“You obviously do. Greg, to be honest with you, I don’t know if a permanent, long-term love relationship can be sustained these days. I do know that life goes on. How do you feel about this?”
“Angry. Sad.”
“Depressed?” Andre probed.
“Yen, I guess,” Greg admitted, “I mean, we were just so close. It hurts a lot.”
“I know,” Andre said, again gently, and waited out the long silence that followed.
“Is this how you felt when mom left?” Greg finally asked.
“Yes,” Andre said, simply. Another, shorter silence, and Andre spoke again.
“Except that before your mother, I’d had a couple of girlfriends, one pretty serious. Janet was really your first girlfriend, so I know you’re feeling things a lot more strongly.” Andre ordered coffee at the end of the meal. “It may take you a long time to find someone else you feel as deeply about as you still do about Janet. And when you do, there will be no guarantees that your next love will last forever either. Or even as long. It may be that all we can do in this life is to accept the brief moments of happiness, and learn from the pain. Life is larger than Janet. Greg, you rebuild classic car engines and get a lot of satisfaction from it. You’ve burned up weekends on that lathe cutting obsolete parts. I’ve seen you spend eight hours straight reprogramming your computer or building some solid state hardware to augment it. I know you like school and I know you’ve got other good friends.”
“Dad, what went wrong?” Greg glumly finished off his lasagna, “I mean why did Janet do this?”
“Nothing necessarily went wrong,” Andre sighed. “Sometimes things change is all. Janet could have fallen in love with somebody else, yet still care for you, even love you in a way. Maybe not in the way you want to be loved by her, but that’s for you to decide. Things change. You might think I’m being cliched, but you’re still very young. Both of you. Maybe Janet felt that she was just too young to be committed to someone else for the rest of her life. Maybe she wanted to explore other people, and maybe you need to also. Believe it or not, you might be hurting badly now, but with time you will heal. That is, if you don’t become obsessed by it.”
“Why did mom leave, dad?” Greg asked, “She told me once it was to find her own life.”
“Because she couldn’t find her life with mine. Or in mine.” Andre interpreted, “She told you the positive side to her actions. Basically, she was trying to stop from being smothered by my career. She told me once that she felt like she was suffocating. I think that’s more accurate.”
“Do you think Janet felt suffocated?”
“Maybe not suffocated,” Andre left a credit card with the check, “Maybe more like confined. Alabaster is a small town, and even if we do five near the *big city,’ neither you nor Janet were raised in the city. You like Alabaster, but Janet, she’s now three thousand miles away, on another coast, in a big city. She’s looking back here from a long distance. Sometimes that can be a distorted point of view in its own way, even if its somewhat broader. And if it had been you who’d fallen in love with someone else, how would you have told Janet without hurting her?”
“I wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone else.”
“You didn’t fall in love with someone else,” Andre made the distinction as he signed the slip and initialed a gratuity, “Don’t be so sure you wouldn’t have, under the right circumstances. So, I shouldn’t get too worried about the hole in my beer supply?”
“No,” Greg was sheepish, “Just had a few friends over, after I found out. Talking things through.”
Greg did not mention Margaret. In turn, Andre did not mention that he had met Janet’s mother, Beverly, shopping at a department store before Christmas. She had given him several not so subtle hints as to this impending breakup over a little cafe coffee. He also realized that most of his words would be lost on his son, for the moment.
On the ride home, Greg sketchily described the campus occupation.
“We’ve got some sleeping bags in storage, don’t we dad?”
“Some,” he crossed Main. “We have two of your old Boy Scout bags. Then we have my bag and your mother’s. Also, we have the extra one we bought when Uncle Will stayed with us that summer.”
“Can I give the one’s we don’t need away?”
“Sure,” Andre smiled, the shadow of memories in his eyes.
“Ill keep the best three for us,” Greg said.
“Funny,” his father mused, “The more things remain the same, the more they change. When I was your age, little younger, we were also protesting against a war. The Vietnam War. Not me so much. I was only 13 when the war ended, but I’d been sympathetic. My older sister, your Aunt Francie, took me to demos when I was ten. Those days, the last thing anyone wanted was commitment and monogamy. Strange.”
Needless to say, Greg did not reveal that two pounds of riemanium were hidden in the basement of his dad’s house. He excused himself when back home, dug out the old sleeping bags, and piled them into his car’s passenger seat. He was determined to re-enter the liberated zone that was the P&M Building that evening. The guard, one of six standing in a semi-circle about the lobby entrance, objected when he tried to do so with four sleeping bags in tow. There were fully a hundred plus students hanging about outside the police line, on the steps and across the plaza. He found Eric, from the MDRG, and convinced him to momentarily neglect a beer and a girl to help Greg. They catapulted three of the bags over the campus cop line and into the building occupation.
The occupiers hooted and cheered as they accepted the sleeping bags. Greg shook Eric’s hand for a job well done, waved at the cop and circled off into the night, the remaining sleeping bag under his arm. The large vents on the long side of the P&MB were completely unguarded. and were where Greg had tasted his first Kajan. one of Larry’s imports, after school his freshman year. They had smoked the pinner in the manicured hedges and cypress trees where the vent fitted into the wedge of the building’s architecture at ground level. It was then that they had noticed that the campus gardeners kept the narrowest of paths open between the landscaping and the building’s walls, perfect now for allowing Greg to sneak in behind the campus cops. Once safely within the police line, safely in the occupation, he made a point of “thanking” the cop who had blocked his way before.
***
A lot of people did a lot of legwork. The Oakland demo was remarkable. Fifty thousand from the community thronged the sidewalks around the downtown police station massively protected by police, who were a bit chagrined by the crowd’s size and solemnity. Slogans were shouted, but curses were not. Black arm bands, and a theme of mourning pervaded. Some participants even carried candles. The rally’s sponsor, the ad hoc Oakland African American Alliance Opposed to Police Brutality included numerous local ministers, the spectrum of Black/African nationalist groups, the African American GI Organizing Project, even the more conservative Black civil rights groups such as the Urban League and the NAACP; the Alliance organizing from the New Afrika Center, heart of the Black nationalist fringe.
The rally lasted from 4 until 8, and community leaders violated noise laws to speak to the multitude over portable PA’s. None were hassled by the police. The cops did not dare. The entire event was peaceful. A young representative from Liberation Station Afrika named Leo ran around interviewing folks. A lot of Oakland, only minimally patrolled with the PD’s concentration in the four-block area around the station for the rally, proved an ideal situation for the city’s gangs. Then there were the Young Afrikan Lords doing security.
DL was the Lord’s warlord, gang president, head man, and he did as the other brothers did; Jack’o’Hearts, Hakim, Killah Samuels, Captain Zero and the rest. Two dozen Young Afrikan Lord members, each dressed in black clothing and leather, and each sporting a black beret with a red-green-black-gold patch, stood in a solemn, disciplined line between the demo and the PD. They had their backs to the police. Yes, it was the same Oakland PD who had busted each
at least a half dozen times before. They now itched to get their hands, or rather their batons, onto the proud, perhaps arrogant Lords.
A lot of the community at the demo were also leery, at first, of the strutting Young Afrikan Lords. Up until six months before, the Lords ran east Oakland turf; drugs, numbers, prostitution, protection, auto theft, the usual. They had been one of Oakland’s most powerful gangs, not gangbangers as much as entrepreneurs with uzis. When DL got out of jail at the beginning of last year, he had sought to reclaim his gang on the advice of Askia and Isaak.
DL had spent the first months out in the community talking with the numerous, fractious nationalist organizations ranged across Oakland, learning from everyone before making his move. And of course, he had talked with the brothers, the baddest as well as the most receptive, teaching what he could, for without them he could not make the move. About half of the Lords wanted to go with DL, so he gave the other half the gang’s entire operation—contacts, fences, bookies, rackets, the works—while keeping the name and treasury to date. Fair deal, all agreed and no friendships were severed.
“You pick up the gun outright,” Askia had warned him when DL visited him last, “And you’ll be dead before the year’s gone. Pigs will see to that. They don’t mind you being a gangbanger. That’s blacks selling to blacks and brother killing brother. S’long as you be doing that, they even help you. But you take up the gun against the powers that be, they gonna try and swat you like a fly. Ask the Panthers about it. Ask Malcolm. Ask the brothers in the Liberation Armies.
“And yah, maybe some of us want to be insects stinging and bothering this beast if that’s all we can do now. But there’s intelligent ways to be an insect. I learned that. You can be the mosquito, what comes out to sting at night and gets away. You can make yourself a scorpion and make your sting too strong to fuck with.”
Flashing off Askia’s words, DL thought about summers long ago, a summer picnic in the park with a dozen families from the same church, when one of the kids knocked down a hornets nest next to the picnic with an errant baseball. The hive boiled out, swarmed up and most effectively broke up the picnic. DL then turned to Isaak’s Nation of Islam for inspiration, not that he was religious at all. Their self-discipline and their enterprise—mosques, restaurants, schools, and the like—did speak to him. So DL, with his Lords, gambled.
He rented a commercially zoned warehouse on a year’s lease three months before, and the Lords set to work. Using the rest of their money, and then borrowing from businesses and friends, they rebuilt the warehouse up to code and under permit for low rent offices and store fronts. An Afrikan boutique, a Jamaican reggae shop, first a Nation of Islam barber shop and then their restaurant occupied the storefronts alongside DL’s own Afrocentric bookstore. And the cheap offices enticed a number of threadbare Black/Afrikan community organizations to relocate. The Caribbean import/export business subletted the remaining warehouse space not taken up by the Young Afrikan Lords’ own projects.
The Lords ran martial arts classes with paid instructors, aware that the self-discipline of karate, ju jitsu or kung fu had habit-kicking consequences. They opened a community library. They arranged computer and desktop publishing classes for neighborhood kids using borrowed and rented hardware. They made rooms available for community meetings. And they wooed a Chicano/Mexicano gang, the Latin 38’s, contemplating the transition to a political organization. They did better than break even on the rent, so much so that DL shared a paid, full time administrative position with Killah Samuels, while Hakim was now a full time, paid center staffer. They had just put in a community switchboard and were looking into setting up a free community medical clinic. They now debated changing their name to the New Afrikan Lords.
Others often termed DL’s anti-sectarianism naive. He was not ML, nor Muslim, nor Rasta, nor cultural nationalist. If anything he resurrected the self-help revolutionist gang ideas of the mid-60’s. If it does not work, chuck it. If it works, keep it. And the New Afrika Center worked, at least so far.
“You can’t keep righteous Muslims in the same building as pork-eating socialists and ganja smoking Rastas.” Isaak had written him from prison even as he thanked DL for the inspiring pictures and the books he had sent. “Shit’ll hit at the first barbecue.”
So DL organized the first barbecue himself; a veggie and fish fry kosher with almost everyone. It was the first time many of these people had talked to each other. Unfortunately, the Lords were getting to be another matter, with a strong Muslim tendency often blocking agreements and extending meetings until late into the night. Only DL’s street charisma and his audacious plans held them together at times.
One of those plans had been to let the Alliance meet at the Center, and to volunteer to do security for the rally. His offers had been much debated by various community organizations in the Alliance until noon Tuesday before both were approved. Silent and strong, and like so many before to include the Panthers and the Fruit of Islam, they stood up for resurgent African people as they held the line, their backs brazenly to the cops in downtown Oakland on that evening become night.
***
The ASU campus bookstore turned into a nightmare. Not only had the alarm been a bitch to disarm despite all his tools and skill, but Peregrine had not been able to crack the main safe in a comfortable time, even with an audio augment. The three cash registers gave him $60 total for his troubles. What’s more, in exiting, he was almost spotted by campus cops on their rounds. His hands shook for risking so much for so little. Peregrine cracked a beer on the fire escape to his apartment after the haunted drive home, watching as an ancient super continent’s patronage wound down for the night.
He ached, his stomach knotted up tight and not from guilt. He never felt guilt when the target was institutional or corporate. He thought of another, more personal close call, years ago. Once, after a raucous house party, he had lifted the wallet of one of the unconscious guests, boyfriend of someone he’d known who turned out to be a football half back. The girlfriend had seen him wandering suspiciously about, and she’d put two and two together when the half back woke up sans wallet, and the $150 in it. That it had been circumstantial evidence had prevented Peregrine from being pulverized by the angry jock unwilling to be charged with assault and battery. He remembered the furious half back’s huge hands clutching his shirt, lifting him up to slam him against a wall. He remembered his legs going numb and rubbery, and his stomach spasming up hard, just as they did now. He went for another beer from his fridge. Still too hyped for sleep, he filled a pipe for a smoke.
NINETEEN
BBC World Service Special Report
“Modern Counterinsurgency: The Weapons of War”
BBC Reporter: Nijal Thomas [1-13-2007]
(Electrostraca #: RNB/GM-113007-375-789-0376)
The guerrillas and general population of southern Mexico have found few ways to deal with newly developed anti-personnel technologies. Derm Ice comes in fine powder dusted from helicopter gun ships. It produces symptoms identical to frostbite, in the tropics. Killing gangrene follows immediately.
Neuro Trace comes in hair fine thread spun off a cruise delivered bindle bomb. It forms a seraphim fine webbing tapestried across wide areas of jungle. Once touched to the skin, it tangles and wraps, its mycotoxin eating down through the nerves with fiery pain. Eventually, it dissolves the nerve trace back to the spinal cord and brain.
Razor Pollen is a large, biodegradable, artificial hydrocarbon that wafts on the breeze and lacerates eyes, even skin, when rubbed in. Once embedded into flesh it quickly dissolves, combining with blood chemistry to cause tissue ulceration, ripe for festering infections.
Besides regular napalm, Smart Jelly is also used. The new gelled fuel can be configured into droplet and string explosions for wider, more thorough impact, coverage and destruction.
TWENTY
Marcus returned for lunch after another routine morning. Thursday morning. He styled himself an insurance claims adjuster to the
merchants and landlords he buttonholed on his rounds, seeking a missing beneficiary, one “Drew Silva,” in order to hand over a fat check. Then he laid out the description. Peregrine’s description. He had redrawn the police sketch to get rid of the cop-art feel, and he produced it. He intended to give merchants his beeper number and ask landlords to introduce him to the tenant in question, if there was a response. So far, nothing.
He piled briefcase and clipboard onto the desk next to the high tech complex he was amassing. Piles of video tapes and photographs were in the process of being run through the multi-media scanner. The photo materials were favors owed him by friends he had in TV, the press and government, as well as Captain Sampson coming through on his connections.
“I found a great little German deli in Novato,” Gwen accepted his peck-on-the-cheek over the boiling bratwurst. “By the way, Captain Sampson called. Said to call him back right away. That it was urgent. And, of course, Neal called for an update.”
Brian was not in, so Marcus left a message. Neal would want reassurances and the detective was not in the mood to baby-sit. Instead, he settled down to sausage with hot mustard and horseradish, cabbage, a dollop of German potato salad, beet relish and pickled mushrooms. The telephone rang as Marcus considered seconds.
“Hope you’re sitting down Marcus,” Sampson did not sound pleased, “Got a call at 11 from Shel Waxmann, program manager for KWNE radio. He received a kind of ‘news release’ in the mail today. From a group calling itself the ‘Mexican Revolution Solidarity Brigade’.”
“My God,” Mark realized, “You mean Sumner was right?”
“Looks that way,” the Captain snarled, angry at having to admit it. “Here’s what we have...”
Marcus listened to Brian shuffle papers over the phone.
End Time Page 17
