Age of Unreason

by Warren Kinsella

  Laverty turned back to the monitor and studied the younger man closely. After it had taken so long to find him, it was hard to believe he was finally there in front of her.

  Jones stood just under six feet tall and was in impressive shape — lean, tanned, and muscled, but not too muscular. He looked like someone who lived entirely outdoors and ate only healthy foods. Reddish-brown hair was close-cropped above his narrow face. His nose was aquiline, almost delicate, but he had a strong jawline, which was presently unshaven.

  Jones’s eyes were pale blue, and Laverty found them off-putting. He hadn’t spoken since being taken into custody, except to ask for his lawyer and the books; he’d just sat there silently, staring unblinking at his interrogators.

  He had no tattoos, but they had noticed a small symbol on his right forearm, about an inch in length. It had been mistaken for a scar, at first. The symbol was a square, with what appeared to be two feet in one corner.

  “What is that?” Savoie had asked after a uniformed cop gave them a Polaroid.

  “It’s the Elder Futhark Odal rune,” Laverty told him.

  “What the fuck is … the elder what?”

  “They call it the Othala rune,” she said, squinting at the photo. “It’s a Viking symbol, third century. The Waffen SS used it on their uniforms and insignia. Nazi death squads appropriated it during the war and wore it in Croatia and places like that. Neo-Nazis use it here in the States, in South Africa, in Germany.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Homeland,” she said. “Their inherited white homeland.”

  Savoie stared at the photo. “It’s not a tattoo?” he asked.

  “No,” Laverty said. “It’s been carved into his skin.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Jessie joining the Hot Nasties wasn’t all that difficult. It just sort of happened. But Your Humble Narrator re-joining the band? That, as it turned out, was a lot more difficult.

  I had been invited to become a Hot Nasty after Jimmy Cleary was killed. He was my friend, and he’d been their lead singer. I’d been in another sort-of-seminal Portland punk band, the Social Blemishes, who weren’t anything like the Nasties. The Nasties were the local punk Beatles, more or less, and the Blemishes were the Stooges before they got a record contract. The Nasties were tight and disciplined and had great tunes. The Social Blemishes were raw and raucous and we sounded like a Mack truck full of squealing pigs slamming into a glass factory at two hundred miles an hour.

  But I knew all the Nasties’ songs. I knew all the lyrics. And — with Stiff Records offering to sign them to a two-record deal, and maybe more — I knew I could help them out.

  It worked out at first. We were pretty much punk rock gods for a while. Had an actual professional-type tour around New England and parts of Canada. Played big shows with some big bands, like the Teen Idles, who would go on to become the hottest hardcore band of the moment, Minor Threat. We got to stay in real hotels (sort of). We had a real tour manager (sort of). We started to generate real buzz (sort of).

  But then everything went to total rat shit. It fell apart. We weren’t as slick as the new wave bands, and we weren’t as raw as the hardcore bands. We were stuck in the middle, not belonging to either genre and therefore no longer cool. We were the punk rock meat in the new wave/hardcore sandwich. Stiff dropped us because we were over before we’d even gotten a chance to be the next new thing.

  The rest of the guys were super bummed out, to be sure. Sam and Luke had to get real jobs, doing inventory at the Sears at the Maine Mall. Eddie started working construction for his dad and spent all of his free time with his new girlfriend, Nagamo.

  And me? Well, you know where I ended up. Go big or go home, I always say.

  The first time I ever got really fucked up, it was doing speed. You don’t really get addicted to speed — you just develop a dependency on it. As luck might have it, I became really, really dependent on it. I ended up OD’ing and wound up in the hospital in Toronto during the tour.

  My friends and bandmates hauled me out of the hospital, where I’d been manacled to a bed, and dragged my shriveled carcass to the Six Nations of Grand River. It was there, about ninety minutes outside Toronto, where I went through this sweat lodge healing ceremony. And I actually got healed. For a while.

  The Hot Nasties didn’t kick me out that time.

  But this time, after I disappeared on them and developed a fondness for the hardest hard drug, well, they gave up on me. Understandably, they moved on, figuring the Hot Nasties were dead. They figured I was dead, too — or soon would be.

  But then I came back like a punk rock Lazarus.

  So, what to do about Kurt Blank?

  There were apparently many discussions about that, down in the dungeon at Sound Swap; much debate, much deliberation. Sam was fed up with me, Luke wanted me back. The Upchuck sisters, when asked for their opinions, insisted I deserved a second chance. X, meanwhile, would say nothing. When asked for his opinion, he refused. That was interpreted as a “no” vote.

  So, I was summoned to the band summit. Jessie, too. She, as noted, was in.

  Jessie was this kick-ass drummer, you see. She was a powerhouse. No fancy frills and rolls and shit. Just a straight-ahead beat machine. She drummed like heavy artillery. She drummed like a screen door in a hurricane. She drummed like a drum machine on meth.

  “I can’t believe a chick can drum so hard,” Luke said to her the first time they all jammed together.

  “I can’t believe you play bass like a little girl,” Jessie said, deadpan. Sam and the Upchucks and I all burst out laughing. X even smiled at that one.

  When Jessie and I arrived for the summit, everyone else was there already. Nobody said much. Sam and Luke were fiddling with their guitars, tuning up, while the Upchucks sat on the dirty old couch beside Mike the bouncer. X was sitting on the steps leading to the shared practice space, and Leah was on the stair below him, leaning against the brick wall.

  Jessie squeezed past X and Leah and headed to the battered drum kit. She started fiddling with the tuning of the floor tom.

  “So,” I finally said, “I guess I’m here to apply for a job I previously held.”

  Nobody laughed. Sister Betty looked up at me. “Are you ready, babe?” She only called me “babe” when she was worried about me. She’d been calling me babe a lot in recent months.

  “I think so,” I said. “I feel okay.”

  Sister Betty looked at me intently. She, I figured, had volunteered to be my inquisitor. I was okay with that. Better her than X.

  “Kurt, we all love you, you know that, right?”

  Here it comes, I thought. “I know,” I said. “I love you guys, too.” Pause. “Even Luke.”

  Sam and Mike laughed at that one, but Sister Betty didn’t. She plunged forward. “What you did after Stiff dropped the Nasties, babe?” she said. “What you did to yourself? It was totally unacceptable.”

  “Totally fucking unacceptable,” Sam said. Luke nodded.

  “Life throws all kinds of shit at you,” she said. “People break up. People are mean. Record labels drop bands.” She was looking pretty angry at this point. She pointed a finger at me. “None of that justifies taking off on your friends and becoming a fucking heroin addict, Kurt.” There was a long silence. No one moved a muscle, and definitely not me.

  Sister Betty glared at me, her painted black fingernail still pointing at me. “Nothing justifies that!” she said, her voice shaking. “Nothing!”

  At Casco Bay, ironically enough, we had been prepped for this sort of thing. You know, the highly uncomfortable encounter with upset family and friends. “You have hurt them!” Drill Sergeant Paula had hollered at us. “You have let them down! Be prepared for them to be angry with you for a long time! Maybe forever! They are justified! They are entitled!”

  Sister Betty was angry. So were the rest of them. I could feel it. Their anger, in fact, was like the heat from the crowd at a packed show, flashing up between songs.
<
br />   I hesitated. I’d been expecting this moment, and preparing for it, but it was still hard to hear.

  “Guys,” I croaked, “I love this band. I love playing. I love all of it.” Pause. “When Stiff dropped us, it felt like the world had ended —”

  “Kurt, that is such bullshit!” Sister Betty yelled, cutting me off. I’d never seen her this pissed off before. She pointed around the room at the assembled Hot Nasties and Punk Rock Virgins and assorted others. “We are each other’s world! Us! Not some fucking record label!”

  She was right, of course.

  I tried again. “I know. I get it. It’s just that if I play again, I’m afraid I’ll get back into bad habits again.” I could see that some of them were surprised by that. They had been expecting me to beg to be let back in. But it was the opposite. I kept going. “I want to play with you guys again. But I’m not sure I should.” At that, X turned and looked straight at me for the first time. He fixed those unblinking, uneven pupils on me, the ones that still made me feel as uncomfortable as they did back in grade seven. “That’s the only thing you could say,” he said, “that suggests you might actually be ready … the realization that you may never be. That this,” X waved at Sam, Luke, and Jessie, “isn’t right for you anymore.”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” I said after a long pause. “I want to come back, but I don’t want to get fucked up again.”

  Anyway, I went for a walk. They took a vote.

  I was back in if I wanted to be.

  CHAPTER 29

  “An important part of the rehabilitation process is for inmates to keep their personal friendships and relationships healthy through communication,” Laverty read in the Inmate Mail Policy of the Maine Department of Corrections. “All inmates are allowed to send and receive mail from anyone, with the exception of correspondence between an inmate and another inmate, an inmate and their victim, and/or a person who is prohibited contact by court order. If an inmate does not have any money in their commissary account for postage, they will be allowed to send two free letters per week.”

  Laverty sighed. Almost from the moment he had arrived at the bunker deep in the bowels of the Cumberland County courthouse, Thomas M. Jones had been receiving mail. And lots of it. A loose-lipped corrections worker had informed her that he’d received letters from people who wanted to kill him and from people who wanted to understand him — from students writing their criminology master’s thesis to reporters seeking exclusive interviews. He’d even gotten a couple of offers of marriage.

  This created a problem, she thought, and meetings were convened with serious-sounding people with seriously important titles. Should the man accused of the worst mass murder in the recent history of the United States of America be permitted to receive mail? Should he be allowed to send letters, particularly when he was standing trial for slaughtering 121 innocent people?

  But the mail policy was clear: all inmates were allowed to send and receive mail. All of them. Even the ones who had no interest in “keeping personal friendships” or maintaining “healthy relationships.” (Thomas M. Jones didn’t have any of those, Laverty figured.)

  After his mini-hunger-strike, Jones had gotten access to some of the books he had requested. He was also given access to old newspapers and magazines (though all of the articles about the bombing had been removed). But it was the letters, Laverty was informed, that Thomas M. Jones enjoyed reading the most. He’d even started to answer some of them.

  All of his mail was opened, inspected, and read before he received it. Any mail that appeared to be written in some secret code or foreign language was treated as contraband and was kept by the Department of Corrections. So, too, were the letters that suggested other people whom Thomas M. Jones could murder when he got out. But most of the letters — even the ones that praised him — got through. Jones still had rights, after all.

  The cell Jones was being kept in was located on the basement level of the courthouse and had been designed for solitary confinement. It was thought he was more likely to survive there than at the Cumberland County Jail or the Maine State Prison. There had apparently been many inmates threatening to kill him if they got the chance.

  Soon after his hearing, Laverty was allowed down there again, and when she peered through the smudged, shatterproof observation window, she saw Thomas M. Jones sitting on a metal stool reading his letters, a stack of correspondence neatly piled beside him.

  CHAPTER 30

  In 1981, people cared about popular movies (like Raiders of the Lost Ark). They cared about the price of gas ($1.25 a gallon). They cared about the stupid faraway wedding of Charles and Diana, for fuck sakes. They cared about the space shuttle (the first one, Columbia). They cared about the possibly imminent collapse of communism (in Poland). They cared about some lunatic shooting the Pope (he survived). And they cared, of course, about the murder of more than one hundred men, women, and children at the Portland YWCA. That’s what they cared about.

  I cared, too, of course, because two of my friends had died. But I also cared about Jessie, who’d been a different kind of victim. The girls in the Punk Rock Virgins all cared, too — Patti Upchuck in particular — that Jessie had been raped. The Nasties all cared, of course, because Jessie was one of them now, and Sam and Luke wanted to protect her — even though she didn’t need protection. And X cared in his own way, having always had zero tolerance for those who use violence against women and girls.

  But the outside world? They didn’t seem to give a shit. The Portland Daily Sun, which was a nasty little right-wing tabloid, called Thomas M. Jones’s outburst in court “a distraction” and “a possible defense tactic.” The morons who made up the Daily Sun’s editorial board wanted the murder trial to proceed, and the “long-ago alleged rape” put on the legal back burner. Or dropped entirely.

  Anonymous sources in the other Portland paper, the Press Herald, were similarly indifferent. Nameless defense attorneys suggested that it was all a stunt cooked up by Jones’s high-paid New York City lawyer, David Dennison. “It’s a transparent tactic to divert everyone’s attention from the main act,” sniffed one anonymous attorney. “It means that Dennison doesn’t have much of a defense.”

  In the spectators’ benches in courtroom one, no one else seemed to give a shit, either. They were there for a murder trial, and they wanted the murder trial to get underway, right away. The rape of a girl with a drinking problem who dresses like a boy? Who cares, they probably thought.

  Out on Portland’s streets, almost everyone felt the same way. They wanted to see Thomas M. Jones hanging from the bell tower at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. In 1981, as the guys in the X Gang soon discovered, sexual assault wasn’t seen as that big a deal by most people.

  Bizarrely, there was one person who seemed a bit indifferent to it all. And it shocked the hell out of me and the guys in the X Gang, to tell you the truth: Jessie.

  I’d been right beside her in court when Jones saw her and called out her name. I’d been with her, too, when Laverty grilled her — and, later, I was loitering nearby when she was interviewed by the DA and two of her assistants. And when she was chased along the street by a gaggle of reporters asking who she was and what she knew about the Portland bomber. I had been with her for just about every moment since we got out of Casco Bay, in fact. I’d been with Jessie through all of that, and she didn’t once break a sweat, other than that one time when we were talking to Laverty. She’d been raped by one of the worst mass murderers in U.S. history, and she didn’t seem to me to be the least bit upset about it. She just always seemed to be totally in control.

  I thought this was a bit weird, actually, so I spoke to Patti about it, because I knew Patti could relate. We were at Sound Swap, and the rest of the gang was out getting something to eat at Michael’s up the street. The two of us were sitting surrounded by stacks of used LPs on the main floor. The lights were off, and the place was totally quiet.

  “I’m confused by something,” I said. “Je
ssie —”

  Patti finished my sentence for me. “Jessie isn’t reacting to what happened like you expect her to?”

  I looked at her, surprised. “How’d you know?”

  “Guys expect girls who’ve been assaulted to be vulnerable, so they can protect them and all that,” she said, smiling. “Even gay guys.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for being predictable and all that, but I do want to protect her.” I was feeling a bit defensive. “I mean, have you seen the shit they’ve been printing in the Sun and the Press Herald about it?”

  Patti shook her head. “No. I couldn’t care less what a bunch of old farts think about what should happen,” she said. “Men are always telling women what should happen to women — especially when it comes to our bodies and sex. Fuck them.”

  “But what about Jessie?” I said, exasperated. “I know for a fact that the …” I stammered, because I didn’t even want to say the word. “What happened to her had a major impact on her. It definitely played a role in her turning to booze and all that.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “So, why isn’t she more upset? Why doesn’t she want to kill that bastard with her bare hands, like we do, like I would if I got half a chance? I just don’t get it,” I said. “She’s so calm.”

  Patti put a hand on my arm. “Kurt, babe, Jessie’s just coping. She’s totally fucking brave. I can honestly tell you that if I ever saw those two bastards who raped me again, I’d probably fall apart. I’d be a mess.” She paused. “For Jessie to be able to keep her cool through all of this — with the cops asking questions, the trial — it’s totally amazing. It shows how strong she is.”

  “Well, I’m worried about her falling off the wagon again,” I said. “The pressure has to be intense.”

  We could hear the rest of the Nasties and the Virgins returning from Michael’s. Patti stood up. “The rest of us are worried about you, too, my friend,” she said, her voice low. “We don’t have anything to worry about, do we?”