MICHELLE FOECALT: ...was completely unrelated. But as for the captain...
what exactly was the point of the whole venture?
NG: Well, it had... it was actually kind of lacking in any real
drive or purpose. Well, there was
drive. Definitely that. But it was blind. Kind of like... you know, when you're
excluded from a law, when you're that homo sacer and you're inclusion in
the law is simply by the exclusion... it's Roman-esque, it's something
Caesarian. I was on that line though.
MF: And so... here, I read that... what was the story you told then? I remember hearing some biopolitic piece...
real folklore, the "replacement of history" stuff.
NG: Oh, that. I kind of trailed off
with all of that, but in essence,
There was this captain...
NG: ...I don't even really know if you want to call him that, he had this
really egalitarian nature about him. He... he kind of had this limp from a
street battle in Gary that he would call-
MF: Continue.
NG: Right. I digress. So,
He was a hero at this point. After
the Battle for Milwaukee, we all really learned something, even if it was just
through the television reports, the videos of en masse resistance, pushing the
cops out street by street, the burning cars and the strikes. It seemed the Egyptians taught us something,
pushed the Occidental hair out of our eyes and made us come up for air (real
air, the kind of air you can't breathe in Terre Haute by anti-negation laws).
Milwaukee was a win.
The captain had a roll in that. This
certainly assisted in his repetoire all the more.
They said the first molotov thrown at the first police station was the
flame cracklin' heard 'round the world.
At least the Midwest. Apparently,
the captain threw it.
When Milwaukee fell to us, Los Angeles hopped up. Such an odd way a fervor can spread in such a
patchy manner. What did a ragtag militia
of illegal immigrants, former gang members, girls paying for school in Porn
Valley, failed mathematicians, drug dealers have to do with the (mostly)
white-bred insurrectionaries? Apparently everything. Everyone earning minimum wage or slaving away
in a college to no avail was hitting the streets in the coming weeks. Looting happened, sure, but we felt it
justified. We were taking hours of our
lives back, drunk and wide-eyed with passion.
Do you think we were wrong to live with such passion? With such gusto in our lungs,
breathing fire and making an adventure for ourselves, even if only for a
moment, even if the escalating police violence threatened to silence us, perhap
for good?
MF: Tell us about the captain. What was his moment?
NG: Ah. The moment. Such a moment it
is.
He had ended up in Los Angeles... organized quite a bloc in Silicon
Valley. He fucked shit up, with such a
large personality that you couldn't help but embrace his calculated
nihilism. After Los Angeles and Atlanta
and Detroit, we started feeling really good.
New York was a loss, for now, but the captain had talked of heading out that
way.
In Atlanta, we had the entire west side focused semi-inward as a commune,
centered around a garden. Best fucking
potatoes you will ever eat. I'm from Ohio... it was so naturalizing to be in
Atlanta, and I'm not even sure in what way that occured in me. Kids that had
been killing each other in the streets a year ago went from fighting the police
two months ago to teaching their younger siblings how to clean the
vegetables. It was surreal. The captain was so unaffected by it, acted as
though it was natural. It was, our minds
were just in another place, maybe.
When the commune spread to the entire west side of the city, a few people
started a zine. An idealistic attempt at
inscribing a culture on the socious? Probably. But the captain loved it. "A free press is of revolutionary
concern. Don't let your head get too far
from you." Said with such a quite impasse, a vicious subtlety that sat
well in one's memory. Albeit, with a sharp glare.
People submitted pieces all the time to the zine. They called it "Milwaukee Rose," in
memoriaum of some Wisconson affinity group that had all gotten gunned down in
one of the early days. It was good
stuff. I would take each new issue to
the captain... he was always so lost in it for a good hour.
But this guy... Calvin something. He was older. He started writing in,
tearing apart the whole revolution, shooting holes of bullshit all through the
silent promises we had been making each other, for when the State fell and we
were left with a blank canvas, a chance to revolve instead of react. We were
ready to quit being stimuli and this Calvin... this Calvin guy was praising
what we had just cast out; the life of minimum wage and disrespect and
(non)consensual slavery. We couldn't have it. The captain knew that. Always.
But Calvin was smart. Very smart.
His pieces were rhetoric, head to toe, but razor sharp. They tore through the ideology, gutted it,
stuck a flamethrower up in the insides and burnt away all the organs and tissue
and muscle. Made the bones charcoal black. He was good at convincing. Pretty
soon, he'd have the whole commune up in arms in confusion.
"American's have a cultural memory of about six weeks."
The captain always said it. It wasn't long after Atlanta was made
liberated. Oedipus is a sneaky fuck. Calvin just might convince everyone their
slavery was for their benefit.
The "Milwaukee Rose" wouldn't refuse him publishing. They were true to the cause (and rightfully
so) but the captain was walking a tight rope.
"You see, N____ G__, I'm at an odd, denigrated four way stop sign, you
hear?" he shot a glance at me that brushed my cheek bone and fell to the
back of me. I nodded, reflexively, transfixed. "I am faced with two
choices. One is to militantly stand by
the principles and truth procedures I've thus far based my life upon. By doing this..." he paused. "I
will be possibly sacrificing everything.
A lot of people's deaths and whether or not they were in vain... this
all falls to me. So... I can stand by
those morals and let what happens happen... or I can actively take a part in my
destiny and eliminate the threat. By
doing so, I will have to completely externalize myself from my inherent
values."
I wonder why he bothers to have these moral obligations if he he favors
such situationism.
"...and I'm afraid the ethical realm isn't harmful-looking enough
right now."
MF: And that's when you went to him, to Calvin?
NG: Yeah. Then. That was it.
Calvin lived on the northern part of the commune. It was still a somewhat unruly area. The captain, myself and Domo took a bus over
to that side of town, about a fifteen minute ride.
The bus stopped at a street that had that real empty feeling, like rolling
over in bed with the assumption that someone is there next to you... and then
realizing they aren't. It's an odd
sensation and this street was painted in it, it was literally dripping off the
trees (which were in full bloom. all of them were that year).
The captain was the last off the bus.
He had a real heavy swag to his walk, a remorseful but arrogant
stumble. His rifle was on his back and
he had a banana he was nibbling on, barely paying any fruitful mind to it.
Calvin's apartment was the only one still occupied. It was surreal for me to think there was
still abandoned property at this time, especially ones with such broken windows
and missing home-iness.
When we found his apartment, Domo walked in without a pause, leading us to
find Calvin sitting on his bed, as if he had been awaiting. His facial expression was not filled with any
sort of surprise, which made me wonder if he had known, if transparency were
real. All I wanted at this point was for him to die gracefully. I didn't want to see something evil, I didn't
want to give all my innocense up yet.
There was still a world to walk.
"I figured you'd come sooner or later, Captain." Calvin's face
was worn. He was old, maybe of some
European decent, a vitamin-D laced tan wore thick on his hairy arms. He had a coffee in his hand. The captain
pulled a chair out from it's position under a table across from the bed and sat
down slowly. It was a moment before he
spoke. His voice, unnaturally weak and trembling,
"There isn't a demon I'd rather avoid wrestling than this..."
"But you have a victory to protect.
We are human." The captain's
eyes shot up to meet Calvin's as he finished the thought that was manifesting
in front of Domo and I. His face turning inwardly focused and restrained, the
captain placed his hands on the butt of the rifle (now unslung and laying on
the table) and stared into Calvin for a moment.
"Captain... I am no more an ulterior motive fighting for center stage
than I am a panda that actually wants to fuck.
I'm a man of age; look at these hands!" he threw up calloused and
wrinkled hands, surrendering himself of any evil. Regaining his posture, he
took a deep breath. "I... I am a gargoyle for the old world and I just
can't quite get used to this new one. I've been planning on getting out real
soon... I just wanted some sort of post-ethical reasoning... sort of my way of
guaranteeing I don't die truly alone."
The captain listened for a moment and then drummed a paradiddle on his lap.
Looking up with a grimace of duty-to-be and contempt, he stood up. Slowly he raised his rifle from the table but
held it in a passive position.
"Reasonable."
Leading Calvin out the door like a sheep going to slaughter and I felt
completely out of place in this northside apartment, the door knobs greasy from
hands and introductions. Deterritorialization or something. I heard the captain
say it.
Calvin walks out into the courtyard and falls to his knees on the grass,
taking in the September sun, smitten with dances around fires and skunked beer.
I knew where he was at that moment. But
the captain just watched him, rifle still flaccid. He had made up his mind but
I think he was still really working the kinks out of his grand entrance. If his
life was Freudian, this was certainly the Death of the Father. Too tumultuous
to screw up, too beneficial to conceive.
I thought for a minute that the capitain was crying but I think now it was
just the sun. That September sun in Atlanta will trick you.
He was standing far from Calvin... probably a good 40 yards. One side of the grassy courtyard to the
other. "The grassy knoll,"
Domo whispered. I didn't get him
sometimes but I appreciated the conversation.
There was a long moment of the captain staring at Calvin with a reserved
sadness... and Calvin was just looking at the grass, admiring everything that
wasn't the captain.
If you would have shot it widescreen and put Edith Piaf's voice over the
ever-expanding silence... you'd earn big in the hipster markets. We were passed
that.
Calvin had a really peaceful look on his face. Not like the look a guy gets post-orgasm,
even though that is a look of delight. This one was anti-libidinal, something
more naive and unassimilated. He looked like
the light that all of us had been stumbling towards the end of the tunnel for
in an attempt to grasp it.
"RIEN DE RIEN!" Calvin started shouting. "IL NE SE PASSE JAMAIS RIEN POUR
MOI!" It startled all of us. I
don't know if the captain jumped but Domo and I sure did. Calvin never rose from his kneeling position
on the grass. The captain never stepped closer... he did slowly begin to alter
his body movements and stance, bringing the rifle in his arms into more phallic
proportions, asserting it's near-future use. Calvin continued, "JE ME
DEMANDE POURQUOI!"
The captain raised his rifle, a shaky confidence in the gesture.
"RIEN! RIEN! RIEN!"
The silence before a gunshot is maddening to some, they say. It rings harder than it's finish, pushes on
your cheeks and claims your suspense with gloating.
"IL NE SE PASSE JAMAIS RIEN!"
When we did hear the gunshot, it almost felt like it reverberated from the
way Calvin's body pulsed and jerked and twisted as two bullets tore through
it. He didn't take it gracefully like I
had been hoping. His body was stricken
with wretchings. The blood would be brown when it dried. I hoped it would look
better than the crimson it dyed it at this moment.
When Calvin stopped his breathing, the captain lowered his rifle. He didn't look at Domo or I from his spot
across the courtyard, just lowered his rifle, looked up for a second and then
simply forward. I wonder now if he looked up, hoping for some kind of divine
violence to fall on him.
"It was like looking into the eyes of a step parent. What can you
expect to feel from them?" he would later tell me. But that was years later. When he was slowed down. Real slow.
MF: So, you say this was the threshold? Nothing came of it?
NG: Something came of it. The next day came of it, if anything. He didn't
really talk much on the ride back to the house we were staying at. But we had a
good meal that night... potato soup. And you know how I mentioned those Atlanta
potatoes. Well, they were good.
