As the train rolled through the countryside I was reminded of one month that had become an era of its own in my life while Vanessa slept on my shoulder, her curly black hair like brambles on the edges of my field of vision. Her eyes were closed peacefully in sleep. She was not worried about what it was that train was taking us towards. She didn’t care about the baggage that I’d be bringing into her colorful little room which rested one story above the ground and ten feet below the clouds which never leave. I envied her calm.
Inside of me there was a war raging. One one side of a dangerous no man’s land was the little boy in me, innocently adrift in a dream, and on the other was the dog toothed soldier that had been raised hard by a cold and awful world. They fought a war over the value of sentimentality during the age of machines.
Both sides of me were now stranded on the other side of an ocean with very little money and no ticket home, so in a way their conflict was made banal by the magnitude of this most recent snap decision.
Traveling had taught me one thing about the decision making process. When you decide to do something on the road that is what you must commit yourself to doing. There is no room for regret and self doubt. Your attention must constantly be entirely directed towards survival, so you are left with no free time to ponder all of the things you could have done differently.
Vanessa was waking up while the train was pulling into Newcastle and I had come to a resolution with myself. I’d made my choices and there would be no whining and complaining. I would use Grandma’s hundred dollar bill as the canary in the coalmine. When I broke that bill the love story was over and I had to go back to the Golden Fields of Plenty, back where I knew people.
It was a sunny day. The sun cast a clean light down on every brick as the ocean wind washed over us while we carried my bags up the hill that leads to Fenhem. Everything was going to be o.k.
Later that night I was in a car going north to Edinburgh. Vanessa was working all weekend and the house would be empty. Her housemates were heading up north for a zine symposium so I went with them. I was with Laura, Mike and Pete.
We stopped on the way to go to the bathroom. There was a gloomy brick tower that split the crisp night. Nested obscenely in the bottom of this ancient heirloom of English culture was a Burger Kind drive through. Off the side of this modern marvel was a mini-mall. The whole thing was such a disgusting juxtaposition and simultaneous marriage of two vastly different times that we just had to stand there for quite a few minutes silently taking the whole scene in. What a phenomenal testament to the passage of time.
The weekend was a D.I.Y. extraveganza. We squatted on the crowded floors of migrated Newcastle political activists. There was lino printing and book binding and shop talking about the future plans of different radical political groups which mostly focused on the cheap or free production of entertainment or radical goods. It was cold and wet. Every moment had that sickly mustiness that always seemed so well conveyed by Joyce. We ran around the streets trying to find as many government surveillance cameras as we could like we were kids on an easter egg hunt.
I met a lot of people there and my enthusiasm for the possibility of keeping my productivity levels high during this stay was greatly increased. Everyone was so excited about a project, and with no other project save for this fledgling love to speak of I became anxious and fidgety. Of course there was always “the project.” This book. This story. But that was not something in and of itself. This was only a story worth telling if I was engaged in the exploits of our freak rebellion, with my hands in the work, producing some artifact of dissent. Without that I would be just another lazy writer in love with love itself. At least that is how it felt at the time.
I couldn’t stand to be away from Vanessa and that scared me most dramatically.
On our final morning in Edinburgh we were waking up in our sleeping bags. I’d been awake all night. Breakfast was cooking. The air was sharp and mean. I felt sick. I wanted to be home but I didn’t know what that word meant anymore. The weight of the last month was finally catching up to me.
We got back to Newcastle late that night after a winding drive through the snowy northern hills. Vanessa got home later. Again her soft voice and her eyes calmed some raging thing inside of me.
Some veterans drink and some shoot dope or gamble or swallow handfulls of pills and some do all of the above, but my drug of choice has always been love. There is no addiction in this world that can keep my mind as busy as the insanity that comes as a byproduct of romance. There are probably a lot of different reasons for this behavior, but they would all read as excuses, so I won’t bother. Like any good addict I’ve just come to accept my addiction and coddle it in moderation. But I’ve never been known to be particularly moderate.
I was well on my way to losing myself in another relationship because I didn’t want to deal with all of the boxes that I had thoroughly packed away after my deployment, the contents of which were now strewn about the floor of the house inside of my brain where I live inside of myself, as scared as ever about who these wretched memories had made me to be.
why i failed ethical philosophy: an essay
There was a phone in my possession that I was eager to ignore. Occasionally when it was on it would ring. One of two names would be on the screen. I just sat and stared at it. I was a liar and it was setting in.
The only thing I could seem to formulate were “buts” and excuses. They were all bullshit, but that is the way of things with things like “buts” and excuses.
But I am in love. But I’m scared to go home. But I don’t have a home. But I need some time to think.
But I had betrayed the trust of a man with whom I had shared a sacred history. I promised him I would go home, but that is not what I did.
I wrote it off easily at first because I figured that nobody would be hurt by this. I had forgotten very important details of history because they had presented themselves while I was in an emotional blur, some kind of pastiche of life while enshrined in a dream cacoon. I had forgotten that some very important people had vouched for me, promising Her Majesty the Queen that I would not pull such elaborate hyjinx as the very business I was involved with. These are very proper people we’re talking about here.
There were a lot of questions about where I was because my facebook page had suddenly become impossible so my friends and family were trying to put together what was happening, including my mom and the lawyer and the Member of Parliament who had protested my detention. What I had pulled was a giant social faux paux. Just like when I was sneaking off the stage in front of all of those people hoping that nobody noticed. Nope. People noticed.
Moazzam had to answer for all of it. And I was not answering my calls. Things were very vague. I didn’t know what I was going to do and I didn’t know why, I mean really why, I had made the choices I had made. I didn’t know how to tell him how I had managed to look him in the face and tell him lies… for weeks when the only thing that made what we were doing genuine, I mean truly legit, was honesty. I don’t know how I did it. I just did.
Needless to say I was very ashamed of myself. This shame would allow me no peace and no break to enjoy this new love though there were so many moments that sparkled with with these elements. I was disenchanted with the allure of beauty because at the heart of every moment was a reasonable degree of contempt of myself.
I think it goes without mention that I was falling apart in front of Vanessa and all of her roomates.
Luckily enough for me there is no group of people better than the people of Fenham to fall apart amongst.
It seemed like a place that I had only dreamed of. Rows of quaint, old houses painted a variety of muted colors. Inside of each house was a close knit cell of predominately girls. Their houses were beautiful and well maintained. All of these cells operated together to operate the Star and Shadow Lounge which provided a home for every project of a radical nature in town. The community was friendly and completely lacking any evidence of a hierarchical structure. Meetings were a daily occurrence. They were much more casual and concerned with the emotional responses of the other discussion participants so people didn’t dread them. There were a few males who acted just like everyone else.
Our house was the think tank. That is mostly because Laura lived there. Laura is half Greek and half British and somehow I think this almost explains her perfectly. She has this high energy gesticulation combined with the English wit. It is a very pleasant mixture. She was dating Mike. Mike lived in another house. He was a Historian zinester. He’s skeptical of almost everything because he knows that most of everything is bullshit. There was Tamzin. She had the best kind of English accent that the world can offer and she used it to keep the often wandering conversations from getting too far from the bottom line with a sense of humor that was more charming than any one person had a right to. And Flo who adds to every room she is in a kind of elegant class that people have let go. She is a relic of the twenties, her hair always curled into some kind of science fiction adaptation of a smoking woman from a Mucca illustration. Keith would come and go. He was always a pleasant surprise in the den of constant political chatter.
These girls were hyper social. Every day all day, if you wanted to talk there was someone who was interested in the same thing.
Down the street was the Fenham version of my darling Alpha Squad. This was Fay, the most sensual human being on the face of the Earth. CJ, the vision of the young folk punk hero equipped with all the talent and the political savvy starting to make his way. And there was Katerina Ballerina who never, ever stops smiling. This was where we drank and smoked and didn’t get much done in the way of organizing but definitely got a lot of spare anxiety off our chests by way of emoting pationately to the beat of Fay’s raw musical energy.
And then of course there was Vanessa who appeared to me to be bathed in some kind of unnatural light which was making me blind. She’s definitely not a fan of men. She wanted to be a journalist at the time. She was learning in English though to hear her speak Italian one knows that those words must flow so beautifully on a page despite that I only knew what they meant by the tone of her eyes which communicated far more than words in a way that I could never replicate with words and she didn’t know how to control.
I was having the same problem at the time. My eyes were ratting out my inner dilemma, though my mouth was holding out on the subject.
How the Sentimental Brontosaurus Got Its Color
The month was ending and everybody knew it. I worked to build some kind of plan that would allow me to keep all of these stories that I wasn’t ready to leave, but there was no two ways about the thing. I had to go. I could not abandon this project for anything.
The month ended on the train platform. I was going to hitchhike into Europe. We were going to meet in a few months at the rally in Calais where we would protest injustice together. As we kissed the moment froze in the way that perfect moments do. It became a treasured memory.
Sylvanna was coming with me. She was one of Vane’s stuffed friends.
The train left.
It took me down to London. I caught another train down to Edinbridge. Danny was living there with his parents again. We were going to finish the Sentimental Brontosaurus.
The trip was funded by a photographer who wanted to take pictures of me for a photojournalism project she was working on.
A few hours later Jo, the photo-journalist, and I were walking in the brambles around Danny’s folks’ swank neighborhood. She was asking me questions and taking pictures of me. She worked with a very peculiar camera which needed a lot of precision so the poses had to be kept for long periods of time. I don’t like posing.
Danny and I tom catted around his home town that night. Two tired road junkies commiserating about the itch over some beers. That night he filled in the color of my brontosaurus while we sat on the floor, occasionally going out to the back yard to smoke and process our crazy plans.
He desperately wanted to be back in Portland with the girl that he had fallen in love with, back with the bike freaks and the big hills and the ocean coast not so far away so that he could feel at home between the cliffs and the ocean of grain.
When everything was said and done I laid in bed, completely unsure of everything I was doing. This happened:
Veteran. Manic Depressive. Student. Sort of comic book nerd. White-trash. Hipster. Homeless. Self-absorbed. Tramp.
Simple narratives for an inexplicable self.
I’m in a trap and I need to get out of it. I only realized it when I got the email from Ben tonight.
I’m describing an absurd subjective narrative to myself based on a pattern of fluctuating emotions which I perpetuate and sensationalize in order to make my life make sense. It stopped being true somewhere in this sentence.
I know what it is. So I’ll write it down.
I put myself in situations and act on impulses, mostly lingual, to make my story more…….. FUCK!
OK. Why am I trying to describe myself to myself? I read an email from a friend and I realized that my writing constrained me into a sensationalized narrative of my life which made me feel unsettled and a little bit like a drama queen. I am confused because it is true that I have experienced unpleasant situations in the past, but as Ben reminded me, my past honestly reflects some moments in which I was happy and sometimes sad…… I have to stop this. It all needs breaking down.
I have pidgeon-holed myself into a situation where I’m writing off whole chunks of time based on how I feel I am expected to react to some events and happenings.
I was worried that if I didn’t say that it made everything horrible for me they would hate me because I would stand rightfully accused of being a sociopath. But now I’ve over amplified my own projections, typically, into something more grandiose with words than it actually is based on a passing trend or fad. I’ve made some rhetorical monster of this thing but… FUCK THIS THING! DAMN! How do I escape Guantanamo? How do I clean myself of this? Iwant to wash it off me but it won’t let me go. More likely visa versa. It is consuming a beautiful history, infecting memories with places I wish I could keep it out of. I just want it gone.
But I keep forcing myself into it, knowing damn well my motivations are selfish and capitalistic and a shameless rendition of self as I would like my self to be seen, not as a true identity. I have all these flaws that I keep finding everywhere and these things have nothing to do with Gitmo. Is this even still about Gitmo?
None of this makes any sense.
I guess accomplishing my mission.
Watch as another veteran slips into mental illness. Driving myself fucking crazy going around in circles about shit I wish I’d just shut the fuck up about. Always bitching about everything, watching nothing and listening exclusively to the one voice I need to hear less of: my own. This is exactly how you were in Cuba. This is you: self-centered. You lived in a place where men were kept in cages and the only person you really cared about was you. Yup. That’s the thorn. Fucked up, selfish, head-tripping, young garbage. I knew it was fucked up. I felt it for a while. But then it all bled away, behind my always fucking talk talk talking brain who demands attention rambling on about some contrived anxiety to keep myself busy, maintaining and trying to hone the act of presentation of self. I’ve blamed everybody else but me. And now I’m feeling sorry for myself.
Every corridor is some bleak extension of the labyrinth with its absolute insolubility.
I don’t know any truth about myself. I don’t think there is one. That is what pisses me off.
I hope beyond anything else that I’m not just doing this for pity.
Stop doing this to yourself.
Expressing yourself doesn’t have to be an exhibition of despair and anxiety. I’m happy too, but you never write on those days. Not just happy, but I’m blowing this out of proportion. That was Ben’s point and he was right. Now be a better writer and drop all of this nihilistic, repetitive and meaningless chatter about your insecurities and work harder at writing the truth.
This isn’t a fucking emo song.
In the morning he drove me to a truck stop on the road to Dover. His mom had packed me a lunch. We said our goodbyes like brothers. We are brothers of the itch.
when you get what you always wanted
Not too long after he left I found myself in a car with two mid-thirties professionals who were on their way to France for a romantic weekend. They were very excited to have me along for part of the ride. I wondered which one of them was married. They were too happy to be husband and wifeand they had too much charisma to be the product of an internet dating site.
We drove onto the ferry and parted ways. I sat in the back and watched the white cliffs of Dover recede into the misty haze of the sea.
When we touched down on the other side I just started walking down the road with my thumb up. Dozens of trucks had been loaded into the belly of this ferry and I desperately needed to catch one.
I didn’t have a traveling partner this time, so there was no fun to be had on this hitch. This was just survival and need.
A round and friendly guy named Pierre picked me up in his truck full of bananas. We talked about how the economy was crashing and he nervously told me about all of the cutbacks that his company was going through. He was the next to go and he knew it. He was 24 with no other vocational abilities. Times were grim.
As we left Calais I saw from the copilots seat the ramshackle squats that I had been talking about for ages. Pierre said he was worried about me when he saw me because the docks have been very violent places. The refugees were piled up here and when they were riled up they would attack the trucks. He told me stories that were funny in his trade about men who had cut holes in the tops of trucks to ride in the cargo area on the ferry. I wondered if I would have the grit to do something that tenacious.
Pierre let me off just north of Paris at a tiny little gas station that saw little traffic because it was on an unpopular route that circumnavigates the city. It was cold and there were rain clouds that were only a few hundred meters away. They caught up with me quickly. I put my bag in the telephone booth and sat outside smoking cigarettes in the rain. It was gloomy but also hilarious.
A man pulled up at a strange angle that indicated that he wanted to pick me up but he made no further gesture so I just looked at the car with rheumy eyes.
He poked his hand out of the window and waved me closer. I came up to the window. He told me to get in.
While he drove me to the junction with the road that would go straight east to Strasbourg he told me about his job. His job was to produce avant garde circuses. He talked the entire time about how disenchanted he had become by the government and how he dreamt of a better world but couldn’t see one coming. I could not get a read on his class status. He could have been a very classy starving artist or a very casual rich guy.
It was pouring.
He was hesitant when he was leaving me at the truck stop. He made note of the fact that there was no cover here. I brushed it off. Everything is going to work out just fine I said.
I got some bread and some cheese and climbed up a slick, muddy hill. I was directing myself towards a shrubbery that was just slightly smaller than a bush, but nowhere near tree status. I accepted the reality of my situation and tried to not sulk. I would need to save my energy for beating pneumonia in the morning.
So I slept there in the mud and the rain. It stopped raining eventually though.
When I woke up I was disgusting. The people inside of the truck stop looked at me like I was a mud monster. The clerk was babbling soft tongued French at me and pointing at the muddy food prints I was leaving all over the store. I nervously bowed away from the situation after feigning an attempt to wipe up my mess. I got a coffee from a vending machine and reported to the side of the road.
The rain had picked up again. I was singing songs to myself. I was coughing. I felt very, very ill. I stood there like a zombie for three hours. Then a sports car raced up to my feet. The door popped open to reveal a surly looking young metal dude.
We didn’t talk much at all. He told me that he worked in a factory. I tried to ask him if he had any weed. He looked confused and disapproving. So we drove along in silence. France was untheatrically boring. I could only think about all of the men who had slept in the mud out here over the last century while they were occupied with occupations, advances, bulges, and of course all of those bullets. It made me think that back then maybe blowing up seemed easier than years of mud sleep. One night had been more than enough for me.
My grandfather’s generation definitely had something that seems lacking in mine.
He went as far as Metz, passing it just a little way to drop me off at the next rest area down the road. I was getting really nickel and dimed on the rides, but if I could catch one more ride I would be in Strasbourg where Chris, a resident member of the IVAW, was going to pick me up the following day.
Nobody seemed interested In me, so after an hour I just approached a car and asked the driver where he was going. He said Freiburg. That was definitely on my way. I asked if he could… of course he said yes.
He was a developer of green transportation solutions. He was the author of a book. He cheerily announced that he was ready for the arrival of an apocalypse type situation, but from his fancy car I had a hard time imagining him roughing it.
He bought me a huge meal, probing me about my aspirations. He was a very nice guy.
He dropped me off in Strasbourg in the afternoon when the sun was at its best. I walked free underneath the weight of my bag into a city that has no shortage of European charm.
My first order of business was finding a place to stay because I was in no shape to spend another night outside.
Never in all of my mental preparation geared towards preparing myself to play the rold of a homeless veteran did I intend to actually sleep on the streets or stay in a shelter. You can call me prissy. Its fine.
While I searched for a place to stay the cold and the sick from the night before were finally starting to set in. I slipped into a dark undercurrent and was washed away in self pity.
I’ve been trying a new tact on the telling people that I am a veteran thing. I’m not doing it. I want to see their reactions, but my problems with exploiting myself as this thing bug me way too much now. I was beginning to get worried that I had no identity left beyond my inescapable veteraness. Plus I don’t have the words to define myself now anyway and I can’t open up that discourse without coming up short. What would the classically anti-American French care about an American soldier trying to figure himself out? Maybe that is exactly what would make their reaction enjoyable and new.
In other news the brontosaurus is now finished and beautiful. A perfect part of the crew. Vanessa is the only person who has catalogued and named all of the entire cast of characters. I really miss how she looked at me.
One thing is for sure. I need to stop this fucked up, possessive head trip that I am on about her. It will poison the whole thing. I am clinging to the idea of her because it is some important characteristic of self to be in love. In the midst of this blank and unhappy labyrinth of crisis of self, in a time when my identity has become a wash amidst the turmoil and madness of our world so as I feel like I am only a creature of madness. A reflection of its irrationality. To be in love, to be loved, to have loved, these things, for some fucked up reason, add a unique necessity of self. It makes me feel like I do exist and it is worth something to have done so. To love and to be loved. But enough is enough.
If love is going to be some thorn in my psyche to keep me occupied in times of idleness, some drama to, for good or bad, inspire a feeling of value about who I am now, then I need to reconfigure. I need to know that this too isn’t just some escape from my island of self in an ocean of selflessness.
Am I always going to have some obscene, obsessive fascination with the few tabloid issues in my life in order to give some structure to this constant dialectical deconstruction that I’ve become? Veteran, lover, activist, artist, they all become a medium for my manic dualism. In all of them I draw the same conclusions. I am both the pig and the wolf that are tattood on my arm. An evil destroyer and an innocent beggar. Villain/hero. Michael/Lucifer. Happy/sad. In love/incapable of love. Lazy stoner/brave adventurer. Brain/body. Like Tekken, they’re all squaring off, but all the matches are tied. Perpetual conflict fleshed out in the noteworthy circumstances of my life.
In the case of Brain vs. Body the two sides are not simultaneous victors. In the winter my brain, sick of the tyranny of the bodies summer triste, seizes control and exerts its dominion by refusing the drugs that I need. My body goes limp when the brain plays these games. An awkward complication of bones and oily skin. It doesn’t dance or sing, it really doesn’t like anything, and the brain makes it move. Eventually the sun magics my body into some mad voodoo passion and my mind passively sits and refuses to say anything. Two lovers refusing union. The sum of their love is me.
The war rages on.
I just looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. It was not a good sight. There are rings under my eyes that I wish everyone who has ever said that they envy my traveling spirit could see. In their admiration there is a refusal to acknowledge the difficulties of the lifestyle. They will never wake up in the mud. They will never sleep in the rain. Or watch people walk past you while you hold a sign begging for money. They will never sacrifice precious dignity into a fire of need. They couldn’t laugh as it burned. They will never walk by restaurants where people eat food on platters that cost sixty dollars a piece while you just stole a handfull of peanuts from a grocery store to survive. They will never say goodbye to the woman who loves them with the comfortable bed to do all of these things. They will never know how tired and uncertain I am right now.
They will live with the dream I’d had before I chose reality. And I envy them.
They do the same, think the same about veterans. Men who dream of pulling triggers think we are kings for having done so. They don’t know the weight of that actual moment and they don’t know the identityless void of existence, and they don’t know about all of the nights falling asleep in the rain and waking up in the mud. They prefer the dream. The virtual and shameless inspiration without commitment to ugly action. Then they ask us if we’ve ever killed anybody.
My sense of self worth has bottomed out. It is a sunken ship on the floor of an unforgiving ocean. I have begged and pleaded and finally cursed when I didn’t get what I wanted. Now I have my cup out again.
Please help a homeless vet. Please, God. Anybody. Help me. Please. But there is never enough help. The people who give it begrudge you the intrusion. The help they offer is a fix, only big enough to keep you from the sickness. We are the addicts of the system dieing from withdrawal.
So we do it on our own. Pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, or so they say. We discontinue our self pity and we thrust out the cup. Our bodies become a prison cell of hellish repentance. The damned, self persecuted, self destructed, souls of the streets. Our eyes are glass windows of closed down shops. Our hopes the trash left by the previous owner. And we are right next door to a four star restaurant.
Our hearts are frigid places. Angry places that have leapt and come down at too many alluring disappointments. When we taste success it is the one good minute in months of hell.
Hard times have made us like the Bedouins. Patiently and dispassionately we wait for nothing because we know that no real cure will ever come.
When I looked in the mirror tonight I saw, for the first time, a real live homeless veteran. I didn’t feel sorry for him. He made his own choices. I didn’t care what he had seen or what effect this had had on his mind and heart. His was just another face I was trained to ignore. I wished to just walk past him, but I was tied to his eyes. We were shadows of the same body. It made me sick to look at him and feel nothing at all.
At the very end of my stay in the cafe I finally got in contact with a woman who lived in this town. She would let me stay at her place. I packed up my things and began to walk.
A little while later I was in a shower watching everything wash away.
in safe hands
A gloomy ambience rolled in through the balcony door as my eyes fluttered open on my first comfortable morning in Europe. I had made it. My dream was coming true.
The girl I was staying with had already left, leaving a nice note on the table informing me that there was coffee and food and that I was to lock the door on my way out. Bon Chance!
The air was wet and grey. My huge rucksack threatened to snap my shoulders off of my body as I tumbled around the town hacking up pieces of my poor lungs. Later that afternoon I was to be at the train station to meet a veteran who had fled the United States in lieu of deploying again. I picked up a few random food items and then spent the rest of my five euro daily limit on tobacco and papers. I smoked that gloomy morning away while I imagined the stories of the lean Europeans that bustled in and out of the train station.
For a moment I considered finding some cardboard and begging for a little money on the veteran ticket but I came to an impasse in the logic. Why would I hold these people accountable for the disease that America gave me. They hadn’t tyrannized the dessert people since the Crusades, if this was truly not just another campaign in that seemingly endless epic. Sure they enacted a racist immigration policy and they hadn’t done anything to denounce the war or stop America from storming through another, weaker country in an occupation which had a goal of spreading a political and social philosophy even though when this happened to them sixty years ago they made a big to do about the whole thing. And sure they had even dedicated a few troops. And sure a lot of their wealthy elite were also making out like bandits in the rampant military industrialism that this war was creating around itself.
Now that I think about it more I really should have taken them for everything I could get.
Chris’ train came in. I was worried I wouldn’t know who he was, but when the train doors opened I could immediately tell that this tall, stiff walking to a sharp inner cadence was the guy that I was looking for. He also pinned me immediately. I was pretty obvious with the bag and ridiculous outfit. I was wearing a sweatshirt that I had hand painted IRAQ VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR on. My presence at the time was fairly loud.
He lived in Frankfurt, Germany. We had a long day of train hopping ahead of us. We were headed up to his place for a few days before the event.
He had invited me to Germany to speak in the European recreation of the Winter Soldier Testimonies. It would be my third official Winter Soldier. It would happen on the one year anniversary of the day that changed my life for the weirder when I announced to the world that I would be happy to be the poster child for the media circus surrounding Guantanamo Bay, the well lit spectacle at the heart of the Detentions Program and the entire Global War on Terror.
The train windows were a film reel. Still by still we passed through a landscape narrative of the history of Germany as hillside became some old town and then subtly became hillside again. This happened over and over again until we finally started to make our descent into the industrial outline of Frankfurt.
Chris lived in a small apartment with his wife Meike and her kid, Leon. The place was filled to the brim with the ephemera of activism, its quaint. For the majority of that week I convalesced while Meike and Chris told me about the rich history of gypsy communes and squatting that thrived for a long time in Germany but was now, for the first time in decades, coming under attack from the German government more and more militantly.
My mind wandered through a possible future of getting involved with some band of gypsies in rural Germany, getting lost for years in some ballad of freedom, dirty but happy. Ah, to dream.
One night we went to a giant squat in the far off industrial neighborhood for a night of free food. The place was immaculate and well decorated with moody lighting in every room. Its many stylish rooms were tucked into the walls of the factory that this building had been in a former life. The people were a little gloomy because the law was coming for them. This building was to be destroyed. Meike had lived here. She was obviously and understandably destroyed by the outlook of losing this important piece of her shared history.
Later that week two Englishmen showed up at the door. One was complaining about the size that his balls had swelled to after a recent vasectomy. Their names were Martin and Lee and they had served in the war as well. Much like Vinny and Sergio back home their eyes told of violence in scales that my mind could not fathom.
We loaded into a van and started to drive towards Freiburg. On our way we picked up a young guy who was very quiet. His face was serious and his eyes defensive. In a few minutes we were all laughing about Martin’s testicles in the van on our way to break another record in an attempt to even the score with the powers that be.
I felt like I was home. It was not the place. It was the people. My people. The Fallen Angels. The refuse of war. Adrift in a nightmare but together like a lost platoon, a band of brothers.
a deal with the devil
We crash landed the van into a scene that was becoming eerily familiar. A dozen seventies era activists gathered in a room drowning in coffee, the mood is tense and people are unusually serious faced as if we were going into battle armed only with a desperate amount of hope. Their faces are ashy and tired for they have known only work for years. For this type there is no rest because they will always fight something that will always be there. So this was just one more battle with an unconquerable foe.
While trying to plug in a coffee maker I managed to spill water all over a stack of important documents and ancient out of print newspapers. Leon helped me clean it up. Nobody ever noticed. Thanks Leon.
It was late. The party broke up and we went to the hostel where a snippy German hippy told us that he didn’t understand why we were here because we were wrong for joining the military. This was my first introduction to an interesting perspective on the role of the soldier in the Global War on Terror that was unique to Germany. I would become very familiar with it over the next few months.
The next day started peacefully with a long, cold walk but that peace was quickly destroyed by 200 over caffeinated activists crammed into a small cafe.
The speakers paced around in circles on the balcony smoking cigarettes. I was trying to hustle a few lino prints on combat paper for five Euro a piece from a table in the smoking section where I usually reside anyway. People were very interested but I only sold a few of them, but every one was one more day in Europe. That’s how I pitched it to them. I wanted my incentive to be declared. Radical honesty.
Eddy Falcone came in from Spain where he’d been studying. We had met each other in St. Paul one night during a safety briefing with the Muskrat. Eddy is an ethical gangster, his weapons of choice are humor and political savvy and he carries them on his hip. He takes everything with the same kind of cool. He was another improbable character in the veteran community and we kind of bonded on it. We were the people that don’t seem like we would have, or could have, ever been in the military. I appreciate it in others because I know how difficult it is to get through the military with any kind of style. It is a graceless and boring life.
Then Alex showed up. I knew she was in Germany. She had called to tell me as much. I’d met her in Portland when we were doing the Winter Soldier there. She was a member of the ISO. I needed help trying to put the chapter together. We hung out one night to talk about how this could be done but the only thing we managed to put together was a very attractively consensual agreement on why it was a good idea to sleep together. She’s smart and funny and excessively candid. Her concept of politics at the time was slightly less playful than my own. After that night I never called her. I knew I would be leaving and there was only one direction that these relationships go so I just avoided going there at all costs. She didn’t appear to be bitter. She just laughed off my apology to let me know it was fine.
We bullshitted for most of the morning until it came time for our panel.
It was a long day of testimonies. We tried to keep things light, politically relevant and sometimes humorous, but there was no way that we could do it without also having it be a gruesome and frustrating story because you cannot tell a war story without the horror. Not if it is to be true.
While I was babbling about the subject of detentions again I noticed a fat man whose thick lens’ made his eyes so comically enormous that I could not help but laugh at his ridiculous appearance as he stared at me, though the comedy was laced with fear because I also found his presence creepy.
After everything was said and done and I was standing outside smoking a cigarette again the fat man approached me at the table. He shook my hand eagerly with a large smile on his face. He told me his name was Hans and that he had come all the way from Vienna to speak with me. He continued on to tell me that he worked as an artist under the name Very Morning. He gave me a book of his work. It was a very expensive looking book with amazing printing quality and design. The work was all digital in nature. As I flipped through it I couldn’t understand what his interest in me was. Finally I got to some pages in the book that seemed relevant, though I did not like the relevance.
The pictures were of children in orange detainee suits with hoods on their heads and flexicuffs on their hands. My stomach turned. What did this man intend to expose by this? I looked up and my eyes were arrested by a few bills that I didn’t think I would ever see again. He put them in my hand. He told me that if I wanted to come to Vienna to do a printing project he would fund the trip and I could stay at his place where he had an extra room. Ewwwww.
I felt slimy. I didn’t like him and I didn’t like his art which was centered on technology whereas my own art relies on tradition and craft. The money was needed and it would allow me weeks of travel at the rate that I was going, but a part of me knew that I would regret taking his offer. I told him that I had plans for the next month but I would like to continue talking with him about the possibility. He left me the book and took off with a disappointed look as if he had expected me to go along with him that very day.
After that was over I met a documentary filmmaker who lived in Freiburg. His name was Luciano. He was a very sweet guy and he offered to let me stay in his film studio for a while upon hearing about my travels. Sometimes it seemed that I was the luckiest tramp in the world.
We walked all over that town that night drinking and smoking and yelling things into the night air. We were guided along a pair of railroad tracks and over a river to an old brick building that they called the KTS which was the home of the Freiburg Autonoma, the headquarters of the anarchist community in this city.
the circulatory system of the G.W.o.T.
Everyone left the next morning, but not me. That afternoon I moved into Luciano’s production office complete with huge bed, kitchen, dreamy balcony over the park and a small shower (which was located in the kitchen) because I am the luckiest person on the planet.
It wasn’t all luck. It was the strength of the community mostly.
I had decided to course through the rapids of the anti-war communities many veins. It was an experiment to see the breadth of our movement. It was an attempt to get some idea of the shape of the forest that I was lost in. What are we? Where are we? Who are we? Why are we? and How are we? These are the questions that I wanted to know. I was quickly finding out the “where” as I realized that we were everywhere. I felt like I understood the “who” more and more as I met more and more familiar characters. The why was the easiest of them all. We do it because there is something which must be stopped. I had seen people figure out the “how” in every city I had been to and it was always different. The “how” comes to you as things happen. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was the “what” and that was mostly because when I tried to think about it my mind kept repeating the word “doomed.”
This room was a testament that the community, much to my surprise and good fortune, happened to be very strong and further reaching than my wildest imagination.
Moazzam had told me several times about the Islamic tradition of housing people who are on any kind of journey in the name of God and in some way it made me very happy that this attribute of the anti-war community fulfilled this major Islamic virtue.
It would be a disservice to my host, though, to rule out the individual’s role in this. This act of kindness was not just the product of some cult of “We.” It was the generosity of one person who believed in what I was saying I wanted to do. Over the course of the weeks that I stayed in this apartment my laziness (which I have long considered an energy saving feature) withered his approval, but I was listening to the things that he was telling me because he was rich in the many virtues of our tribe. He had been with it for a long time.
Every day he went to work on audio and film in one of the most magnificent complexes I have ever had the good fortune to see. This place was some kind of scenic apartment complex at the end of a pretty little road. The buildings ran along both sides. They were two stories and made of yellow bricks. They housed various art and community projects to include a fully operation offset printing operation, a beautiful, very European cafe where it has been deemed legal (and socially necessary) to smoke marijuana and the very studio that Luciano worked at.
I would follow him to work every day and sit outside of the cafe nursing my coffee and speaking with as many people as I could. I came to know many interesting personalities over the course of that time.
There was a contradiction of a boy who dressed like a French aviator from the twenties who spoke arrogantly about the virtual revolution.
There was a programmer who believed that human behavior was just another program to be altered analytically.
There was a tough feminist who glowered at everyone beautifully.
There was a Suffi man who’s only job appeared to be to roll spliffs while debating the schematics of God’s plan, or so I assume because his conversation was so German heavy.
There were so many people that I almost felt I had met before, though they were all wild offshoots from any kind of archetype. They were all dedicated anarchists. The KTS was their home. Without understanding what they were saying they appeared to me to be a bunch of kids in twenty somethings bodies running around an abandoned building acting like pirates and I loved it. I loved them. All of them.
One gentleman gave me weed that he had grown on his organic farm. Not that I needed it. It seemed that the only air that I was breathing there was the dark chocolaty fumes of tobacco and weed.
There were frequent meetings. Obama was scheduled to speak in front of NATO in Strasbourg which was just down the road. The KTS was preparing to be a launching pad for migrant activists as they found their way to the protest and all of the Autonoma were scrambling around the halls to put the place together in time as well as meeting to organize the logistics. Again that sickly feeling that came on me when we were “preparing for war” before the DNC found its way into my stomach and into my head.
When they were talking in English they were talking about violence and the right to use violence. There was almost an ambition towards violence. There was hope. It confused me.
Everyone was telling their war stories and I could see the eagerness in the eyes of the violence virgins and it was all too familiar.
Meanwhile, though they accepted me as an anarchist, they were very confrontational about my military service. Unlike the excessive praise of the activists in the states, these German’s definitely resented my personal history. Once while I sat at a table with a group that was speaking mostly English a girl came up to the table and sat down. She didn’t introduce herself so she didn’t have time to find out that I was an American which might have saved us some embarrassment in the future. She apparently picked up that it was English speaking time however and began to talk about how she had heard about the Winter Soldier Testimonies. She said that it was bullshit to think that these assholes could just come and say a few “I’m sorries” and then think that you are absolved of your sins when really all they were doing was just telling war stories and trying to collect pity. If for just one moment she had registered the look on anyone’s face I’m sure she would have understood what had just happened, but she had other things on her mind than her audience it seemed.
Nobody said a word for a few seconds and it began to dawn on her right when I started to tell her that I had always had the same critique of the Winter Soldier platform myself. I was going to go on to say “but we really think it is worth your time to hear these stories” but she had fully realized by now and she appeared completely stone faced. I wouldn’t say unaffected, but she certainly was not going to apologize. Nor did anyone ever speak of the incident again. I think that was for the best.
Situations like this happened every day while I hung out with them. I didn’t get upset. I saw it as the one job that I was actually performing in the community. I was acclimating them to a world that they didn’t understand.
Of course they didn’t understand what I had been through. There aren’t trailer parks in Europe and recruiters don’t go into poor people’s homes and promise their children free educations because in Europe education is already free. None of these kids had even ever had a fucking job. We had come from two different worlds and their judgment was not fair. Sure, they’re right, it is totally insane for a man to bare arms against another man but kids who had American grandpas learned that sometimes you just have to, while kids with German grandpas learned all about shame. Not to mention that they could thank my proud American military heritage for not having to goose step around in a bookless and Jew-less nightmare.
Maybe I was a little resentful.
“you say you want a revolution”
One of the innumerable iterations of Socialist organizations extended to me an offer to speak at an event. I puffed up with a new sense of determination. Traveling around Europe was proving much easier than I had prepared myself for. It seemed like they were just giving it away.
A few days before the hitch hikers would begin to arrive in droves I boarded a train headed North. Within hours I was fully sated on sunny German countryside and standing bewildered in a very large train station with a piece of paper with a number written on it that I was to call. I only had so much money to make this call and nobody was picking up the phone on the other end.
After a few minutes of chain smoking away the pins and needles of my anxiety I was finally able to get through to my hosts. A ride was dispatched. I met up with another speaker from London. He was a student. Apparently he was very well respected in his circles. He poked and prodded about my politics. I evaded his questions professionally which made it clear that I was not on of the tribe. He didn’t seem to mind much because he invited me out for a hookah before the show. It was delightful.
While we were on stage we found the English barrier to be a huge issue. We were each assigned a translator. Mine was a grave looking large twenty something with thick glasses. His voice didn’t modulate from his standard pitch at all which I could only assume cut out any chance for my humor to be received, though by the end of ten minutes I figured out how to use him well enough to convey some sense of humor. My message probably seemed dry and staccato. The Iraq Veterans Against the War support you in your cause! March forward brave soldiers. Nonsense.
He had a good time flirting with his translator and laying down the party line on the anti-war movement.
The entire time the people in the audience just stared at us as if we were two cadavers suspended over the floor by wires dancing about like puppets.
After the speech we drank and we dined in the attached cafe. It was expensive. I drank a lot of water. For hours they talked and talked about the worker’s movement but underneath their words was the same thing any two drunk humans of mutually prefferable sexes hide in the subtext of debate: sex. It turned out to be a stale evening.
Back at the apartment I was staying at I was packing up my things and preparing to get on the train the next day. One of the flat mates was in and he said that they were leaving to go to Berlin for a conference on the subject of political prisoners. He invited me along. My journalistic intent drove me forward. How could I pass this opportunity up? We’d be back before the NATO war and I will have given Luciano a break so that maybe my clock might reset a little bit. If not there was always the KTS which would prove exciting. Anyway, fuck it. Anywhere I went would be the same as long as I stuck to my budget.
After a few stressful hours of traffic and waiting for people to put themselves together we were crammed in a car bound for Berlin. My fellow passengers were speaking almost only German because two of the three knew minimal English. AnnKat was the English speaker. She would turn to me occasionally to give me updates and ask me questions about who I was. The two boys were Stephan, a lanky computer nerd, and Martin, a severely stern type of person who seemed to hold on to Marxism with the stoicism of a saint.
I drifted in and out of sleep along the ride. I had no idea where we were or where we were going. The trip extended well beyond the time that we thought it would take. Once I woke up to find that we had driven hours out of our way and were now only beginning to repair the damage. I fell back to sleep. The sun woke me up and I lifted my head to see a beautifully beaten down city steaming in the cold of the winter morning. There were only a few clouds but they dispensed huge snowflakes that danced to the ground. I was immediately smitten by this city.
Driving through its streets was cinematic. Berlin, I love you.
We found where we were to stay quickly and soon we were standing in a small one bedroom apartment in front of a man who appeared to be only a few days removed from the bushes of the Cuban Revolution. He silently pointed out all of the pillows and blankets on the ground and went to sleep in a hammock. We passed out instantly.
We woke in a few hours and walked to the rally.
There were more cops than punks at the starting point that morning and I cringed when I realized that I still had a good deal of grass in my bag. They were shaking kids down left and right. If they found me with the grass I’d probably be in a real bind, or at the very least on a plane back home. I had to be cool about my veerings because there were so few of us that I had no anonymity. Especially with a sweatshirt that is both visually bold and written in English.
All of the usual groups were in attendance carrying signs and handing out information about their causes. I was representing my own cause by looking at all of the pretty buildings and thinking about life because I am an existentialist who prefers introspection to revolution.
At the lecture hall the speakers spoke monotonously about something that they seemed entirely bored by. The only exciting moment was when somebody said something that sounded haltingly Hitler-ish to my sensitive ears directly after which everybody stood up sharply and raised their fists in the air. I wondered if anyone else in the room was as surprised as I was about this ritual or more so by how apparently nobody has ever told them that this habit resembles something which ought not be resembled by any group, but especially not one that strives for a better existence.
I left after making hasty plans with the rest of the crew. I contacted Alex who was now living in Berlin and I started walking in her direction.
friends make the best lovers
We met under the train but soon found ourselves walking through a graveyard laden with snow. Alexandra was telling me that she had moved away from the ISO for all of the reasons that we had discussed on several occasions. Mostly because she was resentful that she had been trained only to argue and not to listen. We discussed why everyone is a racist and a sexist and all of the “ists” because we had been raised that way and it was naive and arrogant to act like you’ve conquered generations of cultural training. In the end this mentality, we decided, could make it more difficult to conquer these issues within our society not less.
It was so good to see her and to engage in uninhibited discourse with someone with a sense of humor. The dry professionalism of the German kids was really wearing me down.
She showed me her huge apartment which looked like a partitioned section of a mansion. It was all white and had a kind of snowy beauty all to its own.
It turns out that she had never gone on an extended walk about of her town and I strongly suggested that now was the time. I rolled us a few joints for the walk and we were soon on our way. We walked for ages until we were finally outside of the region that she was familiar with. We soon found ourselves downtown. We walked through a mall underneath an impossible dome of steel latticework with buildings running along it. It looked like a science fiction auditorium. We pretended to give speeches from the center.
There was a park nearby where, for just a few moments, we were both overcome with a kind of literary nostalgia that heralded us back to a pre-war Germany that we were both familiar with only through the emotional pastiches that writers long past had left us with for our dedication to reading old literature. We walked through fields of statues until we were standing at the feet of this austere statue of a soldier who could have been out of a comic book. He was flanked on either side by large tanks. Beyond his ominous and violent presence there was a field and a building which came back to me in a series of flashbacks and black and white photographs. We all knew this place. This was the place where a horrible thing was launched.
This was the field where Hitler had delivered a famous speech in front of the building which housed the Third Reich. This is where it had all begun. To stand in the middle of that field gave me a disturbing. It was unfortunately familiar. It was the realization that the fear that I experienced here was for something that had already come to pass and continued to exist but in a much more terrifying way than even Hitler had created. It was the fear that we had become what he had always dreamed of, though we shifted our religious and economic burden from the Jews who Hitler believed controlled the money to the Arabs who George Bush believed controlled the oil. Now we were killing them in an occupation of their country, exterminating the ones that we consider to be undesirable to our goals.
This was where the head of what proved to be a hydra was cut off. This is our legacy. It is not only the German’s to carry.
Needless to say I was lost in though. Alexandra was tugging on my arm. I looked at her face pink against the snow. It is a strange world that we live in.
We walked into a hip neighborhood where there were abundant signs of counter cultural behavior. I soaked in the Bohemian vibe that was dominating the frequencies. We bought some books and then sat in a coffee shop for a little while reading them. I had purchased a collection of essays by Adorno. It was perfect for the day. Later we visited some friends that she had stayed with when she first came to town but we both had the impression that we were interlopers so we left to find some food.
We had avoided the subject of “us” the entire day because the scenery had been enough to keep us occupied and there was so much else to discuss, but while we devoured pizza Alex looked at me with bedroom eyes. She asked me why I had not touched her. I meekly explained my situation with Vanessa and then began nervously talking around in circles until she was thoroughly offended. We stormed back home. The mood lightened. She plied me with booze. We sat up all night talking. Towards the end of the night she stood out of her door like the she had the night that we had slept together. She repeated the words she said then: “So, uh, I feel like we’ve got things pretty well figured out so why don’t you quit playing hard to get and come in here.” But this time I did not and could not. She told me that I was a fool. I was only trying to prove to myself that I could stay with one person and I was blowing a chance to have something real.
We both knew that it would work because when we were together we were as good a couple as you can find but, like usual, I had myself tied into something else and I could not just throw that away. I don’t know why I chose to exercise one of my only moments of sexual integrity during such a perfect moment at the end of a such a perfect day. All I could think about was the guilt that I had been left with when I had cheated on Jamie during that first harvest and I felt sick of myself and the things that I had done, even if I did them naively and had excuses.
When I woke up the next morning she was gone. There was a letter on the table. She had left me money and reminded me that I could eat whatever I wanted to. I have not seen her since.
It was a long car ride back to Stutgard. By the end of it I had desperately decided that I was going to fly back to Newcastle.
oh no! what if…?
I went straight to the KTS as soon as I got into Freiburg. I knew everyone would be there making dinner. There was a trashcan fire outside of the front door. Several small groups of punks were huddled around it, some of them cleaner than others. It was cold and wet. Word was that the fields that people were going to sleep on in Strasbourg were flooded and muddy. This information had made everyone very sad faced and gray. There was the ominous threat of illness for everyone involved. Muscles visibly tightened when there was another raspy cough.
This protest was doomed to failure. These kids were protesting the president who had come onto the scene like the rebirth of Jesus Christ himself who, as far as most of the Europeans I had talked to, shit golden eggs before long days of fixing every problem that mankind faced. They wanted to convey to him, and to the rest of the leaders of the U.N. that they were irate at the proposal to send more European troops to fight, and possibly die, in America’s war but the whole nation was against them, right and left alike.
I’m not entirely sure they knew what the hell they were protesting themselves. They were so excited for an action packed summer that they seemed to not even be interested in the war. They certainly didn’t want to discuss it with me. Maybe that was German politeness.
I kept my agenda mostly to myself. Things were so chaotic here that I felt like I could slide away at any moment that I chose to. I was not under any particular person’s care here and nobody seemed particularly invested in me. A part of me was sighing relief that I wouldn’t end up sharing a tent with ten other dirty kids outside in the mud in a town that I had already danced with.
On my last night I walked with Luciano and Sara, his girlfriend, through this town which had been spared during the war for the most part. We climbed a tall hill and then a lookout tower and as the sun was setting we stared out over this town which was so sleepy yet so riotous at the same time. The calm of the whole thing was offsetting knowing that the KTS was still swarming with black blockers. It was offsetting to know that there was still a war somewhere. It was also offsetting to see how disappointed Luciano looked.
He told me that I needed to decide whether or not I was actually going to do something for the world or just continue about my selfish way gathering stories and never truly committing to anything, occupying my time mostly with relationship drama and the hunt for more weed. I’d heard this criticism before. I can’t deny that the accusation cut me deep, but it was nonetheless true.
I didn’t want to make excuses for myself but I quickly found myself doing it anyway. I tried to remind him that I was working on a book and that every moment we had shared was spent trying to figure out what this story was. I reminded him that I had remained true and committed to that goad, that ridiculous ambition of mine. He looked at me sadly and in his eyes I read the question before he even asked it. “Have you really?” He asked.
Had I? Is this really the homeless experience? Living in a studio by myself in Germany eating cheese and drinking coffee? This didn’t sound like the story that I had set out to tell. It looked more like that dream that I had had in my little white room. This wasn’t the story of a homeless vet, even though it kind of was, this had become the story of the things that I had dreamed of while I was living in Hell. What value was that to anyone?
His words set in like a virus. Soon I found myself pacing and chain smoking while my brain was lit up like firecracker with panic. What was I doing? Why was I going back to Vane? Why was I so obsessed with Vane and why was that making me so crazy? The rest of my time there was dark.
Luciano bought me a ticket and I escaped from town the next day. It took me all day to get out to the Hahn International Airport outside of Frankfurt. My flight didn’t leave until the next day but I couldn’t stay in Frankfurt because it would take too long to get here in the morning. I went for a walk to smoke the rest of my weed and try to calm this furious demon of failure inside of myself with the last of my weed smoke. I stumbled on an old barracks that looked like the rickety shits that we had lived in in Camp Grayling. I decided to sleep there for the night. I laid there staring up at the scars all night and talking to myself into my recorder.
It was hard to be there alone inside of a moment which felt so beautiful but can never be shared. And with so many thoughts inside of my head.
The Paper Trail 