Cat Power (9 page)

If there was a specific incident between Chan and her mom that precipitated the move, Chan didn't tell her father about it. “I asked Chan what happened a couple times,” Charlie remembers. “She would just put it off as, ‘She's crazy! She's crazy!’” As frank as Chan can be about her mother's tirades, you get the sense that she kept the worst of what happened to herself. Even once Chan was living with her father, she still didn't reveal the most explicit details. “I know that time with her mother constituted a lot of the demons Chan fights today,” Charlie says. “Chan has been totally afraid of her mom her entire life. You think of a suckling child, and that's the one connection they have with life, and to be afraid of that person that brings you into life, I mean, what a scary experience.”

The trauma of finally leaving her mother's house was intense, but Chan got a second chance at a semistable adolescence in Atlanta. When she left North Carolina in the spring of 1988 Chan pulled out of tenth grade midyear, so in the fall she reenrolled as a sophomore at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia. Six months after Chan moved in with her dad, Miranda joined them and, for the first time since Myra and Charlie were married, the Marshall girls were living permanently under their father's roof. Charlie celebrated his fortieth birthday by quitting rock ‘n’ roll (again), and resigned himself to working regular jobs in between playing happy-hour piano gigs that got him home in time for dinner.

At sixteen years old, Chan was a suburban punk. The popular kids peg-rolled their acid-washed jeans and drove around in Camaros, the theater kids wore dark eyeliner and listened to the Smiths, and the city kids dealt drugs and snuck into hip-hop clubs on school nights. Chan hung out with the rock kids. “She was another alternative kid that was into some pretty sedate punk rock,” recalls Loring Kemp, Chan's schoolmate at Campbell and now an Atlanta-based writer. “We were the type of kids who would write ‘Violent Femmes’ on our notebook. There were
parties, and people smoked pot and did acid, but we weren't a rough inner-city crowd.” The boys wore fauxhawks and trench coats; the girls bought used T-shirts and Levi's from the Salvation Army and wore them with black Doc Martens.

Chan had been to so many new schools over the years that adjusting to one more new one was routine. She experimented with drugs, she drank, she smoked, she had lots of friends, but she was never really part of the cool crowd. In some ways, outsider status was Chan's choice; she didn't like the exclusivity that came along with popularity, and shunned it. “It wasn't that she wasn't popular,” Lenny recalls. “I believe she was popular. She basically was the way she is now. She didn't like a lot of clique-ish activity. She liked people that were real. Not phony.” In other ways, however, Chan would have liked to feel more confident. “I always wanted to be like Madonna,” the singer has confessed. “I wouldn't, like, show my boobs and wear that black bustier, but she made me feel sexy.”

As with most people who don't assimilate well in high school, Chan's inability to fit in was a good sign. As she grew up, the singer continued to keep up with trends in pop culture and pop music. In particular, she was a fan of British postpunk bands like the Cure and the Psychedelic Furs, whose singles she bought in the import section of her local record store. But the blues played on repeat in her subconscious. When Chan started writing songs as Cat Power, her deep connection to traditional music would authenticate her as the female, indie-rock Robert Johnson, but as a teenager it defined her as painfully unlike everyone else. “I never met anyone in school who knew who Eartha Kitt or James Brown was,” Chan has said.

While Chan attended Campbell High, she and her sister lived with their father in his apartment, and they had a good routine. On a typical evening Charlie would come home around eight, fresh off his cocktail-lounge gig, to find
Chan on the phone in her room. “I said, ‘There's only one rule about that phone,’” Charlie remembers, laughing. “‘You do your homework, and then you can talk on it.’” Chan found a way around this. “I'd kind of sneak home and catch her on the phone while doing her homework with the TV going and a CD playing,” her father remembers, chuckling. “I would say, ‘Well, I know you're probably tuned into one of them.’

“Out of the seven days of the week, we each got to pick what we would have for dinner,” Charlie remembers. “Everybody else had to agree, and then we could pick a movie. Chan had her movies that she loved. I really didn't care for Whoopi Goldberg at the time, and she made me watch
The Color Purple
. Now it's one of my favorite movies!”

Occasionally Charlie would take the girls to the record store, where they would sort through the stacks and beg their father to buy them the newest new-wave single. “They'd always go to the back of the store where they kept the black-and-whites—that's what I called imports,” Charlie remembers. “The girls were fans of the Cure when they first came out. I said, ‘Yeah, they're a really good band. They need one crossover hit and they'd be even bigger.’ Both girls looked at me like, ‘They don't need a crossover hit—they're fine just the way they are!’”

With Chan and her father finally living in the same house, Charlie had the chance to encourage his daughter's interest in his chosen profession. He could have taught her how to play guitar, he could have let her in on his own songwriting process. Music could have become an indelible bond between the two of them. Instead, Charlie was so intensely territorial about his work and forbidding about sharing his instruments that he made Chan feel she wasn't worthy of following in his footsteps.

“My dad was always writing songs,” Chan has recalled. “But if you ever wanted to touch the guitar or piano, ‘
Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
.’ There would be this huge, what's the word? Soliloquy about, ‘The guitar is not
a toy. The guitar is a musical instrument.’” Instead of perceiving his professional life as an inspiration, an interest they had in common, Charlie gave Chan the impression that music was his, not hers. “My father never encouraged me to be interested in music in a personal way,” she has said. “Because he was a musician, he thought it was his territory.”

Chan's increasing curiosity about her dad's music clashed with his resentment of her interest. “When I was in tenth grade, he had a baby grand,” Chan remembered. “He'd come home and I'd be figuring it out. I liked music like every teenager. It was this massive thing, and it just made sense to me.” Chan felt a natural affinity for the piano, but instead of developing an organic relationship with the instrument, she heard her father's admonishing words in her head: “The piano is not a toy.” When Charlie left the house, Chan relished the opportunity to beat the crap out of her dad's prize. “I'd kind of bang on it,” the singer has recalled. “It really made me rebellious.”

Before Chan moved in with her dad, music was still a private pleasure and solace giver, but living with him corrupted the purity of her connection to writing and singing songs. It was also the beginning of her lifelong inferiority complex regarding her skills as a musician. “When he was gone I'd always play it to prove that this thing isn't so powerful. It's just a piano. It's supposed to be messed with, and there's no right or wrong,” Chan has said. “That maybe created my rebellion to not learn to play.”

Chan's father says he doesn't remember this. In fact, he has no memory of Chan writing songs or displaying any particular interest in playing instruments, but if she had, Charlie says, he would absolutely have encouraged her. “She never asked me about how to chord the guitar, so I never taught her how to play the guitar,” he says. “Don't get me wrong, she loved music and she had her own little collections of music
and everything, but she didn't seem interested in the instruments, not really.” And if she had? “Well, I've always told the girls that these instruments are professional instruments, they're not to be played with. If they were abusing them, that was not allowed.” Sensing that he might be coming across as cruel, he tells this story to clarify: “I got a little baby kitty. She loved to get into the piano. I hated cat hair in there, so one time when she got in the actual frame of the piano, I closed the front of it and I banged on it. I opened the lid and she jumped out. She never got back in.”

Charlie Marshall wanted to be a rock star but ended up playing standards for tourists in cocktail lounges. The idea that his daughter had even the faintest desire, much less the necessary talent, to achieve what he couldn't troubled him. Chan is a born empathizer, always seeing the reason behind the mistake. She understood the source of her father's pain and accepted it even though it meant enduring his jealousy. “It was his dream. Since he was a little boy and he'd go tap-dance on people's porches in Alabama. He had very high expectations. He's a Capricorn. Very workaholic,” she has said.

All these years later, Charlie's relationship with Chan exists, but the two are not close. Ever the dutiful daughter, Chan makes a point to invite her father to see her play when she's in Atlanta, and he'll usually come, accompanied by a date. But when he talks about those shows, there is an almost sociopathic lack of paternal pride in his voice. The primary thing Charlie sees when he watches his daughter onstage is that she has something he wants. “I was just blown away,” Charlie says of a performance he saw at the Earl in Atlanta. “I mean, there's eighty-five, ninety kids, and they just sit right in the middle of the floor. She comes out onstage and you can hear a pin drop. The places I work, the people
are eating and they're making so much noise. I said, ‘God, it would be great to have this.’”

In spite of how Chan's complex and dark relationship with her father has played out over the years, her life has never been as normal as it was when she lived with him. “I really got my act together for a while and almost finished high school,” the singer has remembered. “I told her that for each A she got, I'd give her fifty dollars,” Charlie remembers. “Well, the first six weeks of the first semester, she had all A's and one B! Of course, that didn't continue, she was basically rehashing what she had done the year before. But a promise is a promise.”

Chan blames pot smoking and her tendency to skip school for the fact that she flunked tenth grade and was forced to repeat it. “I went back. I did it over, and I made really good grades the next tenth grade,” she remembers. Things were temporarily looking up. She had righted herself at school, was living a semistable life with her father, and was looking toward possibly graduating high school and getting one step closer to the legitimate, conventional life she desired. Then Charlie pulled the rug out from under her once again. “In the middle of eleventh grade, my dad kicked me out of the house because he went to live with his girlfriend,” Chan has remembered. “He said that I could work and go to school.”

A handful of credits shy of graduation, Chan found herself alone with no money, no parental support, and no place to live. It's hard to understand how any father could justify this choice, but Charlie has an explanation. “They had a curfew—they had to be home by twelve o'clock,” he recalls in a calm, measured voice. “About three times in a row they didn't come home on time, so I told them that they were going to have to move out.” Charlie believes this was the right decision. “They were a little bit upset at first, but then they realized that they
were on their own. They were free. As a parent sometimes you have to do what's best.”

Even after her father threw her out, effectively demolishing Chan's chance to graduate from high school, the singer still felt a stubborn sense of loyalty to her dad. “I was so angry at him, but I protected him so much,” she has remembered. In a way, this move was nothing new. Charlie never seemed to be a reliable presence in Chan's life, even when she was a little girl. For all of Myra's faults, she stuck around to raise her children. Charlie seemed to operate as if parenthood was a hobby, one you could take up in your downtime and drop when things got too hard. When Charlie kicked Chan out of his house, it only reinforced what her childhood had already taught her about herself: namely, that she was worthless. “I was kind of shocked,” Chan has said of her dad's decision. “But I was like, Who gives a fuck? I'm not gonna be anybody anyway.”