In Clayton’s red-lit loft, we went online. I clicked over to the news. In New York and New Jersey, Sandy had killed eighty-seven people; the final death toll would rise to two hundred. Twenty feet of water had filled the South Ferry subway station. The Coney Island boardwalk was smashed like tinder. Swaths of Seaside Heights, New Jersey, lay buried under sand. Wind had torn trees from their roots in Queens. In Staten Island and Far Rockaway, flooding contaminated thousands of homes, and it would take only a week for mold to set in.
In neighborhoods that lost power, the elderly and disabled remained trapped in their apartments, dependent for food and water on neighbors who were able to climb the stairs.
The next day, Clayton left the apartment for a walk. When he returned, he had a bandage on his arm. Under it was a new tattoo: “This too shall pass.”
The next day, lights snapped back on, on Wall Street.
Far Rockaway and Staten Island stayed dark.
In the wake of the storm, Occupy Wall Street morphed into a disaster relief organization—one that was quicker and more helpful than either the Red Cross or FEMA. Volunteers with Occupy Sandy delivered food, clean water, insulin, and candles. They ferried people to shelters. They organized distribution centers out of churches, and ran logistics on Google Docs.
Yes, there was waste—wasted supplies, wasted efforts—but compared with the expensive marketing campaigns and elaborate bureaucracy of the large aid organizations, Occupy Sandy’s ad hoc efforts were like manna.
They also inspired others. My friend Franz, a wiry Sicilian whose favorite word was fuck, was a professional producer of dubiously legal events; he also owned a burger truck. A few days after the storm, he started driving his truck out to Rockaway to distribute food. I’d done some fund-raising already, selling some of my prints to help a local Sandy relief effort, but I wanted to help more directly, so I asked Franz if could ride along with him.
On November 3, Fred, Kate Black, and I piled into the rickety burger truck with Franz and his then–business partner. At the Restaurant Depot on Hamilton Avenue, we bought vast stacks of burgers, cheese, and bacon; delicious, greasy food can heal many wounds.
As we drove out, we passed block-length lines of cars in front of gas stations. The city had started rationing gasoline, and fights broke out if anyone tried to cut the line. But Franz’s partner had some “entrepreneurial” friends, and after the storm they’d worked out a deal with a local mechanic, siphoning the gas from the cars left behind in his garage. They were profiteers, but they wanted to help Far Rockaway. When we met them outside a warehouse in Nowhere, Brooklyn, they greeted us with grins and plastic jugs of gas, for which they refused to charge.
As we crossed the bridge to Rockaway, Sandy’s wounds grew more obvious. It was as if vast hands had lifted up the whole peninsula, shaken it, then left the pieces where they fell. Sand dunes covered many streets, and small recreational boats lay smashed on top of them. We passed houses whose walls had come apart like the sides of wet shoeboxes. Grim families dug out their basements, piling the street corners with the soggy detritus of their lives. Since the storm had hit a few days before Halloween, scarecrows and jack-o-lanterns presided over the trash heaps like kings.
Locals posted handmade signs asking “FEMA where are you?” but neither the Red Cross nor FEMA was anywhere to be seen. Yet every few blocks we came across unaffiliated humans offering warm clothes, water, and soup.
Franz parked his burger truck in a friend’s backyard. We grilled burgers, heated up coffee, and dangled power strips from the truck so people could charge their phones. Soon, a crowd gathered around us. We blared Black Sabbath from the truck’s speakers. As dusk fell, the truck glowed like a firefly: one small point of light and warmth in the powerless neighborhood.
I handed a grilled cheese to an older man, whose face was mostly obscured by his worn Mets cap. “Usually metal isn’t my thing, but I’m so fucking glad to hear it now,” he told us. “I haven’t heard a fucking goddamn song for a week.”
Another girl asked why we were there.
“To hand out food,” Fred answered.
She burst into tears.
After Sandy, more such efforts grew out of the Occupy network. Independent media proliferated, as did workers’ co-ops. The Rolling Jubilee abolished millions of dollars of healthcare debt. Under the banner of Occupy Our Homes, protesters helped fight off foreclosures, using their bodies as shields. “The 99%” is now part of American political vocabulary. Politicians like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren rose to power by projecting Occupy-style populism—though their words seldom translated into actions on the ground.
Above all, Occupy created an alchemical change in its participants. We learned to help each other across perceived divisions, then link arms against a police charge. When I think of what Occupy meant, my mind returns not to any march, but instead to that night in Franz’s burger truck: the bacon sandwiches, the death metal screaming over the ruins of Rockaway, and the phones charging by stolen gas.
In 2012, I slowly made myself into a writer.
I’d been writing on and off for a decade, but those were small things: art reviews for the underground rag Coagula, instructions on throwing your own gallery show, and odes to the publisher Loompanics. I never considered myself a writer. True writers, I thought, were far smarter than me; they saw more deeply and had reservoirs of insight and feeling that a doodler such as myself couldn’t touch. Art was superficial, easy even; we artists were craftsmen, making single images on flat surfaces. I could look at most paintings and tell you how they were done, almost as though I were debunking a magic trick.
I tried to analyze writing by the same method, but the frank way the words sat on the page was deceptive. An essay’s structure seemed like such an obvious thing, but for me it never was. I couldn’t parse out the rhetorical strategies that Laurie, Sarah Jaffe, or Tash Lennard put into their pieces. I only saw them going into the world, interviewing and experiencing. Then, the next day, a polished piece of writing would appear online, full of cutting prose and apt insights.
Intimidated, I kept to my artist’s box.
But the more time I spent with journalists, the more their techniques rubbed off on me—like glitter, or a rash. As I completed each Shell Game painting, I read, researched, and interviewed. I Skyped with Tunisian bloggers who had helped thwart censorship during the revolution. I plied the nomadic hacker Eleanor Saitta with whiskey, then begged her to review the connectors and modems I drew in The Hivemind, making sure they made practical as well as aesthetic sense. An emergency room doctor told me the most evil pharmaceutical companies to paint in The Business of Illness, and I raided the memories of countless Occupiers to create Our Lady of Liberty Park. I loved how these interviews tore apart my preconceptions; they gave me insight into worlds I’d never otherwise have glimpsed.
With each painting, without knowing it, I was learning a skill I’d told myself I wasn’t good enough to attempt.
By April 2012, I had finished two Shell Game paintings, and I was sketching my third, Syntagma Athena, devoted to the Greek protests. But this new work felt somehow false to me, a tableau of easy symbols attempting to capture a protest movement that was more complex and elusive than any single image. Frustrated, I shoved my sketchbook away.
The next week I was in London to do a signing of the just-released Week in Hell art book. One night, the journalist Paul Mason and I sat in the back of the Groucho Club, working our way through a bottle of scotch. At the time, Paul was the BBC’s economics editor. In his fifties, with a lined, rugged face, and dark circles under his eyes, Paul has a deep Lancashire accent that recalls the coal miners in his family—a working-class voice that sounded pure punk next to the posh drawls usually heard on the BBC. His Marxism was not a comfortable fit there either, though it was more tolerated than it would have been in the States. A former musician, Paul now covered war, economic collapse, and global protest; his book on the 2010–11 protests, Why It’s Kicking
Off Everywhere, was one of Shell Game’s bibles.
Paul had just come from the studio, still in his TV suit. As he loosened his collar and took off his tie, we drank shot after shot, until the world swayed around us and the boozy frankness set in.
“In 2011, the world felt like it was on the brink of changing,” I told him. “But now, I don’t know where that went. It’s like being in love, I suppose, after the first high fades.” Resting my head on the edge of the booth, I told him I was having a hard time finding the right visual language for the Syntagma Athena.
Paul had spent the last year working on a documentary about the Greek protests, breathing tear gas and getting repeatedly truncheoned by riot cops. He started to tell me about the white antacid protesters poured into each other’s eyes to counteract tear gas. Then he stopped.
“You’ve got to go to Exarcheia,” Paul told me, referring to a neighborhood in Athens. “It’s like the old Lower East Side and the old Soho and the old Arbat rolled into one, but it’s a fucking anarchist autonomous zone. That’s what you should draw.”
As he spoke, I thought back to the moment I got off the boat in Morocco when I was seventeen. I remembered the intoxication of finding a new world to capture in my sketchbook. I wanted to chase after that, rather than just sitting in my studio, waiting for the world to come to me. On that London night, what he was saying felt impossibly right: I needed to be somewhere where it was still kicking off.
“I’ll go draw Exarcheia, Paul,” I promised him.
Paul looked down at my shoes. “Don’t wear any ridiculous fuckin’ stilettos,” he said. “You probably don’t want to talk out loud in that American accent until they know you.” He laughed, not unkindly. “And practice putting on a gas mask.”
Back in New York, I had a pile of art jobs that needed doing. Shell Game’s panels waited in my studio like nine accusations. Still, I thought, promises are meant to be kept.
In May 2011, the Greek parliament announced it was accepting a €110 billion bailout, to try to fix the nation’s financial crisis. In exchange, it would raise taxes and impose devastating public spending cuts. Within days, mass protests sprung up in every city in the country, building until three hundred thousand protestors gathered in Athens’s Syntagma Square. The unions joined in, calling general strikes.
The crackdown was brutal. Riot cops shot so much tear gas into the crowds that they ran out of it; the police then started throwing rocks. Protesters fought back with Molotov cocktails.
Despite the protests, the austerity program passed that July. It only exacerbated the crisis. By April 2012, one out of three Greeks was unemployed, and the country’s emotional depression matched its economic one.
That spring, benefit cuts pushed countless elders toward suicide. The government slashed the pension of Dimitris Christoulas, a seventy-seven-year-old retired pharmacist, leaving him destitute. On April 4, Christoulas walked into Syntagma Square, took out a pistol, and calmly shot himself in the head. His suicide note urged young Greeks to grab Kalashnikovs, overthrow the austerity government, and hang the “traitors” in the middle of Syntagma Square.
One segment of Greeks did benefit from austerity: a neo-Nazi group known as the Golden Dawn. At once a political party, a mafia, and a violent paramilitary group, the Golden Dawn exploited the country’s economic misery by blaming it on the oldest scapegoat: immigrants. In Syntagma Square, the Golden Dawn ran Greek-only soup kitchens, while in the working-class neighborhood of Omnia, members of the group murdered dark-skinned refugees. By 2012, they were the third most popular political party in the country. As their base swelled, their violence went from secret to spectacle, with one of their MPs punching a female Socialist politician on live TV.
The Golden Dawn’s logo resembled an unraveled swastika. As the winter of austerity turned to spring, the symbol appeared on more walls, in more cities. The party’s thugs swaggered openly, beating and killing in plain view.
By April 2012, Athens was starting to look like our generation’s Weimar Berlin.
Back in New York, I worked on The Business of Illness, my third Shell Game painting. When Laurie stopped by to visit, I was balanced on a chair, daubing cadmium in the villainess’s hair. As I smoothed an outline, I told Laurie about my plan to go to Athens and draw the aftermath of the Greek protests
“I’ve been wanting to cover the Greek protests, too, and do something more in-depth. We should go together!” Laurie announced.
We’d always wanted to work together, but British newspapers weren’t keen on printing my art beside Laurie’s increasingly famous columns. Fuck them and their refusal to let us mix our disciplines, we vowed. In Athens, we’d do as we pleased—on our own, if we had to. We started planning a piece of illustrated long-form journalism, with the art and the text to be equal and interdependent—like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, if Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman had been angry young feminists.
at the New Inquiry (thenewinquiry.com)
In May, Laurie took the train to Montreal to write about Quebec’s student protests. As practice, after she interviewed protesters, she sent me their photos. One of them was Maxence Valade, a young man partially blinded by a cop’s rubber bullet. I drew his eye socket, and the meat of his destroyed eye. The New Inquiry ran the drawings along with her essay.
Armed with this collaboration Laurie emailed a publisher to pitch him on our plan. Two weeks later, we had an ebook contract and two tickets to Athens.
Warren Ellis gave us the book’s title: Discordia.
When we landed in Athens, on a hot night in July 2012, Syntagma Square was as silent as a coma. We dragged our suitcases past smashed shop windows, though crooked streets electric with anti-Euro graffiti, and up the battered cage elevator of the Hotel Carolina.
Before we left for Athens, a young investigative journalist named Yiannis Baboulias had emailed Laurie and offered to show us around. Mono, the magazine Yiannis had cofounded, had just shuttered, and like many young Greeks, he found himself unemployed.
When we met Yiannis that night, he was hunched over on the battered stoop of our hotel. Yiannis was tall and bony, with black hair falling into his pale, sweaty face. Despite the darkness, he balanced a pair of sunglasses on his nose, but one of the lenses had been knocked out, and he stared at us with a single bloodshot eye.
When he saw us, he swaggered up, shook Laurie’s hand, and explained that he’d just come from a party. He was moderately fucked up on ecstasy, he added—some bastard had spiked the punch.
Over the next few days, Yiannis showed us Athens. He led us through Exarcheia, an anarchist stronghold whose walls were bright with murals of gas-masked protesters. On one wall, a defaced fashion ad read “It is really sad that only now I feel alive.” Graffiti was everywhere, livid and swirling: anarchist A’s, pig-headed cops, snippets of dark, wise poetry that Yiannis translated for me later: “Thank money we have a god.” “Vote Ali Baba: He Only Has Forty Thieves.” “Sorry I’m late, Mom—I’m at war.”
He brought us to the shrine where, in 2008, the police had murdered a fifteen-year-old named Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Graffiti covered every inch of wall and ground in that Exarcheia corner, where Alexandros’s face was graven in bronze, over the line: “Oh Alexis, you were so young.” After the murder, Exarcheia rioted. Students from Athens Polytechnic hurled cobblestones at the police, whose violence they saw as the ground-level enforcement of the corrupt and bloody state.
in Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens by Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple (Vintage Digital, 2012)
Despite those riots, cops still idled in pairs on every Exarcheia street corner. They were comic-book caricatures of men, puffed as if with steroids, weighted down with shields, guns, and bandoliers of tear gas, hassling anyone young or brown. Behind them, the graffiti read “All Cops Are Bastards.” According to election exit polls, 50 percent of Greek cops had voted for the Golden Dawn.
Yiannis set up meetings with us at the illegal anarchist cafés,
where Laurie interviewed activists whose parents had been tortured under Greece’s military junta. I sketched them in my notebook, since photos were not allowed for safety reasons.
I had some of my own contacts in Athens. Paul Mason had connected me with others, including a migrant-rights activist, Katia, and a journalist from the ascendant leftist party Syriza. A young communist activist, Ioanna Panagiotopoulou, set up many more meetings for Laurie and me, yet we would have been lost without Yiannis. Years later, I asked him why he’d done so much for us. “Why wouldn’t I?” he replied, incredulous. “I quite literally had nothing better to do.”
After a dozen interviews in two days, Laurie and I drank icy frappés with Yiannis at Floral Café in Exarcheia.
“What do you think the Syntagma Square protests accomplished?” I asked him. Even to myself, I sounded like a typical naïf American, seeking someone from another place to give me a meaning I could then bring back to Occupy.
“They gave us a sense of narrative. They broke the isolation, the idea that as political subjects we were powerless to change stuff. The idea that the two main parties will always win—that ended there. It acted as a platform, a dialogue, an Agora.” As he spoke, I drew him in caricature, a nose with skinny legs. Laurie looked at my sketchbook and burst into giggles.
“What the fuck is this?” He stared. “Is this what you think of me? Now you see why I’m a fucking nihilist.”
A yellow dog came up to us. Big, dopey, dirty, he looked like a twin to Loukanikos, the legendary riot dog who stood at the front lines of the 2011 protests, barreling through tear gas to bite the police. But this was 2012’s burning summer. The dog plopped down and went to sleep.
Drawing Blood Page 26
