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Genesis (so say I)

Alabama-Pennsylvania

The Jet Plane

Adam

The Most Unbelievable Story Ever Told

“Whoa, slow the fuck down.”

The Book

1 Chronicles

2 Chronicles

Happiness

1 Kings

2 Kings

Psalms

Judy

THE CONSEQUENCES

Centralia

The Zombiephonics

Rome and the Visigoths

Poptart

She

Homecoming

Moments

Acts

Hope

The Cold War

Saul

The Reclamation

The Omelet

What Love Wrought

Meriwether

Notes and Loose Ends

Revelation

Even the smallest story is the culmination of a thousand others, and even the largest is but a fragment of a thousand more.

Lucius Gaius Decanus – The Dramatists

The experience itself is to submit to wonders and horrors so fantastic that in order to escape it becomes necessary for men to ignore their senses and devote their entire spirit to realizing a safe return. Only later in telling the tale will the survivors discover how their humanity was corrupted, destroyed, and ultimately regained.

Sir Timothy Allen Byrd – Journals, 1914-1916

THE CONVERGENCE

The Book of

Genesis (so say I)

YOUR AUTHOR CONSIDERS HIS CURIOSITY, COMPULSIONS, AND A BOOK MUCH OLDER AND GRANDER THAN HIS OWN.

The beginning: I was young, I was a sponge.

My mother made sure I had a proper upbringing in the Presbyterian Church. Although this fact has absolutely zero impact (as far as I can tell) on the people and events that I investigated and later chronicled on these pages, it does, I believe, help explain why I felt compelled to write this book.

When I say I was compelled I am referring to a compulsion of the same sort and magnitude as the pursuit of sex that interned my teenage years. The same sort that once seized me with the need to drink a Snapple bottle of a 50/50 iced tea/whiskey solution each day before noon and whatever I could keep down in the hours afterwards. It is why the word itself, compulsion, rubs sandpaper over my spine like a four-letter word. Its very definition is like something out of science fiction.

That is what possesses me, a mediocre writer at best, to write this book. Why this compulsion? I have a theory:

When I was nine years old I decided to read the Bible. The church my family attended had just given me a copy and since reading was my primary leisure activity you can probably connect the dots. I start at Genesis 1.1 on a Sunday afternoon. Nearly all of my Bible reading occurred on Sunday afternoons. It wasn’t so much that morning services put me in a biblical frame of mind but as a result of the lessons in Sunday school. Perhaps you attended Sunday school and remember those horrid readers that resembled coloring books with their large manila pages and illustrations that used the fewest black lines necessary to give the impression of a robed man standing in some formless desert. If not, you didn’t miss anything. The universal trait of all lapsed Christians who attended Sunday school in the ‘80s seems to be the memory of an illustrated cast of men (and they were almost always men) with eyes that were nothing more than blank ovals. They were empty, like zombies or pod people. Pages and pages of soulless biblical cast members have a cumulative effect on the young: they begin to suspect that perhaps the church has some sort of nefarious hidden agenda. Maybe that’s why church attendance is down. But that’s a theory unrelated to my compulsion.

My point has to do with those Sunday school readers and oval eyes. Both were empty. The stories we studied on Sunday mornings were not the same stories pondered at the pulpit for the adult congregation. We kids received the baby food equivalent.

Jesus died for our sins.

Well what does that mean?

It means God loves us.

Then why doesn’t God do anything on Earth now like He used to in the Bible?

God is always at work.

Then what is He doing now?

Go fetch the apple juice and crackers. It’s nearly snack time.

To find out the real story, to put a human spirit within those vacant eyes and finally feel the divine (and as of yet absent) touch of the Almighty, I had to read the Bible myself, yet even that failed to explain things as well as I had hoped.

Right away in Genesis I had some problems, all the usual complaints. Chapter one tells one creation story, chapter two tells another. Plus God seemed strangely fixated on animal sacrifices, global destruction, and unclean bodily discharges. Then there was God’s active role as a broker in the ancient slave trade. I admit I skipped large passages of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and to this day distrust anyone who claims they’ve read every word. The best parts of those books were reruns from Exodus. Upon completing Joshua, I limited the remainder my Old Testament readings to the exciting parts of Samuel, Kings, Job, Esther, and Daniel. Then I skipped ahead to the New Testament and the gospels. According to Matthew and Mark, Judas betrayed Jesus out of greed for thirty silver coins. The book of Luke claims that Judas betrayed Jesus because Satan momentarily possessed him. The book of John also sticks with the satanic possession story and briefly mentions Jesus directly telling Judas to betray him as if to acknowledge that Judas was simply fulfilling part of God’s plan. As is often the case, the inconsistencies of the Bible, as well as its frequent passages of plain silliness, fatally warped the Christian faith handed down to me. Or maybe I should take the point of view that the good book failed to fill a void. The big blank where the magnificent bearded fellow with all-seeing eyes, life-giving lips, and jumper cables of consciousness in his fingertips was supposed to be floating, waiting, watching, and knowing remained as empty as ever.

Now I must confess that not only am I a mediocre writer, I also possess a mediocre mind because it was years before I got the joke.

The Bible is a comedy, isn’t it?

It took no time at all to figure out what was behind my disappointment with the good book. It wasn’t God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit; the problem was people. All the people telling these stories, writing them down, translating them, collecting them, and preaching them, no matter how holy, were still human beings. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has an agenda. Simply put: people are imperfect, every single one of us. Find me an exception and I’ll show you God incarnate.

Happy hunting.

Whatever the real story was, I wasn’t going to find it within the twisted tales of the Bible. Two thousand years of Christianity had only succeeded in blurring four thousand years of its own heritage to the point where it had ceased to be divine and became nothing more than common human fallacy.

If only there had been a printing press made of kryptonite in the Garden of Eden to record for all time with perfect accuracy and clarity what transpired between Man, Woman, God, and Snake. If only there had been a tape recorder immune to eighteen-and-a-half-minute gaps at the Last Supper. If only I could know for sure what really happened.

Hence my compulsion.

The Children of Bert are new. They are a creation of the here and now. Before their circle and lineage grew too vast and chaotic to accurately chronicle, I found myself in the position to record it.

Still, I was not a witness to most of the events I recount in this book. However, as often as possible, the information I gained came from interviews with people who were witnesses. Sometimes I received conflicting accounts of events, and in most of those cases I adhered only to what all parties agreed upon. Other times I weighed my sources and decided which one I felt was most truthful and abided by that story.

Then there are stories, as in all faiths, that are passed on by people who never witnessed the events they recount but believe in them so entirely that to deny their truth would be to deny any purpose in life.

I am not, nor have I even been, a member of the Children of Bert, nor would I consider myself a completely impartial observer. I’ll refrain from stating whether I believe them to be followers of a divine spirit, a collection of crazies, or something in between. Draw your own conclusions as I have drawn mine.

I am the gatekeeper to the legacy that the Children of Bert themselves seem uninterested in precisely preserving. I am simply driven by a compulsion to discover and share the story of a fascinating group of people I can not fully comprehend yet find alluring and revolting in equal measures.

I hope my work here will serve their lore more faithfully and accurately than the Bible has served Christianity.

The Book of

Alabama-Pennsylvania

AN INTRODUCTION TO A PLACE, SOME OF ITS PEOPLE, AND AN ISOLATED INCIDENT.

My own initial encounter with the Children of Bert was early in December of 1996. I was twenty and played bass in an atrocious funk-inflected punk band based out of Philadelphia. We had regular gigs in city clubs, bars in the suburbs, and at the bevy of all-ages shows that thrived in the crumbling industrial towns that litter the eastern face of Pennsylvania like pockmarks. If you listened to the news in the ‘80s you probably heard many of these towns mentioned in conjunction with steel mill and factory closings; Allentown, Bethlehem, Coatesville, York, Reading, Pottstown, Pottsville, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Easton, Hazleton, and Phoenixville. These all-ages shows were usually held in rented halls of VFW posts, churches, community centers, or even lofts of enthusiasts in the music scene. Anyone with the necessary four or five dollars for admission could enjoy an afternoon and evening featuring the musical stylings of several local bands from town, one or two of the more popular regional bands, and a headlining act to close out the night. Ideally the headliner would be a band attempting to break nationally, out on tour and willing to perform for a few dollars, dinner, a chance to sell some CDs and T-shirts, and maybe a place to sleep.

The bands almost always fit somewhere within the punk spectrum ranging from pop-punk to hardcore. There were a few exceptions. Ska was permitted, although ska-inflected punk was looked upon more favorably. Heavy metal was strictly prohibited. Punk was about individuality and fancying yourself an intellectual while supporting the scene by functioning outside the system. Metal was about hairstyles.

1996 was only a few years after loudmouth politico James Carville observed that Pennsylvania was Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. My own experiences confirmed that the people living between the two cities bookending the state are a polite, considerate, and accommodating sort whose reputation is often tarnished by the relatively few, though highly visible, Redneck Assholes living among them. Heavy Metal was the music of the night for Alabama-Pennsylvania and it was the soundtrack for this particular redneck species’ lifestyle. This lifestyle often included membership in one of the many white power Klan or skinhead groups that further embarrass Pennsylvania. Their typical uniform was something not commonly seen since The Headbanger’s Ball was axed from MTV: engineer boots, acid washed jeans, black t-shirts, and (excepting the skinheads) long hair that was often permed and almost always cut in the mullet fashion – that is short in the front and sides while long in the back. Redneck Asshole couples often wore matching shirts, like identical Harley-Davidson shirts or Slayer shirts commemorating the same tour. Alabama-Pennsylvania was their territory and they knew it. It wasn’t unusual for Redneck Assholes to attend all-ages shows for no obvious purpose other than mocking the other attendees and music. When that got boring they’d start a fight.

The punk rock scene that was the catalyst for these all-ages shows was extremely welcoming and enormously supportive of its members. This may come as a surprise to those whose idea of punk rock is the nihilistic noise that arose in the late ‘70s. While some of the music still sounds the same, it has changed from being the music of the desperate and disaffected into the music of young educated outsiders who (more often than not) grew up with many more rungs below them on the economic ladder than above. Still the old punk uniform lived on with dyed hair, mohawks, dreadlocks, combat boots, leather jackets with chrome chains and spikes, and multiple piercing. The kids who embraced this look and lifestyle, especially in Alabama-Pennsylvania, did so at their own peril. While there was safety in numbers and a tightly knit punk community to lend support, this was right at the turning point when mainstream fashion began embracing punk sensibilities. MTV had only just begun to bring the cuddly punk of Green Day and the prickly-cuddly punk of Rancid into homes all over America. To dress punk in Alabama-Pennsylvania was to call attention to oneself (which was the entire point of the fashion) and risk the painful consequences (which were an unfortunate side-effect). Young punks were often accused of being godless, gay, communists, Satanists, perverts, child abusers, or Democrats. While this name-calling was mostly laughable and harmless (and considered by some recipients to be a badge of honor), it was the sticks and stones that manifested as fists and boot heels that were cause for concern. Because every trip to the mall, Wal-Mart, or DQ carried the risk of being beaten up, punk kids considered all-ages shows havens.

Like the born-again flock to revivals, punk kids flock to all-ages shows and organize their own. At each out-of-town show my band played we’d be greeted by friends we made our previous trip there. There was a good chance that no matter how far we had driven to play the show, a quarter of the audience had driven even further. Kids who put on their own shows in Pottstown would attend a show at a West Chester community center. They might have learned about it from a flyer they picked up at a show in Reading that was only organized after a show the same weekend in Kutztown had been canceled.

Legends sprout within every scene or sub-culture with such devout members and the Alabama-Pennsylvania punk scene was no exception. Consider the BINGO Records Halloween party. BINGO was a tiny label located in Reading that pressed mostly small batches of seven-inch records for punk bands. Del Lesniak, founder of BINGO and singer/guitarist of the Mighty Midgets, one of BINGO’s most popular bands, organized a Halloween show featuring BINGO’s roster of bands and invited everyone. Everyone, for once, actually meant everyone. Admission was free since Del figured he’d recoup the costs by selling BINGO seven-inches and t-shirts and the fact that he wasn’t paying any money to rent the site. Fliers for the party had been distributed at all-ages shows for a month, and Del even claimed that he convinced the girl who controlled the light board on the PECO building in Philly (the light board rings the top few stories of the Center City skyscraper) to flash an advertisement. The catch was that in order to get in you had to wear a costume.

There was also an unspoken catch: the reason Del paid $0.00 to rent the party site was because he had neither rented the site nor received a permit for the festivities. Party ground zero was an empty factory on the banks of the Schuylkill River in Reading. On the morning of the party Del arrived with a set of bolt cutters to “unlock” the gate. He then entered the factory through a broken window and opened a set of doors from the inside. Before the party began a 500-amp generator arrived along with several hundred yards of cables and distribution boxes to power the lights and sound system Del and his co-conspirators set up inside. The party was strictly BYOB and the attendees certainly did. According to later police estimates there were close to five hundred people in attendance, all in costume and various degrees of inebriation. Del estimates, and I agree, that there were closer to seven hundred. I know because I was there. Of course that makes me only one of thousands since the BINGO Halloween party has become something like a local Woodstock in the sense that everyone who wishes they had been there simply says they were.

My band Disco Fanclub was one of the groups performing. My costume was that of Mrs. John Murphy (a.k.a. Kim Deal) since we were performing that night in the guise of the late great band The Pixies. Of the ten or so acts scheduled, we were the third and final band to play before the police and fire departments arrived. The bonfire lit inside the factory underneath an air vent was big and bright enough to illuminate a fifty-yard stretch of Route 222 running past the factory. Dozens of motorists called the fire department. Their arrival, along with the police, set off a massive and frenzied exodus. People flocked to their cars and when the police finally blocked the road out about a hundred partiers, rather than be detained by the police, escaped the only way they could. In the forty-degree night they jumped into the Schuylkill River and swam to the safety on the other side while Police Officers watched in vain from the banks. Most of these wet escapees took refuge in a Dunkin Donuts on the other side of Route 222. They got warm and dry over coffee and donuts, and by all accounts never let their partying spirit diminish. There was one nervous moment around midnight when two Police Officers entered. The Officers immediately deduced why fifty-plus punk kids, most of whom were still damp and smelled suspiciously like the Schuylkill, were crowded into a Dunkin Donuts that was usually empty at that time of night. They told the punk kids they had nothing to worry about from them and to behave, dry off, and head home.

Del and the BINGO Records staff were arrested and later had to pay a fine. Supposedly they laughed their entire way through booking, especially during their mug shots. All of them were dressed as characters from Sesame Street: Big Bird, Oscar, Bert, and Ernie. Del claims that he still had yellow feathers attached to his head when photographed and that his profile shot could have hardly revealed anything more than his nose poking out from the plumage.

The entire affair was commemorated with t-shirts proclaiming The BINGO Halloween Bust across the image of a cop from the 1930s. Del sold out the first batch of five hundred before Christmas. Ever since their close encounter Del has organized fund raising events for the Reading Fire Department.

Equally as legendary as the BINGO Halloween Party was the incredible journey of Piston. They were a punk band from Norristown that sounded and dressed like The Clash circa 1979. Their records were popular in the underground punk scene across America and their local shows always packed venues with an eclectic mix of punk kids, teenybopper girls, and college students. Out of nowhere Piston was plucked from Alabama-Pennsylvania obscurity when they were hand picked by the reformed Misfits to open for them on their Shocking Return of the Misfits tour. It was a monthlong jaunt across Europe that saw them gigging and partying from London to Berlin to Paris to Barcelona. Big things were expected when they returned to the U.S. However, the new incarnation of the Misfits failed to generate much interest in America and lost any desire to feature a young up-and-coming act before their own tired and recycled performance. The Misfits dropped Piston, who was unable to convince anyone else to pick them up. Within months they were back on the all-ages show circuit to the delight of punk kids all over Alabama-Pennsylvania. When they broke up a year later to move on with their lives (wives, kids, and new jobs teaching history to high school kids who still moshed to their records) they played a final free show at LOVE Park in Center City Philadelphia. Unlike Del’s show, this one had a permit so the police were on hand to serve the best interests of the band and the hundreds of spectators.

Then there were individual legends like Kevin Utz from the Zombiephonics. The Zombiephonics were an anomaly on the scene. First, they were from Oklahoma City. Second, they played metal, although their sound wasn’t typical of the genre. Kevin classified it as musical evil, and their look was something out of a comic book. Kevin usually boasted a dyed green crew cut that was rarely seen because of the knit cap he wore with flames stitched on the sides. A beard jutted from his chin into two points that he named Beelzebub and Cain. A typical Zombiephonics’ performance included lively banter between songs by Beelzebub and Cain (done by Kevin in two distinct high-pitched voice) and all three of them debated whether or not Kevin should perform oral sex on the female members of Veruca Salt and Blonde Redhead, Special Agent Scully, Ginger Spice, or whoever else struck his fancy at that particular moment. His standard attire was a black leather jacket, a shirt for his favorite musical of all time, The Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, black jeans, and black boots with soles thick enough to give his 5’ 7” frame an extra two inches. He played furiously intricate guitar lines at such speeds that they were nearly impossible to decipher, and didn’t sing so much as scream the lyrics to “My Soul Mate is a Blood Sucking Leech” and “Incestuous Accident.” Backing him was Mud, a talented bassist who was as tall as Kevin was short, enjoyed wearing tights, and hardly ever spoke. Kevin and Mud were never able to retain a drummer any longer than a few months at a time but always managed to find a way to stay on the road. They had set out the day after they graduated from high school in 1994 and never intended to stop.

Kevin said that the scene in Alabama-Pennsylvania was the most giving and supportive in the entire country and he could be happy playing there for eternity. He also liked the fact that Utz potato chips were from Pennsylvania and took to claiming that he was heir to the Utz fortune. When he wrote to the Utz Company to inquire whether they would sponsor the Zombiephonics’ perpetual tour he received a polite letter passing on the opportunity. Included with the letter were several complimentary Utz t-shirts that more than satisfied Kevin since they were what he was after in the first place.

The local punk kids embraced the Zombiephonics for obvious reasons. Their music was fun and silly, just like Kevin himself. They would swing through Pennsylvania about twice a year and were deluged with invitations to play all-ages shows and places to spend a night or two. They traveled the country in a gray van called the Crypt Machine that had flames painted on the sides, a DayGlo green skull on the back, and a pirate flag on the hood. The band’s dirty secret was that the stereo system in the Crypt Machine usually played CDs by Queen, ABBA, and obscurities like Nino Rota film scores. Just the arrival of the Crypt Machine in the parking lot before a show would spark applause because everyone who had seen their act before knew that the Zombiephonics, Kevin especially, were all about fun.

It wasn’t all loud, obnoxious, or cynical fun either. Kevin, once you realized his appearance was a joke that only made complete sense to him, was one of those rare individuals who were nearly impossible to dislike. After a single meeting he could pick you out of a crowd in a different city months later (picking him out was hardly a challenge), greet you by name and give you a hug while requesting that you “share the love.” When the cops were leading Del and some others out in handcuffs from the BINGO Halloween party (the Zombiephonics were about to play when the bust went down), Kevin, dressed and speaking like Bela Lugosi, took the mike and asked everyone in attendance to give a round of applause to Del and Co. for a fun night, and to the cops and firemen as well for looking out for everyone. He later sent thank you notes to the Reading Police and Fire Departments for handling the entire incident with such professionalism, and included some Hershey’s Kisses (Hershey being another Alabama-Pennsylvania institution). Once at a show in Allentown, I saw him spend half an hour folding some fliers into an intricate origami floral arrangement that he gave to Cynthia Lieberman, a Lehigh University student who organized many of the local shows. They drove off together in the Crypt Machine and didn’t return until after the show was over. The story Cynthia told, that Kevin evaded her advances and instead treated her to frozen yogurt (insisting she receive extra rainbow sprinkles), drew a smiling devil’s head on her back with scented magic markers, and ended their brief encounter with a single kiss, only made him more desirable to the girls in the scene and seem all the more of an intriguing enigma to the guys.

As Kevin told me, if you’re in the scene then you have a home in every town. That is true to the extent that a highly visible but rarely seen secret society of punk kids thrives all across the country with chapters in every community that houses outsiders with a taste for loud music. On a snowy night in early December of 1996, the members of Disco Fanclub and myself thought we were entering another outpost of this extended family. Instead we witnessed a dysfunctional earthquake. There were other witnesses that night besides the family members themselves. There were college students, local Redneck Assholes, and several Children of Bert. I’m not claiming that the Children of Bert were responsible for the chief tragedy of the night, just that they were in attendance. They were responsible for some of the night’s smaller sideshows that had fallouts of their own.

East Stroudsburg is a mid-sized town off Interstate 80 right in the middle of Pennsylvania’s border with New Jersey. It is also home to East Stroudsburg University and its five thousand students. I didn’t see the University but I imagine that in 1996 it was the economic engine keeping East Stroudsburg alive. Back then, on a dismal winter night, I only saw a dark main street with a railroad crossing, a doughnut place that served awful coffee, and an old restaurant where the all-ages show was held. From what I could tell the restaurant had been closed for some time. Access was limited to a large hall, the sort used for bar mitzvah and wedding receptions. When we entered – Pod (with Michelle, his ever-present girlfriend), Tork, Hi Rise, and myself – the dim lights and low ceilings immediately gave me a bad vibe. Whoever had organized the show hadn’t been able to find all of the light switches. What few lights were on were dimmed down to the point they gave off an orange-brown glow that hung like an extension of the ceiling. They never got any brighter.

The mood for the entire night was established in the pit while the first band played. The pit is the roughly circular space formed in front of the stage by the moshers. Moshing is a form of slamdancing that ranges from energetic bouncing to violent mayhem featuring unabashed hitting and kicking. All-ages shows, where audiences are too small to contain enough bad apples to turn a pit violent, are usually marked by playful moshing where dancers joyfully leap about the pit in time to the music. If two people happen to collide they simply bounce off each other and no one gets hurt.

There were two groups that night intent on turning the pit violent. The first was a pack of Redneck Assholes who made a point of telling everyone from out of town that they weren’t welcome in East Stroudsburg. Since there were barely any townies in attendance, the Redneck Assholes didn’t make many friends and were told more than a few times that they could keep East Stroudsburg. The Redneck Assholes who did venture to the pit didn’t actually mosh. Instead they stood along the perimeter and threw punches at whoever came within arm’s length.

The other problem group was the Rat Trap gang from West Philly. They were a throwback to the punks of yore who dressed mean, talked mean, and acted mean. They were all about leather, chrome chains, music played at high decibels, and kicking ass. Previous encounters with the Rat Trap gang had taught me to give them a wide berth and keep an eye on my equipment at all times. There were about ten of them that night, apparently there to see four of their members perform in the band Fist Fuck, but one could easily get the impression that their only agenda was to inflict pain on punk kids and college students looking for a good time.

The Rat Trap gang took their name from their home, which earned its title from the abundance of rats that lived in the basement and infiltrated the house from its abandoned neighbors. It was a row house on Willows Avenue that deserved to be condemned where the gang smoked pot, snorted coke, played punk rock day and night, and even hung up a sign on the porch that screamed The Rat Trap in bright yellow letters. It wasn’t long before the sign also boasted some bullet holes.

The Rat Trap gang was violent and had even been banned from several clubs in the city for starting fights, but their reputation mainly stemmed from the location of the Rat Trap. That particular section of West Philly was ripe with gangs, drugs, and shootings, and the Rat Trap members were doubtlessly the only white people living in the area. In the spring of 1996, two years after the Rat Trap had been established, a basehead armed with a pistol forced his way inside looking for cash, drugs, and easy items to pawn. Since it was close to three in the morning, just about everyone residing in the Rat Trap was wide awake and downstairs having a good time watching The Simpsons on tape and passing a water bong. The basehead held them at gunpoint and proved he meant business by firing two shots into the ceiling. Chunks of the ceiling came crumbling and grazed the nervous basehead’s back, frightening him to such a degree that he fired a third shot into his own leg. He dropped the gun, collapsed to the floor, and the Rat Trap gang fell upon him. This story cemented the Rat Trap gang’s reputation as ass-kickers, especially after key elements of the story began to change. The version most people in the scene heard was that Bad Aaron, the singer for Fist Fuck, attacked the basehead after two shots were fired point blank at his head and missed by mere millimeters. Bad Aaron won the fight for the gun and personally put the bullet in the basehead’s leg before the rest of the Rat Trap gang got busy with the beat down. Regardless of whether or not the story had been embellished by its participants, the fact was that immediately afterwards the Rat Trap gang began arming themselves.

The Rat Trap gang ruled the pit that night. Anyone else who entered it left limping or bleeding. Between them and the Redneck Assholes the entire show felt like an abortion. Most of the college students left within an hour. The rest of the punk kids hung back from the pit or sat down in the rear of the hall. When it came time for Disco Fanclub to play I was so disgusted by what I saw that I cut our set short after three songs. As we broke down our equipment we received jeers from the Redneck Assholes and taunts from the Rat Trap gang.

I wanted to leave immediately but the rest of the band was eager to see the Fizzlemen, the headlining band, perform. It wasn’t long into the next band’s set that the inevitable happened: a fight broke out between the Rat Trap gang and the Redneck Assholes. The music came to an abrupt stop while twenty men and women went at each other like medieval warriors. They looked like a mass of flailing limbs without bodies caught up in a hurricane. I was convinced that the fight would only end after a Redneck Asshole pulled a knife, thereby prompting a Rat Trap member to pull a gun. I grabbed my bass and was about to tell the other members of Disco Fanclub that we were leaving, no delay, no arguments, when the impossible happened. The center of the hurricane became suddenly still. The calm permeated outward and the limbs of fighters regained their bodies. As they moved apart I was able to see who was at the center of them. It was man who couldn’t have been any older than I was. He looked incredibly slight and skinny compared to the brawlers around him, and was speaking with Bad Aaron and one of the Redneck Assholes. They were too far away for me to hear what he was saying but I inferred he had somehow brokered a truce. I couldn’t imagine who he was or how he had managed to stop the fight, but thanks to him the music continued and the show went on.

The Rat Trap gang and the Redneck Assholes retreated to opposite sides of the hall and the punk kids reclaimed the area in front of the stage. That’s when I noticed the mystery man had a crew of his own. They were all dressed in khaki colored pants and shirts, probably Dickies, and looked like a platoon of janitors. Some of them wore army surplus jackets over their bland uniforms. There were about a half dozen in all, and they had managed to insert someone into just about every clique at the show. The mystery man was hanging with the Rat Trap gang while a couple who looked like twins because of their identical clothes and short dark hair were across the room laughing with the Redneck Assholes.

Then there was a girl who couldn’t have been any older than eighteen. Her clothes were a few sizes too large and her hair was flattened like it hadn’t been washed in a while. Despite this she managed to look cute thanks to her big eyes and wide smile. I was sitting alone at a table in one of the darker areas of the hall when she sat beside me, and even though events of the evening had put me in a foul mood I tried to be polite and gave her a half-nod-half-mumbled hello. She responded with a fast barrage of questions in the tenor of a curious five-year-old.

Why was I called Zelda?

Because my woeful attempts at danceable bass-lines all sounded like the bass melodies from old Nintendo adventure games. (But never mind that; who had told her my name?)

Why wasn’t I hanging out with my friends?

I didn’t feel like it and besides, my band-mates were hardly my best friends.

Did I feel lonely?

I was too busy to be lonely.

Then she asked a question that until that moment I was always anxious to hear.

“Wanna screw?”

First response: huh? Second response: still, huh? Her cuteness vanished. Maybe it was my lapsed-Presbyterian guilt (it’s not Catholic guilt, but it’s something and it was there). I realized I was smiling despite feeling repulsed. Plus she looked dirty, as in physically unclean, not figuratively or spiritually, with dark grime under every fingernail, matted hair, and spots of dried mud on one sleeve.

She rephrased her question, emphasizing every syllable the way people do when talking to someone who doesn’t know the language. “Do you want to have sex?”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Betty.”

“You’re the first Betty I’ve ever met, but no thanks.”

“It’ll be fun.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Why do you want to be lonely?”

“I told you, I’m not. Maybe I just don’t like screwing little girls who are so clueless they can’t even operate a bar of soap.”

She left without another word. Ten seconds later she sat down beside Hi Rise.

Across the room I noticed the mystery man had left the Rat Trap gang and was talking with Pod’s girlfriend Michelle. Cutting across my field of vision were Hi Rise and Betty going into the bathroom together. Apparently his standards weren’t as strict as mine. The entire evening was turning into a lame rock n’ roll cliché. I went outside and smoked cigarettes in the van until I couldn’t stand the cold any longer.

When I returned inside Fist Fuck were on stage blaring their hardcore punk. The song ended and Bad Aaron dedicated their next song to a certain segment of the audience.

“This one is for the bumblefuck pussies who need their faggot friend to save their ass when things get tough.”

Apparently the honeymoon of the Rat Trap gang and mystery man had ended and now they were looking to get things started with Redneck Assholes again. I didn’t see the mystery man or anyone from the platoon of janitors, but the Redneck Assholes were in front of the stage and hollered back at Bad Aaron.

“Fuck you. Go back to Philly and suck nigger cock. Philly faggots.”

The sound system blasted Bad Aaron’s voice above all others. “That’s right, we’re from West Philly where the rents are cheap and you play for keeps.”

Fist Fuck launched into their next song and the pit swirled around the pissed Redneck Assholes who continued to yell at the stage. Bad Aaron grabbed the microphone stand, lifted it above his head and threw it like a javelin into the crowd. It sailed into the pack of Redneck Assholes whom I assumed were the intended target. The heavy round disc that weighed down the bottom of the stand landed a bull’s-eye on the face of a woman decked in denim with puffed up bangs and a long greasy mane hanging down past her shoulders. I don’t know what it did to her, but I imagine it could have broken her nose, cracked her skull, shattered her jaw, or even knocked her unconscious.

Here’s what I know did happen:

The punk kids scattered and the Rat Trap gang re-engaged the Redneck Assholes. The previous hurricane had simply been a pissing match; this one was a quest for blood. The microphone had come loose from the stand while in flight and now lay on the floor. As I fled with the rest of Disco Fanclub, the P.A. system woofed out the sound of boots stomping on the mike. Then someone fell on top of it and there were deep thumps of kicking, each one accompanied by a tortured groan. Just as I got outside there was a quick burst of gunfire and more screaming.

We drove back to Philadelphia in silence minus one passenger. Where was Michelle? Pod refused to say, only that it was her decision not to be with us. Hi Rise was also mute about his encounter with Betty.

It turned out Michelle had gone off with the mystery man. She returned a few days later with nothing to say about where she had been or what had transpired.

My involvement in the Alabama-Pennsylvania punk scene ended shortly thereafter. That night in East Stroudsburg destroyed whatever romantic notions I had left for the lifestyle, and the joy of playing music before an audience no longer prevailed over my distaste for punk rock.

So I drifted.

In June of 2002 I returned to Philadelphia and soon ran into Hi Rise. We reminisced about our musical adventures and eventually the show in East Stroudsburg came up. I recalled the Rat Trap gang, the Redneck Assholes, and the nastiness of the entire evening. The gunfire was what I best remembered from that night, but what remained most vivid for Hi Rise was his encounter with Betty. Up until that moment I had completely forgotten about the platoon of janitors. Now Betty’s unexpected proposition called out from my memory. Hi Rise had never forgotten it.

“At first I thought it was the greatest thing ever,” he told me. “I mean, I had a hard enough time just talking to girls back then so there was no way I about to pass this up. Sex, right here, right now, no strings.” But once she took him in the bathroom, pressed against him and pushed down her pants, his enthusiasm disappeared. He couldn’t explain why exactly, only that he felt she wanted something more from him than just sex. Whatever her motivation may have been, Hi Rise got freaked and ran out on her.

“There was that whole group of them,” he went on. “And it turned out Pod’s girlfriend screwed one of them. That what a mess. The whole thing was messed.”

“Definitely fucked up,” I agreed.

“What’s really fucked up is that I came so close to fucking that girl and one of them – maybe even her, I don’t know – but one of them killed Kevin Utz.”

There was a disconnect in my head.

I understood what Hi Rise was saying and believed him immediately, but I was suddenly awash in a hundred moments I had spent with Kevin and a thousand more stories I had heard about him. The collected memories of my time in the scene, still viewed through an amber filter despite my final disappointments, were awakened as if to counter the information Hi Rise was giving me.

It had happened three years before, in 1999, when I was living in Vancouver, Canada, far away from happenings in Alabama-Pennsylvania.

Hi Rise explained it to me. The platoon of janitors was part of a larger crew that used to pop up at all-ages shows. Occasionally some of them performed an acoustic set of country songs that no one liked. Some on the scene considered them nomads, like modern gypsies. Others said they were wacked out hippies. Then there was the notion that they were just plain bums. Hi Rise saw them a few more times and always kept his distance. Two minutes with Betty was his limit. When the Zombiephonics swept across Alabama-Pennsylvania that fall, Kevin had a girl with him who was somehow hooked up with this strange crew. Hi Rise didn’t know the whole story but said Del Lesniak received a call late one night from Mud. He and the current drummer for the Zombiephonics were calling from a Philly police station looking for a place to stay. Del asked them if anything was wrong. Mud said that the two of them had ditched the Crypt Machine when they ran for their lives from the girl and the vagabond crew.

The Crypt Machine was later found across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey with Kevin’s body inside. For a few months there were a whole lot of people looking for Kevin’s girl and those country-singing nomadic janitors, but they were never found. They certainly didn’t show up at any more all-ages shows.

That night I found my old little black book of names, numbers, and addresses. Although the ink had faded, the number Kevin had given me where he could be reached in Oklahoma City was still legible. I dialed and his father answered. I introduced myself and explained that I had only just learned about Kevin. I hoped I wasn’t broaching a subject his father would prefer to avoid but I had to offer, however belatedly, my sympathy and tell him just how loving and caring I knew his son to be. His father thanked me and I apologized for calling completely out of the blue and so long after the fact; I simply hadn’t known. Mr. Utz said not to worry myself and shared with me the facts he had learned regarding his son’s death.

In the course of our conversation I learned the names Megan Smith and the Children of Bert.

The Book of

The Jet Plane

HOW THE CHILDREN OF THE MAIN LINE MET THE CHILDREN OF BERT. THE STRANGE CONJUNCTION OF FEAR, SEX, DESIRE, PUNK ROCK, AND A YOUNG WOMAN NAMED AMY BAYWELL. THE CLAIMING OF A SON.

On June 24, 1996, her eighteenth birthday, Amy Baywell received a phone call from Adam Fountain. He had just returned from a weekend orientation session for incoming freshmen at Ursinus College. “It was amazing, Aim,” he gushed. “There are some of the coolest people there. I’m so psyched for the fall.”

They had graduated from high school only the weekend before, Amy from Vincent Academy, Adam from its counterpart The Tericol School. Both were located on the Main Line, an old money community in suburban Philadelphia that has one of the highest concentrations of academic institutions in the country. In the course of a ten-minute drive one can see Villanova University, Bryn Mawr College, Rosemont College, Haverford College, Harcum College, Eastern College, Cabrini College, and The Valley Forge Military Academy and College; prestigious private secondary schools like the Notre Dame Academy for Girls, The Baldwin School, The Miller School, Vincent Academy and The Tericol School; and countless other learning institutions for the offspring of the rich.

Cross City Avenue into Philadelphia and you’ll find Saint Joseph’s University. Keep going and you’ll arrive at über-urban Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania. All three are fine institutions but for the children of the Main Line they are second-tier schools. Harvard, Yale and Princeton are their primary targets. Brown is another top choice, and over the years, as even old money flirts with bohemia, Vassar experienced resurgence in popularity after its star fell when it went co-educational. For those youngsters who chose to study engineering as opposed to something as regal as Business Administration, Pre-Law, or Pre-Med, Drexel was suitable runner up for MIT. Penn, since it was Ivy League, was an acceptable alternative to most anywhere else. Saint Josephs… well, there weren’t many Catholics on the Main Line. (Villanova and St. Joseph’s were points of pride only when their basketball teams were winning.) The Presbyterian Churches were filled every Sunday and tended by Pastors who specialized in comforting the comfortable while prodding them to consider the world across City Avenue.

Amy wasn’t about to attend any of the primary targets and hadn’t even considered their local alternatives because of the fact they were located on the other side of City Avenue. She was first to admit that her shyness inhibited her potential and enjoyment of life. It wasn’t just shyness but actual fear of just about everything. If there was a situation she hadn’t been in before, it scared her. Meeting someone new meant butterflies. Speaking before an audience made her throat dry up to the point where it was nearly impossible to speak. Going somewhere she had never been before made her sweat, and if she had to go somewhere in the city, in The City where people could smell her fear and money, she would start shaking. A few months earlier she had attempted to be brave and drove to the Academy of Music in Center City to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra. By the time she parked her father’s Volvo her stomach was cramped. She spent the entire performance slightly hunched over because of the pain.

Most young adults who emerge from the premier secondary schools of the Main Line are charged by voracious curiosity, finely honed intellects, and vast self-confidence. After all, they are the children of the elite for whom little, if anything, was ever denied. Twelve years of schooling taught them that the world was theirs for the taking. As with everything else, there were some exceptions. Due to some genetic quirks, some of them just weren’t as smart as the rest. Others, like Amy, whether due to genetics or environment, just didn’t have the stomach for much of anything in life.

That was why she was so interested in what Adam had to say about his two days and one night at Ursinus. Like Amy, he was plagued by an irrational fear of everything, only his came in cycles. He’d go for months when everything was just fine, and then in an instant he’d suffer an invisible attack. During these bouts of dread and panic, which sometimes lasted weeks, Adam could barely do anything at all. He’d maintain the appearances of his regular routine of school and academic activities without actually accomplishing anything. His schoolwork would freefall from straight A’s to zero. Finally during his junior year of high school, after an attack dragged on into its second month, his parents took him out of school and placed him in an institution. Amy never got the details (she never asked and Adam never offered), and when he returned home sixty days later he seemed a more timid person. Yet he never had another attack.

This new timid disposition made Amy all the more willing to take Adam into her confidence since she had always considered herself timid. Timid and bright. That was why she hadn’t been accepted to any of the primary targets, she told Adam, because she was timid and bright. Those schools weren’t just looking for the brightest but for those who charged at life like a bull on steroids. Timid and bright was a combination that evoked pity. She was attending Ithaca College in the fall because it took pity on the pitiful.

Adam always offered her encouragement without ever hinting at the state of his own internal life. He admitted that the top-tier schools were beyond his reach because of the mud puddle his grades swam in his junior year, and would instead attend Ursinus College where he planned to major in English and minor in Religion and Philosophy. All Amy knew about Ursinus was that it was a thirty-minute drive away on the Alabama fringe of the state. Adam told her Ursinus was small and safe, and seemed as hesitant about the whole college experience as she was.

Now he was going on and on about registering for classes and the dormitory he was going to live in. Amy thought about the inevitability of her own course selection and dorm room and felt queasy. She had spent the past few months giving minimal consideration to what the fall held in store for her, and here was Adam churning those murky waters. Then he said something she never expected. “You want to come to a show with me?”

She found the right tone to let him know that she was curious, but not curious enough to actually accompany him wherever he planned on going. “What kind of show?”

“A rock show with bands. Local bands mostly. Punk bands.”

“Since when were we punk rockers?”

“Since next weekend.”

“That makes such little sense it makes negative sense.”

“Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

He explained that during his weekend at Ursinus he had met his future roommate Jared Bendrix, a West Chester Henderson High School graduate and bass player for The Pawns Unleashed. The band had just booked their first gig at an all-ages show in Pottstown, a forty-minute drive away, and Jared invited Adam to come.

“No pressure, Amy. If you don’t want to go, that’s cool.”

“I’ll do it.”

At first she thought she agreed to go with him because of how excited and unafraid he sounded. Going to a punk show would be an adventure for both of them and might even, as he said, be fun (although she had no idea how). It might even be a breakthrough for her, the first barrier to bust through in her quest to dismantle the wall of trepidation inside her.

A little while later she wondered if it she had agreed to go because of the way he said her name. He never called her Amy. To him she was always Aim. He even claimed to brush his teeth with Aim toothpaste so that the phonetically identical dentifrice would remind him of her every morning and night. Amy sounded almost formal coming from his mouth. Her name was a distancing devise when he said it like that. Perhaps it was his first act in dissolving their friendship. Despite being the kindest and most considerate person she knew, Amy constantly feared that Adam was only a moment away from cutting her off because of a particular disparity between them.

Simply put, Adam was undeniably gorgeous by most anyone’s standards while Amy, according to popular opinion, was undeniably not. Because of his tall thin frame and mop of curly blond hair, Adam resembled a reed of Timothy grass. His face was smooth and pale, and Amy couldn’t ever remember spotting a pimple on it. Despite his awkward social graces, Adam was popular with the girls at Vincent Academy, none of whom could fathom why the dashing boy from the school across the street wanted anything to do with the frigate Amy Baywell who was built like a wrestler. She wasn’t fat or particularly tall, just big. Her shoulders were wide, her arms long, and her legs thick like a boy’s. She supposed that if Adam had her breasts he’d be a more attractive woman than she could ever be. Like him, she also had a mop of curly hair, only hers was dark and forever beyond her control. Rather than give her only friend yet another excuse to dump her, she agreed to accompany him. She wondered if Adam could see so well inside her to be so manipulative.

That Saturday morning Lester and Lorraine Fountain, Adam’s parents, gave him permission to drive Lorraine’s Chrysler Concorde to the show in Pottstown. Around noon Adam said goodbye and that he might not arrive home until late. He backed the Chrysler down the driveway and left his home in Wynnewood with its cathedral-like stone arches, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and pointed metal fence that circled the grassy yard with its pink and purple blooming rhododendrons and oak trees shading a tennis court. After leaving his native cluster of mansions he followed Lancaster Avenue, the main artery of the Main Line, for a minute or two. If he had been driving east he would have quickly crossed City Avenue into Philadelphia. He’d pass through the Overbrook section, with its slopes of compact stone row houses resembling a Welsh mining town, and the monstrous Overbrook High School at the top of a hill. On the other side of the hill, where the streets intersected at unpredictable angles, there were empty store fronts, old movie theaters used as churches by immigrants from the Caribbean, and a just few more minutes down Lancaster, across Girard Avenue, the open air drug markets were in business offering crack, angel dust, and various grades of heroin for sniffing or shooting.

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