Martin and the New Flock

Martin Sachs, on the face of it, wasn't the likeliest choice to lead the movement. This was due in large part to the fact that he had no designs on leadership whatsoever.

"I thought it was funny," he told Hannah Young of the Times. "But I wasn't going to stop them. People want to follow me around, they can follow me around. It's a free country."

But it was just that outlook that the Times extolled. And in successive newspapers and magazines across the country, Martin Sachs was nailed with such glowing terms as "patriotic visionary," "ambassador of grace" and "postmodern messiah."

"Well, what I really wanted was to be a folk singer," said Martin, speaking of the ambition he'd had at eighteen. "I didn't feel I would be one until I'd lived a certain amount, wrote a certain number of songs, found some resonance with regular folks." The Times reported that Martin Sachs's greatest goal in life was "authenticity." When asked by Young whether he thought he'd managed to achieve that, Martin replied, "To some degree."

But to whatever degree his other goals had been achieved, by the summer of 2031 there was no doubt about one of them; his songs had gone above and beyond in resonating with his audience. On the dusty night of June 17th, Martin could be found with his feet on the asphalt of a Hoboken parking lot and his narrow butt enthroned in the passenger's seat of his white 2008 Honda Civic. The duct-tape-wrapped Fender guitar he'd picked out of twelve at a pawnshop when he first hit the road was angled into the passenger compartment, and Martin was hunched over it as usual, his brown face invisible in the shadow cast by the door of the vehicle.

And spread out in amphitheater style around him was an arc of ninety to a hundred other cars, all makes and models, dusty, rusty and gleaming-new. Some also had their doors open. Some were empty, their owners now seated on the asphalt in front of Martin. One of Martin's faithful, a fat white man from North Carolina named Jackson, careened into the parking lot in a dented Ford and met the commencement of the night's music session with a throaty "Hallelujah!" The young couple in the Lexus... who weren't regulars, at least not yet... glanced at each other and grinned.

This was the new flock, and Martin was the new shepherd. This was the man Reverend Henley called "the false prophet," the artist the Village Voice decreed was "significant, but not necessarily good" and the subject Hannah Young ultimately concluded was a "just another fortysomething American male, caught in the right place at the wrong time."

Who was Martin Sachs? If religion is the opiate of the masses, then Martin was the methadone. And in those years, when God and all the saints above turned their backs on mankind, no sermon could heal the agony of the withdrawl... but some of the new shepherds could alleviate it, a little. Martin was one.