He caught an expansive view of the city on the turn approaching the Golden Gate, above Sausalito. Reborn once from ashes and recently twice shaken by seven-point-plus quakes, the city rubbed its back, the peninsula’s spine spiked with trees and communications towers, up against thick clouds. The eastern lowlands and landfills built up into skyscrapers and arcologies in disregard, if not defiance, of the trembling land. The Transamerica Pyramid was still prominent. To the south the Pleiades Platform climbed into the new day sun. Steel, cement and reinforced concrete, glass, plastic, experimental plasglass and plasmetal fleshed out the body physical of the voracious, computerized global capitalism gripping the peninsula, the tentacles of which he imagined reaching off in every direction. He envisioned a fission sun going nova in its midst, shredding the buildings with nuclear tracery, folding up into an orange cored mushroom cloud, finally forming out into a lightning wrapped human skull teethed in ruins. Then, against his conscious will, he materialized a vision of Janet squarely in his fantasy holocaust, fascinated and horrified by the juxtaposition.
He had driven down early to miss the traffic and so had to wait for the stores to open. Shopping for software only took an hour and a half. It kept his mind off the ugly thoughts and feelings he entertained. He and his dad had talked about what the house needed in the way of a software update, as well as what each of them wanted in a new program package.
“We’ve got an Einstein,” he told the sales clerk in the third software shop he had visited that morning, “The home ‘some needs something for compunet operations. It now coordinates four smaller computers. We need it to handle twelve. My dad wants augmented verbal transcription capabilities, with advanced legal dictionaries and case indices. And I want full 3-D CAD/CAM. Currently, I’m using a quick layer effect.”
The clerk recommended the NOOSPHERE 5.0 package with a compatible GODEL application and a couple of Law Data Extensions. Greg priced the hot selling CASE software series; universal translation modules for computer operating systems produced by NishiCorp. Too expensive, so he settled for the other items, paying for them with his father’s credit card.
Without a doubt, Greg needed a reality check. Janet was a continuous slam to the jaw, but the riemanium was...what? He knew it was enough to make a bomb. The media had made that clear with constant repetition. It was a quintessential of America, a distillate of the evil of which this country was capable. But what was he to do with it? He did have it in his possession, a fact that still rattled around loose in his mind. Time to talk to Larry, Greg told himself.
The day’s chances for rain broke up, patching the cold chopped bay with swatches of creamed sun. On the drive back, he checked out the city’s latest sight, the Pleiades Platform off Potrero Hill. Seven large pylons, each a sleek skyscraper of plasmetal and plasglass, chrome by day and matte black by night, rose in a cluster from the bay floor into the sky, equal in height to anything downtown. Thin, gardened spans, decks and platforms interlaced the pylons at various levels, and sophisticated pneumatic causeways connected the Pleiades to a large parking structure on land south of Market. In the scheme of Bay Area capitalism, the Pleiades was not so much its heart as it was its penis. It was an American/Japanese zaibatzu; the Bay Area’s multinational redevelopment corporation.
California’s economy had suffered a number of shocks toward the end of the 20th century. Drought and imported pests played havoc with the state’s legal agriculture. Defense spending realignments threatened the aerospace industry with severe cuts and the military with draconian reductions. Various voter referenda, state laws and taxes, and state judicial decisions leant to corporate flight. Earthquakes—Los Angeles in 1998 and San Francisco in 1989 and 1999—turned in heavy loss of life and property damage. California, once the sixth largest economy in the world, reeled from such blows.
A governor with her own vision for California then stepped in to turn catastrophe into opportunity. As the Federal Government delayed on water legislation, and hemmed and hawed about supporting aerospace industries or subsidizing winter agriculture based in Salinas, Central and Imperial valleys; and while the multi-nationals steeped in North American free trade diverted, doled out and delayed the State’s economic recovery; the governor opted for the Pacific Rim. The Japanese-financed Pleiades Consortium was the consequence. The Waldo Tunnel’s darkness swallowed Greg up, only to spit him out into Marin County’s affluence.
Bioengineering and water micro-management revived the State’s agriculture. Joint Japanese and EuroAmerican projects brought California aerospace back to its feet, and inspired related heavy industries—shipbuilding, electric car production, etc. The surplus of military and weapons expertise came to terms with a new world order and a new world war; fractious, decades long military brush fires throughout the developing and underdeveloped world. New weapons industries tooled up, and counterinsurgency consulting became a rage. The undeclared war in southern Mexico revitalized the state’s military sector, allowing both the Alameda Naval Air Station and Treasure Island Naval Base to reopen. High tech, always the state’s strongest suit, managed to give the Japanese strong competition and a few surprises. The Pleiades was instrumental in much of this turnaround, and thus spearheaded the state’s physical reconstruction, infrastructural rebuilding, and informational rewiring. Besides the towers in San Francisco Bay, another Pleiades Platform rose from the Santa Monica mountains overlooking LA.
As the United States moved to integrate with Canada and Mexico, California moved to integrate with the Pacific Rim economy. The state was also a majority “minority society” by the turn of the century. California was properly a Pacific Rim power, not a North American power.
He crunched into his driveway before 11. Larry’s answering machine picked up on Greg’s call. Greg piled the software onto the Einstein and fixed himself a sandwich. He had a fax, from his listing in Hemming’s Motor News. Greg read the request for his estimate on rebuilding pistons, cylinders and heads for a ‘64 Cadillac V-8. He called Larry again, and again got his friend’s machine. He remembered another place his friend might be. Before leaving for his car, he recovered the riemanium from the basement, wrapped it in a blanket, and fit it into his trunk.
“Greg, yo! Party tonight at my house,” Larry said as the two high-fived.
“I remember. Got your fax too. Also got to talk to you after the meeting.” Greg whispered. “Serious business.”
The meeting in question, and in progress in the Campus Student Union Building, was that of Alabaster State Students for Peace. ASP for short. It was the day before the beginning of second semester, and the student lounge was not yet Uttered with stacks of newspapers, coffee cups, full ashtrays and soda bottles.
Greg found a seat next to his friend Larry Reed, a prematurely balding, pudgy, scraggly bearded, stringy-haired young man a year older than Greg. Larry had been orphaned at 16 when both his parents died in an automobile accident. Retaining some presence of mind after the tragedy, Larry moved quickly to declare himself an emancipated minor, and to secure his claim to his inheritance. He actually employed Greg’s dad to add weight to his case well before he and Greg became friends. Social security, life insurance, and company retirement and insurance benefits all compounded to secure him a comfortable financial independence. Larry in turn had invested a portion of it into a future of suburban agriculture. Indoor marijuana cultivation to be precise. As the meeting proceeded, they whispered rude gaffs to each other about the principals.
Close to sixty people jostled for seating around a report being given on San Francisco’s demonstration the day before, representing a good cross section of youth under the gun of the draft. Aside from the conventional few, here were punks, dreads, metalheads, mods, at least one skinhead, and a sprinkling of neo-hippies and neo-neo-beats in the retro category. Raspies, Ferals, Spooks and even a few Nulls occupied the modern. Smoke’s transcendent, and therefore somewhat scary MayDay Revolutionist Gang, had not made their entrance yet.
“...Some of u
s stayed at the rally,” Mitch Skyler said. A sophomore, he was a prep, a dap, a yup in training, his attire natty and his grooming impeccable. It was rumored he was heavy into “cognitive performance enhancement substances.” In other words, smart drugs. “Others in the Students for Peace contingent either stayed with the splinter groups who broke off from the march down Market or left the rally once the rioting started. I was one of the one’s who stayed. There were lots of good speeches and literature. ASP had its own table. Also, I got to speak for the organization toward the end of the rally. It seems that our ‘scheduled’ speaker wasn’t ‘available’ at the scheduled time.”
“Sniff, sniff,” Larry said. Lori Turnage laughed out loud. She was a senior, a brassy, long-haired strawberry blonde, cheeky, and zaftig. She was post-Rasputanic, though she still wore the characteristic black clothes streaked with red to resemble blood.
“You bet I was doing something more interesting than hanging around a stodgy old PEACE rally for the ‘opportunity” to speak to a bunch of people too chicken shit to take to the streets and try shutting down the city,” Lori stood. She had been born in Texas and had grown up in the south. Her accent was not noticeable, unless she wanted it to be, and now Lori drawled. “The Hooligans were everywhere; turning over cars, breaking storefront and bank windows, setting intersections on fire with dumpsters full of trash, street fighting with the cops or leading them on a merry chase. Now, that’s how to have an ANTI-WAR action! Those of us who weren’t masked or organized, all we could do was stay out of the way, on the sidewalks. But the cops couldn’t ignore us. They busted heads among the bystanders too. The Hooligans kept regrouping and running off in unexpected directions and we kept backing ‘em up. For the next mass demo I propose that ASP organize our own autonomous cells and kick some ass.”
“And she calls us macho,” Greg commented. Larry snickered. Lori lit a clove spice cigarette.
“That’s not the issue,” Mitch snapped back. “You took the responsibility for being the ASP speaker at the rally.”
“That was before the demo got militant,” Lori lashed back in return, taking a drag on her scented smoke, her cozy southern accent fast evaporating.
“Militant or not,” Mitch took a steadying breath, “Our contingent was depending on you to speak.”
“Half the contingent was watching Hooligans fight cops up and down Market,” Lori flared, “While you all were sitting on your butts, pretending you were accomplishing something.”
“OK, ok,” David stood, holding up his hands to break up the verbal fight. “Can we have a little process here. For a minute. Please.”
“End of round one,” Larry whispered.
David Weinstein, with Beth Roland, were Mr. & Ms. Coop on campus, a couple of sorts. Thanks in part to their energies, an amalgam of coop restaurant, general store, book shop, food store, bike shop, computer exchange and recycling group were giving the University a run for its money in economically providing for student services. Greg himself did volunteer work for the recycling enterprise; renting and driving University trucks to carry the campus’s recycled newspapers, computer paper, bottles and cans to the yard in San Rafael.
David, like Beth and others in ASP’s leadership, was a perennial senior, always on the edge but never quite graduating from ASU. Coincidentally, many of these old timers were also prominent in ASP’s leadership. David was short, of stocky build, 26, and balding in a rabbinical manner that demanded a skullcap. He also had a lecherous eye for the young stuff, and the nubile 17-year-old coeds entering ASU every year as freshmen without a doubt were a factor as to why David cultivated his perennial senior status. Beth, his main squeeze, was David’s height, plump, attractive, with short black hair and clear blue eyes behind stylish glasses. In addition to attending ASU, she had a legitimate job doing community development in the small Latino/migrant barrio in southwest Alabaster.
“OK, let’s just begin with the obvious,” David folded his hands. He was always deliberate in his conversation and mundanely methodical in his thinking, “There are many kinds of action. Education, civil disobedience, street fighting, etc., etc. I mean, the night before yesterday’s demo, someone broke into the biggest police parking lot on the peninsula and flattened every tire on 240 police vehicles. And I’m still trying to get people interested in forming a mobile guerrilla theater troupe to perform on the street and at demos.”
Groans came from around the room.
“OK, my point is, there’s lots of ways of expressing our anti-war protest, and ASP doesn’t necessarily favor any one of these strategies. I personally would like to see our group get a little more militant about things, but the whole organization needs to decide democratically what direction to go into. By the same token, ASP runs entirely on volunteer labor. No one gets paid here, and no one can take up the slack when someone else is irresponsible. At least, they shouldn’t have to. If people take responsibility to do something for the organization, they fuck up ASP’s organizing efforts toward peace when they don’t live up to their responsibilities. It’s like working at the coops. If I’m supposed to open up, say, the Zapata Cafe in the morning, and I don’t show up with the keys, that inconveniences everybody and fucks things up for the restaurant. George.”
Consensus for that meeting had been that each speaker would call on the speaker to follow. George Meternich, at 33, was the seniorest of the seniors present, short haired, steely eyed, and the group’s most likable Marxist-Leninist. Unlike the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard Party and Communist Unity League reps who irregularly attended the ASP meetings, George was truly independent of party, and somewhat principled in his organizing methods. A thinking ML in search of that elusive, true vanguard party.
“I see it as an issue of self-discipline,” George was much more soft spoken, “I mean, all of us could be doing something else, something more enjoyable, like going to a concert or drinking beer, or whatever. We’ve taken on working against the war because we think that work is important. Not necessarily pleasant or glamorous. Going to meetings isn’t ‘fun.’ A lot of this basic organizing requires self-discipline, and living up to responsibilities. I’m afraid there’s a tendency to get a little adventurist and romantic. I get the feeling that something is seen as more fun if its more militant, which I think can be a dangerous attitude. ‘Sitting on your butt’ listening to speeches at a rally may be an appropriate action at a certain point in time, and street fighting might be an appropriate action at another point in time. In either case self-discipline, carrying out the responsibilities we take on, is important. More so, I suspect, in street fighting than in going to meetings or speaking at rallies. If we cant be self-disciplined about a rally, then I don’t think we should be considering street actions at this time. I mean, we need to analyze the conditions of our society, our movement, and our own group, discuss it thoroughly, debate out the various positions and struggle toward common ground if we’re going to change ASP’s work and focus. Joseph.”
“This is gonna get deadly fast,” Larry mumbled, screwing his face up unpleasantly.
Meetings can be such a bore when these guys get going,” Greg seconded the thought.
Joseph Curlew didn’t look to make it any better. Joseph, with Nina Shaw, were neo-hippies, though so old that most considered them just hippies. Joseph had long wiry hair, a thick, full beard and a set of wire rimmed glasses. Sturdily working class, a carpenter with general contractor skills, he nevertheless seemed a little too spaced on drugs, or New Age religion, or utopia. He wasn’t a perennial senior so much as a perpetual student; taking two years of something and then changing majors, taking a couple of years off to work and travel, finishing vocational training on his own by apprenticing out to a licensed practitioner, and the like. Nina, invariably attired in peasant dresses with floral prints, rarely spoke at meetings.
“Now, I might be wrong,” Joseph often emphasized a folksy, rural air. “But as I remember the name of our organization, its Alabaster State Students For Peace. Not
Students Against War, although I’m also against war. I’m for peace, and peace to me is not just an absence of war. Peace means making new relationships between people, relating to each other non-violently and with mutual respect...”
At that moment, Smoke entered the meeting with three of his MDRG boys. The “yo’s” and high-fives momentarily disrupted things as the meeting’s silent mass came to life. No doubt about it, they were popular if only because folks did not want to risk not being their friends.
Leather jackets and military overcoats, heavy black boots and Creepers tennies; they were outlaw to the core. The skinhead, Darrel, popped a Rolling Rock as they got settled, swigged it and handed it to dreadhead Eric, who in turn passed it to Jim in rat tails and shaved patches. Their casualness with alcohol in this part of campus where it was forbidden was a clue to their attitude. Smoke remained standing, casually leaning against a wall with cool approval for the disruption they had caused. Of indeterminate age, he was average in height and build, red hair cut very short, freckled, and always wearing mirrored sunglasses. Smoke was not now, nor was anyone certain he had ever been a student at ASU.
The MDRG boys used more “controlled substances” than any dread, neo-hippie or Raspie, and did so in highly uncontrolled ways. They ran the smoke-ins, psychedelic “mushroom madness’’ festivals, and anything goes liberated zones on the campus as mass, spontaneous, theatrically catalyzed events outside of all channels and permission. Guerrilla theater gone ape shit. At the same time, their aggro levels exceeded any of the punks or skins left around, and the MDRG walked like they talked. For instance, there was the time when an alliance of Woodacre Boot Boy skins and Marinwood Death Wish Kid Nulls named The New Order called them out for war in Barbary Park at the Loop. The New Order outnumbered the Gang two to one, but they had not figured on master strategist Smoke. MDRG’s fifteen-odd crew arrived early at the park to take up positions, and when The New Order mob arrived the Gang immediately attacked, giving their enemy no time to reconnoiter on unfamiliar turf, let alone to dig in or to bluster. Billy clubs and bottles routed the young fascists from Alabaster, Smoke even recruiting some of the local high school crowd to chase after the fleeing nazis with their vans and cars to further scatter them. Smoke cultivated the MDRG’s no nonsense, kick-ass, street fighting image. Gang members also seemed to get laid more often and more creatively than the best of the Ferals. In short, they were so bad, so absolutely on-the-edge all the time, they created their own time and space out of their very presence. More real than reality; in fact they were reality guerrillas.
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