Another Side of Courtney Love

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I met Courtney Love in the winter of 1985, when we both lived briefly in Portland, Oregon. I was twenty-four, she was nineteen. She wanted to be famous at that time. She wasn’t very specific about what for, it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted to be famous too (as a writer), and we talked about that a lot. It became the basis of our friendship. I remember our conversations on the subject: we’d argue about strategies, backstories, the different pathways to fame, the different personas of other celebrities and how the public reacted to them. As with all our conversations, Courtney was brilliant, hilarious, insightful. She was easily the most influential person in my early artistic life. I based numerous characters on her, in my fiction. It was she who patiently explained to me how to get an agent. Friends often joked with me that she was my original “muse”, which I suppose is the truth.

We continued to run into each other in different cities until 1991, which was the last time I saw her in person. Her latest band, Hole, was playing a gig in Portland at the X-Ray Cafe. There were about five people in the audience. They didn’t sound very good in the empty space. Afterward, standing around the van, she gave me a Hole T-shirt and a hug. At the time, I thought that might be it for her. Over the last six years, she’d had a couple bit-parts in movies, she’d played in a couple bands. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done anything. But the big-time fame she had dreamed about seemed to have passed her by. All that talk and preparation had been for nothing. And yet she was still funny and crazy and indefatigable. Laughing and smoking cigarettes. Handing out T-shirts to her “fans”, (me).