Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  “Great,” I said. “What do I do now?”

  “You’ll come to Shabbes dinner this Friday,” Red told me, “and here’s some literature.” He handed me a pile of pamphlets as thick as a book. Then one of his companions, a very short narrow-shouldered man, tugged on Red’s sleeve and rattled off a few sentences of Yiddish. Red nodded judiciously and passed the message on to the third man, who nodded and drew a box from beneath the table. From the box he took two smaller boxes, with black leather straps dangling from them. These he proposed to tie onto me.

  I’d seen them before. Tefillin, or phylacteries. You bind one to your arm, one to your forehead. They contain scripture that, as far as I knew at the time, was supposed to osmose into your bloodstream. It seemed an easy way to learn, so I stuck out my right arm. The Lubavitchers stopped and glanced at one another. Wrong arm. I stuck out my left. “I was never bar mitzvahed,” I explained. They took it in stride, with raised eyebrows but firm purpose. The leather straps wound around my arm. “I was raised by my mother,” I went on, “and she isn’t—wasn’t—Jewish.”

  The Lubavitchers froze.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Red and the third man stared at each other, then turned to Narrow Shoulders, who shrugged what little he had. “What is there to do?” he said. The third man started unwinding the straps.

  “Am I done?” I asked. “That’s it?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Red, turning away. “We cannot help you after all. Perhaps a Reform rabbi might, could, I don’t know.”

  MAKE ME A JEW in Red’s eyes? I don’t think so, no more than he could unwind his leather fast enough to erase dos pintele yid—my fragment of a Jewish soul—that had provoked the binding. Identity is a con like that: One eye winks, then the other. It’s not just blood, either.

  Look at my friend Ann, a pale wisp of a woman after the long months of her father’s dying, a whiskey in one hand and a beer in the other, a cigarette between her lips and a hurled roast potato skidding past her into the snow.

  She’s standing in front of the house her father built with the stones she brought him, among the men and women she grew up with and the men and women she found elsewhere. Tomorrow we’ll all leave. It’ll be Ann and the woodstove and the deerskins. Two mothers gone and one dad dead and the only one who ever told Ann she loved her was the stepmom who hanged her, yes, actually hanged her, in the garage. She still sends cards. She even showed up at the memorial. “What a hoot,” says Ann.

  Ann can’t stay in this house—neither she nor Dostoyevsky belongs here—and she has no particular place to go. She’s quit her job in the city and given away her apartment to someone who can deal with its collapse and written her German architect husband a fat check from her inheritance—good-bye and good luck—and tucked away all her secret poems. She’s ready to move. She’s in her late thirties, freed of her latest marriage, childless, jobless, only her memory of the hollow to sustain her. That, and her ex-Mennonite father’s industrious millions. Or million, singular. Or at least a couple hundred thousand. The myth may have been bigger than the reality, but there’s enough to keep her in Triscuits and SpaghettiOs for a long while. Her plan, in the making since the old man began his dying, is “travel,” itself a glamorous destination, so unlike the stones from the stream across the road with which her father built the bony house she won’t live in. She won’t come back to the hollow, she won’t come back to the city, and who knows when I’ll see her again?

  More important, what book will she take to start off her grief vacation? Not Karamazov. Enough already, we both agree. To hell with the fathers and the saints and all the other myths of purity. It’s not that Ann hates the hollow (she loves it) or that I’m not a Jew (I am, a yid and a half divided by three-quarters), it’s just that we’re bound to stories that don’t so much resolve as unravel, not unlike this one. The dead leave without saying good-bye, the past fails to provide an adequate explanation, and you can go home again but why the hell would you want to? The house Ann’s dad built looks like it will stand forever, but the memory of it is already breaking down. This is, I suspect, as it should be. Half-life, nuclear decay, all the little parts of a thing moving on and becoming something other. Were it not so, what would we build from?

  I have the perfect traveling book for Ann. Before her dad died, she wrote that she wanted My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. A great Jewish novel. Of course, I wouldn’t think this was a very Jewish book if it weren’t for Colin Powell. Normally I’m not one to admire generals, but Colin Powell is an exception. Forget politics: What counts is that he speaks Yiddish and his favorite novel is My Ántonia.

  When Colin Powell was a kid, growing up in Harlem, a West Indian and thus not quite an American, he got a job working in a Jewish furniture store, which is where he learned the Yiddish. The owners taught him so he could listen in on the calculations of young Jewish couples figuring what they could spend, figuring the black boy couldn’t understand them. Thus the general spake Jewish.

  As for My Ántonia?

  Ann offers a theory: “I wanted to read the Pavel and Peter story again,” she writes, “about throwing the bride and the groom to the dogs.” No reason, she wrote, “Just because.”

  Ann’s dad once shot a crow from his front porch and grilled it up and ate it, just because he wanted to know if the caw-caws taste as bad as they sound. Apparently they do. They’re not good eating, but that’s identity for you: greasy, without much meat on its bones, fit for the dogs.

  Ann, the book is in the mail. Use all the parts; get lost; good-bye.

  5Quebrado

  EVEN BEFORE HE was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol, a living folk song, than a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of Times Square taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with wired-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it close in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, a journalist for a radical paper called the Indypendent, met Brad at an Earth First! action in Virginia the summer before he was killed, and although he wasn’t her type she followed him away from the crowd to a waterfall, where he stripped naked, revealing thighs thick with muscle and a torso long and broad. She kept her swimsuit on. He disappeared behind the sheets of cascading water. When she ducked behind the falls, too, and he moved to kiss her, she turned away. She thought there was something missing. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely.” Or maybe just tired, after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.

  He was one of America’s fifty “leading anarchists,” according to ABC’s Nightline, which in 2004 flashed Brad’s mug shot as a warning, a specimen of the black-clad nihilists said to be descending on New York for that year’s Republican National Convention. “Leading anarchist”—that was the kind of clueless oxymoron that made Brad break out in a yaklike guffaw. Brad wasn’t a “leader,” a word he disdained; he was a catalyst, the long-limbed climber who trained city punks on city trees for forest defense in the big woods west of the Rockies, the activist you wanted in the front row when you gave your public report on the anarchist scene in Greece or Seoul or Cincinnati, even though he was also the dude who would giggle when he fumigated the room with monstrous garlic farts, one of his specialties. In the 1990s he’d helped hand New York mayor Rudy Giuliani a public defeat, organizing anarchist punks into a media-savvy civil-disobedience corps that shamed the mayor into calling off plans to sell the cit
y’s community gardens. In the new decade he became a star of Indymedia’s anti–star system, an interconnected, anticorporate press that lets activists communicate directly instead of waiting to see their causes distorted on Nightline.

  Brad always seemed to be everywhere. One friend remembers him in Ecuador, plucking his bike from a burning barricade; another remembers him in Quebec City, riding his bike into a cloud of tear gas, his bony frame later shaking with happy rebel laughter while a comrade poured water into his burning eyes.

  In the end, the one that never ends—the martyrdom of Brad Will—he would become best known for the last minutes of his last day, October 27, 2006, in Oaxaca de Juárez, the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where he had gone to document a strike blowing up into a general revolt. Brad and his video camera peer through broken glass at a smashed computer; hold steady on a strangely peaceful orange-black plume rising from a burning SUV; crawl under a truck to spy on a group of men with guns. Brad feints and charges toward them alongside a small crowd armed with stones and bottle rockets, chasing men slinging AR-15s. With two minutes left, Brad inches toward the door behind which he knows more men with guns may be hiding. “Si ven a un gringo con cámara, mátenlo!” government supporters announced on local radio around the time Brad arrived in Oaxaca—“If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!” Then there are the last words heard on Brad’s video before he films a puff of smoke, a muzzle flash beneath a gray sun, and finally his own knees rising up toward the lens as he falls, the cobblestones rushing up: “No esten tomando fotos!”—“Stop taking pictures!”

  He was scheduled to fly back to Brooklyn the next day.

  DURING THE THREE WEEKS he spent in Mexico before he was killed, Brad would make fun of his half-assed Spanish by introducing himself as Quebrado—“Broken.” He didn’t look it. Six feet two, with a frame broad as his father’s—a veteran of Yale’s 1960 undefeated football team—he was vegan-lean but ropy with muscle, “a little stinky and a lot gorgeous,” says his friend Kate Crane. Back during his twenties, when he’d bring a slingshot to demonstrations instead of a camera, he thought of himself as half warrior, half poet, a former student of Allen Ginsberg’s now specializing in crazy-beautiful Beat gestures recast in a militant mode. He called it “sweet escalation,” protest not as a means to an end but as a glimpse of a world yet to be made.

  By the time he got to Oaxaca he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a one-named Brazilian filmmaker who produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” But in the end there were no noble last words. Just an image, the last one he filmed: the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.

  “Yo d,” he wrote to Dyan Neary, an ex-girlfriend, three days before he died, “jumping around like a reporter and working my ass off—been pretty intense and sometimes sketchy.” The governor of Oaxaca had sent in roving death squads, pickup trucks of paramilitaries firing on the barricades. The bodies were piling up. Brad was getting scared.

  i went back to the morgue—it is a sick and sad place—i have this feeling i will go back there again with a crowd of reporters all pushing to get the money shot—the body all sewed up and naked—you see it in the papers every day—i am entering a new territory here and don’t know if I am ready.

  Ready for what? Revolution? Blood? Brad had seen a little bit of both before, in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. The events in Oaxaca were bigger, more exciting and more frightening. What had started as a strike by the state’s seventy thousand teachers had exploded after the governor attacked them with tear gas and helicopters. The federal government feared a domino effect, other states following Oaxaca’s example and rebelling against Mexico’s corroding regime, a new Mexican revolution gathering as the one-hundredth anniversary of the last one approached. In Oaxaca every kind of leftist group—indigenous fronts, unions, students, farmers, ancient Trotskyites, young anarchopunks—came together in an unprecedented coalition and took over the city. The incoming national government of Felipe Calderón, about to take power after an election so crooked that it drove millions of Mexicans into the streets, was ready to declare the entire state of Oaxaca “ungovernable.”

  Brad knew what to do: Film it. He’d send the tapes home, screen them in squats and at anarchist infoshops. Revolution is real, he’d say; here’s the proof. Burning tires, masked men stuffing rags into bottles of gasoline, farmers with machetes; midnight soccer games, barricades basketball, three men with guitars who sing a song under a streetlight for Quebrado, “Qué lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido!”—“How far I am from the land where I was born”; interviews with housewives’ collectives, “people’s police” debating, striking secretaries knitting; scenes of free kitchens, free clinics, buses commandeered by farmers and fishermen who roamed the city shutting down roadwork construction, freeing men from their jackhammers.

  And there are the dead. In a Catholic church young women wave white lilies and weep; at a street funeral old women sing an anthem with their fists raised in the air; in a red tent at night a father pounds the silver box that holds his son and delivers a eulogy directed via Brad’s camera to “all the scum who want to rape our land,” as his wife and his son’s widow lay hands on the coffin. “The people don’t have weapons,” cries the father. “All we have are our voices.”

  “La muerte as gobierno malo!” chant the bereaved—“Death to the wretched government.”

  “Viva Alejandro!” shout other mourners. Alejandro García Hernández, forty-one years old, shot twice in the head by soldiers who tried to crash through a barricade opened to let an ambulance pass. Brad wrote home: “they had to open his skull to pull the bullet out—walked back with him and his people. And now alejandro waits in the zocalo” (the city plaza):

  he’s waiting for an impasse, a change, an exit, a way forward, a way out, a solution—waiting for the earth to shift and open—waiting for november when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song . . . one more martyr in a dirty war . . . one more bullet cracks the night.

  KENILWORTH, ILLINOIS, isn’t a town that raises radicals. A mile wide, tucked away near the beach on the North Shore of Chicago, Kenilworth is the kind of place where the wrong side of the suburb means that houses cost only a million dollars. There were four African Americans in the most recent census, and if there were any Democrats around when Brad was growing up, a family friend named Stephanie Rogers told me, they kept quiet. “Kids would study that East Coast model, towns like Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s what Kenilworth wanted to be.”

  Not the Wills. They didn’t follow anyone. “The Wills were leaders,” says Rogers. “Everybody knew the Wills. Being a Will meant you had a sense of honor. Wills do the right thing.” Brad’s father, Hardy, owned a small manufacturing firm; his wife, Kathy, stayed home with their children. There was Wendy, a star student, and two years behind her, fraternal twins, Christy, a natural athlete, and Craig, who simply excelled at everything. Then, two years later, came Brad.

  Brad was different. “We were all active kids, curious, athletic, and we would roughhouse and play ball,” his sister Christy told me when I visited her in San Diego, where she lives a few blocks from the beach. “Brad was less interested in those kinds of things.” He liked costumes, playacting, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars, one of the few passions he shared with his father. Hardy Will, an engineer, liked to imagine how other worlds might work. Brad liked to build them. He’d arrange miniature societies with his action figures. Not soldiers. “Adventure People,” says Christy, a forgotten line of smiling Fisher-Price figurines without weapons, most of them wearing 1970s jumpsuits. Later one of Brad’s favorite movies was It’s a Wonderful Life; lanky, amiable Jimmy
Stewart provided a model for the way Brad would move through the world as he grew older, a Teen Beat–gorgeous geek with feathered hair and a broad smile spreading beneath dreamy eyes, a dungeon master who was friends with jocks, preps, and stoners.

  But he was slowly splintering away from the high-school-college-back-to-the-burbs loop that was the natural order of things in Kenilworth. “It was a struggle to open my life,” Brad would tell a Venezuelan newspaper years later. “I didn’t know much about the truth of the world, but little by little, I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone.” Without the help of anyone. It was such a Will family thing to say.

  The Will children were expected to be athletes. Brad ran, without much enthusiasm. Instead of joining clubs he worked after school, as a flower-delivery boy, a library shelver, selling newspaper subscriptions. “Brad was perplexing,” says his mother, Kathy. His sister Wendy went to Stanford, Craig followed their father to Yale, and Christy went to Scripps. Brad’s grades hovered between B and C. Only by acing his entrance exams could he squeak into Allegheny, a small school in western Pennsylvania. There he joined a frat, majored in the Dead, and studied On the Road. Mostly he liked getting high, passing a pipe back and forth with his friend Matt Felix, an outdoorsman from New Hampshire who introduced Brad to the radical environmentalism of Earth First!, defined by direct action and the theatrical gesture. When he graduated in 1992, Brad went west to Boulder, Colorado, where he began attending classes taught by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

  Even more influential than Ginsberg was Peter Lamborn Wilson, who under the pseudonym Hakim Bey was known for a manifesto called The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or TAZ, a study in “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism,” and a guidebook to the life Brad was beginning to lead. “What happened was this,” Bey writes. “They lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”