New Dark Ages Read online

  Speed, speed, that’s all I needed. Like Johnny Rotten sang on “Seventeen.”

  It was the punk rock drug, speed was, and it was all we, me specifically, needed. And, sure, many of us would do weed or mushrooms or acid if we could get our hands on some, but speed — amphetamines, or alpha-methylphenethylamine, if you want to get all formal about it — was every punk’s drug of choice.

  I was introduced to the wonder and beauty of speed at an early Social Blemishes/Hot Nasties gig at Gary’s in Portland. There was a British kid in town, and he was a real punk, too. He knew all the latest British bands and read the New Musical Express and all that.

  I’d caught him giving me a look — that look — during the Blemishes set. I ambled over and said hi. We talked music and stuff. Ten minutes later, we were in the filthy, dirty can, doing poppers and grabbing at each other. When we finished, and when the poppers had lost their pop, my new friend was looking unimpressed.

  “What?” I asked, pulling up my pants.

  “In Britain, this is kids’ stuff,” he said, indicating the little brown bottle labeled RUSH. “Over there, we prefer speed. It’s legal, sort of. Even housewives use ’em. They call ’em diet pills.”

  I was intrigued. “So, you got any of these diet pills?”

  “It’s your lucky day,” he said, fishing a baggie full of multicolored bite-sized happiness out of the folds of his leather jacket. “It just so happens I do.”

  And so began my love affair with speed.

  I would pop it, of course, when I had pills to pop. But I’d also snort it, and sometimes I’d parachute it — like, wrap it in tissue and swallow it like a pill. I’d never stick it in a vein, of course, because you could never know for sure what it had been cut with, and I didn’t want to die just yet.

  The first time I really did speed right, I was at a big pre-grad party at Sam Shiller’s place. Someone I didn’t know offered me some, so I took it up my nose. It was the second time, but this time, it hit me like a fucking sledgehammer in the old cerebral cortex. Bam.

  I knew, then and there, that I had joined speed’s captive audience, and I had somehow snagged a seat right there in the front fucking row. And I didn’t want to miss a single performance of this glorious, perfect drug. I was buying season’s tickets for the entire run!

  It made me feel happy. It made me euphoric. It gave me more confidence, and it persuaded me that I was fucking amazing. It also gave me limitless energy and made me as alert as whiskers on a cat. It helped me concentrate. It made me horny. And it wasn’t addictive, boys and girls!

  It was awe-inspiring and magnificent. Needless to say, I was the life of that party at Sam’s that night. And everyone thought I was super funny and engaging.

  Except X, naturally.

  Eventually, of course, I learned that it wasn’t the perfect drug. No drug is. For instance, it made me talk more — and I already talked way too much. And, when I was coming down, it would wipe me out and I’d feel exhausted and out of it. “Grumpy, too,” Sister Betty told me.

  Also, speed made me skinnier than I already was. Now, when you’re in a punk band, as I was, that emaciated and wasted look is much sought-after. But losing too much weight, as I was arguably doing, wasn’t a good thing. The shit made my skin pretty itchy, too. And I was … well … a bit dependent on it, you might say. In no time at all, it became part of my daily routine, like shaving or going to pee. I wouldn’t say I was addicted. But I would say that I had become completely and totally captivated.

  X was not impressed. He was my best friend, my brother of another mother. Since grade seven, he’d been one of the two most important humans in my life. I loved him. I still do.

  The other most important human was my dad, but he didn’t live with us anymore. My mother had driven him out a couple years earlier. He had a place near the naval base in Kittery, and I didn’t see him so much now. Which may or may not have something to do with my enthusiasm for speed.

  But I digress.

  X, as noted, was straight edge before there was straight edge. Long before the D.C. punks conceived the straight edge way of life — long before Ian MacKaye started writing songs about it, for the Teen Idles and Minor Threat — X was disavowing drugs and tobacco and booze. In all the time I had known him, I had never seen him partake of any mind-altering substance. Like, ever. But me, I popped and snorted and swilled what­ever was readily available, and so did some of the others in the X Gang. But X just didn’t. Good and evil, black and white, cats and dogs, apples and oranges. We shouldn’t have been friends at all, but we were.

  For the first few years, this didn’t create nearly as much tension as you might think. I would imbibe, X would decline, and everything was cool. To his everlasting credit, X didn’t go all Woman’s Christian Temperance Union on me. When we were drinking beer or vodka or tequila or whatever was at hand, he’d sip his RC Cola. And when someone was doing drugs, he’d just sort of slip away. Speed changed all of that. It turned up the volume, in a bad way. He didn’t like it, and I liked it way too much.

  So, one night at Gary’s, it all kind of spilled out onto the dirty, cracked dance floor. We were there for a Punk Rock Virgins’ show, which hadn’t quite started yet. I’d excused myself to visit the bathroom for the third time that night, I think. I’d done a line in the can, and I was feeling like the king of the fucking world. I returned to where X was sitting. I was all peppy and upbeat, arms flitting around like a scarecrow in a windstorm. I was chattering away before I even took my seat.

  X glared at me, his uneven pupils black. “What the fuck are you doing, Kurt?” he said, his voice low, almost menacing.

  It wasn’t the question that stopped me in my proverbial tracks. It was the use of my name. X didn’t like using first names: his, mine, anyone’s. It’s weird, but — as he explained it to me back in junior high — he considered first names way too personal. One day, I asked him why about a million times, and he finally offered up a semblance of an answer. “People use first names to be intimate, at the start,” he said. “Later on, they usually use first names to express disapproval. To put you down.”

  I knew X was expressing disapproval. He was putting me down.

  “What?” I said, pretending not to know what he was talking about. I sniffed. I scratched. “I don’t know—”

  He cut me off. “Don’t lie to me,” he said, leaning in. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  I couldn’t look at him. Instead, I shrugged and toyed with an empty draft glass on the table between us. “So? I’m not hurting anyone,” I said, knowing I probably was. “It’s not like I’m doing smack or anything like that.”

  He stared at me, his uneven eyes flashing, but he was silent. A few moments slid by, like glaciers. One of the Virgins, Leah Yeomanson, had come up to say hi before the Virgins’ set. Relieved, I stood up, hugged Leah, and started chattering away.

  When I glanced back at the table, X was gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  Danny really looked up to X. A lot.

  When Danny O’Heran, formerly the Social Blemishes’ drummer known as Danny Hate, walked into Earl Turner’s campaign headquarters on Congress — the day after he got back to Portland from the bizarro gig at Barrymore’s up in Canada — he’d seen his dentist and his doctor and his barber, and he was all shiny and ready. He was nervous, though.

  Danny was a big guy, and he didn’t actually have any dress clothes. He had slicked back his hair, pulled on some dark thrift-store dress pants, and borrowed one of his dad’s white dress shirts and a tie. His parents, who were God-fearing, right-wing nutcases, were mystified but delighted by the change in their son. They’d been worried about him for a long time.

  He was wearing a pair of black brothel creepers that first day, although nobody really noticed them. The crepe, thick soles made him even taller as he stepped through the main doors and approached the metal desk where a receptionist sat. She was on the phone and held up a manicured finger, indicating that he should
wait.

  He looked around. The campaign office was buzzing. Over on one side, in an area without desks, volunteers were putting together campaign signs. Nearby at some folding tables, other volunteers were stuffing envelopes and making calls.

  The campaign was headquartered in a former bank lobby, so it was pretty loud and echoey. On the walls, huge posters had been taped up: RIGHT, they said. Below that, in smaller letters: EARL TURNER FOR PRESIDENT. Red, white, and blue, of course.

  On the other side of the office, away from clean-cut, WASPy volunteers, were some serious-looking people who seemed to be having serious telephone conversations about serious stuff.

  Danny wondered where Earl Turner’s office was, but it soon became apparent that he wasn’t in it. At that moment, in fact, he was striding across the campaign office floor, smiling broadly at Danny.

  Turner was an imposing figure, as journalists would often write, with the physique of a football star — which, naturally, he had been. He still favored the sort of haircut he’d had in the 101st Airborne Division, and not a hair was out of place. He was wearing his patented uniform: a white shirt with a regimental tie carefully loosened at the neck, L.L. Bean chinos, and a big, toothy grin. He extended his hand to Danny.

  Turner was also a pretty unlikely candidate for the presidency. He was the junior congressman for Maine’s second district, meaning he’d only been in elected office for a short while. His decision to seek the Republican presidential nomination raised a few eyebrows, because freshman congressmen didn’t usually run for president. Governors and senators did that.

  Turner represented the almost-all-rural part of the state, outside Portland, where the culture was guns and God and America-is-great, and all that fucking bullshit. His constituents were overwhelmingly white, straight, right-wing, and churchgoing Christians, like him. And Earl Turner was their boy, big-time.

  They loved his backstory. Decorated war hero in Vietnam, farmer for a while outside Farmington (seriously), then a fisherman in Eastport, where they have a statue erected (seriously) called “Big Fisherman.” Grassroots anti-taxation political organizing in the South and the Carolinas. Law degree, then he helped out some similarly racist congressional candidates in other states. Genetically perfect stay-at-home wife, two Hitler Youth–type children.

  He decided to run, his campaign propaganda declared, because he was tired of the “out-of-touch elites in Washington” and the “minority special interests” bossing around regular folks “like us.” In no time at all, he was mouthing code-words about immigrants and refugees and welfare recipients and demanding “an America for Americans.” The backwoods voters were lapping it up.

  A big part of his plan for America, as it turned out, was banning all abortions for teenage girls and establishing military-style boot camps for “wayward” boys.

  Punk rockers, for Earl Turner, met the dictionary definition of wayward. Turner didn’t like this punk movement menace and he occasionally said he wanted to stamp it out. Which, of course, made his fateful encounter with the former Danny Hate all the more significant. It was almost heaven-sent.

  Earl Turner grasped Danny’s hand in his crushing grip and gave a matinee-idol smile. “Earl Turner,” he said. “And you are …?”

  “Danny O’Heran,” he said, venturing a small smile. “And I’d like to volunteer.”

  CHAPTER 6

  What are we gonna do now?

  Almost all of the X Gang had attended Portland ­Alternative High School, or PAHS. It was where most of the city’s freaks, geeks, gays, and artsy types went.

  Some of the kids who were part of the local punk scene went to Portland High School, usually referred to as PHS. But when they got tired of getting the shit ­beaten out of them by the jocks there, they’d usually transfer to PAHS. So there was a pretty big contingent of punks in our graduating class — more than a dozen mohawks in the yearbook and twice as many kids with hair colors not found in nature. And, on a rainy day in June, when a bunch of us ­assembled to get our pieces of paper and our bit of ­applause in the PAHS gym, I know I wasn’t the only one asking this question: WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO NOW?

  Not surprisingly, the events of the previous year had really fucked us up. It would’ve been weird if they hadn’t. A cop, a member of a clandestine neo-Nazi group, had come after us, just because we were punks. Before the whole thing was over, he’d killed our friends Jimmy Cleary and Marky Upton, as well as a couple of skinheads, a door guy at Gary’s, and three other neo-Nazis. And he had tried to kill Sister Betty, Sam, and Danny, too.

  The one he’d really wanted to kill, however, was X. He’d figured X was our leader, and he wasn’t entirely wrong about that. Even though X wasn’t in a band, even though he didn’t look like your average, standard-­issue punk rocker, X was the Portland punk messiah. He truly was.

  As noted, X didn’t have spiked or dyed hair like some of us did. He didn’t ever wear British-style punk gear. He didn’t pogo or slam dance at shows, and he didn’t sing along when a band we liked somehow made it onto a local radio station. He was the guy who was outside the outsiders. The misfit among misfits, I called him.

  His hair, for instance. It was long, Ramones-style. He wore earrings, and he didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought about it. His standard uniform was tattered old Converse Chucks on his feet, super-skinny black Levi’s, his almost-never-off Schott Perfecto biker jacket, and, usually, one of the T-shirts he designed by hand. Because there was basically nowhere to buy punk gear in Portland in the early days, X had faithfully duplicated the logos of the Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, the Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, and Iggy and the Stooges onto various thrift-store T-shirts. Sometimes he gave them to other members of the X Gang as gifts.

  I think we all sort of looked up to him because he was our resident philosopher punk: he put on most of the early shows, he nurtured the various bands, he was the guy who knew about punk before anyone else in Portland. It didn’t hurt that he wrote these amazing essays in the NCNA, that’s for sure. All of us looked forward to those. “His ‘fuck you’ bulletins to the outside world,” Sam Shiller called X’s essays, and they were. X edited our Non-Conformist News Agency’s semi-regular organ, which we distributed semi-regularly at PAHS and PHS. But he’d also write about all kinds of stuff, and what we really liked were his polemics about what it meant to be a punk, and why what we were doing was important, and all that. Those ones gave us a sense of purpose, you might say. Everyone needs a purpose.

  But we were all graduating from high school, so what were we gonna do?

  For the final issue of the NCNA, the one that came out before graduation, he kind of answered that question for some of us. It was his valedictory address. It was actually a bit melodramatic, too, which was unlike him. But it was good. It took up residence in our memories — those of us living verse-chorus, verse-chorus, three-chord lives.

  X started by quoting “Clampdown,” from the latest Clash album, London Calling. A lot of us hadn’t liked it when it was released, because the Clash didn’t sound as raw and as authentic as they did on their first two records. They were starting to sound like professional musicians now and were experimenting with different sounds and styles. A lot of us were still punk rock purists when London Calling came out.

  Not X, of course. He liked it.

  His NCNA essay, titled “What Do We Do Now?” started with Joe Strummer’s amazing words from “Clampdown,” and then went on:

  High school is over, or it soon will be. Before you know it, you’re going to be walking out of the hallways at PAHS or PHS for the last time, and you won’t be looking back. You shouldn’t.

  In our years in these places, we’ve been taught to conform, and to get along. To believe that we have to fit in if we are going to survive.

  Don’t believe it. Don’t believe it for a moment.

  The clichés are true: life goes really, really fast. One minute you’re graduating from high school in Portland, Maine, and the next minute you’re somewhere in
the Midwest, and you’ve got a mortgage and kids, you’ve got a job you hate, and you can’t escape. You’re wearing blue and brown all the time.

  If there is one thing that the past terrible year in Portland has taught all of us, it’s this: everything you cherish — everyone you love — can disappear in the blink of an eye. It’s here, and then it’s gone, just like that.

  Hold onto it. Hold onto the ones you met at PAHS or PHS. Don’t be what they tell you is normal. Don’t just take it. Don’t settle. Don’t go along to get along. Above all, don’t get old.

  Which reminds me: one of my friends wrote a great song about immortality.

  He wrote that the sky is green, and that the grass is blue, and that they lied to you. What he meant by that is this: Nothing they told you about you, or the future, or anything, was true. NOTHING.

  Rage, rage, rage against lies and the liars who tell them. Batter down their walls. If you want to serve the age, someone said, betray it. If you do, I promise you: it will save your teenaged soul.

  That song he quoted was by our friend Jimmy Cleary, now gone. And it was a great song.

  And that essay was why most of us put off first-year college. We all figured X was right: we didn’t want to settle down, and we didn’t want to live in suburban slag — and we figured we’d maybe go out in a blaze of punk rock glory instead. Do something amazing and remarkable before we were all forced to start worrying about jobs and mortgages and utility payments, you know?

  So we all decided to go on tour.

  The big Rastafarian told us his name was Bembe Smith. Bembe, he said, meant “prophet.”

  “I prophesize great success on the Hot Nasties’ upcoming tour!” he said, but no one laughed. We just looked at him.

  Stiff Records had sent Bembe to manage our first big tour. We didn’t think we needed anyone. But the head guy at Stiff, Jake Riviera, explained to a skeptical Sam Shiller that the British label was investing a lot of money in making the tour a success, and they didn’t feel we had anyone with the necessary experience. So, they’d send a guy. Bembe was apparently the guy.