Come as You Were

In memoriam

I was in Seattle this past week and almost every day, driving from my sister’s house to my mom’s apartment and back again, I passed Kurt Cobain’s house. It’s not Kurt’s house anymore, obviously. I don’t know who lives there now. But in the little park to the south the bench that is on any given day bedecked with flowers, mementos, and graffiti was in particularly extravagant bloom. I noticed this, wondered why, and remembered. Oh right. It’s the anniversary.

Thirty years ago today Kurt’s body was found in a room above the garage of this house on Lake Washington Boulevard. Thirty years ago, grunge died and once the media circus moved on, Seattle was left on its own to grieve and breathe a tiny sigh of relief.

I grew up in Seattle in the 80s. I went to all-ages shows at clubs like the Metropolis and Gorilla Gardens, before the now-infamous Teen Dance Ordinance shuttered them forever. I used my fake ID to get into the Central Tavern to see the Fastbacks and Green River, and later to slide into the Comet Tavern to drink with boys who went on to be famous. I went to high school with some of them; made out with others from the private school up the hill. One of them lives near my sister now, in a house behind a very high hedge.

I spent my adolescence trying to convince my parents that this was all normal, I was going to be fine, it was not a big deal that I had bleached my hair blonde, double pierced my ears, came home bleary eyed, too late— I was still getting good grades, right? It was fine that I was hanging out in grotty punk houses with skaters or riding shotgun on some mod’s ancient Lambretta. It was fine that that band’s “manager,” who must have been 25, told me he loved me and I was 17. It was fine that as we got older it became harder to ignore that this was all a boys club, no girls allowed except as support staff.

In 1988, having dropped out of Oberlin and moved back to Seattle for a time, I lived with my friend Erica in the U-District. Erica was SubPop’s first publicist, and every once in a while I would go down to the office at the tip-top of the Terminal Sales Building in Belltown and help her stuff singles into mailers, to send to college radio stations across the land. Honestly, I would have done this every day, had I the chance — it was obvious that this was the place to be, the heart of the scene — but I knew better than to let my enthusiasm show. Such naked desire was unseemly, and more than anything I wanted to be cool.

That fall I regularly borrowed my mom’s car to drive down to Olympia for the weekend, to visit Krista at Evergreen. She lived in a suite in the dorms at that point, and I was enough of a regular visitor that I knew all of her friends. I felt comfortable there, more so than I had felt in Ohio when I fled. I liked hanging out with the ‘Greeners, drinking beer or doing mushrooms in the woods. It felt normal, like home.

On Halloween Krista and her roommates threw a party, so of course I went, dressed as a flapper in a fringey black dress and headband. Krista was a beatnik, Molly was a leisure-suited lounge singer, and Beth was an M&M. A band from Aberdeen that had recently relocated to Oly played in the living room and, after the very tall bass player started flirting with me, we went to the Safeway to buy more beer and I let him drive my mom’s car.

I have a bunch of photos from this party, which was pretty fun. In them, Krista plays her bongos, Molly flashes a cheesy grin from behind her eyeliner mustache, and the band gets sweaty and the bass player takes off his shirt. At some point, someone produced a tube of fake blood and the band members doused themselves with it, the red running down their faces and onto their hands and chests. I took a picture. This was normal; it was home.

A few months later I went back to Ohio, and after graduation I moved to New York. I never lived in Seattle again and in truth I wanted some distance. Seattle in 1988 was a very fun place to be, and also it could be exhausting, everyone so pumped up on possibility. If you weren’t in a band, if you were a girl, who were you? A year later I was drinking in a townie bar outside New Fairfield, Connecticut, when a loud video came on MTV and I looked up to see cheerleaders, guitars, a very tall bass player. What was Nirvana doing on MTV?

I try sometimes to explain what it was like back then, how we knew this was special — and how we knew we could not ever let on that we knew. (That, of course, was the genius of SubPop, to take this contradiction and make “LOSER” t-shirts, to shove the scene’s self-deprecating exceptionalism back in the fan’s face.) This specialness was for us, no one else. To share it, hype it, god forbid sell it — that was not done. Until suddenly it was, and it was for everyone.

Being back in Seattle last week, some powerful memories from this time resurfaced — though if I’m honest maybe they’ve never been buried that deep. I walked the halls of my old high school with a current student (the child of a friend), and despite a gut rehab it felt close to the same, familiar-adjacent. I went to see my friend Greg play at a bar in White Center, sitting in on bass for a band fronted by Tom Price, a Seattle legend who, despite his Parkinson’s, is still playing out on the regular, and that felt normal; I was at home! I ran into a long-lost boyfriend, and talking with him left me buzzing with adrenaline, as he validated some painful memories I had forgotten we shared.

I was working on a loading dock in Manhattan in 1994 when one of the salespeople came out to the shop floor to tell me that Kurt Cobain had died. I gasped, punched in the solar plexus. I don’t think I cried, not at work anyhow, but I remember swimming through a thick sadness for days, as the story unfurled across the international media and I watched from the East, so very far from home, a place where this tragedy was touching real people I knew.

Over the years I’ve looked at those Halloween photos of Kurt with blood on his face, and wonder how I even have them. I’ve showed them to a couple people, but it feels like a betrayal to show the world. I feel gross even writing this all down — like I’m still trying to prove that I’m cool. Like maybe I’m a sellout — and maybe I am. But that time was ours. We were so young. You had to be there.