“What’s that?” he’d asked.
“The school constitution,” I said, as an unhappy gym teacher started jogging in our direction. “I’m protesting the fascist culture that exists here.”
We had kind of known each other for a while at that point, but we were more or less inseparable after the constitution-burning incident, for which I was suspended for a couple of days. X seemed to be impressed by that. Afterward, we put up posters to oppose war and to commemorate the victims of the shootings at Kent State. We circulated petitions about the environment and Native American issues. For a joke, we even ran a fictional candidate in the Holy Cross student council elections. We called him Herbie Schwartz. Herbie won in a landslide.
Dave Heaney, who advised the student council, came to see us. “Joke’s on you, fellas,” he said. “If Herbie won, then one of you has to serve on council.” So I did.
Dave Heaney liked us, and we liked him. Like X’s parents, he always encouraged us to be suspicious of authority, even his. He seemed to like our refusal to be conventional teenagers. He liked how we read books, how we were aware of political issues, how we refused to be like our peers, how we asked questions that made people uncomfortable. At graduation, he told us his favorite “X-related” anecdote: the day X asked Father McLean, the pious, pompous old priest assigned to the school, if Jesus Christ might have been gay. “He was a lifelong bachelor, and he lived with other men for much of his life, after all,” X had said with a straight face, just before being hustled off to the principal’s office.
Dave Heaney was the one who advised us to go to Portland Alternative High School in Portland’s east end. And so we did. Like at Holy Cross, we continued to stick together at PAHS, and we sort of became the nucleus of what we called the NCNA: the Non-Conformist News Agency. It wasn’t really a news agency, or even a newspaper. It was, as X once noted, a weirdo club — it was “the island of misfit punks.”
X wrote and edited most of the NCNA’s organ; I supplied the photos and the art. It was our semi-regular bulletin of defiance, our “fuck you” transmission to the outside world.
A couple dozen other outcasts and outsiders moved into the NCNA’s orbit, and we protected them from the jocks, who sometimes liked to beat up the punk kids. We, along with our new friends, published The NCNA as often as we could, about every two weeks. Usually it contained X’s lengthy essays about culture and politics and music, and contributions from some of the others — poetry, album reviews, art.
Sometimes we even let in the occasional story about school.
So, that’s the NCNA. Now, here’s some stuff about me.
I was an army brat, per the stupid cliché. I was born in the same year as my best friend X, but in faraway Fort Buckner in Okinawa, Japan. My medical officer dad had been stationed at the base there with the 78th Signal Battalion.
The never-ending mediocrity of my life, and the awareness of my sexual orientation, led inevitably to punk in 1976. The first time I heard “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols, I said to X: “This is a world where I can finally breathe.” Like lots of others, I wasn’t the same after that. For me, punk rock opened up this fucking huge range of creative possibilities — for my art, for my photography, for my music — and it did not give a shit, not one, if I was gay.
My dad was tall and lean; my stay-at-home mother was short and mean. From early on, all that I could remember was my mother shouting and screaming at him. She was a drunk, I sometimes suspected, but I never actually saw her drink much. She was, however, filled with an infinite rage about everything, particularly Dad. It was unrelenting; it was the thing that defined our collective existence, just about. Every morning, wherever we were based — Fort Buckner, Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Lewis in Washington — I would dread the sound of her thudding down the stairs. Her face would be set like a hatchet, and she would immediately start shouting at Dad for any grievance, no matter how small. I fucking hated it, although probably not as much as he did.
She’d scream at him if he loaded the dishwasher, and then she’d unload it and do it over. She’d scream at him if he did the laundry. She’d lose her mind if he even hung a picture of one of his army buddies on the wall of his tiny den.
My father would sometimes react to her outbursts, but most of the time, he didn’t. He would stay silent, head down. When there was a break in the shit storm, he would head out to work or to shovel snow or mow the lawn: anything to get out. Anything to get away from her. His disappearances would last hours. Eventually, days.
I could not understand, and still don’t, why she was so angry all the time. We weren’t poor or anything, we were all healthy, and we lived in reasonably nice places. I loved her, I guess, but I could be at the same time repulsed by her, too. I was also disappointed by my father, truth be told, because he never fought back.
One night, shortly after we moved to Portland, my dad and I watched a late-night showing of James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause. It was my favorite movie, and not just because Dean was a punk, or because he was achingly beautiful. In one big scene, Dean rages at his father, Jim Backus, for not being a man, and for always wimping out in front of Dean’s mother. “You’re tearing me apart!” Dean yells at his mother. “You say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again!” I turned a little and glanced at my father, who was staring intently at the screen. “I can’t fight her, either,” he said. “I just pray that it gets better, Kurt. It never does.”
One night, I woke up to a huge racket coming from the kitchen. I ran downstairs. Dad was sitting on the floor, leaning against the dishwasher, weeping. My mother had balled up her fists, and she was delivering blow after blow to his head. Her face was contorted with rage.
When she saw me, she suddenly stopped the assault and her face weirdly changed. She smiled at me. “Oh, hello, dear,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
My father left not long after that, slipping out of our lives one icy November night. We were in South Portland at the time, and my father moved into an apartment closer to the naval base in Kittery, almost an hour away. A high-priced and long-drawn-out legal battle ensued. Dad tried to get custody of me, but he didn’t win. When he ran out of money, he gave up, and, crying again, apologized to me one morning as we sat in his car.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said.
But it wasn’t.
Mom and I stayed in the South Portland home. I never saw her again with another man. Silently, all the pictures of my dad — and all of his books, all of his stuff — disappeared, and she never uttered his name again, referring to him only as “that bastard, or “your bastard father.”
All of this happened when I was at Holy Cross. I was beginning my first year there, and the separation fucked me right up. I was completely disconnected from my classmates and anything else at the school, like I was floating down a river of shit with my skin on fire.
It was around this time, too, that I became aware that I was supposed to be interested in girls, but wasn’t. I secretly liked the looks of some of my male teachers and the swagger of some of the older male students. It dawned on me, eventually, that I might be gay. It didn’t shock me, to tell you the truth, but it was a total pain in the ass at the time. It was another burden to carry around. I didn’t need it or want it then.
In the middle of grade seven, I met X for the first time. This was just a few weeks before the constitution-burning incident. We both were among the biggest guys in our grade, but we had never really talked to each other much. I had watched him a lot, though. X, like me, didn’t seem all that interested in any of our peers, or in the school curriculum. At the start, I admit, I was attracted to him. He was tall and slender and really good-looking, but he didn’t seem to hang out with anyone. For a while, I wondered whether X was gay, too. He definitely was never around any girls at Holy Cross.
There were differences between us, though: I did pretty well in
sports — hockey in the winter, lacrosse in the summer. X participated in no team sports. I was only an average student, with no big interest in any subject. X, however, seemed to outshine everyone else in every subject, and with no noticeable effort, either. X’s hair was long; mine was short, like my dad’s. X rarely smiled, but I — despite my shitty home life — usually did. X hardly ever spoke; I was a fucking expert in small talk.
In my experience, meaningless conversation helped to avoid conflict. It was a skill I acquired at a young age, a diversion that sometimes helped to ensure that my mother did not start shrieking at my dad, or me, for something or other. So, one day in February, at lunchtime, I spotted X reading a magazine on the gymnasium floor, where Holy Cross students had to eat lunch. It was Creem, which I also read when I could get my hands on a copy, which wasn’t very often.
I couldn’t make out the cover, but X was completely immersed in it. I decided to say something. “Creem magazine,” I announced, ineptly, and I instantly regretted saying anything.
He looked up at me, expressionless, then looked back down at the magazine. “Yep,” he said, “that’s what it is.”
Despite myself, I laughed.
Arrogant prick, aren’t you? But I asked for it.
“Guess I kind of stated the obvious there, right?”
“Yes, you did,” said X, eyebrow up. “You do that a lot?”
“I try not to,” I said. “I just like Creem, I guess.”
X looked at me. He didn’t blink, which made me uncomfortable. “What kind of music do you like?”
“I don’t like any of the crap on the radio, that’s for sure,” I said. “And I don’t like anything that everybody else listens to, I guess.” X said nothing for another long moment, which made me wish I was invisible or something. Finally he said, “Ever hear the MC5 or the Stooges?
“I’ve read about them,” I said, “but I haven’t actually heard any of their stuff.”
“I’ve got some,” X said. “I sent away for some albums. I’ll make you a tape.”
And he did. For me, that day was a pretty fucking important one. I met a boy who would soon become my best friend, my brother from another mother, and I was introduced to some of the music that would become the soundtrack to my life. And soon, Christopher X would become the most important person in my life, after my dad.
One day in the spring of that same year, I asked my new friend why he always called himself X.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said, which was true.
C H A P T E R 5
The NCNA — whose format went back and forth between newspaper and magazine style, but was always called The NCNA — was distributed off PAHS’s grounds so that the school administration couldn’t stop students from reading it. Copies were handed out at Portland High and at local record shops, too.
X, Jimmy Cleary, me, and assorted members of the Nasties, Virgins, and Social Blemishes also handed mimeographed copies to students at bus stops, in parking lots, and along sidewalks that bordered the schools. The first page of the first edition featured a picture of The NCNA staff, sitting in PAHS’s school auditorium staring at the cameraman (who happened to be me). None of them were smiling. The cutline below the photograph read: “The future, maaaan.”
The first edition featured a lengthy essay on punk rock written by X. It was titled “Punks of the World, Unite!” The subtitle: “PAHS students, throw away your Led Zep records: you have nothing to lose but conformity.”
He wrote:
What is it that all punks share, whatever their race, religion, gender, or partisan affiliation? ANGER. All punks are angry at something — at the music industry, for producing so much garbage; at governments, for helping bad situations get worse; at their parents, for being parents; at conservative politicians, for being born; at corporations, for putting profit before people; at anyone in a position of power, for being powerful; at other young people, for being racist or sexist or conformist. Being punk means being pissed off. Punks have pushed young people to embrace the transforming power of anger.
Me and Jimmy and X were laying out The NCNA on a lighted desk in the shop area in the basement of PAHS, where we were unlikely to be disturbed, or caught by a member of the administration. After reading the first bit of X’s polemic, we looked up at him. “So,” I said, “do you think anyone will actually understand this?”
X shrugged. Jimmy and I laughed and kept reading. The next part was something lots of Portland punks would come back to that winter.
Punk is the search for real. If you’re a teenager — and everyone is, at one time or another — you end up believing that everything is phony, and fake, and fraudulent. Parents. Teachers. Governments. Other kids. Everything, when stripped down to its core, is without any truth. It’s all lies.
When you are young, you react to this news with disappointment, or anger, or both. You break things, you take drugs, you punch someone out, you make something.
PUNK IS WHAT WE MAKE. Punk is about trying to scratch out some meaning in a big old world that seems pretty meaningless, most days. It’s about being angry at being lied to, and smashing your fist against the doors the liars cower behind, even if you know you’re the one who is probably going to get hurt. Punk is about raging against all the powers that be, to try and make things better, if only for just an instant.
It’s also about being yourself, and finding something that is real, and holding onto it like your life depends on it.
Which, when you get right down to it, it does.
Portland’s punk scene was like most punk scenes outside New York and London, in the early days, I guess. It had a lot of young musicians, artists, poets, writers, drama types, and assorted societal outcasts in it. In those days, the scene attracted this weird mix of urban subcultures, from skinheads and mods to faux–Teddy Boys to Rastafarians. And, of course, all the young punks.
No band had a real manager, no band had actual roadies, and no band even bothered to make a phone call to a big record company. None of us could generate media interest in what we were doing — until, that is, one of us was crucified outside a punk bar one night in downtown Portland. At that point, reporters started to fall over themselves to write hysterical bullshit accounts of what punk rock was. But ninety-nine percent of the media didn’t have a clue what we were.
Within every city’s scene, there were lots of different theories about what had given rise to it all in the first place. Hatred for what rock music had become. A return to rock ’n’ roll’s primitive roots. A form of political or artistic expression. But the thing that unified the different subcultures that made up the scene in those early days was — as X had written in The NCNA — anger. Anger was energy, as X put it to Dave Heaney one day in Social Studies class.
Heaney was intrigued. He suggested to X that he explain why anger and fury can be a positive force. So X did, in an essay. Much later on at PAHS, it formed the basis of a big rant in another issue of The NCNA titled “Anarchy, Anger, and Punk.”
He wrote:
With their records, their art, their words, their clothes, and their thinking, punks have electrified youth culture, shaken up rock ’n’ roll, and made it okay to be angry. Angry about our parents, our teachers, our life, angry about everything. Punk rock is a rejection of everything rock ’n’ roll has become in the 1970s — namely, an arena-sized, coke-addicted, disconnected-from-reality corporate game played by millionaires. Punk changes all of that. Punks are loud, loutish, pissed off. They are of the streets, and for the streets. Punks are what every teenager should be: they are angry. They are insolent. They frighten their parents, teachers, and the elderly. And they are ready to murder the popular culture.
They want to kill it all. Kill it, kill it, kill it. DEAD.
C H A P T E R 6
Me, X, and X’s father sat in chairs ringed around Detective Murphy’s gray metal desk at Por
tland police headquarters. It was still super early, and, apart from Murphy and Savoie, no other cops seemed to be around.
Savoie, grizzled and red-faced, read out the last few sentences of X’s essay and glared up at him. “They want to murder. They want to kill it all,” Savoie repeated. “Kill it, kill it, dead.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Kill who? When? Why?”
Before X could answer, his dad jumped in, sounding a lot like the lawyer he was. “Wait a second, Detective,” he said, leaning forward and holding up his hand. “What does Christopher’s article about music in a high school publication have to do with Jimmy’s death? As you know, that bar is in a pretty seedy area, with plenty of dangerous people around. Are you looking at any of them?”
“And where’d you get that anyway?” I asked. “We only distributed that to PAHS and PHS students.”
Savoie was at least a decade older than his partner and looked like a human version of a greasy, wrinkled brown paper bag. He had obviously been up all night.
He ignored my question and addressed X’s dad. “We think Jimmy Cleary’s death may have had something to do with this punk rock crap,” he said, holding up the months-old edition of The NCNA. “We don’t see the boys as suspects, or any of the other kids, either. But, whoever did this wasn’t working alone — they killed him and had him nailed to that wall in what must have been minutes. It’s pretty damn unlikely one person could do that.”
“So why does my essay matter?” X asked.
“Because,” Savoie said, “normal people don’t understand this punk thing that you guys belong to. And maybe it’s what set the killers off.”
Is he serious? Someone killed Jimmy because they objected to his taste in music?
Detective Murphy, who was looking uncomfortable with Savoie’s questions, jumped in, big hands gesturing all over the place. “We don’t know if that motivated the killer or killers, of course,” he said. “That’s just a question we have. But it was a terrible, awful way for your friend to die, boys, and we are working overtime to solve this, fast.” Murphy, like in some stupid TV show, was apparently playing Good Cop. Savoie, meanwhile, was the other part of the cliché.
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