Age of Unreason

by Warren Kinsella

  X was looking down. “Was there anything on the jean jacket or the cap, Mrs. Cox? Any logos or symbols?”

  “Yes,” she said, finally. “Bob said his hat had an upside-down sort of peace symbol on it. Isn’t that weird, an upside-down peace symbol? Why would anyone be wearing something like that?”

  X held up a piece of paper for Mrs. Cox to see. “Does this look like the sort of symbol your husband described seeing, Mrs. Cox?”

  “Yes, that looks just like how he described it,” she said, nodding.

  CHAPTER 9

  Special Agent Theresa Laverty held the copy of the May issue of Creem like it was a soiled diaper.

  Laverty had a model’s face and a model’s taste in haute couture, and she was exceptionally smart. She had read, then reread, the Non-Conformist News Agency column — the one titled “The New Dark Age.” She threw the magazine down on her bed in the dingy hotel room in downtown Portland.

  Being a special agent with the FBI, Laverty could be expected to know the real identities of numerous people who used pseudonyms, like the author of the article, and she already knew quite a lot about the young punk who went by the name X. She knew him, and she didn’t like him. Not at all.

  She also didn’t like Portland, Maine, much. She much preferred her modern condo overlooking the Sanibel Causeway, where it was warm and sunny most of the time, and where she could take her yellow Lab, Sloane, for jogs along the beach. Fort Myers was where the FBI field office was located, and it was where Laverty was based. She was one of the bureau’s few in-house experts on violent youth subcultures and extremist groups, and she was increasingly in demand. Historically, when economies went down, Laverty knew, the fortunes of Nazis and other white supremacists went up.

  In this, the start of the new decade, the economy sucked. The experts called it a recession, brought on by the oil crisis and other events. So, the haters and the hate groups were signing up more recruits than ever. As a result, the Klansmen and the neo-Nazis and the Holocaust deniers and the Hitler freaks were getting more desperate, unemployed people to listen to their homilies of hate. And they were getting more active, too.

  Which, some said, led to more radicalized violence and extremism. Which had led to the Portland bombing. Which, in turn, prompted Theresa Laverty to be summoned back to Portland a month after the bombing.

  She picked up the magazine and stared again at X’s column. It wasn’t that he had written things about the bombing that weren’t already public knowledge. The fake name used by the bomber, for example, had been leaked to the news media within days of the bombing. The bomber’s use of the United Klan’s Mobile, Alabama, P.O. box address on the hotel registry had also been leaked. A couple dozen reporters had spent valuable time knocking on doors in Mobile, vainly waiting for someone to speak to them about the local branch of the Klan. The bomber’s use of a common farm fertilizer and diesel fuel hadn’t been a secret, either. Everyone had known about that a couple of weeks after the investigation began; the federal government had issued a ban on mass sales of the stuff to dissuade copycats.

  It was something else that had caught Laverty’s eye when she picked up the magazine on a rack at the Portland airport and read X’s article for the first time — something he’d written that she would have thought nobody else knew. Her eyes had widened when they landed on one paragraph and she’d sworn out loud:

  Jones’s use of the United Klans of America’s Alabama post office box is well known. What isn’t as well known, however, is this: the founder of another virulently anti-Semitic and racist hate group — the National Alliance — has written a novel under a pseudonym. Only a couple hundred copies of the obscure book exist; no mainstream book publisher will touch it. The novel tells the story of a Far Right revolution in which the book’s neo-Nazi hero fills a rented truck with barrels containing farm fertilizer and diesel fuel. The novel then describes how the bomb is used to kill hundreds of people at a government building in Washington, D.C.

  How did X know about that? Had he gotten his hands on a copy of that book? Or was someone talking to him?

  As she sat on the bed in the shitty hotel room, still wearing her coat — a rather expensive Thierry Mugler she’d picked up on her last trip to New York — she pondered for a minute, then reached into her purse and extracted an address book. She thumbed through it to the middle and picked up the phone from the bedside table.

  Despite being the target of the largest manhunt in the history of the republic, no one knew where the man known as Thomas M. Jones had gone. No one had seen him since the morning of the bombing. No one knew his real name.

  The phone rang once, twice, and then Theresa Laverty spoke. “Hello, Mrs. Lank, this is Special Agent Laverty from the FBI,” she said, her tone even. “I believe we met once before.”

  “No, no, Kurt’s not in trouble,” she said, “not at all. I just need to speak to him and his friend X as soon as possible.”

  Laverty frowned. “Rehab? Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Lank. Do you have any idea when it would be possible for me to go see him? I’m in Portland now.”

  Laverty listened, nodding, then thanked her and hung up. She looked out the window at a partial view of Casco Bay. The water was flat and grey and featureless.

  “I hate this place.”

  X started writing for Creem magazine because of me.

  Hey, you owe me royalties, man!

  It happened just before Stiff dropped us from the label. The legendary Robert Christgau had been in Portland to take in a Hot Nasties show at Gary’s and write up a brief profile of the pop-punk quartet that had been signed — improbably, incredibly — to the influential Stiff Records label. During one really boozy afternoon with Christgau at Gary’s before a show, I had boasted to Creem’s legendary capsule review guy that my best friend X was “a way better fucking writer than anyone at Creem.”

  Behind his owlish glasses, Christgau laughed and said I was full of shit. I said I wasn’t. He asked me to send him some of the stuff X had written for our high school paper, which we called the NCNA — the Non-Conformist News Agency. Christgau had laughed, saying he liked the name.

  So, unbeknownst to X, I mailed off a dozen of the best essays he’d written on his old Selectric for the NCNA, including one of my all-time favorites, titled “Punks and Hate,” about politics and punk rock. It was edgy and angry.

  This was the best part:

  The thing to keep in mind about extremism is that, for a lot of people, it all starts with the best of intentions. It’s quite gradual. Most people do not set out to find a girl to kick in the face with a steel-toed boot, as she cowers on a city street, because she opposes racism and couldn’t get away fast enough — and most people don’t participate in plots to beat into a coma a guy whose only crime is working a low-paying night job in a factory and being black. Most people do not plan on doing those sorts of things, however much they are angry about something, someone. But some do.

  When a young person (a punk, let’s say) trades in complexity, nuance, and patience for the arrogance and conceit of bumper sticker ideologies and radical, instantaneous change, all helpfully accompanied by a punk rock music soundtrack — well, hell. Fuck democracy, right? You know what’s best, so fuck second thoughts, fuck dialogue, fuck everyone else. Just do it, man.

  Punk was, and is, about defiance and resistance and self-reliance; it was, and is, anti-authoritarian, youthful, loud, creative, independent, unique. Punk was wonderful, except on those occasions — more than rare, less than frequent — when it wasn’t. When it became the apotheosis of extremism and hate. When it actually became worse than the worst of the society it was seeking to change.

  At the start, everyone got along. Punks were aggressive and unafraid of a good scrap, sure. But in the early days of the scene, in both London and New York, punk attracted a mélange of countercultures — gays, lesbians, Rastafarians, metalheads, and art students — who were all misfits, but who all went to the same shows and danced t
o the same songs. It was a rainbow coalition of outsiders. Reveling in that, rejoicing in that.

  But then, starting in the late 1970s — in both Britain and in North America — organized racism raised its pointed white head in the punk scene. Spurred on by high rates of youth unemployment, and a widespread distrust of prevailing immigration policies, groups on the neo-Nazi and white supremacist fringes started to enjoy a renewal of popularity. And the skinheads flocked to join them — groups as diverse as the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations.

  And the Far Right skins started showing up at punk shows. They started picking fights. And — spurred on by the older Klansmen and neo-Nazi bosses — they got bolder and better organized.

  It was a recipe for hate, and it did not take long for the trouble to start.

  A week or so later, Christgau called me. “Your friend is pissed off at the right things,” he said. “He can also write better than a lot of the professionals I know. Think he’d want to write for us?”

  I told Christgau I’d get back to him pronto. As soon as I hung up, I raced over to X’s place (he still lived at home with his parents and his little brother and sister) a few blocks away. I could have called, I guess, but I was so excited I wanted to tell him in person.

  Creem magazine, you see, was one of the only rock publications we read. Rolling Stone was for boring old farts who listened to Fleetwood Mac and shit like that; Circus was too often about big-hair arena rock; Bomp was awesome, but really hard to get in a place like Portland. Creem, however, was the suburban punk rock survival manual, and it was often for sale at the South Portland 7-Eleven where X and I would pick up late-night Coke Slurpees and beef jerky. Creem was our bible.

  Anyway, I rapped on the door, and after a minute, X answered. He was barefoot, wearing skintight jeans ripped out at the knees and a T-shirt he’d picked up after a Nasties gig in Montreal. It featured a picture of Joe Strummer decked out like a rockabilly rebel. Below Strummer’s face, written in big black letters: “GOD.”

  At the time, X was enrolled in his first year at the University of Southern Maine, taking some general courses, heading toward a journalism degree. I didn’t know what he was planning on doing with that — nobody ever knew what X was planning to do, including me, and Patti, his girlfriend. But, at that moment, I was delighted to know something he didn’t for once.

  “Brother,” I said, bent over a bit, catching my breath, “holy Christ, have I got news for you.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Want to come in?”

  I laughed. “No, I want to tell you right here on your front step. I want to be able to clearly see your mug, to see if you’ll show some emotion about something for the first time ever.”

  X leaned against the doorframe. “Okay. What is it?”

  I told him.

  He didn’t show any emotion, of course, even after I gave him a half guy-hug. Not even the tiniest of grins. But he did start writing for Creem not long after.

  He didn’t have a title or anything, and Christgau and the other godlike luminaries at Creem — Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches — didn’t really need him to write reviews of records or shows. So, instead, they got him to write about politics and culture and what was going on in the news. They wanted him to tell Creem readers about stuff that was going on in the world, socio-political stuff the magazine didn’t often pay a lot of attention to. As such, they called his occasional column “The Non-Conformist News Agency,” which was perfect.

  “It’s by a guy named X,” Christgau wrote in the editor’s note that first introduced X and the NCNA to Creem readers. “None of us know his real name, although someone in payroll probably does. None of us really know where he comes from, or where he is at the moment. He’s X, and he’s everywhere and nowhere. He’s an enigma! He’s a mystery! And he’s Creem’s anonymous chronicler of non-musical happenings. Shocking but true: there’s more to life than KISS and Iggy and the Pistols, boys and girls. Pay attention to X. Boy howdy!”

  And that’s how X came to write for Creem. And that’s how he came to be assigned to write about the Portland bombing, too, I guess: because he lived in Portland, because non-musical happenings were his beat, and because he knew quite a bit about the haters who were starting to become more and more visible. He was the perfect guy to write about the Portland bombing massacre.

  And the Portland bombing was, as X wrote in his first column about the slaughter, “the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States of America.”

  And it had been done, he later told us, by a red-blooded American boy with a particular belief system. But not the belief system everyone was being told about by the newspapers. Not yet, anyway.

  CHAPTER 10

  In their glossy promotional brochures, the Casco Bay Recovery Center claimed to offer “holistic wellness,” “peace and calm,” and “total health” — crap like that. But what they really had was routine — grinding, monotonous, bleak routine, day after day after fucking day.

  We were woken up at 7:30. Breakfast was at 8:00. “Therapeutic activities” were at 8:30 — a walk in the gardens (if it wasn’t raining or too cold). Then there’d be a stupid lecture and discussion at 9:00. Group therapy at 10:00. Then a twenty-minute break — supervised, of course (everything was supervised). More lecture shit at 11:20 and what they called “creative therapy”; then at noon, the real therapy — the lineup to get our meds. In my case, that was some methadone, which always made me feel like puking. But not as much as I would if I were going cold turkey, I suppose. Paula, the head Nazi, had told me the first day that I would be given a declining dose of methadone, until I needed no methadone at all. I nodded. So went the methadone theory.

  Lunch was at 1:00 p.m. sharp. There was an hour for that, and the food always tasted like burnt sand. More group therapy at 2:00, more “creative therapy” at 3:00 — plus what they called “fitness” and everyone else called “stretching a bit.” At 4:15, we did “peer evaluation,” which was the most non-routine part of the whole fucking day. Then, at 5:00, we’d gather in a circle and tell “life stories” for half an hour. Sometimes, we’d get to do that in smaller groups or in pairs. Then more meds issued by the hatchet-faced nurses. Then dinner at 6:00.

  After that, some of us would be escorted to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings elsewhere in Portland. For those who stayed at the center, there’d be “therapeutic assignments,” then “therapeutic reading group,” and then “informal sharing.” Regrettably, the “sharing” never seemed to involve any little baggies full of magical white powder.

  But I actually started to look forward to “informal sharing” and “peer evaluation” during the time I spent there. That was because some of that sharing and evaluation was done outside the watchful eyes of Obersturmführer Paula and her health underlings. And because I met someone (more on that in a minute).

  The AA and NA attendees would slouch back to the center around 9:00 or so, all quiet and defeated, and the nurses would make us line up again for more meds. And then we’d go off to our rooms to read or — they hoped — “meditate and reflect.” Lights out was at 11:00.

  I had a private room. There were some shared spaces at my little rehab home, but they didn’t put me in one. I think they were worried I might be a bad influence on my roommate. They may have been right about that.

  My room was painted beige and it was pretty small, what with all the crap they crammed in there — an armoire, matching dresser, bedside table, and a single bed about as comfortable as a strip of suburban gravel driveway. There was also a chair, which we were told was for “meditating and reflecting.” But no phone. Phones could lead to “phone calls,” which could lead to “discussions with friends” on the outside, which could lead to “bags full of goodness” being taped to a rock and then tossed over the eight-foot brick wall that surrounded the garden out back. There was a tiny TV, up on top of the dresser, but no cable, so it only got two local Portland stations — WGME, the CBS af
filiate, and WCSH, the NBC affiliate.

  There was a window, up near the ceiling, but it didn’t open. I stood on the dresser and tried to open it on the rather difficult Day Two, believe me.

  Jessie was in rehab for booze. I was in for drugs. We hit it off. The thing that brought us together was our shared love of loud music. On Day Two, I was wearing a Ramones T-shirt; she was wearing a Motörhead one.

  “Hey,” I said as we lined up for noontime pill-popping. “My shirt is better than your shirt.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said. “Lemmy’d kick Joey’s ass.”

  It was love at first sight.

  She was tall and lanky like me. She had long jet-black hair and the wan, hollowed-out look of junkies and boozehounds. Pretty face, though. She could have been a knockout if she wanted. She didn’t want to, however. She wore too much mascara and her ears were adorned with a ton of piercings. On one of her spindly arms, she had a tattoo — an ace of spades, of course. At nineteen, she was a couple of years younger than me. She said she came from nowhere in particular — Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, wherever. Her parents were “hippie-dippy” types who ran an organic farm now, she said, and they drove her fucking crazy. “They love the great outdoors and the call of the wild and all of that shit,” she said during one of our “informal sharing” sessions. “I want cities and lots of noise and lights and people. They drove me to drink.”

  That wasn’t the real story, of course — with those of us domiciled at the Casco Bay Recovery Center, it’s never just one story — but it was all she was prepared to share at the start.

  For my part, I told her I was there because of rock ’n’ roll. “Had a band, got a record deal, lost the record deal, lost the band.” We were hanging out in the garden on Day Three, and I was shivering. She was smoking a Marlboro, unfiltered. “Could there be a more clichéd rock ’n’ roll story?”

  “Not really,” she said, and we both laughed.