Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  Bey wasn’t offering an indictment so much as a prescription: “Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou neither selfless not selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels. . . .” Brad was becoming one of them: a wolfangel. “Very high energy, extremely bright, not so well controlled,” Bey remembers of the student who talked his way into class because he hadn’t bothered to pay tuition. “Loose at the edges, reckless, you might call it courage. Manic sometimes, charming everybody.”

  Brad stopped paying rent. “My crazy poet roomies fled the scene,” he later wrote of his accidental introduction to squatting. “I stayed and didn’t even have the phone number of the landlord.” That suited Brad. Cash, he was beginning to believe, was a kind of conspiracy, a form of control he was leaving behind. He became a Dumpster diver, a moocher, a liberator of vegetables. He wanted to write poems, but even more he wanted to become one, a messy, ecstatic, angry, sprawling embodiment of Bey’s Autonomous Zone.

  His first attempt came one summer when fifty thousand members of a Christian fundamentalist men’s movement called the Promise Keepers descended on Boulder, distributing a pamphlet called The Iron Spear: Reaching Out to the Homosexual. Brad wasn’t gay, but he decided to reach back. The Naropa Institute’s lawn abutted the Promise Keepers’ rally ground, so Brad put on a show: He married a man. He recruited Bey to perform the ceremony and the poet Anne Waldman to play his mother. Another student was his male bride, in a white satin gown complete with a train, and Brad scrounged a suit and tie. “I actually am a minister in the Universal Life church,” says Bey. “I married them in full view of the Promise Keepers.” Then Brad kissed his bride, a long, wet kiss that provoked one Promise Keeper to hop the fence to make a closer examination of the abomination.

  That was Brad’s idea of politics and poetry at the time: a party and performance. But he didn’t care for stages. He wanted the show to run 24/7. From Boulder he moved to West Lima, Wisconsin, a half-abandoned town that had become a commune called Dreamtime Village. There was a post office, a school building, little Midwestern houses, and almost no rules. Brad moved into the school and began studying fire, twirling torches, touching the flames, eating them as entertainment for whoever wanted to watch him. Everybody at Dreamtime was a freak, deliberately at odds with the world, but Brad was crazier than most. “That badass motherfucker who wasn’t scared to be on the front lines,” remembers his friend Sascha DuBrul, cofounder of the Icarus Project, an anarchist movement dedicated to the idea that much of what is classified as mental illness should be thought of as “dangerous gifts.” For Brad, the front lines weren’t at Dreamtime; in 1995 they were in New York City.

  “I moved to the big shitty as Giuliani-time kicked in,” Brad wrote in an essay for an anarchist anthology, We Are Everywhere. In New York, at least, anarchists were concentrated in a few dozen squats, buildings abandoned at the nadir of the city’s grim 1980s and rehabbed by whoever wanted to live rent free. It was illegal, of course, which was part of the attraction for Brad—just living in a squat was a form of direct action, defiance of all the rules about property and propriety. Brad found himself an empty room in a squat on East Fifth Street, home to around sixty “activists and destructionists,” in the words of Pastrami, a yoga teacher Brad befriended. They hauled water up from fire hydrants and wired electricity from a streetlight. Next door they cleared the trash out of an abandoned lot and turned it into a garden with a pear tree. They shared the garden with their Puerto Rican neighbors, eventually winning over even the nuns of the nearby Cabrini seniors’ home, whose response to the squats went from one of horror to prayers for the wild but lovely young creatures who ate the trash and the toxic soil of the city.

  This was the life Brad had been looking for. He’d haunt the anarchist store Blackout Books, in New York’s Alphabet City, and then he’d disappear for days into volumes he had bought with scrounged change or borrowed or found abandoned on the curb—the great free sidewalk bookstore of a city with small living spaces—his long bony hands cracking the spines of old lefty tomes and the quickie compilations of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico who was fast becoming the new model for anarchist panache. Once, when Brad found himself across the street from a group of police officials, he got hold of a black ski mask and pulled it over his head Zapatista-style. Then he made his way to a rooftop looking down on the cops and stood there in his mask, pretending to speak into a walkie-talkie until the cops spotted him. They evacuated the meeting. Perfect poetic terrorism, thought Brad—nonviolent, funny, and kind of scary.

  He read Kropotkin, the early-twentieth-century Russian biologist who articulated for anarchism its core idea of “mutual aid,” the simple but radical premise that cooperation, not competition, is the natural condition of humanity, and he worked with movements like the Ruckus Society, Earth First!, and Reclaim the Streets, leaderless networks of activists who put anarchist ideas into action through confrontational tactics—Brad was expert in the construction of “sleeping dragons” and “bear claws,” both methods of locking yourself down in front of a bulldozer or in the middle of a city street. The point wasn’t a set of demands but the act of disruption itself. In Brad’s world, action—direct, local, unfiltered—mattered more than ideology.

  In theory, anyway. In practice anarchist factions often succumb to purist notions, refusing even to speak to comrades they consider co-opted. Not Brad. He was tight with anarchoprimitivists, who view language itself as oppressive, and social anarchists, who write books and build schools. “He was the least sectarian person I ever met,” says Dyan Neary. “That’s what made it easy for him to introduce people to ideas. He was just sort of user friendly.” Not everyone thought so. “Brad did his fair share of alienating people,” says Sascha DuBrul, who like Brad had migrated from Dreamtime to the Lower East Side. “He was so loud and outspoken, and he wasn’t always a big listener.” At the Fifth Street Squat he’d boast about his building skills, but then, friends say, he wired his room incorrectly, resulting in a small fire. The fire didn’t threaten the building, but it gave the mayor an excuse to tear it down. “When they came for our building,” Brad wrote, “there weren’t any eviction papers, and they came with a wrecking crane. I snuck inside, felt the rumble when the ball pierced the wall. I was alone. From the roof I watched them dump a chunk of my home on my garden. . . . When it was all over: a rubble heap.”

  “I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty,” a friend told the Village Voice. Afterward Brad left on a freight-train tour of America, riding in boxcars from city to city, speaking to activist groups about Giuliani’s crackdown. “Brad got incredibly fucking riled up,” remembers DuBrul. “He was on fire; his hands were shaking.”

  IN 1998 BRAD WENT out west to join Earth First! activists for a “forest defense,” which for Brad would consist of spending the summer on a platform built high up around the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir in Oregon, an anarchist retreat from the laws down below. “I called it the Y plane ’cause you’re up, up, up off the rules of the X plane,” says Priya Reddy, who became one of Brad’s best friends that summer. “The only rule you really have is gravity. It’s homelessness in the best sense.”

  A city girl, Reddy—in Oregon she took the name “Warcry”—didn’t know how to climb, so at first she provided ground support, hiking from tree to tree in the murky green light, taking orders for supplies. Brad had a different concern. “I dropped a piece of paper,” he called down on her first day. “Could you find it for me?”

  Warcry looked into the branches. The voice’s source, two hundred feet up, was invisible. So was his piece of paper, fallen amid the thick ferns of the forest floor. When she found it, a folded-up scrap, she took a peek. A battle plan? No. A love poem, for one of the girls he’d left down below.

  The woods were noisy with th
e music of the tree sitters, drowning out the sounds of the forest. CDs and tapes of Sonic Youth, Crass, and Conflict blasted full volume. But the most popular song was “White Rabbit,” recorded by Jefferson Airplane in 1967. After Warcry heard it for what seemed like the hundredth time, she took a stand. “What’s with this hippie shit?” she demanded. “You don’t know?” came the answer. “It’s a warning.” “White Rabbit” meant the cops, spotted by Brad or another tree sitter from their perches far above, were on their way.

  Soon Warcry worked up the courage to join Brad in the trees, spending three weeks on a neighboring platform. Other women visited Brad’s roost, but although she adored him—and, with her dark eyes and long lashes, she was one of the most beautiful creatures in the trees—she never became one of his lovers. She became his chronicler.

  She still is, in her tiny apartment in Spanish Harlem, one wall dedicated to a shrine to Brad: photographs of Brad in the trees, Brad in a boxcar, Brad kissing the toes of a lover, and material traces of Brad’s life as a rebel warrior—his old slingshot, anarchist ninja gear, little shells and pretty stones he’d bring her from his adventures. “I want to show you a video,” she says. We move into her office, a lime green closet with a window, decorated with imagery from past campaigns. She hits Play on a computer. Instead of Brad, trees and the sound of saws, then a giant tree falling, yards away from Brad and Warcry’s perches, almost close enough to take them down. I can’t see Brad but I hear him scream: “Fuuuck! ” The tree settles, and Brad shouts at the loggers below. “How old do you think that tree was? How old are you?” It was a question he might have been asking himself—up in his tree house, there were times he felt like a child, powerless to respond.

  WHAT SET BRAD APART from so many radical activists was that throughout it all, he remained close to his family, the buttoned-down Republican Wills of Kenilworth. When he was jailed for nearly a week at the World Trade Organization Seattle protests in 1999, one of his chief worries was getting out in time for his mother’s sixtieth birthday, which the Wills planned to celebrate in Hawaii. He made it, but he didn’t tell them where he’d been. One day he was behind bars—“screams down the hall,” he wrote, “ear pressed to the crack—twilight and i borrow someone’s glasses to watch rare sun fall on a freight leaving town”—and the next he was learning how to surf with his sister Christy.

  That’s how Brad kept the peace with where he came from. In 2002, when he and Dyan Neary, who goes by “Glass,” were hopping freight trains from the Northwest to New York, he insisted they take a detour so that she could meet his mother. Glass tried to talk politics, telling the Wills about South American coca farmers blasted into extreme poverty by U.S.-funded crop spraying. Brad’s mom looked confused: “But, dear, how do you think we should deal with the cocaine problem?” It wasn’t meant as a question.

  “Later,” Glass told me, “I was like, Oh shit, they don’t really know what you’re doing, do they?” Brad had giggled, proud of his ability to move between worlds.

  He and Glass had met shortly after 9/11, their first date a six-hour walk around Ground Zero. Brad was thirty-one; Glass was twenty, a policeman’s daughter from Brooklyn, tall and skinny with a deep, earnest voice and a smile like Brad’s, wide and knowing. But she was stunned by New York’s transformation from go-go to warmongering. What the fuck happened to my city? she thought. They decided it was time to get out of town.

  There were two complications. The first was monogamy. Brad didn’t believe in it, had never even tried. All right, Glass said, no sex. Brad suddenly discovered an untapped well of fidelity. The other problem was thornier: Brad was about to become a father. The mother was a Frenchwoman with whom he’d had a brief relationship while she was visiting New York. A month later she called to tell him she was pregnant. Brad loved kids, but he’d sworn he’d never bring one of his own into a world he considered too damaged.

  “Why don’t you stay?” the mother-to-be asked when Brad spent his savings on a flight to France. “We can raise the child together.”

  “I’ll help you out with money,” he said—a major commitment, given that he lived on food he found in Dumpsters—“but I’m not moving to France.”

  When the woman had the baby, her new boyfriend adopted him. That seemed to Brad like an ideal solution—he loved the family he already had, but he wasn’t looking to start one.

  “He wanted to experience revolution,” says Glass. “He wanted to live that every day.” They spent much of the next two years in South America, returning to New York to raise funds by taking temp jobs—Brad was a lighting grip—and throwing all-night benefit parties. In Brazil they worked with the Movimiento Sin Tierra, landless poor people who’ve squatted and won rights to more than twenty million acres of farmland. By “working with” they meant living with, documenting the struggle for the sake of the revolutionaries back home. In Buenos Aires they joined up with a movement of workers who’d reclaimed factories shuttered by Argentina’s economic meltdown. In Bolivia they met a radical coca farmer named Evo Morales who would soon become the country’s first indigenous president. This wasn’t the East Village, Brad realized, or a tree platform in Oregon. There was real power at stake, real potential, real politics.

  Now he had a mission. He wanted to show American activists how to join the fight wherever they could find it, or start it. Video, he determined, was his medium. In 2004 he scraped together three hundred dollars for a used Canon ZR40 and headed back south, this time on his own. He was ready to start telling stories, ready to become a reporter.

  In 2005, in a central-Brazilian squatters’ town of twelve thousand landless peasants called Sonho Real (Real Dream), Brad filmed an attack by twenty-five hundred state police who charged through lines of praying women and opened fire on the crowd. Brad was the only reporter on hand. He hid in a shack, filming, and waited for the worst. The cops found him, dragged him out by his hair, and beat him almost to unconsciousness. Then they smashed his camera and arrested him. “The U.S. Embassy refused to do anything,” says Brad’s friend Miguel. “They said, ‘Yes, we know, but he is not an important person to us.’” But his American passport still carried weight with the Brazilian police. They let him go. He’d managed to keep his tape hidden; soon it would be broadcast throughout Brazil, a perfect example of Indymedia in action.

  But it didn’t seem like a victory to Brad. Police would later say that two squatters had been killed, but hospital workers said they had twenty bodies in the morgue. “i feel like i am haunted,” Brad wrote to his friend Kate Crane. “i keep seeing a thin woman’s body curled up at the bottom of a well, her body in a strange position—i can’t escape it.”

  THE MEXICO TO WHICH Brad traveled in early October 2006 seemed like a nation on the verge. Of what, nobody could say. But something was about to break. It was an election year, and a new force in Mexican politics, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appeared certain to win the presidency. Vicente Fox, a conservative who had deposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, was constitutionally forbidden from running again. His anointed successor was Felipe Calderón, an angry man obsessed with oil and secrecy, the Dick Cheney of Mexico. On July 2 Mexican television declared the race between Calderón and moderate Andrés Manuel López Obrador too close to call. The next morning Mexico’s electoral authority made Calderón the winner. Only they hadn’t counted all the votes. Two million Mexicans poured into the streets to protest. Calderón’s only hope was to seduce the PRI, his right-wing party’s traditional enemy, into a coalition against the leftist PRD. Part of the payment the weakened PRI demanded was the preservation of one of its traditional bases of power: Oaxaca.

  The people of Oaxaca are among the poorest in a poor nation, but the state is rich in tourist dollars, and the PRI knew how to harvest them. In 2004 the PRI installed as governor a rising star of the party named Ulises Ruiz. Ruiz was a cash machine, skilled at tapp
ing the state to kick funds up to the national party organization. What he wasn’t so good at, it turned out, was actually governing. The strongest challenge to his rule came not from another political party but from Oaxaca’s seventy-thousand-strong dissident faction of the national teachers’ union.

  Since 1980 the teachers had struck every spring. It was a political ritual: Teachers marched, demanding basic necessities; union leaders, loyal to the PRI, negotiated a few concessions; everybody went home. Ruiz didn’t get the script. When the teachers built a tent plantón in Oaxaca’s central square, he sent his police to attack, helicopters swarming like giant bees. First came pepper spray, then concussion grenades, then bullets. On June 14, 2006, at least three teachers were killed. From that day on Oaxaca was in open revolt. “Con los huevos de Ulises, yo haré los huevos fritos!” women chanted in the streets—“With Ulises’ balls, I’m going to make fried eggs!” The protesters seized twenty-five city halls around the state; Ruiz retreated to a bunker. In August he began sending convoys of paramilitaries into the night, opening fire with automatic weapons. The teachers and their allies locked down the city with more than one thousand barricades.

  And yet the American press ignored Oaxaca. That made it a perfect story for Brad, or so he told his friends. They tried to talk him out of it. “The APPO”—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, in effect its revolutionary government—“doesn’t trust anyone it hasn’t known for years,” Al Giordano, the publisher of an online newsletter on Latin American politics called Narco News, told him. “They keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense.”