The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  Writing in the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault asked, “How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism … the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?” In 1991, I’d never heard of any of the aforementioned thinkers, but that question was probably, in some form or another, the defining feature of my adolescence. In that oh-so-crucial phase of teenage individuation, I was desperately clawing my way to whatever positioned me as far as possible from the example in which I was immersed. Clumsily. With incredibly mixed, not altogether flattering, results. The first day of “spirit week” my sophomore year was “bum day,” in which every adult in a position to intervene and stage a teachable moment (including the Spanish teacher) failed to bat a lash at an entire student body dressed as caricatures of the poor and homeless, replete with “will work for food” signs. When “country and western day” rolled around and I turned up dressed as a Klansman, they were suddenly—remarkably—possessed of an attention to the dangers of stereotypes, and duly unenthused.

  I’m shocking no one by relaying that clashing with that culture at every turn didn’t play well for me. It went rather badly, in fact. After a few years, I was diagnosed with chronic stress headaches so severe that my mom actually let me quit high school, on the condition I immediately obtain a GED and enroll in college classes. But even surviving for that long required the acquisition of a number of skills. Very early on, I discovered that—rather mysteriously—having a better command of information and argument seemed to diffuse situations. Especially situations in which I was likely to get my ass kicked. Teachers would intervene, perhaps out of some sense of obligation to uphold a “use your words” approach to life’s hiccups. Peers would (usually) back down, perhaps because the obvious temper tantrum of pummeling someone who’d out-argued them wasn’t something they wanted on their tacit social CV. Who knows? All that matters is that I noticed. And I set about arming myself.

  This didn’t, however, equip me with any sense of where to begin. The Internet didn’t exist. I was stranded in the middle of the Mediterranean, in a country whose language I did not speak well enough at that point to seek out resources locally. The base library was not exactly brimming with Chomsky, nor would I have had much means by which to know why he mattered. Instead, I mentally catalogued everything I’d ever heard an officer or defense contractor shit on or disdain, and then I sought out its literature. I figured that if a particular idea or concept or cultural form had riled such people, I probably stood to learn something useful from it. I was seldom let down.

  For a time, that process was pretty radically constrained by what was on offer around me. I had Thoreau and Enlightenment philosophy as a counter to the evangelical Christianity bombarding me at every turn; feminist literature to interrogate the version of masculinity valorized by military culture and a home life shot through with domestic abuse; Hesse and Gibran to make alienation less terrifying; MLK and “Eastern” philosophy to assure the radically defiant possibilities embedded in discipline. All of which was roundly ridiculed, resented, or worse, by every intellectually bankrupt asshole positioned to exemplify “adulthood” for me. I skipped classes almost daily and holed up in the library, reading. I found my way to local Marxist squats and social centers in the city and began frequenting them, language barrier be damned. But beyond these few pinholes into the world and what I’d memorized from punk record sleeves, I had little to work from.

  Until, that is, I started hanging out with this girl in Rome. My mom was away for work, leaving me home alone during spring break. My tax return from a summer job had shown up, and our landlord—a likely mafioso eager to pilot light any adolescent mischief in which I showed interest—explained how to reserve a sleeper bunk on the train and wake up eight hours north. With my mom poorly positioned to intervene, I locked up the apartment and hit the road. And so began a semiregular routine of taking the overnight train up on Friday nights, spending Saturday nights at punk shows in squatted castles and other such spaces, all the while nursing a crush on a girl who may or may not have had any such interest in me, before crashing on the train home Sunday nights.

  During one of our outings in Rome, I discovered two fanzines published out of the Netherlands and Germany, Burial and Counter-Clockwise, respectively. Both espoused a trifecta of straightedge (a punk discipline of firm sobriety), veganism, and communism—an ideological cocktail popularized by Dutch hardcore band Manliftingbanner. I’d long adopted the first two prongs on that trident, but the third was pretty much the holy grail—an unmistakable “fuck you” to the tacit culture of the military, a scant half-decade out of the Cold War. And so I dove in, treating the essays and interviews in those zines like a bibliography, seeking out every thinker or book mentioned.

  In short order, my early exit from high school became an expedited parting of ways with military myopia. With a semester’s worth of college credits under my belt to soften the blow of my GED, I fled stateside, ultimately landing at American University in D.C., a city I’d long coveted for its disproportionately influential punk history. Once there, my college years didn’t last long, either. Starved for years of real contact with the very things from which I’d drawn the inspiration to merely survive my adolescence, punk shows and grassroots organizing consistently proved irresistible, felt more vital, and monopolized my attention.

  My first proper summer living in D.C., the group house I’d just moved out of—a student house on the George Washington University campus, near the corner of Twenty-Second and G Streets NW where I’d illegally rented a second-floor sunroom—was effectively running the city’s premier underground show venue out of its basement. Pretty much every small punk and hardcore act touring that summer passed through. Shows happened almost nightly. A local straightedge kid by the name of Doug Wordell had just returned from his first year at Evergreen in Olympia, Washington. We were introduced by my first solid friend in D.C., an indefatigable—and barely eighteen—vegan activist named Paul Shapiro; now the vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States. We sat out one of the bands one night, retreating to the steps of the School Without Walls, around the corner. Doug was one of the few straightedge kids I’d met in the United States who gave a shit about anything political, and I was eager to bond. I was surprised to discover his first year in Olympia had turned him on to anarchism—until that point, I’d mostly thought of it as the nihilistic free for all it denotes in the popular imagination. I pushed back, arguing for more conventional—and in my mind, more structured—Marxist politics. He quoted Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin to me. “Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” It was the first inkling I ever got that anarchism represented something more than a naïve political application of chaos theory.

  One day, browsing a bookshelf at the Positive Force collective house in Arlington, I came across Russian geographer and naturalist Peter Kropotkin’s pamphlet Anarchism and Anarchist Communism, and recognized his name as one Doug had mentioned. To say that the book broke everything open for me would be to undersell it, dramatically. It was practically a religious experience. A majority of the practical questions and contradictions I’d been grappling with in my own politics dissolved. I quickly sought out and devoured anarchist texts with the same vigor that had animated my hours in the library back in Sicily. Whereas Marxism took as its object of analysis the matter of exploitation, the anarchist tradition took aim at domination. White supremacy. Patriarchy. Colonialism. Militarism. Capitalism. The State. Self-styled “Marxist” regimes had—as anarchists like Kropotkin had predicted—reinscribed the very authoritarianism they’d fought to take down, rationalizing antidemocratic institutions as a foil to exploitation. For anarchists, no such deal with the devil was necessary. Direct democracy was possible. Cooperation was possible. Self-organization was possible. Socialism from the bottom up was not only possible, but necessary. Community self-determina
tion replaced the aspirations of electoral politics or authoritarian States. Beyond being dynamic and flexible, anarchism implied an ethics; it was imminently practicable, in the now, embodied best perhaps in the works of German anarchist and sometimes Jewish mystic, Gustav Landauer. “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another,” he famously wrote in an essay titled “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism,” perhaps anticipating Foucault taking aim at the fascism ingrained in our behavior. “We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.”

  Everything came full circle, for me. And I never recovered. There was no grand narrative, no “after the revolution.” There was simply what we do in the here and the now. Anarchism was the aspiration at the core of radical democracy, cooperation, and compassion—present as much in Ella Baker’s work in the civil rights movement as in the history of Spanish resistance to fascism prior to World War II. And therein was equally a holistic orientation of the self, with deeply emotional significance. “We are not in the least afraid of ruins,” wrote Spanish anarchist militia leader Buenaventura Durruti, during the civil war provoked by Francisco Franco’s fascist uprising. Now well into my thirties, the sentiment feels keenly existential, sufficient time having elapsed to accumulate my own share of personal defeats; those places where we’re forced to continue after the story driving our life at a particular moment has ended against our will (perhaps for a second or third time). Relationships that come apart, careers derailed, family or community tragedies. Being in the world necessarily inheres surveying one’s own ruins, from time to time. There’s something of a litmus test buried in Durruti’s insistence: do we really mean it—politically, spiritually, emotionally—if we forfeit the game at the prospect of ruins? Durruti’s refusal of fatalistic cynicism (perhaps unwittingly) blurred the lines between spiritual and political life; especially the case for our present moment, faced with overwhelming suffering and myriad looming crises. Not least of which are ecological ones. “The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history,” he wrote. “We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”

  Every bit as much as anarchism represented, for me, a fierce lack of romance for existing political institutions and social organization, it also held a—perhaps unrivaled—infatuation with possibility. And that possibility was contingent on little more than initiative and a moment-to-moment commitment to exercising power with, rather than power over.

  If nothing else, it’s a combination with a far lower body count than the aspirations normalized for me, in high school. It certainly made looking in the mirror easier.

  2

  WALKING, WE ASK

  The Zapatistas—the indigenous rebels of southeastern Mexico, forced onto the world stage by the rollout of NAFTA on New Year’s Day 1994—are one of the most playful, literary resistance movements in history. Their communiqués usually read as much like Borges as they do Guevara, and they often convey their core community aspirations through almost overly earnest proverbs. Their once primary spokesperson, an iconic, pipe-smoking ladino widely known as Subcomandante Marcos, penned a children’s book about diversity in which he described sex as “a good way to get sleepy before a nap,” and he’s frequently issued declarations through recounted dialogues with a talking beetle named Don Durito. In 2008, while I was attending a Spanish immersion program at the centro de lenguas operated within one of movement’s autonomous municipalities, my promotore (Zapatistas are quick to reject implicitly hierarchical binaries like teacher/student or doctor/patient, and thus have only “promoters”—of education, of health, of food, etc.) offered a shortcut for remembering that Spanish nouns ending in ion are always accompanied by the female article, deploying a cheeky, feminist wink-nudge: “El problemo es masculino; la solucion es feminina.”

  I’d traveled to Chiapas (the home-state of the rebellion, near the border with Guatemala) in part as an attempt at nominal professional development. As a dog walker. My work routine required me to key into the homes of people who typically hired cleaning services staffed by Spanish-speaking immigrants. Many of these folks had rarely encountered dogs that were not tethered to uniformed men with guns, and they were often visibly ill at ease with my four-footed charges. Returning from a walk to find cleaning staff in a client’s home, I’d usually fumble my way through abysmal Spanish and improvised hand gestures, offering to put the dog(s) in another room while they finished, in the hopes of making their job a little less frustrating. It occurred to me that we shared a certain class-commonality in being employed by the same people. All comforts of a potential connection were, of course, promptly undermined by the fact that I could speak to our employers with much greater ease.

  It’s not that I had any illusions about how very different our lives were. It simply seemed reasonable to care enough about those differences to—at minimum—say, “When we cross paths, let’s meet where you’re most comfortable.” I don’t know whether that had any value or meaning to anyone but me, but the practice of seeing others, being present with them—of meeting people on terms other than those dictated to us—was, at the very least, freely available. Certainly, it felt less shameful than doing nothing. So: Spanish immersion in the context of a rebel movement “for humanity, against neoliberalism.” Plus, it was an excuse to expense a six-week jaunt through Chiapas and Oaxaca come tax-time.

  The cab ride up the mountain from the colonial, tourist-saturated town of San Cristóbal de las Casas into territorio Zapatista took about an hour. As a backpack-bedecked gringo, traipsing beyond the tourist andador and standing head and shoulders above locals in the open-air market on the town’s outskirts, I was spotted by cabbies pretty quickly. “Oventic?! Oventic?!”—the apparent destination for anyone moving through the neighborhood with my complexion and attire. All of this felt somehow abstract and visceral at the same time. Here were taxi drivers—a fairly mundane fixture of almost any urban environment—offering to take me to a place that still felt about as real to me as Narnia. Prior to the 1994 uprising that seized the town, stranding tourists and torching property records, the Mexican military had stumbled onto a Zapatista training camp in the jungle, effectively confirming hushed rumors of a looming indigenous insurgency. Under normal circumstances, the discovery likely would’ve sounded all sorts of alarms and triggered a sizable military response (as the uprising itself eventually did), but this was Mexico pre–NAFTA, when the agreement was still being negotiated. Given the stakes, the government moved swiftly to quash all talk of anything destabilizing in the indigenous south, dismissing it as mere fable or hearsay. Today, virtually every tourist shop in the town sells postcards immortalizing an iconic moment in the uprising: Zapatista insurgents, slouched against a wall in the town center, beneath graffiti echoing the repeated proclamation of the then president—No hay guerilla—“There are no guerillas.”

  Some part of me still hadn’t fully metabolized that phrase’s fallacy. Getting in a cab felt like climbing into a spaceship.

  My arrival at the autonomous caracol, or community, where the school sat nestled was unceremonious and abrupt. Trees befitting the more urban terrain turned to pines jutting through low-slung clouds, and switchbacks blurred together until suddenly they didn’t. The taxi stopped, I craned my neck to see through the windshield, orienting myself by the only industrial, reflective road sign in our vicinity. It read: PARA TODOS TODO. NADA PARA NOSOTROS. (“Everything for everyone. Nothing for ourselves.”) I stepped out of the cab across a nondescript road toward a makeshift gate of corrugated steel, watched over by a woman of less than five feet who sported a ski mask, a rifle, and a shoulder-slung infant. A badly behaved Weimaraner—those lanky, silvery dogs often featured in TV commercials—weaved his way between us, tracking through a mist-moistened mud. The woman scolded him with little ef
fect, clearly resigned to the annoyance, as I presented her with my initial entry documents.

  Once beyond the gate, I was escorted to the oficina de vigilancia, to register as a guest with the community’s governing council. The Weimaraner, undeterred and clearly well practiced at evading all half-hearted, exasperated admonitions, had trailed us down the hill and followed us indoors, as though he were as much a part of the formality as anyone else. As soon as he was noticed, a minor fracas ensued, with ski-masked farmers attempting to wrap arms around the wiry dog and haul him out, with all the clumsiness of a first-ever attempt. Mud smearing on denim, paws spinning and dragging across concrete. Not wanting to presume I knew better how to manage the local canine troublemaker, I smiled appreciatively and watched. After a full five minutes of wrangling, the dog got bored and moved on.

  “Como se llama usted?”

  “Josue.”

  “Y donde vive?”

  “Washington, D.C.”

  “Y su trabajo?”

  “Yo trabajo cuidando perros.” (“I work watching dogs.”)

  In advance of my trip, a Chilean friend I’d hired as a tutor advised me this was the most succinct way of describing my occupation, though the sheer demand for such labor was so geographically and culturally distinct the phrase went little distance in making any sense of what I did. Truth be told, what I did for a living made little sense to me, in that moment. A journalist had once told me of her initial visit to the community, standing next to a bonfire her first night, chatting with a man probably in his seventies. After asking where she was from, he’d inquired as to how far she’d traveled. “Six hours flying, huh?” he mulled her answer, pensively. “And how long walking?” Certainly, to the most impoverished population on the continent—among whom literacy was a product of tangible, even grave, struggle—the description of an activity like walking dogs around a city as remunerative work was more likely to yield eye-crossing and astonished contempt than any real meaning. Given what had just transpired, and the two men in front of me still catching their breath, I suddenly realized I appeared to be making a joke. “I work watching you jackasses wrestle with dogs.” I bristled for an instant, worried I’d inadvertently mocked them, before seeing their eyes soften through their ski masks as laughter ripped through the room.