Cat Power (28 page)

As genuinely scary as this scenario sounds, it doesn't really explain Chan's demented behavior. Why didn't she call security? Or the cops? Why didn't she make a beeline for the nearest taxi and get the hell out
of there? If someone is holding a gun to your head and therefore endangering you, them, and every single one of the five-hundred-plus people packed into the Bowery, you might react in any number of ways, but what most wouldn't do is go onstage and attempt to play a rock show for two hours.

Some would say this sort of scenario is definitive proof that Chan Marshall is a manipulative crackpot who stages breakdowns like mercenary performance-art pieces designed to bring in the ticket sales. Others, like Chan's former labelmate Mary Timony, say that anyone who interprets Chan's onstage behavior as contrived is missing the point. “Telling the audience that she feels uncomfortable—that's really a way of bringing them into her,” Timony says. “To some people that's a construct, but that's because they don't understand it. I don't think she intended it to be this thing to make people interested in her. She lets people see her insecurities, and that makes people feel close to her, like she's opening up to them.”

As completely as these devoted fans are on her side, Chan may sometimes wish they were more like the haters, who, at the very least, don't expect her to heal their wounds. During her first few years as a professional musician, Chan learned to deal with the Cat Power-obsessed French girls, the occasional crushed-out rocker boy, and the newly packed venues, but nothing prepared her for the type of fan that started showing up at her shows during the
Moon Pix
tour. “There was this Japanese woman,” Chan remembered. “She was totally trembling. She wouldn't look at me. She was just like, ‘I want to tell you that you help me,’ and she started bawling and turned away. I gave her this hug and started bawling with her because I knew what she was going to say. I know how she felt. She started telling me stuff that happened, her eyes
were just pouring out. She really was, like, looking for something to help her get out of her suicidal thoughts.”

Most of the time Chan found these encounters stimulating; they reminded her that although she was not living the domesticated life she dreamed of as a kid, her music was making an impact on the lives of tens of thousands of strangers. “Those kinds of things are really amazing,” Chan explained, “because that person who's shedding that, it's good for them. It makes me feel good when I see them so open as a human and not as zipped-up. That makes me cry, the human spirit, feeling like, Okay, we're not alone. They help me get through what I can't make sense of.”

Cat Power's most heartbreaking songs convey intimacy through obscurity: “Nude as the News,” “Metal Heart,” “Rockets,” these songs are all rife with an emotional density, the details of which are hidden in plain sight. These are the songs that bring fans the world over to their knees, made prostrate by the overwhelming sensation of being understood by someone in a way they never have before. Chan shares a communal sense of abject sadness with her fans, but there is a vast rift between the truth about her own personal emotional reality and what fans perceive via her songs. “It's almost like I'm making a connection with something that is not even there,” Chan has said of her relationship with fans. “It's okay because they don't know what I'm talking about, really. They don't have the images I have. They have their own images, which is good.”

Chan is able to look at the beneficial side of these encounters, appreciate them for the connection they represent between her music and its audience, and protect herself with the notion that although Cat Power fans feel they know her personally, there is always distance between what they perceive and who Chan Marshall really is. After a year on
the road filled with countless moments like this, a year in which Chan looked into the eyes of hundreds of people who hear her every exhale as the word of their own personal messiah, that distance started to seem insufficient. It became increasingly difficult for Chan Marshall to separate herself from Cat Power, and this contributed to her drinking, which contributed to her erratic stage behavior, which ultimately (and ironically) alienated a core group of her original, most loyal fans.

Ultimately, only Chan knows the complex emotional realities behind her erratic onstage personae. Only she knows why she continues to stand night after night beneath the lights even though being there torments her. Only she knows what drives her to appeal equally to the two factions of her fan base—rubberneckers looking for the train wreck, and lost souls looking for a soul mate. What we know is that every time Chan crawls into the crowd and plucks her way through “Cross Bones Style” with her nose pressed to the floor, as she did at the Bowery that night, the fans reach out to console her because they believe she needs it. They believe they know exactly what it's like to feel as she does, and they long to reciprocally console her the way her music has consoled them. They believe they are sharing something pure with their idol. If they are, then both Chan and the crowd are experiencing an exquisite moment of redemption. If they aren't, then it's a cruel fraud.

Beginning around the Moon Pix tour, when she was in her mid-to late twenties, Chan became increasingly troubled by the idea that, like her sister and her mother, she was going to develop schizophrenia. As a child, Chan had
nightmarish visions of her mother being hauled away by men in white coats. As she got older, Chan started to fear that this time around, they were coming for her.

The onset of schizophrenia is usually in late adolescence, after the frontal lobes are fully formed, but, because so little is really understood about the brain mechanics that are involved, there is no real maximum age of onset. If you have a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia, you are going to live your whole life at risk of developing it. “She worried about getting it. I know that worried her constantly,” Judy Ibbotson says. “And she worried about her mom and sister. And she worried about the little ones
Chan's niece and nephew
being in that situation.” Right before Chan left for the
Moon Pix
tour, she had to deal with a family emergency involving her mother. “She left with a day's notice,” Ibbotson remembers. “She said she had to get up to North Carolina because something had happened.”

By this time, Miranda was managing her disease well and enjoying her life as a wife and mother as well as her career as a nurse. But according to her son, Myra was still entrenched in what has become a lifelong battle against accepting help for her mental problems. “She has been diagnosed,” Lenny says, “but refuses to acknowledge it or take her medication.” Just as she did as a younger woman, and just as she does now, Lenny and Leamon agree that Myra found it difficult to keep a steady job. “Myra worked for a while at Coca-Cola, did bookkeeping, she had a few jobs,” Leamon recalls. “She would work, then get mad at them, cuss them out, and get fired.”

Chan began the
Moon Pix
tour worried about her family and afraid of this hateful disease that rendered both her mother and sister unable to trust their own thoughts. The idea that she too could wake up on any given morning and be crazy festered in Chan's mind throughout the duration
of her time on the road. By the time she got back to New York, she was hallucinating.

Matthew Shipp is a celebrated underground jazz pianist who has been living in Alphabet City since 1984. He first met Chan in 1995. “I was standing in Bell Atlantic paying my bill at their office on Thirteenth Street, and there was this girl in back of me,” Shipp recalls. “She taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Are you a jazz pianist?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She goes, ‘I just read an article about you.’ I'm thinking to myself, ‘God, this girl's really cute.’ She must have been reading my mind because she goes, ‘I'm friends with your wife, and I live next door to you.’” After that, Shipp started seeing Chan all over their neighborhood. They would bump into each other on the street and head down to Max Fish, or to sandwich-and-coffee outpost the Pink Pony, for a beer or a snack.

Around 1999, Shipp noticed a deterioration in Chan's psychological state. “She said she saw Jesus in Midtown,” Shipp states unequivocally. “This was the late nineties. I was seeing Chan around a lot, and it seemed to me that she was on drugs. I've talked to all kinds of delusional people, but this was really scary, and I can't put my hand on exactly why. I remember thinking she was finished. She was talking about how she saw Jesus. Then she saw a vision of Satan, and then she talked to Satan and Jesus came and rescued her. With a straight face I said, ‘Chan, are you all right?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I'm all right. Why?’”

Not that Chan was in the mental state to appreciate this at the time, but the fact that she was having visions indicates she probably wasn't suffering from the same mental illness as her mom and sister. “Schizophrenics rarely have visual hallucinations,” Dr. Ewing explains. “If somebody is having vivid, well-formed hallucinations—not just the dark shadow in the corner of the room, but something that looks like the real thing—you don't think about schizophrenia. In bipolar
disorder, there are visions and hallucinations. You see a lot more bipolar in families with schizophrenia.”

Obsession with religion is something a lot of schizophrenics experience in their auditory hallucinations, and similar visual sensations can accompany the manic phase of bipolar disorder. “God is sending them messages, expecting things of them,” Dr. Ewing says of common schizophrenic delusions. “Sometimes they think they are God and have some kind of special mission. That's more suggestive of a manic psychosis, the real religious overtones. If they bring in somebody naked, you pretty much don't need to know anything else. They're manic.
I
took care of a lovely young girl—
she
decided she needed to preach to the poor, but a real honest girl didn't hide behind clothing, so she gave her clothes away.
”