Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  We marched for blocks before finally running headlong into a moving channel of celebrants, whose numbers were so large and spread out, we were quickly separated and swallowed up by them. Unable to move forward, I chose to back up and shoot down a side street toward the city park where our own after-party was scheduled to begin soon. I had been apprised by OTRP “organizers” that some “major celebrity musicians” were planning to drop in and entertain us, following our historic hike.

  Upon arrival I saw Marcus looking agonized as he leaned against a panel truck and observed the horror of Stash and his motley crew trying to cobble together a woefully inadequate PA system made up of odds and ends, unlikely to have seen active duty since before the Vietnam War. “Hey Stash,” mumbled one of his staff, holding up a tangle of twisted cables and jacks. “Ummmmm, so … whut does this go to dude?”

  “Fuck, man … Can’t you see I’m doin’ shit,” growled a frayed Stash, his entire head stuck into a large guitar amplifier that seemed to be missing its speaker.

  “Wull, yeah DUDE, like—no fuckin’ duh, Sherlock …” retorted the crew member. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re all doin’ important shit.”

  “Frickin’ assclown,” Stash muttered under his breath, while trying to locate parts for the amp. Marcus, standing on the sidelines, was unable to contain himself any longer as he interjected, “Hey man, I thought you could maybe use some extra gear to augment your system, so I brought a whole truck full of mics and cables and amps and stuff like that. I’d be happy to bring my board out and give you a hand with the set up if you want.”

  “I got it handled, Marcus,” barked Stash. “No assistance necessary, man. I’m, like, fifteen minutes away from being ready to do a sound check. If you wanna help then, I’ll call you … ’kay.” A vein on Marcus’s temple looked ready to rupture as he shook his head and climbed, into his truck, where he sat sullenly, still overlooking Stash’s sound crew. As he did so I gazed past him through the windshield, to see a rail-thin woman with a guitar strapped to her back, stomping purposefully toward the sound equipment, haphazardly strewn about on the grass. Stash’s crew, suddenly aware of its absence, had the “aftsight” to begin furiously attempting to construct a makeshift stage from two abandoned shopping carts and some plywood they’d found on site. As the guitar-bearing woman got closer and surveyed the scene, she ripped a pair of gimongous sunglasses from her eyes, and pasted an expression of sheer disgust over her entire face. I recognized her right away to be early-nineties folk/pop star Amy Startle, who I had neither seen nor heard about in at least fifteen years. She had written and recorded a minor hit called “Settled in Seattle,” which became the single from her major label debut album, alliteratively entitled, Brief Bold Brilliant. The tune, which had been in medium rotation on MTV programming for the better part of a year, peaked at number twelve on the charts before landing in the cutout bins of record stores nationwide. Amy had managed to carve a fairly decent career for herself based on the strength of that one song, until it became widely known that she was a bit of a handful—on and off stage. Her last decade had seen a series of backstage tantrums and on stage rants, once or twice culminating in walk-offs, followed by threats of lawsuits from concert presenters. She had run through a series of booking agents and managers before deciding to train her current love interest, a woman she’d met at a women’s music festival, to do the job for her.

  I followed Amy with my eyes as she stepped on the brakes, seconds before reaching one of Stash’s guys. She then pivoted alarmingly swiftly to glare accusatorially behind her. At that moment I spied another woman, roughly Amy’s age and size, staggering toward her with sweat pouring from her brow—arms weighed down by boxes of compact discs, and a backpack the size of a tropical tortoise on her shoulders. As Amy’s eyes locked on the other woman’s, I saw rage replace disgust. “You better not tell me this is the fucking gig you booked, Sierra,” Amy seethed. “And that better not be the fucking stage,” she snarled pointing at the plywood/shopping cart contraption. Sierra grimaced at the scene and began babbling a disjointed, rapid-fire defense of her work. “They said you’d be on the bill with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt … And there’d be a totally tricked out sound system … and they promised you wouldn’t even have to soundcheck. They assured me every single one of the items on your rider would be provided, down to the last detail … and …”

  All of a sudden, Stash was nowhere to be found, having high-tailed it behind a brick building upon seeing ballistic Amy. He was, in all probability, hoping his crew would somehow deflect some of the blows Amy looked ready to rain down upon them. I sat on a marble statue base just out of the action, wondering what would happen next. Marcus is what happened. Witnessing the entire painful scenario, he had boldly evacuated his truck and leaned into Amy and Sierra’s personal space to introduce himself. “Hi, I’m Marcus, and I apologize for the disorganization here. We’ve been unable to get the system fully operational because the police delayed our start time, but if you can hang on for about fifteen minutes, we should be able to get it together.” Sierra looked as if she wanted to pass out, as Amy turned her wrath onto Marcus. “This is bullshit,” she roared. “Complete bullshit. My manager and I are going to disappear for fifteen minutes, and when we come back, you’re either ready to go, or you can go fuck yourselves.”

  With that she wheeled around and buried herself in the crowd, leaving an overburdened Sierra to try to catch up, as best she could. Marcus sprang into action the second she was out of sight, artfully directing Stash’s handful of feckless foundlings in the unloading of his truck and the setup of equipment. Exactly fifteen minutes later Amy returned to a fully functioning system of amplifiers, microphones, and monitors, ready to deliver her dulcet tones to the crowd of three or four hundred onlookers, still in the area. Nothing could be done in such a short time to address the inadequacy of the stage, so Amy, still shooting scathing looks at Sierra, mounted the makeshift platform with the help of Stash, who had suddenly reappeared.

  Since no one had had the foresight to introduce her, Amy did so herself, by announcing shrilly that she had been trying to support the Occupy Movement since its inception in September, but had been driven back at every turn by ugly detractors, who contended that she, a famous folkstar, was more a member of the “1%,” than the “99%” and really shouldn’t be seen trying to glom on to our struggle. “Well, fuck that,” she brayed. “And fuck anyone who thinks that.” She then launched into a spastic, angry progression of power chords, followed by a series of shouted rather than sung words, which comprised the verse and chorus of an Occupy anthem she’d penned, on the fly, the day before. I stood next to Marcus’s sound board as he rushed to get a decent mix on her vocals and guitar. He and I had spoken briefly after the disastrous GA the week before, and he knew I’d done some singing, so he asked me for suggestions as he deftly dialed her sound in. She jabbed sharply at her guitar strings, while singing something about it being all of our faults the world had gotten so fucked up in the last few years. She then pounded a dissonant chord with her thick pick, before stopping the song altogether. “What is this, an oil painting? Ya know what?” Amy shrieked. “I’m getting pretty goddamned sick and tired of looking at you, looking at me, like you’re bored out of your fuckin’ gourds, and like you got something else better to do—so why don’t you entertain me for a minute while I smoke a fucking cigarette.” With that, Amy bolted nimbly off the stage, walked casually over to a nearby tree and lit up, to the stunned silence of everyone in attendance. “How’s this working for ya?” She hollered pointedly at the audience, whose faces were beginning to register the depth of their discomfort. Marcus looked as if he wanted to throw up as his eyes met mine, and he pleaded, “Can you just go up there and do a song or something?”

  “Yeah, I can do that,” I answered, wondering what else could happen to make the day any more bizarre. I climbed, somewhat less nimbly onto the “stage,” and began singing a medley of civil rights standards, “We
Shall Not Be Moved,” and, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” while clapping my hands. Once people joined in and began to loosen up, I started inventing verses to lengthen the song and keep the groove going. Several verses in, I felt the plywood shift beneath me as I realized Amy was attempting to reenter the tiny, unstable platform from behind. Fearing the structure would collapse, I reached out to an audience member to steady me as I turned around to lower myself, ungracefully, to the ground—all the while still singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” I felt hands reaching up to support me as I landed, off balance, onto the pavement below. Somehow still on my feet, I offered the microphone up to Amy, whose hand was already extended toward me. She snapped her fingers impatiently for me to hurry up. Just then, a vigilant Marcus lurched toward us both, offering a wireless microphone to Amy who took it from him roughly. Not wanting to further offend her, I then began giving my mic back to Marcus, as I saw Amy poised to address the bewildered group standing before us.

  “Stay there!” she ordered me, before returning to her audience. “Oh, I get it … You guys are into sing alongs,” she conjectured, condescendingly. “Well, why didn’t you say so. We can do that.” She resumed her complicated Occupy song from the same place she’d left off the first time around. “Okay, so that’s the chorus,” she explained, after running through a difficult assortment of syncopated rhythms accompanied by odd atonal chords and nonrhyming lyrics. “I hope you were paying attention. Now you try it,” she demanded, in a strange tone that was meant to be either conciliatory or patronizing—I couldn’t tell which. Wanting for this attempt to go well, I began beckoning people to sing along, as I echoed, to the best of my ability, the chorus she’d just sung. As we repeated her phrase, she cut us off, midsentence, screaming, “Shut up! That’s terrible! You need to do much better than that, “which we all struggled mightily to do. Still not satisfied, Amy speculated that we might not be “into doing the heavy lifting” that was required to rid the world of all the “fucked up shit that’s happening right now.” “If you’re not even willing to sing the goddamn chorus right, then how are you ever going to stop bank foreclosures? I can’t do everything!” was her parting statement, as she slammed the expensive microphone onto the ground, folded her guitar under her arm, and stalked past Sierra, who hurried to gather the rest of their things and follow.

  Two weeks later I was making my way to the Hertz counter at Reagan International Airport to pick up the economy car I’d rented to Occupy both Congress and the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. I booked my trip well before Occupy the Rose Parade, but had been filled with reservations after that bust. Jack Tatum and Amy Startle had left a bad taste in my mouth and I hadn’t wanted the disorganized, marginally successful event to be my last action with Occupy. “Be the change you want to see,” had become my mantra in the days since the parade. If I didn’t like the way the Movement was going, it was up to me to find the solution that would reinvigorate it. After all, not everyone could afford the luxury of jetting from place to place, following dissent and unrest around the nation in the hopes of unsettling the status quo. How could a twenty-something single mother ever be expected to travel more than a few feet away from the hungry mouths that depended on her to attend to their needs. It was incumbent upon those of us who still enjoyed some modicum of comfort and privilege to sound the alarm that would compel others to recognize the monster storm bearing down on us. If people like me didn’t try to stop the onrushing social, environmental, and economic devastation, a fall of apocalyptic proportions would be unavoidable. Toppling the corporatocracy that had become the United States of America was as much in my hands as in those of every other thinking, feeling American—and it was high time I got to work doing something to combat the problem, even if it meant Occupying a Kardashian.

  What in the world did I have to complain about? Sure the trip to Pasadena felt, overall, like a wasted effort, but I’d never eaten better food or drunk better alcohol in my life. On New Year’s Eve, two nights before the Rose Parade, the Fertigs had thrown a raging, music-filled party to end all parties, replete with prime rib, lobster canapes, Alice in Wonderland–themed costumes, copious amounts of killer weed, and Dom Perignon champagne. That had been fantastic. I had walked into their fabulous soiree, fresh out of another interminable, unproductive, catty meeting with Occupy Pasadena, (or was it OTRP?). That epic gathering had set me straight again. Other than my time and travel costs, I was out nothing for my efforts. And, there had been some cursory, eleventh-hour attempts by Wells Fargo to acknowledge our anger at their ongoing bad behavior. A few mainstream media outlets and print newspapers had even given the event scant, albeit shallow coverage, which led me to believe there may be some hope for future actions, such as Occupy Congress and Occupy the Supreme Court, which I was bound for on January 15, 2012. Both of those actions were scheduled to take place between January seventeenth and the twentieth in our Nation’s capital—the District of Columbia.

  The first order of business was to navigate the way to my host house in Silver Springs, Maryland. Facebook had not let me down yet, and I was fortunate to receive another lodging offer from an easygoing lesbian couple who answered my query. Both of them were politically active and wanted to be more involved with Occupy, however, Beth, who was in her early thirties, was trying to maintain her employment as a full time labor union employee, while battling a rare form of leukemia that she had been diagnosed with the year before. She was still putting in forty hours a week at work, even though she felt like hell and was making frequent trips to the hospital to combat health problems that arose after multiple courses of chemotherapy. She told me she regretted that she couldn’t physically attend Occupy Congress, so she was sending me as her “surrogate” to make sure I represented her interests. The room she and her partner, Jennifer, gave me in their cheery daylight basement was private and cozy, and even had its own bathroom which was swell by me. No doubt, the week was going to be much more plush and amenity-filled than OGP, yet I still missed the vibrant pulse of the Oakland Commune and had yet to replicate that exhilarating feeling.

  Before coming to DC, I made an online connection with two focus groups that appealed to me. Both had originally formed to influence the political decisions made by the Obama administration during his first term in office. Frustrated with the 2010 Citizen’s United ruling from the Supreme Court, (which stated that corporations are people and money is a form of free speech) the first group, Move to Amend, had been working for several months on overturning what many Americans thought of as the death knell to democracy. They believed that allowing corporations to spend as much as they want to get their candidates elected would do untold damage to the electoral process by granting them undue influence on who gets elected and what laws get passed. The other group, The Backbone Campaign, had formed specifically to embolden President Obama to find his spine and challenge the GOP by exercising the power of his office to get much tougher on corporate criminals as well as the scofflaw financial industry. Both organizations had collaborated to put together a series of political protests and events which they named, “Occupy the Supreme Court” that were slated to take place on January 20. I volunteered myself, in whatever capacity, which soon developed into both singing and acting parts in two skits which they’d written to inform and entertain people about the worrisome aspects of the Citizen’s United decision.

  In no time, I was able to fill my calendar with acts of civil disobedience and rehearsals for the entire week. The morning of January 17, I got into my car and drove into the beltway to find the closest parking to the United States Capitol Building. It was early in the morning as I walked past several police officers guarding the building. I reached into my pocket to grab my cell phone and capture the moment on film. As I fumbled to activate my camera through gloved hands an officer walked up to me with an assault rifle displayed prominently across his chest. “What are you taking pictures of?” he asked, curtly. It bothered me that his dark, wrap-around s
unglasses did not allow me to look directly into his eyes as I answered, “Oh, I’ve never been to the Capitol Building and I wanted to get a shot or two.”

  “Then why are you filming me and not the building?” he continued, frowning.