Here We Are Now (14 page)

My feelings shifted for several reasons, but in part because of a public health official who worked for King County. This woman spent a considerable amount of time helping me understand the face of drug addiction in Seattle, where an estimated ten thousand opiate addicts live. Statistically Seattle, like many port cities, has always had a higher incidence of heroin use than other locales. Seattle is also on the West Coast corridor where the heroin trade is controlled by Mexican drug cartels. The cartels are adept at distribution, and as a result their brand of heroin, black tar, is cheap and plentiful. It also represents a type of heroin that leaves users—Kurt included—particularly susceptible to secondary infections from the many agents used to cut it. Though figures on the exact size of addict populations are difficult to compile, in the twenty years since Kurt's death, things have only gotten worse in Seattle, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2013, the DEA called heroin Seattle's “public enemy number one” due to an increased number of busts, ninety-eight local overdose deaths in 2012, and a rising crossover from prescription drug addicts switching to heroin because it's cheaper.

That health worker who filled me in on heroin addiction explained in great detail what using the drug entailed in terms of acquiring and injecting it and its long-term physical and health consequences. I needed to understand these things, to understand what the fabric of life meant for Kurt. There are an estimated ten thousand opiate addicts in Seattle. Those thousands of addicts have to figure out, every day, how to buy, use, and finance their addictions. Some of them steal stereos, but many support their addiction with jobs, as Kurt did. One of the professions where drug addiction is highest is among medical workers—nurses, doctors—because they work in high-stress environments and have easy access to drugs. These aren't down-and-out street people, but rather professionals with lives and families. Addiction crosses all economic barriers, genders, ethnicities, and neighborhoods.

I learned what Narcan was, why people around Kurt always had a supply of this overdose-prevention drug, and that Washington State is one of the few where it is legal to possess it without a prescription. In many other localities, just carrying Narcan, which has no use other than saving the life of someone overdosing, is illegal. I learned that while I'd always thought overdose was the biggest heroin health risk, there were many other deadly infections possible from the black tar heroin sold in Seattle. I learned that hepatitis C will soon kill more people than AIDS and cost our nation billions to treat. I later discovered that many of the friends Kurt used heroin with have hep C now, and that he almost certainly had it, too.

All of this opened my eyes, but the next stop in my heroin-education tour also had an effect. It was important that I research the physiological effects of overdose to understand two key pieces of Kurt's history: why he didn't die from numerous overdoses, and how he was able to take a large amount of heroin on his final day, and still take his own life with a gun. Needless to say, these were not assignments I thought would ever be in my appointment book when I was in journalism school. The second point was critical, however, because most of the conspiracy theories on Kurt's death—there is a industry of them with books, websites, and a supposed “nonfiction” film—begin with the concept that Kurt was so high there would be no way he could have taken his own life.

To believe there was a conspiracy, you would first have to believe that the two dozen Seattle police who filtered through this high-profile case were all—every one—somehow in cahoots in a cover-up when they concluded beyond any doubt that it was a suicide. I have since come to know that if someone wants to believe a conspiracy theory, though, the more factual data you present, the more their paranoia increases and their doubt grows. Like a Whac-A-Mole game at the arcade, no matter how much you beat them down, they spring back renewed. Presidential historian Robert Dallek was recently quoted in
The New York Times
suggesting that the reason so many can't accept that Oswald killed Kennedy is because to do so “shows people how random the world is, how uncertain. I think it pains them; they don't want to accept that fact.” With Kurt's fans, I think something else is at play, too: if they can blame someone else, anyone else, for Kurt's choices, then they can see him forever as an innocent victim, and that makes them feel less betrayed by his actions.

Yet to accept that the entire Seattle Police Department was in on a “fraud,” you must also accept that Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne was in on a “fraud,” too. Dr. Hartshorne was the King County medical examiner who worked on the investigation and conducted Kurt's autopsy. I knew who Dr. Hartshorne was—he'd been the longtime boyfriend of a person I worked with at
The Rocket.
He was a brilliant doctor who cared very much that Kurt's investigation be handled carefully and methodically. His words to me were that if anything whatsoever had been suspicious in the circumstances of Kurt's death, he would have “gone to the end of the earth to investigate it.” And Kurt's death, Dr. Hartshorne told me, was, without a doubt, suicide. He also leaked me documents and information related to Kurt's death as I was doing research because he wanted to make sure I knew every aspect of how it was investigated.

Dr. Hartshorne died a year after
Heavier Than Heaven
came out. He was a base jumper, leaping from the sides of mountains as a hobby when he wasn't excelling in his professional life. There is so much conspiracy hubbub on the Internet about Kurt's death that it disturbs me, but nothing offends me more than reading that Dr. Hartshorne's death is yet another part in “the chain” of the “massive cover-up.” Dr. Hartshorne had completed 501 successful base jumps and, apparently, we are to believe that on the 502nd jump the conspiracy rolled in, blew the wind in a new direction, and took his life.

But back before Dr. Hartshorne died, I questioned him several times about why the toxicology report showed a level of heroin that might have been fatal for others but didn't kill Kurt. He told me that longtime hard-core addicts can build a tolerance that creates a wide variance on what a lethal dose is, or how long it would take for such a dose to cause the onset of death. He also referred me to experts who were meeting in Seattle that next week for the annual international convention—imagine this—of public health workers trying to prevent heroin overdose.

I attended that convention. I asked many of the world's experts these questions, and they confirmed what Dr. Hartshorne had told me. One medical examiner told me there was a case of a man who had taken twice the heroin Kurt did and was still able to ride a bicycle in a laboratory. A dose of heroin that might kill a normal person wouldn't necessarily cause the death of a serious addict. This one particularly awful piece of science also helps explain many rock 'n' roll relapse deaths. Addicts gets clean for a long period of time, get the drug out of their system, and then relapse and use the same dose they previously used during their addiction—which is now fatal. But Kurt never got clean enough to lower his tolerance.

At that overdose convention, I saw a presentation that did more to change my attitudes and moral judgments about drug addiction, and the world's approach to solving it, than anything else. A man took the stage and began a ten-minute slide show that started with photos of babies, then Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, two kids at a prom. It went on to show graduation photos, weddings, and families. As I watched, I had no idea what linked these people of different ages, races, and genders. It froze on a photo of a beautiful young girl, and the man stepped to the front of the stage and spoke. “Every person you've just seen was loved, had a family, a father, a mother, friends, some had sons, some had daughters, and all had dreams,” he said. “And everyone you just saw was someone who died in the last calendar year of an overdose of heroin, including this last one, my daughter Megan. Most of these deaths could have been prevented if we stopped looking at drug use as a moral problem and began looking at ways we can save lives with public health decisions based on science.” By the time the man was done talking, there wasn't a dry eye in the house, even among these scientists.

The man was from Australia, and part of his presentation was how harm-reduction centers there—clinics where addicts can use drugs with medical supervision—had lowered overdose deaths, cut down on transmission rates of AIDS and hepatitis C, and given officials access to addicts so they could get treatment information into their hands, none of which is possible when someone is using in an alley. His daughter had, unfortunately, not been in a city where such a clinic was available.

“We are not going to save a single life until we stop our moral judgments about heroin addiction,” he said. “We need to start finding solutions based in science, based on policies that work, based on harm reduction, and not based on moralism.”

Kurt Cobain's photograph did not appear among those that passed by during the slide show—this was a few years after his death. Several, though, were of slight, blond-haired, blue-eyed boys. They looked almost exactly like him.

In many ways, Kurt Cobain was the last rock star. I don't mean that to diminish the numerous other great musical talents of the last twenty years, but there has not been any single performer in rock 'n' roll since with Kurt's combination of raw talent, charisma, ambition, and, most important, songwriting genius. There are dozens of bands that have produced classic albums, and Adele, for example, is a superstar of immense talent and voice. But Kurt had both a certain kind of rock-star bearing and a lyrical gift, and rarely are the two combined. Kurt also had a darkness that was a key element of his lyrical gift. Krist Novoselic once told me that to understand Kurt you had to understand that there was also something wrong with him, something abnormal, and it was one of the keys to his artistry. “The music was this dark, angry, beautiful, rageful thing,” Krist told me. “It had beauty, but there was something not quite right about it. It was kind of disturbed. That's what separated him from all the other people of the era—he was an artist, and they weren't.”

When Kurt died twenty years ago, I expected there would be many stars who would come along and vault onto the list of the all-time greats, maybe leapfrogging Kurt. For a variety of reasons, that hasn't happened, but that dearth also magnifies Kurt's place in history and plays a role in his legacy. His death, however tragic and ill-timed for a thousand reasons, was good timing in one particular way: he exists on a spot on the timeline of rock 'n' roll greats, just before the last punctuation point.

This may be in part because Kurt died at the start of so many major shifts in the music industry, just as technology was transforming the entire world. It's not just that Kurt Cobain overshadowed his peers and those who came after, but that the very playing field has changed. The last twenty years in the music industry, with the advent of MP3s, downloading, and streaming, have represented a rapid shift in the way people buy and experience music.
Nevermind
is one of the last rock records to end up in the collection of nearly everyone a certain age, bought as a cohesive whole—as an album, which now seems like a radical concept itself—in record stores. Today most music is sold electronically, it's sold as songs mostly, and total music album sales are now a fraction of what they were two decades ago. Only one rock band made it to the top-ten album sales chart for 2012, and that was Mumford and Sons, who sold 1.5 million copies of
Babel
—compare that to
Nevermind
, which sold ten million copies in just one watershed year.
Nevermind
's impact, both commercially and artistically, would have been significantly diminished if fans had been able to purchase a few tracks on iTunes and skip buying the entire album. Genres of music are fractionalized now to the degree that the same rock record blasting from every radio station seems an impossibility. Had his career launched ten years later, Kurt's kind of fame, which combined celebrity and artistry, probably wouldn't have happened. In today's YouTube era, when sudden fame comes as much for being outrageous as it does for the quality of the songs a musician crafts, Kurt would have been adrift.

Kurt was not of these modern times. Most of Kurt's own music collection was on cassette tapes, some of them recorded off the radio after waiting for the perfect song to come on, then trying to hit the record button at just the right moment. He spent months of his life in his crappy little apartment watching hours of MTV, trying to record a clip of a video onto his VCR or waiting to just watch something by his favorite band of the moment. To even find music in his youth, Kurt had to dig through musty bins of vinyl albums in record stores, looking for one particular album that seemed impossible to find, or he had to borrow an album from a friend. He drove all the way to Seattle once when he was a young teen to search for an album he'd heard on the radio and looked through several secondhand stores until he finally located it: it was an REO Speedwagon record that just a few years later he would have been incredibly embarrassed to have owned. In all these instances, Kurt had to interact with other humans, record-store clerks, or his buddies to buy or borrow records, which created a sense of community. Kurt couldn't go to Amazon and download a song instantly—he had to search the physical world. And in the physical world, he found lasting connections. He'd first met Krist Novoselic in high school, but their friendship—the most lasting musical connection of Kurt's life—was formed when Kurt went into the Aberdeen Burger King, where Novoselic worked, to drop off a cassette tape for Krist. An online transfer of MP3s would not have created that one momentous meeting, the casual conversation (“Hey, what kind of music do you like?”), the eye-to-eye connection, and the lifetime friendship that ensued and went on to create Nirvana.