The Big Click: November 2014 (Issue 17)

by The Big Click

  “Actually, I didn’t want to do that,” Robin said. He sipped his coffee. “Are you asking me to consider the possibility that I’m the only person on Earth with free will, and that everyone else is just part of a CIA shadowplay put on for my benefit.”

  “Well, you’re the one who suddenly wanted to run, and you ran right into the arms of the cops. So maybe that was the CIA too, and I’m the only person on Earth with free will.” That shut him up. He even stood and poured his coffee down the sink. I definitely couldn’t tell Robin what I’d seen go down. I didn’t know much more than anyone else. Conner had been very forthcoming at the hospital—a random “black bloc” type in a mask appeared in front of him, stabbed him in the abdomen, and then jetted. He didn’t know why anyone would do that to him either, and could he please call his father in Croton-on-Hudson, New York now. His father got up early every morning to commute to Wall Street, where he made a very good living ruining the planet. His parents were divorced. Conner was estranged from both of them, but his father was the one to call, even though he lived across the country now. So, he had been a rich kid slummer. “I’m just testing you, Robin. A real CIA mindslave would finish his coffee and pour himself, and me, another.”

  He didn’t. He made some excuses about needing to hit the Whole Foods Dumpsters before the sun ruined the dairy products—“But you’re vegan!” I called out after him as the door slammed shut—and left me alone. I smoked a cigarette, then smoked another one. Conner Kiernan. Locally, people were abuzz. The argument had already turned political. Right-wing blowhards love a good bloodletting when they can pin it on the left. Leftie theories were about on par with Robin’s, along with a healthy dose of generalized distrust of the cops. Kiernan’s death—his murder—would wreck havoc on the scene, and the movement. Carte blanche to stop us on the streets, enter our apartments, infiltrate our meetings, and with enough “probable cause” or whatever that even Oakland’s usually liberal population would applaud as the pigs kicked down our doors.

  One more cigarette, and I decided. I needed something to organize my days, between protests. I’d find the killer.

  Crusties don’t really spend much time in Oakland, not since the Occupy encampment had been broken up. Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is more their scene. Plus, the kid who ran when Conner was stabbed had headed north. I took a pocketful of change and a spare pack of cigarettes with me and went looking for him. Maybe I’m getting old, but all these kids looked alike. Dirty blonde boys with crooked beards and ratty T-shirts, girls rebelling against beauty standards with heavy eye make-up and acne that was almost cultivated. They lounged on the curb, or leaned against storefronts—the record store, the café, the vacant lot with its peace symbol murals, and played with their pitbulls, shouted demands for money they knew they wouldn’t get from passers-by, and smiled when they saw me. I was a kindred spirit, with my own hoodie and its patches, my boots, baggy black jeans. And I had quarters and cigarettes. But none of the boys would talk to me when I mentioned Conner.

  Finally, outside of Cookies Rule Everything Around Me, a weird little light blue dump that served ice-cream sandwiches, one of the girls sidled up to me. “Hey,” she said. “Tall girl.” I glanced down; she smiled up. She had dull brown eyes, and a long scraggly line tattooed across her face. She was either looking to drop out of society completely, or had just been the last one asleep in the squat one night.

  “Listen, I have some information for you. I’ve seen you around. I know you’re not a fucking pig. But listen…” Her eyes darted toward the store. “Everyone thinks I’m a vegan. Go buy me a sandwich. Chocolate chip and blueberry ice cream.” I just had to laugh, but I did it. She said she’d meet me down the block, in the parking lot behind Happy High Herbs. She ate; I smoked. She licked her fingers. They were smudged. A wind blew past her.

  “So, you and Conner were together, eh?” I asked her. “And is what you have to tell me was that he, and you, are poseurs?” She didn’t say anything, so I told her. “You smell too good to live on the streets. And that tattoo—”

  “Screw you,” she said quickly.

  “Did you just say screw you? Who even says that anymore?”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. “Conner was trans. That’s why he was on the streets. He had some money his mom couldn’t keep from him, so he could afford T.”

  “I’m sorry…” I can be a real jerk sometimes. And I had questions, but she slowly polished off the ice cream, making me wait. Fake vegans are everywhere.

  “Did he have enemies? How much money are we talking about?” I was thinking maybe the parents had Conner bumped off somehow, or maybe even a transphobic person in the movement. Some manarchist asshole maybe, or even a psychopathic radical feminist with a hate-on for transfolk. It’s not like Guy Fawkes had looked all that different than I did.

  She shrugged. “We all have enemies, right? I don’t know. I just… I mean, the body’s in the morgue, right? He didn’t have bottom surgery. I was surprised the media didn’t report it.”

  “Yeah…”

  I made to go, and she asked after me. “Hey, Tall Girl!”

  “Maggie,” I said, over my shoulder.

  “What are you going to do if you find the guy who did it?”

  “How do you know it’s a guy,” I turned to face her.

  “Women don’t do these things,” the girl said. She had an ice cream mustache, like a little girl. “But what will you do?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t even know, really. It depended on why Guy Fawkes had done it.

  That night, I spent online, switching between my job—I do web stuff for HotQUILT.com; Hot Queer Undecided Intersex Lesbian Trans. Dot Com—and various vids and pics of the demo. Their media and ours. For a security conscious bunch, anarchists sure spend a lot of time posting to Facebook. Finding a Guy Fawkes in a crowd was like finding a particular piece of hay in a haystack, but Conner I found, and I found his friend. Someone had even tagged one of the photos he was in. Jeremy Saltz. And even better, he was a friend of Robin’s. (Robin has like 2000 Facebook friends.) I logged me out, logged him in, and found that Jeremy was dumb enough to have given Facebook a phone number.

  I call him and he answered. But when Jeremy said “Hello” I got confused and excited and blurted out, “Who killed Conner Kiernan? Was it a hit? His parents? Did you know he was trans?”

  “Who the fuck is this?” he demanded. His voice squeaked.

  “I’m trying to find out who killed Conner Kiernan.”

  “You’ve been asking about me, haven’t you?” he said. “The tall chick. Shit shit shit.” There was noise in the background. Street traffic, cars. Then he spoke again. “Why do you care?”

  “Why don’t you?” I said. “I’m not a cop. I’m… a witness.”

  “I care. I just, how do I know that you’re not, uh… the killer.”

  “Did the killer call Conner bef—”

  He blurted out, “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, that’s a yes.” He grunted affirmatively. Good thing Jeremy hadn’t been arrested last night. I didn’t know how much he knew about the movement, our plans for upcoming demos and other actions, but this kid had no poker face.

  “Conner was worried. I dunno. We had a lot of things going on. I…” Then he realized that he still didn’t know who I was and shut up. But he didn’t hang up. A nice, polite boy. Jeremy probably didn’t even get many calls on his cell phone. “Look, we were involved in a lot of stuff. Some of it went back. Don’t call me back, I’m gonna throw this phone into the bay right now. I’m leaving town. Maybe the state. Don’t try to find me.”

  “Are you going to Portland?” Everyone loves Portland.

  “Yea—ah, damnit!” Then Jeremy hung up.

  I didn’t learn much, but I did get a confirmation of what I’d already suspected. The anarchist left, despite all the great projects and experiments in freedom and willingness to fuck shit up—we were fucked if kids like Jeremy were involved. The state hardly needed to oppress
us. We’d just self-destruct, or turn ourselves in, sooner rather than later.

  When Robin came home from the night shift at the all-night copy shop, I asked him how he knew Jeremy. “Your Facebook friend,” I had to remind him. Then I had to narrow it down: a smelly street kid. Local. Blonde fauxhauk. You’re in three pictures with him. And you’re both holding up a giant papier-mâché puppet of Mitt Romney with crepe paper blood pouring out of his mouth.

  “Oh, him!” Robin said between spoonfuls of lentils. “D’you think he did it? He killed Conner Kiernan? We’re having a vigil tonight, by the way, if you’re so interested.”

  “No, he didn’t do it, but he was standing next to Conner when it happened.”

  “So, maybe he did have something to do with it.”

  “I was standing next to Conner too!”

  Robin eyed me for a long moment. “Well, he’s a Democrat you know.” His lip curled when he said Democrat. “Both of them. They were outreach activists, trying to get street kids registered to vote.” We hate Democrats. They’re just capitalism’s B-team. Nothing’s worse than some well-dressed coffee-clutching non-profit types showing up and collecting names for petitions that never went anywhere but to the NSA, handing out their bumper stickers and pamphlets, bursting into red-faced rage on behalf of “the people”, and then finally clearing us all off the streets, to wait for Election Day and the Messiah that would never come. One of the major strategic reasons we bloc’d up to smash storefront windows was to keep the Democrats away. We wanted to be something other than politics as usual. The Democrats hated our spectacles of non-violence. It reminded them too much of the TV news footage of their own foreign wars and occupations.

  “So, if he was a Democrat, maybe he was a mole for the cops too,” Robin said.

  “And someone murdered him to keep him quiet? An anarchist did that? Or the cops did?”

  Robin shrugged, non-committal. Every theory sounded good to him. I lost my appetite and took my cigarettes, and my laptop, to the roof. Oakland looked peaceful enough from up here. Riots get cleaned up quickly, and there’s already so much plywood over the windows of the abandoned houses and burnt-our storefronts that the few new additions barely made a difference. Back to the computer, back to the footage. Lots of boys in their comic-book Guy Fawkes masks running around. The revolution, brought to you by Warner Bros.! For a bunch of people who hate corporate hegemony, we sure know how to keep hoodie manufacturers and boot manufacturers in business. And then I remembered something about the killer—the shoes were all wrong. Back in 2007, in Canada, a bunch of Quebec police provocateurs dressed like the black bloc and got themselves “arrested” for throwing rocks. The boots had given the hoax away.

  But my Guy Fawkes hadn’t been wearing either ratty Doc Martens or well-worn combat boots, or police-issue footwear. He—no, she!—had been wearing something a little different. Her whole outfit was slightly off, really. A windbreaker shell jacket with nice lines, instead of a hoodie. And fancy clog boots. She’d stepped right over me, on her way to Conner. It was dark, except for the flickering of flames and wide splashes of red and white police lights, but I saw it clearly. A middle-class brand, maybe Patagonia or Billabong. I should know. I’m as middle class as anyone. Born and raised in Orange County. College at Smith. Back to California because I hated cold weather and missed real oranges. And only then, politics. Free oranges for everyone, on demand.

  So, why a woman? So much for that girl and Women don’t do these things. Radfem?—not that kind of shoe. Jilted ex, maybe one who was upset that he was trans? Female cop? Then I remembered Perez. Guy Fawkes had been tall enough to be a dude, but so was I. And even in the chaos of a riot, it’s hard for someone to swim against the current. Guy Fawkes had been heading toward the police line. Perez must have pretended to club her, like she did me, then let her do the deed. There were still holes in the theory—it’s harder to track the movements of a particular crusty punk in a riot than it is to keep your eye on a single drop of rain in a squall. So, Perez…

  Oakland Copwatch almost certainly had a file on L. Perez, but when I tried to click over to the page, I got nothing. The wireless was down. But I didn’t need Copwatch. When I turned to go back downstairs her small frame was filling the bottom half of the door. She called me “Margaret Wilkins” and didn’t look happy. Behind her, another cop lurked in the stairwell. Robin was behind him, looking defeated. I did my best impression of accidentally dropping my laptop hard enough to screw up the hard drive.

  I had a lot of questions for Perez, and she for me, but I knew better than to say anything other than my one word: lawyer. Which they ignored at first. It felt so strange, to be arrested alone, without comrades on either side of me, without the security of the knowing that there would be a protest outside the precinct house, a quick 6AM hearing, dropped charges and a welcome-home party for the returning heroes. They ran me through the system the hard way—I had to spread my ass and my vagina, made me take a fucking pregnancy test in case they felt like beating me later, and then they put me in a holding cell with the usual crowd of working women and the unfortunate girlfriends of lumpenprole entreprenuers. For thirty hours, my nickname was White Girl rather than Tall Girl. I took a shit in the little public commode with everyone watching, and didn’t cry.

  “So, you were in the riot downtown two nights ago,” Perez asked me in the interrogation room. This wasn’t like Law & Order at all. The lighting was better. She was out of uniform, in a boxy suit. I checked her shoes. They were proletarian. Nothing fancy.

  “Lawyer.”

  “Did you have fun your riot, White Girl? Real radical of you guys, the way you start trouble on yuppie blocks and then run into the black neighborhoods when the cops show up.”

  “Lawyer.”

  “Did you happen to be rioting along with Conner Kiernan? Also white.”

  “Lawyer.”

  “She was born Constance Kiernan, you know,” she said. “Funny, her parents sent an old picture. They didn’t want to come to the morgue to ID the body. She was a pretty girl. He died an ugly boy.” Perez licked her lips. “What a waste.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know why we gave you the body cavity search? I made up some bullshit about drugs. Told the judge you probably had bath salts up your va-jay-jay. He bought it. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a pretty boy transitioning over to being an ugly girl.”

  Transitioning. For a transphobe, Perez knew the lingo. Was she trying to tell me something? Did she think I was Guy Fawkes, or did somebody higher up want to frame me? Either way, it sounded like a job for my…

  “Lawyer.”

  I didn’t even have a lawyer of my own, and my case was apolitical, so it took another day to spring me. The fat-acceptance genderfluid genderqueer porn must flow, so my boss called her lawyer, whose clerks and interns went through all the visual media related to the demo and managed to find a tenth of a second of video featuring me crawling along the curb as Guy Fawkes leapt over me and then out of the frame to kill Conner Kiernan. No hearing, no grand jury—the judge and my attorney’s partner, whose names I never even learned, were members of the same eating club in Princeton. And of course, my boss and her lawyer and her law clerks were all Smithies, like me. Every little bit of class privilege helps.

  I went home, found my cell phone in the hidey hole Robin prepared in case of arrests, and called Jeremy right away. He answered, of course. “Glub glub, is this a fellow fish at the bottom of the Bay?”

  “Shit,” he said. He recognized me.

  “Obviously, only a Democrat would go running to the cops,” I explained.

  “You assholes sell each other out all the time. Half of you are cops. You play into the hands of the cops with your stunts.”

  “Actually,” I said. “We’re all pawns of the Glazier Industrial Alliance. Think about it? Who benefits from broken windows, but window replacement factories …And even the Nike Store has to buy local too.” Jeremy didn’t hang up. �
��So, why didn’t you hang up just now?”

  “Look, she found me. She made me tell her about you. She—”

  “She who? Perez? Or the woman who killed Conner.”

  Jeremy was authentically surprised. “That was a woman? For real? But how would Officer Perez know…” Officer Perez, he called her. Jesus Christ, why didn’t this kid just get an internship with CALPIRG and call it a political day?

  How would Perez know? She was either part of a conspiracy to kill Conner, or was covering up for something she found out after the fact. I had managed to bust my laptop but good up on my roof, but my smartphone still worked. The Copwatch site coughed up a fun detail—where Lola Perez liked to drink. Sometimes she’d take out her service revolver and spin it around on the bar.

  Luckily for me, Perez favored the White Horse Bar, a lesbian joint in Temescal. Just a half a block from Berkeley. If there was any trouble, I could run across the border, where she might not shoot me and get away with it. The BPD didn’t like it when OPD officers shot people over the imaginary line that separated the cities. At least that’s what I told myself. And two-buck PBRs for happy hour. Maybe I’d meet a nice girl. So I went there every night, for three nights, leaving when the karaoke—ugh!—or the drag king show—yay!, but I had bigger fish to fry—started. It was Thursday when Perez showed up, with a certain girl in tow.

  “Hey there, Officer,” I said. “You know, she ain’t a real vegan. I didn’t know she liked bacon, though.” I was surprised that Perez was the one who blanched. The girl smiled; her face tattoo looking like a primitive city bus map.