Since it took a fleet of Jeeps, Hummers and Econolines to get us back into Seattle, we staggered our departures so as not to arouse suspicion.
It wouldn’t look good to see a convoy of vehicles jam-packed with bedraggled rebels rolling across the Tacoma Narrows. The event we’d been preparing for all those months was about to go down.
Spencer, or whoever told Spencer what to do, had decided in a fit of symbolism, to shut down I-5 on the Fourth of July.
I was one of the last to leave the Olympic peninsula compound. Even though I trained with the men I wasn’t going to fight with them. I would join Spencer on July 3rd at his office which provided an excellent vantage point to observe the battle on I-5, it was to serve as mission control.
When Mike and I climbed into Sam’s Hummer it was July 2nd. I was to have one more night with Rosie and then I’d be gone again.
You can imagine.
We’d decided no women at the Olympic compound. Hector’s place in the Cascades was a different story, he’d found the ladies dug the Che Guevara routine just as much as the Tony Montana role.
The role of Hector's team was different. They were going to work the streets, so to speak. We feared freelancers. Figuring flames on I-5 and the ensuing standstill of commerce, rioters might run rampant. Hector et al were supposed to help police, if that’s the right word, the situation. As you may recall, that didn’t go well at all.
For all its bluster and blather the USPS still had many subversive elements within its rank and file, which is how a few short hours after I walked away from Rosie dozens of trucks, jeeps, semis emblazoned with that screaming eagle went missing, requisitioned not for the purpose of delivering but to block all deliveries.
These, as well as scores more vehicles borrowed or stolen, including ingeniously, a few FedEx and UPS trucks, would take the shape of our modern barricades. I say ingeniously because UPS and FedEx gave the impression this was a larger movement, like joint marketing really. And it raised the implication that this was more than just a few bad seeds at the post office, which as anyone who has read this far must surely see.
However, there was a risk this could be dismissed as an isolated incident and then washed away like so many other scandals, with a trial in the media, an inquiry, a scapegoat, and collective amnesia as we move on to the next train wreck.
Well, this was no train wreck.
Spencer’s office was fitted out with two teevees and a radio, in addition to his landline, three separate cell phones were laid out on his desk. We’d all been issued new phones and could be in constant communication, either by voice or text.
As Spencer and I passed the wee hours waiting for the light of day, and the launch of this new revolutions, the thoughts racing through my brain stopped at the memory of Gianni, one nightmare leading to another, but how.
“What’s going to happen to Gianni,” I asked.
Spencer said, “'Happening,' you mean."
“What do I mean, what’s 'happening'?”
“He’s at Luigi’s, rendering.”
“What?
“You don’t want to know. The man had a lot of fat on those vile bones of his. In a few hours, he'll just be bones.”
I decided Spencer was right, I didn't want to know any more. I waited in silence as grayness creeped, whispering the beginning of a new day.
In the pre-dawn light we saw the first trucks assume their positions just below James St. Further up on the southbound side we could just make out shadows, the proof of the progress being the complete lack of traffic. They’d done it, I-5 South was closed, and the north quickly followed.
We turned the radio to KUOW, the NPR station, but they were in the middle of their semi-annual pledge drive.
“I really need to give this year,” said Spencer. “It makes me feel so guilty listening and not contributing.”
He flipped to another station, but still no traffic report. The broadcast networks didn’t air their first newscasts until 6:00 am, so we had 15 minutes til then. He went online and the DOT had the first live camera shots.
Then we heard the explosions. Mike had blown the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Moments later around Mercer Island there was another explosion.
He’d blown the lid.
“I didn’t know that was going to happen!” I shouted at Spencer.
“Last minute addition,” said Spencer not pulling the binoculars away from his face.
I-5, 99 and the 520 were now effectively closed, Seattle was an island.
Everything was going well.
We’d integrated the troops and divided them into four battalions (not counting Hector’s men on the streets). They were forming two blockades on each direction of I-5, creating a closed section of the freeway which they would hold from either end. As this developed the first images were coming on the local news, we’d made the scroll on CNN, five minutes later we were world news.
This was a critical juncture, all those cars trapped between the barricades needed to be emptied of civilians, and they had to be peacefully escorted out of harm’s way. We could already see flashing lights and the weak plaintive wail of sirens reached us even at our height.
“Cops coming north,” Spencer relayed to Spartacus.
“We’re in position,” his voice cracked back over Spencer’s Motorola.
A group of guys led by a mailman, still in his baby blue shorts and cardigan, AK-47 held aloft, escorted an orderly column of civilians towards that southern barricade on the northbound lanes. Someone in the semi rolled it forward just enough to let the people squeeze out. That kept the cops busy for the time being.
The same procedure didn’t work so smoothly for the southbound lanes. We couldn’t get a good view from Spencer’s office, but we heard the pop pop of gunfire over the Motorola. We ran to the other side of the building just in time to see a spray of muzzle flash and the associated pop pop popping split second delayed.
“Shit!” shouted Spencer, “What was that?”
“Bad,” said a voice I didn’t recognize, calmly. “Hold on, I’ll report in five.”
A civilian with a gun tried to be a hero and shot one of Max’s men, he fired back. Both suffered flesh wounds, neither would die. However, they did have to be taken to the infirmary van, a kind of makeshift ambulance we’d prepared, and that meant another man off the highway.
Plus, now we had a hostage.
That turned into the human interest story.
We’re starting a revolution and Anderson Cooper’s tracking down some over-caffeinated wannabe vigilante’s wife.
News reports rolled in.
The Mercer Island tunnel lid hadn’t caved in, just the east entrance was blocked, nearly everyone survived uninjured, one poor sod got crushed coming out the portal as the stone bearing the quotation “Through this Tunnel is the Gateway to the West" collapsed on him.
“Only one dead on Mercer Island,” I shouted to Spencer when I saw the news.
He had gone to use the toilet. The entire floor was empty due to the Fourth of July holiday, not that it was ever very busy anymore. Incalculable square feet of office space sat vacant across the country. Seattle was no different.
Traffic was relatively light that early holiday morning which helped limit the casualties.
“Only one dead,” I said again as he walked in zipping up his fly. “If that thing had caved in it would have been a bloodbath.”
“It’s Michaelangelo, my friend, he’s an artist. He had no intention to harm that ceiling.”
Things weren’t so clean at the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The images on teevee showed massive dust clouds and a portion had pancaked. It was impassable, so objective achieved, but we’d hoped to avoid real carnage and there was no telling how many people were trapped in there.
The day wore on.
The men moved the stranded cars towards the closest barricades. Those whose owners took their keys were smashed and pushed by bigger vehicles Demolition Derby-style.
Spencer had packed food in a cooler, pulling out a sandwich and taking a bite, he offered me one, but I couldn’t eat. I spent the day running around the building looking out the windows trying to catch a glimpse of the reality being shown on the teevee.
I reached Rosie on her cell phone and things weren’t going well at all at street level. All I-5 traffic spilled onto surface roads which were wall to wall cars. No one was going anywhere and no one was happy.
Idiot kids with nothing better to do and fireworks in hand started a celebration that turned into tragedy. No one could tell the difference between firecrackers and gunshots and before you knew it the noise was coming from everywhere, people were getting shot, there was screaming and I couldn’t hear a word from Rosie.
“I’m going home,” she texted.
I wanted to get out of there, too, go running to Rosie and hide, try, somehow to survive this. This wasn’t Lexington, these shots were being heard around the world, but it wasn’t going to be pretty, and, yeah, I know Concord and Lexington weren’t pretty, yet this shit, this madness was going to escalate to another scale entirely.
“You better eat something,” Spencer said with disconcerting calm. “The tanks will be here soon, and you’ve got a long night ahead of you.”
“Tanks!?”
Sure enough, right there on CNN was a column rolling up from Fort Lewis.
Air cover was to show itself seconds later, a sinister booming Blue Angels display rattling the windows, but those were no angels. Everything was happening lightning fast.
Helicopters hovered and the guys fired warning shots.
They started blowing up cars.
I don’t know when negotiations opened up, but Spartacus was relaying his progress in his talks with the authorities to Spencer every half hour. They were killing time.
The shells of burnt out cars were still flaming when the advance came into view, swerving between the miles of parked cars or pushing them out of the way. The tanks just rolled over them.
Between the jets zooming overhead, the helicopters wop wop wopping as they circled buildings coursing through the corridors of the skyscape careful to stay out of range, but taking fire from the unpredictable crowds milling and roiling below, the sight of tanks, troop carriers and jeeps bearing artillery right in front of us on I-5, Seattle had been turned into a war zone in the short passage of 10 hours.
The initiation of the standoff brought a few moments respite, the two sides sitting there, guns trained, waiting for someone to blink. Then, watching through the binoculars Spencer and I saw two guys start removing a howitzer or something, some big gun they’d been towing behind their jeep.
“Uh oh,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” said Spencer. I was not reassured. “If they wanted to shoot us they would have done it a long time ago, they could’ve strafed us from the Apaches or dropped ordinance, it’s just different killing other Americans rather than a bunch of ragheads at a wedding.”
“And they’re on teevee,” I added.
“Yes, of course. Now watch this,” he picked up a different phone from his desk. “OK, boys, they’re almost in position.”
I was freaking out at this point, nothing good could have happened between those opposing sides. Our guys with small arms and grenades facing off against an armored division.
No. It did not look good, double-plus un-good as Orwell would have said. I wanted to grab the phone, stop him from giving the next order, I just couldn’t bring myself to move, a sick feeling in my stomach, paralyzed limbs, I could only listen and watch.
“Go.”
I looked to the barricades. Nothing was happening. Maybe they were ignoring the order, I thought, maybe Spartacus and his little army saw the futility, the stupid pointlessness of engaging like this against such superior firepower.
Then I turned to look back at the column; men in black were pouring onto the freeway, jumping down from bushes where they must have been hiding all day waiting for this moment, knowing a contingent would be coming up from Fort Lewis and lying in wait.
There were hundreds of them, it seemed impossible, like magic, as if a conjurer had snapped his fingers creating a force out of thin air. Completely surprised, the troops from Fort Lewis almost immediately surrendered.
I was just about to compliment Spencer on this masterstroke when I noticed a scuffle around the howitzer.
“Oh oh,” I said.
“Now what?!” and even as he was preparing to dismiss my worry again, he looked himself and saw that pair of soldiers with the big gun fighting back. It was hand to hand and our guys weren’t getting over there fast enough.
The gun swung out of control, aiming right then left then shockingly up and in our direction. I saw the soldier pull back his arm as he was knocked to the ground, then the flash at the barrel, the boom, and the building rocked, glass shattered all around us.
Spencer and I hit the floor, ears ringing, stunned.
I looked at him as he picked himself up and shook like a wet dog except spraying shards of glass not droplets of water.
“Well, I didn’t see that coming,” he said with the same maddening nonchalance.
“You’d better get going,” I saw him mouth.
“What?!” I shouted.
“You have to leave now,” he shouted back.
“Leave? For where?!”
“Canada, you nitwit. We won, you saw it, we’ve got tanks now, go tell the world.”
He handed me the third and last phone from off his desk.
“Do you know where Waterfront Park is?”
“Sure,” I said, gathering those wits of mine.
“Take that phone and dial this number,” handing me a piece of paper, “when you get through. Ask for Moe, be very clear, you must say, ‘Is this Moe?’”
“’Is this Moe,’” I repeated.
And he will say, “Who wants to know?”
“’Who wants to know,’ right.”
“Then you say, ‘The Marmalade Man.’”
“’The Marmalade Man’?!”
“The Marmalade Man.” He stuck out his hand. I took it, he pulled me close, locked onto my eyes to make sure I was cogent and said firmly, “Talk to no one else, not even, especially not, Rosie. Got it?”
“Got it,” I repeated.
“Good luck,” he said. “You’d better take the stairs.”
And with that as he extracted my hand from his, frozen as it was in a rigor mortis-like clench, he led me out the door of his office, breezy now exposed to the elements, looking so different than the first time I’d seen it, so different from a few short minutes ago, before my world exploded and I was launched on another chapter of this story.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Gone Postal - A Novel - Chapter 12
I met Spartacus in the back room of the Pioneer Square Saloon, playing pool with his demo man Michaelangelo. I would get to know them and their legions well, living as we did in close quarters, training around an abandoned lumber mill on the Olympic Peninsula. They were not pleasant people, pumped up with machismo, bravado and very few who expressed in anything resembling articulate-ness their reason for doing what they do, and, more importantly why they were doing it now, at home.
They’d made their bones in Iraq, Indonesia, Haiti and the ‘Stans, but they weren’t Rambos, no these guys were sophisticated and rich. Really, fucking rich. They drove up in Hummers and Escalades even though gas was through the roof, pulling out wads of cash like toilet paper rolls. They’d been trained by the best and had a taste of nation-building, and whether they acquired it or it acquired them didn’t really matter, they weren’t going to stop, they were going to ply their trade wherever they could and the way they looked at it, the Western States, as Spencer had said, just meant an shorter commute.
The architects of failure may have slunk off to their ranches and ski lodges, but these guys, the hard-hatted steel-toed builders, the masons, and the electricians, plumbers, and, yeah, we might as well say it, the contractors, were still on the job.
One thing can’t be denied, with their men, money and guns, they took our misfit conglomeration of bums, drug-dealers, gang-bangers, washed-out vets, evangelists, martial artists and mailmen and they built us an army.
Out there on the peninsula, Max and I couldn’t help feeling like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine mixing with Hessians and Patriots in some fucked-up amalgam of America’s past and future. Running through the trees, ducking and rolling, shooting at targets that eventually started to fall as our pathetic marksmanship and soldiering slowly grew competent. Some of our carrier-brothers still wore their postal uniforms, maybe for laughs, maybe cuz that’s all they had or maybe cuz they just didn’t care.
There were lively discussions in the barracks, cots originally segregated, mixed as the weeks rolled on. The biggest topic of debate, stupid as it sounds, was about the design of an official uniform, the uniform of the Army of the Western States of America. You’d have thought it was the Fashion Institute of Design, every night sketches were passed around and critiqued by the various camps, no longer segregated by race or creed, now divided into minimalists, those preferring a more functional look, and the more flamboyant crowd who thought we deserved something more decorative and regal.
A guy we called Radar handled logistics, bringing in truckloads of food and other supplies, mostly from the Costco in Port Angeles. Once, though, Max and I went into town with him, feeling like aliens descended onto another planet after our time out in the dripping woods, and found a sewing supply store where we bought fabric and a cheap machine. Max had a guy, Tyrell, who was really very talented, and the plan was for him to put together a prototype. He wasn’t a minimalist. It didn’t go over real well.
We looked for anything to break up the monotony, the slogging through the woods, the training, interspersed with eating, sleeping and talking. Spencer was right about my vets, Joe and his buddies straightened up in a hurry when put back into an environment with a little structure, the food and exercise didn’t hurt either.
I grew tired of playing Minuteman, all the grab-assing and bullshit was fun, but I preferred the officers’ quarters with its wine and words, discussing strategy and what tactics we’d employ, the next steps after we’d accomplished this mission in the Pacific Northwest.
We were still publishing online. Travis was taking my emails and putting them out there into the blogosphere for me. The USPS scandal didn’t go away quickly. We’d been caught tampering with a sacred trust, the feds had enough on us to lock us up for life just on the gun-running and the drug-dealing, but it was violating The Post that really got them fuming. You should have heard those knuckleheads in Washington (the bad Washington) raving like lunatics at our nerve and degeneracy. Statements to the press from both sides turned into a riotous array of vitriolic proclamations.
You would have thought we’d fucked their mothers or defiled their graves. They were backed into a corner and trying to scrawl their way out of it, but they’d run into the king of scrawl.
I fired back under the pen name Junk. At first it was just picking away at the USPS, wasteful, anachronistic, doomed. Then I launched into the classics, taxation without representation, when in the course of human history and all that shit. Spencer penned a beautiful tract under the name Bennie Franks justifying the formation of local militias as legally covered under the Second Amendment. The country was collectively waiting for a shoe to fall somewhere.
We’d exported war and revolution for so long it was only a matter of time before we were forced to eat our own dogfood, and I kept spewing out the appetizers. The Second Amendment bit hit the flag-waving hunters in the Confederacy pretty hard, they didn’t know what to think. Those back-woods country-fucks failed in their bid, now us lot were talking like we could pull off in the 21st century what they failed to do in the 19th.
Those wine-lubricated evenings talking with Spartacus (Sam from Toledo) and Michaelangelo (Mike from Escondido) were fun, we talked about making a run on the Badlands and grabbing some nukes, pull the old North Korea defense, point an ICBM at Calgary and tell them all to fuck off or the Canucks get it. Maybe move in and take Denver, create our own little Switzerland in the Rockies, mile high and naturally majestic not like tin-horn self-proclaimed majesties ruling from inside the beltway.
“We should take Vegas,” said Mike. “It would be like that Stephen King movie…”
“The Stand,” someone said.
“Yeah, I love that stuff, that post-apocalyptic shit. Mad Max.”
They were all a bunch of movie junkies, they’d seen everything, and not just the crap like you’d expect, classics, too, real classics, Kurosawa, of course, but Bergman and Fellini, too. Radar brought the movies.
The weather started to turn, rains let up, sun-breaks more plentiful and longer. One day our forward lookout drove up leading a big Dodge pick-up. We had the road in blocked, obviously, guards stationed around the perimeter at all times. So, this was unique. Everyone stopped what they were doing to see what was going on and who was going to step out of that truck because, really, they shouldn’t have been there.
There we all were standing with our guns, practicing bayonet thrusts, playing boot camp and this cowboy jumps out of his cab, boots acquiring mud as he walked next to the guard. He tips his hat into the air, and shouts to no one in particular, “I’m looking for Spartacus.”
Smart-ass that I am, I shout back, “I’m Spartacus!”
Mike sees where I’m going with it, and he steps forward and says, “I’m Spartacus!”
Then Radar.
Then Max.
Even Milton got into it.
Finally, Spartacus walked over from in front of the officers’ quarters, dismissed our goofy grins shouting, “Will you clowns shut the fuck up and get back to work.”
Then he and the cowboy went inside.
And that was it. The fun was over. We were headed back into town. The cowboy was the messenger.
They’d made their bones in Iraq, Indonesia, Haiti and the ‘Stans, but they weren’t Rambos, no these guys were sophisticated and rich. Really, fucking rich. They drove up in Hummers and Escalades even though gas was through the roof, pulling out wads of cash like toilet paper rolls. They’d been trained by the best and had a taste of nation-building, and whether they acquired it or it acquired them didn’t really matter, they weren’t going to stop, they were going to ply their trade wherever they could and the way they looked at it, the Western States, as Spencer had said, just meant an shorter commute.
The architects of failure may have slunk off to their ranches and ski lodges, but these guys, the hard-hatted steel-toed builders, the masons, and the electricians, plumbers, and, yeah, we might as well say it, the contractors, were still on the job.
One thing can’t be denied, with their men, money and guns, they took our misfit conglomeration of bums, drug-dealers, gang-bangers, washed-out vets, evangelists, martial artists and mailmen and they built us an army.
Out there on the peninsula, Max and I couldn’t help feeling like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine mixing with Hessians and Patriots in some fucked-up amalgam of America’s past and future. Running through the trees, ducking and rolling, shooting at targets that eventually started to fall as our pathetic marksmanship and soldiering slowly grew competent. Some of our carrier-brothers still wore their postal uniforms, maybe for laughs, maybe cuz that’s all they had or maybe cuz they just didn’t care.
There were lively discussions in the barracks, cots originally segregated, mixed as the weeks rolled on. The biggest topic of debate, stupid as it sounds, was about the design of an official uniform, the uniform of the Army of the Western States of America. You’d have thought it was the Fashion Institute of Design, every night sketches were passed around and critiqued by the various camps, no longer segregated by race or creed, now divided into minimalists, those preferring a more functional look, and the more flamboyant crowd who thought we deserved something more decorative and regal.
A guy we called Radar handled logistics, bringing in truckloads of food and other supplies, mostly from the Costco in Port Angeles. Once, though, Max and I went into town with him, feeling like aliens descended onto another planet after our time out in the dripping woods, and found a sewing supply store where we bought fabric and a cheap machine. Max had a guy, Tyrell, who was really very talented, and the plan was for him to put together a prototype. He wasn’t a minimalist. It didn’t go over real well.
We looked for anything to break up the monotony, the slogging through the woods, the training, interspersed with eating, sleeping and talking. Spencer was right about my vets, Joe and his buddies straightened up in a hurry when put back into an environment with a little structure, the food and exercise didn’t hurt either.
I grew tired of playing Minuteman, all the grab-assing and bullshit was fun, but I preferred the officers’ quarters with its wine and words, discussing strategy and what tactics we’d employ, the next steps after we’d accomplished this mission in the Pacific Northwest.
We were still publishing online. Travis was taking my emails and putting them out there into the blogosphere for me. The USPS scandal didn’t go away quickly. We’d been caught tampering with a sacred trust, the feds had enough on us to lock us up for life just on the gun-running and the drug-dealing, but it was violating The Post that really got them fuming. You should have heard those knuckleheads in Washington (the bad Washington) raving like lunatics at our nerve and degeneracy. Statements to the press from both sides turned into a riotous array of vitriolic proclamations.
You would have thought we’d fucked their mothers or defiled their graves. They were backed into a corner and trying to scrawl their way out of it, but they’d run into the king of scrawl.
I fired back under the pen name Junk. At first it was just picking away at the USPS, wasteful, anachronistic, doomed. Then I launched into the classics, taxation without representation, when in the course of human history and all that shit. Spencer penned a beautiful tract under the name Bennie Franks justifying the formation of local militias as legally covered under the Second Amendment. The country was collectively waiting for a shoe to fall somewhere.
We’d exported war and revolution for so long it was only a matter of time before we were forced to eat our own dogfood, and I kept spewing out the appetizers. The Second Amendment bit hit the flag-waving hunters in the Confederacy pretty hard, they didn’t know what to think. Those back-woods country-fucks failed in their bid, now us lot were talking like we could pull off in the 21st century what they failed to do in the 19th.
Those wine-lubricated evenings talking with Spartacus (Sam from Toledo) and Michaelangelo (Mike from Escondido) were fun, we talked about making a run on the Badlands and grabbing some nukes, pull the old North Korea defense, point an ICBM at Calgary and tell them all to fuck off or the Canucks get it. Maybe move in and take Denver, create our own little Switzerland in the Rockies, mile high and naturally majestic not like tin-horn self-proclaimed majesties ruling from inside the beltway.
“We should take Vegas,” said Mike. “It would be like that Stephen King movie…”
“The Stand,” someone said.
“Yeah, I love that stuff, that post-apocalyptic shit. Mad Max.”
They were all a bunch of movie junkies, they’d seen everything, and not just the crap like you’d expect, classics, too, real classics, Kurosawa, of course, but Bergman and Fellini, too. Radar brought the movies.
The weather started to turn, rains let up, sun-breaks more plentiful and longer. One day our forward lookout drove up leading a big Dodge pick-up. We had the road in blocked, obviously, guards stationed around the perimeter at all times. So, this was unique. Everyone stopped what they were doing to see what was going on and who was going to step out of that truck because, really, they shouldn’t have been there.
There we all were standing with our guns, practicing bayonet thrusts, playing boot camp and this cowboy jumps out of his cab, boots acquiring mud as he walked next to the guard. He tips his hat into the air, and shouts to no one in particular, “I’m looking for Spartacus.”
Smart-ass that I am, I shout back, “I’m Spartacus!”
Mike sees where I’m going with it, and he steps forward and says, “I’m Spartacus!”
Then Radar.
Then Max.
Even Milton got into it.
Finally, Spartacus walked over from in front of the officers’ quarters, dismissed our goofy grins shouting, “Will you clowns shut the fuck up and get back to work.”
Then he and the cowboy went inside.
And that was it. The fun was over. We were headed back into town. The cowboy was the messenger.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Gone Postal - A Novel - Chapter 11
Spencer was fucking brilliant, he thought in complete paragraphs, and you talk about connected. Gianni had the juice with the USPS, he had the means to get those pikers to do his bidding. Spencer trumped that in spades. Who knew how far his tentacles reached.
He lived high and worked high, his office near the top floor of that "obscene erection" Columbia Tower, burnt out bankers wandering the halls. When the financial system collapsed, office space went cheap, Spencer sublet his aerie for a song.
In that first visit Spencer cut right to the chase. We sat across his big desk, Rosie, Max, Milton and me looking out at snow covered Cascades, and he asked, “Tell me, how many guns do you have?” When your common-law brother-in-law’s criminal lawyer is asking you how many guns you have, you know you’ve taken it to another level.
We laid out the situation. Max and his crew were sitting on a big cache. His reticence and worry had worn off once Max got his own gun, and friends with guns; and once he was cut loose from the post office he was a changed man.
Milton owned the International District and had allies in pockets up Aurora, Lynnwood, Bellevue and down Tacoma and Federal Way.
Hector gave up the meth trade and the truly kinky sex, but he kept the guns. He wasn’t stupid, dangerous and twisted, but not entirely brainless.
We’d stashed guns in warehouses and safe-houses up and down the coast. I didn’t want to overpromise or overplay my hand, at that point, we really, and I mean really needed Spencer. Gianni was breathing down our necks and nervous turned to terrified with every unexpected noise.
“There are others, too.”
“’Others.’ Nice. How many? How many mailmen and bums can you really rally and how good are they? And what about you,” he said nodding towards Max and Milton.
Max said, “My guys are good, tough, a bit undisciplined, but with a little work…”
Spencer looked to Milton who said, “Don’t worry about us.”
“Oh, but I do worry, it’s my job to worry. If I’m not worrying, not thinking about what next, what’s the next move and the move after that, then this scheme will never work. And, if this doesn’t work then we’re all dead. Dead.” He said again for effect.
“We’re good,” said Milton enigmatically.
Spencer stared, wheels turning, wondering if it was worth pressing, then turned to Rosie, “And, what about you young lady. Are you and your brother and all his compadres on board? What can we expect from them?”
“Loyalty. Blood.”
Even I got goosebumps. I think she really believed it.
Spencer had a good stare, I mean he could wither you with his stare, but even he backed down, looked away after gazing just a moment at her burning orbs.
“OK, then. This is quite an army, a bunch of mailmen and criminals. Thank god we’ve got help.”
“Help?”
Spencer then let us in on the scope, as we sat there at the flaky apex of Seattle’s crumbled financial sector, he explained where the money came from and how it would be distributed.
“Accountability. Here. Now. There will be accountability. I’ll need receipts. The boom times are over, no footballs of plastic-wrapped hundreds will be floating around here.”
“Do you really think we can do this? I mean, sure I’ve got some vets and they know shit, but they’re washouts, most of them would crap their pants if they got put into any sort of action again.”
“Give them three squares and a cot, a little professional help, and they’ll be good enough to serve our purposes.”
“And my carrier-brothers?”
“Yeah, we’ll see, we’ve got some Hessians, our Von Steuben. They will be trained.”
“Huh?”
“Jesus, nobody knows their American History anymore.”
“Dude, I was an English major.”
“The Hessians were professional soldiers paid by the British. Von Steuben trained militiamen, if he could turn a bunch of farmers into an army, our guys can help yours.”
“Yeah, and who exactly are your guys?”
“They’re pros, don’t worry.”
“But I do worry," I said, parroting him. "You’re talking about mercenaries, Hessians, they didn’t exactly work out so well for the Brits…”
“These are ‘domestic’ mercenaries. They’ve got some skin in the game, too. They know the work and are motivated, for them it’s the same shit just a shorter commute.”
He warned us then, “Don’t say KBR, don’t say Blackwater, and for god’s sake don’t mention the Carlyle Group. OK?” Looking across his desk and into each of our faces to make sure we fully understood.
“They have nothing to do with this.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said.
“There are forces at work here beyond your ken. We have influence in the highest reaches of government.”
“So, why do you need us, why do you need me?”
“You have the hearts and minds of the people.”
That was rich. If I had hearts and minds I wasn’t sure how I’d got them. If I had any organ it was livers, or maybe, to get spiritual for a moment, their souls.”
“Where does this end, Spencer?” I asked. “How does this movie end?”
We got into details, jumping around from strategy to tactics to goals, it was a martial SWOT analysis, rolling so fast before our ears and eyes our heads spun trying to keep up.
“The federal government no longer represents the will of the people, in a democracy that’s a no-no. We’re going to take it back, we’re going to reclaim what’s rightfully ours. Elections these days are a farce, a kabuki play put on by corporate media for the entertainment of a populace so numbed by pretty pictures and coddled and comforted with their cars and homes, they don’t even realize they’ve been living, not a dream, no, this hasn’t been the American dream, it’s been an American fantasy, and all of us hypnotized by the teevee and the promises and sloganeering of the marketers and our political masters, as if those weren’t the same thing.”
A wake up call was in order, way overdue as a matter of fact.
“The Civil War never ended, my friends, it’s just been fought by different means. Well, it’s time to re-enter the fray, we’re going to the barricades and storming the Bastille. In the 21st century, though, we have tools at our disposal more lethal than ripped up cobblestones.”
I tried to slow him down and interrupted, asking, “How far does this reach?”
“Farther than you can imagine, farther than you could dream. It’s all about States’ Rights. It’s always been about States’ Rights. Those bad-luck 13 colonies strapped together by Hamilton and Madison with their phony propagandist Federalist Papers and British-based banking institutions, tin shackles everyone thought were steel.
“Davis and Lee and their slave-holding buddies wanted to keep their lives, cushy lives of free labor, free sex and now they couch it all in free market mumbo-jumbo. What it all comes down to is not wanting to do what people you don’t like tell you to do.
“’Don’t Tread on Me,’ ‘Live Free or Die,’ what do you think those are, nursery rhymes?”
I wanted to say those don’t rhyme during the pause after his rhetorical interrogative but thought better.
“We’ve got the Northeast, you’ve got the West.”
I cringed a bit at that and Spencer added, “With your help we’ll take the West. We’re going to go all the way to the Mississippi.”
“Really,” I said skeptically. “Utah, Idaho, Montana…folks there don’t strike me as our types.”
“States’ Rights, my friend, States’ Rights. Give Utah the right to practice their religion as they see fit, bring back, or make legal, rather, polygamy, that would go a long way. We’re just legitimizing what’s been going on already. People are bucking for their freedom because they know what it really is, it’s not spending billions of dollars in deserts and mountain crags trying to fight ‘terrorists’ and find bogeymen. It’s about the land and their future, their children’s futures. For too long they’ve been put on a path pointing to a mirage, some pale made up vision of peace and prosperity that, when they stop to look around, simply isn’t there.
“They’ve been tricked, bamboozled, and the only ones to stand up and scream, to really make some noise, turn heads, and yes, yes, Rosie, to spill blood, have been dubbed cranks and terrorists. Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, that damn Ted Kaszinski, those maniacs wanted the same thing everyone was telling them they already had, but they didn’t have it. Eventually you hack and hack at that sort of people and they’re going to cry foul, and when that doesn’t work they’re going to foul back. Technically, we’d call them ‘insurrectionists’ but what they are is the point at the end of the spear.
“Well, listen to me, my friends, we’re that spear.”
He had a way with words.
Still skeptical and not a little bit afraid after that tirade I inquired about specifics. The Mississippi is one long fucking river, how did he propose to defend it?
Spencer picked up the phone on his desk. “Doris, bring in lunch.” He put his mouth over the receiver and looked at each of us again, this time kindly, asking, “What do you guys want? Sandwiches? How about a pizza?”
After we’d settled on one sausage and mushroom, and a small cheese (Milton’s a vegetarian), he hung up the phone and continued in the same vein as before.
“We don’t need to defend the whole river, we just need the ports, the most important being New Orleans and do you really think the people of New Orleans and all the National Guardsmen who’ve come home after seeing stupidity taken to the Nth are going to side with the crowd that sent them on the mother of all wild goose chases, losing limbs and friends and for what? No. We promise those people something else, we show them there is a way to live free, not that faux free presidents and talk show hosts blather about, I mean real freedom. You know what I mean. I’ve heard you speak, I’ve read your words, you’re our Paine.”
For a split second the homophone confused me, but I got what he meant and was flattered.
“How?” I asked, overwhelmed. “What am I going to do, how can I help with what you’re talking about, because, Spencer, I gotta say this is all starting to sound a little crazy, or, at a minimum over-ambitious.”
“I’ve got one word for you, my friend,” he said, pointing at me. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Then he said, quietly, after a pause, “Diplomacy.”
Have to admit, wasn’t the word I’d expected. We hadn’t heard much from diplomacy lately.
“You’re going to be an adjunct to our special emissary to Asia. You’re our proof that the people are with us.”
So that’s it, I thought. I’m a tool. Well, once a tool, always a tool, I figured, and why the hell not. What between Gianni after us and the feds still pissed about us stealing their paper, we didn’t have many options.
“Look, the engine is breaking down, all we need is one loose screw to fall into the works and the machine will come to a screeching halt,” Spencer opined.
“And I’m your loose screw.”
He raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘you said it not me.’
“Listen, my friend, we’ve, OK, you’ve, no, really, the three of you,” he said, correcting himself again and waving at Milton, Max and Rosie, “You have got one chance to make this work. For obvious reasons, I need to remain above the fray.”
His reasons, frankly, weren’t that obvious.
“You, my friend,” and yes I was getting tired of his ‘my friend’ crap, it was like a verbal tick with him. “You will need to leave for Canada as soon as this is all over.”
“Canada? I thought you said Asia.”
“We can't be certain you'll be able to get out of the country after all this goes down.”
“What goes down,” I stammered, “and isn’t Canada out of the country?”
“Technically…for the time being. Don’t worry, we’ve taken care of all that.”
I don’t know about you, but whenever someone says ‘don’t worry’ to me twice in the same meeting, I know I need to worry. Again, though, there wasn’t much we could do. We’d gotten ourselves into this mess. Max and I with our bullshit sessions, our hair-brained scheme, then Milton enabling it and pushing us towards something better, and Rosie bringing her talents to the table wholeheartedly. We were the ones that went to Gianni, that moved drugs, guns. Sure we shed the drugs (except alcohol, of course) and took the high road, but that was something of a calculated decision to make us look good, a PR move.
Now it appeared we were being thrust in as the lynchpin of a real revolution, or, to segue into the military portion of our program – the pin of a grenade. Ironically, if we didn’t put the pin back in we’d be blown to bits, but in order to put the pin in we needed to throw some grenades.
This was Spencer’s plan, or Spencer’s people’s plan. We were soon to meet these Hessians of his, and what a meeting it was, then, though, winding down our long first meeting, the sun casting last light on the Cascades, veritable purple fucking mountains majesty, as darkness loomed, Spencer set out a skeleton of the plan.
We were to shut down I5, create pile-ups both northbound and southbound, then blow the shit out of it. The Alaskan Way Viaduct, that ugly monstrosity, was to go, as well. No Ryder trucks full of fertilizer, no, this was to be a professional job. We’d bring that baby down like the ’89 Loma Prieta did to its twin brother in San Francisco. Except we were the earthquake now.
Our Hessians had the explosive expertise, we were to supply the mess. Diabolical plots like this are surprisingly low-budget, all it took was manpower, will, skill and cash.
Anyone out there with a teevee saw what happened next, history was made, I’ve no idea how it will be told and retold to future generations, but there’s no disguising the fact that we made history.
The problem is, when you start doing business with history, it has a way of extracting interest, and then, well, to put it simply, you never know how things are gonna turn out, do you. Occam’s Razor meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Spencer didn’t give us a date, it was to be some time during the summer. We were to rally our troops and get them ready. My role was something of a career counselor for fired mailman, except the only vacant positions were for revolutionaries.
We were to send letter carriers and backroom drones, decades lost to corralling a constant stampede of mail, out to the wilds to be trained by that crew Spencer knew.
Walking down the hill back home to Pioneer Square we passed The Brooklyn and I decided we needed to go in. For all his talk about accountability and receipts, Spencer had given us as a parting gift, a briefcase filled with fifties. I didn’t care what he’d said, it had been a long time since I’d been able to expense a really good meal and I was hungry.
We got a booth in the back and evaluated everything over a couple of bottles of their big house red. Max was riled up, and Milton, as usual, was cryptic and reserved. Rosie was sanguine, not to say sanguinary. It was only later back at our room that she would reveal the depths of her disappointment that we were to be parted.
The general consensus was as I had determined myself during the meeting, ie we had no choice, and if we were going to go down we might as well go down guns blazing.
“That ‘adjunct’ bullshit, though,” said Max. “What the fuck is that all about.”
I had to confess I had no idea then what it was or how I would do it, and the guilt at leaving my partners behind during the crisis point was already weighing heavy. Surprisingly, or maybe not considering what we’d already been through together, none of them begrudged me my new status, such as it was. Max even took to calling me Ad-junked or conjunktavitis, or conjunction junction, and then just plain Junk, and that stuck.
Rosie was, as I’ve said, and to which I should elaborate further, but probably won’t for purely personal reasons, different. Yes, we were to be apart, we’re apart now, then, though, we managed to find each other. I don’t know how that’s going to happen now.
He lived high and worked high, his office near the top floor of that "obscene erection" Columbia Tower, burnt out bankers wandering the halls. When the financial system collapsed, office space went cheap, Spencer sublet his aerie for a song.
In that first visit Spencer cut right to the chase. We sat across his big desk, Rosie, Max, Milton and me looking out at snow covered Cascades, and he asked, “Tell me, how many guns do you have?” When your common-law brother-in-law’s criminal lawyer is asking you how many guns you have, you know you’ve taken it to another level.
We laid out the situation. Max and his crew were sitting on a big cache. His reticence and worry had worn off once Max got his own gun, and friends with guns; and once he was cut loose from the post office he was a changed man.
Milton owned the International District and had allies in pockets up Aurora, Lynnwood, Bellevue and down Tacoma and Federal Way.
Hector gave up the meth trade and the truly kinky sex, but he kept the guns. He wasn’t stupid, dangerous and twisted, but not entirely brainless.
We’d stashed guns in warehouses and safe-houses up and down the coast. I didn’t want to overpromise or overplay my hand, at that point, we really, and I mean really needed Spencer. Gianni was breathing down our necks and nervous turned to terrified with every unexpected noise.
“There are others, too.”
“’Others.’ Nice. How many? How many mailmen and bums can you really rally and how good are they? And what about you,” he said nodding towards Max and Milton.
Max said, “My guys are good, tough, a bit undisciplined, but with a little work…”
Spencer looked to Milton who said, “Don’t worry about us.”
“Oh, but I do worry, it’s my job to worry. If I’m not worrying, not thinking about what next, what’s the next move and the move after that, then this scheme will never work. And, if this doesn’t work then we’re all dead. Dead.” He said again for effect.
“We’re good,” said Milton enigmatically.
Spencer stared, wheels turning, wondering if it was worth pressing, then turned to Rosie, “And, what about you young lady. Are you and your brother and all his compadres on board? What can we expect from them?”
“Loyalty. Blood.”
Even I got goosebumps. I think she really believed it.
Spencer had a good stare, I mean he could wither you with his stare, but even he backed down, looked away after gazing just a moment at her burning orbs.
“OK, then. This is quite an army, a bunch of mailmen and criminals. Thank god we’ve got help.”
“Help?”
Spencer then let us in on the scope, as we sat there at the flaky apex of Seattle’s crumbled financial sector, he explained where the money came from and how it would be distributed.
“Accountability. Here. Now. There will be accountability. I’ll need receipts. The boom times are over, no footballs of plastic-wrapped hundreds will be floating around here.”
“Do you really think we can do this? I mean, sure I’ve got some vets and they know shit, but they’re washouts, most of them would crap their pants if they got put into any sort of action again.”
“Give them three squares and a cot, a little professional help, and they’ll be good enough to serve our purposes.”
“And my carrier-brothers?”
“Yeah, we’ll see, we’ve got some Hessians, our Von Steuben. They will be trained.”
“Huh?”
“Jesus, nobody knows their American History anymore.”
“Dude, I was an English major.”
“The Hessians were professional soldiers paid by the British. Von Steuben trained militiamen, if he could turn a bunch of farmers into an army, our guys can help yours.”
“Yeah, and who exactly are your guys?”
“They’re pros, don’t worry.”
“But I do worry," I said, parroting him. "You’re talking about mercenaries, Hessians, they didn’t exactly work out so well for the Brits…”
“These are ‘domestic’ mercenaries. They’ve got some skin in the game, too. They know the work and are motivated, for them it’s the same shit just a shorter commute.”
He warned us then, “Don’t say KBR, don’t say Blackwater, and for god’s sake don’t mention the Carlyle Group. OK?” Looking across his desk and into each of our faces to make sure we fully understood.
“They have nothing to do with this.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said.
“There are forces at work here beyond your ken. We have influence in the highest reaches of government.”
“So, why do you need us, why do you need me?”
“You have the hearts and minds of the people.”
That was rich. If I had hearts and minds I wasn’t sure how I’d got them. If I had any organ it was livers, or maybe, to get spiritual for a moment, their souls.”
“Where does this end, Spencer?” I asked. “How does this movie end?”
We got into details, jumping around from strategy to tactics to goals, it was a martial SWOT analysis, rolling so fast before our ears and eyes our heads spun trying to keep up.
“The federal government no longer represents the will of the people, in a democracy that’s a no-no. We’re going to take it back, we’re going to reclaim what’s rightfully ours. Elections these days are a farce, a kabuki play put on by corporate media for the entertainment of a populace so numbed by pretty pictures and coddled and comforted with their cars and homes, they don’t even realize they’ve been living, not a dream, no, this hasn’t been the American dream, it’s been an American fantasy, and all of us hypnotized by the teevee and the promises and sloganeering of the marketers and our political masters, as if those weren’t the same thing.”
A wake up call was in order, way overdue as a matter of fact.
“The Civil War never ended, my friends, it’s just been fought by different means. Well, it’s time to re-enter the fray, we’re going to the barricades and storming the Bastille. In the 21st century, though, we have tools at our disposal more lethal than ripped up cobblestones.”
I tried to slow him down and interrupted, asking, “How far does this reach?”
“Farther than you can imagine, farther than you could dream. It’s all about States’ Rights. It’s always been about States’ Rights. Those bad-luck 13 colonies strapped together by Hamilton and Madison with their phony propagandist Federalist Papers and British-based banking institutions, tin shackles everyone thought were steel.
“Davis and Lee and their slave-holding buddies wanted to keep their lives, cushy lives of free labor, free sex and now they couch it all in free market mumbo-jumbo. What it all comes down to is not wanting to do what people you don’t like tell you to do.
“’Don’t Tread on Me,’ ‘Live Free or Die,’ what do you think those are, nursery rhymes?”
I wanted to say those don’t rhyme during the pause after his rhetorical interrogative but thought better.
“We’ve got the Northeast, you’ve got the West.”
I cringed a bit at that and Spencer added, “With your help we’ll take the West. We’re going to go all the way to the Mississippi.”
“Really,” I said skeptically. “Utah, Idaho, Montana…folks there don’t strike me as our types.”
“States’ Rights, my friend, States’ Rights. Give Utah the right to practice their religion as they see fit, bring back, or make legal, rather, polygamy, that would go a long way. We’re just legitimizing what’s been going on already. People are bucking for their freedom because they know what it really is, it’s not spending billions of dollars in deserts and mountain crags trying to fight ‘terrorists’ and find bogeymen. It’s about the land and their future, their children’s futures. For too long they’ve been put on a path pointing to a mirage, some pale made up vision of peace and prosperity that, when they stop to look around, simply isn’t there.
“They’ve been tricked, bamboozled, and the only ones to stand up and scream, to really make some noise, turn heads, and yes, yes, Rosie, to spill blood, have been dubbed cranks and terrorists. Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, that damn Ted Kaszinski, those maniacs wanted the same thing everyone was telling them they already had, but they didn’t have it. Eventually you hack and hack at that sort of people and they’re going to cry foul, and when that doesn’t work they’re going to foul back. Technically, we’d call them ‘insurrectionists’ but what they are is the point at the end of the spear.
“Well, listen to me, my friends, we’re that spear.”
He had a way with words.
Still skeptical and not a little bit afraid after that tirade I inquired about specifics. The Mississippi is one long fucking river, how did he propose to defend it?
Spencer picked up the phone on his desk. “Doris, bring in lunch.” He put his mouth over the receiver and looked at each of us again, this time kindly, asking, “What do you guys want? Sandwiches? How about a pizza?”
After we’d settled on one sausage and mushroom, and a small cheese (Milton’s a vegetarian), he hung up the phone and continued in the same vein as before.
“We don’t need to defend the whole river, we just need the ports, the most important being New Orleans and do you really think the people of New Orleans and all the National Guardsmen who’ve come home after seeing stupidity taken to the Nth are going to side with the crowd that sent them on the mother of all wild goose chases, losing limbs and friends and for what? No. We promise those people something else, we show them there is a way to live free, not that faux free presidents and talk show hosts blather about, I mean real freedom. You know what I mean. I’ve heard you speak, I’ve read your words, you’re our Paine.”
For a split second the homophone confused me, but I got what he meant and was flattered.
“How?” I asked, overwhelmed. “What am I going to do, how can I help with what you’re talking about, because, Spencer, I gotta say this is all starting to sound a little crazy, or, at a minimum over-ambitious.”
“I’ve got one word for you, my friend,” he said, pointing at me. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Then he said, quietly, after a pause, “Diplomacy.”
Have to admit, wasn’t the word I’d expected. We hadn’t heard much from diplomacy lately.
“You’re going to be an adjunct to our special emissary to Asia. You’re our proof that the people are with us.”
So that’s it, I thought. I’m a tool. Well, once a tool, always a tool, I figured, and why the hell not. What between Gianni after us and the feds still pissed about us stealing their paper, we didn’t have many options.
“Look, the engine is breaking down, all we need is one loose screw to fall into the works and the machine will come to a screeching halt,” Spencer opined.
“And I’m your loose screw.”
He raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘you said it not me.’
“Listen, my friend, we’ve, OK, you’ve, no, really, the three of you,” he said, correcting himself again and waving at Milton, Max and Rosie, “You have got one chance to make this work. For obvious reasons, I need to remain above the fray.”
His reasons, frankly, weren’t that obvious.
“You, my friend,” and yes I was getting tired of his ‘my friend’ crap, it was like a verbal tick with him. “You will need to leave for Canada as soon as this is all over.”
“Canada? I thought you said Asia.”
“We can't be certain you'll be able to get out of the country after all this goes down.”
“What goes down,” I stammered, “and isn’t Canada out of the country?”
“Technically…for the time being. Don’t worry, we’ve taken care of all that.”
I don’t know about you, but whenever someone says ‘don’t worry’ to me twice in the same meeting, I know I need to worry. Again, though, there wasn’t much we could do. We’d gotten ourselves into this mess. Max and I with our bullshit sessions, our hair-brained scheme, then Milton enabling it and pushing us towards something better, and Rosie bringing her talents to the table wholeheartedly. We were the ones that went to Gianni, that moved drugs, guns. Sure we shed the drugs (except alcohol, of course) and took the high road, but that was something of a calculated decision to make us look good, a PR move.
Now it appeared we were being thrust in as the lynchpin of a real revolution, or, to segue into the military portion of our program – the pin of a grenade. Ironically, if we didn’t put the pin back in we’d be blown to bits, but in order to put the pin in we needed to throw some grenades.
This was Spencer’s plan, or Spencer’s people’s plan. We were soon to meet these Hessians of his, and what a meeting it was, then, though, winding down our long first meeting, the sun casting last light on the Cascades, veritable purple fucking mountains majesty, as darkness loomed, Spencer set out a skeleton of the plan.
We were to shut down I5, create pile-ups both northbound and southbound, then blow the shit out of it. The Alaskan Way Viaduct, that ugly monstrosity, was to go, as well. No Ryder trucks full of fertilizer, no, this was to be a professional job. We’d bring that baby down like the ’89 Loma Prieta did to its twin brother in San Francisco. Except we were the earthquake now.
Our Hessians had the explosive expertise, we were to supply the mess. Diabolical plots like this are surprisingly low-budget, all it took was manpower, will, skill and cash.
Anyone out there with a teevee saw what happened next, history was made, I’ve no idea how it will be told and retold to future generations, but there’s no disguising the fact that we made history.
The problem is, when you start doing business with history, it has a way of extracting interest, and then, well, to put it simply, you never know how things are gonna turn out, do you. Occam’s Razor meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Spencer didn’t give us a date, it was to be some time during the summer. We were to rally our troops and get them ready. My role was something of a career counselor for fired mailman, except the only vacant positions were for revolutionaries.
We were to send letter carriers and backroom drones, decades lost to corralling a constant stampede of mail, out to the wilds to be trained by that crew Spencer knew.
Walking down the hill back home to Pioneer Square we passed The Brooklyn and I decided we needed to go in. For all his talk about accountability and receipts, Spencer had given us as a parting gift, a briefcase filled with fifties. I didn’t care what he’d said, it had been a long time since I’d been able to expense a really good meal and I was hungry.
We got a booth in the back and evaluated everything over a couple of bottles of their big house red. Max was riled up, and Milton, as usual, was cryptic and reserved. Rosie was sanguine, not to say sanguinary. It was only later back at our room that she would reveal the depths of her disappointment that we were to be parted.
The general consensus was as I had determined myself during the meeting, ie we had no choice, and if we were going to go down we might as well go down guns blazing.
“That ‘adjunct’ bullshit, though,” said Max. “What the fuck is that all about.”
I had to confess I had no idea then what it was or how I would do it, and the guilt at leaving my partners behind during the crisis point was already weighing heavy. Surprisingly, or maybe not considering what we’d already been through together, none of them begrudged me my new status, such as it was. Max even took to calling me Ad-junked or conjunktavitis, or conjunction junction, and then just plain Junk, and that stuck.
Rosie was, as I’ve said, and to which I should elaborate further, but probably won’t for purely personal reasons, different. Yes, we were to be apart, we’re apart now, then, though, we managed to find each other. I don’t know how that’s going to happen now.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Gone Postal - A Novel - Chapter 10
As Travis was establishing our online presence, events in the real world were getting rather dodgy. Milton’s decision and our concurrence to eschew the drug trade had immediate and impactful repercussions. Gianni was pissed.
He’d grown accustomed to the arrangement, and why not, it was easy money. Then we stopped delivery. The Postal Worker’s Union leadership may have been in his back pocket, but we had the workers and we were united. Well, we were until they started firing us.
Even Gianni didn’t have the manpower to reek his brand of vindictive vengeance on the lot of us involved in the operation, so he went to the USPS with a list of names, including Max, Milton and me and all of our closest conspirators.
Sacked.
But getting fired ain’t shit, happened to me all the time, the difference here was I also had a pseudo-mobster hell-bent on sinking me in the middle of the Sound fitted with concrete clodhoppers.
Gianni sent people for us, but with the reunion and rapprochement between Rosie and Hector, we had a new element of protection. Still, we had to go to the mattresses for awhile; or the mattress in our case, which was considerably more pleasant than they make it out to be in the movies.
Milton was fine in his district. Max, too, was in an impenetrable position at his White Center headquarters. With Hector running interference on the street we enjoyed a degree of tranquility we hadn’t seen all year.
We were; however, losing momentum and running out of time, that is to say, money. We needed new financing.
The digital pamphleteering kept me busy and kept the spirit alive, especially in those demographics we’d struggled to reach before, 16-35, connected, politically active, underemployed, looking for something to do, anything. Our site traffic was steadily growing, you’ll forgive me that little play on words those of you aware of the facts, and those not, though, I have no idea how you could not be, bear with me and you’ll soon see.
Site traffic is one thing, real traffic quite another.
The fulcrum upon which Hector turned was surprising. Rosie had been pressing him to give up the drugs and join us, but for Hector giving up the drugs meant giving up the pussy, and he wasn’t ready to concede that, not easily.
One stormy night, wind blowing and rain falling steadily, Hector left his pied-a-terre at the W and joined us at the nerve center for wine and a tete a tete. We got blistering drunk and as the evening approached dawn, sore boils would be lanced, the puss of bitter memories flowing freely. Rosie and I were in a tight spot, we needed Hector’s money and yet for the purposes of our movement he had to give up his drug enterprise.
Finally, Rosie just asked him, “Why is it so important, why do you have to have it all the time?” Not mentioning the word ‘sex.’ “All the time, Hector?! It’s sick.”
Hector looked chagrined, downright repentant, then his anger flared one more time (for the evening) and let loose a story that had all of us in tears.
“After you and I split, Rosie, I didn’t know what to do. I had to go, you remember Tia Maria, my god such a puta, no way, no more. So I went to my buddy Juan’s, you didn’t know him, older guy. We had a great time at first, drinking, partying, lots of people around. Then one night we had all gone out, just cruising, walking the ‘hood, you know, and I got separated, lost them. I still had most of a brass monkey forty so sat on some steps and just drank. I was miserable.”
He looked miserable then, too. Sitting there on the lone chair in our one-room hideout, Rosie and I on the edge of the bed, watching, as this immensely powerful man, both physically and professionally, I mean, he could have killed me with his bare hands or by his fingers, as making one phone call would have had the same result. Then, though, he let himself go and he was that lost 15 year-old boy, alone, drunk, bereft of friends and family.
“I passed out, and I was woke up by a priest. I’d fallen asleep on the steps of a fuckin’ church an I didn’t even know it. Christ, Rosie, I figured it was some sort of a sign, you know, and this guy, Father Rick, he was a good guy. He took me into the rectory, fed me, talked to me, and I just spilled my guts and said I didn’t know where to go. He made some phone calls and before I knew it I was off at some boys school, living in the priests’ quarters. I had my own little room and I took classes with everyone else. It was good, I was learning shit, you know. I felt safe, like I’d dodged a bullet, and was on the right track.
“But, there was this one priest, I can’t even say his name, the bastard. He’d come in and talk to me. At first it was fine, just talking about my classes and god and shit, then he started getting close, closer day by day.”
Hector was shaking now, tears welling in his eyes, no longer angry, just hurt and afraid as he entered territory he’d never explored, land he’d banished and never shared with anyone.
“He sat closer and closer, every day, and I liked him, you know, but not like that, he was smart and he listened to me, taught me stuff, but then, then he really started touching me and telling me to touch him. It felt dirty and wrong, but I didn’t know what to do. I liked the school, I was improving myself, you know. Finally…”
Hector choked up and began sobbing. Rosie went over to him and tried to rub his back, but he knocked her hand away.
“He had me go down on him…and that was it. After he walked out of the room, I puked, and gathered my shit. I couldn’t take it anymore. No matter how good the school, no matter what it meant for my future, my present fucking sucked, and I got the hell out.”
Hector sat there and cried himself out.
All of us did, sitting in our own separate spaces, crying for him and ourselves, purging ourselves. After I don’t know how long, Hector looked up, gathered himself and finished his story.
“I left and found Juan. He had been dealing meth, so I started with him. We worked it, you know, got to be big shots, but always I had this secret and it ate me up inside. I was dirty, any touching set me off, when I was getting money, the girls flocked to me, like bees to honey. I had all I wanted, I have, have all I want. I don’t know, you could psycho-analyze it, maybe there’s no relation, maybe I jus’ use all that as an excuse because I like it. I don’t know.”
At that point it was getting early, the wine was gone so I put on some coffee. Hector and Rosie talked quietly as I plugged Mr. Coffee into the extension cord strung up from the restaurant below.
At last Hector stood up, puffed himself out to his full self, walked over to me and poked a hard finger into my chest, “You tell one fuckin’ person what I just told you bandejo, and I’ll fuck you up. I won’t kill you, cuz of Rosie, but you’ll wish I had.”
Then he broke into a grin and laughed, turned and said vaya con dios with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice, and went back to his suite at the W, where he probably had a good shag with the junkie or speed freak, whichever was up.
He gave up the drug business, though. Juan bought him out, but that money would run out. So, as I said, we needed new financing.
Hector’s solution was Spencer, a lawyer, a friend of a friend recommended when Hector got in a scrape over possession. Spencer was expensive, but he took care of things.
He’d grown accustomed to the arrangement, and why not, it was easy money. Then we stopped delivery. The Postal Worker’s Union leadership may have been in his back pocket, but we had the workers and we were united. Well, we were until they started firing us.
Even Gianni didn’t have the manpower to reek his brand of vindictive vengeance on the lot of us involved in the operation, so he went to the USPS with a list of names, including Max, Milton and me and all of our closest conspirators.
Sacked.
But getting fired ain’t shit, happened to me all the time, the difference here was I also had a pseudo-mobster hell-bent on sinking me in the middle of the Sound fitted with concrete clodhoppers.
Gianni sent people for us, but with the reunion and rapprochement between Rosie and Hector, we had a new element of protection. Still, we had to go to the mattresses for awhile; or the mattress in our case, which was considerably more pleasant than they make it out to be in the movies.
Milton was fine in his district. Max, too, was in an impenetrable position at his White Center headquarters. With Hector running interference on the street we enjoyed a degree of tranquility we hadn’t seen all year.
We were; however, losing momentum and running out of time, that is to say, money. We needed new financing.
The digital pamphleteering kept me busy and kept the spirit alive, especially in those demographics we’d struggled to reach before, 16-35, connected, politically active, underemployed, looking for something to do, anything. Our site traffic was steadily growing, you’ll forgive me that little play on words those of you aware of the facts, and those not, though, I have no idea how you could not be, bear with me and you’ll soon see.
Site traffic is one thing, real traffic quite another.
The fulcrum upon which Hector turned was surprising. Rosie had been pressing him to give up the drugs and join us, but for Hector giving up the drugs meant giving up the pussy, and he wasn’t ready to concede that, not easily.
One stormy night, wind blowing and rain falling steadily, Hector left his pied-a-terre at the W and joined us at the nerve center for wine and a tete a tete. We got blistering drunk and as the evening approached dawn, sore boils would be lanced, the puss of bitter memories flowing freely. Rosie and I were in a tight spot, we needed Hector’s money and yet for the purposes of our movement he had to give up his drug enterprise.
Finally, Rosie just asked him, “Why is it so important, why do you have to have it all the time?” Not mentioning the word ‘sex.’ “All the time, Hector?! It’s sick.”
Hector looked chagrined, downright repentant, then his anger flared one more time (for the evening) and let loose a story that had all of us in tears.
“After you and I split, Rosie, I didn’t know what to do. I had to go, you remember Tia Maria, my god such a puta, no way, no more. So I went to my buddy Juan’s, you didn’t know him, older guy. We had a great time at first, drinking, partying, lots of people around. Then one night we had all gone out, just cruising, walking the ‘hood, you know, and I got separated, lost them. I still had most of a brass monkey forty so sat on some steps and just drank. I was miserable.”
He looked miserable then, too. Sitting there on the lone chair in our one-room hideout, Rosie and I on the edge of the bed, watching, as this immensely powerful man, both physically and professionally, I mean, he could have killed me with his bare hands or by his fingers, as making one phone call would have had the same result. Then, though, he let himself go and he was that lost 15 year-old boy, alone, drunk, bereft of friends and family.
“I passed out, and I was woke up by a priest. I’d fallen asleep on the steps of a fuckin’ church an I didn’t even know it. Christ, Rosie, I figured it was some sort of a sign, you know, and this guy, Father Rick, he was a good guy. He took me into the rectory, fed me, talked to me, and I just spilled my guts and said I didn’t know where to go. He made some phone calls and before I knew it I was off at some boys school, living in the priests’ quarters. I had my own little room and I took classes with everyone else. It was good, I was learning shit, you know. I felt safe, like I’d dodged a bullet, and was on the right track.
“But, there was this one priest, I can’t even say his name, the bastard. He’d come in and talk to me. At first it was fine, just talking about my classes and god and shit, then he started getting close, closer day by day.”
Hector was shaking now, tears welling in his eyes, no longer angry, just hurt and afraid as he entered territory he’d never explored, land he’d banished and never shared with anyone.
“He sat closer and closer, every day, and I liked him, you know, but not like that, he was smart and he listened to me, taught me stuff, but then, then he really started touching me and telling me to touch him. It felt dirty and wrong, but I didn’t know what to do. I liked the school, I was improving myself, you know. Finally…”
Hector choked up and began sobbing. Rosie went over to him and tried to rub his back, but he knocked her hand away.
“He had me go down on him…and that was it. After he walked out of the room, I puked, and gathered my shit. I couldn’t take it anymore. No matter how good the school, no matter what it meant for my future, my present fucking sucked, and I got the hell out.”
Hector sat there and cried himself out.
All of us did, sitting in our own separate spaces, crying for him and ourselves, purging ourselves. After I don’t know how long, Hector looked up, gathered himself and finished his story.
“I left and found Juan. He had been dealing meth, so I started with him. We worked it, you know, got to be big shots, but always I had this secret and it ate me up inside. I was dirty, any touching set me off, when I was getting money, the girls flocked to me, like bees to honey. I had all I wanted, I have, have all I want. I don’t know, you could psycho-analyze it, maybe there’s no relation, maybe I jus’ use all that as an excuse because I like it. I don’t know.”
At that point it was getting early, the wine was gone so I put on some coffee. Hector and Rosie talked quietly as I plugged Mr. Coffee into the extension cord strung up from the restaurant below.
At last Hector stood up, puffed himself out to his full self, walked over to me and poked a hard finger into my chest, “You tell one fuckin’ person what I just told you bandejo, and I’ll fuck you up. I won’t kill you, cuz of Rosie, but you’ll wish I had.”
Then he broke into a grin and laughed, turned and said vaya con dios with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice, and went back to his suite at the W, where he probably had a good shag with the junkie or speed freak, whichever was up.
He gave up the drug business, though. Juan bought him out, but that money would run out. So, as I said, we needed new financing.
Hector’s solution was Spencer, a lawyer, a friend of a friend recommended when Hector got in a scrape over possession. Spencer was expensive, but he took care of things.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Gone Postal - A Novel - Chapter 9
Travis took our rantings and ravings and put them online, first through blog posts then on our own blogs, then we linked to other blogs and leaked into almost mainstream press. It all had to be done very carefully. Travis had in depth knowledge of network security and the various tools at the government’s disposal to track us down.
I won’t go into details because I didn’t understand them, still don’t. Max and I were in charge of content, as was, later, Spencer.
Getting hooked up with Spencer resulted from a random reunion between Rosie and her brother Hector. We were walking down First Avenue when, quickly scurrying out of the Lusty Lady, came a man oblivious, he ran right into us, knocking notebook out of my hand and Rosie right on her can.
“What the fuck!” I said stepping forward and grabbing him by shirtfront. Taut muscles bulging and countenance scary made me regret my impulsive response.
“I say ‘what the fuck,’ mother-fucker.” And he made to hit me, brushing aside my hands from him with his left hand and pulling back his right.
“Hector!” Rosie shouted, now on her feet and at my side. “Wait!”
And Hector did, eyes going from angry to confused to stunned, then he whispered, disbelieving, “Rosie?”
Turned out Hector was something of a poorman’s Scarface, running a methamphetamine empire across the state out of a compound in the woods somewhere in the general vicinity of Eatonville, though there was no telling where, neither signs nor roads led there. Once a quarter he came into town for a sort of business review, checking on distributors, resellers, and his lieutenants on the streets. He was just unwinding at the Lusty Lady before his trip back to his compound.
As I got to know him better I discovered Hector was something of a sex addict. It was his Achilles heel. Rumor had it he kept a pair of hotties on call at the compound full-time, always one junkie and one speed freak, so if one went down he could juice up the other. He played the odds.
Spencer was Hector’s attorney. We’d get to know him soon enough.
I won’t go into details because I didn’t understand them, still don’t. Max and I were in charge of content, as was, later, Spencer.
Getting hooked up with Spencer resulted from a random reunion between Rosie and her brother Hector. We were walking down First Avenue when, quickly scurrying out of the Lusty Lady, came a man oblivious, he ran right into us, knocking notebook out of my hand and Rosie right on her can.
“What the fuck!” I said stepping forward and grabbing him by shirtfront. Taut muscles bulging and countenance scary made me regret my impulsive response.
“I say ‘what the fuck,’ mother-fucker.” And he made to hit me, brushing aside my hands from him with his left hand and pulling back his right.
“Hector!” Rosie shouted, now on her feet and at my side. “Wait!”
And Hector did, eyes going from angry to confused to stunned, then he whispered, disbelieving, “Rosie?”
Turned out Hector was something of a poorman’s Scarface, running a methamphetamine empire across the state out of a compound in the woods somewhere in the general vicinity of Eatonville, though there was no telling where, neither signs nor roads led there. Once a quarter he came into town for a sort of business review, checking on distributors, resellers, and his lieutenants on the streets. He was just unwinding at the Lusty Lady before his trip back to his compound.
As I got to know him better I discovered Hector was something of a sex addict. It was his Achilles heel. Rumor had it he kept a pair of hotties on call at the compound full-time, always one junkie and one speed freak, so if one went down he could juice up the other. He played the odds.
Spencer was Hector’s attorney. We’d get to know him soon enough.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Gone Postal - A Novel - Chapter 8
God bless the Internets.
Computers had always been scary stupid things to me, eager to eat my work. I got out of San Jose State before silicon was soldered into everyone’s brains by high school. Now, we get them young, rich toddlers are online before they’re potty trained. So, it was good fortune Travis tracked me down, good fortune for me; for Travis, not so much.
Travis was the Northwest USPS Information Technology hotshot. He was aware of what was going on, of course, it was the worst-kept secret on the Pacific coast, damn near every employee in the Western States had an inkling, the barest knowledge something was going on, although nearly all knew nothing of the scope. No one cared, fear of getting retired, dislike and disgust at the weight of “standard” mail, both on the environment and, especially, on their backs, left them bitter and eager to contribute to whatever shenanigans were afoot.
Travis had caught me blustering at the Pioneer Square Saloon, raving about the corruption of credit:
"...these shifting sands serve the usurers right, teasing and tempting us with wants and fattening treats then sucking the life out of us bit by bit, stripping us of liberty as they strip the meaning from the word.
"We're free yeah, sure we're free, free to work and pay taxes and buy, buy, buy, and then what? What happened to those taxes, what still happens to those taxes? They take our cash and buy tanks and planes from their buddies and campaign contributors which they send overseas to kill people we have no qualms with."
I pulled a $5 bill out of my pocket. This was one of my regular routines, standing up on a barstool or the bar itself in the more seedy, and thus friendly, establishments, I’d wave it half-slurring sometimes for effect sometimes cuz I couldn’t help it.
“Five bucks. Five fucking bucks! Do you know how many bullets they, we, we buy with five bucks? Do you know how long I had to work to get the government this five bucks?!”
That night a drunk in the back shouted, “Two hours.”
“Rhetorical question, fuckwad. I can kill two people with this five dollars, we buy two M17 Tracer bullets for five bucks, talk to Joe,” I said pointing at my friend new-found under the viaduct two weeks prior, a vet wrapped in a felt blanket, lost and looking for a handout, a little help. I had no cash to spare, but sat down with him for a beer and he had all sorts of fun facts about life in the army.
Joe nodded and sipped the beer I’d bought him, nervous in the limelight, dim as it was.
“And yeah, yeah, I know not every bullet kills someone. No shit. But, do I want to spend $2.50 so some jarhead can fire a round in the air or take target practice or just for kicks shoot a dog in the streets of Baghdad? Fuck that! For $2.50 I can get a PBR for my friend Joe, and it’s money better spent. His piss may stink, but it never killed no one.” That was my laugh line.
“That beer just bought Joe a moment’s peace which no bullet ever did for him.”
Usually, as then, there was raucous debate. Fighting for democracy, you hate the troops, bullets bought us our freedom, that sort of crap.
“Maybe, maybe,” I said now in more mutes tones, “But is that what’s happening now? Look, I’m not against guns per se, I just think we’re being stupid with our money. We made a mistake, a really really big fucking mistake and no one is ever going to say ‘sorry’.”
“So what, just up and leave,” said a guy looking out of place in khakis and oxford shirt.
“Yeah,” I said, “Leave there and Guam and Germany; Japan and Korea, too. Why should I pay for some colonel to live the high life playing golf on a base not wanted by Koreans and not wanted by Americans. It’s stupid, it’s undemocratic, it’s a waste of money.”
“Our troops are needed in those places,” said Khaki Man.
“Were. Were needed.”
“So, what we just pack up and leave?”
“Yeah.”
“Like that’s going to happen,” said Khaki Man.
“I’ll tell you exactly how it’s going to happen. We stop feeding the beast. We stop paying the taxes that pay for the bullets and tanks, the star wars and satellites, and drones that drop bombs unmanned. We create unrest here, force them to bring back the National Guard to where it belongs. We prevent recruitment, we give the poor saps that join the army cuz they got nothing else, something else. And if that doesn’t work we put the Second Amendment to the task for which it was written, we create a militia and fight to stop a distant government from abusing our rights, unalienable rights, the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, cuz right now I ain’t happy.”
“I’ll tell you what you are, you’re crazy,” said Khaki Man.
“That’s what they said about Son-of-Sam,” I shot back laughing, defusing what had become a too tense moment. There’s a fine line between freedom fighter and lunatic.
Then the cops came.
Brought by what or whom I didn’t know, some fucking software salesman with a cell phone maybe. The guys at the Saloon knew me well and were agitators themselves, so I stood on my First Amendment rights.
“Lawful assembly officers, read the fucking Constitution. Not all of us are aging hippies you can lock up in barricade zoos.”
There was some chanting and the crowd cowed the pair of boneheads that lacked the wherewithal and the desire to engage further. I almost detected some sympathy in the shorter one’s eyes.
Still, I watched my back as I slunk back the alley to Rosie's and my place, which is why the shadow bugged me. If it was cops, I didn’t want them to follow me, I didn’t want to lead them home. I was getting something of a reputation and for the moment Rosie’s place served as the perfect safe house. She was totally off the grid.
Her years jumping around from relative to relative to nobody meant she had no school records, no dental records, no social security number. The tiny place was built above a Mexican restaurant as a makeshift office and the entrance in the floor had long ago been sealed shut. She had no phone, no electrical bill, nothing, it was a space that did not exist. Buck’s was still in Buck’s name. For all intents and purposes, Rosie did not exist.
As I walked in the dark, still alert, thinking if it was just some bum after my five bucks I could handle him. Cops, though, I didn’t know.
I spotted him again as I crossed Washington, he tried to duck behind a wall.
Quickly, I jumped behind a dumpster, crouched there looking for the first thing that came to hand, and grasped a hunk of 2-by-4. Breathing hushed I felt the same charge as when I’d held the knife at the wife’s back, loud blood banging ear drums forcing me to hear with my feet, as he stepped ever closer. When the first shin cleared the dumpster I swung and hit it hard. He went down and I jumped up kicking him in the gut to shut him up cuz he was screaming like a stuck pig.
As he writhed, gasping, I realized I might have made a mistake. It was Khaki Man, getting dirty now as he wriggled in the mossy slime beneath a rain spout.
“Who are you?” I asked looking down on him.
He sat up, hands and knees, spat thickly, leaned against brickwork and mumbled, “No one. Travis.”
“Well, which’n is it,” I said jocular now, tension past, feeling my oats. “If’n you’re no one, ya’ can’t very well be Travis, too.”
He looked up from his prone position. “I do IT for the USPS.”
It took me a second, too many letters too late at night after too many beers, then, realizing, “Oh.”
Awkward.
“Well, shit, I’m sorry. Um, are you friendly?”
“What do you mean, am I friendly!? You just kicked me in the stomach!”
“Yeah, really sorry about that, but shit, man, what’re you doing following me in a dark alley?!”
“I can explain.”
Isn’t that always the way, everyone can always explain. I felt bad, though, and he looked trustworthy, I made a judgment call and brought him back to the place. Rosie looked at me like I was out of my gourd. Once Travis started talking; however, her opinion changed. He wanted in and he had ideas, great ideas. We would breech the gates of the burbs through the Internet tubes.
Computers had always been scary stupid things to me, eager to eat my work. I got out of San Jose State before silicon was soldered into everyone’s brains by high school. Now, we get them young, rich toddlers are online before they’re potty trained. So, it was good fortune Travis tracked me down, good fortune for me; for Travis, not so much.
Travis was the Northwest USPS Information Technology hotshot. He was aware of what was going on, of course, it was the worst-kept secret on the Pacific coast, damn near every employee in the Western States had an inkling, the barest knowledge something was going on, although nearly all knew nothing of the scope. No one cared, fear of getting retired, dislike and disgust at the weight of “standard” mail, both on the environment and, especially, on their backs, left them bitter and eager to contribute to whatever shenanigans were afoot.
Travis had caught me blustering at the Pioneer Square Saloon, raving about the corruption of credit:
"...these shifting sands serve the usurers right, teasing and tempting us with wants and fattening treats then sucking the life out of us bit by bit, stripping us of liberty as they strip the meaning from the word.
"We're free yeah, sure we're free, free to work and pay taxes and buy, buy, buy, and then what? What happened to those taxes, what still happens to those taxes? They take our cash and buy tanks and planes from their buddies and campaign contributors which they send overseas to kill people we have no qualms with."
I pulled a $5 bill out of my pocket. This was one of my regular routines, standing up on a barstool or the bar itself in the more seedy, and thus friendly, establishments, I’d wave it half-slurring sometimes for effect sometimes cuz I couldn’t help it.
“Five bucks. Five fucking bucks! Do you know how many bullets they, we, we buy with five bucks? Do you know how long I had to work to get the government this five bucks?!”
That night a drunk in the back shouted, “Two hours.”
“Rhetorical question, fuckwad. I can kill two people with this five dollars, we buy two M17 Tracer bullets for five bucks, talk to Joe,” I said pointing at my friend new-found under the viaduct two weeks prior, a vet wrapped in a felt blanket, lost and looking for a handout, a little help. I had no cash to spare, but sat down with him for a beer and he had all sorts of fun facts about life in the army.
Joe nodded and sipped the beer I’d bought him, nervous in the limelight, dim as it was.
“And yeah, yeah, I know not every bullet kills someone. No shit. But, do I want to spend $2.50 so some jarhead can fire a round in the air or take target practice or just for kicks shoot a dog in the streets of Baghdad? Fuck that! For $2.50 I can get a PBR for my friend Joe, and it’s money better spent. His piss may stink, but it never killed no one.” That was my laugh line.
“That beer just bought Joe a moment’s peace which no bullet ever did for him.”
Usually, as then, there was raucous debate. Fighting for democracy, you hate the troops, bullets bought us our freedom, that sort of crap.
“Maybe, maybe,” I said now in more mutes tones, “But is that what’s happening now? Look, I’m not against guns per se, I just think we’re being stupid with our money. We made a mistake, a really really big fucking mistake and no one is ever going to say ‘sorry’.”
“So what, just up and leave,” said a guy looking out of place in khakis and oxford shirt.
“Yeah,” I said, “Leave there and Guam and Germany; Japan and Korea, too. Why should I pay for some colonel to live the high life playing golf on a base not wanted by Koreans and not wanted by Americans. It’s stupid, it’s undemocratic, it’s a waste of money.”
“Our troops are needed in those places,” said Khaki Man.
“Were. Were needed.”
“So, what we just pack up and leave?”
“Yeah.”
“Like that’s going to happen,” said Khaki Man.
“I’ll tell you exactly how it’s going to happen. We stop feeding the beast. We stop paying the taxes that pay for the bullets and tanks, the star wars and satellites, and drones that drop bombs unmanned. We create unrest here, force them to bring back the National Guard to where it belongs. We prevent recruitment, we give the poor saps that join the army cuz they got nothing else, something else. And if that doesn’t work we put the Second Amendment to the task for which it was written, we create a militia and fight to stop a distant government from abusing our rights, unalienable rights, the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, cuz right now I ain’t happy.”
“I’ll tell you what you are, you’re crazy,” said Khaki Man.
“That’s what they said about Son-of-Sam,” I shot back laughing, defusing what had become a too tense moment. There’s a fine line between freedom fighter and lunatic.
Then the cops came.
Brought by what or whom I didn’t know, some fucking software salesman with a cell phone maybe. The guys at the Saloon knew me well and were agitators themselves, so I stood on my First Amendment rights.
“Lawful assembly officers, read the fucking Constitution. Not all of us are aging hippies you can lock up in barricade zoos.”
There was some chanting and the crowd cowed the pair of boneheads that lacked the wherewithal and the desire to engage further. I almost detected some sympathy in the shorter one’s eyes.
Still, I watched my back as I slunk back the alley to Rosie's and my place, which is why the shadow bugged me. If it was cops, I didn’t want them to follow me, I didn’t want to lead them home. I was getting something of a reputation and for the moment Rosie’s place served as the perfect safe house. She was totally off the grid.
Her years jumping around from relative to relative to nobody meant she had no school records, no dental records, no social security number. The tiny place was built above a Mexican restaurant as a makeshift office and the entrance in the floor had long ago been sealed shut. She had no phone, no electrical bill, nothing, it was a space that did not exist. Buck’s was still in Buck’s name. For all intents and purposes, Rosie did not exist.
As I walked in the dark, still alert, thinking if it was just some bum after my five bucks I could handle him. Cops, though, I didn’t know.
I spotted him again as I crossed Washington, he tried to duck behind a wall.
Quickly, I jumped behind a dumpster, crouched there looking for the first thing that came to hand, and grasped a hunk of 2-by-4. Breathing hushed I felt the same charge as when I’d held the knife at the wife’s back, loud blood banging ear drums forcing me to hear with my feet, as he stepped ever closer. When the first shin cleared the dumpster I swung and hit it hard. He went down and I jumped up kicking him in the gut to shut him up cuz he was screaming like a stuck pig.
As he writhed, gasping, I realized I might have made a mistake. It was Khaki Man, getting dirty now as he wriggled in the mossy slime beneath a rain spout.
“Who are you?” I asked looking down on him.
He sat up, hands and knees, spat thickly, leaned against brickwork and mumbled, “No one. Travis.”
“Well, which’n is it,” I said jocular now, tension past, feeling my oats. “If’n you’re no one, ya’ can’t very well be Travis, too.”
He looked up from his prone position. “I do IT for the USPS.”
It took me a second, too many letters too late at night after too many beers, then, realizing, “Oh.”
Awkward.
“Well, shit, I’m sorry. Um, are you friendly?”
“What do you mean, am I friendly!? You just kicked me in the stomach!”
“Yeah, really sorry about that, but shit, man, what’re you doing following me in a dark alley?!”
“I can explain.”
Isn’t that always the way, everyone can always explain. I felt bad, though, and he looked trustworthy, I made a judgment call and brought him back to the place. Rosie looked at me like I was out of my gourd. Once Travis started talking; however, her opinion changed. He wanted in and he had ideas, great ideas. We would breech the gates of the burbs through the Internet tubes.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Gone Postal - A Novel - Chapter 7
That’s how it happened on a national scale, weighed down by debt, bad times, and the fear of worse to come, all signs pointing south, a convergence of forces collided. It was the mother of all rip tides, as if a massive earthquake or multiple earthquakes around the world went off at once sending tsunamis hurtling towards each other, speeding towards each other across vast oceans with an earth-shattering power nothing man-kind, in all its mortal deviancy could match.
If you’ll indulge me a bit more seismic hyperbole, me, Max, Rosie et al were drilling holes in tectonic plates, planting dynamite and sparking explosions propelling lava thrust earthward and directions too random to predict, the flow, once unleashed following its own course reeking its own destruction, which held, as volcanic islands do, the key to creation.
None of this high-falutin imagery occurred to me then, though something like it drove me on, justifying the violence as an omelette's broken eggs, growth pains, shedding of skin. And, no that irony is not lost on me. I can see creating a violent peace movement is oxymoronic on its face, was I Gerry Adams achieving peace throwing bombs?
I hear the megalomania creeping into my words, taste the sweet-bitter nectar of power again on my tongue as I sit here recalling the spine-tingling excitement found standing above a crowd of thousands shouting to them, exhorting them to cast off their velvet shackles, to fight, yes fight with fists and stones, bombs and guns, with fire, yes with fire – and hearing them roar back their crowd lust approval guttural and high piercing shrieking mixing to create a cacophonous wave of motivated real gutblood emotion.
We were to meet fire with fire, and it would culminate in those historic days that made the Battle in Seattle look like Romper Room, that transformed Seattle from a sleepy backwater on the periphery of the nation into the nexus of change, the fulcrum upon which history turned, balancing growing Pacific Rim economies on the better half of a country, bridging an ocean whose very name represented our goals yet held like all nature immense destructive capacity, latent, just waiting for the right combination of events.
Our time had come, and those summer days, those long hot, nay flaming, smokin’ days, they stand out now in my memory acrid still, my eyes burning again from the mere recollection. But, I get ahead of myself.
It must be the cold here spurring recollection of the conflagration, though that’s tantamount to dropping a nuke to warm your toes.
In those early days when Gianni was providing protection you could say we were consolidating our base. Early meetings resulted in fisticuffs as players wrangled for control. The cash from recycling bred greed, but big hauls from the drugs and guns spawned envy, gluttony and lust – it was like they’d traded up from sloth. I took the remainder of those seven sins, pride and wrath.
Those petty little power plays made me feel superior to the more insignificant players, my carrier-brothers who so easily cast aside decency to follow me towards their deaths. I lost a lot of myself in those days and acquired someone else.
Gianni had taken the operation to another level, and we followed right along. The entire time, though, Max and I had the majority, we had the sway of the crowd. It required some wrangling to garner consensus, a mandate if you will. Milton, our former night shift boss, had his own power base, as well; and he called a meeting with us one day to discuss matters, because matters desperately needed discussing.
Milton’s home was the International District, he’d grown up there, born abroad, but raised since infancy on the grease-slick streets populated with odd shops, spicy restaurants and the crews that ran them. He knew that milieu top to bottom, working his way up from busboy to waiter to maitre d'. Then into a more respectable career, a government job that made his family proud, their immigrant son was now a full-fledged part of their adopted country.
What could be more American?
He rose through the ranks of the post office until the point where I made his acquaintance as that first stone turned starting the avalanche, the cascade of postal employees that flooded the streets and washed them clean with blood. He’d grown disillusioned with this “America” his parents found so wonderful, equal opportunity didn’t seem as equal as it could be despite the window dressing, lurking below the pretty veneer was blatant hypocrisy. He didn’t like it and wanted to see something else.
That day in the back room of a nameless eatery; however, Milton was just getting started stirring things up.
“There’s gonna be big trouble,” he pithily summarized in gross understatement. There was no escaping from where we were then. Everyone, well, all the worst elements in town, knew what we were doing. Milton’s people were getting scared Gianni wouldn’t provide them protection, they didn’t think they could trust him. In the end they figured they’d get cut loose and left asses to the wind. So, some were falling under the spell of local gangs, who wanted to take a cut which would have set up brutal war between Gianni’s people. But they figured, why put their necks out and pay protection money when they knew the Fat Man wouldn’t provide protection when they really needed it.
To explain this concern you must understand how complex the operation had become. With the postal service fundamentally corrupted we had at our disposal an unrivaled distribution network. From Canada to Mexico we were shipping pharmaceuticals and armaments; everything from Ambien to Zantac, from AK-47s to Z-Force stun guns, you name it we’d ship it, for the right price. Cheap prescription drugs across from Canada were a volume play, but we’d played on volume for years, you could say it was our forte. Marijuana, meth, heroin, ecstasy, you name it, our mailrooms were a smorgasborg of illicit substances filling the bags my brothers carried to the resellers and local dispensaries. Guns moved by the truckload to warehouses up and down the coast.
That day the three of us decided to get ahead of this toxic wave. Milton’s men didn’t like the drugs, not the meth and narcotics at least. Guns were no problem, but the idea of falling from decent hard-working people just to become drug dealers wasn’t gonna wash.
“Look, there are three kinds of people in this world,” Milton started.
“Two kinds. It’s always two kinds of people,” Max interrupted.
“Not in my world. There are people who shower before they go to work, people who shower after they come home from work, and people who don’t shower. I wanted to be the kind of guy who showered before work. I wanted something better, we all do. At first, I thought it was about money. People came into places like this,” he said with a sweep of his arm to encompass the private room and restaurant in totality.
“I see them laughing, eating, drinking, and putting down credit cards without even thinking and I wanted that, I wanted not to worry about money and food for my family.”
Milton expressed in his eloquent way what so many people, from all walks of life, from all eras, had discovered at one point or another. Then it sounded quaint.
“Unhappiness from wanting money is stupid. It’s not money, it’s not comfort, it’s peace of mind. It’s knowing if you got sick or shot you’ll be OK, that your children will have a life you don’t have to worry about, that you can die knowing they can do well and be happy.”
He captured in a way Max and I found particularly moving, the struggle of generations, how the hope of one can lead to greatness in the next, how love can reflect itself in discipline and ambition. How without that hope, love and discipline, leading, in the simplest terms, to something better, it’s all pointless. We should all strive to leave this world a better place, and right then the world had gotten pretty shitty and it didn’t appear anyone was stepping up with a pooper-scooper.
“The kids don’t care. It was bad enough before, now they see what’s going on and it’s chaos. Why should they listen to elders when the government is screwing them and not just some far off government, people like me, right in their own neighborhood who’ve completely gone off the tracks.”
We needed to offer something better. Max and I knew what we had to do. This was exactly the subject of our rantings and ravings working the late-night shifts shouting to each other over the noise or barking back and forth with others in the break room.
It wasn’t about stealing some money or trying to lighten our load. It was about sticking a wrench in the works, fucking with the system. All those credit card offers, catalogs and coupons were mere symbols of our collective inadequacies. Every smiling model saying buy this and be like me, every promise of $30k in pre-approved credit, a promise of prestige and a chance to look good in front of neighbors, to go places and buy things to enhance your status and build self worth.
“I’m so much freer now,” I told Max. “I have no stuff, I want nothing. All this crap they push holds no meaning.”
“OK, Gandhi, but what about food, insurance, healthcare, what if it ain’t just you, huh, then what. Say you’ve got kids and they need good schools and doctors, are you just gonna tell them to meditate and free themselves from want by not owning anything. No. It doesn’t work like that.”
He was right. My path wasn’t for everyone. I’d always been a selfish prick, and the selfish prick path runs narrow. Thank god the wife and I never had kids.
“It’s about the collective good,” Max went on, “About the greatest good for the greatest number, the lucky helping out the luckless.”
“OK, Karl Marx,” I shot back at him. “Eat the rich, is that your motto, redistribute the wealth and create a utopian workers paradise. Been done. Didn’t work out too well.”
“I’m not talking communism, I’m talking common decency. Helping out your brother. I mean, shit, you listen to these fucking ‘Christians’ on the right talk about ‘entitlements’ like some welfare mom’s picking their pocket. We’ve got the capacity to roll out Christ’s teaching right at our fingertips, they wouldn’t even have to get their hands dirty doin’ in and instead they talk about drowning government in a bathtub, and THEY’RE government! I’d like to drown them in a bathtub, the selfish mother-fuckers.”
On and on we went and now here Milton was adding his voice to the mix. It was clear we needed to retake the moral high ground, and that’s when the pontificating began.
For Max it came natural, he’d been prepped by years of holding court across sorting tables and in lunch rooms, a lifetime in churches listening to sermon after sermon exhorting the poor to give to the less poor cuz the rich were nowhere to be seen.
It came harder for me, the meetings at Max’s were one thing, drinking beers and talking smack with co-workers came naturally. Gathering crowds and holding them rapt with my words and ideas was terrifying work.
Starting in bars was the logical first step, a step I’d already taken, I just needed to speak up, let the voices in my head stream screaming out my mouth, and I did. First at the Saloon and the Card Room then further out of my comfort zone, gathering people on the streets, taking a phalanx of my carrier-brothers and pulling together the guys outside the Mission, standing on proverbial soapboxes in the pale light of early morning or the stark darkness of night.
I roused rabble.
Taking it to the street wasn’t going to be enough, though. Max, Milton, Rosie and me and all our cohorts could bluster and blather all we wanted in the city, but there were acres and acres of folks in their tract homes watching the teevee and listening to their traffic reports on the radio as they drove right by and they wouldn’t hear a peep in their plush leather seats butts warm and dry. We were invisible to them.
If you’ll indulge me a bit more seismic hyperbole, me, Max, Rosie et al were drilling holes in tectonic plates, planting dynamite and sparking explosions propelling lava thrust earthward and directions too random to predict, the flow, once unleashed following its own course reeking its own destruction, which held, as volcanic islands do, the key to creation.
None of this high-falutin imagery occurred to me then, though something like it drove me on, justifying the violence as an omelette's broken eggs, growth pains, shedding of skin. And, no that irony is not lost on me. I can see creating a violent peace movement is oxymoronic on its face, was I Gerry Adams achieving peace throwing bombs?
I hear the megalomania creeping into my words, taste the sweet-bitter nectar of power again on my tongue as I sit here recalling the spine-tingling excitement found standing above a crowd of thousands shouting to them, exhorting them to cast off their velvet shackles, to fight, yes fight with fists and stones, bombs and guns, with fire, yes with fire – and hearing them roar back their crowd lust approval guttural and high piercing shrieking mixing to create a cacophonous wave of motivated real gutblood emotion.
We were to meet fire with fire, and it would culminate in those historic days that made the Battle in Seattle look like Romper Room, that transformed Seattle from a sleepy backwater on the periphery of the nation into the nexus of change, the fulcrum upon which history turned, balancing growing Pacific Rim economies on the better half of a country, bridging an ocean whose very name represented our goals yet held like all nature immense destructive capacity, latent, just waiting for the right combination of events.
Our time had come, and those summer days, those long hot, nay flaming, smokin’ days, they stand out now in my memory acrid still, my eyes burning again from the mere recollection. But, I get ahead of myself.
It must be the cold here spurring recollection of the conflagration, though that’s tantamount to dropping a nuke to warm your toes.
In those early days when Gianni was providing protection you could say we were consolidating our base. Early meetings resulted in fisticuffs as players wrangled for control. The cash from recycling bred greed, but big hauls from the drugs and guns spawned envy, gluttony and lust – it was like they’d traded up from sloth. I took the remainder of those seven sins, pride and wrath.
Those petty little power plays made me feel superior to the more insignificant players, my carrier-brothers who so easily cast aside decency to follow me towards their deaths. I lost a lot of myself in those days and acquired someone else.
Gianni had taken the operation to another level, and we followed right along. The entire time, though, Max and I had the majority, we had the sway of the crowd. It required some wrangling to garner consensus, a mandate if you will. Milton, our former night shift boss, had his own power base, as well; and he called a meeting with us one day to discuss matters, because matters desperately needed discussing.
Milton’s home was the International District, he’d grown up there, born abroad, but raised since infancy on the grease-slick streets populated with odd shops, spicy restaurants and the crews that ran them. He knew that milieu top to bottom, working his way up from busboy to waiter to maitre d'. Then into a more respectable career, a government job that made his family proud, their immigrant son was now a full-fledged part of their adopted country.
What could be more American?
He rose through the ranks of the post office until the point where I made his acquaintance as that first stone turned starting the avalanche, the cascade of postal employees that flooded the streets and washed them clean with blood. He’d grown disillusioned with this “America” his parents found so wonderful, equal opportunity didn’t seem as equal as it could be despite the window dressing, lurking below the pretty veneer was blatant hypocrisy. He didn’t like it and wanted to see something else.
That day in the back room of a nameless eatery; however, Milton was just getting started stirring things up.
“There’s gonna be big trouble,” he pithily summarized in gross understatement. There was no escaping from where we were then. Everyone, well, all the worst elements in town, knew what we were doing. Milton’s people were getting scared Gianni wouldn’t provide them protection, they didn’t think they could trust him. In the end they figured they’d get cut loose and left asses to the wind. So, some were falling under the spell of local gangs, who wanted to take a cut which would have set up brutal war between Gianni’s people. But they figured, why put their necks out and pay protection money when they knew the Fat Man wouldn’t provide protection when they really needed it.
To explain this concern you must understand how complex the operation had become. With the postal service fundamentally corrupted we had at our disposal an unrivaled distribution network. From Canada to Mexico we were shipping pharmaceuticals and armaments; everything from Ambien to Zantac, from AK-47s to Z-Force stun guns, you name it we’d ship it, for the right price. Cheap prescription drugs across from Canada were a volume play, but we’d played on volume for years, you could say it was our forte. Marijuana, meth, heroin, ecstasy, you name it, our mailrooms were a smorgasborg of illicit substances filling the bags my brothers carried to the resellers and local dispensaries. Guns moved by the truckload to warehouses up and down the coast.
That day the three of us decided to get ahead of this toxic wave. Milton’s men didn’t like the drugs, not the meth and narcotics at least. Guns were no problem, but the idea of falling from decent hard-working people just to become drug dealers wasn’t gonna wash.
“Look, there are three kinds of people in this world,” Milton started.
“Two kinds. It’s always two kinds of people,” Max interrupted.
“Not in my world. There are people who shower before they go to work, people who shower after they come home from work, and people who don’t shower. I wanted to be the kind of guy who showered before work. I wanted something better, we all do. At first, I thought it was about money. People came into places like this,” he said with a sweep of his arm to encompass the private room and restaurant in totality.
“I see them laughing, eating, drinking, and putting down credit cards without even thinking and I wanted that, I wanted not to worry about money and food for my family.”
Milton expressed in his eloquent way what so many people, from all walks of life, from all eras, had discovered at one point or another. Then it sounded quaint.
“Unhappiness from wanting money is stupid. It’s not money, it’s not comfort, it’s peace of mind. It’s knowing if you got sick or shot you’ll be OK, that your children will have a life you don’t have to worry about, that you can die knowing they can do well and be happy.”
He captured in a way Max and I found particularly moving, the struggle of generations, how the hope of one can lead to greatness in the next, how love can reflect itself in discipline and ambition. How without that hope, love and discipline, leading, in the simplest terms, to something better, it’s all pointless. We should all strive to leave this world a better place, and right then the world had gotten pretty shitty and it didn’t appear anyone was stepping up with a pooper-scooper.
“The kids don’t care. It was bad enough before, now they see what’s going on and it’s chaos. Why should they listen to elders when the government is screwing them and not just some far off government, people like me, right in their own neighborhood who’ve completely gone off the tracks.”
We needed to offer something better. Max and I knew what we had to do. This was exactly the subject of our rantings and ravings working the late-night shifts shouting to each other over the noise or barking back and forth with others in the break room.
It wasn’t about stealing some money or trying to lighten our load. It was about sticking a wrench in the works, fucking with the system. All those credit card offers, catalogs and coupons were mere symbols of our collective inadequacies. Every smiling model saying buy this and be like me, every promise of $30k in pre-approved credit, a promise of prestige and a chance to look good in front of neighbors, to go places and buy things to enhance your status and build self worth.
“I’m so much freer now,” I told Max. “I have no stuff, I want nothing. All this crap they push holds no meaning.”
“OK, Gandhi, but what about food, insurance, healthcare, what if it ain’t just you, huh, then what. Say you’ve got kids and they need good schools and doctors, are you just gonna tell them to meditate and free themselves from want by not owning anything. No. It doesn’t work like that.”
He was right. My path wasn’t for everyone. I’d always been a selfish prick, and the selfish prick path runs narrow. Thank god the wife and I never had kids.
“It’s about the collective good,” Max went on, “About the greatest good for the greatest number, the lucky helping out the luckless.”
“OK, Karl Marx,” I shot back at him. “Eat the rich, is that your motto, redistribute the wealth and create a utopian workers paradise. Been done. Didn’t work out too well.”
“I’m not talking communism, I’m talking common decency. Helping out your brother. I mean, shit, you listen to these fucking ‘Christians’ on the right talk about ‘entitlements’ like some welfare mom’s picking their pocket. We’ve got the capacity to roll out Christ’s teaching right at our fingertips, they wouldn’t even have to get their hands dirty doin’ in and instead they talk about drowning government in a bathtub, and THEY’RE government! I’d like to drown them in a bathtub, the selfish mother-fuckers.”
On and on we went and now here Milton was adding his voice to the mix. It was clear we needed to retake the moral high ground, and that’s when the pontificating began.
For Max it came natural, he’d been prepped by years of holding court across sorting tables and in lunch rooms, a lifetime in churches listening to sermon after sermon exhorting the poor to give to the less poor cuz the rich were nowhere to be seen.
It came harder for me, the meetings at Max’s were one thing, drinking beers and talking smack with co-workers came naturally. Gathering crowds and holding them rapt with my words and ideas was terrifying work.
Starting in bars was the logical first step, a step I’d already taken, I just needed to speak up, let the voices in my head stream screaming out my mouth, and I did. First at the Saloon and the Card Room then further out of my comfort zone, gathering people on the streets, taking a phalanx of my carrier-brothers and pulling together the guys outside the Mission, standing on proverbial soapboxes in the pale light of early morning or the stark darkness of night.
I roused rabble.
Taking it to the street wasn’t going to be enough, though. Max, Milton, Rosie and me and all our cohorts could bluster and blather all we wanted in the city, but there were acres and acres of folks in their tract homes watching the teevee and listening to their traffic reports on the radio as they drove right by and they wouldn’t hear a peep in their plush leather seats butts warm and dry. We were invisible to them.
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