Love & Death Read Online Free

journal after he saw the band play for the first time behind the local Thriftway. “I came to the promised land of a grocery store parking lot and I found my special purpose.”
    Twenty years later, Donnie Collier, nephew of Dale Crover, the Melvins’ drummer, takes a long hit off his pipe and proceeds to share his memories of Kurt, whom he met at the Melvins’ sessions. “There was a bunch of us who’d go over after school while the band rehearsed and just hang out. Sometimes he’d jam with the band, but he still wasn’t very good. They didn’t pay very much attention to him, I don’t think. But they were the coolest guys in town and anybody who hung around with them was automatically considered cool. At least we thought so. I think it’s about the only place where Kurt really fit in. You always read that Kurt was really quiet, but I never really noticed that. There was this nerdy guy, Scottie Karate, who would come over and hang out all the time. Kurt would sort of pick on him, just rag on him constantly; he could be a bit of a bully. He was pretty nice to me though, maybe because my uncle was in the band. He used to sell me pot. Kurt wasn’t a big-time dealer or anything, but he’d always have a little extra that he’d sell to make some money.”
    Collier has run out of the homegrown he has been using to fill the pipe that has been going around the room for the past twenty minutes. He offers to take the lot of us to “Kurt Cobain Bridge,” so nicknamed because Kurt immortalized it in the heartbreaking song “Something in the Way,” and would later claim to have slept under it when his mother threw him out of the house. Recent accounts, fueled by the denials of Kurt’s sister, Kim, have suggested the stories are a myth, that Kurt never really slept under the bridge at all, but that he had embellished the stories to make his youth seem more unhappy.
    “Nah, the only myth is that it was the Wishkah Bridge he slept under,” explains Collier, referring to the massive bridge you have to cross to enter Aberdeen. “You can’t sleep under that bridge. The tide would wash you away.”
    Instead, Collier takes us to a much smaller structure known as the North Aberdeen Bridge, and we climb down a path to the fetid Wishkah River through thorny brambles and bushes, to emerge on a spacious rocky slope sheltered by the span. “Here’s where he slept,” says Collier, his words occasionally drowned out by the rumbling of the cars overhead. “Just about every kid around Aberdeen ends up sleeping here at one time or another. Anybody who says Kurt didn’t sleep here doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s dry, it’s pretty warm and you can pitch a tent. Kurt would sometimes spend a couple of nights at a time under here whenever his mother threw him out. Then, if it got too damp or miserable, he’d end up sleeping on somebody’s floor. But it’s a good place to play guitar. The acoustics are perfect.” One of the girls, Angela, who’s been with us all afternoon, tells us she slept under this bridge for five days in 1995 after her own parents banished her from the house. “It was dry, but it wasn’t very warm,” she remembers. “I froze my ass off.” The remnants of a small cooking fire and an abandoned sleeping bag suggest that somebody has indeed been sleeping here in the not-too-distant past. But it isn’t the only sign of human activity. Judging by the graffiti adorning every available inch of the concrete columns, walls and ceiling, we aren’t the first to make the pilgrimage under this bridge in search of Kurt’s ghost by the banks of the Wishkah.
    “Everything I ever knew, I learned from Nirvana. Thank you Kurt!” scribbled one fan. “Kurt Lives!” another had spray-painted. Among the hundreds of sentiments paying homage to their musical hero, we immediately notice the same three-word graffito—“Who Killed Kurt?”—sprayed, painted and scrawled like a nagging whisper from at