Love & Death Read Online Free Page A

least ten different locations. Donnie Collier, however, doesn’t give much credence to the murder theories. “When I knew him, he certainly didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would end up killing himself, but who knows what happened after he left here?” He shrugs. “Nothing would surprise me about that world, but I doubt if he was murdered. I guess he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
    Autumn, the young mother, weighs in: “Who wouldn’t want to kill themselves growing up here? It rains all the time and there’s nothing to do. He was a junkie, and junkies die here practically every day. It’s so common, the paper doesn’t even bother reporting it anymore.” She is holding the baby in her arms so that he doesn’t accidentally step on a dirty syringe, she says, but we don’t see any needles, just a lot of cigarette butts and a few beer bottles.
    Why do you stay here? we ask. Do you ever dream of escaping? She looks incredulous before responding meekly, “Where would I go?”
    As we emerge from under the bridge, the kids ask us if we want to meet Kurt’s daughter. This is an odd question, since Kurt’s daughter, Frances Bean, is eleven years old and is known to live in Los Angeles. “No, he has an illegitimate daughter by a local girl that he slept with when he still lived here,” Angela claims. “She looks just like him, and she used to say all the time that Kurt was her dad. Most people think it’s true.” Skeptical, we decline the invitation. After we drop them off downtown and shell out some cash so the kids can each “get a forty” (a 40-ounce can of beer, the drink of choice in these parts), we head to a local bar where we had been told we could hook up with the one person left in Aberdeen who might be able to shed light on how Kurt himself eventually escaped from this sad, seemingly dead-end existence.

    Six nights a week, each evening in a different location, Dave Reed organizes what appears to be the chief source of entertainment in these parts—karaoke. We arrive at Trio’s Bar, where the night’s program is already well under way. As lowbrow as the surroundings appear, one thing strikes us immediately: the people here are having fun, the first indication since we arrived that not everybody in this town considers it a redneck backwater devoid of culture. As an overweight, middle-aged woman finishes screeching an out-of-tune version of “Brown Eyed Girl,” the room erupts with cheers and encouragement.
    A fifty-something man sporting a purple tie-dyed T-shirt and a long beaded braid almost to his waist adjusts the mike. This is Dave Reed, the man who was said to have been like a father to Kurt Cobain during his latter teenage years. By 1984, when he was seventeen, Kurt had already experienced frequent and extended bouts of homelessness, living for months at a time in alleys, under bridges and in friends’ garages. His mother had taken up with a new boyfriend—a heavy-drinking, womanizing, hot-tempered longshoreman named Pat O’Connor, whom Kurt despised—and she didn’t want anything to do with her son. He tried living with his father for a few months, but things were no better than before.
    Kurt had recently made friends with a boy named Jesse Reed, the teenage son of evangelical Christians, and began a period of his life that he would not be anxious to discuss in later years. One would be hard-pressed to find any evidence in his soul-baring lyrics or soon-to-be frequent interviews about his Aberdeen youth that Kurt Cobain had found Jesus, become a born-again Christian and had even been baptized at the age of seventeen. Among the chroniclers dissecting the evolution of his drug use, few noted that he spent a portion of his teenage years lecturing friends about the evils of drugs as an abomination against Christ. It was during this period that Dave Reed and his wife, Ethel, invited Kurt to live with their family at the Reeds’ large home a few miles outside Aberdeen.
    “His family