New Dark Ages Page 4

  X and Mike the bouncer, the only people the Hot ­Nasties thought had the necessary experience, said we needed someone like Bembe. “I’m a bouncer,” Mike said, big ­tattooed arms crossed over his FUCK THE WORLD T-shirt. “I don’t know jack shit about running a fucking tour.”

  X, sitting on the couch beside Mike, nodded. “Me neither,” he said. “I’ll sell your merch and roadie for you guys, but that’s it. I don’t know how to run a tour either.”

  Bembe Smith was enormous, maybe six foot six. He was in pretty good shape, too; not an ounce of fat on him. He had long dreads that reached to the middle of his broad back and hands the size of dinner plates. He looked like he could break any of us in two.

  He was kind of hot, too. But I digress.

  Like me and X, Bembe couldn’t fully stand up in the basement of Sound Swap because the ceiling was so low. So, he sat on the ratty old couch we’d rescued from a nearby Dumpster, stretched out beside X and Mike. I could see that X liked him already.

  Bembe explained that he was from Treasure Beach, which was the actual name of a little place in St. Elizabeth Parish, on the southwest side of Jamaica. His dad had been a fisherman and later the manager of a renowned little hotel called Jake’s. But he hadn’t lived there since he was a little kid, he told us. He’d spent most of his time in schools in Britain and the States, New York City specifically. I guess that’s why he didn’t have much of an accent.

  Treasure Beach was where Perry Henzell lived, Bembe explained. “You know who Perry Henzell is, don’t you? He’s the man who created The Harder They Come.”

  We sure did. All of us brightened. The Harder They Come, every punk rocker knew, was the film that introduced reggae to pale-skinned people. All of us had the soundtrack, and all of us knew every note. It contained fucking amazing songs by Jimmy Cliff, the Melodians, the Maytals, Desmond Dekker. It was probably my secret favorite record, to tell you the truth.

  Bembe, like the characters in The Harder They Come, was a real Rasta. He believed in a single God, Jah, and he believed that Haile Selassie — the former emperor of Ethiopia, who had died just a few years earlier — was the messiah, the second coming of Christ. Africa was Zion, the Promised Land, and reggae music — and weed — were super important parts of their faith. Cannabis was an actual sacrament to a Rasta like Bembe.

  “But don’t worry, my religion won’t get us arrested on tour,” Bembe said, big hands spread wide, smiling. “I am careful when I am on the road.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I was hoping you’d know where to get some better shit!”

  Everyone — the Hot Nasties, some of the Virgins — laughed. X didn’t.

  The tour was just three weeks away. We had the bands — the Hot Nasties and the Punk Rock Virgins. We had our instruments — Fenders, Marshalls. We fin­ally had a set list, we had a record label (Stiff), we had a roadie (X), we had a driver (Mike), and now we had a tour manager (Bembe). Things were looking up, but there was still a lot to do.

  And there was something else to figure out, too. When X got to his place in South Portland, and I got to mine, both of us had worried-looking parents holding message slips from an FBI agent by the name of Theresa Laverty.

  Here we go again.

  I did most of the talking. X kept quiet.

  Theresa Laverty was a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, yes. She had a badge and the authority to detain us, yes. She had a revolver somewhere beneath her stylish Polo jacket, yes, and could shoot me and X at any time.

  Despite all this, I liked her right away. She didn’t sound like a fascist, unlike most of the cops we’d met in Portland. She talked to us like we were actual human beings. And — I’m not sure if X picked up on it, but my gaydar sure had — Theresa Laverty was almost certainly gay, like me. A stunningly beautiful lesbian FBI agent: that’s not something you run into every day in Portland, Maine, folks.

  We were at Gary’s, sitting at one of the battered little, round tables near the stage. The waitress and the cook who had unlocked the bar’s heavy reinforced doors off Brown Street had been pretty surprised to find us standing there on the sidewalk when they opened up at 10:00 a.m.

  Me and X, not so much. They were used to seeing the two of us around Gary’s; we’d been regulars there since the place had become a punk rock venue in late 1977 or so. But the stunningly pretty, well-dressed woman waiting with us? That they clearly found weird. They stared at the three of us for a few seconds before letting us in.

  On the phone, Theresa Laverty had told me she wanted to meet in the place where the local punk scene was centered.

  “The center is my friend X,” I’d said. “He is the Portland punk scene.”

  “I had heard that,” she said. “But I’d appreciate it if the two of you would meet me just for an hour or so. I’ve got a case that’s quite unusual, and I’d be grateful for your input.”

  I asked her for more details, but she remained vague. Said she had a general interest in youth subcultures, and a specific interest in the Hot Nasties. She didn’t say why. I asked her, half-joking, if we were in trouble.

  “No,” she said.

  Against my better judgment, but intrigued, I suggested we meet at Gary’s the next morning. Laverty agreed. I hung up and called X. He, to my surprise, wasn’t immediately opposed to meeting with the FBI agent. X didn’t like cops either. But he said yes.

  Anyway, there we sat, eyeballing each other. Laverty had an RC Cola in front of her, as did X. I had a beer. As Gary’s longtime server, Koby, was taking our orders, Theresa had looked right at me when she said “no” to a beer. And she kept looking at me when I said “yes” to one, even though it was before noon. The way she looked at me — it was like she knew.

  Wow. I didn’t know then, but I certainly did later on: not only were we both gay, but we both had a substances problem. We could practically be a couple. Let’s get ­married!

  She was a knockout, as noted. She could have been a model, I figured, but her diminutive size had probably eliminated that career choice. And the way she dressed, the way she moved — it wasn’t like a cop at all. Graceful, elegant, controlled. In person, too, Laverty was very precise with her words, very careful — even more than she had been on the phone.

  Methodically, she told us about the murders of Johnny Raindrops and Colleen Tomorrow. She told us about how both were regulars at CBGB. And then she told us about the connection to us. “We’ve confirmed with the owner that the victims were both at CBGB on the two nights in early summer when the Hot Nasties played there,” Laverty said, easing back a bit in her chair. She watched us. “They were both murdered shortly after those shows, we think by the same person or persons.”

  I slouched in my chair and squinted up at Gary’s filthy, prehistoric-looking ceiling. “Fuck,” I said. “Not again.”

  X, meanwhile, hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle. He gazed, unblinking, at Theresa Laverty. She gazed right back.

  When X finally spoke, he said, “You didn’t ask us where we were after the band played.”

  Laverty wasn’t fazed in the slightest. “I know where you all were afterward. You aren’t suspects.”

  “So who is?”

  Laverty frowned. She seemed to deliberate whether we could be trusted or not. Finally, she asked, “Are you familiar with the Creators?”

  The “Bible” of the Church of the Creator, Theresa Laverty told us, was something called Nature’s Eternal Religion. It was written a few years earlier, she said, by the COTC’s founder and self-described “Pontifex Maximus,” Bernhardt Klassen.

  Klassen was Dutch-Mennonite, and he’d grown up on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, up in Canada. He eventually moved to the States, where he worked as a teacher and an engineer, and then as a real estate agent. “For most of his life, he sold real estate, and he became a multimillionaire doing that,” Laverty informed us, without consulting any notebooks or anything. “In the late fifties, he settled in Florida and, a few years later, he was elected t
o the lower house of the Florida state legislature on a platform that was explicitly anti-busing and anti-government. It was around that time that he became extremely concerned with what he called ‘the rapid mongrelization of our formerly white America.’”

  Shortly after his election to the state legislature, she said, Klassen showed up at a meeting of the racist John Birch Society in New York City, where he was introduced to delegates by the Birchers’ leader. After that, he became the Florida chairman of something called the American Independent Party, which was the electoral vehicle for white supremacist presidential candidate George Wallace.

  “Later, he had a falling-out with the Birchers, who he said were not radical enough. He looked around for a while for a vehicle for his extreme views,” Laverty said. “He couldn’t find one. So, in 1973, he founded the Church of the Creator, not too far from the FBI field office where I work in Florida. He started collecting guns and supporters. That’s when he came to our attention. And that was the year that he wrote and published his first book, Nature’s Eternal Religion.”

  Laverty reached into her purse, also bearing the Polo trademark, and extracted a few sheets of paper, which she handed to us. They were copies of extracts from Klassen’s book, apparently. I scanned through them; X didn’t. He just kept looking at Laverty and sipping his soda.

  It was the same kind of hateful crap I’d seen before — just as awful as the material produced by the Aryan Nations lunatics we had encountered a year earlier, but with a twist. Where the Aryan Nations fanatics had claimed they were doing God’s will, the Church of the Creator seemed to openly mock Christianity.

  The COTC was sort of an atheistic neo-Nazi group, apparently. They called Jesus Christ “an imaginary spook,” among other things. To Klassen and his followers — he called them “Creators” who followed the rules of “creativity” — Christianity was “a suicidal religion.”

  “We completely reject the Judeo-democratic-Marxist views of today and supplant them with new and basic values, of which race is the foundation,” Klassen wrote. “We mean to cleanse our own territories of all the Jews, niggers, and mud races, and send them back to their original habitat.”

  Thoroughly disgusted, I handed the sheets back to Laverty.

  “Bernhardt Klassen occupied himself with building a neo-Nazi organization that was highly militant and quite violent,” she said. “Klassen moved his growing church to a small town called Otto in North Carolina. There, he wrote and published another book, The White Man’s Bible.” She paused and looked directly at X. “That’s the book we find most interesting, in the current context.”

  In it, Laverty said, Klassen called on his fellow Christ-hating Creators to build — and here she could quote from memory — “sound minds in sound bodies in a sound society.”

  Creators, she said, were urged to eat only fresh, wholesome food, engage in strenuous physical exercise several times a week, fast every once in a while, totally avoid medicines and intoxicants, and participate in what Klassen called the “healthy expression of our sexual instincts.”

  Holy shit.

  Theresa Laverty, who apparently didn’t miss much, looked at X: “When your band played at CBGB, were there many so-called straight edge followers there?”

  He sipped at his RC Cola, then turned to her and said: “I think you already know the answer to that one, too, Special Agent Laverty.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Click. Ring. Click.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Better than expected.”

  “No one suspects?”

  “No one.”

  Pause.

  “Are they as bad as you said?”

  “Worse.”

  For someone who hadn’t ever worked in politics before — for someone who had been a punk rocker, no less — Danny’s ascent up the political ladder in the Earl Turner campaign was pretty swift. Other people in the campaign noticed, and they didn’t all appreciate it.

  But Earl Turner liked the former Danny Hate, and — being a candidate for president — he didn’t particularly give a shit what anyone else thought. He was indisputably the boss.

  Turner was also something else: that year, he was the Republican Party’s only true outsider candidate. All the other presidential aspirants were senators and governors and two-term congressmen, and — at the start, at least — none of them paid any attention at all to Earl Turner. “Not a serious candidate,” went the Washington wisdom, which is a fucking oxymoron if there ever was one. “A fringe candidate,” they called him.

  But Earl Turner seemed to love the insults and the put-downs. He loved being the anti-politician politician. Whenever one of the beltway political types said something critical about him, he’d repeat it over and over to the growing crowds who came to hear him, in church basements and veterans’ halls all over the early primary states, like Iowa and New Hampshire.

  He’d say: “When the backroom boys say I’m not serious, when they go on C-SPAN and say I’m a fringe candidate, well” — and here he’d pause — “well, I say, there sure are a lot of other serious folks out here on the fringe with me! And we want to put America right!” They’d always give that a lot of applause. RIGHT! RIGHT! RIGHT! they’d chant.

  Earl Turner figured he’d come this far — the come-from-nowhere guy, the one everyone was always underestimating, the one who was now an official Republican presidential candidate — by doing things his way. So, he’d keep doing that. He’d say what he thought, and he’d do what he wanted to do. And, if that meant promoting some weird former punk rock kid he’d taken a shine to, he’d do that, too.

  So, within no time at all, Danny went from being a mere volunteer putting together lawn signs, stuffing envelopes, and canvassing door-to-door to being Earl Turner’s paid backup personal assistant. Danny had a driver’s license, and he was in the campaign office early that morning when Turner’s regular personal assistant had a bad bug. Turner asked Danny if he could drive, Danny said yes, and that was that. Turner threw him the keys to his campaign Jeep, and off they went to meet some Republicans in Vermont.

  There was plenty of speculation within the campaign as to why Turner so clearly favored Danny over the other ambitious young volunteers and staffers, but most of the speculation was wrong. Danny, Earl Turner quickly decided, was a true convert.

  He’d been a punk, living an amoral, godless, leftist life. And now — praise the Lord! — he had converted to Earl Turner’s cause, and he had completely rejected punk rock, atheism, and socialism. Danny had gone over to the right side, and was now like all true converts: he was trying to make up for lost time. Earl Turner realized that, and he knew how to take advantage of it.

  Whatever Turner asked Danny to do, he did. If Turner wanted Danny to go and secretly tape record a rally for one of Turner’s Republican primary opponents, Danny would do it. If Turner wanted him to poke through the garbage bins behind an opponent’s campaign office, Danny would do it. If Turner wanted someone’s campaign signs trashed late one night, Danny would do it. If Turner wanted a particularly dirty rumor circulated about a political adversary — an extramarital fling, for example, detailed on some anonymous leaflets and left outside a church gathering — Danny would do it. No hesitation.

  On one road trip to New Hampshire, while two press aides napped in the back seat of the campaign Jeep, Earl Turner sat up front with Danny as they made their way west along Interstate 89. They chatted about the weather and the state of the race and the places Turner had worked — in Maine, in the South, in the Carolinas. Conversation turned to Danny O’Heran’s past life as drummer Danny Hate.

  “So,” Turner said. “What was it like, being involved in that godless punk rock stuff, Danny? I’m curious.”

  Danny glanced at Turner but otherwise kept his eyes on the road. “It’s a bit embarrassing, sir,” he said. He always addressed Turner as sir.

  “Don’t be embarrassed!” Turner said, energetica
lly patting Danny on the leg. “You’ve put all that behind you, and now you’re where you belong. I’m just curious about what it was like.”

  “If I might ask, sir, why?”

  “Well,” Turner said, folding his big arms behind his head, “I’ve noticed this punk rock stuff has been getting a lot of media attention lately. So I thought I should start saying some things about it.” He paused. “It certainly seems to represent everything that we’re against, doesn’t it?”

  And that is how Earl Turner started his campaign to demonize the godless, perverted, communistic, drug-abusing punk rock subculture.

  And his followers loved it.

  CHAPTER 8

  News of the third murder took a long time to reach Theresa Laverty, mainly because it happened in Canada. And, well, nobody in the U.S. pays much attention to anything that happens in Canada.

  The body of the victim had been found quite a few days after we did the Barrymore’s gig, the one at which Danny bailed on us for good.

  You know: when he stopped being Danny Hate, drummer for the Social Blemishes, and when he became Danny O’Heran, fucking Republican working for the fucking fascist Earl fucking Turner, for fuck’s sake.

  I was still having a hard time with Danny dropping us like we were a handful of warm dog crap, by the way. X, not at all. He didn’t say anything about Danny after that. Not a word.

  The only reason anyone eventually noticed that the Ottawa punk was dead — and notified the local cops, who notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who in turn notified Pete Schenk, who then called up Theresa Laverty, still in Portland — was the overwhelming stench. The punk, who called himself Nuclear Age, apparently lived in an apartment above a pizza place on Sunnyside Avenue in Ottawa. The smell of the pizza had been stronger than the smell of Nuclear Age for the first few days, I guess.