New Dark Ages Page 13

  But we weren’t interested in the other candidates. We were only interested in one: Earl Turner. You might say we had a personal connection to the racist bastard cocksucker shithead.

  The stage had been decked out in garish red and white and blue, of course. But in the preshow crap, they’d shown all of the candidates arriving at the Capitol Center in Concord, New Hampshire. And that’s when we’d caught the first glimpse of our former friend.

  The rest of the candidates had arrived in limousines and were greeted by all-white throngs of frat boys and sorority sisters, clothed in the finest Brooks Brothers cas­ual wear. A phalanx of Secret Service dudes surrounded them all.

  But not Earl Turner. No, he pulled up at the debate in his modest campaign Jeep with the stickers on the sides — the same one we’d all seen plenty of times in and around Portland. He was alone, with no visible security. He was wearing his usual uniform, too: white button-down shirt, L.L. Bean chinos, regimental tie loosened at the neck, and a big aw-shucks grin that made me want to punch him in the face.

  The crowd that had assembled to await his arrival were completely different from the storm troopers who had greeted his opponents, the ones who were senators and senior congressmen and satanic Washington in­siders. Turner’s crowd was made up of farmers and truck drivers and waitresses and construction guys — all of them white, of course.

  The objective had clearly been to leave the visual impression that Earl Turner was of, by, and for regular, everyday Americans. The people’s candidate. The populist guy. And it worked. Without even saying the word, the bastard had already made every other candidate look like an out-of-touch rich prick.

  As Turner leapt athletically out of the Jeep, his telegenic all-American crowd cheering him and swarming him, the TV camera briefly settled on the young guy behind the wheel of the Jeep. He was dressed exactly like Earl Turner, except he was wearing a navy Polo blazer. There was a triangular pin on his lapel.

  We could see a flash of Danny’s freckled face and blue eyes. He seemed to be holding some sort of a file folder.

  All of us stared at the screen, speechless. It was surreal.

  Punk rock was always overwhelmingly progressive, you see. Almost every punk placed himself or herself on the left side of the spectrum. We were the kids in every high school who were feminist or gay or socialist or artsy or overweight or lonely or unathletic or homely or geeky or lost. We were not on the football team or the cheerleading squad or student council. We were the rejected and the outcasts. And we were, almost to a one, political lefties.

  Conservative punks weren’t unheard of, I suppose. Johnny Ramone was known to be a Republican, and Johnny Rotten had railed against abortion in “Bodies.” Others, like Agnostic Front or Fear or Exene of the L.A. band X or (astonishingly, sadly) Iggy Pop — who even had a song about being a conservative! — were also right wing, but not necessarily racist pieces of shit. But they, the right-wing punks, were in the minority.

  When I thought back to the earliest days of the Social Blemishes, when Danny and I were the only permanent members, I recalled that my big drummer friend had never been all that political or progressive. He didn’t ever object to any of my onstage rants about Nixon, but he didn’t ever join in, either. He didn’t dye his hair like I did, and he never wore super-strange clothes. And he rarely, if ever, voiced an opinion about politics, left or right, like I did.

  X and me and the Upchucks knew his family were ultra-conservative Catholic psychos, of course, but we didn’t tease him about it. Lots of punk kids had conservative families. In fact, lots of them got into punk to escape their conservative families.

  But Danny had now taken being a conservative to an entirely different level, you know? As we sat there watching the unfolding fascist rally, we were all thinking the same thing: What the hell happened to our friend?

  After the other candidates gave their opening statements, it was Earl Turner’s turn. He had changed out of his usual outfit into a dark suit, and thereby looked way younger and way better than any other candidate onstage. He waited until the applause died down. It was louder for him than for any other candidate.

  “My friends,” he said, “America is in bad, bad shape. America is in trouble. America — our home, our homeland — has been lost. For too long, America has been run by men like my opponents.” Here, Turner paused and pointed at the unhappy-looking men to his left and right. “And they have run America into the ground. They have done the bidding of international bankers and let in dark hordes no other nation wants. They have let in scum and garbage who have stolen from us, and leeched off us, and defiled our homeland with their foul presence. They have let in the worst of the worst.”

  Some in the crowd were cheering, of course, but some were now booing, too. Turner gave no indication he had noticed.

  “Our Western European brothers and sisters have a wonderful phrase: political correctness. My opponents say I’m not politically correct, because I say what I think. I’m politically incorrect.” He paused. “Are you politically incorrect, too?”

  There were some boos, but most in the crowd were lustily cheering him on.

  “I thought so,” Earl Turner said as the moderator vainly tried to tell Turner that his time was up. Turner started shouting over him. “Well, if you’re like me, you want to make America right again! You want to make an America for Americans again! You to make America … what, again?”

  The crowd screamed as one, like a mob at a lynching: “WHITE! WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!”

  Earl Turner didn’t need to say anything else. He just grinned, basking in the heat and the hate.

  His opponents looked shocked, now having seen up close what they had previously only seen on TV or read about. The media’s talking heads were expressing how shocked and appalled they were, too. Some of them pointed out that this kind of racism, this kind of hate, would never “sell” in modern America. It would not fly, they said. It was a huge political mistake on Earl Turner’s part.

  But the crowd didn’t care. They belonged to Earl Turner. “WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!” they kept shouting.

  “I’m not going to watch this,” X said, and he got up and walked out.

  CHAPTER 25

  Earl Turner was agitated. Derwin Hailey and Danny O’Heran watched as he paced back and forth in the campaign headquarters conference room. Hailey was there because he was the one who had devised the “America for Americans” campaign. Danny was there because Danny went everywhere that the candidate did.

  Danny watched Turner out of the corner of his eye. He knew to keep quiet at times like these. Turner was one of those political candidates who would occasionally lash out at whoever caught his attention. So, the longest-­serving Turner campaign staff members had long ago learned to blend into the background, like chameleons. Danny sometimes thought that Turner’s senior staff were actually worse than lizards.

  Derwin Hailey, however, was the lizard who was the focus of Turner’s attention at that moment. The candidate was seriously pissed off, although probably not at Hailey personally. But Hailey was there, so he was taking the brunt of it.

  “What the fuck?” Turner said, not expecting an answer, and not getting one. “What the fuck? How the fuck am I supposed to dial up the racism stuff? I mean, we’re practically the Ku Klux Klan campaign already, but he wants more? What the fuck can I say that I haven’t already?”

  Hailey undoubtedly thought he should maintain his courageous silence, but the curiosity was probably killing him. “What does he want?”

  Turner glared at him, and Hailey immediately looked as if he regretted opening his mouth. “He wants more attacks on niggers! More attacks on Pakis and slopes and kikes! That’s what he wants, Derwin!” Turner glared even more, fuming. “What the fuck for? It’s not like anyone else is competing for the Hitler Youth vote! I’m out here all on my own!”

  Danny kept his eyes on the floor. He, like everyone else on the campaign, knew Turner enjoyed saying these horrible things. He hadn’t
been forced into it.

  Danny glanced up at Earl Turner and marveled. Turner had gone from nobody congressman from a nowhere state, a place with as few Electoral College votes as Idaho or Rhode Island, to what he was today: the guy who came from behind to shake up one of the most powerful political machines in the history of the world, the guy who was in the top tier of Republican Party candidates for president of the United States. Or, as Turner’s friend Ben called the country, “The Jewnited States.”

  If Turner wasn’t in second place, he was definitely in close third, now. He had blazed past candidates with ten times as much experience and a hundred times the money. In the past few weeks, Turner had been on the cover of Time and Newsweek and had been profiled on the front pages of every major newspaper. None of the press — or “Jewsmedia” as his pal Ben called them, to Turner’s amusement — liked him, but it didn’t matter. The more the media hated him, the more the pointy-headed intellectuals dismissed him and said, for the millionth time, that he had gone too far this time, that his campaign was never going to recover, blah blah blah, the stronger Earl Turner got.

  Danny had a ringside seat at Turner’s circus, and he figured he had seen everything there was to see. Along the way, he’d formed two conclusions: one, calling Earl Turner a racist and a bigot wasn’t ever going to work, because a lot of Americans were racists and ­b­igots, too. They liked what he had to say about the minorities who they believed had taken away their jobs and their culture and their country. And they didn’t like elites who called Earl Turner a racist and a bigot, either, because those elites were basically also calling them racists and bigots.

  The second reason the mainly rural, high-school-­educated, angry old white guys loved Earl Turner, Danny knew, wasn’t just because of what he said. They worshipped him because of how he said it — the way he said it. They loved him because he talked like they did when they were in the privacy of their homes. They loved that he didn’t use twenty-dollar words when two-dollar words would suffice. They loved that he said outrageous, offensive things, and that the TV commentators couldn’t resist reporting what he said, and then analyzing it over and over and over. They loved that he stirred up the elites and the intellectuals.

  And when they did that, Danny also knew they were letting Earl Turner control the agenda. They were letting him “dominate the dialogue,” as Derwin Hailey had put it. Turner was getting a thousand times the coverage his more experienced rivals were getting. “They hate him, but they can’t stop talking about him,” Hailey said. “It’s fucking hilarious. They chase every shiny silver ball he rolls past them.”

  The political correctness thing had been a stroke of evil genius, Danny acknowledged. Turner had gotten one of the pencil-necks in the campaign policy shop to analyze the phrase. “Political correctness” first showed up in a 1793 U.S. Supreme Court decision, apparently, and then occasionally appeared in other “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant” countries after that. Ironically, the memo noted, the phrase was used in a 1970 book called The Black Woman.

  But no one had ever used the phrase as effectively as Earl Turner. For him, it paid dividends for a couple of reasons. For one, it gave a patina of respectability to Turner’s racism.

  “This may not be politically correct,” Turner would say, “but I think all refugees should be thrown in detention when they arrive in America!” And, sometimes, Turner would whip out the “political correctness” club to beat down legitimate criticism of his views on issues like abortion (against it, even in cases of rape and incest), or gay rights (against them, even when gays were being strung up for “choosing” to be gay), or refugees and immigrants (against them, even when Turner himself was the third-generation descendant of Turners from England, who came to the U.S. in search of work).

  In Earl Turner’s hands, “political correctness” was both a shield and a sword. It allowed him to get away with political murder. And it made his critics worry that they were being too “politically correct.” It was a bullshit phrase, Danny knew, but it had helped make Turner a front-runner.

  At the moment, however, Earl Turner was still pissed off. He glared at Hailey, who blinked behind his thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Danny continued to examine the tops of his L.L. Bean penny loafers. “He’s hinting,” Turner said. “He’s hinting he’ll stop donating if we don’t start escalating.”

  “M-meaning?” Hailey stammered.

  “Meaning the ad buy ends, Derwin, and I start laying off my well-paid campaign staff!” Turner said, pointing at Hailey. “Meaning the fucking party is fucking over!”

  “We are doing great with earned media,” Hailey said, using the fancy phrase that campaign lizards use to describe what is just plain old news coverage. “If our buy drops off, earned could fill the void­—”

  Turner cut him off. “That’s fucking retarded, and you know it, Derwin,” he said. “The only media we ever get is negative. That ad campaign gives us the only positive exposure we ever get.”

  “Right,” Hailey said.

  “Right,” Turner said, glaring at him.

  There was a knock at the door. Danny opened it a crack. Daisy Something whispered a few words to him before beating a hasty retreat.

  Danny looked at Turner and Hailey. “It’s Ben,” he said. “He has something he wants to feed to Ron McLeod. He says it’s good.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Pete Schenk didn’t know much about Tommy beyond what FBI special agent Theresa Laverty had told him that day at Fanelli’s. But, more than once, Schenk found himself wondering who the old bartender really was — and how he knew as much as he did. CIA? NSA? Mossad?

  They’d met again, early one morning, to walk to Tommy’s Lab, Sloane. Tommy had told Schenk to meet him near the Bowery in the East Village, near CBGB.

  As they strolled past, Schenk looked up at the club’s tattered sign. He squinted. “What’s that mean again?” he asked.

  “Country, Blue Grass, and Blues,” Tommy said, without looking up.

  “No, the other word, what does that mean … OMFUG?”

  “Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers,” Tommy said, stooping to pick up Sloane’s crap. “Don’t ask me what that means. But the only kids who hang out here are punk rockers. No country or blues or anything else. Place is a shit hole.”

  Having seen CBGB’s infamous toilet when he and Laverty had met Hilly Kristal, Schenk wasn’t about to argue. “Gotcha.”

  Schenk and Tommy walked around to Second Street, to the alleyway that ran behind CBGB. It was a minefield of broken glass and discarded used syringes. Sloane would not be walked through there today. Instead, the two men stood and looked south, in the direction of First Street and Houston — and the Dumpster where Colleen Tomorrow had been found.

  “So,” Tommy finally said, as they continued walking. “Klassen has a son.”

  Schenk looked at Tommy, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, heading toward Houston. “In his twenties. Was off the radar for a while, now he’s back. Klassen is the Pontifex Maximus, as he calls himself — the high priest, basically. The son is just under that, a senior minister type. His name is William. Billy.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  “He’s a sociopath. Big boy. Does steroids and works out all the time, like a lot of the Creators. Pursues what he calls ‘salubrious living’ — no alcohol, no meat. He does a bunch of martial arts and is known for his rages, probably caused by the fistful of steroids he does every day. He’s feared within the Church, and not just because he’s the son of the Pontifex Maximus. The other Creators are all homicidal nutjobs, too, but Billy takes it to a different level.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was in the Marine Corps, got discharged dishonorably. Got kicked out for refusing to eat or bunk with the black marines. Called them niggers to their faces. Stabbed one black marine for looking at him sideways. Spent six months in the stockade before they kicked him out.”

  “Sounds like a n
ice guy.”

  “Yeah. And now he’s back with the old man.”

  They kept walking toward the blare of traffic on Houston. Tommy was heading to Fanelli’s to open up and Schenk was going to the precinct to learn more about the Klassens.

  “You figure the son for the murders?” Schenk asked, as they got to the corner of the Bowery and Houston.

  “One hundred percent,” Tommy said, reaching down to pat Sloane. “He did ’em all. Even the kid up in Canada.”

  “So why don’t we take him in?”

  Tommy looked at Schenk. “Because the bureau doesn’t know exactly where he is.” He looked disgusted. “He may be in the bunker under the dry-cleaning place, but no one’s sure.”

  “And we still can’t get a search warrant?”

  “Not yet, I’m told,” Tommy said. “Friends in high places.”

  “Okay,” Schenk said, filing that away for a later discussion with Laverty. “Do we at least know why Billy Klassen killed these kids? Because they were punks or gay or whatever?”

  “That was part of it, but it wasn’t the main reason,” he said.

  “What was?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  CHAPTER 27

  When we got back to the Rex, we saw that X’s mom had been urgently trying to reach us, again, about yet another Ron McLeod story. But we had already seen the Associated Press story in one of the local rags, the Toronto Star. The headline read: “PUNK BAND’S FANS SLAIN IN OTTAWA, NYC.”

  The subtitle read: “Police fear serial killer crossing borders.”

  And the story was just as shitty. X and the Upchucks and I huddled over the paper at a restaurant along Queen West called Shanghai Cowgirl. We’d gone there for lunch when X spotted the story. We read it more than once.