Born to Rock (3 page)

[5]

I CHECKED THE NAME AGAIN. SOMETIMES
your eyes play tricks on you.

Marion X. McMurphy.

If it had been just Marion McMurphy, I could have told myself it was a coincidence. But how many Marion X. McMurphys could there be?

One. My biological father. It was a bull's-eye, a lightning strike.

I'd always assumed I'd learn about my father in the long run. But it would be from Mom, and only when she had covered every tabletop and flat surface in our house with acres of jigsaw puzzles. Who ever thought that such pivotal, life-altering information would come from Melinda Rapaport's essay on punk rock?

For God's sake, the guy was
famous
! A legend, practically, if you went by Melinda. I scrolled through the pages. And what a legend! Convictions for destruction of property, drug possession, public indecency, civil disobedience, resisting arrest—everything but murder!

Melinda listed these crimes like they were his accomplishments, not his rap sheet. In the Old West, people like this were strung up from the nearest tree; in the '80s they became rock stars.

I'd always blamed my McMurphy DNA for every weird urge and character flaw, but that was just neurotic. Never did I seriously believe that I'd turn out to be so spectacularly
right
! I mean, a dad in the entertainment industry would have been kind of cool, but
this
was more like terrorism than show business. The blood of a notorious lowlife flowed through my veins.

I was Prince Maggot.

I went through every word of that essay, devouring the details about this rock star who had fathered me. Even in the rebellious antisocial world of punk, King Maggot was considered a bad boy. Those warning labels they put on CDs—all that started because of Purge!

Purge's idea of a cute publicity stunt was to call a press conference and then hold the reporters hostage for two days. Everyone thought it was staged, but the band did three months in jail for that. All the proceeds of their next album went into paying the fines and reimbursing the city of New York for the use of their SWAT team.

Once, when Purge suspected their lawyer might be skimming money from the band, King Maggot drove a three-thousand cc Harley through the plate glass window of the man's office, and threatened him with a samurai sword.

Dear Old Dad was more than a rock star. He was the cultural boogeyman of his time. When Purge came to town, parents double-locked their doors; church groups picketed the performance venues; even the Teamsters called in sick to avoid having to unload equipment for the hated band. The president himself called Purge un-American, which made sense except, on the other side of the Atlantic, they were considered un-British too. Norway turned them back at the border on their 1986 world tour. When their song “Bomb Mars Now” hit number one on the charts,
Billboard
magazine refused to print their name, leaving the first line of its famous Top 100 blank.

Purge broke up in 1990, when the angriest band in America had become too successful to be all that angry anymore. They were gone, but not forgotten. Scores of punks, rockers, ska bands, even some hip-hop artists listed Purge as their biggest influence. That included Melinda's current favorite group, the Stem Cells, a band so abundantly talented that she described them as “the next Sphincter 8.” High praise. “But,” she wrote, “there will never be another Purge.”

When I finished the essay, I wasn't done yet. Google came up with 175,000 hits on the keywords “King Maggot.” I thought of the years I'd spent
agonizing
over the identity of my stealth sire. If I'd bothered to do a simple Internet search, I'd have learned the truth on day one.

But who could have believed the guy would turn out to be an icon? My mother was Sally Average, puzzle fanatic, book-group member, Oprah fan. For her, cutting-edge music was Pink Floyd. Her only addiction was to frozen yogurt. Even when she worked, she still managed to be a stay-at-home mom—like when she got her real estate license and couldn't sell a single property. (She just enjoyed seeing the inside of other people's houses.)

Her and the punk Elvis?

I binged on information about Marion X. McMurphy, so long a mystery, and suddenly so vividly real. It was like witnessing a car accident—the details were awful, and yet I couldn't bring myself to look away.

Born in Wichita on July 23, 1961, Marion Xavier McMurphy attended Kansas State University, where he was a business major with hopes of becoming a CPA.

If that one sentence was divorced from everything else ever written about this man, I could almost have understood how he might be a relative of mine. This was a person who fathers a Young Republican.

Then I scrolled down to his picture, circa 1985, age twenty-four. It wasn't technically a Mohawk, but the head was shaved on the sides, and multicolored spikes marched up the crown. He had two black eyes—not the color. I mean shiners. Around his neck was a hangman's noose over a ripped white T-shirt, which featured a happy face with an ax buried mid-skull. He wore one earring—a dangling electric chair. The hand that held the microphone sported brass knuckles.

But his face—that was something else. The eyes bulged; the veins stood out. He seemed to be on the verge of biting the head off the mike and spitting it out at the audience. I had never seen such pure, unadulterated rage. If Purge was the angriest band in America, this was its angriest member on one of his very angriest days.

I looked for a sign—the barest hint—of family resemblance. Nothing. If I could have taken a special pill to put me into a homicidal fury, then maybe I would have had a basis of comparison. This looked more like a vicious dog than a human being.

I was so thoroughly transfixed by the image on the screen that I never noticed my parents had wandered upstairs. My mother walked straight into my room and spotted the picture on my computer screen.

It might have been the start of a very long conversation if she hadn't gasped and fainted dead away.

[6]

“YOU USED TO BE A
GROUPIE
?”

A vast underwater panorama of the Great Barrier Reef covered our kitchen table. Mom was hunting up and placing pieces with the concentration and driven intensity of a chess master. The puzzle was a megalith, with enough eye-poppingly microscopic fragments to assemble the reef one coral polyp at a time. She went for it the instant she came to, leading me to believe she'd bought it years ago, with exactly this day in mind.

“Not a groupie,” my nonbiological father said sharply. “You're talking about your
mother
, Leo.”

“Well, how else would she meet that—that guy?” I demanded. “Or was I conceived through the mail?”

Mom glanced up from a school of yellowtail long enough to say, “We're not discussing it.”

My McMurphy impulse—King Maggot impulse, I guess—was to sweep the entire puzzle onto the floor. Then she'd have no choice but to confront this head-on. I tried a different tack. I took a tiny piece, part of the lower jaw of a grouper, and set it in place.

That small act—working
with
her instead of against her—seemed to draw her attention from the puzzle. She seemed almost dazed, as if waking from a deep sleep.

Gently, I said, “You have to discuss it. It's
my
story. This is how I came to be.”

Dad backed me up. “Donna, the kid's seventeen. He's going to Harvard in the fall. It wasn't Immaculate Conception. He has the right to know.”

And there, leaning over a scene out of Jacques Cousteau, she told me. She looked like she was facing a firing squad, but I give her credit. She came clean.

“I thought we were going to the movies,” she mumbled, eyes averted. “But Cynthia, my friend, surprised me with tickets to see Purge at some club in New Haven.”

I was amazed. “You
like
that kind of music?”

“Well, not really. But it was right after King pulled that stunt with the Harley. Everybody was talking about Purge. Anyway, we were at the show, and one of the roadies invited us to a backstage party. And we met the band.” She looked at me, her eyes imploring me to understand. “I worked as a bank teller. My life was so boring. This man was a rock star, and he wanted to hang out with me.”

I was amazed. “So you were, like, King Maggot's girlfriend?”

She grimaced. “It was just that once. I had a lot to drink and there were—drugs. To tell you the truth, I don't even remember that much about it.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but she cut me off. “Can't you see what an awful memory this is for me, Leo? I could never regret having
you
—that's been the best thing in my life. But the way it happened—how can I talk about it without setting a bad example for you?”

So now I knew. After seven years of total, almost pathological preoccupation, the great enigma was over. And it didn't solve anything or make me feel any better.

That night was the first and last time I posted a comment on Melinda's blog. KafkaDreams had set up a message board for people to give their opinions of “Poets of Rage.” Mine was this:

It changed my life.

She'd never know how much.

Of course, I didn't realize it then, but I was another big step closer to Detective Sergeant Ogrodnick and the cavity search.

I'd been in music stores before. But when I stepped into the HMV at the Brickfield Mall, I felt everyone looking at me, as if I were naked or something. And when I found the rack devoted to Purge's discography, I half-expected somebody to say, “Checking out the Old Man's albums?”

But nobody could know who “the Old Man” was.

Still, going to the register carrying a CD entitled
Sewer-ride
made my cheeks hurt.

The cashier was impressed. “Oh, I love that one! The first time I heard it I shaved my head.”

A ringing endorsement.

I listened to it on a Discman, of course. The last thing Mom needed was to hear her old mistake screaming the house down. The next voice screaming the house down would have been hers.

There weren't a lot of punk Republicans, and
Sewer-ride
offered nothing to add me to the list. The guitars were muddy, loud, and relentlessly pounding. All I could get from the drums was that someone was beating them to a pulp. The vocal was a violent harangue—against what I'm not entirely sure. It was impossible to make out what King Maggot was bellowing. It was just too distorted, a cross between ranting and quacking.

The CD cover listed all the songs in order: “Bomb Mars Now,” “Number Two,” “The Supreme Court Makes Me Barf,” “Bleed Me”…

I couldn't connect the titles with the vocals, or even tell where one track stopped and the next began. Okay, I wasn't exactly a fan, but should it be so hard to understand what you're listening to?

I tried. Honestly I did. I set aside all my opinions about punk and approached it as an intellectual exercise. Nothing. No melody. No rhythm. I might just as well have headed to the nearest airport and listened to them revving up jet engines.

I stuck
Sewer-ride
so far in the back of my sock drawer that it was practically not in the room. Nothing was different. Finding out was just a hiccup; Project X was still on. Now that I knew I was harboring a McMurphy far worse than my wildest nightmares, it was more vital than ever to keep the guy under control.

I woke up at three o'clock in the morning. The CD was trying to interface with my McMurphy DNA. I could feel it out there, like a fax signal waiting for another fax to make a connection.

Tomorrow, I resolved, I would bury it in the backyard. If that didn't do the trick, I was prepared to carry it to Mordor and hurl it into the fires of Mount Doom.

The next day at lunch, I admitted something to Melinda that ordinarily I wouldn't have confessed under torture.

“I was listening to
Sewer-cide
last night—”

“Don't patronize me, Leo,” she interrupted with a snort.

“Hey,” I defended myself, “I listen to music.”

“Oh, yeah. Kenny Chesney and Zamfir, master of the pan flute.”

I bristled. “You're the one who's always calling me a musical Philistine. Forgive me for taking the initiative and trying something new.”

Owen was humming tunelessly and drumming on the cafeteria table with a plastic fork. I was so amazed to find that I recognized the un-melody that I actually sang a few words along with him: “Bomb Mars, now; nuke Mars now…”

Melinda was round-eyed. “I can't believe you got turned on to Purge! So? How much did you love it?”

I shrugged. “I didn't shave my head, if that's what you mean.”

“No, seriously. It's the greatest punk album of all time. Lacks some of the oomph of
Apocalypse Yesterfunk
, but more sophisticated musically.”

“Well—” I probed further, “what do they mean by bomb Mars? Even if we could get bombs to Mars, what would be the point? There's nobody there.”

“Don't you get it? We're always bombing somebody. Why not Mars? Nobody makes a statement like King!”

Being one of those statements, I couldn't really argue with her. But the songs still made no sense to me.

“What about ‘Number Two'? What's the message there?”

“That's my favorite,” Owen enthused. “We spend twelve years in school, but to the system, we're nothing but a bunch of test scores—Number Two pencil marks for computers to read.” That made sense for a guy who'd spent most of his life trying to outrun his own IQ test.

Melinda nodded. “Things like that get King nuts.”

“Seems to me just about everything gets King nuts,” I observed sourly.

“That's why Purge is so great,” she explained. “We think it and feel it, and there's King screaming it over a hundred thousand watts of raw power. It's like your words are pouring out of his mouth, and his rage is your rage. It blows your mind!”

Look, it was still just noise, and I couldn't make out a note of it. But the mere fact of knowing it was about something—
anything
—gave me some small comfort. It made King Maggot a little less of a wild beast.

McMurphy, that poltergeist in my veins, was a real person. In all the years that I'd been sharing a body with the guy, that thought had never once crossed my mind.