Vermin Supreme pushes his way toward the Kerry-ites. A few of them have to hop backward in order to avoid the pointy wingtips of the eagle lashed to his torso. He hoists his megaphone—which confers upon him the electronic voice of authority. “Where does John Kerry stand on mandatory tooth brushing?” he demands. “Is he soft on plaque?” A few college kids break off to listen to the tirade. You can see it in their faces; suddenly, they’re no longer members of the Kerry gang. They’re just their ordinary selves again, exchanging glances with each other. Who is this guy?
As he passes through the crowd, Vermin Supreme spreads that kind of puzzlement wherever he goes. He has spent years figuring out how to transform a group-thinking throng back into a bunch of individuals. This is his art form.
“Vote for me,” he tells a gray-haired lady, peering at her from under the rubber boot stuck on his head, the foot end of which points up at the sky. “I’m running for…something.” In fact, in the past fifteen years, he has set his sights on a number of political offices, all of them fictional: Tyrant, Mayor of the United States, Emperor of the New Millennium.
He seems at first to be a flamboyant-yet-sane hippie who is making a point about civil rights. With his wife, Becky (who asks that her last name be withheld), he roams the country to present his own brand of performance art at anti-war rallies and Republican pancake breakfasts. The couple fund their peripatetic activism by paying as little rent as possible and working odd jobs. But it’s not as simple as that. When he goes home—to a shack in the woods of Massachusetts—he’s still named Vermin Supreme. He’s Vermin Supreme twenty-four hours a day, every day, no vacations.
THE PONY
Last year, I ran into Vermin Supreme at an anti-war march. Instead of the Visigoth costume, he had shown up in his Weirdo Lite ensemble—a Satan mask, megaphone, and sensible shoes. His job that day, as he saw it, was to boost the morale of the marchers, to be a sort of Bob Hope of the revolutionary army.
People swarmed around us, chanting, beating drums. Some guy screamed, “What do we want?”
“Peace,” the crowd answered.
“What do we want?” the guy screamed again.
“Peace!” Now the river of people roared the word. The sound boomed through my chest. No one was laughing.
“What do we want?” the guy demanded again.
And this time Vermin Supreme pointed his megaphone at the sky. “A pony!” he screamed, his amplified voice rising over the roar.
Next time around, pretty much everyone in the crowd had defected to Vermin’s chant. “What do we want?” “A PONY!” hundreds of people hooted. Some young women near me bobbed up and down. “A pony, a pony,” they squealed.
Vermin Supreme has spent years working for peace, but what he really wants is a pony. He wants cotton candy and a funhouse mirror. He wants to topple the politicians from their pedestals and replace them with plastic chickens. He wants us all to live in a constant state of participatory democracy.
We’re bound to disappoint him.
THE NAME
It’s legal. “SUPREME, Vermin Love,” reads the government-issue font on his drivers’ license. He took the name in 1986, when he was booking bands for a grungy rock club. “All booking agents are vermin, right? So I decided to be the most supreme vermin. I schmoozed people in character as Vermin Supreme, wearing a tacky suit and chomping a cigar.” When the job ended, he could not let go of the character. He decided to run for mayor of Baltimore in his plaid leisure suit. If all politicians are vermin, he reasoned, why shouldn’t citizens vote for the best vermin available?
And Vermin Supreme—the name as well as the passion for cartoonish gestures—began to leak into his private life. His wife has been calling him Vermin for so long that the word rolls off her tongue like any other endearment, honey or darling or sweetie. At this point, even his mom calls him Vermin.
THE BOOT
Often, when Vermin Supreme shows up at a political event, it’s the boot that causes trouble. Security guards confer with each other through their walkie-talkies and decide that the rubber galosh on his head has to go.
“What’s the problem with the boot? Why is it so subversive?” Vermin Supreme wants to know, though the answers are obvious. The boot makes him the tallest man in the room. The boot gathers an audience around him. It draws cameras and microphones.
“That boot is like Wonder Woman’s tiara,” according to Darren Garnick, the producer of two PBS documentaries about fringe candidates. “If Vermin hadn’t worn that boot on his head, I never would have noticed him. There were plenty of other guys who share the same values, but they don’t have boots on their head, so no one listens. Maybe the boot is an indictment of the media.”
Indeed. We journalists will follow a guy with a boot the way a trout will go after a shiny plastic worm. The boot promises a good story. Vermin Supreme knows this. He has packaged himself as a made-to-order wacky sidebar for newspapers to run during campaign season. Like the politicians that he mocks, Vermin Supreme presents a version of himself, and it’s nearly impossible to see the real guy underneath.
When I asked to follow him around on a “typical day”—that is, to watch him cope with the exigencies of being Vermin Supreme on the job and at the supermarket—he only laughed. He made it clear that if he had any typical days, he would not offer them up for inspection. He requested that I keep his hometown a secret. And he refused to specify what kind of blue-collar job pays his bills, although I know, because I’ve snooped around, that he has worked construction in the past.
But it wasn’t just his edicts that kept me from learning more about the private Vermin. During several hours of interviewing, he regaled me with anecdotes that had a pre-packaged quality, as if he’d told them many times. When I probed for deeper insight—Why does he use the name ‘Vermin’ in his private life? When did he feel his first twinge of political consciousness?—his words simply ran out. He didn’t have answers about his own motives. He didn’t seem to know what made him tick. In that way, too, he reminded me of a career politician. His own inner life bores him. He’s interested only in his public self.
PEACE
Back in 1986, Vermin Supreme lived in Baltimore, a down-and-out art boy. One day, he heard that the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament would pass through town, the cross-country parade of walkers opposed to military buildup. “I went to Memorial Stadium to check it out, and I was floored,” Vermin Supreme remembers. He surveyed a parking lot that had transformed, overnight, into a town. “It was an amazing mobile community. They had Porta-potty trucks. They had kitchen trucks. They even had schools for the kids. It was so impressive.”
A week before, in Two Greeks Restaurant, he had announced to his friends a new performance-art venture: He would run for mayor of Baltimore as Vermin Supreme. Now, as he surveyed that parking lot, his prank took on deeper meaning. He would align it, somehow, with this massive, mobile outcry for peace.
“I went to the thrift store and bought a sleeping bag and t-shirt and I joined that march,” he said. And after that, he signed up with Seeds of Peace, a group that conveyed around the country to furnish demonstrators with food and sanitation. And he found a role for himself among the peace activists: sideshow. Wherever the group landed, Vermin Supreme ran for office. “My character came from the far Right, with policies reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal,’” he says. He had turned himself into a walking essay.
And he watched as too many peace marches devolved into violence—either because people in the crowd did something stupid, like throwing trash at the police, or because the riot cops lost their cool. So he decided that he would show up at some demonstrations as a clown rather than a candidate, helping to keep the peace. At such events, “I’m a little bit emcee, a little bit town crier, a little bit 10-watt radio journalist, and a little bit Tokyo Rose”—whatever it takes to keep everyone in a good mood. Especially the cops. When a line of police approaches in full riot gear, he whips out
his bullhorn and broadcasts reassuring messages to them: “There is no problem here. You are in no danger.” Sometimes, he uses his megaphone to lead the police through meditations inspired by New Age relaxation tapes: “I’m going to ask you to seize on your happiest childhood memory. You can feel your breath inside your gas mask.”
Or he’ll resort to pratfalls. “In D.C. recently, I had a foam tube that looked like a nightstick and I started whacking myself on the head in front of the police, who had their own nightsticks. Whack. Ouch. Whack. Ouch. A lot of them were laughing at me.”
Though he has aligned himself with the anti-war movement, Vermin Supreme’s true allegiance is to The Prank. And it’s this—the anarchism of comedy—that leads him to exploits that seems awfully strange for a man of peace. He recites his attacks on politicians as if he’s reading from a resume: “Sometime in the ’80s, I bit Jesse Jackson’s hand. Also, Jerry Falwell: I jammed a big wad of phlegm onto my palm, and then I shook his hand. I chased Paul Tsongas down the sidewalk and we swung an enema bag in his face.”
It’s this side of Vermin Supreme that makes me uncomfortable—he seems to have forgotten that even though politicians market themselves as products, even though their hair seems to be made of extruded plastic, they’re still human.
Garnick agrees. “I’d call myself a fan of Vermin’s, but there are things I wish he wouldn’t do. He’ll say all these clever things and then he’ll go and bite somebody.”
VERMIN IS OUR FUTURE
In October, while I was clicking through cable stations, I stumbled across a show called “Who Wants To Be Governor of California?” It asked a collection of real-life fringe candidates to spin a glittery wheel and then talk about whatever issue came up. In the past few years, our country has turned a corner. The political sideshow has moved to center stage. Characters like Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger might be called fringe candidates, except that they’re winning elections.
“Political disaffection is very high—data shows Americans are more disaffected from government than any time since the polls started recording such numbers,” according to Ron Hayduk, an assistant professor of political science at Manhattan Community College. Such alienation, he says, will help to fuel protest candidates and auto-de-fes. Politics is going to get weird. Very weird. It seems only a matter of time before some cable station creates an “I want to be president” reality TV show or a guy in a hot dog suit becomes governor of New York.
What do we want?
Peace.
What will we probably get instead?
A pony.
UPDATE:
Vermin is still running for Mayor of the United States.
The Chemist in the Desert
Two years ago, Dr. Gordon Sato was planting trees in the sandy muck along the coast of Eritrea when the reporters began calling. They wanted to know what Sato thought about the fall of Martha Stewart. Back in the 1980s, Sato had co-invented a drug that helps to block the spread of colon cancer. Now, Martha Stewart was accused of dumping her shares of the company that owned the rights to Sato’s drug.
When Sato heard the news, he barely looked up from his digging. “I had no interest in it,” he says, of the Martha Stewart scandal. Gordon Sato has one all-consuming interest and that’s finding new ways to grow food in the desert. He believes he’s on the verge of doing just that. By his count, he and his team of workers have planted over a million mangrove trees in the sand along the coast of the Red Sea, in a drought-wracked, tin-shacked wasteland pocked with overturned Russian tanks, where up until recently not much of anything green could survive. In a pilot program, Sato has shown that the leaves and seeds of the mangrove trees can feed goats, and, thus, provide local villagers with life-saving meat and milk. He says his work will not be finished until he has transformed the coastline of Eritrea into a mangrove park, hundreds of miles of trees. And then maybe he’ll move on to other countries. This is an especially ambitious plan given that Sato is now 76 years old.
I am curious about this man who presumes to transform the coastline of an entire nation. What keeps him flying around the world, pushing his solution to world hunger, when so many other men his age are content to hit a few golf balls? And so I arrange to meet him—in Wayland, Massachusetts, of all places. This is where Sato lives in between trips to Hargigo, the Eritrean village that has become his base of operations, and to spots around the world where he meets with people who might possibly donate a few hundred thousand dollars to his project. In a few days, for instance, Sato will fly to Dubai.
Did I mention that he’s 76? Sato takes a long time to come to his door. He’s deeply tan and wears rumpled work pants, so when I catch my first glance of him through the glass, he strikes me as vigorous. But once I’m inside, I notice the frailty of those sun-beaten arms, the way his clothes hang loose. When he speaks, he pauses, as if marshaling himself for the effort of breath and words. It’s nearly impossible to imagine him bumping along in a Land Rover toward a village with no running water. And yet that’s where he’s most happy.
In his stocking feet, he leads me through a somnolent living room that is bathed in sea-green light from the trees outside. Plump chairs gather around a TV tray, which is set up for Sato’s next smoke, all of it laid out just so: the pipe, the matches, the can of Prince Albert. Once we’re in the office, the phone rings. He takes the call. He has to. He’s a full-time fundraiser now. “This is the job I hate,” he says. “But I have to think about a long-term plan, how to have the project go on after I’m dead.” Most of the funding for the mangrove project has come out of Sato’s own bank account. Still, he has proved himself to be a whiz at raising money. He started his project in 1986 with half a million dollars donated by a Japanese businessman; in 2002, he won the $100,000 Rolex Award for Enterprise. Sato does not bother with the time-honored tools of fundraisers—tact and flattery. “He tends to blurt out what he thinks, often in salty language. But he’s feisty and he’s smart,” according to Bruce Ames, a professor of molecular and cell biology at U.C. Berkeley who has known Sato since they were grad students at Cal Tech. “I think he’s a real hero,” says Ames. And perhaps most important, Sato has already proved himself right once before, as co-inventor of a cancer drug.
Now he’s got another big idea, a plan to turn badlands into wetlands. The secret turns out to be three holes. You take a fist-sized bag of fertilizer and punch a nail through the plastic surface, then bury the bag near the roots of a mangrove seedling that you have just planted in barren soil. Over the next three years, the fertilizer will leak out slowly, supplying the tree with an IV drip of nutrients. If you punch two holes, the tree ends up stunted from lack of fertilizer; with four holes, the tree suffers from too much. Sato discovered this method back in the 1990s, working with Eritrean agriculturalists; he also discovered that goats could live on the mangrove cuttings, though farmers will have to add a cheap supplement in order to fill out the limited diet. “None of this has ever been done before,” Sato says.
According to Richard Wright, professor emeritus of environmental science at Gordon College in Wenham, Sato’s project could help to showcase the value of mangrove swamps, which are being felled in alarming numbers around the world. “Mangroves provide microhabitats for many species, and that contributes to biodiversity and enhances the stability of the coast,” Wright says, pointing out that the trees both hold back the waves and act as nurseries for fish. Sato’s project, he adds, “might help people in other regions who have mangroves and have never thought of using them to feed animals.”
About seven years ago, Sato began training a team of women to plant row after row of the trees. They’ve already covered about three miles of the coast, with some of the mangroves now towering over the heads of the workers.
But of course, it’s one thing to figure out how to fertilize trees, and quite another to keep any kind of program going in Eritrea, a country studded with landmines, traumatized by ethnic hatreds, and in danger of going to w
ar, once again, with Ethiopia. And then there are the camels. “They’re our enemy,” Sato says, showing me a photo of a mangrove that has been picked clean. The nomadic people who roam Eritrea let their camels feast on the trees, requiring Sato’s team to build fences. “We may be changing the culture of the country because we’re fencing off mangroves. The nomads were previously free to go anywhere,” Sato acknowledges.
And last year, Sato found out that he had another group of foes, potentially far more damaging than even the camels: coral-reef people. The New Scientist ran an article quoting Mark Spalding and other unnamed marine biologists who worried that the fertilizer runoff from Sato’s trees—all those chemicals leaching out of all those little plastic bags—could damage the coral reefs off the coast of Eritrea.
“Environmentalists are sanctimonious hypocrites,” Sato says, when I bring up the accusations. He pulls at his hair, which is salted black, unkempt and thick, so that it stands up in a ruff, the way a cat’s will. Now that he’s angry, his exhaustion drops off him. He’s leaning forward in his chair, spewing out the reasons why Spalding cannot be trusted, reasons so ad hominem as to be utterly unprintable. Sato asserts that the accusations don’t hold up because the runoff from the bags of fertilizer is negligible. “We’re not harming the coral reef.”
And now I understand what keeps Sato going, keeps him flying around the globe and sends his mangroves marching along the coast. Yes, he’s concerned about the Eritrean people. Yes, he’s eager to find a direct and simple way to feed the hungry. But what really seems to motivate him is outrage. And in Sato’s case, that outrage is more than justified. You only have to see the sign that he’s erected in Eritrea to understand why. In English and Japanese, it proclaims the name that he has given to his mangrove project: Manzanar. Sato has taken that awful name, that word with the razor-wire of a Z at its center, and made it his own.
The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories Page 9