Bruises on the Fruit

Consider this article as both a follow up to my review of Soaked In Bleach, and as a segue piece into tonight's Fear Of A Dork Planet podcast, during which Erik and I plan to discuss the songs that shaped our misspent youths and the film Soaked In Bleach. Don't get me wrong; I love our podcast. I look forward to the hour that Erik and I spend blathering about movies and music and books and socks and Godzilla films. But I am also the first to admit that I am not good at public speaking. By nature, I am an extreme introvert. There is a neverending cyclone of words inside of me, but my open mouth cannot release them in a smooth breeze. I forget words. My thoughts become jumbled and snared. I forget the point I am trying to make, hence why I often pause and trail off and leave a great big gap of awkward silence for Erik to jump into and fill.

So I just want to expand a little bit on what we'll be discussing later tonight. Namely, Kurt Cobain.

On March 9th, 1994, I turned 24. On April 9th, 1994, I found out Kurt Cobain was dead. I was living in Bloomington, Indiana at the time and hated it. It was too humid, too landlocked and too filled with corn shucking yeehaws who voted Republican and praised Jesus with a glassy eyed devotion that scared the shit out of me. I was planning on moving soon. I just couldn't decide where. Either Sacramento, CA. or Seattle, WA. I missed the ocean. I needed the diversity of a coastal region.

It was a bright, warm Saturday morning and I was washing the breakfast dishes when the newspaper slammed down on the doormat. I had the door open, screen door letting in some fresh air. It was too early yet for cicadas and fireflies - the only two things I loved about the stifling Midwest summers - but that year, I had something else to look forward to. I was going to Lollapalooza in a few months time. I was beyond psyched. I was a GenXer. It wasn't a label I had sought out, or an accessory I chose to wear: by birth and by temperament, I was a GenXer. I had finally found my place in the world, even if I wasn't living in a geographical location that felt like home. The early 90s had justified my very existence. It was okay to be artistic, withdrawn and disdainful of a world that expected me to cast aside my childish colors and become another cog in the machine. The world had suddenly exploded into a Renaissance of music both angry and forlorn, of fashions cast off by generations before and patched back together into a bizarre poverty armor. My bedroom walls were plastered with posters of Alice In Chains, The Screaming Trees, Janes Addiction and, of course, Nirvana. I was high on the ever-shifting kaleidescopic hues of self deprecation and despair braiding themselves together to form a tremulous hope for our futures.

I dried my hands. Brought the newspaper in. Opened it to the headline. Saw Kurt Cobain's name and, in that first millisecond of recognition, thought to myself: "Oh god, what's he done now?" He'd only just recovered from an overdose in Rome. Had he done it again?

I didn't read the article. Not then. I folded the newspaper back up, sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. Does that sound like GenEx drama? I don't really care. I cried because I would never hear a new Nirvana song. I cried because I knew that the GenEx revolution was over, right then and there. We'd been a fragile movement at best, ready to crumple if dealt a strong enough blow to our sensitive shells that we'd dared to try and emerge from. We never thought that the blow would come from one of our own.

I wasn't mad at him for killing himself; I was mad at the darkness for finally gaining the needed foothold to overpower him. I knew what it was like to have tar black sorrow running through your veins and clouding all rational thought. I was sad because I knew things would never be the same. The feeling of community and belonging that we'd somehow miraculously managed to find was shattered. I would still go to Lollapalooza later that summer, but the pall was inescapable. We'd bought tickets to see Nirvana and instead ended up attending his wake. Once the concert ended, so did the summer of GenEx. We went home, shut the door, retreated into moody silence, turned the volume down on our stereos, drew disturbing stick figure pictures in pencils and wrote depressing poetry and took our Prozac.

Three Years Earlier...

Autumn, 1991 in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I was getting ready for work and, as usual, had both the TV and the radio on. It was mid morning and I'd been listening to The Howard Stern Show whilst getting dressed and fixing my hair. The sound on the TV was muted, but it was tuned to MTV and had a blank video cassette lodged in its guts on the off chance that a good video was shown for a change. I liked recording them and playing them back, and had stacks of them in my closet.

As I walked back and forth from my bedroom to the bathroom, trailing rejected outfits, cans of hair spray and tubes of lipstick, I caught sight of a not-immediately-recognizable video playing on the TV. I didn't recognize the band and had apparently missed the intro. Shot in muddy oranges and sepia tones, it looked to be taking place in a high school gymnasium. Tattooed cheerleaders whipped themselves into anarchic frenzies. Order was quickly abandoned, the seated audience quickly rejecting their confinement and stampeding down to the floor with the band. The band members themselves looked just like their audience. These weren't "Rock Stars" parading around, demanding homage and keeping their distance. These were just guys, gritty and average looking, unshaven and rumpled in their secondhand clothes. The sound remained off as I continued my pre-work preparations, but I kept glancing at the screen, intrigued, watching as the gym was trashed, destroyed and finally eaten by flames.

I came home that evening and turned MTV back on. I'd been unable to shake the images of that strange video from my head all day and determined to find out who the hell this band was and if their music sounded as good as the video looked. Within the hour, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was played. I turned up the volume and pressed RECORD. What I heard was galvanizing. I'd spent the last years of the 80s feeling increasingly frustrated with the soulless pop music that my age group accepted as "good" and sounded to me the way stale bubblegum tastes. This was different. This was new and angry and powerful and disgusted. It was a gigantic FUCK YOU to the very same channel that was playing it. I felt like one of the privileged few who got the joke. And before the song had ended, I knew and even said to myself: "THIS is going to be HUGE."

And it was, for better or worse.

October, 1994...

I was still in Indiana, but not for much longer. Preparations had already been made - I would be leaving for California before the winter could close in. Back to the state I'd been born in. I felt defeated. I wanted to be excited about starting all over again. I'd gone to Lollapalooza just a few months ago. Gotten drunk on the way up and listened to Skinny Puppy. Bought a T-shirt. Cheered The Beastie Boys. Spoke with strangers. But it was horribly sad. The previous Lollapalooza's had felt like life; the celebration of diversity. This one felt like a party that no one really wanted to attend and couldn't wait to leave. Smiles were sad, enthusiasm wilted. The people I went with drifted away soon after and I never saw or spoke to them again.

I woke up on the morning of October 9th to a rainstorm. It had been six months to the day since Cobain's suicide and I had just had the longest, most realistic dream of my life so far. In it, I had gone back in time. It had been the first week of April, 1994. I was still in Indiana, but knew I had to leave. I had to get to Seattle and find Kurt Cobain and somehow talk himself out of taking his own life. I started walking. There were distractions along the way - a gypsy caravan, a troupe of dancers, a fortune teller who invited me to stay with her in her mobile home where she hung crystals in every window and grew ferns - but I always returned to the path. I kept walking. I never forgot my destination.

I found him in the rehab he was currently drying out in. I walked into his empty room and patiently waited for him to return. He did, and stopped dead in the doorway when he saw me, a nervous look on his face at the sight of finding a stranger in his room. I stood and said something which only makes sense in dreams: "It's okay Kurt, I'm a Pisces too." He didn't answer, just closed the distance between us and hugged me. We held each other in silence for a very long time.

When he finally let go, we were no longer standing in the antiseptic rehab facility, but in the greenhouse in Seattle. Rain beat against the windows. He looked so tired.

"You couldn't have saved me." he said. "No one could have."

I woke up and it was still raining, in the dream, inside me, in Seattle too most likely. I laid in bed for a long time that morning, knowing it hadn't been a dream. Knowing I would never forget it. I wrote it down later, every sight, every sound, every word. I told no one. Eventually I lost the journal I'd written it in, but it didn't matter. I remembered it all, mostly his last words to me. But it was just a dream. Dreams prove nothing and come from nowhere. But it was my dream, and I'd like to believe it was more than that. That maybe he really did just stop by as I slept to say goodbye. I kept it to myself for twenty two years, and now I'm giving it to you. Because as much as Kurt ended up hating fame, he still gave us his music and it made our cold worlds a little bit brighter for a short while.

And there's no way I could fit such a long-winded, pretentious, drama-stuffed GenExy schpiel into an hour long podcast without boring the shit out of everyone in the process, so I'm putting it here. And now I feel a little lighter.