New Dark Ages

by Warren Kinsella

  The staffers jumped. Even Daisy Something and Stacey Something appeared worried at that point. The men looked terrified. Danny, having seen Earl Turner practice for this performance, wasn’t. He knew what was coming next.

  Turner turned his gaze on Derwin Hailey, who seemed about to have a stroke. Immediately, his face softened and he gave Hailey a thousand-watt smile. “But,” he said, “there’s something else you found out, isn’t there, Derwin?”

  “Yes! Yes, sir, there is,” Hailey said, visibly relieved, leaping up and pulling a stack of stapled sheets of paper out of a file folder. He passed them around the room, including one to Danny. Once back in his seat, Hailey started talking about his graphs.

  “Chart one,” Hailey announced. “As I said, we found that too many registered Republicans in the early primary states don’t know who we are. When they find out, they like the candidate’s backstory, a lot. They become open to switching. But they know the establishment candidates way better.”

  Everyone flipped to the next page.

  “Chart two,” he said, clearly loving that the senior campaign staff were listening to him. “We get better known by ramping up our ad buy, and by changing the creative we are doing. We need to get a lot more aggressive in our messaging, and we need to have our spots seen by a lot more people.” Hailey paused, sounding uncertain. “This will be, um, costly.”

  Earl Turner waved a dismissive hand, but kept his eyes on chart two. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Danny and I are going to see someone about that right after this meeting. Keep going.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hailey said, practically saluting. “Chart three, everyone … well, it’s actually a few charts on one sheet.”

  There was the sound of pages being turned, and then silence. Shocked silence. Hailey continued.

  “These charts and data represent a summary of everything we’ve been able to find out about the core attitudes of the available vote,” he said. “That is, the significant number of Republican swing voters who haven’t really committed to a candidate. They’re the ones who are nominally Republicans but are very dissatisfied with the establishment candidates. There are also some independents in there. All of this gettable vote wants one thing, above all else.”

  For drama, Hailey paused. But he didn’t need to. What the senior campaign staff saw before them already was dramatic. Basically, it was a bunch of pie charts legitimizing appealing to people’s worst instincts: even Danny could see that. It was a strategic map that said Earl Turner could win if he started pushing white supremacy.

  “They want someone to speak for them,” Hailey said, triumphant. “And what they want that candidate to say is something that no other candidate will, in either party.”

  He paused again.

  “They want—”

  Earl Turner cut him off, held up a beefy hand, and slowly stood up. “They want a candidate who will not be afraid to tell it like it is,” he said, quieter, starting to pace around the table.

  Danny watched him. Turner was mesmerizing when he got like this. Scary, but mesmerizing.

  “They want a candidate who will say no to the immigrants. No to the refugees. No to the illegals. No to the parasites, the ones who come here to rape and impregnate white women. No to the white punks and the black thugs and the brown perverts and the yellow thieves and the hook-nosed international bankers. No. No more. We will round them up, and we will ship them back to whatever rock they crawled out from under.”

  The senior campaign team was staring at Earl Turner, stunned. Some would tender their resignations shortly after this meeting. Earl Turner, anticipating this, had told Danny he would be delighted to shed “the cowards” who had been dragging down his campaign.

  Turner stopped and suddenly pointed at one of the big red, white, and blue posters with RIGHT on it. “Right,” he said. “Right means white, from this point on in this campaign.”

  There were a few audible gasps. Earl Turner was going where no previous Republican presidential ­candidate had gone before. If he couldn’t win the country, he was essentially going to set the countryside on fire.

  Earl Turner watched them, then nodded for Derwin Hailey to continue.

  “It’s time to go big or go home, folks,” the spidery pollster said, spinning his web. “This strategy will get us noticed, hugely, and it will get us support. It’s going to be bumpy, and the special interests and the minorities and their fake media will go nuts, but that’ll help us in the long run. Our voters like it when the liberal media and minorities get upset. So, with the right execution, with the right discipline and resources, we think this strategy will work.”

  Earl Turner was still standing. He crossed his big arms and looked around the room. “We need a candidate who will speak for white, small-town America,” he said. “And that candidate is me.”

  CHAPTER 10

  It was a few days until the tour began, so I decided to go see X at his family’s place. His mom let me in. He was packing when I stepped into his bedroom.

  X pointed at the old hockey bag, previously used by his little brother when he played junior A. “Couple pairs of jeans, underwear, lots of T-shirts, extra pair of Converse, some books and toiletries,” he said. “Also bringing my jacket, my sweater if it gets cooler somewhere, and that’s about it. You?”

  “Same kind of stuff,” I said, sitting on the end of his bed, back against the wall. I didn’t tell him about the little baggie full of white power I’d also stuck in my own hockey bag, hidden away inside a sock and then stuffed into the toe of a Doc Martens boot. He didn’t want to hear about that, I figured.

  I sniffed. I scratched. I looked around. It had been quite a while since I had been in X’s spartan bedroom.

  Nothing much had changed: on one wall, an early framed picture of the Hot Nasties in front of Gary’s, with Jimmy Cleary between me and X. We were all smiling and laughing — happier, better times. On the other wall, a super-rare poster of an October 1968 Iggy and the Stooges show in Ann Arbor. And on the middle wall, above his typewriter, a Polaroid of Patti onstage with the Punk Rock Virgins. A bit blurred, but looking cool.

  When he saw me come in, X wasn’t surprised. But he never really looked surprised about anything, like, ever. We hadn’t really been hanging out as much as we used to. Since he had quietly started seeing Patti Upchuck — and since I had even more quietly started making speed a staple of my diet — we’d undeniably drifted apart. He disapproved of what I was doing, and I disapproved of the fact that he disapproved.

  However, given that we were going on the road together with five other guys, crisscrossing the hinterland in Eddie’s 1977 Ford Econoline E150 van, things were going to get pretty crowded pretty fast. We’d be towing all the Hot Nasties’ equipment in a U-Haul cargo trailer, but it was still going to be cramped and smelly in the van. Our short pre-tour trips to Ottawa and New York City certainly had been.

  The Punk Rock Virgins, meanwhile, were going to be exclusively opening for us at some of our gigs, but not all of them. So the three of them were going to be using the Upchuck family’s station wagon for Patti and Betty’s guitars and amps and Leah was going to be sharing Eddie’s drum kit.

  Anyway, I was mainly at X’s to see if we could get things back on track a bit. Anyone who has ever been on tour will tell you that things can get tense in close quarters, even with the best of friends.

  X kept folding and packing shit, and I kept looking around his room, and occasionally at him. Even when he was folding underwear, the fucking guy was ­charismatic. Silent, stoic, slender: he was a teenager like no other.

  X, as I always told everyone, had been the one who introduced me to punk rock, way back when. But not the Clash or the Pistols — those bands came later. Before I even knew him, X was listening to the early, early stuff: MC5, the Dictators, the aforementioned Iggy and the Stooges. X had been into the punk scene before there was a scene.

  How a seventh-grader in Portland, Maine, could know about MC5’s “Kick Out
the Jams” — let alone own a copy of that record — was totally fucking amazing, in retrospect. I couldn’t even picture him, all of thirteen years, sitting on the floor of his room beside his tinny record player, listening to Rob Tyner, the MC5 front man, shouting: “Kick out the jams, ­motherfuckers!”

  Thirteen years old! I mean, I was barely out of G.I. Joe at that age, and here X was listening to these banned Michigan punk rock communist ­revolutionaries! Amazing.

  Anyway. X was silent, now almost oblivious to my presence. I examined his profile. He was, as Patti Upchuck had said before, “More than handsome.” His face was intriguing. Unusual. Was he hot? Speaking as the resident gay guy in the X Gang, yes, X was decidedly hot. But there was something else about him, too — not bad on the eyes, but also fucking scary sometimes. In a fight he was like an animal.

  One time I saw him hit a big biker type so hard in the side of his head, the guy’s eye sort of half popped out. Seriously. It was fucking insane. The biker didn’t get up again.

  Beneath his long, dark hair, X’s face was a bit broad, with these killer cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and “those eyes,” as Patti put it. His pupils were different sizes, the infamous outcome of a fight at a community hall gig, when a couple guys jumped him, and one of them hit him hard in the face. I was elsewhere, at the same gig, having a scrap of my own with a couple other assholes. The uneven pupils made him look like Bowie, which is never a bad thing. But he’d refused to get it fixed. “Don’t care,” he said, and he didn’t.

  He had scars, too, most of them from other fights at other gigs. A half-moon-shaped one above an eyebrow, and a couple smaller ones on his chin. But it was when he pushed his hair back that people would get a bit of a surprise: they could see, right away, that some of X’s left ear was missing. It kind of looked like it had been chewed off by a hungry dog, and there was this triangular chunk of skin just gone from his earlobe.

  It had happened when one of the small hoop earrings X wore had been ripped out by a big biker in a fight. X then proceeded to beat the biker until he was hustled off to the Mercy, the Portland hospital where members of the X Gang had been patched up at various times over the years. It was a bit gross, that ear, but it also sent a message: Do not fuck with me.

  Nobody fucked with X. Or, if they did, they regretted it.

  The upcoming tour, however, presented a unique dilemma, even for a guy as intimidating as X could be. By going ahead — as Theresa Laverty had warned us — we were potentially putting some Hot Nasties’ fans at risk. Us, too, I suppose.

  But by canceling the tour, we might also be ensuring that the FBI would take a lot longer to find the bad guy. Or maybe making it impossible to find the bad guy, who might then, you know, go on to kill yet more punks.

  All of which reminded me of a question that had been nagging at me: Why had we only heard from Theresa Laverty? Why hadn’t we seen any other FBI agents around?

  I asked X what he thought about that, and he paused in his packing. “Wondered the same thing,” he said, one eyebrow up.

  “I mean, she’s obviously intelligent and capable. But dealing with a serial killer all alone? I’m no expert on police procedure, but that seems really fucking strange, to me,” I said. “Doesn’t she have a partner or something?”

  X shrugged.

  “And what about this Church of the Creator shit?” I asked, warming up. “If another fucked-up neo-Nazi group is killing off punk rockers, yet again, shouldn’t that involve multiple police agencies?”

  X paused. “The cops weren’t much help last time,” he said, then gave another small shrug. “We were the ones who solved it.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But this cop, I think I trust her.” I paused. “We share … a point of view.”

  X looked at me but said nothing. He kept packing.

  “Anyway,” I said, deciding to change the subject, “I still wonder if we’re gonna be able to handle it, if there is trouble at a show, you know?”

  X shrugged. “Mike and Bembe and I have gone over it. There’ll be no violence at any of the shows,” he said. “That’s our objective.”

  I squinted at him. “Even with the straight edge guys?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was accusing him of something, but knowing that I kind of was. “A lot of them seem to only go to shows to cause trouble.”

  “Yeah,” X said, eventually. “But they’ll regret it if they do.”

  Ring ring ring.

  We could hear the phone going somewhere in the X family house. His mom, Mrs. Bridget X, yelled down to us. “Boys, it’s a Ron McLeod from Associated Press. He says he wants to talk to you about your tour.”

  “Great,” I whispered. “Fucking great.”

  X frowned and walked out of the room to take the call. I followed.

  McLeod had wanted to meet us downtown at Matthew’s, the chicken and chips place the X Gang frequented on Saturdays. I was surprised he knew about it, actually.

  McLeod had been a reporter at the boring old fart’s newspaper of choice, the Portland Press Herald, for a really long time. It was there that X and I had gotten to know him. And while we didn’t trust him — we didn’t trust any reporters, basically — we also didn’t distrust Ron McLeod. He hadn’t ever broken his word to us to keep stuff off the record. And he had been a pretty reliable source of information for us — me, for my writing, and X for finding out what the cops had been up to. So, we agreed to meet.

  He was a little guy, balding, with a ginger mustache and John Denver–style glasses. When we walked into Matthew’s, McLeod was sitting alone at a table near the can, gnawing on a piece of chicken. He half-stood when he saw us. “Fellas,” he said, waving a chicken bone in our direction. “I’d shake your hands, but …”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, as we pulled up seats and sat across from him. “You’re looking prosperous, Ron.”

  He was, a bit. After he’d written all of his stories about the clash between the X Gang and the neo-Nazi killer who’d been stalking us, McLeod had won a bunch of regional media awards and had even been put up for a Pulitzer Prize by the Press Herald. He didn’t win, but the nomination had made him a bit of a local star.

  So, he’d taken a better-paying job with Associated Press. He was still based in Portland, but he wasn’t just on the police beat anymore. Now, McLeod was writing about the presidential race as it played out across New England. Reporters love to write about political strategy, and Ron McLeod was no exception. He was really enjoying his new job, he told us, between mouthfuls of chicken and chips.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, as X stepped away to get food for the two of us. “So, what do you want from us?”

  McLeod wiped his mouth on a greasy napkin and looked at X’s receding back. He seemed to want to wait for him to return, but didn’t. He frowned. “So,” he said, “this is off the record.”

  “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have come,” I said. “What’s up?

  McLeod looked around to see if anyone was listening. No one was. No one had even noticed we were there, in fact. Matthew’s regulars were old army veterans, retirees, and some characters who looked like they bunked on the sidewalk. None of them cared what we were talking about. “I’ve been writing about the presidential primaries and both parties for a month,” he said. “And it’s been bizarre on the Republican side. I mean, really strange.”

  “All Republicans are strange. All of them are closet Nazis, if you ask me.” Like most punks, I despised conservatives in general, and Republicans in particular.

  McLeod laughed. “Yeah, well, I can’t call them that,” he said. “But strange things certainly are happening in the Republican race.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as Maine’s own favorite son, Earl Turner, has turned into a full-fledged Klansman, minus the white robes,” he said. “He’s taken to peddling racism, big time, and it’s paying off for him. Big time.”

  “See? All Republicans are racists. No news there.”

  �
�Well, not all of them,” McLeod said, waggling an index finger at me. “They are the party of Abe Lincoln, after all. But Turner’s racism stuff has shaken up the race. He’s slowly gaining on the more establishment Washington candidates, to everyone’s amazement. He’s bringing in people who have never really been involved in politics before …”

  “Because they’ve all been too busy attending cross burnings,” I scoffed.

  “Yeah, well, maybe,” he said, chortling again. “But his polling numbers are freaking out the establishment. So, instead of condemning him — like many of them are telling me they want to, off the record — they’re keeping quiet.… Some of them are even saying that Turner could actually win this thing.”

  “So? Doesn’t affect me or my friends.”

  “I’d have to disagree with that,” McLeod said. “He’d wreck this country if he got a chance.”

  Then I noticed that X was standing behind me with a tray of chicken and chips, along with a couple RC Colas and a couple draft beers. He sat down and looked at me. “I agree with Ron,” he said quietly. “It matters.”

  There was no point in debating X. He’d forgotten more about politics than I would ever know. For my entire life, I hadn’t spent five minutes thinking about the presidential primaries or the Republican Party. I mean, who fucking cares about those douchebags? That is, I guess, until our friend Danny Hate joined them. Which — surprise, surprise — was really what Ron McLeod wanted to talk about. He cleared his throat, waiting for X and me to start eating. We ate and listened.

  “So, fellas,” he said. “I’ve been spending a lot of time paying attention to the Turner campaign, just like a lot of other reporters have been doing. Everyone is trying to figure out how he has turned into a contender. Lots of come-from-behind stories being written about him.”

  We waited, listening.

  “But I’m really the only local guy writing about the background of our, um, illustrious local political star,” he said. “I’m the only one who really knows the local angle, I guess.”