When he saw them approaching, X jumped down off the stage and crossed his arms, like he expected a fight.
The chief stepped forward, smiling, and extended a hand. After a long pause, X took it.
“Mr. X,” Chow said. “Nice to see you again. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Good, good,” he said, then turned to acknowledge Laverty and Savoie, who were now standing behind him. “I think you remember Detective Savoie and Special Agent Laverty?”
X nodded.
Laverty glared at X and noticed that Savoie looked like he wanted to pull out his service revolver and shoot the assembled punks, X in particular.
Chow, though, kept smiling. “I was hoping we could speak to you, confidentially, about a case we’re working on.”
“Confidentially?” the girl said, crossing her arms over her “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” T-shirt.
“Yes,” the chief said. “Confidentially. Portland PD, for which I am responsible, is working co-operatively with the FBI on …” He hesitated.
“Finding the bomber you haven’t caught yet?” the girl said angrily.
Laverty felt her face flush and heard Savoie swear under his breath.
But Chow was undeterred. “Yes,” he said to the girl. “Patti, isn’t it?”
The girl continued to glare at them.
The chief turned back to X and pointed at the photo on the wall above the drum kit. “We have a shared interest in bringing the bomber or bombers to justice, I believe. That’s why we want to speak with you.”
X looked at Chow, as if considering. “Not with those two,” he said finally, pointing at Laverty and Savoie. “And anything you have to say, you can say in front of my friends.”
Chow’s smile slipped for the first time.
“I told you this was a waste of time,” Savoie growled. He turned and stalked out of the bar.
“Well,” a clearly unhappy Chief Chow said, as he and Laverty watched Savoie disappear through Gary’s main doors, “perhaps we can meet on another occasion, X?”
He shook X’s hand again, and he and Laverty turned and left.
APRIL 18
This morning, David, I spotted a beaver at work at a tributary off the Androscoggin.
The river is cleaner than it was a decade ago, so the fish and wildlife are coming back. Thus the beaver.
The spot was a rushing creek, and the beaver’s dipping back was silver in the sun, spinning sanctuary out of the wood. Dunking beneath the rippling surface, always at work.
It wasn’t a dam, I realized. It was an act of defiance, hauled out of the woods and built by the beaver, bit by bit.
That is me, David. I am not building a dam to provide for my family. They’re all gone now.
I’m building to stop the river, and to kill every living thing that lies below it.
CHAPTER 14
Portland PD’s grey, boxy headquarters on Middle Street was an abomination. It looked like a Soviet-style gulag, thought Agent Laverty.
She sat in a chair across from Chief Chow, who sat behind his huge desk. X slouched in the chair beside her. Following the unsuccessful encounter at Gary’s, Chow had decided to try again. He’d called X at home, and more or less pleaded with him to give them another chance. Laverty was surprised he’d showed up.
Detective Savoie had been asked to stay away from the meeting, and he’d been more than happy to do so. “Fuck that arrogant little shithead,” he’d said.
Chief Chow began. “X, thank you for agreeing to come in. You don’t mind if I still call you X, do you?”
X shrugged.
“Good. X it is,” he said, smiling. “Do you know that, to Americans, the symbol X sometimes means yes, but to us Chinese, it always means no?”
“No,” X said, deadpan.
Laverty couldn’t disguise a grin.
“Okay,” he said. “So, X, I must ask: Do you regard yourself as a member of the media? Or as a student at USM?”
“I’m a journalist,” X said, his voice even. “With all that entails … constitutionally.”
The chief laughed and clapped his hands. “I win the bet!” he said, looking delighted. “I told Agent Laverty you would assert your First Amendment rights in the first five minutes of our meeting! She wasn’t so sure.”
Laverty seethed.
Small talk over, Chow became more serious. “So, then, let’s discuss this.” He held up a copy of Creem, the one with X’s column in it.
“We’re interested in some of the conclusions you reached,” Laverty said, sitting forward. “We’d like to discuss that.”
“You and I are both all too aware of the way in which this department has failed you and your friends in the past,” said Chow. “And I think you know that I was recently promoted to chief to demonstrate our commitment to equality and our opposition to extremism.”
“So?”
“So, X, I do not expect you to love us,” Chow said, leaning forward, “but I think you know you can trust me, at least. Yes?”
X shrugged again.
“I do not expect you to name your sources or act as an agent of the police. I am not asking that, and I will not ask that of you,” Chow said. “But it has been several weeks since the bombing, and we are no closer to identifying a suspect or suspects.”
“I’m aware.”
“And it is apparent to some of us — me, Agent Laverty, even Detective Savoie — that you have learned quite a bit about these extremist organizations and the threat they pose. So, it seems we have some shared interests. We have a joint interest in catching the killer, do we not?”
X remained silent.
Agent Laverty erupted. “Don’t you get it? This monster killed two of your friends! We want to get him. Come on, you aren’t even a real journalist — you write a column for a rock ’n’ roll magazine, you —”
X turned to look at her, stopping her in mid-thought. After a long pause, he said just two words.
CHAPTER 15
Patti Upchuck waved her arms for the Punk Rock Virgins to stop.
The band had just finished the first number of their set — fittingly, their take on Johnny Thunders’s “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” — and Patti had something to say. Her neon-green Mosrite guitar dangled below her studded belt, the words on the T-shirt she was wearing visible: “TIT SWEAT,” it said — the name of Nagamo’s band up in Toronto.
The couple hundred or so punks stopped dancing and slamming and went sort of quiet, watching her.
Gary’s was packed, typically well over the legal limit for bodies. The Punk Rock Virgins show — which had been opened by the Mild Chaps, and then Maine’s only all-black punk outfit, the Sturgeons — was the city’s first punk rock gathering since the bombing.
The Virgins and the remaining members of the Hot Nasties, along with X, had gotten together a week earlier in the basement at Sound Swap to plan the gig. The Nasties’ Sam Shiller and Luke Macdonald, still reeling from the murder of their drummer and friend Eddie, wondered if it was all too soon. But the Virgins and X wanted to do it. “Everyone else is getting remembered,” Sister Betty had said. “We need to remember our friends.”
Sam and Luke lacked the energy to argue. So, the show went ahead, and punks were lining up hours before the doors opened. The Portland scene needed punk rock communion — and, of course, charging no cover helped, too.
Patti was standing in the middle of Gary’s stage, looking almost stricken, waving her arms. “Oh my god,” she finally said, and everyone followed her gaze. In the middle of the pit, edging toward the front, were the three surviving members of Tit Sweat. They’d come down from Toronto. No one had known they were coming, except X, that is, who had set it all up and paid for their train tickets.
When Sister Betty saw the three girls, she started crying. Patti waved for the Toronto band’s drummer and two guitarists to come onstage and for the crowd to let them through.
“Everyone,” she said, one arm around the shoulder
s of the tiny but mighty drummer, who had a mohawk haircut and actually was Mohawk. “Everyone, these girls are from Tit Sweat, and they’ve come here all the way from Toronto, Canada.”
There was lots of applause and cheering, even though not many of the Portland punks actually knew who Tit Sweat was.
Patti continued, handing her Mosrite to Tit Sweat’s guitarist while Sister Betty passed her Danelectro Longhorn to the Canadian band’s bassist. “They’ve lost their sister Nagamo, who was their lead singer, and who was with our brother Eddie Igglesden when he died in the bombing.” She paused before continuing, her voice cracking, “That goddamn bomber, tying us up and holding us down.”
Tying us up, holding us down.
The cheering and clapping had stopped again, because no one really knew how to react to what Patti had said. There was ten seconds of nothing. Then one of the guys in the Sturgeons, at the back, had the perfect idea, the perfect response to Patti’s words: “Oh bondage, up yours!”
At that, all of the girls onstage laughed. Patti yelled into the mic, “I can’t think of a better song for all of us punk rock girls to play right fucking now!” The punks started to cheer, while Patti conferred with the band members to see if they all knew the chords to X-Ray Spex’s glorious feminist punk rock anthem.
They did, apparently: D, C, D, C, G, A, G, A, ad infinitum. That’s it. Smiling, Patti stepped up to the mic, one fist raised. She screamed, this amazing and defiant scream, “OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!” And then the two bands launched into one of the messiest — but one of the most singularly flawless — renditions of that song, ever. The assembled punks went crazy, slamming into each other, leaping up and down, dancing on the spot. The walls and the floor seemed to be bending outward, like the place was ready to burst with too much punk rock joy.
At the back of the dance floor, X stood with Sam and Luke, one hand in his pocket, biker jacket slung over his shoulder. Luke and Sam were on either side of him. Sam leaned in to be heard. “Wow,” he said, looking like he might actually cry, “bringing the girls down here was pretty fucking awesome, X. It’s perfect.”
Through the flailing bodies and limbs, X and Sam and Luke could see flashes of the faces of Patti and Sister Betty onstage — and they looked happier than they’d been in a long, long time.
When I heard about the epic gig they’d organized in memory of Eddie and Nagamo, my chest ached. I was so pissed I’d missed it. How I wish I could have been there with my friends as they remembered the two friends we’d lost.
I didn’t want to be there because it was a funeral or a wake. Not that. Punk to me is all about the here and now, you know? It’s about the present. If you’re into nostalgia and scrapbooks and reminiscing, it’s decidedly not for you. Punk is about being young, angry, and defiantly present in the moment. So, when Sid Vicious died — or later Joy Division’s Ian Curtis or the Germs’ Darby Crash or the Ruts’ Malcolm Owen — we were sad, of course, but we weren’t shocked. If you’re a punk, you don’t expect anything or anyone to last forever, including yourself. We had made a conscious and non-refundable choice to never be like the old farts in the Strolling Bones or Dread Zeppelin — no playing three-chord ragers into your sixties. No nostalgia tours. No career retrospectives. We thought all of that corporate shite was worse than being dead.
None of us therefore figured we’d ever be slam-dancing at a Punk Rock Virgins show and simultaneously collecting a pension. Like Jimmy wrote in that Nasties song, “The Secret of Immortality,”
I think that I know why
I don’t give up, I’ll never die:
Forever doesn’t go beyond next week!
But the murders of Eddie and Nagamo, and of those little kids without biographies, and all those other totally innocent people, that hit us all really hard. We were all bent and broken. We were suffused with grief. We couldn’t escape from the shadow that hung over Portland.
So, that gig — with the Virgins and Tit Sweat playing their hearts out, playing like their lives depended on it? That night, lives did depend on it.
And I fucking missed it.
APRIL 19
With conviction on our side, we need not fear the coming Armageddon. But the present Holocaust — the real Holocaust, not the fictionalized one — must be stopped.
It will be stopped.
It is an issue that has touched my heart, David. It is a terrible, terrible evil. And the facts cannot be denied: we, the true Israelites, are at risk. The white race — and especially the British and northern European segment, as Kipling wrote — are the peoples who God has permitted to receive and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and which have remained relatively free of the Conspiracy’s absolute control.
From where does all this evil come? It is a creation of secular humanism, that anti-Christ religion, which is the genesis of World Government, euthanasia, homosexuality, suicide, legalization of drugs, and pornography. All of it.
The smut peddlers, the atheists, the perverts, the seducers of children: these are the ones who are the diabolical forces behind rock music, modern art, and the drug trade.
We despair, but we must not give up the struggle. Never has our Race faced as many challenges as is the case today, Mr. Dennison. We have been manipulated by the purveyors of popular culture to hate ourselves, to hate our western Christian Heritage. This is done with propaganda like the television series Roots, or the Holocaust series. They try to portray us and our ancestors as fools and liars. To prevail, we must be prepared to break through a wall of fabrications to find the truth.
Past generations have succumbed to these lies. They have allowed two World Wars to destroy the flowers of our Race. Now, through the new Holocaust, they are willing to sacrifice the buds of our Race. They have opened the floodgates of immigration, diluting our blood while slaughtering those of our Race — by the millions.
It must end. It must be stopped.
I, and others, will stop it.
CHAPTER 16
It was late.
Back in his room, the door closed, with only a single desktop lamp on, X reached into his bottom drawer. There, under half a dozen old Creem issues and the NME, plus a couple never-opened PAHS yearbooks, he found what he was looking for hidden in a white Target bag.
X reached in and extracted the thick stack of mimeographed pages, about four hundred in all. They were bad-quality copies — likely copies of copies of copies. They were stained and dog-eared and held together with elastic bands.
It was well past midnight. The rest of the family had gone to bed hours ago. It was safe, now, to take it out. If his parents knew what it was, they would be very upset. They wouldn’t want something like that in the house. X understood why.
The author of The Patriot Diaries, the cover page announced, was Andrew McQuirter, founder and leader of the extreme-right National Alliance in West Virginia, a former physics professor and American Nazi Party publicist. But in the neo-Nazi firmament, he didn’t achieve anything noteworthy until he wrote the Diaries. On the cover was a symbol that resembled an upside-down peace sign.
McQuirter had written the novel to raise funds for the National Alliance and as a recruitment tool. On both counts, The Patriot Diaries was wildly successful: mimeographed copies had started to seep out like some foul virus. Copies would be sold or shared at Far Right rallies, gun lobby meetings, and through the mail by groups like the Aryan Nations and the KKK.
The book electrified those it reached within the racist right; it transformed them. The fact that it was almost impossible to find made it even more influential. For many of these people, the book served as a clarion call to battle — the beginning of the white revolution the haters believed was foretold in Scripture.
It was unlike any other racist propaganda ever produced. Most of the pamphlets, booklets, and texts generated by the white nationalist movement, X knew, were monosyllabic crap, rife with spelling errors, non sequiturs, and insane historical revisionism. They claimed to be factual, but they were anything b
ut.
The Patriot Diaries, on the other hand, was written with what could only be described as an uncharacteristic intelligence and style. Even though it was clearly a work of fiction, and everyone knew it, it had the potential to transform a whole generation of racist activists across North America.
The book tells the story, diary-style, of just over two years in the life of John T., a member of an underground racist terrorist group called the Organization. It begins in September 1991, when John T. and two thousand like-minded men and women are fighting something called the Bender Act, which has outlawed the private ownership of guns. The government — or, as John T. calls it, the System — is employing gangs of black people to confiscate weapons. But John T. and his band of outlaws are determined to overthrow the entire System at any cost.
Writes John T.: “Terrible days lay ahead of us. But God’s will must be done.”
The book describes how the Organization operated in a cell system, made up of “units” whose five or six members are mostly unknown to each other. “Leaderless resistance,” John T. calls it, whose particular expertise is the construction of homemade bombs. John T. relates how to find and assemble the materials needed to construct homemade bombs, along with how to store, handle, and use firearms and explosives. He provides a forensic amount of detail about how to source materials for these explosive devices, and how to build them.
With John T.’s help, the Organization plots to bomb the offices of the Washington Post, because it believes the press is a willing tool of the “political police.” Along the way, John T. murders one of the paper’s Jewish editors at his home.
The Organization also murders one of its own members who refuses to murder a priest and a rabbi. It bombs television transmitters. It rains mortars on Congress during a presidential visit, killing hundreds. It shoots a Tel Aviv–bound jetliner out of the sky with a bazooka. It bombs Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, targeting black neighborhoods. It kills three hundred people at a cocktail party at the Israeli Embassy.
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