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2.28.05

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 Fifteen

Tuesday June 20

anarchy, noun.

1. an absence of a system of government and law.

Ex. After its defeat in war the country was in a state of anar-chy. Eternal anarchy amidst the noise of endless wars (John Mil-ton).

2. disorder and confusion; lawlessness.

Ex. (Figurative.) ... the wild anarchy of drink (Ben Jonson).

(SYN) chaos.

"The anarchists are right in the assertion that, without Author-ity, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions."--Leo Tolstoy

Brenna is sprung. Finally. When she called her parents from the lock-up, they hung up on her...apparently content to let her rot. Luckily, Rick, who, no matter how he’s treated, seems ready to jump in to help her, cashed a couple of cds and posted her bail.

Brenna’s mom has some sort of Old South conception of social standing where proximity to political activism or controversy is the equivalent of giving birth out of wedlock. There’s something else at work too. Brenna never talks about what her Dad does, except that he’s former military and now does “consulting work” and just happens to live within a convenient 5 minute drive of CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia.

Obviously, the CIA agent with the “anarchist”(1) daughter would make for a predictable TV movie: Agent has to choose between daughter and country, finds way to choose both, daughter dies anyway, but not before renouncing anarchism and tearfully re-embracing Dad and country.

Of course, everyone suspects everyone of secretly working for the CIA. Someone says “I work for the Gap” or “I work for a pizza delivery place” and the listener smiles knowingly because everyone knows that “The Gap” or “Pizza Delivery” are code words similar to “I’m a salesman” or “I sell lawn furniture” or “I’m an accountant.” Of course they mean CIA. Everything means CIA. It’s unbelievable what people think means you work for the CIA. The CIA must have 100 million employees if the current rate of suspicion (or the claims of those desiring attention) is justi-fied.

They’re all assassins too. Especially the ones you knew from high school who you’re almost sure didn’t do anything but drop out of community college and work in the record store; that is, until they started dropping hints about guys they plugged for some secret Reagan administration project that went awry. Who’d suspect them? Especially not after they grew morbidly obese bingeing on hot dogs, cheez whiz and Dominoe’s Pizza. Obese as-sassin geeks from the CIA would make for a great set of action figures.(2)

Brenna has been staying with Rick, Jean with Frank, me with Dani (I’m sitting at her fold-out table writing this), and Kerran with Samantha. No one has heard from Nell, though our lawyer, who is provided by the coalition of groups that planned the pro-test, is in contact with her, or claims to be. The rest of us are in touch by phone. I’ve also been thinking that we need a network of trained carrier pigeons. There’s no way we can main-tain adequate phone security over obviously tapped phone lines.

"I hear you, Mr. FBI man...I hear you...” I keep saying into Dani’s phone, but he pretends I’m not onto him.

I’m completely onto him.

So the 2012 Park Road Gang, world-renowned anarchists, all of us fugitives or out on bail, are dependent on the generosity of girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, friends, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, semi-ex-boyfriends, ex-semi-boyfriends, secret ex-semi-boyfriends and, in Kerran’s case, his grandmother, who provided his bail which was higher than everyone else’s since when the house was raided, he was still really drunk and pissed on the shoes of the cop who handcuffed him.

Jean is double-lucky. Not only did she get away that day without getting arrested, but since we never put her on the lease, there’s no legal documentation tying her to our house. They did confiscate her stuff when they confiscated the rest of ours, but what are they going to do? Arrest her on the basis of owning a box of tampons? I shouldn’t joke. Prosecutors have no sense of the absurd.

(So little as a matter of fact that I’m going to jump out on a limb right now and recommend that every law school in our laughably crime-ridden nation establish a class called “Having A Sense Of The Absurd.” I’m almost positive that such a class would cut unnecessary prosecution by a redeemably high frac-tion.)

The lawyer says that we should be able to move back into our house in a day or two, though I don’t quite believe him. The way he says it is like we’re just going to get the house back with-out any effort or threats or lawsuits, like they’re just going to give it back because of what nice, fair people they are? “All a big misunderstanding. No worries,” they’ll say with smiles on their faces?

I think I hate him. He’s so pompous and always acts like he’s in a rush and like answering our questions is a very big strain for him. Fuck him. We should just go ahead and defend our fucking selves.

My coworkers still don’t know anything about any of this. The only serious story on the protest landed below the fold in the Post and, subsequently, there was only a blurb that didn’t men-tion my name. It was buried too, around about page 5. It’s as follows:

Anarchist Group Houses Targeted

Several co-conspirators of fugitive World Bank riot ringleader, Margaret Elizabeth “Nell” Cochrane, were arrested over the week-end in a sweep of anarchist group houses in the Mt. Pleasant section of Northwest Washington. Several suspects were taken into custody.

Despite the article being less than 50 words, the newspaper chose to accompany it with a photo of Brenna, in her PJs, doing a perp walk down the stairs of our house. Her hair is frumpled and she looks really angry, which is, in real life, because she was awakened by swat police to be arrested for something she had no part in. Unfortunately, her angry look should feed the image of wild-eyed crazy anarchists which is so good for ad sales.

I love the way they refer to “anarchist group houses” when A)we’re NOT an “anarchist” group house B) as far as we know, we’re the only group house raided so there’s ZERO need for use of the plural. Of course, since it’s printed everyone assumes it has to be true and that Mt. Pleasant is honeycombed with anar-chist group houses full of hairy, pot-smoking bomb-throwers plotting to dismantle this open, transparent, in-no-way-paranoid, thoughtfully-run democracy of ours. Meanwhile, while the rest of the world is parsing the ironies in the previous sentence, I don’t suppose there’s any reason for the Post to do ANY actual fact-checking, is there? Lazy assholes.

Channel 5 did one of those scare-the-parents segments that local news is so good at. It was entitled “Is Your Child A Secret An-archist?” and featured a neatly dressed news-maton with a taste-fully highlighted bob haircut talking in caring concerned tones about the new dangers of anarchism, about how, if they weren’t vigilant, anarchists would secretly convert their children into...people who might express a belief in something? People who might think they have a right to freedom of speech?

Do people believe this shit? The emphatic tone, the panicked terminology, the naivete? Do they? Do people believe that their children would so easily take up a political philosophy of any sort? Not when there was McDonald’s, glue-sniffing and the Spice Girls available?

I won’t even get into the more pressing philosophical question: Where is Dani and why hasn’t she called to make dinner arrangements?

So, this morning, I got off the Metro in front of work and there were two cops -- both tall, both white, one with a thin face, the other with a big jowly face -- leaning against their squad car. They saw me and I saw them and they motioned me over and I walked over and they told me to get in and I asked if I was un-der arrest and felt a current of fear and the taller of the two said “no,” but I felt like I was under arrest anyway and got into the car.

At first they said nothing as we pulled into traffic. “What’s going on?” I asked.

The jowly cop in the passenger seat turned towards me, “Here’s the deal. We know the photos you have. They’d be pretty bad for us. We want to offer you a deal. You give us the film and the evidence against you will get lost.”

"What evidence against me?” I asked.

"Don’t play dumb,” the cop said. “You know the evidence.”

My brain said, “He’s bluffing.” But the fear in my chest said, “There must be something.” They couldn’t just claim that they had something, could they?

The car made a right, then after a minute, another, getting back on Connecticut. We were making a triangle.

As we pulled back up to the building I work in, the jowly changed to more soothing tones, like he was talking to a friend.

" Look kid, we don’t want anyone else hurt. There are guys’ ca-reers at stake here. And you don’t want jail. Those photos are bad news. Just give us the film and everyone’s problems disap-pear. Good, huh? We’re going to be here on Friday. Be here with the film, OK?”

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(1) We do actually stand in opposition to the government’s arbitrary (and I’d argue unconstitutional) imposi-tion of order in this case, making us, for purposes of our role in this little passion play of control freakdom, anarchists. Or, if you’d prefer, this arbitrary imposition of order constitutes chaos since order is being im-posed according to a set of “facts” that are, in fact, deceptions created for the pretext of the imposition of order, and therefore, order is being imposed randomly – chaotically -- and since, definitionally, anarchy is chaos, then the government themselves are the anarchists and we are, by upholding and/or demanding a standard of truthfulness, advocates of order and opponents of anarchy. Have a nice day.

(2) For me, this is an obvious reference to Brian Greenberg who I’ve known since 8th grade honors science. During 11th grade, he got into role-playing games the way some people get into heroin. He flunked out of high school, went to work for a game shop, got his GED, tried community college and now claims to have “taken out” Noriega’s chauffeur during the 1989 Panama incursion.

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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun@ bigbagoftricks dot com.