I looked at X as he stood, rigid as a mic stand, midway between the door to the alleyway and Mike the bouncer. He seemed to be in a daze. X was kind of a leader to the rest of us, but at that moment, his face was as white as the sheet I’m typing this on. I had never seen him like that before.
“How well did you know him?” Mike quietly asked X. “What was his name?”
X looked at Mike and started to speak, but no sound came out.
Mike pointed at a chair. “Sit down, kid,” he said. “The cops’ll be here soon enough. They’ll have plenty of questions.”
About five minutes later, we heard the first patrol car finally arrive, skidding to a halt outside the front door, sirens blaring. Two young-looking constables swaggered into the bar and down the stairs. Mike led them past us to the alleyway door. It wasn’t long before one constable came racing back through the bar and out the front doors.
The other stayed outside with Mike, and I thought about the two of them staring up at Jimmy, nailed into the porous old redbrick wall of Gary’s back alley wall, his black brothel creepers two feet off the ground.
“Holy God,” we heard the cop saying. “Holy God, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Ditto,” Mike growled, just as X and I appeared in the doorway.
“You can’t come out here, guys,” the cop said, trying to sound in control. He cleared his throat, nervous. “You shouldn’t come out here, anyway. It’s not a good thing to see.”
X nodded, but stayed where he was. “He was our friend,” he said, his voice flat.
“What’s his name?” the cop asked.
“Jimmy,” I said. “Jimmy Cleary.… Is anyone gonna call his parents?”
“We’re waiting for the detectives. They’re on their way.”
By midnight, Gary’s was swarming with a dozen police. I think it was the first time I was actually relieved to see the cops.
The uniformed ones were interviewing the bands and the bar staff. Some were out in the alleyway, trying to keep warm just outside the fluttering yellow caution tape and the Nasties’ van. And some — the two lead detectives, in plainclothes — were sitting at tables with X and Mike the bouncer. Earlier, they’d spoken with me along with Sam Shiller and Luke Macdonald.
I watched and tried to remember what was going on, which was what I usually did.
I’m a journal-keeper. It keeps me sane. Sort of.
I looked down at the business card the detective had handed me. Terry Murphy, it said. Detective, Portland Police Department, plus a post office box and a phone number. His partner, Detective Savoie, was a table over, interviewing Mike and looking super pissed off.
Detective Murphy carefully watched as X turned over the business card in his hands, head down. Murphy spoke really quietly, almost in a whisper, like he had with me, but I could still hear him. He was going over the evening’s events for the billionth time. “So, you and Kurt immediately went out there when you saw the reaction of the other two guys in the band, is that right, Chris?”
Chris? Uh-oh.
Everyone knew X didn’t ever, ever like being called Chris; he actually didn’t like being addressed by any name. “It’s too intimate,” he told me one time, a bit irritated, when I asked him about it. “The Koreans have it right. Don’t use someone’s given name.” But that’s another story.
This time, X didn’t bother to correct Murphy. Instead, he just nodded. “Yeah, Kurt and I went out and we saw Jimmy.” He sounded weary. “We tried to get him down, but we couldn’t. We checked if he was breathing, but he wasn’t. His skin was cold when we touched it …” He stopped, clearing his throat. Listening to him, I started to cry again. X didn’t. He never cried, as far as I knew.
I tried to concentrate. I noticed that Murphy was quite a bit younger than his partner: square jaw, lots of muscles, longish hair, and a handlebar mustache. He had friendly eyes; I personally thought he was good-looking, too. Unlike his partner, Murphy wasn’t wearing a tie, and his jacket was this semi-hip brown leather car coat thing, like from a TV detective show or something. Before making the decision to become a cop, he’d been a counterculture type, too, he’d told me earlier. When he was younger, he’d supported environmental causes, he said, and he had even gone to protests against pulp and paper mills along Maine’s polluted Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot Rivers. “I opposed authority, just like you guys,” he told me, trying to cheer me up, I guess. “I think my generation may have had better music, though.”
To my surprise, Murphy actually knew something about the punk movement. In 1978, most adults didn’t, or they didn’t want to. But the detective said he had become interested in the punk scene, and he told us that it was good to see local teenagers doing something other than listening to Led Zeppelin all the time and getting stoned.
X looked up at Murphy, fatigue and worry on his face. “Jimmy’s parents?”
Murphy shook his head. “They’re still out, not sure where,” he said. “But we’ve got some guys in a car waiting for them. They’ll take the Clearys downtown when they get home.”
X looked unsure, which was also something I wasn’t used to. X was never unsure about anything. “Will they just tell them right there? When they get home?”
Murphy placed a big hand on X’s shoulder. “We have to tell them as soon as we can, Chris. The guys who will do it have experience with these kinds of things. They’ll be sensitive, but we have to tell them and get them downtown.”
X looked alarmed. “Not to show them …”
“No, no,” Murphy said. “We’ve taken pictures and done what we need to do. The medical examiner is taking care of Jimmy now. Then there’ll be an autopsy and forensic tests. But we need his folks to identify him formally.” He stopped and rubbed his eyes. “It’s gonna be a long night.”
“Can me and Kurt go there to be with them?” X asked. “We’d like to go and try and help them … or whatever.” I nodded.
“That’s not a good idea, guys. We need to work with the family at this point,” Murphy said. “You should just go home and get some rest, if you can. We’ll be in touch soon enough.”
When Murphy stood, he towered over us, and I figured he was easily six foot five, maybe more. Despite a bone-crushing handshake, he had an easygoing way about him, one that you don’t usually see in Portland cops. Since his arrival at Gary’s, he was the only one of them who had shown any sympathy toward us. His partner, Savoie, meanwhile, could not have been more different: he was a total asshole, all terse and gruff. After a few more questions, Murphy told us we could get our friends together and head home.
“I’m very, very sorry about the loss of your friend,” Murphy said. He regarded us with concern. “Are you going to be okay? We’d give you and your friends a ride home, but we’ve kind of got our hands full right now. The media are outside waiting for a statement.”
“It’s okay, Kurt has a car,” X said. “What if the reporters try to talk to us?”
“We’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything,” Murphy said. “We need Jimmy’s parents to hear it from us, not the media.”
“That makes sense,” X said. He looked down at the floor. After a bit, X stood and extended his hand. I did likewise. Murphy in turn gripped both our hands firmly. For a moment, I thought I spotted a flash of a tattoo below Murphy’s sleeve, which certainly hinted at some kind of a less traditional pre-cop life.
“Thanks, Detective,” I said.
“Good night, boys. We’ll be in touch in the morning.”
Heading toward the others, I decided I would break the no-tattoo vow and get Jimmy Cleary’s name inked on my arm.
My own name, by the way, is Kurt Lank. My friends call me Kurt Blank, or Point Blank. This is our story, as I remember it, about what happened to all of us in Portland that winter.
C H A P T E R 3
Jimmy’s murder happened
late Friday night, which I guess made it too late for most media to report on it. The one exception came as a quick mention on WBLM, the big Portland rock music station. Disc jockeys at LM, as it was called in city high schools, liked to mock us and the music we listened to. They liked big-hair, big-arena rock bullshit. “Portland police are saying that a teenager was slain in an alley near Brown Street late tonight, between Congress and Free Streets,” the newsreader droned, just before excitedly reciting an ad about a mattress sale. “Police are withholding the youth’s name until family members can be contacted. But the murder apparently happened at Gary’s bar, where punk rock bands often perform.” When he said the word punk, the newsreader sounded like he wanted to spit.
The two local papers in Portland were the tabloid Daily Sun and the broadsheet Press Herald. Both were pretty conservative, and the only stories they ever published about the genre were totally wrong, completely sensationalized, or both. The Sun headline the next morning wasn’t very subtle: “BLOODY PUNK SLAYING ON HOOKERS ROW!” The story below it contained not much new information, but it did quote two “anonymous prostitutes” who said they were worried about what the murder would mean for them and their “clients.” The story ran beside a grainy photograph of the Sex Pistols, above the cutline: “The Sex Pistols, punk rock’s leading British band, favor songs about ‘destroying’ society.”
The Press Herald’s headline was on page one and above the fold. “TEEN’S DOWNTOWN SLAYING SHOCKS POLICE,” it read. The story was written by the paper’s police reporter, some guy named Ron McLeod. His story was only a few paragraphs long, but it contained a bit more detail than the Sun’s version, and it actually hinted at the slightest degree of pity toward our friend. Among other things, it stated that the victim had been in his late teens and that he lived in South Portland. But it didn’t name him.
X and I slouched at the kitchen table in his family’s home on Highland Avenue, staring at the walls. We felt gutted. X’s mother had heard us come in at about 3:30 a.m., even though we’d tried to be super quiet. She came downstairs and then collapsed, crying, on the living room couch when we told her about Jimmy.
It was now a few hours later, and the breakfast she had made for us was still untouched. Some light was creeping through the blinds. My head was throbbing.
This is insane. How can this be happening?
The early-morning editions of the two newspapers were on the table; the stories about the unnamed victim read and reread many times. The three of us had been listening to NPR, the sound down low, but there had been no mention of Jimmy’s murder; stories about Maine, even murders, didn’t ever attract the attention of big city media. Nobody gave a crap about news from Maine, actually, even people who lived in Maine. For what seemed like forever, there was total quiet. Finally, X’s mom stirred. “I need to wake up your father and tell him,” she said, red-eyed. “We’ll let your sister and brother sleep a bit longer.” She slipped out.
Apart from the buzzing of the fridge, there was more silence. I stared at the newspapers, then looked at my best friend. “Who would do this, X?” I asked. “This is the fucking worst, man.”
“Yeah,” X said. “But it wasn’t random.”
Before I could speak, X’s father stepped into the kitchen, pale as a tombstone. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a Montreal Canadiens T-shirt. X’s mother was behind him. She looked like she’d been crying again.
“Boys,” he said, putting a hand on X’s shoulder. “I am so, so sorry. I am so sad and shocked. I wish you had woken me when you came in.”
“We didn’t want to wake anyone up,” X said. “There was nothing you could do, anyway. The cops told us to go home and wait to hear from them. But nobody’s called.”
“They must still be speaking to the Clearys, and dealing with the media,” his dad said. You could still hear a hint of his Canadian accent. He scanned the newspaper articles. “I can’t imagine what they must be going through. This is just beyond belief.”
X’s parents sat down at the table and started to ask us about what happened at Gary’s. We told them what we could. When we gave them the details about how Jimmy had been found, they both actually lurched back in their seats. “Good God,” his father said. “What did the police say?”
“Nothing,” X said. “I heard a uniformed cop say he had never seen something like that before. He seemed shocked.”
“Did they say anything about a suspect?” X’s father asked.
“No,” I said. “The one detective who spoke to us was pretty shocked, too. He seemed like an okay guy. For a cop.”
The phone suddenly rang, and both X’s parents jumped. His mother answered, listened for a few moments, then held out the receiver to X.
“It’s Detective Murphy,” she said. “He wants to see when you boys can come back downtown. He also says that Rolling Stone has called, and wants to talk to someone who knows something about the Portland underground music scene.”
C H A P T E R 4
X sat in the front, and his dad drove; I sat in the back. We were on the way downtown to police headquarters.
X looked like he was paralyzed or something. He didn’t say a word all the way there. He just stared straight ahead.
X, what are you thinking?
I should have been used to this — the complete absence of emotion, the creepy quietness. But it still sort of pissed me off sometimes.
Right from Day One, X was completely different from anyone else I knew. His ears, for starters: that was one of the first things people noticed. In late-1970s Portland, no guys wore earrings, not even the punk guys. Nobody. But X did. And it led to a ton of fights, most of which started with him being called “a fucking fag” and then getting pushed. In one brawl, when a couple of drunken bikers and their drunken biker girlfriends stumbled into a punk community-hall gig we’d organized and called X a “fucking fag,” he didn’t blink, as usual. But when one of the bikers called his younger sister, Bridget, a name, X’s eyes went black and he leaned into the biker’s beard and hissed: “Apologize!”
Instead, the biker reached up and ripped out the little gold hoop, which tore away a not-small chunk of X’s earlobe. Blood gushed everywhere. Even over the noise of the band, I could hear Bridget screaming. As I and everyone else present watched, astounded, X beat the much-bigger biker’s face into hamburger meat. In his fist, he held a short length of lead pipe he sometimes carried in his pocket. The biker slumped to the ground, and he didn’t get up again. His friends just silently picked him up and hustled him out of there.
Word spread. All of the bikers knew about X after that. They didn’t like him, of course, but they also left him alone. They’d never admit it, but a few of them seemed to grudgingly respect this wiry, pale, leather-jacketed punk rock kid. So they gave him a wide berth on nights we spent at Gary’s, the triangular notch in his right ear a sign that X was totally different from the other punks there. Among other things, nobody called his little sister names anymore.
X was different in other ways, too. Some of our friends sported Mohawks, for example. A few had shaved their heads, in the early days of the scene, favoring the skinhead look. Many had dyed their hair a variety of colors not found in nature, me included. And all of us were careful to have hair that wasn’t too long, so we wouldn’t ever be confused with the hippies, who we mostly hated.
But not X. His hair was longish, and he clearly didn’t give a shit who disapproved. It went to his shoulders, just about, and it was wavy and wild. Most of the North American punk bands, and all of the British ones, kept their hair short. X favored the Ramones look.
X also wore the sort of uniform the guys in the Nasties liked — a biker jacket in any weather, skinny jeans with the knees torn out, T-shirts, and Doc Martens or Converse Chucks. If it got really cold, like tonight, X would wear this crazy ancient knitted hunting sweater with ducks on it. He’d bought it for two bucks at a downtown thrift s
tore, which is where us Portland punks bought most of our clothes. He didn’t wear a hat, because real punks don’t wear hats.
As the car moved toward downtown, over the Casco Bay Bridge, I looked at X’s profile from my spot in the back seat. He had a slightly prominent jaw, like his dad, and a slightly off-center nose (cause: a fight). His face was broad, almost moonish, and there were two scars to be seen — one below his mouth and the other above an eyebrow (cause: two more fights). He was always clean-shaven.
His eyes, his mother and I had agreed one day, were probably his most memorable feature. Like Bowie, one eye did not dilate or contract properly. During yet another community center battle, when I was off fighting someone else, X was jumped by a couple of guys and one of them hit him in the eye, hard. Over his protests, and much later, we rushed him to emergency at the Mercy, but there was nothing they could do. The medical term for his condition, we were told, was anisocoria, meaning he had unequal pupils. X could see well enough in both eyes, but — like Bowie, whose music we thought was mostly average, except around the Low period — his eyes were mismatched. So people would stare at him quite a lot. He would stare back. They would look away.
FUCK. Fuck fuck fuck.
My guts were churning, and my head still hurt. Jimmy’s murder had left me desolate, a total wreck. But X remained silent. I looked at the notched ear, at the set of the jaw. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t even cried yet.
X and I met back in junior high school, at Holy Cross, which both of us regarded as an oppressive shit hole of Catholic uniformity. We became friends because we both regarded everything, and everyone, as seriously weird and/or boring. I remember talking to X on the day he found me burning some papers on the school grounds.
Recipe for Hate Page 2
