There's enough evidence, circumstantial though it is, to
suggest my uncle committed suicide. I was ten, I think, or nine or eleven. I
opened the front door on a Sunday – I’d spent the weekend at Darien Lake,
determined to ride every roller coaster until my ears bled – and found my mom,
hysterical, saying into the telephone something like, "don’t they know
what happened?" My sisters, both much younger, were crying.
I tried to get my footing – I'd only come home and all I
knew was that something in my corner of the world had broken, a pulley
somewhere in the rigging had snapped and crashed on our heads, and there we
were, wading through a wreckage we couldn’t yet measure.
Mom hung up and said her brother wasn't breathing, that he
had a tube down his throat, and that's all they knew. Grandma and grandpa would
call when the doctor had more.
Then she hugged me and hugged my sisters and maybe told us
she loved us, or maybe she didn't say anything. We were all crying. Then the
phone rang.
***
I inherited two pairs of tube socks, a copy of Behind Beavis and Butt-Head: Are They “Really
Cool” or Are They Really Jerks?, which a house fire would later claim, and
a brown, faux-leather case. In it are 26 Neil Young cassettes: three are mine,
added later, and four are mix tapes that would have been mine at some point
anyway.
My uncle would record these mixes: the best Neil Young, or
the weirdest, or a whole album, and mail them to me. And I’d listen to them
until the ribbons were worn through to the clear and empty plastic.
I even kept the broken tapes.
***
It's strange that, out of the blue, I'd find myself reading
Kurt Cobain's suicide note.
Strange because I can't stand Nirvana. I don't care what you
think about that. I’ve heard it all before, so don’t bother. Ask Haggus
– I'm a real asshole about what I don't like.
But I knew, in the back of my mind, that Cobain’s note
alluded to a line from “My My, Hey Hey,” a Neil Young tune that, with “Hey Hey,
My My” (go figure), bookends the album Rust
Never Sleeps. “It’s better to burn out,” he says, “than to fade away.”
I’d been reading this note, and rattling around in my head
was a recent conversation with a friend who’d revealed he was thinking about
suicide. I didn't know what to say to him then. I don't know now. But it hit me
somewhere deep. It all came together, Cobain’s note, my friend, and Neil Young crunching
through the speakers, and it hit – scutch! – like a shovel against the tip of a
huge, ancient boulder buried in a field someplace, dropped there by a glacier
during the last ice age.
On top of all this, my wife and I had just had a son. The
thought of Cobain killing himself – or dying, anyway – before his daughter
reached her second birthday, was too much.
A hungry yowl brought me out of my funk. I wiped my eyes,
snapped to, and warmed a bottle.
And I sat there, feeding this young, helpless thing; I
looked at him and thought, “Once you're gone, you can never come back.” His
cheek is the softest thing I've ever known.
***
As my uncle was fond of telling me, Neil Young is the
Godfather of Grunge. Godfather, too, of everything that came after. The stratum
of crust and filth he lays down on “Hey Hey” launched J. Mascis, Dinosaur, Jr.,
his Fog, and a thousand other guitarists, both great and terrible.
A teenager opened that brown case one day and pulled out a
band called the Pixies, tripping through Winterlong on a tribute album. The
Pixies blew my mind wide open then, and I haven’t been able to find the pieces
to put them back together. I've since stopped looking.
Neil can jam, Neil can rock, he can croak bizarre new wave
tunes from a glorified cancer kazoo (see the infamous Trans), and it’s all been part of my brain and my guts since I knew
music could be more than Christmas carols and nursery rhymes.
Right now our son’s favorite tune is “Twinkle, Twinkle
Little Star.” But I wonder how long before “After the Gold Rush” works its way
into his tiny heart.
I sat down tonight to write about punk rock. This is a
story, I suppose, of Johnny Rotten, never far behind.
I can't a imagine a life without music. I'm sorry to hear about your friend, but tell him to hang in there, and if seems bad, to try something new. Just keep trying new things until something sticks.