The police raids and the damaged rental halls caused us lots of hassles. By mid-1978, renting out venues had become basically out of the question. Gary’s had started booking bands again, but it wasn’t enough: only one or two could play there a night, and there was an occasionally enforced age limit. Younger punks couldn’t get in very easily.
Where to go, and what to do?
Sam, Jimmy, Danny Hate, and I had come up with a solution. Because we all had (mostly) short hair — and because we all had access to thrift-store ties and jackets that (mostly) fit — we could pass ourselves off as young businessmen or even Christian missionaries. So we had fake business cards printed up at a place downtown. The cards advertised us as representatives of something called M and M Entertainment. Sam or Jimmy told booking managers that they needed a space for a “youth dance,” and the stunt would almost always work.
The gigs were never licensed, of course. Only government-approved charities could get those, and punk rock was not in any way government approved. So punks were encouraged to bring their own booze, but in plastic containers to avoid broken glass all over the floor.
In 1977, then, gigs were pretty easy to set up; by early 1978, a bit harder; by late 1978, around the time of the murders of Jimmy Cleary and Marky Upton, finding a hall was virtually fucking impossible. With Gary’s closed for the next few weeks, and with no one wanting anything to do with the scary punk rock menace, and with the media’s punk rock panic spooking lots of people, the scene basically had nowhere to go.
So X, me, the Blems, the Virgins, and the three remaining members of the Nasties again got together in the basement of Sound Swap. We sat on the amps and rickety chairs and drank cheap beer that had been donated by Sister Betty. All of us agreed that a gig was needed if punk rock was to stay alive in Portland. But where? And how?
“I heard Gary’s may be reopening soon,” Danny Hate said. “Someone told me the cops gave them the go-ahead, so I guess they got their liquor license back.”
“That’s good,” said Patti, “but we need to do something right now.”
“Agreed,” said Sister Betty. “But easier said than done.”
X started noisily finishing off a Coke Slurpee, which — along with RC Cola or water — was pretty much all he ever drank. “We’re going to do a gig,” he said, looking in his cup as he stirred the contents. “And we’re going to raise money for a reward — to catch the bastards who killed Jimmy and Marky.”
C H A P T E R 13
I’ve been typing this thing for most of the fucking night. So, I figure it’s time I tell you a bit about my friend X.
X was born in the old Mercy Hospital in 1961, on a February day when a brutal nor’easter was howling down Spring Street. Story goes, his father, Thomas, suggested to his mother, Bridget, that the unforgiving coastal wind — arriving at the same time as their first kid — was some sort of good omen. “Try squeezing out a basketball and say that,” his mother had apparently said. “Typical male.”
His father laughed.
X was a big baby, nearly ten pounds. He was different in other ways, too: he didn’t cry much, he slept for hours at a stretch, and he was nameless. For the entirety of his stay at the Mercy, three days, his parents could not agree on what to name him. The nurses, therefore, started calling him Baby X. It stuck.
But that wasn’t why he called himself X, he told me.
Not even close.
“Then it’s about the twenty-fourth letter in the alphabet,” I once said to him, reading off a list of guesses I’d put together in the PAHS library. “In math, it means unknown. Or a hidden treasure on a pirate’s map. Or the number ten in the Roman system. Or Malcolm X. Or it means multiply. Or it’s how you vote. Or negate something. Or some secret society. Or it’s the symbol for the sun god Osiris. Or the witch symbol. Or porn. Or it’s a placeholder. Or it’s the X chromosome in genetics. Or it means strong. Or it’s the cross. Or, the double cross for betrayal. Or it’s a Christogram, representing Christ, like in Xmas!”
X sort of grinned, but he said nothing.
Bastard.
His mother was a nurse at Bayside’s Maine Medical Center, on the other side of downtown, and his father had just been called to the Maine bar. They were penniless when they got married. So X’s arrival — while good news — made life pretty complicated. For the first few years, the family didn’t have much in the way of material possessions and all that.
At the start, X was so quiet his parents worried he might be deaf. They took him to a specialist at the Mercy, who was amused by their concern. “He’s not deaf, he’s quiet,” said the doctor. “Be grateful.”
His parents had met at a wedding. Bridget’s cousin was getting hitched to Thomas’s older brother, and Thomas was in the wedding party. At the reception, Thomas had also been asked by his brother to be the master of ceremonies. Bridget had laughed, uncontrollably, at Thomas’s jokes — she was the only one who found them amusing — and so he asked her out. She was beautiful and tall, he was handsome and tall, and they were both considered a bit odd by their respective families. He moved from Toronto, where he had only just been called to the Ontario bar, to be with her. That’s true love — moving from a real city, like Toronto, to a shit hole like Portland.
“What were some of his jokes?” we asked his mom one night at the kitchen table.
“I only remember one,” she said, snorting at the memory. “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a jellyfish?”
“He asked that? So what’s the answer?”
“One’s a spineless, poisonous blob. The other’s a form of sea life,” she said, howling. “None of the other lawyers at the wedding thought it was funny.”
Adults are weird, I thought to myself.
Anyway, Bridget married the Toronto lawyer at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in 1958. He became an American after that.
Portland was conservative and religious; Bridget and Thomas were neither. Portland was suspicious of big government; Bridget and Thomas were both happily employed by government, she as a nurse, and he as a junior attorney with the U.S. Attorney’s Department, District of Maine. Portland, like the rest of the state, was overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; Bridget and Thomas, meanwhile, while also white, were super-liberal Catholics who cheered on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, always voted Democrat, and kept a small shrine to the Kennedys in the kitchen of their rental house.
Years later, their eldest son would carry on the family’s progressive tradition, organizing anti-police concerts at the Riverton Community Center, not far from their first home. His sister, also named Bridget, came along in 1963; his brother, Michael, in 1965. The family needed more room, so they moved to Bayside in 1969, around the time that the city was expanding in all directions. By the mid-’70s, they were in South Portland, the suburban hell hole we would rip in lyrics written in our various bands. The “bland, satanic monoculture” of the place, as I put it in one tune, provided us with tons of material.
Anyway, that’s X’s family.
There are three stories I like to tell about X. They kind of tell you what you need to know about the guy. These incidents took place before we were best friends, and they suggested to his parents (and his siblings, and his teachers, and everyone else) that X is completely, totally different from every other teenager on Earth. I loved telling these stories to people who ask me about X. There’s the God story, the javelin story, and the Keith Sharma story.
So, here’s the God story.
In grade five, X and the kids in his class were assigned the task of writing a brief essay about their “relationship to God.” The rest of his classmates all wrote up sunny first-person accounts about Heaven, in which God and Jesus were depicted as fatherly Caucasian men. X (of course) did not. Without smiling, he painstakingly typed up his essay on his parents’ Selectric and presented the thesis th
at God was a total sadist. “I believe in Him, but we should wonder if He believes in us,” he wrote. “There is no other way to explain why He stands by and does nothing when we are killed by Nature or by each other. He must hate us. It is also possible that He is dead. I have nothing against Him, but I see no proof for Him, either.”
The essay led to a lengthy summit between his parents, his Religious Studies teacher, the principal, the vice-principal, and even a child psychologist. X, from the school’s perspective, was a problem to be fixed. Either that or he was possessed by Satan. “This is written at a level that is impossible for a child in grade five,” said the teacher. “It is also blasphemy,” said the vice-principal. All of them suspected that one of X’s parents had written the essay. One said so.
“We did not!” said Thomas angrily. “And we can assure you that he reads and writes at a very advanced level. He has been writing a daily journal since he was in grade three. He reads what we read.”
“What is he reading now?” the vice-principal asked, horrified.
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I think,” Bridget said.
“That is not suitable literature for a ten-year-old. It was on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum list for many years, in fact.” The principal was pleased by his use of Latin.
“That’s why he wanted to read it. And we’ll make the determination as to what is appropriate, thanks,” Thomas said. “Is this meeting over?”
Next up: the javelin story.
It happened in grade seven, in his first year at Holy Cross, the year we met. Dave Heaney was the only teacher there that he liked, and he urged him to go for the track team. So, X reluctantly showed up one day for the tryouts wearing cut-off jeans and a Karl Marx T-shirt. He was taller and leaner than a lot of the other students, and probably stronger and faster, too. We watched him as he totally dominated in every event in his age group that day — sprint, high jump, long jump, all of it. At the end of the tryout, the coach was basically begging X to join the team. We listened, sort of in shock, as X refused.
“But why?” the coach asked. “You’re a natural!”
X shrugged. “Thank you, but I don’t want to. You don’t have javelin.”
“None of the junior high teams do javelin,” the coach said, exasperated. “What’s so important about javelin?”
X pointed in the direction of the other students, as they continued running and jumping. “Animals can run faster than us, and jump higher than us,” he said, impassive. “I want to do something an animal can’t do.” And with that, he walked back to his locker. When some of the rest of us discussed what he had said, we also lost enthusiasm for track, because none of us liked the idea of being beaten by an animal either.
Okay. Now, the Keith Sharma story.
This one also happened during seventh grade — just before X and I became buddies over the burning-the-school-constitution incident. Coming out of Holy Cross at the end of class one sunny afternoon in March, on a day when I was at home with the flu, X saw three grade eight boys beating the shit out of another grade eight student named Keith Sharma. They were at the far end of the schoolyard and surrounded by maybe twenty other students, all cheering. Keith was a Pakistani kid and one of only a handful of non-white students at our school. We all knew that Keith was frequently mocked, but none of us had ever seen something as bad as this. Throwing down his book bag, stripping off his belt, X ran up to the crowd of students, where some were actually chanting: “Kill the Paki! Kill the Paki!”
Without a word, without stopping, X plunged into the center, his belt wrapped around the knuckles of his left hand. He started punching the three grade eight guys who had Keith down on the ground. He slammed his fist into the backs of their heads, hard, and when they turned, he cascaded blows on their faces with everything he had. They pulled back, bleeding, shocked at this maniac grade seven, just as some of their friends grabbed at X’s arms and hair.
Pinned down, X looked over at Keith, who — while also covered in mud and blood — was staring at X, shocked. “Run!” X barked at him, and Keith did. Fists started to rain down on X until Dave Heaney and another teacher ran up to stop the fight.
The next day in his office, beneath a huge, ugly crucifix they had up on the wall, the principal told X’s parents and Heaney — while a bruised and silent X listened, expressionless — that the three boys who had beaten Keith had been suspended for three days. X would be suspended for three days, too, he said.
“Really?” X’s dad said. “Those three little bastards beat that boy in a racial attack, and you don’t expel them? Really?”
The principal waved his hands. “Language, language. And, yes, what they said and did was wrong,” he said, in soothing tones. “But what your son did was wrong, as well.”
“He deserves an award for what he did,” Mr. Heaney nearly shouted. The principal glared at him.
X’s father edged forward on his seat, furious. “I’m telling you right now, if you do not expel those three little monsters, I will contact my best friend, who is the editor-in-chief of the Press Herald, and I will ensure they write a story about how Holy Cross is indifferent to the presence of violent racists, and punishes those who oppose violence and racism. That’s a promise.”
After the three grade eights were expelled and X was at home serving his one-day suspension, he quietly said to his father, “Dad, I didn’t know you were best friends with the editor of the Press Herald.”
“I’m not,” Thomas said, not looking up from the paper. “But in cases of extreme injustice, you are entitled to sometimes embellish the evidence.”
X actually gave a rare smile. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. And he did.
C H A P T E R 14
Next I guess I should tell you about our gang. The X Gang.
X and I met Jimmy Cleary near the end of our third year at Portland Alternative High School. It had been an insanely cold day in April, cold as fuck, and so Jimmy was actually wearing these blue long johns under Ramones skinny jeans with the knees totally gone. We could see the long johns through the kneeholes. It impressed us.
Over a white T-shirt, Jimmy also had on an oversized men’s white dress shirt, on which he had carefully inscribed “HATE AND WAR,” in block letters on the pocket. This, we knew, was a song on the still-impossible-to-get first Clash LP, and the punk movement’s unofficial slogan or whatever. Hippies claimed to be seeking “love and peace.” Punks, meanwhile, saw hippies as a bunch of hypocritical liars. We figured that no matter how much you wanted peace and love across the universe, hate and war was all that was currently available, down here on Earth.
Jimmy Cleary, the newish kid, walked past us in the hallway outside the Social Sciences study area. His hair was short on the sides, a bit wavy on top, and on his feet were a pair of too-big army boots. He was pale and rail-thin, with a bit of acne on his Irish mug, but I thought he was actually kind of good-looking. I was surprised we hadn’t really noticed him before.
We were near my open locker door, and I had taped a picture of the Clash on it, one I’d cut out of the NME.
“Hey,” I said to him. Not friendly, not aggressive, just that. Hey.
“Hey,” Jimmy said, slowing, wary.
I tapped the picture of the Clash and pointed at Joe Strummer. “That’s the fucking Messiah, right there, man,” I said.
“Hallelujah,” said Jimmy, seeing Strummer and smiling. “Yes, he is.”
We all became really good friends after that. Jimmy had moved to Portland from Boston with his parents and two brothers a few months earlier. His father was a doctor at the Mercy, his mother an artist. Like X and me, he considered himself a prisoner of conscience in the teenage gulag that is South Portland. “Welcome to the soulless suburban wasteland,” I told him, which made him laugh, and which he later used in a Nasties lyric. Like me and X, Jimmy had been attracted to the stories and rumors about th
e early punk scene in New York City and London. He’d gone to Portland High for a short while, but transferred to PAHS when the beatings by punk-hating jocks became a bit too frequent.
At PAHS, jingoistic jock culture was also celebrated, but not as much as in other high schools. The only students considered to have real value — by most of the teachers and the administration, at least — were the jocks. The only ticket out of Portland, they thought, was professional sports, which, of course, was insane. The chance that any of these Led Zep douchebags would ever make the NFL or whatever was somewhere between slim and zero. They were, and always would be, lemmings.
At PAHS, the likes of me, X, Jimmy Cleary, and the NCNA gang had very few places to hide out. Most days, a dozen or so of us would occupy the windowless Room 531 and talk about music and poetry and art and politics, and never do any actual schoolwork. Room 531 had four walls, three tables, and eight chairs. Door at one end, blackboard at the other. That was it. But we loved it there.
Room 531: home punk home.
PAHS, meanwhile, sort of was and sort of wasn’t home. While those of us in the NCNA were totally aware that we didn’t fit in at any other high school, we were under no illusions about PAHS’s bullshit claims to being a progressive place of higher learning that valued the individual, blah blah blah.
It wasn’t progressive and it wasn’t all that interested in the individual. “And the learning isn’t all that higher, either,” I said to Jimmy. From the outside, PAHS resembled a gray concrete factory, like just about every other suburban high school. With the difference that, at PAHS, you could move through courses (or fail in them) at your own pace.
The school’s exterior had the architectural appeal of a medium-security prison, X liked to say, because it did. The walls were concrete slabs, and the few windows were long but narrow, too narrow to squeeze through. (Luke Macdonald had once tried, and gotten stuck, earning him a month of detentions.) Inside, there was a gym, an auditorium, and a cafeteria. The thing you noticed right away was that there were no classrooms to speak of, just rooms in which seminars were held, and which were filled with lots of trapezoid-shaped tables and uncomfortable metal chairs. Like prison.
Recipe for Hate Page 6