New Dark Ages

by Warren Kinsella

  The X Gang Series

  Recipe for Hate

  New Dark Ages

  Copyright © Warren Kinsella, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design: Laura Boyle

  Cover image: istock.com/kcastagnola

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kinsella, Warren, 1960-, author

  New dark ages / Warren Kinsella.

  (The X Gang)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-4215-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4216-1 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4217-8 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8621.I59N49 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901779-1

  C2018-901780-5

  1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the ­Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a ­investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des ­Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  — J. Kirk Howard, President

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  To James Muretich, Tom Wolfe, and Barrie Wright

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BOOK CREDITS

  PROLOGUE

  Hello, you bastard.

  It was hard to believe. Like a bad fucking movie. But it was happening, right there, right then, right in front of our eyes.

  It was that night. The night before the last day.

  I looked over at X, and his eyes — one pupil dilated, one not, as always — were squinting at the TV. His fists were clenched. He looked pissed, as if he was going to punch the screen or something.

  The TV cast a bluish glow over my non-family’s family room. My mother was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, and she was watching, too. She had her arms crossed, but she seemed to be nodding about some of the things being said. By him.

  I looked back at the TV, and at Earl Turner, who was still standing behind the podium in downtown ­Portland. There was an American flag on the front of the podium, and below that, in big block letters, was the word RIGHT. His slogan. His word.

  As usual, Turner was wearing a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. As usual, his regimental tie was loose at the neck. You could tell he worked out. Behind him, an enthusiastic crowd of supporters were assembled. They were clapping and nodding their heads.

  X and I weren’t really watching Turner. We were watching one of the people just behind him who was clapping and nodding his head, just like the rest of the assembled crowd.

  I could not fucking believe this shit. I hated it.

  And hate was what Earl Turner’s speech was all about, pretty much. It usually was. Hate for refugees and immigrants and welfare moms and anyone, basically, who didn’t look like Earl Turner and his friends. Hate dressed up in fine-sounding words about patriotism and family and country and all that horseshit. Hate was Earl Turner’s thing, and it had brought him to this, his big moment. The confetti and the balloons — red, white, and blue — were ready to be dropped from above.

  Turner was coming to the big wind-up in his speech. He always ended it the same way. “America,” he said, his booming voice sounding tinny on my mother’s old RCA. “America is for Americans. America is for the righteous. America is for the bold. America is for those who believe in God, those who love God, those who fear God. America isn’t for everyone. America is for normal people like us!” He paused, a big fist hovering above the podium. We couldn’t see them, but the crowd at the hotel had started to chant: “RIGHT RIGHT! RIGHT! RIGHT! RIGHT!”

  Midway through — and this had happened before — “RIGHT!” changed, and the crowd started to chant a different word: “WHITE! WHITE! WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!”

  Earl Turner smiled, that big square-jawed quarterback all-American douchebag smile of his, and waved for the crowd to settle down. “Right,” he said. “Right is …”

  The crowd screamed as one, like a beast. “WHITE!”

  Earl Turner leaned into the gaggle of network microphones. He smiled. This was his moment. This was it. He had won. He knew it. Everyone knew it.

  He started to speak. It was the part of the speech about how God “created” America. At that point, the young guy behind him — the one we’d been watching — stepped forward. He was wearing a white shirt and tie, just like his hero. We could see his broad, freckled face clearly. At that moment, Turner saw him, too, and clapped a big hand on the young man’s shoulder.

  It was our friend, Danny. When he was drumming in my band, his stage name had been Danny Hate. He looked different now. He was different. He and Turner looked at each other and smiled, like father and son, like some fucking Norman Rockwell painting. Behind me and X, my mother whispered just one word: ­“Danny.”

  The crowd kept on cheering, calling out RIGHT and WHITE. They were screaming it.

  “Enough,” said X, and that was all he said.

  CHAPTER 1

  NO NO NO NO NO.

  “
What’s that mean, Agent Laverty?”

  Special Agent Theresa Laverty looked at the NYPD cop who’d let her in, and then she looked at the words again. They were all-capitals, about a foot high, and they had been spray-painted on the wall above the mattress. Laverty shrugged. “Something,” she said. “Nothing.”

  She couldn’t tell if the five words had been put up on the wall of the Bowery apartment by the victim, or the killer, or someone else. She couldn’t immediately tell if they were new or old, either. She looked at the words for a while longer, and then back at the grubby mattress, where dried blood indicated where the body of the young man — a boy, really — had recently been found. There was blood. A lot of fucking blood.

  The body had been removed before she got there. It would have been written up as just another Bowery junkie death, an addict dying at the hands of another in the hot middle of 1980, a squabble over twenty bucks’ worth of junk. But the murder of Johnny Raindrops hadn’t been routine, which is why someone at NYPD who remembered Laverty from a panel at a conference in Baltimore picked up the phone and called her. “There’s some weird symbols and shit in this junkie’s place,” New York detective Pete Schenk had said to her over the phone. “Maybe you can make some sense of it.” So she’d come up.

  The victim had copied the style of his junkie hero, New York Dolls’ legend Johnny Thunders, and he even cultivated an impressive heroin habit like Johnny Thunders. But he was no Johnny Thunders. He couldn’t play guitar very well; he didn’t write his own songs. And he had no sense of style beyond what he regularly saw, and copied, on the puny stage up the street at CBGB. So his friends called him Johnny Raindrops.

  No thunder, just a bit of rain.

  Laverty looked around the apartment, on the Chinatown side of the Bowery, which was noisier and dirtier and more dangerous. Through the open window, she could hear the Chinese merchants selling their fish and vegetables down on the sidewalk off Lafayette. Punk rockers liked the area, she knew, because the rent was cheap, and the Chinese left them alone. And CBGB was their shrine, their Mecca.

  On the walls, Johnny Raindrops had tacked up posters and newspaper clippings about his New York heroes — the Ramones, Television, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Jayne County. And, of course, the New York Dolls.

  Over in one corner was a tiny fridge with the door duct-taped shut. Beside it, there was a sink crowded with mismatched dishes and, on the streaked countertop, a filthy hot plate. In the opposite corner sat an ancient-looking Marshall amp and a black guitar leaning up against it. Clothes were spilling out of garbage bags, a battered biker jacket tossed beside them on the hardwood floor.

  In the middle of the place was the mattress. When a couple of his friends finally persuaded the super to let them in, because Johnny Raindrops hadn’t been seen back at CBGB, they found him on the mattress, filleted like a fish. His throat had been cut, too, in a pattern that resembled a jagged W. Johnny Raindrops’s eyes, caked in mascara and tears, stared up at the wall.

  There, above the string of NOs, someone had carefully inscribed a W within a circle, with a crown and a halo floating above it.

  The New York cops didn’t know what that meant, but Special Agent Theresa Laverty sure did.

  CHAPTER 2

  The guys with the big Xs on the backs of their hands were getting really fucking rough. They were slamming into anyone who came close, hard. All of the girls had moved to the sides, and quite a few of the punk guys, too. The pit was a frenzy of sweat and spit and colliding bodies. And, any minute now, blood, too. It was going to happen.

  We were standing on the sidelines at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., with the rest of the X Gang: The Nasties, the Punk Rock Virgins, some of the Non-Conformist News Agency guys who came down. The opening act, the Teen Idles, had brought out a ton of kids from the local punk scene. But they’d attracted a lot of these guys with the Xs on their hands, too. And these X guys were fucking nuts.

  The Idles were loud, so we couldn’t talk, but when I looked at X, he could tell I wasn’t happy. With the situation, or with him. These are your people, X. See them? I was thinking. He looked away, toward the pit.

  The ones sporting the Xs were all guys; not one girl among them. They all had short hair or totally shaved heads, too. And they were all buff and tough, like they were in the military or something. Some of them had gotten the X on their hand from the 9:30 Club security dude who was wielding a Sharpie, indicating that they were too young to get served booze. But a few of them, I was told, had actually gotten the X — or XXX or sXe — tattooed as a permanent statement. No alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs. For some of them, no meat or dairy or sex, either. Straight edge. Straight edge for life.

  As the Teen Idles tore through their one- and two-minute songs, and as the pit got more intense, I saw a couple of the straight edge guys glance our way. They were looking at X. They wanted to see what he was doing, to see if he’d seen them.

  Amazing. Even in faraway D.C., they’d heard of him, the Portland, Maine, punk known as X. He wasn’t in a band, but he was a fucking punk rock celebrity. And he didn’t give a shit, not one. If he was aware of the admiring looks he was getting, he didn’t show it.

  The Teen Idles finished one song and were getting ready to let another rip. The pit slowed and ground to a halt, like an off-balance washing machine between cycles. I used the lull in the roar to yell in X’s ear. My own ears were ringing. “They’re pretty good, the Idles,” I said, while the band was tuning up. “Better than the Nasties even.”

  “Not as good as you guys,” X said. “But Ian and Jeff are really good.”

  I waited. Before the band started up again, I figured I’d just say what I was thinking. “Some of these straight edge guys out there are assholes, brother.”

  X, who’d been straight edge before the term was even invented, looked at me, expressionless. But he couldn’t respond because the Idles started playing again, a song called “Fleeting Fury.”

  “Listen to the words,” the lead singer, Ian, yelled as the band launched into the song, like a howling punk rocket. At the foot of the stage, the straight edge types had flipped the switch on their berserk hurricane again. They were going totally psycho, but you could see they weren’t listening to any of the words. I was. Later on, I even wrote them down, in the little Hilroy notepad I always have with me. “Tales of youth fighting back,” Ian hollered, was “just another load of crap.”

  The Teen Idles were different from the Hot Nasties. They were younger than us, and their songs were super-fast and super-short. But they obviously shared one thing with us: they were starting to think that the punk scene was becoming just as phony as the rock scene that came before it — more about fashion and fame, less about fury and fun.

  Suddenly, X pushed himself away from the wall and uncrossed his arms. His uneven gaze was fixed on the pit now, and he wasn’t paying any attention to the Idles. I followed his stare and saw a skinny punk kid, with ­Day-Glo green spiked hair, torn bondage pants, and a leather biker jacket, in the pit. Whether he’d gone in on his own or had been pushed in, I couldn’t tell. Either way, he was at the center of the maelstrom, and a few of the straight edge guys were now hitting him hard and grabbing at his jacket. Then two guys lifted him up and started tossing him around like he was a beach ball or something. You could tell from his face that he was aware that the straight edge guys were not in any way his friends. He looked scared shitless.

  As X pushed his way into the pit, with me not far behind, the punk kid was slammed down onto the concrete floor by his attackers. His head bounced off the floor like it was basketball or something. I cringed. He sat up for a second, looking kind of confused, and then fell back, eyes shut, out cold.

  Up onstage, Ian MacKaye had seen what had happened. “Stop! Fucking stop!” he yelled at his bandmates. By then X was on his knees beside the kid, trying to wake him up. With all the noise, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Standing around us were all the straight edge guys. They were lookin
g down, but they clearly didn’t give a fuck about the kid they’d just about killed. Instead, they all started yelling, “X! X! X! X!”

  The kid, as it turned out, ended up being okay.

  Me? I wasn’t.

  Nothing lasts forever, or so the stupid cliché goes; but a part of me actually thought the X Gang might. Our group of misfits had helped us all get through the teenage wasteland that was 1978–1980. Before the X Gang, there had been the NCNA (what we called the Non-Conformist News Agency) and Room 531 (our hangout at Portland Alternative High School, where a bunch of us went), but the X Gang was more of a punk thing, and it was our thing. It was who we were. The X Gang was the thing that had kept us whole, and kept us together, through no small amount of shit. It kept us sane last year when two of our friends died.

  Who am I kidding? They didn’t “die.” They were killed, murdered by a psycho Nazi cop. Just for being punks.

  It had been in all the papers, what happened to us. We were famous, or at least infamous, for a while. There was X, of course, and the Upchuck sisters, and our various bands ­­­— the Hot Nasties, the Social Blemishes, the Punk Rock Virgins. Later on, there was also Mike the bouncer and the others. And then there was me, Kurt Lank, or Kurt Blank, or Point Blank. I played guitar and sang for the Nasties after Jimmy died, and I kept a diary.

  The story stayed in the news for a while. There was even a profile of me and X in the Portland Press Herald, the local broadsheet rag. We’d refused to speak to the guy who wrote it, Ron McLeod, but he wrote it anyway. He even found a couple of cops to say nice things about us.

  We rarely have anything nice to say about cops. Hell, one of them killed our friends Jimmy and Marky, after all. And the bastard tried to kill Danny and Sam and Sister Betty, too. Needless to say, not big cop fans.

  The media, who have a shorter attention span than my goldfish, Sid Vicious, eventually moved on to stories about the weather, or the Patriots, or, this year, to the presidential race. We were happy when the media stopped paying attention to us and instead wrote about the soulless creeps who comprised both the Democrats and the Republicans.