New Dark Ages

by Warren Kinsella

  The X Gang continued to hang together, and we kept going. We got back to what we wanted to do, which was write songs, play music, and go see bands.

  We’d played a couple shows at CBGB, which had been totally epic. But then we were in some bar called Barrymore’s way up in Ottawa, Canada, where our rec­ord label — bizarrely, inexplicably — wanted us to play before our big tour kicked off. It looked like an old strip club, with faded red velvet on the walls and chipped gilt on the scattering of chairs. It stunk of piss and french fries and gravy. No shower, no sound check, nothing to eat.

  No fun. I was in a bad fucking mood.

  And then, with only a few hours to go before we were to play to an almost sold-out crowd of locals and music industry people, this hit: Danny Hate, the guy I’d known almost as long as X, the guy who’d drummed for the Social Blemishes since their inception — the guy who almost fucking died because of it — wanted out.

  Danny stood there, his big freckled face staring at the floor, and his big freckled arms hanging at his sides. He would occasionally glance at X and me, sideways, ­gauging our reaction to his statement, which was: “I’m out. I want to go home.”

  I was shocked and pissed off all at the same time. “Why?” I asked, probably louder than I needed to. “I mean, what the fuck, brother? After everything we’ve gone through, you want to bail? Why, man?”

  X gestured to me to cool it and said, “What’s up, brother?”

  Danny couldn’t look at him. “It sucks, I-I know,” Danny stammered. “But I’ve been thinking about it a long time. I just don’t feel the scene is right for me anymore.”

  I didn’t say anything. I waited for X to speak. Danny wouldn’t bullshit X.

  “So, what do you want to do, brother?” X asked softly, but as if he already knew the answer.

  Danny shook his head and went red in the face. “You’ll laugh at me,” he said, before going quiet.

  X crossed his arms. “I’d never laugh at you, Danny.” He meant it. Danny could tell. I could tell.

  Danny looked up at us. “I’m kind of interested in politics and all that,” he said.

  “So? That’s cool,” I said, encouraged. “Almost everyone in the scene is political.”

  Danny shook his head. “Not that kind of politics,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “Conservative sort of politics, I guess. I want to help this new Republican candidate, Earl T—”

  I cut him off. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? A FUCKING REPUBLICAN?”

  X waved for me to stop. I stopped, but I was beside myself.

  “What’s wrong, brother?” X said. He didn’t seem surprised about what Danny was saying.

  “I can’t explain,” the former Danny Hate said, face red again.

  And then he turned around and walked up the stairs and straight out of Barrymore’s. Just like that. And I didn’t see him again for a long, long time.

  X said nothing, as usual. He’d never talked much, but during those days, he talked to me even less than he used to. It sucked. But I knew why. None of us had been on a real tour before, with real promoters and real contracts and all that, so we had nothing we could compare the Hot Nasties’ first big tour to. It was a new world for all of us, big-time. But X had days ago concluded that we Nasties were making our upcoming tour of North America way more complicated, and way more stressful, than it needed to be. “They’re pissing it away,” he’d said.

  Because I was in the Hot Nasties, and because we weren’t talking like we used to, X didn’t tell me that, of course. He told Patti Upchuck, who told her sister, Betty, who then told me. The X Gang party line.

  He was right, of course. But I didn’t tell him that, because of the not-talking-much thing. Instead, I just looked at him as he sat on the stairs to the basement at Sound Swap, a bit pissed off — pissed off because, just possibly, he was right.

  The remaining members of the Hot Nasties were there, in our basement practice space at the used record store in downtown Portland, Maine, in the U.S. of Fucking A., for a big band summit. This gloomy, dirty basement had always been our space, and we were determined to stay there, even after we won the big recording contract and the big tour. But before we hit the road, before the big tour started in earnest, we all had stuff to say.

  Being signed to England’s Stiff Records had been a huge, huge achievement for a punk rock quartet from a place like Portland, naturally. In all of Maine — in all of New England, pretty much — no other band had been picked up by England’s most respected punk and new wave label. The record contract had produced a bit of coverage in the pages of Creem and Bomp! and even the old-fart tabloid Rolling Stone. And there had been a signing bonus, too, all of which went into new Fenders and Gibsons and amps — and leather jackets, of course.

  We should have been pleased with ourselves. But we were still bitching and bickering. X sat on the stairs at the used record shop, studying the tops of his black Converse. His long hair covered his face, so it was hard to see that he was unimpressed. But I knew he was.

  We had (literally) survived all kinds of shit and turmoil, a fraction of which would have doomed a lesser group. We had been attacked by the tabloids and called big-label sellouts by other bands in the Portland punk scene. We had lost Jimmy. We’d almost packed it in a million times. But we hadn’t. Instead, here we were, on the eve of our triumphant first tour as a Stiff act, fighting over the song list.

  X sighed quietly. I swore.

  Sam Shiller, our other guitarist, didn’t want to play any of the songs he had written himself, because he was now worried that all his songs were terrible. Luke Macdonald, our hulking albino bassist, wanted to play some punked-up Mersey Beat numbers, like the band had occasionally done in the old days. Eddie Igglesden, our highly practical drummer, wanted to play whatever Stiff Records wanted us to play, but mainly he just wanted to get laid a lot.

  When it came my turn, I mumbled. I said I thought hardcore bands like the Teen Idles were the future and the Nasties — always a pop-punk outfit — probably needed to “play faster and louder.”

  But I didn’t know that for sure, I said, and sniffled. To be honest, I had become disinterested in the endless debate taking place all around me. In recent weeks, I had embraced the oldest rock ’n’ roll stereotype: that is, becoming an aloof, moody bastard, interested only in snorting and fucking everything I could get my hands on. I had always been a bit wild, a concerned Sister Betty said to me, but not as wild as this. True enough, I thought.

  But whatever.

  I saw X watching me as I pulled, yet again, on the fifth of vodka in my hand. Sister Betty Upchuck was also looking worriedly at me. I was probably laughing a bit too loudly at whatever it was that she was saying. I’d seen my reflection in the can upstairs, too: my eyes were shiny, my pupils dilated. I was definitely thinner.

  The arguing went on. I laughed more. X suddenly stood and went upstairs, where Patti Upchuck had disappeared earlier. They left without a word.

  CHAPTER 3

  Theresa Laverty was at the center of the subterranean ­madhouse known as Penn Station, making her way to Newark Airport and then on home to Fort Myers, when she called the field office to see if she had any messages. Pete Schenk, the NYPD cop who had asked her to come and view the Johnny Raindrops crime scene in the ­Bowery, needed to speak with her again. She was told it was urgent.

  So, as tourists noisily milled around the line of pay phones, looking for cabs to their hotels or the Empire State Building or the World Exchange Plaza or ­wherever, ­Laverty hung up and called Pete Schenk at the Fifth ­Precinct.

  “We’ve got another one,” Schenk told her. “Another punk kid, same neighborhood, same deal — um, cut from stem to stern, a W slashed in his neck, more weird symbols.”

  “Okay,” Laverty said wearily. “I’ll head back. What’s the address?”

  The address, as it turned out, was just off the Bowery, close to CBGB. The victim had been found around the corner, in the filthy, trash-strewn alleyway behind
the club. When Laverty arrived in a cab, still pulling a stylish Eastpak wheeled suitcase full of files, notebooks, and a single change of clothes, Schenk was waiting for her.

  “Hey, Special Agent,” he said. He was big and gruff, with a buzz cut and a nose that looked as if it had been repeatedly broken. He was unhappy, because he clearly now believed there may be a serial killer on the loose. In his jurisdiction. “Sorry to pull you back. But we thought you needed to see this one, too.” He led her past the fluttering yellow crime-scene tape toward a battered Guma Dumpster, every inch of which was covered with punk graffiti for bands like the Ramones, Voidoids, and the Dead Boys.

  Schenk stepped up on a discarded kitchen chair that had been placed beside the Dumpster. He looked in, confirming the body hadn’t gone anywhere since he’d been back at the precinct, then signaled for Laverty to do likewise. She left her suitcase with a uniformed cop, got up on the chair, and winced as she looked in. There wasn’t much trash in the Dumpster, so the body was easy to see. Blond wig, pink hot pants, shiny lamé halter, ripped fishnets, cheap pumps. Gutted, hacked up. Dead.

  There was blood everywhere. Legs and arms were splayed out at crazy angles, apparently broken. One mascara-smeared eye was open, one swollen shut. And, carefully positioned on the torso, a page from a recent edition of the New York Post, with the big W written on it in marker. The letter was inside a circle, another crown and another halo floating above. Laverty sighed and stepped down.

  Schenk explained to her that a homeless couple had found the body. According to a driver’s license that had been found in a bag that lay beside the body, the victim’s name was Colleen Tomorrow.

  “He was a junkie, a drunk, a punk,” he said, “and a fag —” He stopped himself, likely remembering what he had heard at the Fifth about Laverty — that she was gay herself. Some of the cops called her things like “Agent Lipstick Lesbo,” but she’d long since stopped caring. She was the FBI’s resident weirdo youth subculture expert, and she got a lot of stuff like that.

  “Gay,” Laverty said, not angry. She was used to it. “And she, not he.”

  “Sorry,” Schenk said. “Gay. She hooked along the Bowery. Been picked up for solicitation and possession a couple of times.” He paused. “So, that symbol again. What does it mean?”

  Laverty didn’t want to share too much, not yet. “It refers to a group,” she said carefully. “Extremist.”

  Schenk scowled. “It’d be news if it wasn’t extreme, given the crime scenes,” he said. He seemed annoyed. Maybe he thought she wasn’t telling him everything. He paused, scanning his notepad. “Oh, yeah, there’s something else. The two victims,” Schenk said, watching her, “they’d both been at this CBGB place pretty recently.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Schenk said, “the manager at CBGB said they were both present when this punk band” — he glanced at his pad again — “the Hot Nasties, they’re called, played last week. That’s the last time anyone remembers seeing either of them.”

  Hilly Kristal may have been the legendary owner of the legendary CBGB, but there he was, taking stools down off the bar when Laverty and Schenk walked in. He didn’t smile.

  “Officers,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  Laverty was impressed. Pete Schenk certainly looked like a typical cop, but she — being shorter, slender, and with a face that was still considered quite lovely — didn’t. At least she didn’t think she did.

  She flashed her FBI badge and Schenk flashed his NYPD detective’s shield. Kristal cocked a gray eyebrow. “I’ve had visits from the Fifth Precinct a few times before,” he said, arms now crossed over a sleeveless jean jacket and a Talking Heads T-shirt. “But not the FBI. Did one of my bands violate the Mann Act?” He snorted. The Mann Act was a seventy-year-old law that prohibited transporting girls over state lines “for immoral purposes.”

  Laverty laughed despite herself. “Do your bands often kidnap girls and sell them into the white slave trade?” she asked, smiling.

  Kristal rolled his eyes. “Wait ’til you meet Dee Dee Ramone and Stiv Bators,” he said. “If those two aren’t involved in the white slave trade, I’ll be amazed.”

  Even Schenk had a laugh at that one, though he didn’t even know who Dee Dee Ramone and Stiv Bators were. Kristal waved in the direction of a dilapidated old couch near the grimy front windows. “Let’s sit.”

  “So,” Kristal asked, “what’s up?”

  Laverty and Schenk looked at each other. They had decided not to tell Kristal about the two murders just yet.

  “We’ll get to that,” Schenk said. “Mind if we take some notes?”

  “Knock yourselves out.”

  Laverty went first. “I guess it makes me sound old,” she said, smiling again, pretending to know less than she did. “But what, exactly, is this punk rock stuff? We need to understand it better for a case.”

  Personally, I thought it was pretty cool: FBI agent Laverty was talking with The Hilly Kristal, the guy who gave the Ramones their first opportunity to play in public. The Hilly Kristal who can legitimately claim to have created punk, and who helped to completely rewrite rock ’n’ roll’s script.

  Kristal nodded, leaned back, and started talking.

  Behind his wispy beard and his big, shaded glasses, Hilly Kristal gazed out onto the noisy intersection of Bowery and Bleecker, just up from SoHo. When the place opened in the early seventies, he said, CBGB wasn’t much to look at. The neighborhood was an open sewer, basically. Patrons were charged a buck to get in. The name was an acronym for Country, Blue Grass, and Blues — even though those genres never really showed up on the puny stage. It was always a rock ’n’ roll place.

  “If I’m going to explain punk to you,” Hilly says, “I’m going to have to tell you about the Ramones, who kind of started the whole thing.”

  Schenk looked unsure, but Laverty was eager to hear more. She’d canceled her flight back to Florida. She had time.

  Kristal started talking.

  The first time he had heard the Ramones, he could not believe his ears. He could make out, barely, Joey’s voice, yelping lyrics that were alternately funny and shocking. Along with that was a barrage of guitars and drums, ripping through three-chord riffs like a chainsaw. As if to drive home the point, Kristal added, “One of their songs was even called ‘Chainsaw.’”

  “The Ramones were what rock ’n’ roll had been meant to be in the first place,” Kristal declared. “Simple, fast, loud, and designed to irritate your parents. It was a kick in the ass for the rock business, which had become totally disconnected from the lives of real kids.”

  Back when it opened up, rent in the Bowery was cheap. So, sort of, was life. “I mean, you were taking your life in your hands if you walked into this neighborhood at night. People were frightened to come here. It had this reputation, you know? There were no other clubs here. So we had a lot of rock bands who nobody had heard of, who had nowhere else to play. And we offered the only place in New York for bands that wanted to play original music.”

  Laverty stirred. “Have any of your patrons ever gotten badly hurt here? Fights, whatever?”

  Kristal shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “There’s been fights, and we kick them out, or we ban them. But nothing too serious.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Laverty said. Kristal returned to his story.

  After word spread about the Ramones’ performances, a lot of things started to happen, Kristal recalled. There was a buzz. Who were these weird-looking punk freaks?

  The Ramones and their fans favored biker jackets, T-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes. At the start of punk, Kristal explained, Ramones shows attracted people who were anything but typical: Brit-style punks, metalheads, art school types, skateboarders, university students, and even honest-to-goodness bikers.

  The band, meanwhile, would always play CBGB shows the same way: heads-down, straight-out rock ’n’ roll. No chitchat between songs: just Joey occasionally mumbling “Thank you,” and then Dee Dee holler
ing “One-two-three-four!” before every tune. Sometimes, he’d do the count-ins in German, too. And then another sonic bombardment, washing over the ever-larger crowds like a wave of heat.

  “Well,” Kristal said, “they were probably the worst band I had ever heard, when I first heard them. I mean, they just weren’t together. Their amps were breaking down, and they were yelling at each other onstage. It wasn’t a very good beginning.” He laughed at the memory.

  At this point, Schenk was getting pretty impatient, but Laverty was still enjoying listening to Kristal.

  There was a commotion at the door, and an impressively bald, bespectacled man in a biker jacket ambled in, looking for Kristal.

  “Let him in. This here is John Holmstrom! He’s from Punk magazine. Hey, do you guys want to talk to John?”

  Schenk frowned. “Not unless he knew Johnny Raindrops or a trans hooker named Colleen Tomorrow, or who might’ve killed them.”

  Laverty hadn’t wanted that to come out just yet, but it was too late.

  There was a pause as Kristal eyed the two cops. “Ah, that’s what this is really about,” he said, sounding a little less friendly. He told John Holmstrom he’d talk to him shortly. Holmstrom ambled off and grabbed a stool by the bar. “He’s the guy who came up with the word punk, really,” Kristal said of Holmstrom. “That was the name of his magazine.” He paused. “He named it, but CBGB started it.”

  Kristal mused for a moment, now knowing the cops probably didn’t much care about punk rock or the Ramones. He started to wrap up. “Anyway, by the end of the summer of ’74, all of a sudden, you know, I mean everybody came here. The Ramones turned everybody on, you know? Just high-energy, nonstop, song after song …” He trailed off. “It was quite a thing.”

  His punk rock genesis story now complete, Kristal eyed the two cops from behind his shaded glasses. “All right,” he said, finally. “What do you want to know about Johnny and Colleen?”

  CHAPTER 4