around Seattle—impossible to miss with his ridiculous cap

    with flaps over his ears—he was a character in an industry

    with few true characters.

    There were many times writing this book when that humor

    seemed the only beacon of light in a Sisyphean task. Heavier

    Than Heaven encompassed four years of research, 400

    interviews, numerous file cabinets of documents, hundreds of

    musical recordings, many sleepless nights, and miles and

    miles driving between Seattle and Aberdeen. The research took

    me places—both emotional and physical—that I thought I’d

    never go. There were moments of great elation, as when I

    first heard the unreleased “You Know You’re Right,” a song

    I’d argue ranks with Kurt’s best. Yet for every joyful

    discovery, there were times of almost unbearable grief, as

    when I held Kurt’s suicide note in my hand, observing it was

    stored in a heart-shaped box next to a keepsake lock of his

    blond hair.

    My goal with Heavier Than Heaven was to honor Kurt Cobain

    by telling the story of his life—of that hair and that note

    —without judgment. That approach was only possible because

    of the generous assistance of Kurt’s closest friends, his

    family, and his bandmates. Nearly everyone I desired to

    interview eventually shared their memories—the only

    exceptions were a few individuals with plans to write theirown histories, and I wish them the best in those efforts.

    Kurt’s life was a complicated puzzle, all the more complex

    because he kept so many parts hidden, and that

    compartmentalization was both an end result of addiction, and

    a breeding ground for it. At times I imagined I was studying

    a spy, a skilled double agent, who had mastered the art of

    making sure that no one person knew all the details of his

    life.

    A friend of mine, herself a recovering drug addict, once

    described what she called the “no talk” rule of families

    like hers. “We grew up in households,” she said, “where we

    were told: ‘don’t ask, don’t talk, and don’t tell.’ It

    was a code of secrecy, and out of those secrets and lies a

    powerful shame overtook me.” This book is for all those with

    the courage to tell the truth, to ask painful questions, and

    to break free of the shadows of the past.

    —Charles R. Cross

    Seattle, Washington,April 2001Prologue: HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN

    NEW YORK, NEW YORK

    JANUARY 12, 1992

    Heavier Than Heaven

    —A slogan used by British concert promoters to describe

    Nirvana’s 1989 tour with the band Tad. It summed up both

    Nirvana’s “heavy” sound and the heft of 300-pound Tad

    Doyle.

    The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and

    fifty-seven minutes after the very moment an entire

    generation fell in love with him. It was, remarkably, his

    first death, and only the earliest of many little deaths that

    would follow. For the generation smitten with him, it was an

    impassioned, powerful, and binding devotion—the kind of love

    that even as it begins you know is preordained to break your

    heart and to end like a Greek tragedy.

    It was January 12, 1992, a clear but chilly Sunday morning.

    The temperature in New York City would eventually rise to 44

    degrees, but at 7 a.m., in a small suite of the Omni Hotel,it was near freezing. A window had been left open to air out

    the stench of cigarettes, and the Manhattan morning had

    stolen all warmth. The room itself looked like a tempest had

    engulfed it: Scattered on the floor, with the randomness of a

    blind man’s rummage sale, were clumps of dresses, shirts,and shoes. Toward the suite’s double doors stood a half

    dozen serving trays covered with the remnants of several days

    of room service meals. Half-eaten rolls and rancid slices of

    cheese littered the tray tops, and a handful of fruit flies

    hovered over some wilted lettuce. This was not the typical

    condition of a four-star hotel room—it was the consequence

    of someone warning housekeeping to stay out of the room. Theyhad altered a “Do Not Disturb” sign to read, “Do Not EVER

    Disturb! We’re Fucking!”

    There was no intercourse this morning. Asleep in the king-

    size bed was 26-year-old Courtney Love. She was wearing an

    antique Victorian slip, and her long blond hair spread out

    over the sheet like the tresses of a character in a fairy

    tale. Next to her was a deep impression in the bedding, where

    a person had recently lain. Like the opening scene of a film

    noir, there was a dead body in the room.

    “I woke up at 7 a.m. and he wasn’t in the bed,”

    remembered Love. “I’ve never been so scared.”

    Missing from the bed was 24-year-old Kurt Cobain. Less than

    seven hours earlier, Kurt and his band Nirvana had been the

    musical act on “Saturday Night Live.” Their appearance on

    the program would prove to be a watershed moment in the

    history of rockn’ roll: the first time a grunge band had

    received live national television exposure. It was the same

    weekend that Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind, knocked

    Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard

    charts, becoming the best-selling album in the nation. While

    it wasn’t exactly overnight success—the band had been

    together four years—the manner in which Nirvana had taken

    the music industry by surprise was unparalleled. Virtually

    unknown a year before, Nirvana stormed the charts with their

    “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which became 1991’s most

    recognizable song, its opening guitar riff signifying the

    true beginning of nineties rock.

    And there had never quite been a rock star like Kurt

    Cobain. He was more an anti-star than a celebrity, refusing

    to take a limo to NBC and bringing a thrift-store sensibility

    to everything he did. For “Saturday Night Live” he wore the

    same clothes from the previous two days: a pair of Converse

    tennis shoes, jeans with big holes in the knees, a T-shirt

    advertising an obscure band, and a Mister Rogers–style

    cardigan sweater. He hadn’t washed his hair for a week, but

    had dyed it with strawberry Kool-Aid, which made his blond

    locks look like they’d been matted with dried blood. Neverbefore in the history of live television had a performer put

    so little care into his appearance or hygiene, or so it

    seemed.

    Kurt was a complicated, contradictory misanthrope, and what

    at times appeared to be an accidental revolution showed hints

    of careful orchestration. He professed in many interviews to

    detest the exposure he’d gotten on MTV, yet he repeatedly

    called his managers to complain that the network didn’t play

    his videos nearly enough. He obsessively— and compulsively—

    planned every musical or career direction, writing ideas out

    in his journals years before he executed them, yet when he

    was bestowed the honors he had sought, he acted as if it were

    an inconvenience to get out of bed. He was a man of imposing

    will, yet equally driven by a powerful self-hatred. Even

    those who knew him best felt they knew him hardly at all—the

    happenings of that Sunday morning would attest to that.

    After finishing “Saturday Night Live” and skipping the

    cast party, explaining it was “not his style,” Kurt had

    given a two-hour interview to a radio journalist, which

    finished at four in the morning. His working day was finally

    over, and by any standard it had been exceptionally

    successful: He’d headlined “Saturday Night Live,” had seen

    his album hit No. 1, and “Weird Al” Yankovic had asked

    permission to do a parody of “Teen Spirit.” These events,taken together, surely marked the apogee of his short career,the kind of recognition most performers only dream of, and

    that Kurt himself had fantasized about as a teenager.

    Growing up in a small town in southwestern Washington

    state, Kurt had never missed an episode of “Saturday Night

    Live,” and had bragged to his friends in junior high school

    that one day he’d be a star. A decade later, he was the most

    celebrated figure in music. After just his second album he

    was being hailed as the greatest songwriter of his

    generation; only two years before, he had been turned down

    for a job cleaning dog kennels.

    But in the predawn hours, Kurt felt neither vindication nor

    an urge to celebrate; if anything, the attention hadincreased his usual malaise. He felt physically ill,suffering from what he described as “recurrent burning

    nauseous pain” in his stomach, made worse by stress. Fame

    and success only seemed to make him feel worse. Kurt and his

    fiancée, Courtney Love, were the most talked-about couple in

    rock n’ roll, though some of that talk was about drug

    abuse. Kurt had always believed that recognition for his

    talent would cure the many emotional pains that marked his

    early life; becoming successful had proven the folly of this

    and increased the shame he felt that his booming popularity

    coincided with an escalating drug habit.

    In his hotel room, in the early hours of the morning, Kurt

    had taken a small plastic baggie of China white heroin,prepared it for a syringe, and injected it into his arm. This

    in itself was not unusual, since Kurt had been doing heroin

    regularly for several months, with Love joining him in the

    two months they’d been a couple. But this particular night,as Courtney slept, Kurt had recklessly—or intentionally—

    used far more heroin than was safe. The overdose turned his

    skin an aqua-green hue, stopped his breathing, and made his

    muscles as stiff as coaxial cable. He slipped off the bed and

    landed facedown in a pile of clothes, looking like a corpse

    haphazardly discarded by a serial killer.

    “It wasn’t that he OD’d,” Love recalled. “It was that

    he was DEAD. If I hadn’t woken up at seven...I don’t know,maybe I sensed it. It was so fucked. It was sick and

    psycho.” Love frantically began a resuscitation effort that

    would eventually become commonplace for her: She threw cold

    water on her fiancé and punched him in the solar plexus so as

    to make his lungs begin to move air. When her first actions

    didn’t get a response, she went through the cycle again like

    a determined paramedic working on a heart-attack victim.

    Finally, after several minutes of effort, Courtney heard a

    gasp, signifying Kurt was breathing once again. She continued

    to revive him by splashing water on his face and moving his

    limbs. Within a few minutes, he was sitting up, talking, and

    though still very stoned, wearing a self-possessed smirk,almost as if he were proud of his feat. It was his first

    near-death overdose. It had come on the very day he had

    become a star.

    In the course of one singular day, Kurt had been born in

    the public eye, died in the privacy of his own darkness, and

    was resurrected by a force of love. It was an extraordinary

    feat, implausible, and almost impossible, but the same could

    be said for so much of his outsized life, beginning with

    where he’d come from.Chapter 1

    YELLING LOUDLY AT FIRST

    ABERDEEN, WASHINGTON

    FEBRUARY 1967–DECEMBER 1973

    He makes his wants known by yelling loudly at first, then

    crying if the first technique doesn’t work.

    —Excerpt from a report by his aunt on the eighteen-

    month-old Kurt Cobain.

    Kurt Donald Cobain was born on the twentieth of February,1967, in a hospital on a hill overlooking Aberdeen,Washington. His parents lived in neighboring Hoquiam, but it

    was appropriate that Aberdeen stand as Kurt’s birthplace—he

    would spend three quarters of his life within ten miles of

    the hospital and would be forever profoundly connected to

    this landscape.

    Anyone looking out from Grays Harbor Community Hospital

    that rainy Monday would have seen a land of harsh beauty,where forests, mountains, rivers, and a mighty ocean

    intersected in a magnificent vista. Tree-covered hills

    surrounded the intersection of three rivers, which fed into

    the nearby Pacific Ocean. In the center of it all was

    Aberdeen, the largest city in Grays Harbor County, with a

    population of 19,000. Immediately to the west was smaller

    Hoquiam, where Kurt’s parents, Don and Wendy, lived in a

    tiny bungalow. And south across the Chehalis River was

    Cosmopolis, where his mother’s family, the Fradenburgs, were

    from. On a day when it wasn’t raining—which was a rare day

    in a region that got over 80 inches of precipitation a year—

    one could see the nine miles to Montesano, where Kurt’s

    grandfather Leland Cobain grew up. It was a small enoughworld, with so few degrees of separation that Kurt would

    eventually become Aberdeen’s most famous product.

    The view from the three-story hospital was dominated by the

    sixth busiest working harbor on the West Coast. There were so

    many pieces of timber floating in the Chehalis that you could

    imagine using them to walk across the two-mile mouth. To the

    east was Aberdeen’s downtown, where merchants complained

    that the constant rumbling of logging trucks scared away

    shoppers. It was a city at work, and that work almost

    entirely depended on turning Douglas fir trees from the

    surrounding hills into commerce. Aberdeen was home to 37

    different lumber, pulp, shingle, or saw mills—their

    smokestacks dwarfed the town’s tallest building, which had

    only seven stories. Directly down the hill from the hospital

    was the gigantic Rayonier Mill smokestack, the biggest tower

    of all, which stretched 150 feet toward the heavens and

    spewed forth an unending celestial cloud of wood-pulp

    effluence.

    Yet as Aberdeen buzzed with motion, at the time of Kurt’s

    birth its economy was slowly contracting. The county was one

    of the few in the state with a declining population, as the

    unemployed tried their luck elsewhere. The timber industry

    had begun to suffer the consequences of offshore competition

    and over-logging. The landscape already showed marked signs

    of such overuse: There were swaths of clear-cut forests

    outside of town, now simply a reminder of early settlers who

    had “tried to cut it all,” as per the title of a local

    history book. Unemployment exacted a darker social price on

    the community in the form of increasing alcoholism, domestic

    violence, and suicide. There were 27 taverns in 1967, and the

    downtown core included many abandoned buildings, some of

    which had been brothels before they were closed in the late

    fifties. The city was so infamous for whorehouses that in

    1952 Look magazine called it “one of the hot spots in

    America’s battle against sin.”

    Yet the urban blight of downtown Aberdeen was paired with a

    close-knit social community where neighbors helped neighbors,parents were involved in schools, and family ties remained

    strong among a diverse immigrant population. Churches

    outnumbered taverns, and it was a place, like much of small-

    town America in the mid-sixties, where kids on bikes were

    given free rein in their neighborhoods. The entire city would

    become Kurt’s backyard as he grew up.

    Like most first births, Kurt’s was a celebrated arrival,both for his parents and for the larger family. He had six

    aunts and uncles on his mother’s side; two uncles on his

    father’s side; and he was the first grandchild for both

    family trees. These were large families, and when his mother

    went to print up birth announcements, she used up 50 before

    she was through the immediate relations. A line in the

    Aberdeen Daily World’s birth column on February 23 noted

    Kurt’s arrival to the rest of the world: “To Mr. and Mrs.

    Donald Cobain, 2830? Aberdeen Avenue, Hoquiam, February 20,at Community Hospital, a son.”

    Kurt weighed seven pounds, seven and one-half ounces at

    birth, and his hair and complexion were dark. Within five

    months, his baby hair would turn blond, and his coloring

    would turn fair. His father’s family had French and Irish

    roots—they had immigrated from Skey Townland in County

    Tyrone, Ireland, in 1875—and Kurt inherited his angular chin

    from this side. From the Fradenburgs on his mother’s side—

    who were German, Irish, and English—Kurt gained rosy cheeks

    and blond locks. But by far his most striking feature was his

    remarkable azure eyes; even nurses in the hospital commented

    on their beauty.

    It was the sixties, with a war raging in Vietnam, but apart

    from the occasional news dispatch, Aberdeen felt more like

    1950s America. The day Kurt was born, the Aberdeen Daily

    World contrasted the big news of an American victory at Quang

    Ngai City with local reports on the size of the timber

    harvest and ads from JCPenney, where a Washington’s Birthday

    sale featured 2.48 flannel shirts. Who’s Afraid of Virginia

    Woolf? had received thirteen Academy Award nominations in LosAngeles that afternoon, but the Aberdeen drive-in was playing

    Girls on the Beach.

    Kurt’s 21-year-old father, Don, worked at the Chevron

    station in Hoquiam as a mechanic. Don was handsome and

    athletic, but with his flattop haircut and Buddy Holly–style

    glasses he had a geekiness about him. Kurt’s 19-year-old

    mother, Wendy, in contrast, was a classic beauty who looked

    and dressed a bit like Marcia Brady. They had met in high

    school, where Wendy had the nickname “Breeze.” The previous

    June, just weeks after her high-school graduation, Wendy had

    become pregnant. Don borrowed his father’s sedan and

    invented an excuse so the two could travel to Idaho and marry

    without parental consent.

    At the time of Kurt’s birth the young couple were living

    in a tiny house in the backyard of another home in Hoquiam.

    Don worked long hours at the service station while Wendy took

    care of the baby. Kurt slept in a white wicker bassinet with

    a bright yellow bow on top. Money was tight, but a few weeks

    after the birth they managed to scrape up enough to leave the

    tiny house and move into a larger one at 2830 Aberdeen

    Avenue. “The rent,” remembered Don, “was only an extra

    five dollars a month, but in those times, five dollars was a

    lot of money.”

    If there was a portent of trouble in the household, it

    began over finances. Though Don had been appointed “lead

    man” at the Chevron in early 1968, his salary was only

    6,000 a year. Most of their neighbors and friends worked in

    the timber industry, where jobs were physically demanding—

    one study described the profession as “more deadly than

    war”—but with higher wages in return. The Cobains struggled

    to stay within a budget, yet when it came to Kurt, they made

    sure he was well-dressed, and even sprang for professional

    photos. In one series of pictures from this era, Kurt is

    wearing a white dress shirt, black tie, and a gray suit,looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy—he still has his baby

    fat and chubby, full cheeks. In another, he wears a matchingblue vest and suit top, and a hat more suited to Phillip

    Marlowe than a year-and-a-half-old boy.

    In May 1968, when Kurt was fifteen months old, Wendy’s

    fourteen-year-old sister Mari wrote a paper about her nephew

    for her home economics class. “His mother takes care of him

    most of the time,” Mari wrote. “[She] shows her affection

    by holding him, giving him praise when he deserves it, and by

    taking part in many of his activities. He responds to his

    father in that when he sees his father, he smiles, and he

    likes his dad to hold him. He makes his wants known by

    yelling loudly at first, then crying if the first technique

    doesn’t work.” Mari recorded that his favorite game was

    peekaboo, his first tooth appeared at eight months, and his

    first dozen words were, “coco, momma, dadda, ball, toast,bye-bye, hi, baby, me, love, hot dog, and kittie.”

    Mari listed his favorite toys as a harmonica, a drum, a

    basketball, cars, trucks, blocks, a pounding block, a toy TV,and a telephone. Of Kurt’s daily routine, she wrote that

    “his reaction to sleep is that he cries when he is laid down

    to do so. He is so interested in the family that he doesn’t

    want to leave them.” His aunt concluded: “He is a happy,smiling baby and his personality is developing as it is

    because of the attention and love he is receiving.”

    Wendy was a mindful mother, reading books on learning,buying flash cards, and, aided by her brothers and sisters,making sure Kurt got proper care. The entire extended family

    joined in the celebration of this child, and Kurt flourished

    with the attention. “I can’t even put into words the joy

    and the life that Kurt brought into our family,” remembered

    Mari. “He was this little human being who was so bubbly. He

    had charisma even as a baby. He was funny, and he was

    bright.” Kurt was smart enough that when his aunt couldn’t

    figure out how to lower his crib, the one-and-a-half-year-old

    simply did it himself. Wendy was so enamored of her son’s

    antics, she rented a Super-8 camera and shot movies of him—

    an expense the family could ill afford. One film shows ahappy, smiling little boy cutting his second-year birthday

    cake and looking like the center of his parents’ universe.

    By his second Christmas, Kurt was already showing an

    interest in music. The Fradenburgs were a musical family—

    Wendy’s older brother Chuck was in a band called the

    Beachcombers; Mari played guitar; and great-uncle Delbert had

    a career as an Irish tenor, even appearing in the movie The

    King of Jazz. When the Cobains visited Cosmopolis, Kurt was

    fascinated by the family jam sessions. His aunts and uncles

    recorded him singing the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” Arlo

    Guthrie’s “Motorcycle Song,” and the theme to “The

    Monkees” television show. Kurt enjoyed making up his own

    lyrics, even as a toddler. When he was four, upon his return

    from a trip to the park with Mari, he sat down at the piano

    and crafted a crude song about their adventure. “We went to

    the park, we got candy,” went the lyrics. “I was just

    amazed,” recalled Mari. “I should have plugged in the tape

    recorder—it was probably his first song.”

    Not long after he turned two, Kurt created an imaginary

    friend he called Boddah. His parents eventually became

    concerned about his attachment to this phantom pal, so when

    an uncle was sent to Vietnam, Kurt was told that Boddah too

    had been drafted. But Kurt didn’t completely buy this story.

    When he was three, he was playing with his aunt’s tape

    machine, which had been set to “echo.” Kurt heard the echo

    and asked, “Is that voice talking to me? Boddah? Boddah?”

    In September 1969, when Kurt was two and a half, Don and

    Wendy bought their first home at 1210 East First Street in

    Aberdeen. It was a two-story, 1,000-square-foot house with a

    yard and a garage. They paid 7,950 for it. The 1923-era

    dwelling was located in a neighborhood occasionally given the

    derogatory nickname “felony flats.” North of the Cobain

    house was the Wishkah River, which frequently flooded, and to

    the southeast was the wooded bluff locals called “Think of

    Me Hill”—at the turn of the century it had sported an

    advertisement for Think of Me cigars.It was a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood,which Kurt would later describe as “white trash posing as

    middle-class.” The first floor contained the living room,dining room, kitchen, and Wendy and Don’s bedroom. The

    upstairs had three rooms: a small playroom and two bedrooms,one of which became Kurt’s. The other was planned for

    Kurt’s sibling—that month Wendy had learned she was

    pregnant again.

    Kurt was three when his sister Kimberly was born. She

    looked, even as an infant, remarkably like her brother, with

    the same mesmerizing blue eyes and light blond hair. When

    Kimberly was brought home from the hospital, Kurt insisted on

    carrying her into the house. “He loved her so much,”

    remembered his father. “And at first they were darling

    together.” Their three-year age difference was ideal because

    her care became one of his main topics of conversation. This

    marked the beginning of a personality trait that would stick

    with Kurt for the rest of his life—he was sensitive to the

    needs and pains of others, at times overly so.

    Having two children changed the dynamic of the Cobain

    household, and what little leisure time they had was taken up

    by visits with family or Don’s interest in intramural

    sports. Don was in a basketball league in winter and played

    on a baseball team in summer, and much of their social life

    involved going to games or post-game events. Through sports,the Cobains met and befriended Rod and Dres Herling. “They

    were good family people, and they did lots of things with

    their kids,” Rod Herling recalled. Compared with other

    Americans going through the sixties, they were also notably

    square: At the time no one in their social circle smoked pot,and Don and Wendy rarely drank.

    One summer evening the Herlings were at the Cobains’

    playing cards, when Don came into the living room and

    announced, “I have a rat.” Rats were common in Aberdeen

    because of the low elevation and abundance of water. Don

    began to fashion a crude spear by attaching a butcher knife

    to a broom handle. This drew the interest of five-year-oldKurt, who followed his father to the garage, where the rodent

    was in a trash can. Don told Kurt to stand back, but this was

    impossible for such a curious child and the boy kept inching

    closer until he was holding his father’s pant leg. The plan

    was for Rod Herling to lift the lid of the can, whereupon Don

    would use his spear to stab the rat. Herling lifted, Don

    threw the broomstick but missed the rat, and the spear stuck

    into the floor. As Don tried in vain to pull the broom out,the rat—at a calm and bemused pace—crawled up the

    broomstick, scurried over Don’s shoulder and down to the

    ground, and ran over Kurt’s feet as he exited the garage. It

    happened in a split second, but the combination of the look

    on Don’s face and the size of Kurt’s eyes made everyone

    howl with laughter. They laughed for hours over this

    incident, and it would become a piece of family folklore:

    “Hey, do you remember that time Dad tried to spear the

    rat?” No one laughed harder than Kurt, but as a five-year-

    old he laughed at everything. It was a beautiful laugh, like

    the sound of a baby being tickled, and it was a constant

    refrain.

    In September 1972, Kurt began kindergarten at Robert Gray

    Elementary, three blocks north of his house. Wendy walked him

    to school the first day, but after that he was on his own;

    the neighborhood around First Street had become his turf. He

    was well-known to his teachers as a precocious, inquisitive

    pupil with a Snoopy lunchbox. On his report card that year

    his teacher wrote “real good student.” He was not shy. When

    a bear cub was brought in for show-and-tell, Kurt was one of

    the only kids who posed with it for photos.

    The subject he excelled in the most was art. At the age of

    five it was already clear he had exceptional artistic skills:

    He was creating paintings that looked realistic. Tony

    Hirschman met Kurt in kindergarten and was impressed by his

    classmate’s ability: “He could draw anything. Once we were

    looking at pictures of werewolves, and he drew one that

    looked just like the photo.” A series Kurt did that yeardepicted Aqua-man, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, Mickey

    Mouse, and Pluto. Every holiday or birthday his family gave

    him supplies, and his room began to take on the appearance of

    an art studio.

    Kurt was encouraged in art by his paternal grandmother,Iris Cobain. She was a collector of Norman Rockwell

    memorabilia in the form of Franklin Mint plates with Saturday

    Evening Post illustrations on them. She herself recreated

    many of Rockwell’s images in needlepoint—and his most

    famous painting, “Freedom From Want,” showing the

    quintessential American Thanksgiving dinner, hung on the wall

    of her doublewide trailer in Montesano. Iris even convinced

    Kurt to join her in a favorite craft: using toothpicks to

    carve crude reproductions of Rockwell’s images onto the tops

    of freshly picked fungi. When these oversized mushrooms would

    dry, the toothpick scratchings would remain, like backwoods

    scrimshaw.

    Iris’s husband and Kurt’s grandfather, Leland Cobain,wasn’t himself artistic—he had driven an asphalt roller,which had cost him much of his hearing—but he did teach Kurt

    woodworking. Leland was a gruff and crusty character, and

    when his grandson showed off a picture of Mickey Mouse that

    he’d drawn (Kurt loved Disney characters), Leland accused

    him of tracing it. “I did not,” Kurt said. “You did,too,” Leland responded. Leland gave Kurt a new piece of

    paper and a pencil and challenged him: “Here, you draw me

    another one and show me how you did it.” The six-year-old

    sat down, and without a model drew a near-perfect

    illustration of Donald Duck and another of Goofy. He looked

    up from the paper with a huge grin, just as pleased at

    showing up his grandfather as in creating his beloved duck.

    His creativity increasingly extended to music. Though he

    never took formal piano lessons, he could pound out a simple

    melody by ear. “Even when he was a little kid,” remembered

    his sister Kim, “he could sit down and just play something

    he’d heard on the radio. He was able to artistically put

    whatever he thought onto paper or into music.” To encouragehim, Don and Wendy bought a Mickey Mouse drum set, which Kurt

    vigorously pounded every day after school. Though he loved

    the plastic drums, he liked the real drums at his Uncle

    Chuck’s house better, since he could make more noise with

    them. He also enjoyed strapping on Aunt Mari’s guitar, even

    though it was so heavy it made his knees buckle. He’d strum

    it while inventing songs. That year he bought his first

    record, a syrupy single by Terry Jacks called “Seasons in

    the Sun.”

    He also loved looking through his aunts’ and uncles’

    albums. One time, when he was six, he visited Aunt Mari and

    was digging through her record collection, looking for a

    Beatles album—they were one of his favorites. Kurt suddenly

    cried out and ran toward his aunt in a panic. He was holding

    a copy of the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, with the

    infamous “Butcher cover,” with artwork showing the band

    with pieces of meat on them. “It made me realize how

    impressionable he was at that age,” Mari remembered.

    He was also sensitive to the increasing strain he saw

    between his parents. For the first few years of Kurt’s life,there wasn’t much fighting in the home, but there also

    hadn’t been evidence of a great love affair. Like many

    couples who married young, Don and Wendy were two people

    overwhelmed by circumstance. Their children became the center

    of their lives, and what little romance had existed in the

    short time they’d had prior to their kids was hard to

    rekindle. The financial pressures daunted Don; Wendy was

    consumed by caring for two children. They began to argue more

    and to yell at each other in front of the children. “You

    have no idea how hard I work,” Don screamed at Wendy, who

    echoed her husband’s complaint.

    Still, for Kurt, there was much joy in his early childhood.

    In the summer they’d vacation at a Fradenburg family cabin

    at Washaway Beach on the Washington coast. In winter they’d

    go sledding. It rarely snowed in Aberdeen, so they would

    drive east into the small hills past the logging town of

    Porter, and to Fuzzy Top Mountain. Their sledding tripsalways followed a similar pattern: They’d park, pull out a

    toboggan for Don and Wendy, a silver saucer for Kim, and

    Kurt’s Flexible Flyer, and prepare to slide down the hill.

    Kurt would grab his sled, get a running start, and hurl

    himself down the hill the way an athlete would commence the

    long jump. Once he reached the bottom he would wave at his

    parents, the signal he had survived the trip. The rest of the

    family would follow, and they would walk back up the hill

    together. They’d repeat the cycle again and again for hours,until darkness fell or Kurt dropped from exhaustion. As they

    headed toward the car Kurt would make them promise to return

    the next weekend. Later, Kurt would recall these times as the

    fondest memories of his youth.

    When Kurt was six, the family went to a downtown photo

    studio and sat for a formal Christmas portrait. In the photo,Wendy sits in the center of the frame with a spotlight behind

    her head creating a halo; she rests on an oversized, wooden

    high-backed chair, wearing a long white-and-pink-striped

    Victorian dress with ruffled cuffs. Around her neck is a

    black choker, and her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair

    is parted in the middle, not a single strand out of place.

    With her perfect posture and the manner in which her wrists

    hang over the arms of the chair, she looks like a queen.

    Three-year-old Kim sits on her mom’s lap. Dressed in a

    long, white dress with black patent leather shoes, she

    appears as a miniature version of her mother. She is staring

    directly at the camera and has the appearance of a child who

    might start crying at any moment.

    Don stands behind the chair, close enough to be in the

    picture but distracted. His shoulders are slightly stooped

    and he wears more of a bemused look than a legitimate smile.

    He is wearing a light purple long-sleeved shirt with a four-

    inch collar and a gray vest—it’s an outfit that one could

    imagine Steve Martin or Dan Aykroyd donning for their “wild

    and crazy guys” skit on “Saturday Night Live.” He has a

    far-off look in his eyes, as if he is wondering just why hehas been dragged down to the photo studio when he could be

    playing ball.

    Kurt stands off to the left, in front of his father, a foot

    or two away from the chair. He’s wearing two-tone, striped

    blue pants with a matching vest and a fire-truck red long-

    sleeved shirt a bit too big for him, the sleeves partially

    covering his hands. As the true entertainer in the family, he

    is not only smiling, but he’s laughing. He looks notably

    happy—a little boy having fun on a Saturday with his family.

    It is a remarkably good-looking family, and the outward

    appearances suggest an all-American pedigree—clean hair,white teeth, and well-pressed clothes so stylized they could

    have been ripped out of an early seventies Sears catalog. Yet

    a closer look reveals a dynamic that even to the photographer

    must have been painfully obvious: It’s a picture of a

    family, but not a picture of a marriage. Don and Wendy

    aren’t touching, and there is no suggestion of affection

    between them; it is as if they’re not even in the same

    frame. With Kurt standing in front of Don, and Kim sitting on

    Wendy’s lap, one could easily take a pair of scissors and

    sever the photograph—and the family—down the middle. You’d

    be left with two separate families, each with one adult and

    one child, each gender specific—the Victorian dresses on one

    side, and the boys with wide collars on the other.Chapter 2

    I HATE MOM, I HATE DAD

    ABERDEEN, WASHINGTON

    JANUARY 1974–JUNE 1979

    I hate Mom, I hate Dad.

    —From a poem on Kurt’s bedroom wall.

    The stress on the family increased in 1974, when Don Cobain

    decided to change jobs and enter the timber industry. Don

    wasn’t a large man, and he didn’t have much interest in

    cutting down 200-foot trees, so he took an office position at

    Mayr Brothers. He knew eventually he could make more money in

    timber than working at the service station; unfortunately,his first job was entry level, paying 4.10 an hour, even

    less than he’d made as a mechanic. He picked up extra money

    doing inventory at the mill on weekends, and he’d frequently

    take Kurt with him. “He’d ride his little bike around the

    yard,” Don recalled. Kurt later would mock his father’s

    job, and claim it was hell to accompany Don to work, but at

    the time he reveled in being included. Though he spent all of

    his adult life trying to argue otherwise, acknowledgment and

    attention from his father was critically important for Kurt,and he desired more of it, not less. He would later admit

    that his early years within his nuclear family were joyful

    memories. “I had a really good childhood,” he told Spin

    magazine in 1992, but not without adding, “up until I was

    nine.”

    Don and Wendy frequently had to borrow money to pay their

    bills, one of the main sources of their arguments. Leland and

    Iris kept a 20 bill in their kitchen—they joked that it was

    a bouncing twenty because each month they’d loan it to theirson for groceries, and immediately after repaying them Don

    would borrow it again. “He’d go all around, pay all his

    bills, and then he’d come to our house,” remembered Leland.

    “He’d pay us our 20, and then he’d say, ‘Hell, I done

    pretty good this week. I got 35 or 40 cents left.’ ”

    Leland, who never liked Wendy because he perceived her as

    acting “better than the Cobains,” remembered the young

    family would then head off to the Blue Beacon Drive-In on

    Boone Street to spend the change on hamburgers. Though Don

    got along well with his father-in-law, Charles Fradenburg—

    who drove a road grader for the county—Leland and Wendy

    never connected.

    Tension between the two came to a head when Leland helped

    remodel the house on First Street. He built Don and Wendy a

    fake fire-place in the living room and put in new

    countertops, but in the process he and Wendy battled

    increasingly. Leland finally told his son to make Wendy stop

    nagging him or he’d exit and leave the job half finished.

    “It was the first time I ever heard Donnie talk back to

    her,” Leland recalled. “She was bitching about this and

    that, and finally he said, ‘Keep your god damn mouth shut or

    he’ll take his tools and go home.’ And she shut her mouth

    for once.”

    Like his father before him, Don was strict with children.

    One of Wendy’s complaints was that her husband expected the

    kids to always behave—an impossible standard—and required

    Kurt to act like a “little adult.” At times, like all

    children, Kurt was a terror. Most of his acting-out incidents

    were minor at the time—he’d write on the walls or slam the

    door or tease his sister. These behaviors frequently elicited

    a spanking, but Don’s more common—and almost daily—

    physical punishment was to take two fingers and thump Kurt on

    the temple or the chest. It only hurt a little, but the

    psychological damage was deep—it made his son fear greater

    physical harm and it served to reinforce Don’s dominance.

    Kurt began to retreat into the closet in his room. The kindof enclosed, confined spaces that would give others panic

    attacks were the very places he sought out as sanctuary.

    And there were things worth hiding from: Both parents could

    be sarcastic and mocking. When Kurt was immature enough to

    believe them, Don and Wendy warned him he’d get a lump of

    coal for Christmas if he wasn’t good, particularly if he

    fought with his sister. As a prank, they left him pieces of

    coal in his stocking. “It was just a joke,” Don remembered.

    “We did it every year. He got presents and all that— we

    never didn’t give him presents.” The humor, however, was

    lost on Kurt, at least as he told the story later in life. He

    claimed one year he had been promised a Starsky and Hutch toy

    gun, a gift that never came. Instead, he maintained he only

    received a lump of neatly wrapped coal. Kurt’s telling was

    an exaggeration, but in his inner imagination, he had begun

    to put his own spin on the family.

    Occasionally, Kim and Kurt got along, and at times they’d

    play together. Though Kim never had the artistic talent of

    Kurt—and she forever felt the rivalry of having the rest of

    the family pay him so much attention—she developed a skill

    for imitating voices. She was particularly good at Mickey

    Mouse and Donald Duck, and these performances amused Kurt to

    no end. Her vocal abilities even gave birth to a new fantasy

    for Wendy. “It was my mom’s big dream,” declared Kim,“that Kurt and I would end up at Disneyland, both of us

    working there, with him drawing and me doing voices.”

    March of 1975 was filled with much joy for eight-year-old

    Kurt: He finally visited Disneyland, and he took his first

    airplane ride. Leland had retired in 1974, and he and Iris

    wintered that year in Arizona. Don and Wendy drove Kurt to

    Seattle, put him on a plane, and Leland met the boy in Yuma,before they headed for Southern California. In a mad two-day

    period, they visited Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, and

    Universal Studios. Kurt was enthralled and insisted they go

    through Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride three

    times. At Knotts Berry Farm, he braved the giant rollercoaster, but when he departed the ride, his face was white as

    a ghost. When Leland said, “Had enough?” the color rushed

    back and he rode the coaster yet again. On the tour of

    Universal Studios, Kurt leaned out of the train in front of

    the Jaws shark, spurring a guard to yell at his grandparents,“You better pull that little towheaded boy back or his head

    will get bitten off.” Kurt defied the order and snapped a

    picture of the mouth of the shark as it came inches away from

    his camera. Later that day, driving on the freeway, Kurt fell

    asleep in the backseat, which was the only reason his

    grandparents were able to sneak by Magic Mountain without him

    insisting they visit that as well.

    Of all his relatives, Kurt was closest to his grandmother

    Iris; they shared both an interest in art and, at times, a

    certain sadness. “They adored each other,” remembered Kim.

    “I think he intuitively knew the hell she’d been through.”

    Both Iris and Leland had difficult upbringings, each scarred

    by poverty and the early deaths of their fathers on the job.

    Iris’s father had been killed by poisonous fumes at the

    Rayonier Pulp Mill; Leland’s dad, who was a county sheriff,died when his gun accidentally discharged. Leland was fifteen

    at the time of his father’s death. He joined the Marines and

    was sent to Guadalcanal, but after he beat up an officer he

    was committed to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

    He married Iris after his discharge, but struggled with drink

    and anger, especially after their third son, Michael, was

    born retarded and died in an institution at age six. “On

    Friday night he’d get paid and come home drunk,” recalled

    Don. “He used to beat my mom. He’d beat me. He beat my

    grandma, and he beat Grandma’s boyfriend. But that’s the

    way it was in those days.” By the time of Kurt’s youth,Leland had softened and his most serious weapon was foul

    language.

    When Leland and Iris weren’t available, one of the various

    Fradenburg siblings would baby-sit—three of Kurt’s aunts

    lived within four blocks. Don’s younger brother Gary was

    also given child-care duties a few times, and one occasionmarked Kurt’s first trip back to the hospital. “I broke his

    right arm,” Gary recalled. “I was on my back and he was on

    my feet, and I was shooting him up in the air with my feet.”

    Kurt was a very active child, and with all the running around

    he did, relatives were surprised he didn’t break more limbs.

    Kurt’s broken arm healed and the injury didn’t seem to

    stop him from playing sports. Don encouraged his son to play

    baseball almost as soon as he could walk, and provided him

    with all the balls, bats, and mitts that a young boy needed.

    As a toddler, Kurt found the bats more useful as percussion

    instruments, but eventually he began to participate in

    athletics, beginning in the neighborhood, and then in

    organized play. At seven, he was on his first Little League

    team. His dad was the coach. “He wasn’t the best player on

    the team, but he wasn’t bad,” Gary Cobain recalled. “He

    didn’t really want to play, I thought, mentally. I think he

    did it because of his dad.”

    Baseball was an example of Kurt seeking Don’s approval.

    “Kurt and my dad got along well when he was young,”

    remembered Kim, “but Kurt wasn’t anything like how Dad was

    planning on Kurt turning out.”

    Both Don and Wendy were facing the conflict between the

    idealized child and the real child. Since both had unmet

    needs left from their own early years, Kurt’s birth brought

    out all their personal expectations. Don wanted the

    fatherson relationship he never had with Leland, and he

    thought participating in sports together would provide that

    bond. And though Kurt liked sports, particularly when his

    father wasn’t around, he intuitively connected his father’s

    love with this activity, something that would mark him for

    life. His reaction was to participate, but to do so under

    protest.

    When Kurt was in second grade, his parents and teacher

    decided his endless energy might have a larger medical root.

    Kurt’s pediatrician was consulted and Red Dye Number Two was

    removed from his diet. When there was no improvement, his

    parents limited Kurt’s sugar in-take. Finally, his doctorprescribed Ritalin, which Kurt took for a period of three

    months. “He was hyperactive,” Kim recalled. “He was

    bouncing off the walls, particularly if you got any sugar in

    him.”

    Other relatives suggest Kurt may have suffered from

    attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Mari

    remembered visiting the Cobain house and finding Kurt running

    around the neighborhood, banging on a marching drum and

    yelling at the top of his lungs. Mari went inside and asked

    her sister, “Just what on earth is he doing?” “I don’t

    know,” was Wendy’s reply. “I don’t know what to do to get

    him to stop—I’ve tried everything.” At the time, Wendy

    presumed it was Kurt’s way of burning off his excess of

    boyish energy.

    The decision to give Kurt Ritalin was, even in 1974, a

    controversial one, with some scientists arguing it creates a

    Pavlovian response in children and increases the likelihood

    of addictive behavior later in life; others believe that if

    children aren’t treated for hyperactivity, they may later

    self-medicate with illegal drugs. Each member of the Cobain

    family had a different opinion on Kurt’s diagnosis and

    whether the short course of treatment helped or harmed him,but Kurt’s own opinion, as he later told Courtney Love, was

    that the drug was significant. Love, who herself was

    prescribed Ritalin as a child, said the two discussed this

    issue frequently. “When you’re a kid and you get this drug

    that makes you feel that feeling, where else are you going to

    turn when you’re an adult?” Love asked. “It was euphoric

    when you were a child—isn’t that memory going to stick with

    you?”

    In February 1976, just a week after Kurt’s ninth birthday,Wendy informed Don she wanted a divorce. She announced this

    one weekday night and stormed off in her Camaro, leaving Don

    to do the explaining to the children, something at which he

    didn’t excel. Though Don and Wendy’s marital conflicts had

    increased during the last half of 1974, her declaration tookDon by surprise, as it did the rest of the family. Don went

    into a state of denial and moved inward, a behavior that

    would be mirrored years later by his son in times of crisis.

    Wendy had always been a strong personality and prone to

    occasional bouts of rage, yet Don was shocked she wanted to

    break up the family unit. Her main complaint was that he was

    unceasingly involved in sports—he was a referee and a coach,in addition to playing on a couple of teams. “In my mind, I

    didn’t believe it was going to happen,” Don recalled.

    “Divorce wasn’t so common then. I didn’t want it to

    happen, either. She just wanted out.”

    On March 1 it was Don who moved out and took a room in

    Hoquiam. He expected Wendy’s anger would subside and their

    marriage would survive, so he rented by the week. To Don, the

    family represented a huge part of his identity, and his role

    as a dad marked one of the first times in his life he felt

    needed. “He was crushed by the idea of divorce,” remembered

    Stan Targus, Don’s best friend. The split was complicated

    because Wendy’s family adored Don, particularly her sister

    Janis and husband Clark, who lived near the Cobains. A few of

    Wendy’s siblings quietly wondered how she would survive

    financially without Don.

    On March 29 Don was served with a summons and a “Petition

    for Dissolution of Marriage.” A slew of legal documents

    would follow; Don would frequently fail to respond, hoping

    against hope Wendy would change her mind. On July 9 he was

    held in default for not responding to Wendy’s petitions. On

    that same day, a final settlement was granted awarding the

    house to Wendy but giving Don a lien of 6,500, due whenever

    the home was sold, Wendy remarried, or Kim turned eighteen.

    Don was granted his 1965 Ford half-ton pickup truck; Wendy

    was allowed to keep the family 1968 Camaro.

    Custody of the children was awarded to Wendy, but Don was

    charged with paying 150 a month per child in support, plus

    their medical and dental expenses, and given “reasonable

    visitation” rights. This ......