Urgent…
FROM: SPC MIXON/0258
Operation Perpetual Fall was a complete success.
Rendez-vous with “The Doctor” was plagued with nonsense. I had no means of communication and DR.ew is elusive, masterfully evasive and often drunk. This is precisely what makes him so good at what he does. Boston was neon. Strange. My bags were heavy, my every thought sharp and angry. I was hungry for booze. I needed to talk to “Bad Larry” direly.
Found DR.ew behind his shining round glasses shivering on a corner. Made him pay the taxi driver. It was good to see him again.
He equipped me with my travel rations: a small amount of money, a small satchel of that which clears the mind, an itinerary, a list of the equipment I’d be working on and a copy of my orders. The expectations for this tour were high.
I was introduced to Special Agent Jim Oneil and was pleased to learn that he was also a member of the E4 Mafia. We recited the creed to one another and when that formality was over we began to tell our war stories. “This has nothing to do with Vietnam, Walter.” He was also a printer, but some strange variant of the trade for he produces no multiples. He prints one thing at a time. He is called a Monoprinter.
In the morning M.Mahan reported for duty. I’d never met her though command had advised that she was a skilled communications expert. She also exhibited promise in the Dark Arts of Printing from whence I had also learned. She carried a lot of luggage. One of our first interactions went as follows:
M: Hangovers are the worst thing in the world.
Me: I’m sure there are worst things.
M: Oh, fine. So it’s not Gitmo.
Me: Ummm… wait. What? I think there are things in between “Gitmo” and hangovers. I meant those things.
Then we talked about shoes and lobster sauce stains. It was a bizarre introduction.
That night Jim trained us in his alluring antithesis, showing us how one Monoprints. See report “Monoprinting” sent earlier to archives.
The next morning our fearless leader woke us all from our nests with his solemn insistence. I swore at him, some vulgar thing. Soon we were loaded into the Rescue Chopper which he had piloted into town throughout the night. M.Mahan, DR.ew, Lieutenant Drew and myself were soon driving cautiously towards our first destination.
I was both apprehensive and overly confident.
For one week we drove around the Northlands picking up new things like a trailer for our van, the precious beaters, and the equipment to make our portable dry box. We hunkered down in our improv HQ in an undisclosed Northern location with Tom. He sagely smoked his pipe and sorted us out, reminding me quite frankly that there are no free rides on the Paper Trail. I believe he underestimated my particular kind of discipline which only operates when it needs to.
In an effort to clean my mind I went to a large party at the local college to purchase hallucinagens. I was successful. After several hours of walking around with tears in my eyes and an overwhelmingly beautiful feeling radiating from my innards as I walked and the colors, all of those colors, more intense in the streetlights and I felt so much love because of these colors. I ended up back at the house telling every member of our squad that I loved them and why, fitting in a few apologies for my paranoia’s sake.
We never spoke of that night again.
Then our holdover was over and the tour began. We drove in silence, one step ahead of the line that demarcated the falling of the leaves which we were determined to never have to see.
Cleveland smoldered ahead of us darkly like the skeleton of a fallen giant. In no time we were pulling our van into an unlikely destination.
We had been offered shelter in an abandoned warehouse turned antique museum/paper making studio/culture bunker. Every surface in the building held some incredible fiction, every scene which unfurled inside of it laced with magic. We filled it with booze and vowed only to leave when we had to work.
Work was an ordeal of a thing there. We had been invited to come, yet when we arrived it seemed that there was no interest in the people who saw what it was we were doing.
What is it that we were doing? I forget sometimes, about our job.
To make paper. To deconstruct identities and the fabric which symbolizes the consumption of the individual in the economic harvests of war. To separate the fibers so that their story might be told, that which they have seen, which they were there for, that super secret story that the wearer, our customers, are often unable to speak of let alone tell the whole story.
Four people came, only one of them pulled a sheet of paper. We had to compete with the stage set-up crew for the speeches which would be given by prominent intellectuals. (See previous submission for details on these characters and their silly ideas) Eventually the set up crew became our only audience. I made as many sheets as I could knowing that they would come in handy later down the line.
Over the course of this week the message of the DADA began to haunt my head, but not in a schizophrenic kind of way. Mostly in a heritage kind of way. We didn’t come from nowhere. What is our history? Who are our predecessors and what lessons can we learn from them? Anti-war art. Anti-art war. I want to understand the trajectory of history to further understand what we ought to do now. But enough of that. We had to leave again.
It was Halloween weekend and we were heading south. I made an awful decision in West Virginia which nearly lost us our lives. The road looked straight on the map. Hours later we had gained no real ground while we winded through broken down shacks with the occasion shirtless hill person staring at us in disbelief. Who would take such a wildly ungainly get-up through these passes? D.Cam who knows no end to his own patience grew rather short with me as I laughed about the absurdity of it all.
That night we pulled into a skeezy hotel. I was making jokes about how likely it was that we would be serial killed in this town. Lynchburg. Oh, the South. When will you understand? We were not killed however and Halloween passed boringly safe.
We made it safely the following day to Raleigh where we were to meet our new recruits who were being enlisted to liberate their own rags as soon as we could show them how. They were an unusually alert crew, hungry for the work and anxious to divulge the story they were pulping. So many histories circling around the Hollander beater all at once. Blended narrative.
They were efficient and quick to learn like good soldiers. Disciplined. They worked all day, showed up early, stayed late. They worked with a sense of purpose. It is widely believed that these virtues are scoffed at in the E4 Mafia but I think that these accusations are entirely false. Even gangsters need something to work for.
Jim and I taught them how to print, or rather we taught one of them to print in five minutes and then left to smoke cigarettes only to come back and find that they had taught everyone how to produce a monoprint. I cannot say enough for the ability of people to learn and to share. I was so proud of them. Over the course of the week Jim and I cleaned for them while they produced piles of amazing prints with this trial run of a new technique.
The week was emotionally exhausting, but there is no rest for us.
We were in Charlotte the next week and waiting for us was 24 hours of stress every day. We were staying with a paper maker whom we had reached out to to host us but it came at the toll of an 11 O’Clock curfew. I hadn’t had a curfew since Basic Training. I rebelled against it and found myself other arrangements so that I could print through the night without worrying about how I would get back to the base of operations.
I stayed late every night working on secret projects. I’ve sent the products of that week in for review as well. I am fond of the work personally.
My battle buddies covered for me while I recovered from being emotionally over burdened the prior week. They handled all the war stories so that I was free to print and to be in my zen place where I understand the rules and I know what success is. Oh what a sweet place it is. I want to always be there.
That week also ended, and again we were thrust down the black highways, this time into Atlanta where we stayed for one night in another hotel which we littered with beer cans like rock stars.
Our final mission, and surely the most daunting, was to drive into the deepest heart of the dark American South, into Alabama itself, and to aquaint ourselves with our liason Steve Miller who would introduce us to the printing studio where we were to produce enough paper and images and text to make a book in one week. To compound my anxiety, Steve Miller also happens to be one of the primary gatekeepers of the Book and Paper world in which the CPP does almost all of its dirty bidding. We needed this to be a win.
Luckily Steve happens to be outlandishly generous and wise.
The Drews split to make the paper while I hit the ground scouring the internet to pirate images. In two days we had made all the paper we would need for fifty 16 page books and all of the design work was done, the plates had been made and we were at the press. Well, I was at the press.
On the first day I was ready to denounce the very idea that I could ever be a real printer, scrap the whole job and declare failure. It seemed as if it would all be a wash. I was dejected to the extremities of my capabilities. The Doctor told me that there was no use trying to fight my way out of sinking sand and I loathed his advice knowing that if I were to start over there would be no way to make our deadline. That night I lay in bed thinking about my failure until it dawned on me that I could still fix the run if I thinned the ink, added more pressure, and varied the colors. I had damned myself by starting in blue which did not work.
The next day I applied green ink without the thickening agent and began to work slowly. At noon I was jumping up and down, so excited that we had resurrected the job. It was done by five.
Anna Embree and D.Cam led the binding effort in a magnificent cacophony of perfectionism which resulted in finishing our objective by four O’Clock on Thursday. I only got to take one copy of the book with me as evidence that I do actually do something with my life when this week and subsequently this whole month and tour was over.
My evaluation of the tour is that we were successful in our mission and that this work is too valuable to leave. I have decided to stay on the tour for the next year as this is the best place for me to learn what it is that I can do with myself and the help of my other exceptional friends. I have never felt loyalty this strongly, nor have I ever seen such fascinating reciprocal benefits in my work with any other agency. We are learning to make art in a quick and meaningful way, and we’re sharing the process. So it is Paper Trail for life for me now and I know that and accept it as what it is.
We met a lot of future leaders in the veteran community, people who will continue to make a difference in their local areas. They are all beautiful people who feel lonely sometimes because they don’t have many people who understand what they’ve been through and I think that we all feel a little closer to something now.
The crew has now dismantled again. I am off again on my own until the Rescue Chopper comes to take me further down the Paper Trail. Until then I have more work to do.
The Paper Trail 