The Convulsion Factory

Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt

I was a couple years adrift out of school, thinking yes, today is probably the day I’ll kill myself, when the weatherman went and upstaged anything I could’ve done.

They say he was distraught over a woman, a restraining order, negative publicity. Family problems too, you have to figure. I hadn’t heard a word of any of it. He had a pilot’s license and his own plane, and what he did was, he aired one final weather report on the early evening news, smiled at the city one last time, then drove out to his plane, got cleared for takeoff, climbed 500 feet into the blue summer sky, then turned flaps down and did a full-throttle nosedive straight into the runway. This while rush-hour traffic was still clogging Chicago’s paved arteries. They say the fireball was a thing of beauty, although not so for the pieces they finally pulled from the wreckage.

And I ask you: Now how can you follow something like that?

Megan, one of my housemates, taped the later re-broadcast of his final weather report, and we’d watch it over and over, running it back and back again. We were looking for clues. Anything. But the weatherman gave up nothing. Not one thing.

“I just realized something,” she finally said, days after the burial. “He didn’t even fly around for one last look. Just got the plane up and did it.” Then she grew very reflective. “I couldn’t have done it that way. I’d have to fly around, make some goodbyes, see everything from above. Make one final bid for a little genuine pathos. The way he did it … that’s so cold.”

Megan was right. It had been a very singular-minded devotion to purpose. No wonder he’d been a success in his career.

*

The summer I was ten I played Little League baseball with a number of other boys who were either too lanky or too pudgy, and who spent every spare moment of every game with one fearful eye turned to the stands, where our fathers sat, expectant and often quite rabid. I was not a star player.

I can’t remember if it was my idea, or the coach’s, but every time we took the field, I dangled my glove from a loose arm and went trudging out into right field, as if it were my own personal Siberia. Whether my own altruism, or the coach’s doing, it seemed the best way I could serve the team. Nothing much ever happened in right field. The kids at bat generally pulled to the left. So I’d stand out there and gaze across into left field, watching Dennis Freemont as he heroically went loping after each fly ball that came his way, effortlessly plucking them from the air like some budding young god of the harvest. I alternately felt sickened by him and wanted to be his best friend, imagining what it must feel like being in control of his precociously developed musculature instead of the puny sticks that were my arms and legs. Imagining what his glowing father must’ve said to him after every game. I’d never hear words like that.

I remember the fly ball that came directly to me as clearly as if it’d been a comet bearing down on me, or a small plane. The world fell into a silent hush as I braced myself beneath the ball and wondered if my father would notice my glove trembling.

I reached forward from my crouch as the ball plopped straight into my glove as I caught it underhanded, the way the coach always said not to. It fell into the laced pocket, then wormed its way back and went dribbling out the other end of the glove…

And somehow ended up wedged between my knees. I stood knock-kneed, the ball caught there and pivoting as if it were the socket of a new joint that had fused my legs together. All the sounds of the world came rushing back again, most of all the cries of my teammates, and then I toppled over backward, the ball dropped, my miracle play hopelessly blown.

My father had little to say in the car later, quietly smoking and blowing his gray clouds out the window as he sought to merge with the road, lose himself and his disappointment in the traffic. Finally he turned to me and his eyes weren’t too accusing, and I realized that he was, in his way, trying to understand.

“Maybe baseball’s not the thing for you,” he said. “But the one thing I don’t ever want you to forget is, with hard work and effort you can be anything you want to be. I know you can do it. You can be whatever you want.”

I nodded. This was a great relief to me.

“I want to be a girl,” I told him.

It seemed easier then, to my ten-year-old outlook. All the expectations just weren’t as brutal. Nobody forced girls into the fields like untrained gladiators. But at the time I didn’t realize that there were mothers who made up their daughters, as young as five and six, into seductive miniature adults, entered them in contests, got their pictures in the papers where they could be ogled by sick men who didn’t understand — or maybe didn’t want to admit — that that knowing look in their eyes was just Maybelline. I didn’t know any of that then.

I only wanted to be a girl because I thought fathers left you alone then.

And mine looked at me, everything new again between us, new and awful. He looked at me as if for the first time realizing that I wasn’t something from his loins after all, rather something he’d excreted in a moment of illness.

My father turned back to the road then, started smoking with renewed need. He no longer bothered blowing it out the window, and I rode the rest of the way home in the choking clouds.

*

Even before the weatherman snuffed his life out on the tarmac and made me realize how uncreative I was, I didn’t really consider myself suicidal. It’s just that I’d been weighing options lately, and there was something about turning out all the lights that I’d begun to find very sensible.

A few days before, one weekend morning, all six of us in the house had managed to straggle awake at the same time, and we sat around the breakfast table talking about all the things we didn’t want to be, and all the things we’d love to do but that would’ve still left us penniless urchins, old enough to know better, that the world wasn’t that accommodating. Most of us had earned our college degrees in the past year or two, but by choice or by dire curricular miscalculation were still marking time before doing anything real.

There was a lot of bitter laughter in the kitchen that morning. I happened to remark that, as career options went, medical school cadaver was looking better and better.

Later, Megan came up to me where I sat in the back, looking over a lawn that had earned us the enmity of our neighbors. She sat down and drank most of a Tab in silence before looking at me, quizzical and maybe worried, and saying, “You were kind of serious this morning, weren’t you?”

To me, the creepy thing was, I immediately knew what she was talking about. I told her I was, come to think of it.

“Nobody else around here catches shit like that. Sometimes I really hate being the sensitive one.” Then her worried look gave way to one of nervousness. “You’re not going to … act on it, are you?”

“Wrong time of year,” I said, and she didn’t understand that at all, so I had to explain. “If it was winter, I might have to go over to Lake Michigan. Find an ice floe and chip away at it, until I could float off into the haze, like a toothless old Eskimo. I heard they do that when they realize their lives are useless.”

“You are not useless,” then Megan started laughing. “You pay one-sixth of the rent and utilities.”

“Anybody who answers an ad can do that.”

“That’s true. But you do it on time.”

Of those under our roof I liked Megan best, with a rare and true affection that left me terrified at the notion of sleeping with her, because of what it probably would’ve destroyed. Among the little archipelagos that were all our lives, I think Megan and I sat closest together.

There were Syd and Brendan, grad students and hypochondriacs who worked themselves into weekly frenzies over what they might’ve contracted. I was convinced they remained in school mainly for the health benefits. They went to Student Health Services so much that the rest of us had taken to calling them the Socialist Patients Kollective — unwieldy, but it gave us a great sense of personal vindictiveness.

Then there were Pam and Camilla, who were trying very hard to be lesbians because it was the correct thing to do, but they just didn’t seem very good at it, and the time Pam slipped up and slept with a guy at a party, it triggered a screaming match that lasted a week. When I came to Pam’s defense, it seemed to mend the rift because finally they had a new target, womyn together, and they spent the next week deciding to hate me for being patronizing. I then understood why so many police officers are attacked at domestic disputes.

I was very suspect in Camilla’s eyes anyway, because when she first moved in and we were getting the obligatory personal trivia out of the way, I told her mine, that I printed T-shirts for a living, but that I had a journalism degree, although what I really wanted to do was write fiction.

“I despise modern fiction,” she said, suddenly frosty. “The only reason people read it is because it makes them feel better once they’ve assured themselves that everybody else’s lives are just as vapid as their own.”

It was then I learned that Camilla took refuge in nineteenth-century literature. Jane Eyre was, I think, more real to her than I was. And I hadn’t written a word since she had leveled what I’d finally come to believe was my reason for existence.

Naturally this led to the realization that my conception and birth were tragic mistakes. This was no exaggeration. I’d had the temerity to be born indecisive in an age when we’re all defined by what we do, our titles and our job descriptions. Once I’d taken a good look back at everything I’d ever really wanted to be, things became very clear.

When I was eight I wanted to be a cop. TV had a lot to do with that one, I suspect. In my early teens I argued so much that my mother told me I’d make a fine lawyer, and I actually took this to heart, because there had to be truth in anything that caused her so much spite. Later, by default more than anything, I settled into courses in journalism, because being a reporter seemed one of the more non-committal directions I could take.

In looking back, I realize that everything I used to think I wanted to be when I grew up, it’s turned out that people scorn them now. Thanks to Camilla’s critique, even my dreams were vapid.

Medical school cadaver. It had possibilities.

*

Early in my college career, my father grew loudly exasperated by my inability to declare a major. By this time he and my mother were divorced, each of them militantly, bitterly opposed to being subsumed by the memory and loss of the other. They spent lots of money and made themselves miserable, each conspicuously trying to prove to the other just how happy they were to be free.

If someone had sent me to the encyclopedia to look up Hell, I just knew I’d find a flow-chart of their relationship.

And there I was, the boy who didn’t know what he wanted to be, only that he’d once wanted to do it with breasts. I’m sure to my father I was the world’s great blemish on the Y-chromosome.

“Aw, christ, why don’t you be a meteorologist?” he suggested in disgust. “There’ll always be weather. You’ll always have a job.”

Security was terribly important to him.

I thought this over, but just couldn’t get past what I’d been hearing from scientists, all this dire talk of a coming Ice Age. I worried that I’d be on TV and that everyone would start to hate me, because there I’d be, standing before a chromakey display that read Tomorrow’s Forecast, and I’d have to look them all in the eye and say, “I’m sorry … umm … more ice.”

So it’s just as well.

I guess my father didn’t lie to me — there really is always weather — but then, that still wasn’t enough for the weatherman, was it?

Dad always could get off on a technicality.

*

So that suicide thing was working at me, like a Rubik’s Cube, or the pretty rock paperweight you pick up and turn over and over in your hand when there’s nothing better to do.

I became a student of methodology whenever I saw some sort of mention in the paper, but few of the guaranteed, no-miss techniques appealed to me, because mostly they were very messy without the redeeming grandeur of the weatherman’s nosedive. Most of my housemates I didn’t want to burden with the grim task of cleanup, and there was no way of insuring that it fell to Camilla alone. That I could’ve lived with.

I wondered if it might not be easier to contract some hideous disease — surely Syd and Brendan could qualify the symptoms — then summon Dr. Kevorkian. I pictured his arrival like that scene from The Exorcist when Father Merrin finally shows up to battle the devil, standing still in black silhouette beneath the streetlight in front of that foreboding house, his mysterious and holy bag in hand.

And then my thunder got stolen again.

When Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain put the shotgun in his mouth and thumbed the trigger, it sent shock waves through our house. All of us, even Camilla, would look at each other as if we’d been living a movie and one of the reels of film got put in upside-down, or out of sequence. It felt as if we were all on the verge of saying, “No, wait, it’s not really supposed to be like this.”

And it wasn’t. The weatherman, now he’d been a frat boy. He was supposed to turn out miserable and hollow at the center of it all. But this was something else entirely. Kurt had done it all his way and flipped everyone the bird from his breakthrough album, and it still wasn’t enough, so what chance was there for the rest of us?

Oh … never mind.

We left MTV on all weekend, saw the same varnished newsreels until we could’ve recited them by rote, and I don’t know that we were grieving so much as we were simply horribly justified. We’d come of age, an entire demographic group of us, from Seattle to Key West. We finally had our JFK — where were you when you heard the news? — and no, he wasn’t in the same league, but he was ours.

By early the next week my T-shirt shop had already coughed up its paean to tastelessness and commemorative gallows humor, and I brought home a half-dozen prototypes of the shirt. In a rare era of unity, all six of us wore them that night, black shirts with a picture of Kurt on the front, thick stringy gobs of red and gray ink blasting furiously from the top of his head, and above this it read:

nirvana [noun]: The state of perfect nothingness

We liked to think Kurt might’ve at least appreciated the irony. Especially since Megan looked the word up in Webster’s and found that nirvana literally meant, in Sanskrit, “blown-out.” Some things you just can’t make up.

So we wore our shirts and later got bold, maybe masochistic, and flipped on Rush Limbaugh. It really was quite astounding, the authority he’d become on Kurt, considering until a few days before he’d never heard of the guy. We watched Rush chortle and bluster his way through a denunciation of nearly everything that was under thirty and not Republican. A bunch of lazy whiners who’d had everything handed to us — yeah, so what’s your point? We all sort of knew we couldn’t do anything right, but I’d always thought that that’s the sort of judgment you prefer to reserve for yourself.

“He’d been trying to kill himself for twelve years,” said Rush. “He finally had to buy a shotgun so he wouldn’t miss.”

“Well at least he didn’t have to buy a goddamn airplane!” I shouted at the TV, and couldn’t recall feeling quite so cranky in years.

It was an epiphany, glorious and violent. For the first time in maybe forever, I wanted somebody to be dead, and it wasn’t me.

“You know how they used to execute horse thieves?” I said, not caring who was listening and who wasn’t. “How they used to tie one leg to a northbound horse, and the other to a southbound, and fire a gun?”

“Make a wish,” said Pam.

“I’d really like to do that to him.” I jabbed at the round, jack-o-lantern face on the TV. “Label one horse’s ass ‘Dad’, and the other one ‘Mom’, and just see how well he handles that.” I really started to cook then. “And maybe a couple more horses for his flabby arms, too. And another one for his big fat neck. Label those ‘truth’, ‘liberty’, and ‘the pursuit of happiness.’”

They were all staring at me. Even Rush, but I’m sure that was just a fluke of timing. And I burned with the fury. It was the Gettysburg Address and the Sermon on the Mount and Henry V’s rally of his troops at Agincourt. Well, to me it was.

They all knew I was alive then, and oddly enough, so did I.

I slept with Megan that night, and it didn’t seem nearly the mistake I was convinced it would be. And then dawn came in on the songs of birds as I looked at her, her black hair bunched upon the pillow, thick enough to tie a cable, a lifeline. Not a noose.

“Morning,” she murmured, with a smile, and I wondered how many others across Chicago and the rest of the country were waking up alone, knowing with prophetic certainty that they always would. I imagined they must number in the millions. And of those I had to wonder how many listened to Kurt’s music and thought he’d written it just for them, or fantasized of sitting beside the weatherman to share that fragile cockpit’s ultimate dive.

They deserved a voice, at least.

“Can I borrow some money?” I asked Megan, and she didn’t even ask what it was for, just said sure.

*

In the colorful and tragic circus after Kurt’s suicide, when it seemed that everyone with a forum, an agenda, and a vocabulary had to say something, I was surprised that no one mentioned Ernest Hemingway. Three decades plus change lay between their deaths, but I would imagine shotgun shells taste the same, no matter what their vintage is.

Kurt left a note, told his wife and the world he didn’t have what it takes anymore, that he couldn’t fake it.

Then, thirty-some years before, you had Hemingway, up in years like he never really wanted to be. Couldn’t fight any more, couldn’t fuck. Prostate trouble, too, if the gods were feeling particularly vicious. I don’t know if he left a note or not, but even if he didn’t, he really hadn’t needed to. It was all there in the books to begin with.

And there you have them, two influential artists with their own singular visions, lives gone, their motives as clear as their demises, and still no one understands. They’re all too busy crying foul to pay attention.

So I ask you: What chance does the average underachiever with a death wish have of being understood?

I went my own way the next several days, placid through my angers. Didn’t bother watching the forecasts. Rain or clouds or sun, I’d gotten to the place where I preferred the surprise to the tipoff. Then the next round of free weekly papers came out, the ones you find at all the better bars and bookstores and coffee shops. The ones whose deadlines I’d caught after borrowing from Megan. I swept down on them and brought home one of each. Sat on the couch as the ebb and flow of life went on under our mad roof, browsing the classifieds until Megan came home.

“I’m writing again,” I told her. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Are you really?” She seemed very happy to hear this, and she was so decent, you know, she didn’t even say the obvious. Oh yeah, well how about writing me a check sometime soon?

“I’m putting together a portfolio,” and then I handed her one of the papers, folded back the way my father always read them, and left them for the next person. I showed her where to read, my ad under “Special Services.”

SUICIDE NOTES

FOR ALL OCCASIONS

•

Don’t waste that last opportunity to have your say … you’ll never get a better chance to explain.

• Custom-written just for you, or choose from among our many demos.

• Blame laid, guilty consciences eased, more.

And on it went, with my evening number and suggested hours, but of course I realized I’d have to be flexible. Emergencies do come up.

“That’s morbid,” said Megan. “But I admire your ability to find a niche.”

“Most people need help just writing a resumé,” I said, and she nodded, remembering. I’d helped her write one two weeks after I’d moved in.

And for all the days of soul-searching, I actually felt good about this. It could prove to be a valuable service, one less thing to worry about at a really shitty time. Making money off the misery of others? I didn’t think of it as selling out. I preferred to think of it as buying in. I’d been there, could relate.

Eagles do fly higher than vultures, but at least they both get off the ground. After that, what really matters?

Megan and I curled into the couch, and then each other, and we talked until the phone started to ring, and once it started, I wondered if it would ever ever stop.