Cat Power (5 page)

Even with some of the traditional comforts of childhood in place, the first seven years of Chan's life mostly resembled one long Molly Hatchet after-party. Three years before her birth, her parents had been drinking, drugging, rocking revolutionaries, and it would take more than two young girls and a stack of bills to turn them into a settled suburban couple. “It was like those movies where the stereo is playing Lynyrd Skynyrd, and people are on motorcycles and smoking mad dope, and little kids are running around,” Chan has said. “It was a hippie drugged-out Southern kind of thing.” At the Marshalls' house there was always a collection of stoned, aimless, broke rock boys and girls crashing on her
family's floor. Everybody smoked, everybody drank, and everybody played guitar.

“During the Vietnam War, if you had money you went to San Francisco, if you went to college you went to New York, and if you were poor you stayed in the South,” Chan has said of her parents' generation. “You get a lot of uneducated people jumping onto a Greyhound bus and going to Atlanta. I grew up with these people who had long hair, no money, and no jobs.” As babies, Chan claims, the girls slept in drawers, not cribs. She has also said that her mother used to fill up her baby bottle with Budweiser and that she spent time at bars in Atlanta. The kitchen cabinets were stocked with cartons of cigarettes, records, guitar strings, and bottles of booze, not Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Cheerios. Some days Chan would come home from school to the illusion of a stable home. The house would be neat, Myra would have prepared something simple for dinner, and the family would eat together before Charlie headed out to play one of his cocktail-lounge gigs. On other days, however, she would come home to a floor full of vagrant musicians sleeping off a wild night on the family's carpet, nothing but a fridgeful of condiments for dinner.

“I started when I was in second grade,” Chan has said of her very first cigarette. “My mom would come home from work, before we'd go out with her, and she'd light a cigarette—Kool kings. We'd sit on her lap and play around for a minute, then she'd go take a shower. She'd always leave her Kool king lit in the ashtray, so that's how I started smoking. I remember first grade and kindergarten, I would beg her, ‘Please, please don't smoke. You're going to die.’ Then, when I was in second grade—I'll never forget it—I thought, Fuck. I'm hungry. All we had was bread, which was kind of old, and the toaster had caught on fire so many times I was scared of it. I used to put mustard on my bread and we
didn't have any mustard. That cigarette was sitting there, so I started smoking it.”

Both of Chan's parents have sugar-coated the extent to which their daughters were exposed to the drinking and the drugs that permeated the Marshall household. One of the first things Myra said, unprompted, when she contacted me with concerns about this book was that many of the details she reads about Chan's childhood are untrue—and not because Chan is misquoted, but because she exaggerates. “We drank, don't get me wrong, everybody drank,” Myra says. “But she magnifies things.” Charlie was initially similarly defensive. “I did have my cup of tea then,” he admits. “We would do some drinking. We smoked and so forth around the kids, but never any heavy drugs. I would never allow drugs around my house with my daughters.” When pushed a bit about his ability to shield his kids from what was happening in the next room, Charlie relents a little. “There was a lot of experimentation with myself with LSD and all these other things,” he says quietly. “It was the early seventies. The drugs were mostly kept separate from the kids, but you can't really—you put up a wall, but kids hear and see everything.”

As completely as Charlie and Myra both loved their daughters, they were not able to take care of them because they were not able to take care of themselves. Myra battled her untreated mental issues with booze, Charlie used drugs to ease the anguish of his failed attempt at rock stardom, and they took their pain out on each other. Whenever Charlie showed up at the house for one more try at committing to marriage and fatherhood, Charlie remembers Myra mocked him for his pathetic attempts to be a good man, almost daring him to fail her and the girls. Meanwhile, ever since Chan was a baby, Charlie knew that Myra was mentally unwell and that her increasingly troubling behavior wasn't necessarily her fault if it was related to her untreated disease. But instead of
getting her the help she needed, he walked right out the door, leaving his two young daughters at her mercy.

Chan was almost four years old when her parents finally split up. The breakup had been building since a few months after the couple's bacchanal of a wedding, and when it finally came, it was not pretty. “About the third time we tried to get back together, we got into an argument,” Charlie says. “She wanted to take the kids to school and I said, ‘No you're not.’ I took the kids and I pushed them in the closet and I closed the closet door. I wouldn't let her take them.” In his fury, Charlie was deaf to the screams of his terrified daughters banging on the closet door. “I realized they were both hysterically crying in the closet,” Charlie recalls, his voice quiet and his words labored. “Myra was just freaking out, so I went and sat down in the living room. She came to get the kids and she left. That was our last time together.”

Today Charlie is appropriately candid and regretful when he talks about the emotional scars moments like this left on his daughters. “Those type of things for the kids are probably things they still remember now,” he says. “It probably still touches them. I know they probably had nightmares about that. We had good times. There were happy times; the bad times—they were more memorable.”

Charlie and Myra Marshall officially divorced on December 16, 1975. Charlie was twenty-seven, Myra was twenty-five. Free from the burden of trying to make life as a father and husband work, Charlie refocused on music and even
considered moving out to Los Angeles. Ultimately, though, he decided that he didn't want to be that far from Myra and the girls.

Charlie remembers Myra remarrying shortly after the divorce, but Myra's second husband, Leamon Land, says they didn't marry until 1979, two years and a few months after Myra and Charlie legally split. “Myra and Charlie were not together long,” Leamon says. “They had Mandy and they had Charlyn and for some reason they didn't get along. Charlie was off doing his thing and Myra raised the girls alone.” The time that Myra spent as a single parent was difficult. She had a hard time holding down a job. “This is such a classic story,” Dr. Ewing says. “One consequence of mental illness is there's going to be social chaos. Daddy is going to split because he's not going to be able to put up with the craziness. There's going to be a little of that. There's gonna be poverty. Mental illness will make you poor.”

When things got too hard, Myra would send her girls to spend a few weeks with their grandmother. No stranger to struggle, Grandma Lil was dealing with the dissolution of her marriage to Myra's father, Richard. “He's kind of a short guy with a real hot temper,” Leamon says of Myra's dad, who moved out around this time and now lives in Nashville. Grandma Lil turned to God to get her through. She attended church regularly, and as long as her granddaughter was living with her, so did Chan. It was in church and at home with her grandmother that Chan first learned to sing. “When I was very little, a baby girl, my grandmother would always put a tape in a tape recorder and ask me to sing,” Chan remembers. “I have one of them, from when I was seven. I remember her doing it all the time. She had these religious tapes and she would record over them.”

From the time Chan was less than a year old, Granny Lil was the closest thing Chan had to a trustworthy parental figure. An almost comically
archetypal maternal presence, Granny Lil is protective of her family and resolute in her beliefs. To this day, she and Chan are still incredibly close. Chan wrote the
Greatest
track “Willie” while taking a cab from the airport in Tallahassee, Florida, to visit Lillian in Pensacola, a trip she makes several times a year.

Chan isn't a conventionally religious person, but through attending church with Granny Lil as a kid, she developed a deep sense of spirituality and respect for the idea of God. “I lived with my grandmother a lot growing up,” Chan has said. “When she lost her son, Uncle Wayne, in a motorcycle accident, she found God. She brought God into my life as a little kid.” Religion showed Granny Lil how to find redemption in pain, and it provided Chan with a safe haven from the madness she faced at home. “Church was a way to get out of my home, which was kinda a mess,” the singer has explained.

Chan's relationship with religion is complex. In most obvious ways, she seems the furthest thing from a dutiful Christian. She swears like a sailor, has displayed her pubic hair in a national magazine, has had an abortion, drinks, and has experimented with drugs. As Lenny puts it, “If you know Charlyn for two seconds, you know she's not gonna be beating the Bible.” On the other hand, Chan has a deep respect for the idea of faith. “I have a Bible by my bed,” the singer has said. “If something gets weird, it distracts me. It's very philosophical or metaphysical that there's no real— nothing is permanent.”

Chan's favorite Bible stories are the ones that convey this sense of faith as a way to make peace with the unknown. “
My favorites are
the mystical ones
where Jesus
goes into the desert. Or when the fishermen just drop their whole lives and follow him because they believe this person is so good,” Chan has said. “They just believe him without even thinking about it. They realize, this is Him. Just things like that make the
belief exist from somewhere. And Revelation, the end, like it's the end of a prayer. All children of God go out with the grace of God. It's final. You can either have the grace, or not.”