“Try me.”
I thought for a moment. “We were outsiders, they were outsiders,” I said. “We had that in common. Also, in the early days, some punks were pretty careless about racism and anti-Semitism and all that. Siouxsie Sioux would give Nazi salutes at shows. Johnny Rotten had his famous swastika T-shirt. The Ramones had songs with lyrics that seemed to praise the SS and all that shit, even though Joey, the lead singer, was Jewish. Punks weren’t all as progressive then as they are now. They weren’t as political. Some of them were actually pretty fucking clueless about politics.”
“Were you and X always political?”
I nodded. “He was, for sure, right from the start,” I said, remembering. “He taught me a lot. Changed the way I thought about a lot of things.” I trailed off. “He was really important to me.”
“I’d say he still is,” she said. “You heard from him since you’ve been here?”
I shook my head and looked down.
“I knew a guy back when I was younger,” she said. “A bit like X, in that he was the first kid my age who seemed to care about ideas. He’d come around where I worked and talk my ear off about politics, philosophy, books.”
“What kind of politics?”
“Oh, nothing like yours and X’s,” she said, stretching her long legs out in front of her. “He was smart, but he was really, really conservative. I got to not like most of his opinions, actually, especially his views on women.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Dunno,” she said, looking a bit uncomfortable. “We lost touch, and I was happy to keep it that way.” She paused, then abruptly changed the subject. “So, did I ever tell you I know how to play drums?”
“You what?”
CHAPTER 20
The remaining members of the X Gang knew that Eddie Igglesden wasn’t alive somewhere. Knew that his body was never going to be found. Eddie’s parents finally accepted that truth about ten weeks after the bombing and commenced the sorrowful work of dealing with the priests at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland — even buying a casket from Jones, Rich and Barnes that would remain empty for the funeral.
Word got around the scene, and even to me at Casco Bay (Sister Betty phoned and told me). I promised I’d do everything I could to be at my drummer’s funeral.
Sister Betty also told me that Nagamo’s family had held a memorial for her a couple of weeks earlier, at the Six Nations reserve up in Ontario. All the Virgins, along with X and Sam and Luke, had gone. Mike the Biker had driven everyone up there in the old Econoline van we’d toured in when the Nasties were still together.
Eddie’s funeral was set for around the time Jessie was supposed to be discharged from Casco Bay. For me, however, it would mean leaving a few days sooner than planned, which was apparently against the rules and which necessitated a meeting with Paula and some of her storm troopers so I could beg for permission to leave early. My dad showed up and pledged to keep an eye on me every minute of every day. And, for my part, I assured the Casco Bay folks that they’d chased the toxins out of my blood and had instilled in me, forever, the Twelve Steps to sobriety: honesty, hope, faith, courage, integrity, willingness to change, humility, discipline and action, forgiveness, acceptance, knowledge and awareness, service and gratitude.
Anyone who knew me, of course, knew that was all basically bullshit. If the Twelve Steps were a junkie’s equivalent of the Ten Commandments — well, then I was almost certainly going to be landing back at Casco Bay (or a funeral home) sometime soon. I mean, on a good day, I might be able to pull off forgiveness and knowledge and awareness. But hope, courage, or humility? Not a chance. Not me. But I didn’t tell Paula that.
Honesty? That I could do. I’m a fucking champ at honesty — usually far too much of it. And honestly, I was scared shitless. I was scared of returning to the real world, scared of seeing my friends again, scared of going to Eddie’s funeral, and scared of seeing X. Scared of being seen by X. That I honestly wasn’t ready for.
Anyway, Paula wasn’t moved by any of my promises. She didn’t trust me, and she all but said so. But my dad’s pledge to keep an eye on me and ensure that I attend every NA meeting and every post-release checkup swayed her in the end. “We will release him into your care, Dr. Blank,” Paula said, clearly skeptical. “Good luck.”
After winning my early release, I told Jessie that I was scared I’d relapse. At Casco Bay, she’d become my Mother Confessor, and I confessed that I had fear “in abundance.”
“What do you fear?” she said, bemused, shoving T-shirts and jeans into an army surplus duffel bag, preparing for our joint departure.
I shrugged. “Falling off the wagon, which seems inevitable,” I said, “and seeing X and the rest of them … seeing their disappointment in me, again.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “X is supposed to be your best friend, and you’re afraid of seeing him?”
“Not really. Well, sort of,” I said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I’m not afraid of him. I love him. I like to say he’s my brother of another mother, and he is, but …” I tried to think of the right words. “But I just always end up disappointing him, you know? And I hate that. I hate that the most.”
“If he is really your best friend, your brother like you say, then he’ll forgive you,” she said, pausing in her packing. “You’ve been busting your ass to get clean and get better here, Kurt. This X guy is a total asshole if he doesn’t give you credit for that. You deserve a shot at redemption.”
She sat down beside me on the floor. Paula and one of her “teams” walked by, looking in at us with concern. Jessie waited until they were farther down the hall. “Look, I have something to tell you,” she said, her voice low. “My folks paid for me to be here. And they’ll never say it, but they don’t really want me coming back to stay with them. We always fight and shit. So, if you want, I can stay in Portland for a while. You know, keep an eye on you and all that. We can be a sobriety tag team.”
“Really? That would be fucking awesome! My dad’s based in Kittery, but he’s rented me a place in South Portland, near the mall, that has plenty of room. Having you there would mean that he wouldn’t need to be there all the time, watching me. I know he’ll go for it. He told me he likes you.”
“Cool,” Jessie said, laying a hand on my arm, right beside my tattoo of Jimmy Cleary’s initials, which I’d gotten what felt like a million years ago. “And I can go to the funeral with you, if you want — moral support and all that.”
“That’d be awesome, Jessie,” I said, ecstatic. I was feeling a lot less anxious about leaving Casco Bay. “Thank you.”
“No probs, Point Blank,” she said, using my sometime stage-name. “It helps me out, too. It’ll be good. For starters, I won’t need to run away from my folks again, like I’ve done a million times.”
“When was the first time you ran away?” I asked. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.” Her features had grown dark.
“Did you have a fight with your parents?”
“No,” she said. “It was something else. We were living in this tiny shithole town in Maine called Clinton. I was working after school at the town library, reshelving books mainly. There was this kid who used to come in. I mentioned him before. We’d talk all the time — about philosophy, ideas, art. He knew so much stuff, but his ideas were kinda fucked up. They made me uncomfortable, but I was so grateful to be able to talk to someone who had a functioning brain, you know, so I put up with it.” She gave a little laugh. “There weren’t many functioning brains in Clinton.”
I nodded.
“Anyway,” she said. “He was interested in me. He said so.”
“Did he say he loved you like I do?”
She laughed again. “No, he never said that. He’d never say that. He actually said that love didn’t really exist. That it was all just mutual dependence and biology.”
“That’s kind of depressing.”
She nodded.
“Yeah, it was. Anyway, I didn’t know for sure I was gay back then, but I suspected it. I struggled with it. But I definitely knew I had no physical attraction to him, not at all. But like I said, he was attracted to me.” She lowered her voice. “So, he jumped me one night as I was walking home after work. He pulled me into the woods, and … he raped me.”
“Oh, shit, Jessie, I’m so sorry. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to …”
She shook her head. She wasn’t crying or anything. She was calm. “It’s okay. He wasn’t big, but he was pretty strong. Wiry, you know?” She paused. “When he finished, I ran home. I didn’t tell my parents. I never went back to the library. I never saw him again. Not long after that, I ran away, first to Boston, then Albany, then a bunch of other places. I just didn’t want to see him again. Clinton’s a small place.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, putting an arm around her and pulling her closer. “I’m so sorry, Jess.”
After a few minutes she sat up. She just sat there, staring off in space, looking sadder than I had ever seen her.
“Kurt,” she finally said.
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t thought about him in years, but lately I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him. Where he is, what he’s doing now, all that. I just sort of suddenly remembered him one day during one of those stupid group therapy sessions we did with Paula. Right out of the blue, I started thinking about him, and something he’d said to me once, when we were in the library.”
“What?”
Jessie looked right at me then, and she looked a bit afraid. “It was one of the last times I ever saw him. He’d changed — dressed differently, talked differently. I didn’t like him as much anymore. And he said he’d read a book, this super-important book. He told me it had changed him forever.”
“What book?”
“I can’t remember the title,” she said. “I’d just thought it was bullshit at the time. Schoolboy bragging, you know.”
“What was it, Jess?”
“He said he was going to do something that would be remembered for a long time.” I felt her shiver under my arm. “He said he was going to kill a bunch of women one day for their sins. With a bomb.”
MAY 1
Like that Russian dissident said, David: the forest does not weep over one tree.
I am a dissident, like him. And I believe in the grim procession that is man’s history, that day in Portland — in and of itself — matters little. No real man weeps over that.
What matters, in the days to come, is that Portland be remembered for what it was: a clarion call. A day when men finally woke up and became men again.
Nietzsche, were he here, would celebrate it. He anticipated my quest. “I am a forest, and a night of dark trees,” he wrote. “But he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
Darkness lights the way, Mr. Dennison.
CHAPTER 21
“I’m takin’ enough of a risk staying in fuckin’ Portland and talkin’ to a couple cops in a motel room,” Tim Reid growled, deeply unhappy. “I need to get back home or my brethren are gonna start wonderin’ where I am and start askin’ questions.”
Theresa Laverty shook her head. “I don’t care what your brethren think. You’re not going anywhere yet. And you’re lucky to be in a motel room and not a jail cell, Mr. Reid.”
It was true. He should have been facing a judge on the weapons charge, and probably a few other things, but he was instead in a room at the very rear of the Holiday Inn across from the Portland mall. Chief Richard Chow had agreed to the unusual arrangement to protect Reid’s status as a CI — a confidential informant — and to also “facilitate loosening his tongue,” as Chow had put it.
But Reid’s tongue had not been loosened. Not yet.
Everything he had to say about the Klan so far, Laverty already knew. And anything he had to say about the Portland bombing could have come from the news media. More than once, he’d claimed to know something about the Portland bomber, but he hadn’t divulged anything yet. He wanted “garn-tees,” he said.
Laverty was getting impatient, but it was Savoie who spoke next. “We said we’d drop the weapons charge. We’re giving you a bus ticket home. What the fuck other guarantees do you want?”
Reid was on the floor, his back to the hotel’s shiny wall. “You’re hurtin’ my business by keepin’ me here,” he said. “I need compensation.”
“What business, Mr. Reid?” Laverty said. “You supposedly run a private security firm in Mobile. But we know for a fact that you don’t have a single client.”
Reid shook his head defiantly. “They all got scared away when the FBI started knockin’ on every door in town!” He pointed a finger at Laverty. “You guys were chasin’ the bomber all over town, and it freaked everyone out! And he wasn’t even there. Never was.”
“How would you know where he is, Mr. Reid?” Laverty said coolly. “And, for that matter, how are you so sure who he is?”
“I’m not sure,” Reid said, getting to his feet and walking across the room to his unmade bed. As he sat down, the mattress creaked under his weight. He was big boy. “But I got suspicions.”
“What suspicions?” Savoie prodded.
Reid examined his big hands, pondering. “Well, the bombin’ was pretty much a carbon copy of the one described in The Patriot Diaries,” he said, quieter. “Step by fuckin’ step.”
“We already know that,” Laverty said, unimpressed.
Reid looked at her. “Yeah,” he said coolly after a long pause. “But there ain’t too many copies of the Diaries floatin’ around.”
“We know that, too,” Laverty snapped. “So?”
“So,” he said. “So, the United Klans of America has its own printin’ press, you know.”
“We know.”
“And we are the only organization that’s got approval from McQuirter himself to sell the Diaries,” he said, head down, even quieter now. “We do a pretty good business sellin’ bound copies …”
Laverty’s eyes narrowed. She moved across the room and sat on the bed. “You keep track of who buys it?”
He looked amused. “Yep. Only a dozen or so copies sold in Maine and New Hampshire in the past three years or so.… Kept track, y’see.”
“Mr. Reid,” Laverty said, trying hard to hide her excitement, “we need those names.”
Reid reached across to the bedside table and retrieved a pen and some Holiday Inn stationary from the desk. He extended it to Laverty. “Write it down,” he said. “Gun charges dropped and a thousand bucks cash.”
“Mr. Reid …”
“Two thousand.”
Laverty snatched the paper from Reid, pulled her own Mont Blanc pen from her purse, and scribbled out the terms. “There,” she said, handing the paper back. “I’ll take you to my bank and get you the money personally, right now. But first, give us the names.”
Reid stood up slowly and reached around to the rear pocket of his Wranglers. He extracted a folded-up piece of paper that looked like it had been ripped from a ledger and handed it to her. “Had it on me all along,” he said, grinning as Laverty and Savoie scanned the handwritten list. “Now, let’s go get my money.”
Less than an hour later, the two cops dropped Reid back off at the Holiday Inn, told him to leave Portland, then sped off to meet with Chief Richard Chow.
CHAPTER 22
The day of Eddie’s funeral was sunny, and the big round stained-glass windows above the main doors at the Church of the Immaculate Conception were glittering with reds and greens and blues. Little bits of colored light were dancing on people’s faces inside, and it made me feel a bit better. It was pretty.
When Jessie and my dad and I arrived, the X Gang was already there, except X. Every one of them was wearing black, and they looked pretty miserable. Also present were FBI special agent Laverty and the local cop, Savoie. Lots of people from the Portland punk scene were there, too, along with
kids who’d known Eddie at Holy Cross or PAHS. His family and relatives were there, too, of course. They didn’t talk much to any of the punk kids.
When Patti and Sister Betty spotted us, they came right over and hugged me and said hi to my dad. Dad said he wanted to go and give his condolences to the Igglesdens and headed toward the front of the church.
“You look great, babe,” Sister Betty said. “You’ve gained weight!”
“Yeah, prison food’ll do that to you,” I said. I stepped back a little and gestured toward Jessie with a bow. “Patti, Betty, this is my friend Jessie. We met at Casco Bay.”
Patti looked a little uncertain, but Sister Betty stepped right up to Jessie. “I wish we were meeting on a happier day,” she said, shaking her hand. “But it’s great to meet any new friend of Kurt’s.”
Jessie smiled.
I looked around. “So …”
Patti shook her head. “He’s not here yet. Said he had to meet someone for a column he’s writing or something.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “So … how is he?”
“He hasn’t called you at Casco?” Sister Betty asked.
I shook my head.
“He’s X,” Patti said, reaching across and squeezing my arm. “You know how he is. Tall, dark, frustratingly mysterious.”
I laughed. “Yeah. Sounds like him.”
Sister Betty pointed to the big wooden doors of the church. “Speak of the devil.”
X was standing just outside the open doors, looking down at one of the little notepads he always carries. He hadn’t seen me yet.
“This is going to be interesting,” I said, then looked at Sister Betty. “Can you introduce Jessie to everyone while I go talk to him?”
“Sure,” she said, taking Jessie by the arm. “Good luck, babe.”
I started walking slowly toward X. I hadn’t seen him in months — not since Stiff had dropped the Nasties, not since I had taken off for Sanibel Island — but he looked exactly the same. Black Converse, skinny black jeans, black leather jacket, and today a plain black T-shirt. His long, wavy hair hung down, obscuring his face.
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