In case you haven't noticed, I've kind of got a thing for conspiracy theories. Good ones. Bad ones. Real ones. Fake ones. That's not to say that I consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist, though I'm certain more than a few of my regular dearest motherfuckers probably disagree. I'm more of a conspiracy enthusiast or, as my late hero Gore Vidal once described himself, a conspiracy analyst. I have my doubts about the "official" story on a number of historical events. I don't buy that FDR was caught off guard by Pearl Harbor. I have trouble believing that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I'm pretty sure those Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco. And don't even get me started on the Middle East. But unlike most "theorists" I recognize that these beliefs are hypothesizes at best. We'll probably never have all the answers and, like a good little agnostic, I'm more or less cool with this.
On the other hand there are some conspiracy theories that I find downright infuriating. Big Foot is bullshit, the Holocaust fucking happened and Obama was born in America. But if there's one conspiracy theory that really gets under my skin and drives me up the fucking wall it's the asinine farce that Kurt Cobain was murdered by Courtney Love. I'm fully aware that this is far from the most repulsive falsehood, the Holocaust one probably gets that tainted honor, but it's the one that really burns my ass. Mostly because I adore both Kurt and Courtney and I can't seem to manage to have a single fucking conversation about either one of them without having to debunk that stupid fucking theory for the umpteenth time. So this year, which would have been Kurt's 50th, I've decided to finally put this shit to rest once and for all. But first things first, some personal explanations are due.
I've been a Nirvana fan forever but I didn't become a fanatic until their music helped me through the darkest chapter of my lifelong struggle with depression. There's only one band that I might love more (with a capital MIGHT) and that's Courtney Love's band Hole. Kurt's lyrics made me feel less alone and gave me the courage to survive the mess I made of my early twenties. Courtney's lyrics however made me feel empowered and gave me the courage to do more than just survive, with her candid tales of feminine empowerment and irreverent freak-show pride, Courtney Love's lyrics gave me the courage to persevere on my own damn terms. And Courtney, perhaps more than any other single person, gave me the metaphoric ovaries to kick down my closet door and taste the light of day as the queer, genderfuck, queen bitch you all know and fear. So, yeah, long story short, this is kind of fucking personal to me.
With that being said, lets go over what we know about the tragic death of Kurt Cobain. Kurt's final downward spiral began on the mourning of March 3, 1994. After taking a red-eye to Rome to join Kurt for the night while on tour with Nirvana, Courtney crashed in her husbands hotel room with some Valium only to wake up to find Kurt's lifeless body. He had downed a fist full of Rohypnol with a bottle of champagne in an apparent suicide attempt. He came back to life after twenty hours in a coma but in many ways Kurt was already gone. Over the next few weeks Kurt OD'd at least two more times. Courtney, who had long tolerated Kurt's addiction, finally put her foot down on March 25 with an intervention. Kurt was livid. In an attempt to strong arm her stubborn husband into recovery Courtney left Seattle alone for Los Angeles where she began an outpatient detox program at the Peninsula Hotel for her own lifelong addiction to prescription sedatives. The move seemed to work when Kurt joined Courtney in L.A. and checked into the nearby Exodus Recovery Center on the 30th. But unbeknownst to Courtney, that very day Kurt had his friend Dylan Carlson buy him a 20 gauge shotgun which he stashed at his Seattle mansion before hopping on the next flight out of town.
Kurt spent two days in rehab before jumping the fence and returning to Seattle. Courtney hired Hollywood P.I. Tom Grant to track her husband down. A decision only she would live to regret. After less than a week of bouncing around local flophouses and shooting galleries Kurt returned to his mansion where his body was discovered on April 8th by an electrician in the greenhouse above his garage. Dead from what the Seattle Police determined to be a self-inflicted shotgun wound.
But according to the conspiracy theorists, lets call them Kurt Truthers, they know better than the Seattle P.D.. They also know better than Kurt's own band mates, friends and family, many of whom had no love lost for Courtney but still had no trouble excepting the fact that the long troubled troubadour had taken his own life. In fact, pretty much the only person close to Kurt who couldn't except this fact was Courtney herself who asked Tom Grant to investigate the possibility of foul play. Once Courtney finally came to terms with what Kurt had done to himself and their family she stopped sending Grant checks for the biggest break of his pathetic existence and Grant got his petty revenge by spending the next two decades building a career out of blaming his former client for her own husbands tragic death. And it's this washed-up, fat-fuck, ex-pig with an ax to grind who has been largely responsible for generating the lion share of the Kurt Truther's so called evidence. Creating a veritable cottage industry out of telling tall-tales to dip-shit twats, Tom had finally found his calling in life, ruining Courtney's.
According to Grant and his little clan of Truthers, Courtney decided to have her husband killed before he could divorce her and cut her out of his will. Rather than taking the easiest route to achieving these means by simply hooking Kurt up with a hot-dose or just letting her husband OD on his own stash without reviving him with Narcan as she often did, Courtney sent Kurt to rehab then hired a hitman to hunt him down like a dog when he escaped, shot him full of dope, propped him upright in his greenhouse, jammed his own shotgun in his mouth and somehow blew his brains out without leaving so much as a trace of evidence. Oh yeah and Courtney managed to pay off the entire Seattle P.D. and she would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for that meddling dirt-bag dick and his internet fan-club.
If this sounds like bush league horse-shit to you then congratulations you're officially an adult. But for all the children in the room, please allow me to pull the rug from under you so I can beat your monkey-asses with it until they leak blood. Kurt had struggled with crippling depression and chronic stomach pain his whole life. The latter of which was so severe that it had nearly caused him to starve to death. Heroin was the only thing that made his stomach pain tolerable and in spite of their tumultuous and at times downright unhealthy relationship Courtney and their daughter Frances Bean were the only people that gave Kurt any joy during his final days. Virtually everyone else had abandoned him over his use of narcotics. Kurt was terrified that Courtney would leave him. He had associated divorce with death ever since his parents split when he was nine. His suicide attempt in Rome was inspired by the fact that Courtney had merely contemplated cheating on him. And when Courtney threatened to leave Kurt at his intervention if he wouldn't give up the one thing that made his excruciating life livable, Kurt decided he had officially had enough. It was time to go.
Kurt killed himself. And he pulled that trigger for a lot of reasons but, as politically incorrect as this may be to say, Courtney Love and Heroin were the only things that kept him alive as long as he was. Kurt never found the source of his stomach pain but the last doctor he saw believed it was the product of a nerve pinched between his vertebrae due to untreated scoliosis. With its proximity to both the spine and the vagus nerve this likely made Kurt's problem virtually inoperable. This also would have made Kurt a prime candidate for Oxycontin or even Dr. Kevorkian if he had only stuck around for a couple more years. As Courtney had said during her public reading of her late husbands suicide note- "That Eighties tough love bullshit- it doesn't work. We all should have let him have his numbness. We should have let him have the thing that made him feel better, that made his stomach feel better, we should have let him have it instead of trying to strip away his skin." To this day Courtney seems to be the only one who gets this and it's precisely this kind of unabashed empathy that made Kurt along with Courtney's own devoted tribe of fans like myself fall in love with her and I just know from the bottom of my own burning nauseous stomach that Kurt would be disgusted if he knew that the same people who continue to senselessly crucify this person he loved for simply being a convenient scapegoat call themselves his fans. They're not. Just like the assholes he lampooned in "In Bloom" they like all his pretty songs and they like to sing along and they like to shoot their guns but they don't know what it means and they probably never will. So fuck them. And that's all I have left to say about that.
This ones for Kurt and Courtney. The best friends a freak like me could ever hope for.
And remember dearest motherfuckers, always remember, It's better to rise than fade away.
As always,
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* Negative Creep By Nirvana
* Pretty On The Inside By Hole
* Wave Of Mutilation By The Pixies
* On A Plain By Nirvana
* Violet By Hole
* Ever By Flipper
* In Bloom By Nirvana
* Reasons To Be Beautiful By Hole
* You're One By Imperial Teen
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