Werewolf #2: Killing Kurt
Nirvana was a turning point for me.
I was introduced to the band by one of my uncles. He stayed with my mom and me for a few months when we lived in Winnipeg in 92. He lent me Metallica’s black album and Nirvana Nevermind. He also did witchcraft in front of me, which I thought was cool.
The whole back-to-school experience that year was one of my most memorable. Every Nirvana song rocked. Local radio stations played nothing but solid hits from other monumental albums like Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Use Your Illusion and No More Tears, along with epic performances by artists like Faith No More, Ugly Kid Joe and Weird Al. The songs are burned into my memory.
I wore a slicked back undercut with a dangly earring. It was grade 9. I’d just joined a new school because my first stepdad had kicked us out—with his boot. I’d also just cut my mullet off, and was feeling a bit self-conscious.
I’d only been there a week, but already there was a girl I really liked. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember she was pretty cute.
I was heartbroken over her. My mom had just told me that this would be my last day at the school. We were moving. Again.
I think that’s why I resonated with Nirvana so much. They were revolutionary, mirroring the revolving door my life had been going through that whole summer.
I listened to them on my Walkman as I tried working up the nerve to talk to that girl. But I couldn’t talk to her. Of course not. I’d barely spoken to her all week. I think she knew I liked her though. Her eyes were…
At the end of the day, I suddenly got a burst of courage. I wrote a note and slipped it in her locker.
Or at least I meant to.
Actually, I got spooked at the last moment and put it in her neighbor’s locker by accident. I stood there, horrified, imagining this other girl I didn’t even know, who had a horse face and buck teeth, opening a note that read: “I think I love you.”
The very next day I was driving west across the prairies with my mother. We were gonna move in with my grandparents in BC, she said. We listened to Nevermind over and over again that entire three day drive, my seat leaned back, my feet dangling out of the passenger window. My mom loved Nirvana, said it was groovy. For me, the music was the perfect way to zone out and forget the old life I was leaving behind.
The first night while we were driving across Saskatchewan, I told my mom to stop the car. The entire sky was northern lights—literally, the aurora borealis stretched from horizon to horizon in a 360 degree panorama across the Great Prairies as far as my eye could see. I will never forget it.
The second full day on that bone-straight highway, my mom drove late into the night. She looked absolutely exhausted, but she just kept on driving. When I could take no more of the endless miles, I asked her when we would stop. She pointed ahead, wearily saying, “We’re going to that motel.” She was pointing at the moon.
We did get to a hotel that night, and in the morning I bought Nirvana’s first album Bleach at a gas station. So that was the soundtrack of our drive into the Rockies.
I was initially terrified when I first saw those mountains. After growing up in the prairies, I’d never felt so closed in in my life. But little did I know that the mountains would also bring me so close to the epicentre of the musical revolution expanding the minds of youth the world over.
That was the coolest time for music, man. A friend from my new school gave me a mixtape with Slayer and Pearl Jam on it. We’d cut class to watch Alice in Chains and Jane’s Addiction on MuchMusic. The next year I saw Tool’s Prison Sex for the first time with a bunch of stoners at a house party. I was the only one sober, but I think I tripped the hardest.
The exact moment I heard about what happened to Kurt is burned into my memory. I was sitting in history class at yet another new school at the tail end of grade 10. I barely knew any of my classmates, but we all knew that the teacher was a first cousin of Sharon Tate, the most famous victim of the infamous Charles Manson murders.
A girl sitting behind me was speaking with her friend about Kurt’s suicide. I turned around and made her repeat herself. I was dumbfounded. Kurt? Dead?
She replied: “Don’t you know? He blew his own brains out weeks ago.”
I turned around in shock, put my head on my desk, and silently bawled my eyes out for the rest of the class. Nobody teased me. They knew. And the teacher knew even more so.
With only a few minutes remaining before the bell, the class stoner returned from blazing a joint out behind the school. When he was blamed for cutting class, he cut into the kids’ favorite dig at the teacher those days: referencing the Manson murders through that old Beatles song.
“Helter Skelter!” he sang, “Neener neener neener noo! Helter Skelter!”
The teacher’s change came upon him in an instant. One moment he was staring fiercely at the boy, outraged at the cruelty and disrespect he’d just endured. The next moment, the teacher was a massive, monstrous wolf tearing the kid’s heart out with a single lunging chomp.
I lifted my head when the bell rang, all cried out. Everybody was dead.
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