The Convulsion Factory

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