Home Free – Chicaco, Denver, St. Paul, Minneapolis – August-September 2008)
Welcome home, soldier. That’s what they all say now. Welcome home.
But what happens when you never came home really. What if your home got destroyed in the war when you realized that nothing about it was true anymore, nothing that you had believed in was left of it? It had all been a lie gone violently insane. What if you just kept running because the American Dream that you had left with had turned into some kind of day time nightmare where the only reason is the unreason of the USD and you knew you could never go home because you didn’t have one anymore.
What happens is that the only home you have left is the American Dream that you nurtured in your bunk with every thought of green grass and endless roads and beautiful free people. So you keep that inside of you and you live like a turtle.
When I came back my dream was ruined when I saw that my home had become some kind of science fiction dystopia. Everyone was on pills because consumer culture had made this place so fucking intolerably boring that folks didn’t even want to get through their days anymore. Hitler would have had a hard-on for the kind of loyalty that pharmaceutical companies commanded. Part of the reason people went to the pills was because the world seemed so loud and obnoxious, filled to the brim with bullshit and opinions. The TV presented our culture like a circus spectacle with our very President suspended on a rhetorical high wire that spread from here to Pakistan. The people were out waving the flag while losing their jobs by the thousands because their precious America no longer gave a fuck about them. Hundreds of billions of their hard earned dollars were traded from public to private hands in a Rube Goldberg scheme and still those fucking flags were flying.
A great disenchantment settled in on me. This wasn’t what I had fought for, it isn’t what my Grandpa had fought for. This America was a disgusting perversion of what we had intended it to be. Complacency had turned us all into executioner’s wives. Our money was soaked in the blood of thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties yet still all we could seem to do was buy, buy, buy.
I had joined the military so that I could feel like a WWII hero but when I got home I felt much more like a Nazi who had done something that he was decidedly unsure of.
Sure it sounds melodramatic but I was also twenty-one and fresh out of working in the premier Detention Facility of the Global War on Terror and here I am returned to an industrial wasteland in Michigan with all the doom and gloom of joblessness and home foreclosures while the TV keeps telling me and everybody else that the banks and the oil companies and the other war profiteers are making out like gangsters and all the while you’ve got nineteen year old kids with assault rifles off fighting a holy war with people they can’t talk to and don’t understand, kicking in doors and taking people away in the middle of the night to spread freedom and peace via Democracy to a country that never wanted it. The only windows into this war are fifteen second night vision shots of streets exploding in the night or some boy rushing up to the corner of some building, slamming against it and then shooting wildly down the corridor. Then there are commercials for pills to fight depression, give you longer lasting erections or a detergent with one thousand times the cleaning power of any other detergent. People just don’t give a fuck about our war anymore. They just want to forget it… and us. They wanted to be part of this new cultural fascism that was spreading over our country. It was a dream of a lazier, greedier life where we had more things and had to work less hard no matter how many millions of people had to die around the globe for it. Everything was all fucked up.
I was nervous and paranoid all of the time, self conscious of every neurotic twitch of my brain. I thought it was all my fault. I thought I had fucked it all up. But I hadn’t. We all had.
We had made it this way over a torturous parade of time spent working against ourselves and forgetting every important lesson we were given. This fucked up modern world is our birthright passed down from a strong lineage of war survivors and lunatics. Still we blame God, we say it was all his fucked up design, but it was just us being crazy and violent stranded on some rock.
God didn’t build Guantanamo Bay. God didn’t write a Standard Operating Prceedure. God didn’t invent the G.W.o.T. God didn’t steal men without reason and stick them in cages for years. God didn’t build M16s and Howitzers and bombs and the whole military industrial complex. We did it. We did it all by ourselves. God didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of it.
But we didn’t do it for God. We did it for Money. We did it so that we could get a little bit for ourselves and all of the rest of the white world could keep spending it because it is and has always been more powerful than God in the psyche of mankind which may be the only place that God truly exists.
I had a dream
This dream was my own American Dream. It was conceived in the punk rock of my disenfranchised youth. It was full of travel, foreign women, friends, stolen time and impossible stories shared. It was full of things that I had read in the books that were stuffed underneath my bunk. Moments that I wanted to feel when at last this short stay in hell was over.
I kept it all throughout the war and all the terror of deployments. I kept it throughout the meaningless jobs. I kept it during all those hours of school when I was studying ethical philosophy to ensure that I never got a job. I kept it when the military told me that I wouldn’t be getting the benefits they had promised me for school and all throughout the anger that ensued when I thought of all of the things that I had done to honor this contract, this precious obligation that they never let me out of no matter how much I protested only to find out that the government would not meet its end of our bargain.
I don’t mind making deals with the Devil as long as the Devil keeps his word.
My name is Otis. I am the son of Sputnik Mixon who wanted to be a pilot or an astronaut but failed and so he became a truck driver instead.
This is my American Dream.
On How To Leave Your Home…
There came a hot and sweaty summer in Chicago in 2008. I’d been living there for a few years while I sweated out my last few years of enlistment.
A few months earlier I had sought the company of veterans as a last resort to save the relationship that I had worked so hard to destroy. One winter day I walked into the office on Diversey Street. There was a smily punk kid there named Robert and a tall, wild eyed dude who was pacing back in forth in the other room while on the phone. I would come to find out that this was Aaron Hughes and he had built this group here in Chicago. The name of the group was Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The following Spring Jamie and I loaded into a bus with about thirty other veterans. An older vet walked up and down the halls of the bus handing out pot bread. Soon we were all best friends and that bond would never break.
That weekend we went in front of the cameras and we spoke our piece. We added our little fragment of experience to the collective history of this war. We detailed the atrocities that we had seen.
I spoke about my experience as a prison guard in Guantanamo Bay. I had signed contracts with the government that I would never do this. I was willing to take the risk. It was time that I said something.
A few months later I was standing in the office again. Aaron had just finished a session of pacing. He stopped and asked me if I wanted to go to Martha’s Vineyard to make paper out of my uniforms with a handful of other vets that I knew. And I thought: Why the fuck not?
July came and I packed my shit into a duffel bag and I took a mind-fuck chain of busses and planes and trains and eventually a ferry until I was disgorged on the shore of Martha’s vineyard with a lingering rumor of shark attacks floating in the sea air. I hadn’t felt sea air since Cuba.
Oh Cuba.
I walked up and I see the whole crew, all these beautiful warrior faces, gathered around the ashtrays at a cafe. There was a microphone and if there’s one thing Otis Mixon likes best its to hear himself talk on a microphone so I played the people a song. A love song. Or a song about how love is broken. Its a Mountain Goats song so its hard to tell. I read a little story. Brother Bird was smiling something fierce.
Nobody had any grass so I got to work on networking like a professional. Back in Chicago I was one kind of.
People say that I never do any real organizing, but they don’t understand the rigors of organizing supplies for a proper week of fun. These are veterans we’re talking about. We have needs.
Not one half hour later I was in a car with Fancy Pants Phil with his big eighties, coke addict glasses and the only outfit he brought for that whole week and this guy by the name of Mike who was a veteran who just so happened to live on a little house boat there off the shore of the island. He pointed his house-boat out to us.
Crazy veterans. Its like there isn’t enough freedom in the whole world for them.
Mike was driving us out to his friends house where he guaranteed us he knew he could get us some grass. Well we drove for about a half hour in the pitch black and eventually we pull into this little two track that connects to this little island, water on both sides of us. Mike pulls us into this strange little busted shanty and hops out of the car and sprints off into the woods.
Fancy Pants turns around to me and says “I think this guy is going to try to kill us man. I think we’re going to have to fight this dude, man!” He’s all worked up.
I agreed soberly. “I agree,” I said.
So we’re both all worked up. Mike finally comes back into the headlights and we’re damn near in a frenzy because we’re sure we’re going to be serial killed and Mikes got a plastic bag. He creeps into the car and throws this bag in the back and he looks us both right in the eye with the look of a dog that has brought something really sweet back to the old master.
In that bag was a peanut butter jar, and in that jar was another bag, and in that bag a baggy, and in that baggy about an ounce of some crazy dirt weed. That shit was magical.
We drove back to the cafe just in time to catch a ride with everyone heading out to our house, the former homestead of a one James Cagney. I caught a ride in the back of a truck with some of the guys. We stood up most of the way with the bugs smashing into our faces in the swampy hot night. We pulled into the plot of land that would change my life forever. It looked like that famous painting with a girl at the bottom of the painting crawling through a wheat field to get to some bland and ghostly home.
We dismounted and I was overwhelmed with ghosts.
It is hard to explain the happenings of that week. To try to explain how time worked there would take too utter a deconstruction of the fundamentals of time itself to an almost entirely subjective thing.
Every night we stayed up drinking, lighting cigarettes with burning flags, playing music on the porch. I don’t mean on the porch like we were sitting on the porch quietly picking and grinning. I mean that people were playing the porch itself. That and the propane tank and all of the empty bottles. Robynn played the potato chip bag accordian.
The beach, I mean the ocean beach, was a beautiful 30 minute walk. I spent almost every sunrise there.
We cut our uniforms together while sharing our stories and we blended all of our fibers together. I accidentally cut the tip of my finger off so we put that in the paper too. Blood, sweat and tears.
The emotional energy of the week was so fucking pure, like doing cocaine in Columbia, that I was frayed around the edges but I felt fine. I slept on the wooden floor right next to the door a few hours every night after everyone else went to bed and I woke up as soon as the first people started cooking.
Sitting in the grass with JT and Eli and Davey Rucksacks playing with the snapping turtle that lived in the pond that we had named Old Face we were talking about living the hobo dream.
The three of them had lived on the road for the last few years. Dave had carried his rucksack across Europe and the states and thats how he got his name. Eli had lived out of his car and been everywhere you could be. JT lived out of VW bus with his dog Sadie.
All three of em, they teamed up on me. The argued. They convinced. By the time they were done I knew I was going to quit my job and travel around the states living the dream.
Why the fuck not?
I wanted the feeling I was feeling then every day forever. I’m a drug addict.
On our last day all of us walked to the beach to catch the sunrise. There was a guy walking around the trails. He had a knife. We were all like “what’s up with the knife, dude?” and he was drunk and incoherent so we all moved on a little dazed. I still wonder what he was up to.
When it came time to catch my ferry I was crying like a baby. I didn’t want to go back.
We all made promises that we’d see each other in Denver.
I got on the ferry, then a bus, then a train and then a plane and I came back to Chicago. I went straight to work that day on my bicycle and I quit my job and I bought a rucksack.
Dave said it best: “Its not home-less dude. Its home-free.”
Otis Mixon has always been a sucker for freedom.
I pieced together a loose sense of purpose about my decisions by listening to the shit that I said to people as I was explaining what I wanted to do as I packed up my things and got ready to leave that peculiar city Chicago. It just happened that I began to tell people that I was going to do a 15 month “Tour of Duty” meant to mimic a kind of stateside deployment of the freak kind in which I would interview homeless veterans by sorting out a homeless veteran lifestyle for myself.
I made a few phone calls to find friends who were interested and a few days later Davey Rucksacks comes in on the Greyhound. We were talking to Bad Larry on the Lake Michigan shore, bullshitting about the costs of yachts.
Rucksacks became my hitchhiking Virgil as he had all of the relevant prerequisites: he had done it before.
I set up a ride out of town with my friend who is a clown. We had to meet him at one of his gigs. First we stopped to pick up the medicine that was kindly donated to our cause by the nicest pharmacist that has ever walked the planet. Then we walked extra smiley to pick up our ride.
Douglas, the clown, finally gets us in the car and he keeps turning around to us with his awesome story telling face and his makeup on and he starts telling us all these folk-isms about riding the black ribbons which tangle together infinitely across our beautiful country until finally he just up and leaves us in Joliette.
And so there we are in the tall grasses that mark the beginnings of the plains, Dave stationed at the corner with the sign telling me to put my banjo away. I drew a picture of him and the clouds. This was it. This was the start of the great American hunt for a sense of reason inside the skeleton of the American Dream who’s obituary has been written already by greater men than Otis.
A car pulled up after a few minutes and this nice, plain blond woman hustled out and helped us put our bags in the car while her husband sat white knuckled at the wheel. We took off down the road. She did all the talking.
It turns out that her husband was a veteran. What luck. And how! He was a Navy Seal and he had a very intimidating scar on his face and he stared a long ways down the road the whole time and he didn’t say much. I tried by way of thought or vocal inflection to tip my hat to him in some sense. Compared to whatever this man had seen, Dave and I had been on a sort of vacation.
We left them arguing about lost checkbooks ten miles down the road and started walking to a field where we assumed we would sleep for the night but while we were on our way a willowy kid with 90′s hair came up to us and asked us if we needed a ride.
Fuck yeah we needed a ride.
He took us back to his ride. There was a grey, toothless woman smoking a long menthol cigarette out of the window of a rusted red conversion van and she didn’t say a word and Drew, our new friend, didn’t say a word to her. We just smoked cigarettes by the side of this van until the kind of guy you see on COPS comes walking up to us with a sleeveless black shirt with a spiky skull on it and two handfulls of change and assorted shiny truckstop shit. His smile exposed the most marvelous set of sharklike methteeth that I’ve ever seen in my life. And I grew up in Michigan.
He invited us into his van and we get along on our way and we’re just cruising right along. He’s leaning over his seat bursting at the britches to tell us the story of his glory days when “a motherfucker could walk up to any nigger in Detroit and buy a motherfuckin boulder for TEN DOLLARS” at which point he’s looking me right in the eye, trying to sort me out with his porous meth brain. I was so fucking uncomfortable.
“What’s a boulder?” I managed to ask, instead of frankly suggesting to our benevolent ride giver that he adopt a new turn of phrase for referring to African Americans. Dave was pinching my leg with a pinch that said “now is not the time to be the p.c. police.”
“Fucking Crack Cocaine, mother fucker!” he said with that special fire in his eyes.
So there we were with crack/meth heads in a van heading for Davenport, sitting on top of a fan and their dirty clothes. We turned our attention to each other.
It turns out that Drew was also going to protest the Democratic National Convention and he was very excited to learn that he was in a vehicle with two of the vets from the group for whom Rage Against the Machine was playing that week.
The three of us slept in the grasses across the street from the truckstop where the lightbulb burners were doing their thing in their home. We got a few beers and brought Bad Larry out for a late night babble session and we fell asleep under the enormous crackling flag of the car dealer parking lot that was a few hundred feet away from our sugar plum fantasies of what would happen when our happy feet touched ground in Denver.
My first night on the road. The stars were there. We had a ride for the next morning sitting across the street and we’d already made great time across Illinois.
Time has a funny way of going about its business when you’re hitching. It is just not the same.
hey dad, you’ll never guess where i’m calling you from
When we woke up I ditched some of my clothes because my bag was ridiculous. Drew gave me a spare knife that he had on him. The name “Brian” was inscribed on its side. Brian the knife.
Our drivers stumbled out of a velveteen menthol Marlboro cloud down into the sun like reformed vampires testing their boundaries. The skull shirted fellow stretched his arms and said “gotta get to Butte!”
All three of us stopped. “We thought you said Davenport man!” one of us said, I can’t remember which.
“Fuck Davenport. Can’t hustle for shit in Davenport. Gotta get to Butte. I’ll make fine hustlers out of all of ya’ll.”
Well thats fucking fantastic. I was freaking out without even thinking about where Butte was. Turns out they would still be going our way but further.
When we pulled into the worlds largest truckstop in Davenport we all quickly said awkward goodbyes as Skull Shirt sadly told us how great he thought it would be in Butte. I could have cried. But I didn’t.
The worlds largest truckstop, huh? The Mecca of my bloodline.
All of the dads I’ve ever had have been truck drivers. Mom had a thing for guys who left I guess. Funny that I turned out to be such a leaver in the end. Hard not to reflect on these things. Everything seems so coincidental and divine when you’re hitching. Strange times.
Lady walks up and gives me 20 dollars just for sitting there with my banjo. Wasn’t even playing it. I played her a little part of a song that Bruce had taught me before I’d left about how I’d stab a man for sleeping with my woman which is supposed to be a funny song because I’m not the stabbing type. That lady looked so happy.
Bought a pack of cigarettes and a can of beans.
Started eating my beans on the side of the road with the boys. We were discussing how nobody was going to pick up three hitchers. No way. We’d ripped the “TWO” portion of our sign which had read “TWO VETERANS HEADING WEST” so that we could float Drew under the vet card.
Just when we were about ready to split into groups a silver semi pulls up at our feet and the door pops open.
Didn’t even get a look at the guy when I was trying to get all of my shit into his cab it was such a commotion. Finally I looked up front and I saw this little man bobbling up and down on his hydraulic chair and smiling with these giant yellow teeth. I sat up front first shift. I caught the brunt of Nebraska. What a horrible place Nebraska is.
His name was Sandy. He asked me questions like wether or not I had forgiven my truck driving dad or if I thought his daughter really loved him. He told me about how he had been in the Navy but could never seem to get the rules right. He ended up falling in love and driving truck.
His wife had died a few years ago from cancer of some kind. Sandy told me not to be a smoker.
He dropped us off at exit 102 in Nebraska. Drew stayed on for the long haul out to the West Coast where Sandy was delivering pharmaceuticals that had been manufactured in Michigan and shipped out there because the West Coast Dream was broken or intolerable to enough people to fill a semi truck once a week,
So it was just Dave and I again. We made a little camp in some hardcore brambles and smoked and shot the shit until we both heard this loud sound that sounded exactly like a cop on a bullhorn saying “WE GOT YOU SURROUNDED!” So Rucksacks and me are all like fuck you coppers and we ditch all of our grass in my bag and throw that under some brush and then get down into the low crawl and inch up to the woodline.
There wasn’t anybody there. I guess we just had the same delusion.
Well I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I wished I had the next day.
We were gonna walk to exit 107 so that we could pick up 76 which would be a more straight shot to Denver and we’d only need to get one more ride. So we shouldered our rucks and we marched that fucking five miles like troopers, hopping fences and climbing over this huge mountain of coal and staring down some cows until we finally got a break and got to walk in a dirt two track with about a million grasshoppers.
When we finally made it to our crossroads we realized, much too late, that these cars were all traveling at speeds of at least 60 miles an hour. There was no way that they would stop for us.
That was the first and only time I’ve ever seen Dave lose his cool.
We just walked on the side of the highway back. We stopped frequently. I cooked a grasshopper with my lighter and ate it. On one of our stops I got the last phone call I would ever get on the phone that I had. It was somebody who wanted to buy some grass. I laughed and hung up on them.
When we finally crawled back into our oasis I bought a loaf of bread and a tub of butter and ate the whole goddamn thing. I stared at people coming into the station as if I’d been severely traumatized.
A Christian guy named Greg picked us up next and spent the night telling me about the coming of the anti-Christ and how it had been “ordained” that he pick us up while Dave slept in the back seat like a baby. By the time that we made it to Wyoming I had Greg convinced that Dave actually was the anti-Christ. Then Greg got a ticket for picking up hitchers. He let us off in Cheyenne more than a little disappointed with what God had told him to do.
Everything is a trial, Greg, and God knows all.
We slept on the hill besides the McDonald’s and woke up soaking with dew and third in the line to hitch out of that post. That gave us plenty of time for Dave to steal us a load of breakfast from the hotel which was why Dave was my fucking guide man. That is some smart shit.
We finally got up to the stand and got picked up while we were smoking a joint by a construction worker driving back down to Denver.
He smoked us out the whole way while I got to see mountains for the first time in my life. When dude dropped us off in Denver I could have married that shower. Jesus, nothing has felt better than that fucking shower.
Recreate 68!
We had come this far to protest the DNC. Why? Our newer, blacker candidate was saying all the things we wanted him to say with that toothy, snake oil selling grin. He even promised to close down my little nightmare. And to be honest, the only thing I seemed to be protesting effectively was sobriety.
We were camped in a serious way in Eli’s mom’s basement. It was Rucksacks, Fancy Pants, the Gloominator, Vinny, Pinky, Robynn, and our full time film crew of one staying down there, occasionally migrating outside in smaller groups to smoke cigarettes. We were playing a lot of the “I wonder what kind of fantastic weoponry we will see come Wednesday?” game.
My personal favorite was the laser gun that was supposed to make you feel like your skin was melting. I don’t get paid enough/anything to go up against guns that simulate the feeling of burning flesh. I am still not even sure if I believe in anything that strongly.
We walked around Denver a lot that week soaking in the fantastic view into some kind of hyper fascist wonderland in which cops covered in fancy, sparkling doodads of all sorts were bustling into and out of all kinds of troop carrying vehicles. Once we saw a group of about six of them just holding on to the side of an SUV as it drove around.
All of the cops looked so miserable and we were so stoned and happy.
Some of the sharper eyed members of our gang spotted a number of snipers on the roofs. I wonder where they learned how to do that?
Most of the rest of the crew, the drinkers and the straights, were pigeonholed into this unconverted office space in a hellish wasteland somewhere in the city. We visited them rarely.
We were Alpha Squad. We were the best of the best. We had better things to do than sit around in meetings and when we did sit in meetings we all ended up outside again smoking cigarettes. Its as if we are allergic to any kind of organizational work. We just have other priorities.
I spent the week stoned, watching the few bills I had left fly out of my pocket. I can barely remember how it feels now, that paranoid money sickness. It has been so long since I’ve had a bad case of it.
The days drew nearer to our protest. I found myself getting more and more antsy. I’d never done anything like this before. We were going to be in front of a lot of people and the talk on the streets was that people expected us to blow the lid off this thing real violent like. Lots of the vets were talking about beating up cops.
I don’t want to beat up cops. I’ve seen and participated in enough beatings of people to last me for my whole life. All of this revolutionary talk was turning my stomach. I’d heard people pride and preen themselves about the violence they were capable of. You can never believe talk when it comes to things like this. I’ve learned that by experience. There is something violent inside of a person or not and when the moment comes you are put to the test and you are part of that group or you are not part of that group.
I, happily, have never been a part of that group.
i just wanted to smoke weed all day and be around my friends having fun stories and possibly talk to a few veterans so I stayed with my kind and we were always engaged in some kind of protest.
The day of our confrontation with the law finally came and we were all dressed to impress. We had two platoons of veterans wearing all kinds of combinations of uniforms which made Drew and I wince. So much paper could be made out of these ridiculous suits.
I was sporting a pair of camoflaughed pants which I’d sewn a heart unto and an old Army under shirt that I’d hand painted “Iraq Veterans Against the War” on.
The concert was at eleven. Sure as shit Rage Against the Machine walked on the stage. They saluted us in our secluded little section and proceeded to play the best show I have ever seen.
After that the thousands of people who attended the show flowed out of the building we were staged in and into a long column on the asphalt in the sweltering sun.
For the next eight hours we slowly crawled behind a police car with a sign that happily invited us to follow it blinking rapidly. We made frequent stops to soapbox on the microphone because everybody loves attention. We walked seperately in front of the whole march. I was just kind of wandering through our lines offering people waters and lip balm.
I laughed to see Vinny so serious in his old man veteran hat with all of his pins and doodads attached and shining. He was in his element. Gloomy Bear was plodding along behind the whole thing pessimistically ranting about the inadequacies of street protests.
We were marched into a chain-link fence trap ironically called the freedom cage into which we stupidly wandered behind the cops until we were at a dead end with a big fence and a whole lot of cops to our front, 5000 dehydrated punks to our rear and fence to our left and right.
I fucking hate fences.
We managed to do something I have never seen even a small military unit do properly: we countercolumned. 5000 people countercolumned.
We quicktimed it to a weak spot in the police line and managed to get as close as we could get to the building that Obama was going to give his speech in. We had a letter for him that pleaded with him to end the war for the sake of the soldiers and the civilians. The cops finally stopped us and threatened us with tear gas.
We stopped. We waited.
Eventually a suited man came out and talked to us. He was Obama’s Veterans Affairs Officer or something. He took our letter and read it. He said he would like to meet with us.
Success? Did we accomplish something? We had a goal to hand this letter off. Nobody thought we could do it. Was this it being done? Could it be?
I was so glad that I didn’t get my eye shot out by a pepper gas ball or something equally vulgar.
That night we bullshitted with the cops in the park about how hot uniforms are and how annoying chains of command could be while Food Not Bombs brought us a bunch of buckets of rabbit food.
We slept well that night.
the badlands…
The day after the march in Denver we were driving across the planes with a few hits of acid burning holes in our pockets with sugar plum dreams of dropping that acid to the tune of the sun setting over the Badlands. Due to several unfortunate and mostly stupid stops along the way we did not make our deadline to watch the sun fall with our heads melting amidst those ghostly ashen spires.
We went to sleep with warnings of blackfooted ferrets and rattlesnakes posted over our heads and when the sun came up all of our hurt feelings were washed away.
FancyPants, Rucksacks and I were in Ruck’s car. At the first sign of confusion we split the scene. We’d been talking to Bad Larry the whole ride and we’d gotten ourselves all worked up to stop at Wall Drug where we had been promised five cent coffee and dinosaurs from signs spread across the land for hundreds of miles.
Dinosaurs have always occupied a soft spot in my heart.
We sat like freaks inside the diner, eyes twisted, rag tag military regalia covering our dirty and high strung bodies. There were two young Asian women working in the diner. We made absurd and loud plans to free them from this place on stolen motorcycles. I was going to ride the dinosaur out of town.
This dinosaur, however, turned out to be an unfortunate rendition of the majestic T-Rex and I found myself frowning a frown of connoisseurs disappointment. I had seen better animatronic dinosaurs. Maybe I’m just spoiled.
We left the Asian girls to bus the tables and walked out with pockets full of stolen goods to eat up the last few hundred miles of planes and windmill farms between us and the Twin Cities where we were to attend our own organization’s convention to be followed by yet another protest of the Republican National Convention (RNC).
We made one more short stop at the Corn Palace and left cussing and laughing at how un-exciting it was.
i am not, nor have i ever been a…
The convention was a disaster from the word go that hot summer.
My money was all but gone and the tornado-esque passage of time had left me emotionally jet lagged.
We pulled into the Holiday Inn which would host our festivities as the sun was going down. Our friends were darting around the open spaces of the hotel with lost looks on their faces. Groups of males were breaking off to go downtown to find women. This is a classical military move: a large pack of boys goes out thinking that they will be able to chat girls up but quickly realize that they will all be coming home together except maybe one or two lucky ones so they get rowdy drunk and fight instead.
I quickly located an old Vietnam vet that I called the Muskrat knowing that he would have his finger on the pulse of the green treasure. After putting on a good buzz I proceeded to wander the perimeter alone.
We were sharing the hotel with the Republicans who were in town to attend the convention. They seemed to not understand how to take our radical brand of smelly punk combined with the dogtags and related ephemera of military service. Their tightly shaved heads seemed to blink back and forth between disapproval and gratitude.
The cops in the Twin Cities were a much more utilitarian breed than their Denver peers. They were big, burly men who didn’t need all of the plastic coating to look hard. We had no end of trouble from this bunch.
Our convention was scheduled to be a tightly packed schedule of workshops to be followed by the election of our board members.
I skipped all of the workshops in order to continue relaxing in the hotel’s hot tub while making occasional calls upon the Muskrat. Whenever the workshops would get out the halls would be filled with unhappy activists venting off the steam accrued during two hours of listening to more silly talk about how nobody treated anybody fairly and how all boys are rapists.
Then came the time for the elections.
There had been a pink elephant in the middle of our organization for a long time. We knew it particularly well in Chicago.
IVAW was pretty fairly split at the time between people who had radicalized towards two separate poles: Anarchist or Socialist.
The anarchists were split into hundreds of different sub-projects but were loosely affiliated under the red and black flag. The Socialists came, by a vast majority, from an organization called the International Socialist Organization, or ISO, which was a student group which had inducted a lot of our organizations membership in on college campuses.
We had worked with the ISO before in Chicago. That city is their headquarters and home to some of the groups biggest movers and shakers. It seemed that we could not hold an event without their presence being known.
I did not personally care for them. They are always the first people to talk about what is best for working class people who have jobs in manual labor, though most of the people I had met from the group do not have any desire to actual do any manual labor themselves and did not come from a background of manual labor. I saw them as a group that carried a banner for another group of people that they found easy to simplify but could probably not actually talk to in any productive manner. In this way I saw them as just another politicians bureau.
I come from a long long line of truck drivers and factory workers and I wear that point with pride. I do not take kindly to watching my people, my family, being used to sell hyperbolic calls for violent revolution in the form of poorly put together weekly magazines by which I am referring to Workers Weekly.
Though I did have a personal opinion I did not think that that opinion should by any means be reflected in who ran the board. I simply desired competence and restrained egos, two things any soldier should have fairly under control.
While the board nominees were giving their speeches I was sitting in the back with the other fiends who fell under no particular flag except that of excessive drug usage and hedonism. We were talking amongst ourselves and we realized that many of the people standing in front of us had direct responsibilities for other organizations. Now, when you are asking to lead a group that many of us had poured our lives into without asking for anything in return it seems only fair that you dedicate one hundred percent of your energy into it, but when you come to the table with obligations to other groups with other agendas you raise flags for me. Can you do this job without fucking us over for some other group? How can your attention be so divided. One of the nominees is actually on the board of another organization.
The time came for questions and answers, so I wandered up to the podium and I asked: “Do any of you have any commitments to other organizations?” A simple question. The entire line-up said no. Well, Otis Mixon will not be lied to. I returned to the podium angry as a hornet and exploded into the microphone “that is just not true. I know as a fact that a few of you just lied to all of us in the audience and I would like to give you a chance to revoke these lies and give us the truth.”
The pink elephant was released. The crowd erupted. It was immediately assumed that I was calling out one of the members who was involved with the ISO though I had never said her name or the name of the ISO. People started clamoring that I was a “red baiter.” It was an upheaval. The anarchists formed a tight circle around me and we crept out of the room to the sound of complete chaos.
We went outside to smoke cigarettes and talk amongst ourselves. There were many congratulations from my friends. I had a deep sense of confusion and pride. Roberto, my very close friend from the Windy City walked up to me and said “DAMN SON! Breaking they fuckin knees with a BASEBALL BAT! You fucking wrecked’em son!” Right after these powerful words the doors opened and a tide of angry Socialists was unleashed upon us. It seemed that we may have had a fight on our hands.
A giant pair of golden hoop earrings with a girl attached was yelling in my face that I had no right to make such accusations and accused me of trying to round up the Socialists like a Nazi. I calmly smoked my cigarette and blew it in her face, on the verge of punching her teeth out. Nobody calls me a Nazi. I won’t stand for it.
The screaming went on for hours. I don’t remember how it subsided. I was evacuated from the site for personal safety reasons. The convention was over, the votes cast. The Socialists got into office anyway.
So much drama in so few days. So much more to go.
all fun and no play
August 16, 2010 at 10:01 pm (Home Free – Chicaco, Denver, St. Paul, Minneapolis – August-September 2008)) · Edit
And so our convention came to a close and we all mosied on over to the other twin to settle in to our new sleeping quarters: the floors of a liberally minded church that had donated itself to our cause.
It is hard to discuss the kind of debauchery that happened on the grounds of that church that week because much of the goings ons are damning, both socially and spiritually, to many of us who believe in things like damnation.
Luckily I do not prescribe to such notions, so I feel relatively guilt free.
I made my bed at the pulpit of the church so that I could wake up in the light of the stained glass. Other people seemed to think that this was especially sacrilegious so I had the run of the place to myself.
There was a large group of people who were intent on recreating the fever of the DNC up here in the north, and then there was also a large contingent of people, myself included, who were only interested in getting as fucked up as we could inside of this church before this activists vacation came to a close.
Fancy Pants, Rucks and I were sick of sobriety and stress, so we got to work immediately on consuming the acid that had been screaming our names. We were hoping that it would either cleanse us of the wicked vibes that were going around or make us so socially unpalatable that we would completely twist the entire event up.
I had almost forgotten that I had dropped the hit until it made itself known while I was rummaging through our stores of rabbit food in the fridge. I walked outside, eyes gaping, a hunk of cheddar cheese smashed in my hands. Fancy Pants and Rucks were playing with some wet burritos on a plate. It had arrived.
I grabbed my banjo up and began to play a Mountain Goats cover of No Children but I abandoned the cause almost immediately when people began to flock towards our magnetic drug pulse. I nervously, yet professionally, stated that I was simply tripping too hard to finish the job that I had started and wandered off.
The scene was far too tense for us with our heads so sensitive to the vibes of others. They were all so angry that it felt as if we were pieces of meat inside a crocodile cage. They wanted to tear us apart. This was not supposed to be fun time. The aire of judgement was heavy.
We decided to flee into the confusion of streets surrounding us where we could have our own party. We wandered down the median of a major road, laughing and touching trees and making car sounds. I recorded the whole thing but upon listening to it again it is nonsense… just three friends laughing so much at visual cues which did not record on my device.
We all fell in love with one giant tree and for a short time we worshiped it but then there were cops near and we realized with a distinct gravity that we were in a very vulnerable way here, so we snapped into military mode and retraced our steps back to the church like three special forces operatives cutting through the brush to complete a very obscure mission.
When we arrived back at the church the scene was absolute pandemonium. Vinny and Sergio were posted up like gang leaders with the rest of the degenerates on the side of the church smoking dope and cigarettes and talking loud and mad shit. Carlos was passed out against the church sign with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. Nate Louis, in an attempt to sit on one of the ornamental benches had somehow completely dismantled it, one more piece falling off every time that he touched it. The drunks were surly, the stoners completely mad. I was shirtless and I still had my cheese in my hand.
Somehow I was on a bicycle. It was the most beautiful bike I had ever ridden and it made a series of beautiful sounds in a perfect rhythm. I rode the bike in circles around the church ignoring the fact that people were staring at me in disbelief. I assumed that they hated my joy.
The cops kept driving by all night, but what were they to do? We’d heard that they had raided some of the other squat houses, and surely they were aware of us, but it seemed very impractical for the cops to raid a church to oust a group of war veterans no matter how much we broke the sound law. Or public intoxication for that matter.
To ward off the police our tripping crew plus Vinny and Sergio stayed up all night.
I woke up the next morning in some bushes against the side of the church, cheese still in my hand and partially smeared over my naked body. Carlos was still passed out against the sign. Lars was screwing the bench back together. When he was finished it was a Frankenstein version of its former self.
A former marine was walking around banging a trash can, screaming that it was time to wake up in a very frank way. I told him that if he hit the trash can again I would kill him and at that time I very well might have. I do not appreciate waking up to a trash can alarm and I certainly was not going to have it with a head full of acid.
The part of the group that participates went down to the march while the rest of us lazed about. Rucksacks and I were ready to go.
Fancy Pants had always run deep with the Socialists and they had come in the morning to tell him that he couldn’t be my friend anymore. I was disgusted. We were not on speaking terms. All three of us were emotionally destroyed.
Before people got back from the march Rucks and me loaded into the car ready to go to Portland. Sergio made a snap decision to come with us. We left before sunset. I would not see many of these people again until my tour was over or even longer. I said no goodbyes… I didn’t even really care. It was as if I were lost in a dream and I wanted desperately to wake up.
It was such a grey day that day.
The Paper Trail 