by Neil Strauss
Luckily, I had internalized the first lesson of urban survival: planning. I’d spent the previous night locating supplies, hiding them in caches, and finding collaborators in the city. To make sure my bobby-pin pick wasn’t confiscated, I’d made a thin slit in the seam of my shirt collar and stashed it inside.
I pulled it out and undid my handcuffs, then Michael’s. Beneath the Range Rover floor mat was an envelope containing the first of several tasks we’d need to execute in downtown Oklahoma City to prove we’d learned to successfully navigate a dangerous urban environment. Our first assignment was to meet an agent wearing a black hat in the Bass Pro Shop in an area known as Bricktown and use persuasion engineering to get her to reveal our next mission.
Bricktown was a long walk away—especially since we’d get caught by bounty hunters if we took the main streets. Nearby, however, there was an Enterprise Rent-A-Car office; perhaps someone there would give us a ride.
The only customer inside was a young, muscular man in a large sleeveless basketball jersey. He was at least six inches taller than me and three times as thick. His face was crisscrossed with scars.
So I asked him for a ride.
“Our friends dropped us off here as a joke, and we have to make it back to Bricktown. Is there any way we can get a lift?”
“Do you got any guns or drugs on you?” he asked. That wasn’t exactly the response I’d expected.
“No, definitely not,” we reassured him.
“I’ll give you a ride then,” he grunted, “but I gotta warn you, if I’m pulled over by the police, I’m not gonna be nice to them.”
I didn’t know what he meant exactly, but it was scary as fuck. In that moment, I realized this wasn’t a game. This was a real city, and this was real life.
Yet we followed him outside to a black Chevy Tahoe and climbed inside anyway. This, I realized as he drove us into town, was how people got killed. Evidently, in my mind, the law of conservation of energy had overruled the principles of common sense.
As he drove into town, he handed me his card. Underneath his name were the words CREDIT DOCTOR. “If you ever need your credit repaired, I can do it overnight—for the right price,” he informed me. He, too, was an urban survivalist of sorts, with his own method of beating the system.
He dropped us off in an alley in Bricktown where I’d cached a bag of disguises the night before. In a lecture on urban camouflage, Reeve and Alwood had taught us there was a certain category of people in cities called invisible men. If the city is a network of veins, invisible men are the white blood cells: they work to keep it clean. They’re the janitors with bundles of keys on their belt loops, the alarm servicemen with clipboards and work orders, the UPS men hidden behind piles of boxes, and the construction workers with hard hats, safety vests, and tool belts. In these disguises, Reeve and Alwood said, we could walk unnoticed into almost any event.
However, since Alwood and Reeve had taught us these disguises, I knew they’d be looking for invisible men. But what they wouldn’t be looking for was an invisible woman.
I slid under the back porch of a Hooters restaurant and found my bag of disguises. Miraculously, it was still intact in a small ditch in the rear of the crawl space where I’d cached it the night before. I grabbed the bag, climbed out, and entered a small corridor of shops above while Michael waited in the alley.
Inside, I found a public restroom and began my transformation. First I shaved my mustache and goatee in the bathroom mirror. Then I stepped into the stall and put on a flowery yellow cardigan I’d bought at Wal-Mart, after having seen a nondescript woman wearing a similar top.
I removed my cargo pants and replaced them with women’s black dress slacks, then swapped my sneakers for yellow flats. Next, I pulled out a purse I’d stuffed with the rest of my disguise: hat, wig, sunglasses, clip-on earrings, and makeup Katie had recommended—face powder, mascara, and lipstick.
I left the stall to put on the hat and wig. Gazing at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I realized, to my disappointment, that I didn’t even make a good transvestite, let alone a passable woman. I hoped Katie’s makeup tips would help.
I powdered my face, which helped conceal the faint outline of my freshly shaven beard. But as I was pulling out the mascara, the bathroom door swung open and a thick-necked college student with a crew cut and a striped button-down shirt stumbled in. His face was patchy and red, as if he’d been drinking.
He looked at me and slurred, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m doing a class exercise,” I blurted, hoping it would sound normal enough to calm him down. Then again, I was in a men’s room in Oklahoma, dressed like a woman.
“What the fuck are you?”
I wasn’t so sure I understood the question, but I tried to answer anyway. “I’m being chased by bounty hunters, and I need to dress like a woman so they don’t recognize me.”
He glared at me and knitted his brow. I tried to clarify: “It’s for a course I’m taking on urban evasion.”
In response, he opened the bathroom door and yelled into the corridor. “Hey, broheim, get a look at this.”
Seconds later, broheim walked into the bathroom. He was bigger than his friend, and just as drunk.
“What do we have here?” he asked as soon as he saw me.
At this point, I was sure I was going to get my ass kicked.
With the two of them blocking the exit, I needed to put my survival skills to use immediately. Unfortunately, there were no locks to pick and no cars to hot-wire. And instead of my Springfield XD, I was carrying a purse.
I’d learned from Mad Dog that force respects greater force. So I ripped my hat and wig off in one motion, mustered as much toughness as I could, and told them coolly and firmly, “I’m in the fucking marines. We’re doing a drill in the city. Now back the fuck out before I get the rest of my battalion.”
The thick-necked guy who started it all stared for a moment at my shaven head and then said, sheepishly, “I guess you are in the marines.”
Thank God I hadn’t attached the clip-on earrings yet.
I made a mental note to add another skill to my survival to-do list: hand-to-hand combat. I couldn’t be a runner all my life. The only reason they were leaving was that they thought I was a fighter. I was reminded of something Tom Brown had said at Tracker School when teaching us to hunt: “A fleeing animal is a vulnerable animal.”
After they backed out of the bathroom, I quickly changed into my jeans and tennis shoes again. Then I put on a military-green cap I’d bought, glasses, and a flannel shirt. With my facial hair gone, I hoped I’d be difficult enough to recognize. I’d learned my lesson: cross-dressing is not an urban survival tactic. It’s an urban suicide tactic.
When I returned to the alley, my urban escape team was waiting for me. Michael had been joined by four locals I’d recruited by posting a bulletin on MySpace the previous night, asking for volunteers in Oklahoma City for a top-secret mission. (Evidently, there’s not much to do in Oklahoma City on a Sunday afternoon.) Because the instructors had divided us into pairs, I hoped to escape their notice by moving in a larger group.
Sticking to alleys, parks, and industrial areas, we made our way to the Bass Pro Shop and safely carried out the first few missions. But then I made the mistake of leaving the group to grab another cache, which included a set of lock-picking tools. As Reeve had taught us, “Once you learn lock-picking, the world is your oyster.”
I found the cache behind a pile of sandbags lying along the banks of the city’s canal. But as I made my way back to the group, I noticed a bounty hunter on a bridge above. He hadn’t spotted me yet. But he would soon.
There didn’t appear to be anywhere to hide or run—except for a door on the side of the bridge. I tried the knob. It was locked. I grabbed my lock-picking tools, found a pick with a flat underside, stuck it inside the lock, and raked it against the pins. There were five of them.
I selected a thin pick with an S-shaped end know
n as a snake and stuck it into the lock. At the bottom of the lock, I inserted a tension wrench. As I raked the snake along the pins, I pressed gently downward on the handle of the tension wrench. After a few minutes, the wrench began to turn. I pushed slightly harder on the wrench and, with a click, the door was open.
This class was better than my entire college education.
I needed to remember this wasn’t a game. This was reality and it could have consequences.
After emerging fifteen minutes later, I rejoined my team and completed the remaining assignments, which mostly involved finding and photographing survival locations and items in the city: a water source, food source, daytime hiding location, safe place to sleep at night, easy-to-steal car, and an item that could be turned into a stabbing weapon.
This could just as easily have been a Fagin-like class for future career criminals. But like most governments, police forces, and armies, by calling ourselves the good guys, we had full permission to do any bad things we wanted—that is, until other people who thought they were the good guys felt otherwise.
While looking for water (available from several fountains) and food (available from edible plants and public ponds stocked with fish), I accidentally found several caches in the bushes made by homeless people. One contained a frying pan, the other a plastic bag with blankets inside. Between the cracks of the city, there was another world. And in that world, I learned, it was possible to live with no name and no money. I’d never thought of the homeless as survivalists before.
After completing our assignments, we reported back to Kevin. “How’d you get everything done so quickly without getting noticed?” he asked suspiciously.
Though I was worried he’d accuse me of cheating, I told him the truth: I’d recruited a scout and camouflage team on MySpace.
“I saw those guys, but I had no idea who they were. That goes down as one of the all-time great class stories.”
I was relieved. Unlike wilderness survival, urban survival had no restrictions. Whatever worked was permissible. And that’s why it appealed to me. After all, living like our primitive ancestors doesn’t necessarily mean using sticks and stones. It means using every resource available and any means possible.
When I’d talked to Spencer after returning from Gunsite, we’d concluded there were only two scenarios to plan for: bugging in and bugging out. Thanks to Reeve and Alwood, I was finally ready to aggregate the skills I’d learned and conduct a trial run of the apocalypse to make sure I was fully prepared.
That is, after I called the Krav Maga center in Los Angeles and signed up for street fighting lessons. I wasn’t going to get caught defenseless in a bathroom dressed as a woman again.
DAY ONE
12:39 A.M.
Tomas calls and announces, “L.A. has shut down. Lights out, water off, gas off.”
His timing couldn’t be worse. I have a towel wrapped around my waist, and I’m about to step into the shower. But I must follow the rules. And the first rule is that Tomas will call me at a random time during the week to begin the three-day test, simulating a citywide emergency shutdown. So evidently I won’t be showering for a while.
In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the outside world won’t exist until Tomas comes by in three days and tells me the crisis is over. The goal of the test is not just to take care of myself during that time without utilities, but to make sure I have the necessary logistics and supplies to hole up for an entire month or longer, both here and in St. Kitts, in the event of a major disaster.
I grab the flashlight near my bed, walk to the fuse box, and shut off all the circuits. Then I find the master valve for the water line and turn that off. Next, I turn off my BlackBerry and unplug my land line. Finally, I grab one of my new survival tools, the Res-Q-Rench—a combination seat-belt cutter, window punch, gas shutoff, and pry tool—and turn off the gas.
In the dark silence that ensues, I feel calm and look forward to a deep sleep. Because I am prepared—or at least think I am—I don’t fear the isolation. All I fear right now are the fish—which I’ve been practicing catching, gutting, and primitively cooking—spoiling in the freezer and stinking up the house.
I write on my troubleshooting list: “No fish.”
9:30 A.M.
I bring my laptop into bed to write. I work for half an hour with no TV, no ringing phone, no Internet, no e-mail with a link to some YouTube video of a hamster licking its balls to distract me. I’ve never had a more productive thirty minutes. This little experiment might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. At least that’s what I think until I discover the first flaw in my three-day test.
I credit this discovery to my bladder after eight hours of sleep.
The problem is that I can’t relieve myself in the toilets, because they may not have a last flush left. I can’t go in my backyard, because it’s small, I don’t want to attract vermin, and, well, I just don’t want to pee in it. And I can’t use a bush outside, because there’s a busy road in front of my house and I’ll definitely be spotted urinating alongside it.
As I’m kneeling above my kitchen sink and unzipping my pants, worried that without water to wash it down the drain, my urine will reek up the house along with the dead fish, I remember the seventy-two-hour survival kit I bought from Nitro-Pak after 9/11. It remains untouched in my garage.
I zip up, find the duffel bag, brush off the dust, and open the top flap to discover a stack of water pouches and, below them, this gift from heaven:
It contains a cardboard base, a cardboard seat, and five biodegradable garbage bags. I assemble the Jungle Jon and carry it to a secluded spot in the backyard where my neighbors won’t accidentally see me.
After finally emptying my bladder, I notice that the Jungle Jon has no lid. To keep the smell from attracting animals, I tie the ends of the bag together. I don’t want to waste these bags. I’m going to need them.
As I walk back indoors, I’m reminded, for some reason, of when I was ten years old at overnight camp. Every Wednesday, the counselors took us to town so we could purchase a couple dollars’ worth of candy. Most campers ate all their candy within the hour. But I hid the candy in my duffel bag to save for when I needed it most. Each week I stockpiled more sweets, until, at the end of the year, I had to throw most of my candy out. But I had no regrets over the waste. Though I never got to eat it all, I always had candy when I wanted it.
Even at age ten, I was stockpiling supplies.
I write on my troubleshooting list: “More biodegradable toilet bags.”
10:30 A.M.
I learned in CERT class that, in an emergency, I should first eat everything in my refrigerator that could go bad. Then I should move on to the freezer. And only then should I dip into the canned foods, MREs, and emergency supplies.
I check the refrigerator. There’s milk, eggs, cheese, more butter than I can possibly consume in a day, tortellini, half a pizza, and leftover Chinese food.
I gather twigs and sticks from the side of the road, add a strand of jute twine to use as tinder, and build a fire outside so I can make an omelet. Then I check the refrigerator to figure out what to add to it. The carton of Chinese leftovers seems to be in immediate danger of putrefaction.
I look at the egg rolls inside. They’re vegetables, meat, and eggs, basically. So I bring them to the fire, peel away the fried wrapper, and dump the contents into my omelet, avoiding the cabbage whenever I can.
The result: one of the most delicious omelets of my life. Necessity is truly the mother of invention.
I write on my troubleshooting list: “More egg rolls.”
11:30 A.M.
My next challenge is one thing the survivalists never taught me: how to wash the dishes WTSHTF. Without a creek, lake, or pond nearby, I’m not about to waste my precious drinking water to scrub a frying pan.
As I stack the dishes in the kitchen sink, I realize there’s water everywhere around me. Half the houses in the area have swimming pools, and most of my n
eighbors are probably at work. Though my house has a small pool of sorts, I drained it months ago because it was old and the plaster was cracking.
So I grab a waterproof plastic storage container from my garage, sneak into a neighbor’s backyard, fill the box halfway with chlorinated water, and run home, sloshing liquid everywhere.
I’m only half a day into my survival test, and already I’m looting the neighbors. Maybe the gun nuts were right after all.
I write on my troubleshooting list: “Repair and fill pool.”
1:30 P.M.
After eating, I return to the computer and enjoy an hour of uninterrupted writing time.
Until, suddenly, I feel a kick in my stomach. Now a gurgle. Then a push.
I try to ignore it. The last thing I want to do is sit on a piece of cardboard in my yard and take a dump in the blazing sun. I need to control myself. I can’t go through this after every meal. I must hoard my shits like candy at camp and save them for when I want them.
Survival is easy until your body begins to make demands.
I cross out “More egg rolls” on my troubleshooting list.
2:00 P.M.
I walk outside to urinate but am horrified to see a small puddle leaking from underneath the Jungle Jon. I lift the bag to check for a hole, and there’s water dripping from the plastic in multiple spots. Evidently, the bag is already biodegrading.
I take it outside and carefully throw it in a trash can. Then I grab a regular garbage bag and use it to line the Jungle Jon.
I never imagined so much of this journal would be devoted to my waste functions. I’ll never take a flushing toilet for granted again.
I cross out “More biodegradable toilet bags” on my troubleshooting list.
4:00 P.M.
I eat the leftover pizza, then start the generator so I can recharge my computer. As I’m writing, Katie drops by with her sister.
Katie is wearing a tight pink T-shirt, a pair of low-rise jeans, and three-inch heels. She is the very apex of civilization.
