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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here for a Chapter Index.
Chapter Eight
June 15
The fruition of Nell's plans was a living room full of sleeping bags, backpacks, padded floor mats, multicolored yoga mats, and woven faux peasant mats. Pickets and banners rested against the walls, scratching the floors. Protesters from all over the country, the world even, mostly kids in frayed sweaters and worn blue jeans, had converged here and many of them, amid the racket, somehow slept. The awake ones shuffled aimlessly around the living room or huddled quietly reading.
They'd been arriving for two days. I now had to stand in line for my own bathroom, even though the line for it hadn't been nearly as bad as the line for the one on the second floor. At first, there were going to be designated men's and women's rooms but that fell apart really quickly, once the women started comparing the lines between their bathroom and the men's.
Nell didn’t exactly ask the rest of us if we wanted to play Holiday Inn and Brenna has been super-pissed over the whole thing. She "can't take this do-gooder-save-the-world-shit" to start with. At least that's what she said last night, but this morning I swear I saw her helping to find space for a couple of the newbies. When she caught me watching her stretch out a sleeping bag, she glared at me like she'd caught me watching her get dressed or shower or something.
All these kids compete for Nell’s attention. It's, "Nell, what did you think of this article," and "Nell, what did you think of that government's version of events," and "Nell, did you read the press release about such and such?" They follow her around. They ask her opinion on every slogan, on ever placard. They couldn’t even hang flyers up by themselves until she demonstrated the method that used the fewest thumbtacks.
Most of them are fans of socially conscious Punk music and many have drawn X's on their hands like the old straight-edge crowd, though I think they're about one decade too late. Straight-edge nostalgia might as well be hippie nostalgia at this point. They were especially excited to be in Mt. Pleasant since many bands on mega-holy Dischord Records have group-houses in the here. They were very disappointed to find out that we're about 3 very tenuous degrees of separation from the Dischord crowd and Ian Mackay won't be stopping by for kool-aid and a pre-protest pep talk.
However, Kerran's band Bleed Monkey might actually get signed to Dischord (or so he says) and that gives him some extra cachet. He doesn't tell them that Bleed Monkey's lead singer used to be in another notorious hardcore band, regrettably named, Everything Pizza: Hold the Meat! They were very pro-Animal Rights and sang against vivisection and played all the rallies and benefits, but then their guitarist admitted in a 'zine article that the band loved barbecue ribs and would go out for steak and cheese sandwiches after shows because they “actually couldn’t stand all the chickpea crap” they had to eat at the benefits.
It was like they'd been caught lip-synching. Their former fans held rallies to burn their records. Their label, Famous Never, was forced to drop them and make a statement apologizing to the fans, who were almost completely from the Animal Rights community.
In addition to the credibility problem, Bleed Monkey's lead singer, Wayne, who was over last night, is kind of a dick. Even Kerran complains about his "preening machismo." "Why do you put up with it?" I asked last night after Wayne and his perfect hair left our house. Kerran snickered and said, "Because I don't really care."
Without even having heard Bleed Monkey play a note, I’m positive that they’ll be the closest possible thing to cock rock that Dischord ever puts out.
One
of the smaller, younger, prettier, more fragile looking little punk girls…big
brown eyes, pale milk skin, pink and green streaked hair…matted
from too much dye…is completely enamored with Kerran and has been
following him around like a little puppy. Tonight, when he went up to
bed, she followed and when I went upstairs, I found two Germans and a
Chicagoan asleep on the floor of my room.
June 16
There was a soft knock at my door, then Jean's voice: "Nate...Nathan, it's time."
The room smelled like stale breath and old shoes. The Germans hadn't wanted to run the air conditioning, an inconvenience that revealed itself as an obvious mistake when I breathed in the acrid, almost indescribable, vinegar/urine/must/mildew stink of bodies that had slept in their own old summer sweat.
The house rattled and I heard people stretch and groan. Nell had instructed every single person sleeping here that there wouldn't be time for showers today. She'd even posted signs, but The Chicagoan, whose name I sadly couldn’t remember, went into the bathroom and seconds later I heard the shower run. Nell didn't precisely say how she was going to enforce her "no showers" rule and it was probably my fault for not stopping him, but what could I have done? Plus, he was the worst smelling of the bunch in my room. I wanted him to shower.
The Germans, on the other hand, stood where they slept to pull their clothing on.
I gathered up camera equipment, my all-manual Pentax K1000, Nell's more automated Nikon F601, a flash that I'd later realize fit neither camera, and about 30 rolls of film, most of it black and white. I was not actually a participant. Nell asked me to photograph the whole thing, both as a record of what her group does, to record any potential civil right's violations and to try and drum up some press for the cause.
I'm not actually a believer in their cause(s), more of a barely-informed sympathizer: in general terms I want people to be able to vote in fair, free elections for their governments; I want governments to respect the rights of the press; people not to live in poverty, blah, blah, blah. I also would love to raise, train and own a supersonic flying pig that could get me from Washington to Hong Kong in under 5 hours.
My shame being that, if Nell knew I wanted such a pig, she'd be out at pig farms right now, figuring out how to breed a sow with an F-14.
I got downstairs, walked into the kitchen and found that Jean had taken every size pot, canister, vase or anything else of that shape or configuration and somehow figured out how to brew coffee in each of them.
She had also set out about 30 individual plastic bowls of homemade granola (yes, granola: bonfire and Kumbaya sure to follow) that she had broiled in the oven. The air of the entire first floor was all coffee and roasted nuts and cinnamon. Perfect winter smells, but, of course, it wasn't winter so they just smelled out of place and seemed to make the room warmer.
We were sort of a kindergarten class field trip of 35; everyone had lined up and, being hyper-environmentally conscious, brought their own metal mugs and Jean, playing our delightful Mom, poured coffee into each one.
"Are those plastic bowls?" one girl with ratty hair said. "Those can't be. You guys wouldn't?"
"They're biodegradable," Jean said.
"It's the principal of the thing," the girl said and I swear she snarled. One or two others shook their heads in agreement.
"The principal of the thing is that we have invited you into our house and Jean has been really nice and made you breakfast," said Brenna from further back in the line where no one had seen her standing.
After that, there was silence and my own grateful crunching. Brenna, wearing a long t-shirt and a black leather motorcycle jacket, stood off by herself in the corner of the living room closest to the front parlor. She had a don't-fuck-with-me-or-for-that-matter-acknowledge-my-presence-in-any-way look on her face, so I went over and stood near her, but tried to look like I wasn’t trying to stand near her.
Then, the mustering began. There was a little map of the World Bank and its surrounding blocks. Nell, using, of all things, little plastic soldiers, showed everyone where to stand, how to block the entrances peacefully, gave demonstrations on how to go limp when carried off by police, and other important tactics, which I dutifully photographed her demonstrating.
She was standing in the middle of the room and she went silent for a second and looked at her shoes, which she'd tied badly so that the bows were too loose, ready to be tripped on or come undone at any moment. When she looked up, she started speaking:
"We might not accomplish much," she said. "It's not about that. It's about getting some of these fat, lazy, over-educated, over-privileged men to question themselves just a little, to take a moment and stop and ask if maybe their policies aren't perfect, maybe aren't right. Maybe we can make them pause for even a moment and remember why they have the jobs they have and, if we can, well, that one 'if' would be worth it."
And, then, in the just-peeking-above-the-horizon-white-light, we...Jean came, Brenna and Kerran did not...walked out the door, one-by-one and around Park Road to Mt. Pleasant Street, where the route for the 42 bus begins and ends. There was a bus waiting and we all piled on—the driver not even noticing we were there--for the ride downtown.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2004 Me Three