NOT AN AMERICAN
By Stanley W Rogouski
Text copyright @ 2015 Stanley W Rogouski
All Rights Reserved
To Shannone Rhea Morgan, Stephen Rogouski, and the baristas at the Westfield, NJ Starbucks
Preface
I suppose one reason for a preface is to sell the book that follows.
So why should you read a self-published novel by a writer you’ve never heard of? Why should you get to know over a dozen characters, learn the history of an imaginary city, and follow the twists and turns of a complex plot over the course of 140,000 words? It won’t make you smarter, get you laid, or teach you how to be a better person. Why is it worth your time?
Not an American is written for the general reader. The plot is complex but straight-forward. There are no unreliable narrators. I go out of my way to make everything as clear as possible, but it’s a still a 140,000 world novel, not a short story or a blog entry. It would still be 14 hours long if I recorded it as an audiobook. It still takes about as much time and effort as it would take to read Tale of Two Cities or Lord Jim. So why not just read Tale of Two Cities or Lord Jim? Better yet, why not watch Girls or listen to Serial? That’s what everybody else is doing. That’s what will get you laid, get your blog entry read, and give you something to talk about around the water cooler at work.
The honest answer is “I don’t know.”
But let me give you the book’s genesis. My father grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania, just outside of Scranton. In the summer, we would drive up to visit relatives. There I got to know the landscape, the Ashley Huber coal breaker, the mine fire at Centralia, the seedy hotels that dot the Poconos, that corner of the Northeastern United States that was so similar, yet so different from my hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 2008, I drove up to the University of Scranton to photograph a rally for John McCain. I chatted up a group of conservatives. Clean coal, Obama’s birth certificate, the anti-abortion movement, Northeastern Pennsylvania is still Blue America, but these people seemed to be from a different country.
Fast forward to 2010. They’re everywhere. Obama has already revealed himself to be a bought and paid for Wall Street whore. Chris Christie is governor of New Jersey. The Tea Party is terrorizing congressional town halls for the Affordable Care Act with the corporate media cheering them on. And I’m reading Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens.
Barnaby Rudge, which Charles Dickens wrote when he was 28 years old, is full of the rough passion and anger of a young man just entering his prime. It’s not as great a novel as Tale of Two Cities, but it might be a more honest novel. Dickens slandered the French Revolution in the figure of Madame Defarge. In Barnaby Rudge, he comes back home to London, to the Great Gordon Riots of 1780. If the mob that stormed the Bastille fought for democracy, for liberty, equality and fraternity, then the mob that attacked Newgate Prison wanted to take peoples’ rights away. It started out as a controlled pogrom against Catholics. But it got out of control. Under the cover of “No Popery” the London mob attacked the established order, freed prisoners, burned down the houses of the wealthy, and rocked the social order down to its foundation.
I will never be able to write as well as Charles Dickens. This is not self-deprecation. God can’t write as well as Charles Dickens. But when I read the fictional description of the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge, my mind went back to Northeastern Pennsylvania, to the Centralia Mine Fire, to the McCain supporters I met in Scranton. Somehow, in my imagination, the fires of the Gordon Riots, the 50-year-old Anthracite coal fire under Centralia Pennsylvania, and the racist, far-right wing passions of the Tea Party came together in Poison Springs. If Joseph Conrad invented a whole country, I thought, surely I could create my own small city.
In 2011, I wrote a first draft and set it aside. It didn’t work. I knew how I wanted the novel to end. I just wasn’t sure how I wanted it to begin. When I looked at its villains, it felt like I was “punching down.” Scranton and Hazelton aren’t New York and London. Lou Barletta isn’t Michael Bloomberg. Northeastern Pennsylvania is a run-down corner of the Northeast, not the Jim Crow South. In the fall of 2011, however, I participated in Occupy Wall Street in NYC. I witnessed the insane amount of police repression and state power that came down on a non-violent protest movement. I watched the media slander idealistic young people as “rapists” and “hippies who needed jobs,” and I had the rest of my story.
Imagine two young malcontents in their early 20s. Imagine a corrupt city government and a brutal, repressive police force. And imagine a spark that sets off the conflagration that brings it all down. If you think you’d enjoy seeing any of this, then by all means, download my novel, and take the 10 or 15 hours you need to read it. I may not be Charles Dickens or Joseph Conrad, but if you hate cops, hate bigots, hate corrupt politicians, hate the media, and want to “stick it to the man,” if only in your imagination, I actually think you’ll enjoy Not an American so much you’ll probably read it twice.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - What’s in a name?
Chapter 2 - A short history of Poison Springs
Chapter 3 - Every time I see you, you're passed out on a bench
Chapter 4 - Welcome to WillyMart
Chapter 5 - The scarf
Chapter 6 - The gold standard
Chapter 7 - The United Coalition against Xenophobia
Chapter 8 - Stop Resisting
Chapter 9 - The Press Conference
Chapter 10 - A Plea Bargain
Chapter 11 - A vigilante
Chapter 12 - The Harp factory
Chapter 13 - Some Training in Public Relations
Chapter 14 - Bad cop Bad Cop
Chapter 15 - Stitches for Snitches
Chapter 16 - The Shot
Chapter 17 - Mother and Daughter
Chapter 18 - Fired
Chapter 19 – A reunion
Chapter 20 - A very slow fuse
Chapter 21 - these are not the droids you are looking for
Chapter 22 - tear down this wall
Chapter 23 - The white elephant
Chapter 24 - Shooting at the walls of heartache
Chapter 25 - The Poet
Chapter 26 - Goodbye my brother
Chapter 27 - The Cabal
Chapter 28 - An Arrest
Chapter 29 - Keystone Cointelpro
Chapter 30 - Bum Wrangling
Chapter 31 - Vengeance is Mine
Chapter 32 - Deceptively Edited
Chapter 33 - The safe house
Chapter 34 - The Mouth of Hell
Chapter 35 - Calling in a debt
Chapter 36 - The Cabal
Chapter 37 - The Rally
Chapter 38 - A grisly discovery
Chapter 39 - The speech
Chapter 40 - Cop Killer
Chapter 41 - sic semper tyrannis
Chapter 42 - The Police Riot
Chapter 43 - John Wilkes Fail
Chapter 44 - Houdini
Chapter 45 - Method Acting
Chapter 46 - An American Hero
Chapter 47 - The Cabal
Chapter 48 - The Pledge
Chapter 49 - The Monster’s Cage
Chapter 50 - Hidden In Plain Sight
Chapter 51 - Poison Springs is under Siege
Chapter 52 - An innocent man
Chapter 53 – Sprung
Chapter 54 - J’accuse
Chapter 55 - The Overground Railroad
Chapter 56 - Very Bad Things Happen
Chapter 57 - Sacked
Chapter 58 - Don’t Look Back
Chapter 1 - What’s in a name?
Alongside a great public park in a small, industrial city somewhere in the American Northeast, there was a line of bus
stops, newspaper boxes, and taxicab stands, a busy local transportation hub.
Three passengers remained on the "East Poison Springs Local" when it pulled to a stop, the rest of its cargo having been discharged along the way. There were two women, one in her late teens, and the other middle-aged. Both of them had the air of nannies or house cleaners -- East Poison Springs was the rich part of town -- who had just gotten off from work. There was a young man who appeared to be in his mid-20s. He was very tall. He had an olive-colored complexion, long, dark hair, brown eyes, which became green in the right kind of light, and a five o'clock shadow on the verge of becoming a beard. He was chatting with the young of the two in Spanish, which he spoke, not only fluently, but like a native. They both stopped talking when the bus driver opened the doors.
"Last stop ladies. Jackson Street, Roosevelt, uh, I mean Reagan Plaza, Downtown Poison Springs."
The bus driver turned off the engine, took out his cell phone, and got ready for his 15 minute break. The two women stepped down onto the sidewalk. The young man, however, remained seated, in no hurry to go anywhere. It was easy to see why. On the sidewalk there were about 15 or 20 people. Some were holding signs. Others were handing out leaflets. Others were just shaking their fists.
"America for Americans. Go home illegals. America for Americans. Go home illegals."
The young man looked at the two women, both of whom were in the process of "running the gauntlet." The younger, who looked back up at him, had a reproachful air. "If you were a man," her expression seemed to say. “You would come out here and escort us through this mob." He closed his eyes to pretend that he was asleep, but the bus driver, an elderly man with a bushy white mustache, was having none of it. He put his cell-phone back in his pocket, banged on the seat, and leaned over.
"Ladies. Last stop. Reagan Plaza North, Downtown Poison Springs."
No longer able to put off the inevitable, he stood up, slung his battered green messenger bag over his shoulder, and walked down onto the sidewalk. He was immediately surrounded.
"Wake up," a woman said, blocking his way. "Find out who's stealing your country."
She took a page off a stack of fliers and thrust it in his face.
He took the flier, folded it in half, put inside the messenger bag, and nodded as if to say "thank you. I'll read it later." He looked down at the woman. She appeared to be in her 50s, had a round pale, colorless face, and an aggressive manner. A cynic might have remarked that the lines in the corner of her mouth had come from too many forced smiles.
"Do you speak English? What's your name?"
"What's in a name?" he finally said, laughing, as if suddenly amused at his own cowardice. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title."
The woman stepped back, startled.
"What the hell was that?"
"Shakespeare, otherwise known as English."
The woman stepped aside, apparently satisfied that he had passed her test. One of her companions, however, a man in his 40s, frowned. He was of medium height, very thin, had a neatly trimmed goatee, and a leather jacket with an American flag patch on the sleeve. There was a bit of a Mongolian cast to his blue eyes, which peered out from narrow slits in his brown, leathery skin. He crossed his arms over his chest.
"She wanted English, not some fancy poetry you memorized from a text book."
He reached over, took another copy of the flier, and flourished it in the young man's direction.
"That's in English. I want you to read it."
The tall young man sighed.
"Well OK then," he said, taking the flier. "I guess I have no other choice."
He lifted the flier up to eye level, lowered it once and nodded to the woman in the biker jacket and then to the man with the goatee as if to indicate that, yes, he was reading it, and would be done very soon. He looked down.
"OK. It's done."
"Done?" the man said, a skeptical look coming over his face. "Done?"
The tall young man folded the leaflet in half.
"I've memorized it. I'll show you."
"I want to see this," the woman said.
"So do I," the man said.
The tall young man put the leaflet up to his forehead and closed his eyes.
"If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian," he declaimed, opening his eyes, “he can live in peace. The Earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself, and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty."
He crumpled the flier, threw it at woman's feet.
"Now if you Native Americans don't mind," he said, stepping around the man with the goatee. "I need to cross Reagan Plaza to catch my bus."
He continued on his way, his long strides carrying him forward so quickly that the group of picketers stood in place, frozen as if hypnotized, and before any of them could say anything, he was already too far away to follow without running.
"Get a job, you hippie," the woman shouted after him.
Chapter 2 - A short history of Poison Springs
With a little over 100,000 people, Poison Springs is the largest city in the Winterborn County, the origin of the name a colonial war of conquest where the original Scots Irish settlers dumped corpses into a well-used by the local Indians. "We have poisoned their spring," a letter from the Reverend Titus Brown, dated 1723 and addressed to James Murdoch, Member of Parliament from East Anglia, declared. "Now we may carry the civilization of free and Christian Englishman to this lush and verdant land in the new world.
Nestled on a flat piece of land between the Scahentoarrhonon, the Mahican, and the Pennamite, a small, shallow, muddy river which loops tightly around the north and east side of town, Poison Springs had been a village of no more than 700 people until 1832, when anthracite coal was first discovered in and around what would eventually become West Hill and the Mechkentowoon overpass. By the Civil War it had 30,000, mostly Irish Catholic immigrants, and, by the First World War, it was a thriving city of almost 150,000 people, the extensive railway system, along with the cheap labor provided by a huge wave of southern and eastern Europeans having transformed it into a regional manufacturing center. Poison Springs in 1914 produced not only anthracite coal, but steel, chemicals, weapons, and even musical instruments.
Downtown Poison Springs was built on a grand scale.
The Winterborn County Courthouse and Civic Center occupied the better part of two city blocks. A scaled down copy of the Minneapolis City Hall, and an outstanding example of late Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, it was topped off by a clock tower that rose almost 200 feet above the west end of Reagan Plaza. It had hundreds of windows, a grand staircase that swept down to Reagan Plaza West, and so much extra office space that, until the county jail took over the three basement floors of northern wing of the building in the 1950s, nobody had ever quite figured out what to do with it all.
On the east side of Reagan Plaza, Scahentoarrhonon Station divided the central business district of Poison Springs from the seedy industrial area that sprawled out to Route 1081. Built in the French Renaissance style, six stories tall, and a city block wide, it was absurdly out sized for a city of just over 100,000 people. It was almost demolished in 1958, and spent the next two decades as a National Guard Armory before being land marked in the 1980s. With the resumption of Amtrak service in 1988, and the relocation of the Greyhound terminal into its underutilized eastern half, it once again became a transportation hub.
Reagan Plaza itself, which stood between City Hall and Scahentoarrhonon Station, eclipsed both. While it was possible to imagine downtown Poison Springs without City Hall or Scahentoarrhonon Station, or even without both, downtown Poison Springs would not have been downtow
n Poison Springs without Reagan Plaza. Not so much built in, but rather scooped out of the city center, Reagan Plaza had once been called Roosevelt Plaza. Begun in 1938 as a WPA project, and, since then, at the center of almost every important event in the city's history, it was five football fields long, and three football fields wide, small, perhaps, compared to Central Park or the Washington DC Mall, but a dominating presence in a city of barely 100,000 people.
The original 1936 proposal is still probably the best description.
"The Grand Plaza at Poison Springs will not be the center of Poison Springs, so much as its negation, a protest against the city rammed right into the middle of the city itself. The Grand Plaza at Poison Springs will constitute brutalist architecture at its finest. A blighted neighborhood that separates the two most important structures in Poison Springs will be knocked down in one great gesture of creative destruction. Not only will the city's two most important buildings be able to face each other across a 500-yard stretch of green, but the slum that once divided them, the disorderly stretch of cheaply built tenements, haphazardly designed streets, a hodgepodge of vice and depravity, will be replaced by a symbol of order, prosperity and grandeur."
When the city accepted the proposal in 1936, some people thought it was a joke. Where in other cities, the WPA had built bridges, roads, hospitals, and other types of useful infrastructure, all that was proposed for Poison Springs was a big stretch of empty space. It was a joke. The architect, a conservative Republican who had wanted to satirize the excesses of the New Deal, had never intended it to be built. He had not realized how much the construction and demolition industry still dominated local politics, or how they would jump at the chance to turn his joke into reality.
Few people laughed, however, when they found out that the ground lying under what used to be Delaware Avenue, Mohawk, Huron, and Lenape streets had been soaked through with toxic runoff from an old zinc factory. The 15 square blocks between City Hall and Scahentoarrhonon Station were not only a "hodgepodge of vice and depravity." They were an oozy death trap that would eventually have turned the whole downtown area into an out sized Love Canal. Instead, between 1936 and 1938, the 500-yard-long, 300-yard-wide chunk of toxic dirt between Scahentoarrhonon Station and the Winterborn County Civic Center was given a thorough cleanup. Over 500 houses and commercial buildings were demolished and carted away along with tens of thousands of cubic tons of contaminated earth. The earth was then replaced and seeded with grass. Downtown Poison Springs was saved.
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