solemn's harrowing

MICHELLE FOUCALT: ...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 s**t 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 an entire block focused semi-inward as a commune, centered around a garden.  Best f*****g 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 f**k. 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 f**k.  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.