Cat Power (8 page)

As a child Chan witnessed firsthand what the life of a professional musician was like, and she hated it. The drug use, the drinking, the sleeping around, and the blinding lust for fame all repulsed her. She fantasized about rising above the
derelict rock ‘n’ roll circumstances of her birth and becoming a teacher or a vet, something “normal,” she had said. Yet the people who made the music Chan loved—Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Eartha Kitt, Buddy Holly—had her deepest respect and admiration. Perhaps some of them lived depraved lives, but they rose above it to create sounds that penetrated her soul and made her life more bearable. This juxtaposition between music as an instrument of good and music as a gateway to evil continues to be one of the most fundamental conflicts in her life.

As the relationship continued to deteriorate between Chan and her mom, Chan began to project onto Charlie all the qualities of an ideal parent with even more intensity than she had as a little girl. The more Chan and Myra fought, the more appealing Charlie became, and the more Chan felt compelled to stand up to her mother until the situation reached a crisis point. In 1984, when Chan was in sixth grade and her sister was in eighth grade, Myra packed up the girls' things and moved them to Atlanta to live with their father.

“Basically, how can I put this to be politically correct,” Lenny says, struggling. “She left home because her and my mother—oh, man, I don't know how to put this. She has a little bit of an alcohol problem. My mom would always give us a hard time. When she would drink she had a hard time getting along with anybody. Charlyn was just tired of it. So she went to Atlanta and moved in with Charlie. Miranda went with her. It was a breath of fresh air, a lot of independence. At that point Charlie's not used to being a father so he's like, ‘How do I do this?’ Charlyn had free rein to do whatever she wanted. She didn't like school that much. She just wanted to basically be free and live life.”

“Myra calls me up and says, ‘I'm bringing the kids down today,’” Charlie remembers. “She just brings them by and drops them off at my house. They don't know what's going on, it was the middle of the school
year. They stayed for about a month that time.” During this visit, Charlie registered the girls at school, but before long they were homesick for their life back in Greensboro, where Myra was still living. “Miranda came home from school one day and said, ‘Dad, can I call Mom?’” Charlie remembers. “I knew what they were going to talk about. She missed her friends up in North Carolina.”

Back in Greensboro, an uneasy peace between Chan and her mom was reached. Then, just as things seemed semi-settled, another family crisis occurred when Lenny was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. “In my case, Charlyn kind of had, I wouldn't say resentment, but they
Miranda and Chan
were teenagers when I was going through a lot of my physical trouble. They didn't know how to react to it. I was getting a lot of attention that might have been focused on them. I spent years in the hospital. I had about three or four surgeries.” Leamon concurs. “The time we had to spend in hospitals and going to treatment centers, probably not enough attention was given to the girls.”

Lenny is articulate, funny, and soft-spoken but direct. He says he feels lucky that in spite of his disability, which has put him in a wheelchair, he has been able to establish such a full life for himself. “I go to college, I drive, I work,” he says. “I've been fortunate enough to do all those things. Some people can't. I have a day job and I own two companies— a vending company, and I run the e-commerce portion of my father's business. I also work at the Wal-Mart here
in Atlanta
. I'm the switchboard operator. I handle all the inbound and outbound calls. If you heard some of the people, you'd be laughing all day.”

Lenny worries that, as used to living with his cerebral palsy as he is, the disease has kept him from being closer to Chan. “For whatever reason, we're kind of distant,” he says quietly. “I love my sister to death. Any time she calls me, I'm there.” Lenny is very aware of the fact that
Chan rarely mentions him in interviews. “I don't really know why she doesn't talk about me that much,” he says. “I don't think she'd be ashamed. She says that she knew I'd been through a lot and didn't want me to have to deal with any questions. The other side of that is that she travels a lot. She's taken Miranda's kids on the road a couple of times, taken them to stay with her in Miami. She maybe feels responsible if anything happened to me if she took me, too.”

Lenny's diagnosis was hard on the entire family, especially Myra. “My mom felt guilty,” Lenny remembers. “You're a mother and you have a child that's born not the way you want them to be born, have an early life you don't want them to have, you kind of bear that burden.” Myra assuaged her guilt by focusing all her energy on making Lenny well. Not only did Miranda and Chan get lost in the shadows, but they also had to pick up the slack around the house. “With my physical limitations, sometimes Miranda and Charlyn were left to care for me,” Lenny remembers. “When I was younger I didn't have a lot of independent skills. When they were left to care for me, it kind of threw Chan for a loop. She didn't know a lot of stuff to do. She didn't want to hurt me. She was very distant. That's one memory that I have. She always took care of me, but was always real hesitant. She didn't want to cause me harm.”

By the time she started ninth grade at Ragsdale High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, Chan was old enough to understand that Myra was not mentally well, which meant that she had even less respect for her mother's authority than your typical teenager. “My mom sent me to an acting workshop when I was in high school 'cause I wouldn't go to a therapist,” Chan has said. “She was convinced that we
the girls
needed a shrink when actually she needed a fucking doctor.” Chan was enraged by her mom's hypocritical expectation that she behave like a normal child when Myra was anything but a normal mother.

The entrenched conflict between Myra and Chan extended to Chan's body image and sense of herself as a young woman. The singer has always had a girly personality. Yet for years Chan wore her hair brutally short and shrouded herself in shapeless work clothes. As a child she thought of herself as ugly and made sure her appearance reflected that perception. “My mom told me that I was stupid and that I was ugly because I wasn't feminine,” Chan has remembered. “I felt so awkward being a girl. All the girls at school were mean and beautiful.” Lenny doesn't remember a lot of boys calling or stopping by. “If she had boys, she didn't have them around the house,” he recalls. “She was probably worried that Myra would have caused conflict. She didn't want to have any problems with my mom. She laid low.”

“I was, like, constantly suicidal and not having friends,” the singer has since said of her state of mind in early high school. By then Chan had also discovered what her parents liked about drinking and taking drugs. “I started taking LSD and smoking all the pot I could get and drinking any thing I could drink,” she has recalled. “I'd get high all day and all night.”

Things got so bad at Myra's that Chan was afraid to come home. She took to waiting out her mother's rages elsewhere. “My mom always had dogs,” the singer has said. “I had my last dog when I was fourteen or fifteen, and we had a real connection. I would come home from school and there was so much shit going on I would get in the doghouse with him. It felt like he was my only friend.” When Chan's relationship with her mother once again became unbearable, the singer turned to her father to rescue her. And unlike previous times when Chan moved out of her mom's house, this time she never came back. “Her mom called and she put Chan on the line,” Charlie remembers. “She said, ‘Dad, can I come live with you?’” She didn't speak to her mother again for more than six years.