Black bloc activists known to throw bricks through the plate glass windows of McDonald’s and Starbucks were there too, and as the convention approached, vandalism spiked. For city officials and local police, this was their worst nightmare. The Republican National Convention was slated to begin in two days, and the event’s urgency muted law enforcement’s distinction between nonviolent activists exercising their constitutional rights to protest (99 percent of the movement) and the anarchists. To the cops, it all became one problem to be solved.
This was a big moment for Philly. In the 1990s, Philadelphia had shrugged off its postindustrial, high-crime shroud to become a gleaming beacon of affordable housing and booming small business that promised the excitement of New York with less in-your-face hassle, and its weeklong turn on national television would make its comeback a national news story. Then activists started pouring in, and the mayor, governor, and business leaders had nightmare visions of Seattle the year before, when tens of thousands of activists marched, snarled traffic, barricaded themselves to buildings, scaled skyscrapers to unfurl banners, and for a short while even managed to shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings. The Battle of Seattle brought global economic issues into American living rooms, because their clashes with local law enforcement led the news for days. The way Nick and Sol saw it, the activists had exposed the WTO to be a network of developed nations, driven by big business, colluding to implement economic policies for the benefit of the few and at the expense of the many, in each and every country.
Sol’s first foray into the movement (which after a period of dormancy would rise again as Occupy Wall Street in 2011) happened during a similar protest against the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, the previous April—the first major protest since Seattle. Afterward, he returned to Tally and told stories of activist girls who were brainy and sexy, tender and open-minded. He told Nick that Philadelphia would be the next target, and that anyone who showed up and was willing to march and squat in one of West Philly’s beat-down old Victorians would be provided with a bed, a bike, and a date. That was the policy that convinced Nick.
As the convention loomed, the city urged, threatened, and begged protestors to utilize their “legal protest zone,” a cordoned-off quadrant of sidewalk tucked away from the main entrance of the convention and most of the television cameras. Activists were in the mood for civil disobedience instead—the kind that if properly executed would shut the convention down.
The Friends Center on 15th Street and Cherry Avenue offered a welcome mat for the activists. A brick complex whose oldest buildings date to 1856, this was the city’s main meeting house for people of the Quaker faith, one of the largest of its kind in the country, and a place where activists had gathered for more than a century. When it opened, it was where abolitionists met and organized. After the turn of the twentieth century it was the headquarters for the women’s suffrage movement. It was also a shelter for antiwar protesters during Vietnam.
Nick met Sol and another activist, Jessica Mammarella, in the Friends Center lobby, which was packed with protesters. There were silver-streaked elder longhairs who’d been agitating since the sixties; painted, pierced punks of the new day; and church-rooted African American protesters young and old—some of whom had been fighting for equality and justice for decades. Jessica, born to a teenage mother and raised in the Philly suburbs, was in charge of logistics. It was her job to take that raw manpower and channel it. She led Sol and Nick from the Friends Center to the brand-new, state-of-the-art Convention Center with its multihued LED lights glowing on Broad Street, one block away.
“That’s where W is to be crowned,” she said.
“Gross,” said Sol.
“We need the entire parade route sealed. Nobody gets nominated without a little chaos.”
When they weren’t on Ben Franklin Parkway or in the Friends Center, Nick and Sol were in West Philly at an old trolley turnaround. Jessica and her team rented the mammoth two-story brick warehouse in an impoverished neighborhood, across the street from the Mount Olive housing projects, for $500 from a man who owned a flooring company. This is where they’d build props and prepare for the signature moment of the Philadelphia protests: a puppet show.
A rather elaborate puppet show that would feature 141 twelve-foot-tall skeletons linked together with colorful chains. Built with the help of a famed political theater troupe out of Vermont called Bread & Puppet, they would be marched along a parade route carved through the city center by activists who would block traffic by locking themselves together with a contraption made from metal pipes. Day one of the Republican Convention was criminal justice day on the streets, and the skeletons symbolized the record 141 prisoners executed by Bush during his tenure as governor of Texas.
Sol led one of the lockdown teams. He recruited Nick to create a diversion with his bicycle and block traffic while he and the others could be locked in place, at which point Nick could ride away to safety. In the meantime, he became a gofer. Whenever Jessica needed something, she’d find Nick, whom she always called by his full name. As in, “Nick Mevoli, we need more plywood,” or “Where’s your bike, Nick Mevoli, I need you to make a run to the dollar store.” He would happily do her bidding, hit hardware stores and dumpster dive for supplies. Sometimes he would take care of his tasks alone, but he often asked Jen Kates to tag along.
Nick and Jen had noticed one another on his first day in the trolley house. She was twenty-one years old and pretty, with short dark hair she’d cut herself, fair skin, dark eyes, and a small mouth. Philly born, she’d only recently moved home from Asheville, North Carolina, to take part in the protests. Before Asheville she’d studied human rights law and Greek tragedy at Oxford; Nick wasn’t anything like the intellectuals she was used to dating.
“He was beautiful, but with unusual features,” she said, “and he was self-conscious. He didn’t really know where he fit.” Nick wouldn’t engage in the political discussions. He’d do BMX tricks, and put Jen on his handlebars and ride her around a still-decrepit corner of her hometown with no fear. “He lived in an immersive way,” she said. Whenever they went out for supplies he’d hit a coffee shop he liked, where old-timers played chess and the coffee was strong, or he’d have lunch at an Indian restaurant with a cheap vegetarian buffet. Nick told her every moment with her was an adventure to be savored. She would have kissed him, but he never tried. Didn’t matter. Blurred lines only added to the urgency and romance of the task at hand.
On the morning of August 1, the day of the puppet show, Sol and his team staged their gear at the trolly house, while Nick slipped out and rode over to his favorite dive café for breakfast then coasted back in plenty of time to join the action. Or so he thought. As he made the final turn, he was stunned to find police cars everywhere. More than 150 cops had the trolley house surrounded, and his friends—Jessica, Sol, Jen, and seventy-two others—were being led off in zip-tie cuffs.
Days before the convention, four carpenters had showed up with union cards and were put to work. They were undercover state troopers. They joked with the activists as they helped build the puppets, while surreptitiously taking note of flooring chemicals and metal pipe in various sections of the warehouse. Didn’t matter that the chemicals belonged to the landlord’s flooring company, and the pipes were there to lock the activists together. What they reported was an explosives factory and a bomb plot, when all they did was shut down a puppet show.
The DA hammered the activists with an array of charges, and most were held until the convention was over. “It was a conspiracy to keep the city clean and conflict free during the convention,” said Jessica, “and they succeeded because [the GOP convention] was a huge coming-out party for the city. And it was all Democrats doing it.”
The city’s infiltration into the activist community would eventually be proven illegal after it was revealed that the FBI and police tracked activist emails in the run up to the arrests, and to make matters more absurd, in the immed
iate aftermath, officials claimed the protesters were in league with communists. At a press conference weeks later, Stefan Presser, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said of the police report, “That document could have been written by Hoover’s FBI.” Still, it would take several months, and in some cases years, before all the charges would be dismissed.
Jessica was held for four days. Sol was released after posting a $250,000 bond twelve days after his arrest. Jen was locked up for two weeks. Nick stuck around for as long as he could, hoping to see her, but Paul and the Bonzo crew needed him in Marathon. It was lobster season, after all, and by the time she was released, Nick was already home in Tallahassee trying to figure out what to do next.
Within days, she called him from her grandparents’ house in Boynton Beach, near West Palm, where she’d retreated to recover from her incarceration. “I’m taking you to the Keys,” he said. “You have to see them.”
“Yeah, that sounds like fun. When were you thinking?”
“I’ll leave in fifteen minutes, and see you in, like, six and a half hours. Be ready.”
“Nick, that’s crazy. You can’t drop everything because I randomly called you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, because it doesn’t make any sense. Nobody does that.”
“Exactly!” he said. Her giggle was a yes.
Sol used to talk about how Clayton was good with girls because he could make them laugh. Justin would cuddle and watch movies all day, but Nick would take them on a magic carpet ride. True to form, he hung up the phone, packed a duffle, and checked the oil in the Chick Magnet, his 1976 Pontiac Grand Prix. His Uncle Paul named it when he drove it in high school, and gifted it to Nick when he turned seventeen. In minutes Nick was lead-footing it 427 miles to Boynton Beach.
He rang the bell just after dark and Jen found him on her grandparents’ doorstep. Her grandfather was a World War II air force veteran, just like his, and Nick wanted to hear every story. They went through old pictures and talked for hours, and the next morning her grandmother packed them a lunch, sealed in waxed bags she’d salvaged from cereal boxes. Nick loved it. He did the exact same thing.
“You realize that you have the soul of a Jewish grandmother, don’t you?” Jen asked on their drive into Little Havana for a cup of Cuban coffee before they hit Highway 1. He glanced over at her. “One that grew up during the Great Depression and refuses to throw anything away.”
“Thank you,” he said.
They zoomed the highway from Miami Beach and veered into the Everglades, stopping to scope gators and blue herons, watch snakes slither, and listen to the wind rustle the mangroves. They blitzed through Key Largo at sunset and landed at the foot of Seven Mile Bridge as the half-moon rose high enough to illuminate the causeway, that minimalist marvel of engineering. The sky was clear and dark. They still hadn’t kissed, but they undressed each other to their underwear before wading into the warm water on the Gulf side. He pointed toward Grouper Gorge.
“Let’s go out there.” Jen tensed up. “You’ll be fine,” he said, “I got you. Relax on your back.” She trusted him and lay flat. He took her by the wrist and kicked farther out. As the current started to swirl he noticed phosphorescence rising from the surface with each stroke. He lifted his hand out of the water and droplets of blue-green light streamed down his wrist as he drizzled electricity on her neck, chest, and navel. They were surrounded by microscopic bioluminescent plankton, which turned the sea into an electric blue field of light—their magnificent biological ploy to distract predators.
“No way!” she said, watching liquid light pearl on her arms and cling to his eyelids. Nick duck dove and dolphin kicked in figure eights all around her. When he finally came up for air, she splashed him good, starting a delirious bioluminescent water fight, charging the night with a blue-green flash. The water rippled with an energy that connected them, the privileged Jewish intellectual from the Northeast and the dreamy son of a butcher from West Florida.
They spent that night curled up in the Chick Magnet and when the sun rose, took off again, blitzing up the west coast of Florida. They listened to Nick’s mix tapes the whole way. There was a lot of Weakerthans and Pedro the Lion—all straight edge punk. They talked incessantly, stopped in a shitty motel when he got too tired to drive, and made love for the first time. They drove all the way to Tallahassee, where Jen hopped a flight back to South Florida. When she left they had no idea when they would see each other next.
Two months later Clayton and Nick made their way into 4040, an underground punk club in Philly that was on its last legs. The interior was dank and dark, the sound system wonderfully distorted, and the Weakerthans were about to take the stage. Nick was nervous with anticipation. He and Jen had barely spoken since their roadtrip, and tonight would be their reunion. The lights came down, the crowd cheered, and the two friends snaked through the compressed web of humanity toward the front of the stage where they found her.
“I know you,” she said. He didn’t say a word. He just stared into her eyes. She threw her arms around him, the band launched into “Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist,” and he spun her around as the crowd hopped up and down, screamed and collided.
They stepped outside for a smoke break and watched each other silently as their breath fogged in the chill. Layered in a denim jacket and a hoody, Nick shivered, ill prepared for true winter. He had just moved out of his Tally digs—finally escaped Florida—only to land in a cold-water squat with no heat and no warm clothes. Jen decided there and then to take him home.
She brought him to her parent’s colonial farmhouse outside the city, and the next day they started looking for a place to live. They never discussed boundaries. They never said I love you. Their lines remained blurred as they moved in together, renting a turn-of-the-century row house in a beleaguered, working-class section of South Philly. It was a dump. The foundation was cracked, and the splintering wood floors were sloped. Furniture, which they found on street corners and in alleys, would migrate, and there was no hot water, which was a big deal during a Philadelphia winter. As he heated bathwater for them on the stove, he held her close to warm up.
Jen got a job at a local bakery. Nick worked as a bike courier, the only one of his kind on a BMX. He liked everything about his job at Heaven Sent: the ancient dispatcher with her gravelly Philly brogue; the grimy wood-paneled office always percolating with Maxwell House; and the fact that he could learn the city on two wheels.
At home he created scavenger hunts for Jen, hiding letters and gifts around their hovel. One was a book of illustrations and poetry he’d created after their trip to the Keys. Another was a glass of seawater and shells sealed in wax. He even made a postindustrial dream catcher, crafted from an old glass lens, twisted wire, and feathers, all of which he found on the streets.
They’d take long bike rides, often to that Indian buffet in West Philly, which Jen didn’t even like and was out of the way, but she’d always agree. It was completely unreasonable, but he was completely unreasonable, and she appreciated that about him. It was at the buffet when he confessed that he wanted to be an actor. “Nobody comes to Philly to be an actor,” she said. “You have to go to New York.” He shrugged, knowing it was true, and plopped a samosa on her plate.
On Saturday nights they’d get take-out pizza and eat while sitting on the brick paths of Rittenhouse Square, surrounded by sycamore trees dangling with white lanterns. On Fridays they’d join the midnight Critical Mass ride to the Pretzel Factory to pluck fresh, warm pretzels straight from the conveyer belt. But the trouble with undefined relationships is they don’t often last. Jen stepped out on him and then moved out of the house completely. She expected him to hate her, and he was certainly hurt, but he told her he understood, that he wouldn’t hold it against her, and he kept his promise.
Nick stuck around Philadelphia, working as a courier, and had just moved back into a West Philly squat when he heard about a Brooklyn film director who
had come to town to shoot an independent movie about Philly’s activists and squatters. There was an open casting coming up, and the director was hoping to hire real activists, which she called actorvists. Nick was intrigued.
The casting was held at a defunct video store near the University of Pennsylvania, and when Nick showed he was asked to fill out a form with his name and age, and write a short bio. He watched as a lineup of would be actorvists, some giggly and goofing off, others looking overwhelmed or on edge, took turns sitting in a plastic chair before the director, her assistant, and a camera operator.
The director had creamy white skin, red hair, brown eyes, and she spoke softly. When it was his turn, he handed her his reel of student films along with the questionnaire, and read his lines. She jotted down notes about his burning intensity and leading man’s looks, but all she needed were side players. Glorified extras. She checked his age on the questionnaire. It said he was twenty-five years old.
Esther Bell was thirty when she and her assistant moved to Philadelphia to shoot her second feature film. She’d sold her first movie, Godass, about a gay father and his punk teenage daughter, to Showtime in 2000, and was approached to direct a fully financed independent feature based on the activists who had protested against the WTO in Seattle. She hated the script, but the opportunity to direct a film with a $300,000 budget was too good to pass up. She planned to rewrite it on the fly. The night after the auditions she lingered on Nick’s audition tape late into the night and watched his reel. He was in.
Esther filmed cinéma vérité style, which meant the actors as well as the crew would become entrenched in the world they portrayed. Nick couldn’t fathom his luck. He’d practically stumbled into his first professional acting gig, and he would do everything he could to help. He invited all fifteen members of the cast and crew to come live in his sprawling old Victorian that was once a mansion and was now a wreck. He also became the unofficial location scout, securing locations around the city, and a one-man craft services concession. After Philadelphia’s wonderful Italian Market closed for the night, he’d root through the dumpsters of the delis and bakeries, olive oil purveyors and chocolatiers, sorting edibles from true waste. He had an above-the-rim policy. With Nick on the case and in the kitchen, the cast and crew ate like movie stars.
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