New Dark Ages

by Warren Kinsella

  Laverty smiled and waved a hand at what she was wearing — at the moment, a linen jacket and a silk blouse. “I don’t have a dog, I don’t have a cat, and you know I certainly don’t have a husband,” Laverty said to Schenk. “My weakness is fashion. I know all the best places to get Roger Vivier stilettos, anywhere in North America. This neighborhood has haute couture.”

  Schenk didn’t know what or who Roger Vivier or haute couture was, so he shrugged and started examining Fanelli’s menu. “So, why talk here, Laverty?” he said. “I know my office ain’t grand, but this place ain’t much better.”

  “Maybe,” Laverty said, scanning Fanelli’s menu for a salad, or salad equivalent. “But this place is actually kind of relevant. Look around, but try not to be too obvious about it. There will be a test.”

  Fanelli’s main door was at the corner of the bar, opening onto where Prince and Mercer Streets meet. Eight tiny tables were positioned parallel to the bar, at which two regulars were presently nursing beers. There was dark wood everywhere. Tin roof, painted yellow. Cracked, octagonal tiles on the floor in a fleur-de-lis pattern. The can was beside where the bar ended, under an old sign that said LADIES AND GENTS FITTING ROOM. Beyond that, there was a room of some sort, with a dark curtain drawn across the opening.

  On the wall behind Laverty, the main feature of the place: dozens and dozens of framed photographs of boxers. Many of the photos were faded now, and the glass was cracked and dirty. But they were of some of the greatest boxers to ever live — and some he hadn’t even heard of. Muhammad Ali, Paul Berlenbach, Mickey Walker, Mike McTigue, Stanley Ketchel, and more. Knowing a bit about what old guys like to call the sweet science, Schenk looked at the boxers’ faces admiringly. “Jesus, there are some great ones up there,” he said, big arms crossed. “Did fighters use to hang out here or something?”

  “Not really,” Laverty said, not looking up. “Tommy used to box. He put them up.”

  “Who’s Tommy?”

  Laverty jerked a manicured thumb at the hulking figure of the bartender, who was doing his best to ignore them. “The guy behind the bar,” she said. “He’s got an interesting story to tell.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Earl Turner’s ad campaign hit with the force of a ­hurricane. It pulverized the Republican competition. It reduced them to red, white, and blue confetti.

  In the primary states where they were competitive, Turner’s staid establishment opponents had been ­putting the usual stuff on air: images of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, and the ­candidate riding a horse and wearing a cowboy hat. Or grainy ­images of America at war — the Second World War, ­Korea, Vietnam — and the candidate modestly ­recounting how he got his Purple Heart. Or the candidate at home, at church, on Capitol Hill, fighting for Middle America and all that was right and good. Squared jaw, clenched fist, stirring musical track. The usual conservative bullshit, in other words.

  Earl Turner, being a junior congressman from a state many Americans wouldn’t be able to locate on a map, couldn’t compete with all of that. He didn’t have a long CV like his opponents did. So, aided and abetted by his pollster, Derwin Hailey, Turner crafted thirty- and sixty-second spots, as they are called, that had all the subtlety of a hand grenade in a bowl of porridge. They were racist rockets, aimed right at Middle America’s middle.

  In one ad, the camera surveyed a dirty, garbage-strewn city street. Broken-down cars were seen here and there and burned-out homes loomed in the background like ominous apparitions recalling better times. On the sidewalk, slightly out of focus, a group of young black men smoked cigarettes and conspicuously passed little bags — presumably filled with drugs — back and forth. They glared at the camera. Doom-and-gloom music played.

  Then Earl Turner’s voice: “America is broken. America is lost. America, once the greatest nation on earth, is no longer. Its streets are filled with drug dealers and pimps and thieves and killers from other cultures, from other countries. They are destroying our way of life.”

  Pause.

  The screen then cut away to Turner’s handsome face, looking earnest, looking concerned. “My name is Earl Turner. I say we need to take back our country. Take back our streets. Take back our culture. We need to do what’s right — we need an America for Americans. I hope you’ll join me in our crusade.”

  It wasn’t a “campaign” anymore. It was a “crusade.” Every one of Turner’s ads ended that way — with him facing the camera, shirt open a bit, tie loosened, his features radiating an earnest, pained look. There was one targeting blacks, one targeting Hispanics and Latinos, one that went after Asians, and one that slimed gays, implying that we carried communicable diseases and molested children. For certain media markets, there was even one about capital punishment for drug dealers, all of whom looked like they were members of punk rock bands.

  Danny O’Heran had helped Turner and Hailey put that one together.

  One particularly controversial ad showed a bunch of fat, balding men with big noses sitting around a boardroom table that had been stacked high with money. The men were all dripping with jewelry, smoking fat cigars, and laughing uproariously. A couple of them seemed to be wearing yarmulkes.

  That one was called the “international bankers” ad, and it ended with Earl Turner pledging to imprison the “foreign bankers who have stolen away the livelihoods of God-fearing Christians whose hard work has made America great, from the family farms to the factories.”

  That ad, which caused a firestorm of controversy, didn’t use the word Jew, but it didn’t need to. Everyone knew who Earl Turner was talking about. Derwin Hailey’s polls had found that a surprising number of Republicans believed that Jews were behind the twin evils of godless satanic communism and unsupervised Wall Street capitalism, and that they had killed Jesus to boot. So the Turner campaign put together their commercial targeting Jews, and it caused no end of outrage at the New York Times and in Hollywood, just as Earl Turner had hoped.

  Some TV channels, in some urban media markets, refused to run Turner’s ads, correctly noting that the Earl Turner ads were openly racist and anti-Semitic. This, too, was what Earl Turner and Derwin Hailey had predicted would happen, and they were ready for it when it did.

  The Turner campaign immediately published ads in right-wing newspapers — and they held raucous press conferences, with Earl Turner front and center — denouncing the owners of the TV channels as censorious “elites, atheists, and foreigners” who were trampling on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the part that guaranteed freedom of speech.

  In his ads and in his press conferences, Turner would call for boycotts of the stations and their advertisers — and his legions of followers would comply. In a day or two, then, most of the TV channels would capitulate. They’d start running the Turner campaign’s “America for Americans” ads.

  No one could mistake “the message” — as Derwin Hailey put it — that wound through any of the Turner ads like a big slippery snake. They were a naked appeal to bigotry and hate. They were disgusting and horrible and wrong. And they were highly effective.

  Turner’s “America for Americans” ads worked for two reasons. One, they had “given voice to what white Americans felt but were afraid to say,” Derwin Hailey told a rapt senior campaign staff at the Turner campaign’s Portland headquarters one night, as they pored through the latest internal polls. In other words, quite a few older, white men with high school educations — “the white working class,” Hailey called them — had found a champion in Earl Turner.

  “Two,” Hailey continued, “they want their old lives back. They want things like they used to be. They don’t like technological change, they don’t like cultural change, they don’t like all of the stuff that they feel has been imposed on them — civil rights, fem­inism, pacifism, being careful about saying the correct thing, all of that crap. They are nostalgic for the good old days, when they felt they still ran America. And Earl Turner is the only guy who wants to give it to t
hem.”

  But there was probably another reason why the ads were working, Hailey said, as the senior staff listened, bewitched — and as Danny O’Heran stood again by the conference room door, looking bored.

  “And that reason can be summed up in one word: repetition,” he said. “Our fucking ads are fucking everywhere.”

  And they were. Every channel, at every hour, on just about every network. Hailey bragged that Earl Turner’s little campaign had embarked on “one of the biggest media buys in the history of the Republican primaries.” Turner’s ads were on everyone’s mind, because everyone had seen them, multiple times. Repetition, simplicity, and volume work, Hailey said.

  Hailey went on about “gross-rating points” and “cost per point” and “designated market area” and something he called “dayparts,” but Danny — and not a few of the others — found it all confusing. The bottom line was that the budget for Turner’s “America for Americans” spots was essentially bottomless. That was something Danny, and everyone at the meeting, understood quite well. Money bought exposure, and the Turner campaign suddenly and inexplicably had more money than it could spend.

  “Our ads are winning us support because Republicans like our message,” Hailey concluded. “That’s obvious. But they are working because they have been seen so many times, the message has literally embedded itself in the minds of millions of angry, isolated, white American guys who yearn for yesterday.” He paused, then ended with a flourish: “And those angry, isolated white Americans are helping us win this thing, folks.”

  There was silence, and then there was a knock on the conference room door. A volunteer timidly stuck her head inside and signaled to the two press assistants, Daisy Something and Stacey Something — the ones that Danny now knew Earl Turner was fucking, sometimes simultaneously.

  “Um, Stacey or Daisy,” said the volunteer, looking at a pink message slip with URGENT written on it, “there’s a Ron McLeod from Associated Press on the line, and he says he has urgent questions about the ad campaign budget, and about someone called Ben.”

  Derwin Hailey turned white — as white as a Klansman’s sheet — and he dashed out of the conference room.

  CHAPTER 17

  When I came downstairs at the McGill University student residence on Sherbrooke Street, I found X on a pay phone. Again. He hung up when he saw me.

  Now we stood in the lobby, staring up at the black-and-white TV they had hung above the registration desk.

  The Canadian TV network was doing a story about Earl Turner’s campaign ads, and broadcasting bits and pieces from them. They showed a clip from the one about the drug trade. All of the actors in it were dressed up like cartoon punk rockers, slouching near an ­elementary school playground, openly passing drugs to kids who looked to be ten or eleven. Earl Turner’s voice came on, steeped with worry: “These punks and drug pushers are preying on our kids. They are getting them hooked on drugs and anti-Christian lifestyles.”

  The ad cut to a brief shot of the drug dealers now in a bar somewhere, a really bad punk-like band playing onstage, and people shooting up right beside it.

  Because, you know, all of us always mainline drugs right out in the open, when our bands are playing onstage.

  Earl Turner continued: “These punks and thugs hate God, hate America, and hate normal people like you and me. When I become president, I will send these punks and creeps to jail, and, when deserved, the electric chair.”

  Well, there you go. He’s going to kill us. Full points for clarity, Earl.

  The screen cut away to the surprised-looking Canadian news reporter, standing near the White House. She concluded by saying that Earl Turner’s ads have become the talk of the Republican primary race. “They may be controversial,” she said in her Canadian accent, “but the ads are reaching the Republican faithful. Earl Turner is surging toward the front of the pack in the race to become his party’s presidential nominee.” She signed off.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” I said to X, my voice low. “How could Danny have anything to do with such a pile of racist fucking lies?” I sniffed.

  X just shrugged.

  “Anyone from Maine knows what Earl Turner is,” he said, unfazed. “He’s always been a racist liar.”

  “Yeah, but …” I was, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words. “I just can’t believe Danny would have anything to do with that piece of shit! Doesn’t this bug you, man?”

  X shrugged again. “Sure.”

  I felt a flash of irritation. “Well,” I said, “you don’t seem like it does.”

  X said nothing.

  We were staying in a student residence building ­because — as Bembe had explained to us when we pulled up out front — rooms were more readily available during the summer months, and the place was cheaper than staying at a hotel. Among the Hot Nasties and the Punk Rock Virgins, there was some skepticism about that, but we all agreed that the student residence was a step up from sharing a floor at a youth hostel — which is how we used to do things, before the Nasties got signed to Stiff Records. My room, as it turned out, even had a nice view of the big cross that had been planted on Mount Royal, the mountain at the center of Montreal.

  I was mad. Not so much about the secretive pay phone calls: X is always secretive. I was pissed off about Danny getting involved with a fucking fascist’s ­political campaign — and I was a bit pissed off that my best friend, the anti-racist fighter X, wasn’t as pissed off as I was.

  But I said nothing. We waited in silence.

  The elevator door slid open, and Patti and Sister Betty Upchuck stepped out. “Who’s hungry?” Betty said. “I heard there’s this great deli a five-minute walk away — Ben’s or something like that.”

  We had a few hours until load-in at Les Foufounes Électriques, the punk club where we’d be playing. Having given up on getting X to be as outraged as me, I agreed, and the four of us set off for Ben’s. We walked along Sherbrooke Street toward Peel Street, drawing zero attention as we went. This, I found highly unusual.

  Here’s why. My hair was spiked and dyed blond; Patti and Betty had jet-black hair, also spiked, and were wearing ripped white T-shirts (Slits and X-Ray Spex, respectively), skin-tight jeans, and bondage pants. Meanwhile, X and I were in our biker jackets, over suitably edgy T-shirts (mine was bright yellow and the cover of the Buzzcock’s “Orgasm Addict” single, which featured a naked woman with an iron where her head should be, while X’s was homemade and featured Joe Strummer’s immortal words, I’M SO BORED WITH THE USA, in big block letters).

  We kind of stood out in the crowd.

  Patti noticed it, too. She said, “Hey guys, no one is staring at us.”

  “They don’t give a rat’s ass, unlike American suburbanites slowing down to gawk at us,” I said.

  “I like Montreal.” Sister Betty beamed. “It’s laid-back. It’s nice to punks.”

  Ben’s was as good as Betty had heard. After we’d finished these mile-high smoked meat sandwiches — along with potato latkes and coleslaw — we settled back. Patti, Sister Betty, and me had beers, something called Labatt 50, and X was drinking a Cherry Coke.

  “That was fucking awesome,” I said. “Why don’t we have a Jewish deli like this in Portland?”

  “Well, Earl Turner isn’t making Portland very hospit­able for Jews these days,” Patti said.

  “Or Maine. Or the U.S. Or for blacks or Hispanics or any other minority, basically,” I said.

  There was quiet. We drank our drinks and watched the white-shirted Ben’s waiters ferrying food around. I simmered.

  “This Danny shit,” I said, finally. “I just can’t deal with it. I just don’t understand it. Front page of the fucking New York Times — our friend!”

  “Yeah,” Patti said, sullen. “Our friend, the actual right-hand man to a fucking Nazi.”

  Sister Betty looked around. “Have any of you guys tried to talk to Danny? Have you tried calling him?”

  “I called his folks’ place, but they’re
ultra-religious nutcases, as you guys know,” Patti said. “They wouldn’t let me talk to him and hung up on me.”

  “Same thing happened to me,” I said. “Although Danny picked up once. I’d barely gotten six words out, and then he mumbled that he couldn’t talk to me and hung up.”

  Sister Betty looked at X. “Have you talked to him, X?”

  X kind of shrugged, but said nothing.

  Weird. Fucking weird.

  X looked up at the clock on Ben’s wall, over by the cash register. “It’s getting late,” he said. “We need to get to the gig.”

  Les Foufounes Électriques was on the Eastern part of St. Catherine Street, which is the main drag in downtown Montreal. Les Foufounes Électriques was a bar, basically, with red lights reflecting off everything, weirdo art hanging on the brick walls, some standard-issue bar tables and chairs, a patio up on the roof, and a can that rivaled CBGB for graffiti and grime.

  The owners hadn’t turned on the air conditioning yet to save money. So the place was as hot as the Ninth Circle of Punk Hell when we got there.

  Ten minutes after we arrived, however, Bembe and Mike discovered that various things we’d need for the gig — Sam’s two guitars, Eddie’s snare drum, and a milk carton full of the Shure microphones shared by the Hot Nasties and the Punk Rock Virgins — had somehow been left back at McGill’s student residence. So X and Mike asked me to watch their biker jackets, and they left with Bembe to go get our stuff. I said I’d stay put and watch over the equipment that was there and the merch.

  The Virgins, meanwhile, took off to explore the vintage shops on St. Catherine Street, and the rest of the Nasties went backstage to work on a new tune Luke had written called “Fashion Show”:

  Hey all you punks, come on down

  To the biggest joke in town

  The Nasties are playing somewhere tonight

  Maybe if you’re lucky, you can start a fight