Poppy Mom

I do hope you have the time

I need an easy friend,
I do, with an ear to lend.
I do think you fit this shoe,
I do but you have a clue.
Nirvana, "About a Girl", 1989

Why yes, I am quite the prolific blogger today. Thanks for noticing!

I found something to cheer my foul mood. After dinner, while B. cleaned out the fridge and Clara Jane helped herself to the grenedine, I finally imported the nearly-2000 music files from my old computer into iTunes. I've spent the past few hours fixing the file names so they match everything else in iTunes. (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - It's Not Just About Checking the Stove Fifteen Times a Day Anymore!)

Oh, the jewels that I had forgotten! The albums and albums worth of The Ramones! Morphine! Classic Rolling Stones! And Nirvana! Their entire catalog, sans last year's box set!

I'm currently listening to "Unplugged in New York", because I'm no longer in my 20s and the part of my auditory system that enjoyed feedback turned to liquid sometime around 1998. I've got to work my way back up to the noise that is "In Utero".

I had totally forgotten what today was until I read Lisa V.'s entry for today. I know exactly what I was doing at this moment 11 years ago today, the day Kurt Cobain's body was found.

I was 21, sharing a duplex with my best friend Amanda and two former friends I had grown to hate. I was half-heartedly studying communication at the University of Missouri while working for an Indian family who owned (cue the Magic Stereotype Machine)hotels. I was the personal assistant to the owner, with an office in the basement of their home. I did everything from the bookkeeping to working in housekeeping on busy weekends to carting the owner's two kids on the typical adolescent errands.

I won't mention the family's name because, due to my own youthful stupidity, we didn't part company on very good terms when I left my job ten years ago this coming September. All of that's irrelevent.

When I started writing this, I was going to tell my usual story about what happened the day Kurt Cobain's body was found. Long story short: I had a ten-gallon aquarium. A week earlier I had spent a few days visiting my family. While I was gone, the heater fritzed and my stupid-ass roommate didn't bother to do anything about it. I came home to 10 gallons of 110 degree water and a bunch of slow-cooked mollies. It was so utterly vile that the only solution I could find was to carry the aquarium outside and dump the contents into the drainage culvert behind our house.

We had a sliding glass door with a wooden bar propped at the base as a lock. When I came inside after my little fish funeral, I bent over the put the bar back in place, raised up a bit too quickly, and whacked myself in the temple with the tail of a decorative carousel horse.

Don't ask. Just ... don't ask, ok?

I knew something wasn't quite right, but I went to work anyway. It was only after I came home a few hours later that my roommate (the fish-killer) noticed I was acting a bit off-kilter. She insisted that I go to the emergency room where I was diagnosed with a concussion. I wasn't allowed to sleep that night, so I sat on my bedroom floor, eating clearanced Easter candy in the dark, burning sandalwood incence and listening to "Nevermind" over and over.

What I really want to talk about today is what happened at work.

My boss had a son, and I can't remember how old he was at that time. Thirteen, maybe fourteen? He was still in junior high. I remember that only because I picked him up from school most days. He was a smart kid and a great student. Never in trouble. At least, not any real trouble. His parents, while being very Americanized, were also very conservative. They expected their son and his older sister to be perfect, and they weren't crazy about their sons growing interest in music.

One of the first times I taked to their son, when I was newly hired and he was still pre-pubescent, he impressed me by rattling off the rap in the middle of "Soul to Squeeze" by Red Hot Chili Peppers, verbatim, without missing a beat. From that point on, we always had music to discuss.

In fact, he never returned the copy of "The Joshua Tree" I leant him not long after I started working there, the copy I got for Christmas the year I was 14.

He discovered Nirvana when "In Utero" was released in October, 1993. I can't remember if he got interested in Nirvana on his own, or if it was from listening to them in my car on those rides home from school. Either way, he latched on, not quite fully grasping the gravity of the lyrics. Regardless, something in the music obviously spoke to him.

After I hit my head, I got my wits about me as best I could and headed to work. I heard the news as I was backing out of my driveway. I laughed. Everything else in my brain felt so scrambled that this, too, must be something off. No way.

Shortly after I arrived at my office, he came in, having caught a ride home with a friend. I met him at the door. "Did you hear?" He looked at me blankly. "The news about Kurt Cobain?" I paused. "He's dead. He killed himself."

He didn't cry. He didn't curse. And he most certainly didn't laugh. I watched his young face freeze to stone in my fuzzy concussion-addled gaze.

Nothing else was said about Kurt that day. Or, if there was, I don't remember. My only clear memories of that day are emptying the aquarium, hitting my head, hearing the news, telling him, going home a few hours later, and then going to the hospital. Even without a concussion that's a lot to remember about one single day eleven years ago. It feels like I should be able to remember more.

He went even deeper into his music after that. He got his first guitar a few months later and one of the first riffs he learned was the opening of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which he played over and over in my office until I would run him out before we both got in trouble for goofing off.

The time that I knew this boy was so brief. I worked that job from June, 1993 until September, 1995. But it was in that time that he was at that awkward stage of not being a little kid, but not quite to the surliness of full-blown adolescence. He was just entering that phase when I quit my job and vanished from their lives. But in that time, I had something I had always wanted - I had a little brother, one who shared my love of music. I got to introduce him to so many artists, so many songs that meant the world to me, and in turn he gave me a glimpse of what the future might look like, with his younger perspective. Hell, it's only been in recent years that I can acknowledge that he was right - Sheryl Crow is pretty obnoxious sometimes.

I think about him often, but I always think of him on the anniversary of the day we learned Kurt Cobain's fate. Despite that, I have never tried to find any information about him. I think a big part of me just wants to remember that earnest rock n' roll obsessed kid who could have gone good or bad. I don't know what would have been worse - if he'd followed the conservative, professional path his parents desired, or if he full-on rebelled. I didn't want to know anything that might hint that his innocence might have gotten harmed along the way.

Tonight, after I started writing this, I finally gave in and put his name into the search engine, both his Indian name and the English name he used. I found an interview with him from three years ago, when he was 20 and a senior at a very good university, about his involvement in anti-war protests. He's been discussing Stanley Kubrick in detail. He was arrested during the War Resister's League demonstration during the Republican National Convention last summer. He's presented papers on the connection between hip-hop and Julio Cortazar's short story "The Southern Thruway". He's writing articles about the experience of Middle Eastern Jews living in Isreal. He's teaching university courses on the relationship between music and American society.

You know I always give credit where credit is due, but I'm going to make an exception in this case, since I am trying to keep him anonymous. But here's a bio from one of his articles, name and source edited to protect the no longer innocent:

________________ is a somewhat recent college graduate, fascinated by grassroots efforts at broad-based social transformation. He currently resides nowhere in particular (through he prefers Ann Arbor, Chicago and Richmond), and is praying nightly for the grant he applied for to come through, so that the government will pay him to study the death of capitalism in Argentina.

For the first time in eleven years, April 8th is no longer a day tinged with a mental fuzziness and a bit of sadness and "what ifs" in my mind. Today, it's a day where I let go one more bit of my youth by seeing what kind of man someone I knew as a child has become.

And I am so proud of him.

Posted by Robin at April 8, 2005 09:22 PM | TrackBack