Life with Shay was better, if only marginally. I thought maybe we would run away together. Fuck his girlfriend. We would be Kerouac and Cassady, dance wild across the heartland, sip the Pacific, drive for the sake of driving. I believed we both understood that there, any there, would always be better than here, just like I believed that he’d dropped out of high school because true intelligence can’t be contained, that he let his parents support him because he was writing a novel and true art demanded sacrifice. I showed him some crap poetry, and I believed him when he said it was good.
Shay doesn’t matter. Shay was a gateway drug, a cheap glue-sniffing high on the pathway to transcendence. Shay was like something ordered out of a catalog: Of course he quoted Allen Ginsberg, of course he got stoned to the Smiths, of course he smoked cloves and wore black eyeliner and had a glass-blowing girlfriend named Willow who’d made him a Valentine’s Day bong. Shay only matters because of the day we camped out in his friend’s attic studio a block from the Schuylkill, and after we got good and stoned, someone turned off the Phillies game and turned on 91.7 and there he was.
Kurt.
Kurt screaming, Kurt raging, Kurt in agony, Kurt in bliss. “Fucking pseudo-punk poseurs,” Shay said, and reached over to turn it off, and when I said, “Don’t, please,” he only laughed. It took me another week to find the song again and then steal a copy of Bleach and another few weeks after that to fumigate Shay out of my life, but that was the moment he went from mattering a little to not at all.
After that, it was like they say about love: Falling. A gravitational inevitability. Even Shitbag Village had one decent record store, with a giant bin of discounts and bootlegs, and it only took thirty bucks and some tongue wrestling with the walking zit behind the counter to get what I needed. Then I closed myself into my room and, except for periodic forays back to the record store and one very inconvenient move to the middle of nowhere, spent that year and the next one catching up: the Melvins, because that was Kurt’s favorite band, and Sonic Youth, because they’re the ones who got Kurt his big deal; the Pixies, because once you knew anything about grunge, you knew that was where it all came from; Daniel Johnston, because of Kurt’s T-shirt and because the guy was in a mental hospital so I figured he could use the royalties; and of course bootleg Bikini Kill, for some righteous riot grrrl rage, and Hole, because you got the feeling that if you didn’t, Courtney would come to your house and fuck you up.
Then, like Kurt knew exactly what I’d need when I needed it, there was Nevermind. I barricaded myself in until I knew every note, beat, and silence—cut school for the purposes of a higher education.
I loved it. Loved it like Shakespearean sonnets and Hallmark cards and all that shit, like I wanted to buy it flowers and light it candles and fuck it gently with a chainsaw.
I’m not saying I go around doodling Mrs. Kurt Cobain on my notebooks or that I, like, ohmygod, imagine myself showing up on his doorstep in black lace panties and a trench coat. For one thing, Courtney would gouge my eyes out with barbed wire. For another, I know what’s real and what’s not, and real is not me fucking Kurt Cobain.
But: Kurt. Kurt with his watery blue eyes and his angel hair, the halo of stubble and the way the rub of it would burn. Kurt, who sleeps in striped pajamas with a teddy bear to keep him company, who frenched Krist on national TV to fuck with the rednecks back home and wore a dress on Headbangers Ball just because he could, who has enough money to buy and smash a hundred top-line guitars but likes a Fender Mustang because it’s a cheap piece of crap you have to abuse as much as you love if you want it to play nice. Rock god, sex god, angel, saint: Kurt, who always looks at you from the side, from beneath that golden curtain of hair, looks at you like he knows all the bad things scuttling around inside. Kurt’s voice, and how it hurts. I could live and die inside that voice, Dex. I wanted to crawl inside it, soft and razor raw at the same time, his voice cutting me bloody, warm and slippery and alive. I don’t need Kurt—the real living, breathing Courtney-screwing Kurt—to throw me down on the bed and brush his hair out of his eyes and lay his naked body on mine, miles of translucent skin glowing white. I don’t need that Kurt, because I have his voice. I have the part of him that matters. That Kurt, I own. Like he owns me.
I know you don’t like him, Dex. It’s cute how you try to fake it, but I see you glaring at his poster, like some jealous boyfriend. Which is ironic. And unnecessary. Because the way I felt when I found Kurt? That’s how it felt when I found you.
DEX
Story of Us
THE BOOTS WERE STURDY BLACK leather, rubber heel, yellow-threaded sole, eight eyelets with ragged laces, classic Docs exactly like Lacey’s, except these were mine.
“Really?” I was afraid to touch them. “Not really.”
“Really.” She looked like she’d shot me a bear, slinging it over her shoulder and carrying it single-handedly back to our cave to roast and feed on, and that was how it felt. Like sustenance. “Try them on.”