Courtney retreated to the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills the next day to promote her forthcoming album. It was a cold move certainly, though more negligent than cruel. Kurt and his best friend, Dylan Carlson, went to buy a shotgun, for self-defense according to Carlson. People do not, of course, necessarily announce their trigger-sad intentions when they buy their suicide weapons, so who is to say, really? And though there is a case to be made for his fear being of Courtney’s hired goons, it is worth noting that he had the kind of fans who later believed he had transubstantiated into his infant daughter and was awaiting their companionship upon her reaching adulthood. That he didn’t have a shotgun earlier is among the bigger shocks of the story, really.
It is here in the early spring, on the eve of a masterpiece being unleashed on the world, that Courtney, the previously merely greedy bitch, is most gloriously reimagined into an otherworldly instrument of madness and death. Kurt checked into the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles on March 30. He stayed only two days before dramatically scaling the six-foot walls of the center despite being free to walk out the front gate. Why did he choose a method of escape when he could simply exit? Why did he return to Seattle and believe for a moment that he could go undetected under baggy jackets and large sunglasses? When Kurt left the center, Courtney sent a private investigator to Seattle to find him. One cannot help but think of Snow White believing she had avoided death when the huntsman took pity on her, only to find that she was still being doggedly pursued by a far greater evil. And just as Snow White bites into the apple of her own volition, Kurt likely pulled the trigger himself. “Some day you will ache like I ache” was a promise Courtney made good on.
Though I heard the murder rumors with everyone else in the first few years after Kurt’s death, Nick Broomfield’s 1998 documentary, Kurt and Courtney, was my first deep dive into any serious meditation on the possibility of foul play. An especially memorable scene involves a wild-eyed musician nicknamed “El Duce” claiming Courtney asked him to “whack” Kurt for $50,000 but that his friend did it instead. Despite his violent claims, the Duce’s bald head and doughy features come together to make him look like an overgrown but decidedly ugly baby, and he was killed by a train three days after he made his on-camera claims that Courtney wanted him to serve as her personal assassin.
In conjuring various iterations of Courtney the witch, I return often to her doll-infested homes and lyrics. The tradition of the voodoo doll and a number of other magical practices claim a person can summon death to a human target via a toy likeness and a sufficiently robust will to power. The magic books I consulted all warn that most death spells fail because of insufficient power by the casting witch or magician. But surely if the spirits would obey any kind of person, the demonic heiress to a rock legend drenched in blood would be it.
I realize, of course, that the cruel and supernatural Courtney Love I have fashioned in my mind is a fiction. She was born in the vulgar imaginations of those who felt they were more entitled to Kurt Cobain’s beating heart than the woman whose body bore his only child. I also realize that the image of Courtney on trial is easy to imbue with meaning given knowledge of the events that would occur after the recording of Live Through This. But I am hardly the first person to retroactively assign symbols to events in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s because I had a point to make. When discussing Kurt and Courtney with my best friend Phoebe, she summed up my feelings perfectly when she said, “Look, I don’t think Courtney killed Kurt,” then she paused a moment to grin and continued, “But I think it would be pretty fucking cool if she did.” And because Courtney herself has made no secret of her desire to attain the status of a legend, I entertain these absurd possibilities as a celebration of female brutality rather than the typical condemnation of it.
When given a choice between the girl with the most cake and the liar at the witch trial, I choose the witch every time. I prefer Courtney as the ancient sorceress convincing the public of her innocence. The disguise of the lost little girl who sabotages her own attempts to gain approval by dissolving into tantrums is a sufficiently degenerate cover for something truly sinister. I like Courtney the succubus, Courtney the bitch. I revel in the idea of Courtney as the thief of men’s genius and as the employer of assassins.
When evil is done to a person, it gets under their skin. If there is enough of it, it’ll sink down through the flesh and into the bones, becoming part of its target. For most of us, the pain is absorbed as poison rather than power. We see a world awash in women’s blood and tears. We endure claims that the most profound kinds of pain are the exclusive possessions of men, that they are best equipped to make art from this suffering. Instead of bearing witness to it, we are asked to be killed by it, quietly if possible. But Courtney did nothing quietly. She said in 1995, “The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I’m not going to die.”19 And she has made good on that promise. The word “survivor” comes up often in sympathetic profiles of her. But “survivor” has connotations of thriving, of some conquering of life’s wreckage rather than a dwelling in it. Witches do not survive; they simply refuse to die.
In the witch trials of seventeenth-century New England, authorities would put the accused in water and use her flotation as evidence of rejecting baptism—and she would submerge just enough to get them to pull her back to shore. They would strip her naked in search of demonic markings, only to find flawless flesh where a pox had been rumored. They would throw her into a rushing river and she would fucking swim. And perhaps most fittingly, cakes were baked from the rye meal, the ashes, and the urine or blood of victims and fed to a dog. If the dog exhibited signs of bewitchment, it was considered evidence that witchcraft was at play. But unlike the unwitting dogs of this coarse ritual, the human public actively consumed the blood and detritus of Kurt and fell willingly enchanted. We are never sated in our appetite for that which would destroy itself. It is we who are offered a taste and beg for more.
The rituals by which we humiliate women have migrated from folklore-inspired trials of the body to more sterile but no less degrading assassinations of character. Courtney foretold their brutality before enduring it herself. I have lived in this world that she warned us girls about. I have loved the kind of man who loved only certain things because he loved to see them break, to borrow a phrase. I have not seen a fraction of the cruelty that the world is capable of, but I have trembled often enough in the aftershocks of my own resistance to a world built to break me to know that female brutality is not just an acceptable response, it is the most sensible one, too. But my heart is home to docile rage because I am afraid: afraid I don’t know how to wield my own viciousness with any expertise and afraid that once I do know how, I won’t stop until the fire I set can be seen from space. This is why in my personal mythology of Courtney, she has mastered not only the art of the supernatural foul play necessary to wreak havoc on the world, but the practical skills of restraint and deception that elevate such magic. The end result is a world begging for the mercy of a deathless woman, and her grinning reply that they were asking for it.
Our Sisters Shall Inherit the Sky