Free Cat Power by Elizabeth Goodman Page A

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 peopleare 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 theywere 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