They ran then, the cops having decided they were the easier quarry. Down streets, cutting alleys, jumping fences, running backyards, dodging traffic and removing all of their incriminating evidence in the process. Once in the cool isolation of an enclosed apartment complex courtyard, Greg’s adrenaline finally gave out, as did his legs. Only then did he realize that he had been scorching on adrenaline since he had donned his bandana, how many hours ago?
“I...I gotta rest,” Greg gasped, and kneeled to lower his head.
“So do I,” Larry croaked, leaning up against a wall, panting noisily.
“I guess we’re far enough away now,” Smoke said, glancing about. He didn’t have his glasses on, and it was the first time Greg had seen his eyes. They looked small and faded, compared to the wide mirrored lenses he was used to. “Wanna go back to the riot?”
“Naw,” Larry wheezed, “That’s enough for me today.”
Greg nodded in agreement and brushed his hair back. Smoke looked disappointed.
“There’s a squat not too far from here,” Smoke said, “I’ll take you there so you’ll be safe. I wanna try and catch up with my crew.”
They agreed. and started to saunter up toward North Beach, as if they hadn’t just stepped out of the fiery furnace, their hair and clothes still smelling of its fury. They avoided police patrols whenever possible. Those they had to pass paid them no mind. The squat, a run down three story ‘Victorian, was locked down, the windows shuttered and the front door barred.
“Who is it?” a gruff voice asked to Smoke’s insistent knock.
“Smoke,” he said, “I know Captain Chaos, BdN.”
The door flung open, and a wild-eyed man gestured emphatically for them to enter before slamming locked the door again.
“Jesus, what the hell you doing approaching this place?,” the man, bearded and balding, bore a strong resemblance to Charles Manson, “Haven’t you heard?”
“No,” Smoke smiled, “We been kinda outta touch the last couple of hours.”
“Someone drove eight motorcycles right down into the BART Station,” the man said, spittle flecking a corner of his mouth, “Embarcadero Station. Four right onto the BART tracks and four down to the Muni. Armed group first knocked out the turnstiles, but some fancy riding anyway.”
“Fuck,” Larry whistled.
““Not only that, but Hooligans shut down both the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges.”
“How?” Greg asked, astonished.
“Drove a line of cars, junkers, onto each bridge both ways. Stopped right in the middle of the bridges, chained them together, and lit them on fire. They were chock full of thermite or magnesium! So were those cycles. They’re still burning.”
As the squatter spoke and gestured, Smoke smirked.
“You mean, the city’s shut down?” Greg asked, “Nobody can get in or out?”
“South’s still open,” the man shrugged.
“Did they get away?” Smoke asked.
“Clean.”
“How goes the street fighting?” Smoke continued.
“Still going strong. Pigs are getting the upper hand in some areas. The rumor is, once they settle with the Hooligans, they’re gonna clear out the squats.”
It was then that they noticed the others in the shadows around them. People stood pensively next to piles of bricks, boxes of pre-made molotovs, sections of pipe, fiberglass sheets broken into shield sized pieces, wooden boards and baseball bats, a whole assortment of crude weapons.
“We’re ready to fight for this squat,” the man grinned, missing a few teeth, “Wanna join us?”
“Can’t,” Smoke frowned, “Basically, these two never been in a riot before today. I gotta get them to safety. Then I’ve got to track down my crew.” “Understood,” the squatter nodded.
Once again on the street, they meandered toward Russian Hill. Smoke smudged the southern skyline.
“I know another safe house,” Smoke mused, “If it’s not too crowded I’ll put you up there.”
Smoke guided them first down the narrow alley between two high rises, and then through a handleless metal door in the wall to one of the buildings, opened only by Smoke’s key in the deadbolt. They descended from a platform, Smoke in the lead, down stairs to a dimly lit door frame.
“This isn’t going to work,” Smoke said, as the two reached the floor next to their guide. The door opened into a modest basement, a very full room. Autonomists and anarchists assembled their paraphernalia for use, hiding or disposal. A few Klowns removed their makeup and rearranged their clothes. Their low talk and occasional laughter did not break when the newcomers stepped up to the threshold.
“It’s real tight,” one of the Hooligans shrugged, “But if you’re in need...”
“Got a couple more options,” Smoke grinned and waved at the crowd. Once back on the street, he headed them back to North Beach via Chinatown, the southern horizon still darkly plumed. The day failed. “I’ve got another place I’m sure is open.”
As they turned down on Columbus, a woman approached them climbing the hill. She was older, pretty, but a touch frumpy, and definitely preoccupied. She looked up at the trio, and suddenly, absolutely stopped.
“Mike,” she smiled, “That’s you, isn’t it?”
She looked directly at Smoke, into his eyes. He stopped also, and something passed across his face. Recognition, mixed with panic.
“Sorry,” he said, tentative.
“Michael Baumann,” she said, so sure, “You know who I am. Rosanne. I’m Rosanne Casey.”
She smiled broadly. Radiated. Smoke scowled blackly.
“Don’t believe we’ve met,” Smoke mumbled.
“Mike!” she chided, “It’s me, Rosy. Where have you been?! Why haven’t you called me?!”
“Get ready to dash,” Smoke whispered to Greg and Larry. He was pale.
“What’s that?” The woman, Rosanne, seemed confused. “Mike, why did you leave? I lost my job. I lost my scholarship. I had to drop out of “school I’m working full time as a waitress now “
“Run!” Smoke hissed, plaintively.
They did.
“Mike, don’t leave me again. Please, don’t...”
Panting and haunted, Smoke halted them several blocks and corners away.
“What the hell was that all about?” Larry hyperventilated.
“Entrapment,” Smoke breathed, just as heavily, “Police, I think.”
It was not convincing.
“We’re close to the safe house,” Smoke sidestepped.
Actually, it was a safe roof, on top of an apartment complex. Smoke smiled to find that no one else was there as night descended. Plywood, chicken wire and fiberglass shelters occupied two sides of the roof. A neat warren of rabbit hutches occupied one and two decks of pigeon cages the other, but both shelters had been built larger than their husbandry warranted. Smoke produced another key, this for a large locked box bolted firmly but unobtrusively in one of the rabbit shelter’s unoccupied corners. He opened it to reveal bundled sleeping bags, blankets, clothes and a food cache.
“Help yourself,” Smoke offered, “This is where we’ll spend the night. I’m going back out to find the MDRG. I’ll be back later.”
The two dug into some vegetarian luncheon pate and crackers after Smoke left. A symbol marked the underside of the box’s lid.
“Jesus, I’m hungry,” Larry said between bites, “We were all over today. Damn, what a riot.”
“Yah,” Greg said, uncomfortable with his growing awareness. No one said enlightenment was necessarily joyful. “Kind of scary also, if you ask me.”
“How’s that,” Larry munched, “Exhilarating I can see. But scary?”
“We could have been dead ringers for Hitler’s SS and SA on Krystalnacht, smashing things up. Terrorizing people.”
“Come on, there’s no resemblance. We were fighting the powers-that-be. Fighting the cops. The cops weren’t standing around watching us attack synagogues and Jews, like t
hey did in Nazi Germany.”
“Okay, so our target was different,” Greg said, “But our methods were the same.”
“Hold on. Hitler’s boys weren’t organized into affinity groups. There were no anarcho-nazis doing Krystalnacht.”
“My ancestry is part Polish Larry. The Poles sure didn’t need a Hitler or an SS to lead them into committing Jewish pogroms. Lots of times it was the community that did it. Friends and neighbors getting together and going out to stomp some Jews. Certainly our level of violence was similar.”
“Anger is a legitimate emotion,” Larry pointed out, “So is outrage.”
“Come off it. There was a whole lot of romanticizing violence in that riot today. People got off on wrecking shit, not because they were so goddamned angry or outraged by the war. They were glorifying destruction. And what about Smoke and the MDRG. Man, they’re pros. Not much gut anger there. Just a whole lot of professional street fighting is what I saw.”
And so their discussion continued, going about in circles, until the day’s exertions, plus some food in their stomachs, caught up with them. They unrolled two of the sleeping bags and Larry was soon fast asleep. Greg had a little harder time finding solace in slumber as his mind wandered over heady images of the day’s actions. He stood, wrapped in his sleeping bag, and walked out of the shelter into the middle of the roof. The city climbed up into hills and rolled down into the bay. The sweep of city lights faded what stars managed an appearance between shifting clouds. To the north he saw the Golden Gate connect up with Marín, a bright white flare winking halfway along its span. There, on the side of Mount Tamalpais’s dark mass, rested a Nagasaki nightmare. Waiting for him. The Pleiades Platform stood visible even above downtown’s nearby skyscrapers to the south, its blue and gold lights leaking through dirty streaks and layers of smoke.
Greg was not accustomed to staring the death’s head straight in the sockets. The wino’s murder by the Fed’s last night, and the guards who had spared him as he hurled a gasoline bomb at them today were hard things not to think about. Azrael breathed down his neck. Other connections became clear as well, the most obvious being the potential for mass murder he had buried in his meadow, the bomb’s plans even now residing in his car in Alabaster. Much more subtly, it waited for him in Janet. In the death of their relationship.
He had spent the past several days trying to maintain the notion that Janet had applied to Wellesley on junior transfer on a plan to dump him. He had wanted to blame her, not only for disloyalty, infidelity and betrayal, but also for premeditation. Sometimes he had imagined that her duplicity had gone on longer than her move to Boston, that she had been scheming to crash and burn their relationship for some time. He had even gone as far as to try and convince himself, in a warped logic, that a plan need not be conscious to remain a plan. He had needed to condemn her totally.
At the same time he had dosed up on lots of intended anesthetic; in Margaret and Lori with sex, and in all too conventional drug use. Those, along with all the political activism, were dropping him further and further behind in school and were not helping him to resolve anything about Janet. Every time he thought of her, the same visceral anger and hurt boiled up, raw as the day he read her letter. He was not getting anywhere. He was stalemated, and the stalemate devoured him. He felt the beginnings of an ulcer brewing, his stomach churning. He needed to break the stalemate. But to do so he needed to admit to some uncomfortable truths. And tonight was the night to do so.
His depth of reaction to Janet’s leaving, the blackness of his betrayal, resonated with the sense of betrayal he had felt when his mother left. He had felt abandoned then, and he felt abandoned now. He felt overwhelmed and helpless, then and now. Greg was used to doing what needed to be done; in school, on his lathe, in his life, and doing it pretty well. He clenched at not being able to do anything, either to get his mother back into a happy family, or to recover Janet for a happy couple. He had no control over such things.
Consequently, he felt guilty that he had caused both women to leave. Had responsibility for his childhood been so great a burden on his mother and her aspirations for an independent life that she had needed to leave? Had his possessiveness so suffocated Janet that he had literally driven her out of his life? His own jealous, zealous possessiveness; that he needed to admit. He had bound Janet into their relationship so tight that perhaps she had not had the room to breath.
Funny, how he had tried to do things 180 degrees differently from his father and wound up in the exact same place. Greg could not escape his own history. And, like history, he could not relive it differently. To say “If I’d only done it differently” meant nothing. He could only go one time around. No repeats, no second chances. Had he been less possessive she might not have left. Or, she might have left sooner.
He could not even learn from his mistakes, not in any conventional sense, even as history did not give “lessons.” Every person, every relationship, every situation was unique; history after all being a chronicling of the unique. He thought he had been applying lessons from his parent’s divorce. His mother had not had a life because his father subsumed their relationship to his career. In turn, Greg had made his and Janet’s relationship paramount. He had denied her any independent life with his jealousy, and his desire to share every possible minute of his life with hers. Janet’s individuality had been subsumed to their identity as a couple.
Greg had not felt being a couple as not being an individual. After all, being a couple was what he had wanted as an individual. Apparently, that had not been what Janet wanted.
What good was going through life’s pain if you could not learn lessons from that pain and apply them to making life better? When he had gotten what he needed from Janet, he had not been jealous. But was he so needy of attention and reassurance from his own feelings of abandonment by his mother that no woman could give him what he needed for very long, let alone a lifetime? What good was admitting such razor edged truths to himself if he could not act on them? If he could not move forward? If he could not stop feeling so helpless?
Exhaustion finally overwhelmed his consciousness under cloud muted starry night. He dreamt of wheels within wheels within wheels, each turning, all to no effect.
***
DL’s speech to the peace rally had been pure righteousness. He had followed a black vet who had just finished his tour of duty in southern Mexico and was not planning to reenlist. The uniformed, disciplined New Afrikan Lords stood in formation behind DL, proudly wearing the symbol of their organization and center.
The brother who just spoke,” DL confronted the crowd of some one million, mostly white, “Spoke truth when he said that the powers-that-be want people of color in this country to fight and kill foreign people of color to further the interests of white supremacy and US imperialism. He gave you the figures; how many more brothers and others of color are in the military compared to our numbers in the general population. He spoke truth when he said over a third of the army’s enlistees and draftees are African American while we’re only 13% of the population. He spoke truth when he said that the Oakland Army Base is 2/3rds Black while the City of Oakland is only half African American. He spoke truth when he said that Black troops in southern Mexico are dying at twice the rate of white soldiers. And we ain’t done giving you the truth today.”
DL felt like a Southern Baptist preacher on that platform, before that microphone. He flashed to an image of a Bible thumping circuit rider as he paused for effect, and he smiled.
“The powers-that-be, their policy is exactly the same here in this country as it is in southern Mexico. Let people of color fight and kill other people of color. Black gangs in Oakland, the Bloods and the Crips, they don’t kill white folk. Not many anyway. Mostly, they kill other black folks. Or they kill members of other gangs; and not just other Black gangs, but also Chicano gangs or Cambodian gangs or Filipino gangs. The brothers behind me, we’re NEW Afrikan Lords, but we used to be the YOUNG Afrikan Lords, one of the to
ughest, baddest gangs East Oakland ever saw. And what did we fight over? Drugs and rackets and turf. And why’s that? Who benefits? The white ruling class of this country benefits. With drugs and rackets we only hurt and destroy our own people. And until there’s revolution in this country, Afrikan people will only have the illusion of holding any kind of turf. Again, why’s that? Who benefits? Again, the white ruling class of this bloody nation benefits. They keep you white college kids from getting your asses shot at in some Yucatan jungle, unless you wants to. And they keep the people divided so that the white elite running this country can exploit all of us, but especially the Black nation in this nation.
“I’m not talking now about the drugs, the heroin, the crack, the ice, the 999 that the US government encourages to spread in the Afrikan community to keep my people chained. I mean, you all know that the CIA and the US military brings the horse and coke into this country. I’m not even talking about the AIDS plague that’s still killing people of color in this country ‘cause the cost of the vaccines are so high. All I’m talking about is brother killing brother in driveby’s and gangbanging, and the family homicides, and all the other ways we’re killing each other so that the white bourgeoisie can stay in power.”
The crowd squirmed, some uncomfortably, and some in radical-chic-right-on. An eagle tacked the wind high above the vast crowd, paused in flight high in the cloud cut heavens.
“As I said before, me and the brothers behind me, we were once the Young Afrikan Lords, the baddest gang in all of Oakland. Our turf was the biggest, our drugs were the purest, and our guns were the loudest. Then we learned the truth about how this country is run and we stopped that gang banging stuff. Now as I said, me and the Lords, we’re the New Afrikan Lords and we’re a political organization. We run the New Afrika Center in Oakland and we’re working to build the race. You all are invited to visit. We’ve got a fine restaurant and other things at the Center you might enjoy. Next week, the New Afrika Center is calling a Council of War of all the gangs in Oakland. We’re gonna call a truce on all this gangbanging. But we’re gonna do more than call a truce. We’re gonna forge an alliance. There’s ten gangsta’s for every cop in the city. We’re gonna start turning the guns around. Stop brother killing brother and start defending the community against The Man. Against the Powers That Be.”
End Time Page 31