Age of Unreason Read online

  The X Gang Series

  Recipe for Hate

  New Dark Ages

  Age of Unreason

  Copyright © Warren Kinsella, 2019

  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.

  Publisher: Scott Fraser | Editor: Allison Hirst

  Cover designer: Laura Boyle

  Cover image: Shutterstock.com/Robert Spriggs

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Age of un-reason / Warren Kinsella.

  Other titles: Age of unreason

  Names: Kinsella, Warren, 1960- author.

  Series: Kinsella, Warren, 1960- X Gang.

  Description: Series statement: The X-Gang

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190196513 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190196521 | ISBN 9781459742185 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459742192 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459742208 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8621.I59 A64 2019 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts 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 Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  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.

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  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  For Emma, Ben, Sam, Jacob

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  APRIL 13

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  APRIL 13

  Words. That’s all these are, David. Words. Darkening, dry leaves — turned brown and black, blowing around on her school’s painted, grey-white concrete playground. A wedge of geese, way, way up, pinned against a glittering blanket of Maine sky. Scratches on a piece of paper, like the pricks of buckthorn on my pale extended arm as ten-year-old me runs to the edge of the forest, escaping.

  Just words. That’s all they are, David: words. Filaments, figments, fictions.

  But words have defined the boundaries of my life, every luckless minute of it. Words now propel me forward, toward what I must do next. Without stopping, without pity.

  Words are what you make of them. Me? Words made and make ME.

  Today, my words — and this, my manifesto — will be written all over the streets.

  In blood. And in tears.

  CHAPTER 1

  The words contained in the police report were leaked everywhere. They were on the front page of every newspaper.

  The yellow Ford truck had quietly pulled up to the curb around 8:20 a.m. on Monday, April 13, 1981. It slid into a spot just a little bit past the entrance to 70 Forest Avenue in Portland, Maine. Back in the 1920s, someone had carved the words “YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION” into the grey foundation stones. But the old building was now home to the YWCA — the men had moved to a much more modern space down the road.

  The old building was a bit of a dump, and it creaked and wheezed like an old man. Its best feature was the main doors, positioned as they were beneath a spectacular archway, which architects called a lunette. This area was decorated with lovely leaded glass, which shimmered when the sun caught it.

  Most weekdays it was pretty challenging to find a parking spot so close to the main doors. But not that day. The driver of the yellow truck had no difficulty finding a space. He’d been watching the place for weeks, the police figured, and he knew how busy it could be early in the morning.

  The staff greeted one another as they arrived for work. It was an unusually warm spring day, and some of them were smiling and chattering about their weekends. Some paused to hold the door open for harried-looking parents dropping off their kids at the Y’s daycare.

  The truck, it was later discovered, was the legal property of Roger Rentals of Boston, Massachusetts, but it had been assigned to a rental company — Macmillan’s Body Shop — way up in Newport, Vermont, near the Canadian border. A pair of bewildered employees at Macmillan’s would tell a small army of FBI agents that the truck had been driven off the lot a few days before the bombing, rented by a clean-cut young man who identified himself as Thomas M. Jones from Pulaski, Tennessee. Mr. Jones had told them he was helping a friend move. Thomas M. Jones was, in fact, the name of a long-dead lawyer, in whose offices the Ku Klux Klan was formed in Pulaski back in 1865. Jones had started the Klan along with some fellow former Confederate soldiers, mainly as a lark.

  This modern-day Thomas M. Jones was a slender young man with a crew cut. When he smiled — which he apparently didn’t do a lot when he was at Macmillan’s — he had a broad, toothy grin that made him look like a teenager.

  The five-story YWCA building had an ancient gym located on the main floor along with the daycare center. The administration and membership offices were housed on the second. On the upper floors were offices supporting an array of programs from summer camps to healthy living to veterans outreach. There were also a couple of converted classrooms, where the YWCA and YMCA did a booming business offering ESL classes for a modest fee. The women’s health and well-being offices were up there, too. They offered women and girls advice on reproductive health.

  The investigators discovered that for the four days prior to the bombing, Thomas M. Jones had been renting a room at the Holiday Inn across the road from the Maine Mall in South Portland. He’d parked the yellow rental truck in the lot out back, in a spot that could be readily seen from his room. On the inn’s register, he had used the long-dead Klansman’s name, but it turned out he had entered a real mailing address in the registry: a P.O. box in Mobile, Alabama. The FBI would quickly determine, however, that the P.O. box was registered to the United Klans of America. The man had paid cash for his room and didn’t leave behin
d a single fingerprint or anything else that gave any hint to his true identity.

  That Monday morning, the man everyone would soon know as Thomas M. Jones drove the yellow rental truck downtown and parked it on Forest Avenue. He then hopped out of the truck, locked the door, and walked west.

  Soon after he regained consciousness at Mercy Hospital, security guard Bob Cox was interviewed by the police and FBI. He immediately began recounting all of his injuries to the FBI agents. “The doc says I’ve got more than three hundred stitches outside my body, fellas, and more than six hundred inside. He told me they also had to leave three or four clamps inside me, to hold together the muscle and tissue and whatnot. They operated on me for a full day, on what was my first wedding anniversary. How about that, eh?” He paused and looked at the agents.

  They said nothing. They were there to talk to the security guard about whether he had seen anything. Bob Cox wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but they needed to get his statement as soon as possible.

  Cox sensed this and stopped rambling. “How many, fellas?”

  The agents looked at each other. “As of this morning, a hundred and twenty dead,” one of them finally said. “Three hundred injured.”

  Bob Cox, who had worked on the main floor at the YWCA and knew the names of each of the children in the daycare and many of their parents, started to cry. His big frame shook the hospital bed. Although it hurt when he moved, he couldn’t stop crying.

  As it turned out, Mr. Cox was the only survivor to see the young man who called himself Thomas M. Jones step out of the yellow rental truck that morning and walk away.

  Cox was thirty-three years old, newly married, and was a volunteer peewee hockey league referee in South Portland. He had just arrived for his regular shift at the Y when he spotted the truck. “It was weird,” Cox would tell the FBI, “for someone to park a truck that big in that spot at that time of day.”

  He’d watched the man for a second or two — even thought about telling him to park somewhere else, so parents would have an easier time dropping off their kids — but then he remembered he’d left his lunch back in his van, parked in the municipal lot a block away. He forgot about the truck and the man and instead doubled back to retrieve it. On his way back, he said he stopped to talk to the parking lot attendant about the Red Sox before heading back in the direction of the Y. He was half a block away when the bomb went off.

  He said he couldn’t actually remember what sound it made; if anything, there seemed to be an absence of sound, he recalled, a momentary silence that preceded the opening of the Gates of Hell. He remembered an enormous ball of fire, far bigger than the truck had been, pushing outward. Then he was hit with the blast wave, which Bob Cox said he could almost see, like a living thing, as it tore through everything.

  Some of the nice old trees out front of the YWCA bent then broke into a million pieces, embedding themselves in asphalt, surrounding buildings, parked vehicles, and bystanders. Windows along Forest Avenue exploded and the shards of glass became searing-hot missiles. They sounded like music, Bob Cox recalled thinking. Like chimes, he said.

  One moment, the Y’s staff, parents and kids, and other residents were heading to work or school or wherever; the next, they were just gone. All that remained was a beast shaped like fire, twisting and screeching and casting out billowing black smoke and choking dust.

  Cox recalled hearing the sound of a car horn echoing in the distance as debris rained down on the scorched pavement. Next he heard the wailing of a child crying out for her mother. It was only after what seemed like a very long time that the screams of the wounded commenced.

  The Ford truck was no longer there, of course. It had delivered its cargo of death and then it was gone. A massive crater remained where Jones had parked it. Parts of the truck were later found as much as five blocks away. A janitor found one of the truck’s axles on the roof of a school two streets over.

  The old building that housed the YWCA had been leveled. Thick steel cables could be seen in the concrete slabs that had once supported the structure. Bricks and bits of mortar littered Forest Avenue as far as Bob Cox could see.

  He’d been in shock, he figured, because he didn’t recall immediately feeling any pain at all. The blast had flung him up against the passenger door of a station wagon, as if he were a paper doll. After looking up and down the street for someone to help, Cox had looked down at his own injuries and promptly fainted.

  CHAPTER 2

  X was a man of few words.

  I had been at the shithole motel on Sanibel Island, getting my arm ready for blast-off, when X called. I knew right away it was something bad, because we hadn’t talked in a while — a long while.

  “Hey, X,” I said, genuinely happy to hear from him. He was still my best friend, after all. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  His voice was flat, all business. He didn’t sound particularly happy to be speaking to me. He was calling from Portland, he said.

  “I figured,” I said.

  “Have you seen the news?”

  “Not really,” I said, electing not to mention I’d been busy procuring some junk from my guy in the 7-Eleven parking lot across the causeway. I looked around the dark motel room where I’d been hiding out for two weeks. “I don’t have a TV. Why? What’s up?”

  The line hissed like a snake. “Kurt …” he said finally — alarm bells immediately went off, because he never used my first name, or anyone’s first name; he somehow regarded it as too intimate or something. I held my breath. “Eddie and Nagamo are dead.”

  Eddie was Eddie Igglesden, the drummer in my band, the Hot Nasties. And Nagamo was his girlfriend, a Canadian who was in another punk band. The two of them had been together since our tour the year before.

  “What? When?” I’m not sure why I thought it was important to ask him when it had happened. I wasn’t thinking straight, I guess. Momentarily, I even forgot about the bindle of smack beside me on the shitty little bed in the shitty little motel room.

  “This morning,” X said. “They were at the old Y on Forest. A bomb went off.”

  I felt sick, like I was actually going to puke. “What bomb, man? What the fuck are you talking about?” The room spun and buckled like I was in an earthquake.

  “Someone set off a bomb at the YWCA on Forest this morning, Kurt,” he said, using my name again. “Eddie and Nagamo were there for an appointment.”

  “What kind of appointment?” I asked. “What —”

  X cut me off. “Nagamo thought she was pregnant. So, they’d gone there to get advice about that.” Pause.

  “Shit,” I said, and started to cry. “I can’t believe this.” I dropped the phone onto the filthy carpet. I was gasping. I could still hear X’s voice coming through the line. “Kurt?” he was saying, “Kurt, you need to come home. Kurt, are you there?”

  I wasn’t — “there,” that is. I was elsewhere. Gone. I had been for a while. I didn’t pick the phone back up, the conversation over.

  The past couple years had been fucking nuts. First our friend Jimmy Cleary got killed by a neo-Nazi psychopath. Then our friend Danny O’Heran killed a neo-Nazi psychopath and got killed himself. And then our record label dropped us. And there was all kinds of other shit along the way: death threats, beatings, bad press, interpersonal psychodrama. It was relentless, and it got to me. It broke me. It chewed me up and spit me out like gum that’s lost its taste. And, yes, sure, I was a punk. I was supposed to be tough, right? But I was broken.

  I’d been in the band Social Blemishes when it all started, and then I joined the Hot Nasties after Jimmy died. And for a while I was on top of the punk rock world — signed to Stiff Records, playing sold-out shows all over the place. We were going to record a single or two for Stiff, tour some more, then maybe make an album. We had the tunes, too, great tunes. We knew how to play, you know?

  And then Stiff stiffed us. After seeking us out — after telling us they believed in us — they dropped us. It was Jake R
iviera, the big cheese, calling all the way from London, England. He spoke to Sam Shiller, our lead guitarist, and he cut to the chase. “Sam, I’m sorry. The punk-pop thing just isn’t happening right now. Everything is this new wave shite. That’s what the college kids want. We’re exercising our option.”

  And that was that. They let us keep the advance they’d given us, at least, which was a good thing, to tell you the truth, because we’d already spent it — on new amps, guitars, and Schott Perfecto biker jackets like the ones the Ramones wear. Not cheap.

  And yeah, it’s true, some of it went up my nose, too. And what little was left of my share made its way into my arm (or behind my knee, or in the bottom of my feet).

  Heroin had become my best girlfriend. And I’m not even into girls.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve lost the narrative. I’ve lost the storyline. I’m sick, I’m lost, I’m lonely. I’m living in Motel Shithole on Sanibel Island, Florida, and I wash dishes at the family-friendly Lazy Dolphin on Periwinkle Way. And I’m a junkie. Allegedly.

  You see, I have totally screwed things up, deeply disappointing my family and bandmates and friends. Especially my best friend, X. I could see the disappointment in his eyes before I left.

  X, with pupils darker than his darkest Converse Chucks, blacker than the tops of his shiniest Doc Martens boots; one bigger than the other, frozen that way after he was jumped by two guys at a community hall gig. I couldn’t get to him in time; I was dealing with a couple of foot-swinging skinhead bovver boys myself.

  He would lock that uneven gaze on me, and I’d just stop. More than once, mid-song, I’d look over to the side of the stage, or down in the pit, where punks would be slam-dancing in a frenzy of sweat and spit, with X hovering at the periphery, to make sure no one got hurt, and I’d catch his eyes on me, and I’d just stop playing, with the rest of the Hot Nasties glaring at me, wondering what now, Kurt?

  It seemed X was always mad at me for something. Like the speed thing, which put me in the hospital in Toronto, or the heroin thing, which put me beside a sink in a seafood restaurant on the Gulf of Mexico in deepest Florida — sniffing, coughing, wasting away, calculating the dishes-washed to smack-purchased ratio (with minimum wage winning me about thirty bucks a day, I’d usually have ten bucks left over for food).