Born to Rock

  Behind the tortured lyrics and vitriolic rants of front man King Maggot, Purge united the disparate tribes of hardcore and heavy metal, forging the headbanger’s road map for years to come. For that reason, Melinda believed that the key moment in the modern history of punk was the formation of Purge by guitarist Neb Nezzer and King Maggot himself, born Marion X. McMurphy.

  The room became a vacuum as I wheezed every molecule of air into palpitating lungs.

  McMurphy.

  [4]

  A SILVER BALL RICOCHETING ACROSS the angled tabletop of a pinball machine, battered by flippers, jolted by bumpers, snared in traps, and just as suddenly sent careening around again. It was the image that taught Owen Stevenson vectors.

  It was also the story of my life.

  My first run-in with the flippers happened before I was born, but I wouldn’t feel the sting for another ten years. Fourth grade—the field trip to Montreal.

  You don’t need a passport to travel to Canada, but you have to be able to prove your citizenship. Mom dragged my birth certificate out of mothballs, and she was plenty weird about it. Dad too, although he covered it up a little better.

  Something didn’t make sense. My name was on the document, but my last name wasn’t Caraway. It was Davis, Mom’s maiden name. Even stranger, Dad wasn’t on there at all. On the line marked “Father” was typed—

  “Marion X. McMurphy?” I read. “Who’s that?”

  He had a look on his face like the gas company had started digging in the exact spot where he’d buried that dead body last year.

  He cleared his throat carefully. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. What if Canada won’t let me in? I’ll be the only kid who doesn’t get to go because there’s a mistake on my birth certificate.”

  Mom: “It’s not—technically—a mistake.”

  “Technically?” I turned to Dad. “You mean your name used to be Marion X. McMurphy? Did you get beat up a lot at school?”

  I was sent out of the room so my folks could have a heated argument in whispers. I couldn’t pick up every word, but Dad’s refrain was “Don’t you think it’s time we told him?”

  “Tell me what?” I called through the doorway.

  My father faced me. “Leo, I love you more than anything on this earth. I’ve loved you since you were a little baby—”

  “No!” my mother barked. “Over my dead body—”

  “He has the right to know,” Dad insisted. “He’ll have to know sooner or later.”

  “Then let it be later,” she pleaded. “Much later. Like when I’m dead.”

  To this day, I believe the only reason they finally did tell me was because I looked so cowed that even the truth couldn’t possibly be as awful as what was running around my terrified imagination.

  Dad took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say, son, is—I’m your father in every way but one. Biology. Your biological father was a man named McMurphy.”

  “What do you mean, biological father? What are you talking about?”

  My mother tried. “You know how babies are made, Leo. When a man and a woman—”

  “Oh, come on,” I interrupted, “I know all about sex—” And then it hit me. “You mean you had sex with Marion X. McMurphy?” I wheeled on my father. “Dad! Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “I didn’t know your mother when you were born,” he replied stiffly. “Or when you were—” His voice trailed off. “Haven’t you ever noticed that you’re ten, and your mother and I just celebrated our ninth anniversary?”

  I kept waiting for them to tell me it was all a joke—a sort of April Fools’ Day in October. They never did. Eventually, Dad went to lie down with a splitting headache. But Mom had been steeling herself for this confrontation for a long time. She was prepared to go all fifteen rounds.

  To her credit, she never once told me it was none of my business. It obviously very much was. But she refused to discuss word one about the man who had contributed fifty percent of my DNA. On that, she would not budge.

  So I went on the class trip, and McMurphy went with me, on my birth certificate and in my veins. Canadian immigration officials didn’t mind him. But I did.

  I wasn’t quite me anymore. Leo Caraway wanted to see St. Joseph’s Shrine and Old Montreal. It was McMurphy who acted up and spoiled the trip for everybody else.

  “Leo, what’s gotten into you?” my teacher exclaimed.

  She’d hit the nail right on the head. Something had gotten into me—or more precisely, someone. I’d try to be good. I’d try to be interested. And then I’d feel McMurphy rising.

  I don’t recall the specifics of my misbehavior, although it has become legend in the faculty room of my elementary school. At one point, I allegedly climbed over the railing of a freeway overpass and tap-danced on the concrete precipice while traffic zoomed by forty feet below. I was probably lucky not to have fallen to my death, which might explain why I’ve suppressed most of the details.

  Mrs. Novak sent my folks a letter after the field trip was over. For weeks I waited for Mom to bring up the subject. She never did. She knew exactly what had ailed me in Canada.

  “You’ve got to control yourself,” Dad told me.

  But he was wrong. I had to control McMurphy. I even called it that in my mind—The McMurphy Solution, or Project X. Of course, McMurphy shared that mind with me, which was kind of a security breach. That was the scariest part—were my strange impulses coming from my genetic hitchhiker, or were they my own, manufactured by paranoia, because I knew I wasn’t alone in there? After all, I’d been a pretty normal kid before I’d learned about McMurphy, hadn’t I? It became an obsessive game for me, replaying my entire life. Every misstep, broken rule, and temper tantrum—had that been him, hovering just below the radar screen?

  By high school, Mom had filled in a grand total of zero details regarding my birth father. But as I got older, I became savvy enough to bombard her with some alternate theories of the crime:

  “What was it, Mom? Soft music? Candlelight? Rohypnol in your ginger ale? Contraceptive failure? Beaker mix-up at the sperm bank?”

  My mother would have made a great secret agent. Even under torture, she would reveal absolutely nothing. If I pressed the issue, she’d pull a jigsaw puzzle out of a cabinet, and begin fitting pieces together. To watch her painstakingly assemble a reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, just to avoid telling me the story of my own origin, was maddening beyond belief.

  She’d murmur generalities while searching for the right corner piece. “I was very young then, Leo.” Or “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  I couldn’t let it lie. “Were you drunk? High? Feverish? Did you get bitten by a tsetse fly?”

  “There are no tsetse flies in Connecticut,” she informed me. “It was more like temporary insanity. Now, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s in the past for both of us.”

  “Was he a quarterback?” I persisted.

  And when she took out a 1,500-piece macro-puzzle of an extreme close-up of the inside of a pomegranate, I howled, “That’s why I need to know! I wouldn’t ask such a rude question! That had to come from the McMurphy side of me! Don’t you get it? I’m carrying around a time bomb, and I don’t know when it’s going to go off!”

  At least now I had the answer to that question—April of senior year, while reading “Poets of Rage” over the Internet.

  [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 su
ch 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”…