Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  Copyright © 2016 by Laura Love

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Jacket design by Laura Klynstra

  Jacket photo: iStockphoto/urbancow

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-106-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-112-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

  —Mario Savio, December 2, 1964, University of California, Berkeley Free Speech Movement

  Chapter 1

  The Beginning Is Near

  October 21–25, 2011

  “Mic check,” boomed a basso profundo call from filthy cupped hands encircling the craggy, unshaven face of a shirtless man, clad only in floral, loose fitting cotton pants held up by a single frayed drawstring.

  “MIC CHECK,” echoed the energetic throng of people surrounding the sweaty, hairy, impossibly thin caller.

  “Okay, there’s like …” resumed the caller, pausing after the word, “like.”

  “OKAY, THERE’S LIKE …” repeated the crowd.

  “a shitload of awesome …”

  “A SHITLOAD OF AWESOME …”

  “vegan, non-GMO …”

  “VEGAN, NON-GMO …”

  “gluten-free …”

  “GLUTEN-FREE …”

  “organic food being served right now in the kitchen.”

  “ORGANIC FOOD BEING SERVED RIGHT NOW IN THE KITCHEN.”

  Several hands shot skyward, fingers fluttering, while earthy faces beamed and shone with delight. As a first-time visitor to Zuccotti Park, I had no idea what was going on, so I too raised my hands in the air and copied the motions of the hundreds of people surrounding me. I soon learned that this demonstration was known to members of the Occupy Movement as “twinkle fingers,” which is similar to “jazz hands,” but signifies general approval for what’s being said by the main speaker. The call and response delivery of the message is what I now know to be the “human microphone,” whereby a single person can deliver an entire speech without the aid of a PA system to a large group of people, simply by having those nearest the caller repeat short sections of the message in unison to the outlying listeners. The process serves to deliver the communiqué to those further away who cannot hear the original caller. It reminded me of the old Saturday Night Live skit where TV pitchman, Garrett Morris, cups his hands and re-screams his original commercial message for the benefit of the hearing impaired.

  “So like—if you fuckers are hungry …”

  “SO LIKE—IF YOU FUCKERS ARE HUNGRY …”

  “you need to head on over there—pronto—and check that out.”

  “YOU NEED TO HEAD ON OVER THERE—PRONTO—AND CHECK THAT OUT.”

  The smell of burning white sage met my nose and mingled with body odor, incense, and marijuana smoke. I didn’t find the aroma pleasant, although I appreciated the act of “smudging,” an ancient Native American ritual I was vaguely familiar with, having seen it performed by alternative type friends of mine, to purge and purify an area of negativity, harmful spirits, and general bad vibes. I remembered back to the eighties when I bought my first house in Seattle. Friends came over to perform the ceremony as a housewarming gift, since the place wasn’t in a great neighborhood and had most likely been a drug shooting gallery or murder scene before I scored it.

  Many took the caller’s advice and headed over to the growing line at the “kitchen”—a series of tables and canopies providing shelter for a makeshift structure of propane burners, steam tables, Tibetan prayer flags, industrial cookware, washable plates, flatware, and cloth napkins. The scene enthralled me. There was even a gray water reclamation system that looked similar to moonshine stills I’d seen in pictures taken by government “revenuers” during Prohibition, just before they dismantled the works and hauled the manufacturers off to the hoosegow.

  In September of 2011, I began hearing about a rogue band of disaffected young people in New York City who had taken their disgust with corporate greed and Wall Street excesses to the streets and set up an encampment in a park not far from the iconic bronze bull statue. The group had been inspired by a call to arms from the lefty, anticonsumerist Canadian magazine, Adbusters, who had asked their readers if they were “ready for a Tahrir Moment,” referring to the Arab Spring protests that had captivated the imaginations of simmering malcontents all over the world with their populist uprisings and sudden overthrow of long-standing tyrants and dictators. The publication outlined its bold dare by declaring that, “On September 17, we want to see twenty thousand people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.” Cannily, the group that answered the call was able to take advantage of a loophole in the city’s laws that permitted them to bed down on the edges of New York sidewalks without being jailed. The burgeoning commune quickly became an embarrassing eyesore to multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who was soon gnashing his teeth and racking his brains to figure out a low profile, nonincendiary method to rid himself of the rebellious, noisy, stinky hippie plague of locusts that had descended upon his city’s crowning jewel—the fabled Financial District. As bothersome as the incessant drumming, singing, marching, smudging, and chanting had become, nothing bore greater responsibility for the mayor’s ire than the fact that this insouciant band of semiferal, bottom-feeding, ragtag, pseudo-intellectuals had appointed themselves arbiters of the fantastic, uniquely American system that had been working just fine for him. Not only were they attacking the institution of Wall Street, they were specifically targeting the very businesses and practices that had made him rich and the Bloomberg name famous. In a revolting display of cheekiness, they had frosted their nondairy, gluten-free cake by giving the operation a catchy Mad Men worthy title, in the form of a Twitter hashtag, #OccupyWallStreet, and a memorable poster of a reedy ballerina, arms outstretched, leg extended on tiptoe, atop the symbolic bull itself. Christ, where’s the respect? The OWS brand was taking off and growing exponentially. The fact that its activities were reaching and intriguing a shut-in like me, in my off-grid home on a remote mountain in North Central Washington State, was ample evidence that things were spinning out of control and the upstart movement was creating a life of its own.

  I came to this place with the intention of seeing for myself a movement I’d been waiting for most of my adult life. Even though I’d glimpsed it from the lens of mainstream media cameras and talking heads, it consumed me. Luckily, my occupation as a touring folk singer had landed me within a stone’s throw of
the Wall Street phenomenon I’d become so enamored with and hopeful about of late. It was pure coincidence that my “day job” as a traveling entertainer took me to that place, at that time, just when I needed it most. All it had taken to get me there was a single phone call from a friend who happened to be a legendary folk goddess who needed a backup singer on her comeback tour, after a much-needed two years off—an eternity in musician time.

  It was Saturday, October 21, 2011. Folk singer/cultural activist, Holly Near, and I had just finished performing a concert for 250 or so gray- and white-haired people, mostly women, in a theater in Albany, the capital city of New York State. I marveled at how old I’d somehow gotten, as evidenced by our largely mature audience. I couldn’t believe how swiftly life had flown by, and how the twenty-somethings had suddenly become sixty-somethings in what seemed like the skip of a stone. Over the years my stage dancing had turned to stage sitting and these days I was getting applause for simply standing up and leaving the comfort of my padded chair every once in awhile. As I sat there singing, I could feel the comforting bulge of credit cards and ID in my back pocket, however, now nestled between my driver’s license and Visa, was an AARP card, a recent addition to my wallet.

  Since I first became aware of her in the 1990s, I have admired Holly and her soul-deep commitment to fighting social injustice, war, poverty, sexism, racism, and all the other “isms” that screw everything up in this world. I learned that she had gone on the much-publicized “Free the Army” tour with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland in 1971, which caused quite a stir and blew a lot of minds. The event, which Fonda described as “Political Vaudeville,” took the antiwar trio to military towns along the West Coast, with the purpose of establishing meaningful dialog with soldiers who were soon to be sent off to Vietnam to fight and perhaps die in that conflict. They eventually wound up in Southeast Asia, performing for and talking directly to American troops in a show that was meant to be a sort of counterpoint to Bob Hope’s USO tours. It seemed fitting that I would be there with Holly in Albany, New York, on the very night that residents planned to launch their own tent city, much like the one I knew Occupy Wall Street had erected at Zuccotti Park in New York City on September 17.

  I had been closely following the Occupy movement on TV and the Internet and was titillated by its grassroots, guerrilla activism aspects, as well as the “get you some justice now” urgency of the Wall Street activists. I was instantly drawn to it like a tornado to a trailer park. Holly’s show, which had a casual living room feel to it, had somehow morphed that evening into an impromptu pep rally for Occupy Albany. She sang her rousing anthems, and I sang my civil rights songs, “Eyes on the Prize,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” After the performance, we were asked by concertgoers to lead a group to a nearby park around the Capitol Building. I’d been champing at the bit to get my feet wet in a real live Occupy event and on this night, a rally, protest, and demonstration were planned, followed by tent setups. It was widely known that the mayor and governor intended to enforce the 11:00 p.m. curfew and prevent any camping after that time. All of us, including many senior women, walked the half mile or so into a scene of primal drumming, chanting, electronic signs streaming the cost of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, high pitched ululating, Guy Fawkes masks, face paint, and tribal dancing. I guessed that maybe five hundred to seven hundred people were gathered there. Chants of, “We are the 99%,” “Ain’t no power like the power of the people, ‘cause the power of the people don’t stop,” and, “The Revolution has begun/Everything for everyone,” enveloped me. There were news trucks every few yards, lining the street with their twenty-foot hydraulic satellite receivers mounted on top. Journalists sat inside these trucks—talking heads with screens glowing ghostly on their faces as they hunched over laptops. Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC—all the mainstream media were there. Countdowns were shouted intermittently, to warn us of the fast approaching curfew. Cops with batons, helmets, and face shields began to assemble on the periphery. It looked to me as if we were getting boxed in, which was an uncomfortable feeling. Trouble seemed imminent. I was nervous, but otherwise happy as a clam to be at an authentic Occupation.

  I began interviewing people around me with my new cell phone, a Droid, that I could barely use or read because I’m too old to figure out new technology and I’m practically going blind—probably should have been wearing trifocals. Eleven thirty arrived with no uptick in police activity. I lingered until 11:45 when an Occupier offered to give me a ride back to my hotel. I was reluctant to depart the exhilarating scene, but duty called and I knew I’d have to be crisp in the morning. I went to bed that night believing we’d gotten bad information about the police crackdown and thinking, “Oh well, it sure was a great experience.”

  Two days later Holly emailed me with an Albany newspaper link reporting that the local cops had been poised to act, but looked out at the late arriving “sea of grannies,” alongside families with kids in strollers, and the chief of police decided to defy orders to enforce the curfew, citing their presence as a major justification. He pointed out that his area of expertise was policing, and Mayor Jennings’s and Governor Cuomo’s was not—“they know politics.” So he overrode them, citing that “it wouldn’t have looked too good on TV to have cops hauling grandmothers off to jail and tearing children from their parents’ arms to prove a point about curfews.” “Besides,” he added, they didn’t have the ability to adequately enforce the law anyway because of “downsizing and cutbacks in city spending.” He also revealed that none of his officers wanted to babysit a bunch of crying kids while their parents got booked into the pokey. Wow, how sensible, I thought. This whole Occupy thing is going to be easy peasy. We should be able to get this justice thing done in a hurry. At this pace we should have the world totally turned around by Christmas.

  By the end of my tour with Holly, I was obsessively googling Occupy stuff at every chance to get the latest news about Wall Street. I was intrigued by the notion that a handful of college kids had done a little sniffing around, saw what a raw deal they were getting from their government—(no good jobs, drowning in student debt, endless wars, a toxic food supply, global warming, relatives in foreclosure, gigantic oil spills, etc.), connected the dots, and traced the source of their predicament right back to exactly the place where I thought it should be—big corporations, big banks, and big fat rich people!

  On October 23 my longtime manager, ex-partner, housemate, best friend, and co-parent (it’s complicated), Mary McFaul, joined me in New York City to see the greatest show on earth—Occupy Wall Street. She and I felt festive as we walked the short distance from the subway stop to the Financial District. We passed the World Trade Center Memorial that had a huge line waiting in the unseasonably warm weather. It had been ten years since 9/11 and the Memorial planners themselves said they’d been overwhelmed by the amount of visitors they had received. There was still a lot of construction going on and between the jackhammers and the frantic New York City traffic, we were deafened and didn’t hear the Occupy drums until we were almost on top of Zuccotti Park.

  I squealed with delight when I laid eyes on the chaotic scene of tarps, tables, tents, and teepees obfuscating the landscape, obscuring the masses and anchoring scores of people, many who were absorbed in stimulating conversations about things that mattered to me, too. Signs that said things I’d been thinking for a long time were plastered everywhere. I was glad that I had been able to convince Mary to fly out the day before to join me in the “witnessing of history.” “This is an extraordinary moment in time,” I insisted. We were both wide-eyed and jubilant as we dove in and lead a sing-along beginning with “This Land is Your Land,” then “We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands,” followed by “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” It felt in those moments like the revolution was finally here, and I became wholly committed to the Occupy Movement on that day. There was a huge phalanx of cops on scooters all around the square; cops on foot, cops in a mobile cop tower, cops on horses, cops i
n vans, cops in cop cars, cops on bikes, cops in buildings, cops with assault rifles, cops with flashbang grenades, and cops with tear gas overlooking the park. There were a lot of cops. Many colorful protest signs caught my eye and resonated deeply with me as I wandered about. WHY ARE YOU WATCHING THIS FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM? GIVE MY GRANDMA’S HOUSE BACK FOX NEWS: RICH PEOPLE PAYING RICH PEOPLE TO TELL MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE TO BLAME POOR PEOPLE, I’LL BELIEVE CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE WHEN ONE HELPS ME MOVE FOR PIZZA, and my personal favorite, from an ordained minister, THE BEGINNING IS NEAR. Exciting discussions about topics like constitutional rights, corporate greed, war, environmental devastation, and the Glass Steagall Act abounded all around me. I hovered like a vulture on the edges of intense interactions, craning my neck to hear arguments about issues such as the military industrial complex, incarceration rates, GMOs, and capitalism. Sometimes I’d overhear people groping for a word or asking each other a question I knew the answer to, so I’d crowd in close, hoping to cadge an invitation to jump in and break the impasse. In addition to the intoxicating atmosphere, the mercantile setup was fantastic. Leave it to the scrappy resourceful people of New York City to hijack a trend in its infancy and turn it into a full-on merchandising shopportunity. There were micro vendors at every turn. The place was lousy with them. None of them could have been there for more than a few weeks max, but they all looked like they’d been shilling Occupy Wall Street souvenirs for generations. In fact, in order to gain access to the park, we’d been forced to squeeze past a stocky, impatient black woman, who’d located her sales stand directly in front of, and almost blocking, the main entrance to Zuccotti Park. She was aggressively hawking Occupy-themed buttons: WE ARE THE 99%, MAKE BANKS PAY, EAT THE RICH, STOP FORECLOSURES, THE PEOPLE ARE UNITED. I was drawn to one that said, I DON’T NEED SEX—WALL STREET F*CKS ME EVERY DAY. I bought it.

  All too soon, Mary and I were packing to return home from our visit to Occupy Wall Street. By that time I’d learned a few basic functions on my phone, and before we took off, I was reading an online account of a police raid on Occupy Oakland demonstrators. I read that two-term Iraq War marine veteran, Scott Olsen, had sustained a severe head injury from a tear gas canister spitefully hurled by an overzealous Oakland police officer. The words on the page elevated my blood pressure and I could hear a rushing sound in my head as I digested them. The more I read, the more I could feel my activist button being pushed, and I announced that I was going immediately to Oakland. Mary’s eyes rolled as she said, “Don’t go there, it’s dangerous. Here, let me show you something funny on your cell phone instead.” She dialed up a series of “Honey Badger” YouTube videos on my new device to make me forget all about Scott and his broken skull. I leaned in to focus on the collection of bastardized, overdubbed, National Geographic–style nature videos which had recently gone viral and blown up all over the Internet. The unlikely subject was the formidable, obscure animal known as the honey badger. The narrative was delivered by a fussy, catty, gay man, who was demonstrably impressed with the Honey Badger’s large bag of tricks. The flamboyant observer continually interrupted the original narration by shrieking things like, “Oh my Gawd, Honey Badger’s a badass. Did you see Honey Badger fuck up that whole pride of lions?! HONEY BADGER DON’T GIVE A SHIT. She’s all like, ‘Thanks for the dead zebra, stupid,’ to those dumbass lions.” We laughed ourselves incontinent before takeoff. We’d been flying for about five minutes before she looked at me and said, “I suppose I have to book your flight to Oakland since you’re too dim to figure that out on your own.” I rolled my eyes, dismissing the fact that she’d just insulted me. I shrieked, “Honey Badger don’t care, she’s a badass, she’s going to Occupy Oakland!” God bless Mary.