Emperor of Gondwanaland (6 page)

So here in this section, you’ll see me dabbling in realism, fabulism, ribofunk, horsepowerpunk, and what might be called “galactic core values.”

I might not have struck gold yet, but I keep looking.

My, my, how times do change! Once, not so very long ago in a more innocent age, the notion of “monkey-wrenching” or “culture-jamming” seemed like good, clean fun. A stolid, stable, somnolent society can always use a few jesters to speed up its pulse and awaken the stupefied masses to thoughts of alternatives to their daily grind. But in a world where society teeters on the brink of collapse (or is perceived to be so teetering), due to enemies within and without, where the majority of citizens are scared stiff and a premium is placed on not rocking the boat, the actions which earlier had been considered tolerable buffoonery now look like sheer sedition. After 9/11, every yippie became a terrorist by default. But perhaps you can let your freak flag fly high once more for just the space of a few pages …

My Adventures with the SPCA

I screwed on the stolen plates, while Fiona used bungee cords to mount the PA system speakers on the Toyota’s roof, next to the illuminated Domino’s Pizza sign we had lifted from an unattended delivery car. Burr had his head under the hood.

Standing, I brushed grit off the knees of my jeans.

“Are we ready?”

Fiona twanged the bungee cords. “Snug as a plug in a jug.” Tonight for some reason she was smiling. It looked good on her, and I felt sad she couldn’t do it more often.

Burr emerged from beneath the hood and slammed it shut.

“All wired,” he said, brushing black curls away from his eyes.

Tonight for some reason Burr was scowling. It looked lousy on him, and I was glad he didn’t do it more often.

“What about the leaflets?” I said.

“Shit!” said Burr. “Almost forgot. I’ll get ’em.”

I watched Burr go inside our house. Then I turned to Fiona.

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Sure?”

“Oh, quit worrying about me. I’m great. If you must know, Burr tried grabbing my ass a few minutes ago in the kitchen.”

“That’s just Burr. Don’t let it get in the way of our job.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

I still didn’t understand something. “Why are you smiling?”

“I’m picturing his face when he looked down and saw the knife.”

“Woof!”

Burr came out with the box from Kinko’s. “All set!”

We clambered into the car. I was driving, and Burr was beside me in front, mic already nervously in hand. Fiona held the open box of leaflets in her lap. It had cost an extra penny apiece to get them folded, but was well worth it for the professional look.

“Take the freeway?”

“It’s a little too light out yet,” Burr said. “We don’t want to make it easy for people to remember our faces. Let’s go crosstown.”

“Good thinking.”

No one said much on the ride. It was a nice summer night, but we were all busy thinking about what could go wrong.

Burr tried whistling the
Mission Impossible
theme song once, but gave up when it fell flat.

The south side of the city was Burnout Town, trickle-down economics at its finest: vacant lots littered with trash; old rows of dismal project housing; fortified stores; a lone Salvation Army outpost; human wreckage almost indistinguishable from the inanimate junk. All that was missing to make it look like the worst Brazilian favela was a flock of circling buzzards, vigilante-strung corpses on the few remaining light poles, and a burning garbage dump.

Suspicious and indifferent black and Hispanic faces watched us from corners, stoops, and windows. Although Domino’s was only half a mile away, on the edge of the devastation, their drivers seldom ventured in this direction.

“Better start,” said Burr nervously. “Before they decide we look like a can of government surplus meat waiting to be opened.”

“That’s really unfair and judgmental,” Fiona said.

“Don’t get on my case now, you and your frigid bleeding heart—”

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just do it.”

Burr flicked on the PA. He coughed a couple of times, and it came out sounding like God’s bronchitis. He turned down the volume, then began his rap.

“Free pizza! Help celebrate our anniversary! Free pizza for the first thousand people! Grab a flier! Use the coupon! Free pizza right now!”

Fiona started tossing fliers from the car. The people already on the street snatched them from midair or piled on them like football players. Men, women, and kids were pouring out of the buildings.

The fliers looked really pro. Burr had typeset them on our Mac, using scanned Domino’s illos. The pizza joint’s address was in twelve-point bold.

At the bottom, in minuscule type, a line read: “Sponsored in part by the SPCA.”

There had been a quaver in Burr’s voice. But now that he saw how successful his spiel was, he got cocky.

“Extra pepperoni! Double cheese! Anchovies and pineapples!”

“Hey, cool it, man …”

We drove up and down through the neighborhood until all the fliers were gone. Then we made a big circle back toward Domino’s.

Parking a dozen blocks away, we switched plates, dismounted the sign and speakers, and trashed them in a Dumpster.

“Hate to waste good equipment like that—” said Burr.

“They’re incriminating. And besides, we won’t be needing them again. No repeating ourselves, remember?”

We started to walk toward Domino’s. Four blocks away, we could hear the angry crowd noise.

“I’m a little scared,” Fiona said.

“Nothing to be scared of. Believe me, no one got a good look at us. They were too busy diving for coupons.”

Sirens started to wail, plainly converging on the disturbance.

We couldn’t get any closer than a hundred yards to the Domino’s. It was surrounded by a solid mass of people, and the people were ringed by squad cars, their lights painting the scene a patriotic red, white, and blue.

A chant began to swell.

“Pizza! Pizza! Motherfuckin’ pizza!”

I approached a cop. He dropped his hand to his gun instinctively, then recovered himself.

“What’s happening, officer?” I said in my best concerned Young Republican voice.

“Some kinda crazy publicity stunt that went cock-eyed.” His walkie-talkie crackled. “’Scuse me.”

I eavesdropped on his conversation. Apparently, every Domino’s in the city had been enlisted to deal with the crisis. All orders in progress had been diverted to the scene of the incipient riot. Ovens were being crammed with pizza after hastily assembled pizza to satisfy the crowd. Extra tomato sauce and mozzarella had been requisitioned from as far away as Boston. All speed limits and traffic laws had been temporarily waived for the courageous drivers.

I walked back to Fiona and Burr.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have ignition.”

Perhaps a little unwisely, considering the cops, we gave each other high-five salutes. But we couldn’t help it, and they were too busy to notice.

“Let’s get home,” said Burr. “I’m starving.”

“There’s nothing in the fridge,” Fiona reminded us. “Takeout?”

“Chinese? Or pizza?” said Fiona reflexively.

And that’s when we lost it, laughing through tears so hard that we could hardly find the car.

The Society for Poetically Creative Anarchy was born in a laundromat, while our grass-greened workclothes were in the spin cycle.

That’s where Burr and I met Fiona.

Burr and I had grown up together. We went through elementary school, high school, and three years of college as buddies, reading the same comics, the same science fiction, the same boho philosophers, the same semiotic jarheads. When we both ran out of intellectual steam and tuition money at the same time—that year they axed the Pell grants—we dropped out together and started a landscaping business with a used Ford Ranger and some old tools and mowers given to us by Burr’s uncle Karl, who wanted to retire.

The work was hard but the money was decent, and we were our own bosses. We even had a few months off in midwinter, when we collected unemployment.

We were pretty much content to glide along as we were doing. But even though we were pretty comfortable, we still liked to bullshit about how fucked-up society was.

We were metaphysical malcontents, our brains warped by too much Edward Abbey and secondhand Bakunin, but lacking any clear goals.

That day in the laundromat we were talking about this book called
The Abolition of Work
.

I guess we got pretty loud and excitable. The next thing we knew, this woman was standing over us.

She wore a backwards baseball cap, overalls with one strap dangling across a thermal undershirt, and the inevitable Doc Martens. She had red hair shorter than mine, too much purple lipstick, and six studs in one ear, each one a different fake gem.

A pin on her bib said: anarchy won’t work? that’s an indictment of work, not anarchy.

Her voice was roughened by smoke and drink. “Have you guys read Hakim Bey?”

“Who?”

She told us about this mysterious Arab and his theory of “poetic anarchy.” It sounded intriguing.

So we read him.

Burr and I started hanging out with Fiona. We found out a little about her.

She worked a phone-sex line, and hated it. But she couldn’t stand any other job, either. She shared a crummy apartment with a junkie girlfriend on welfare. And somewhere back in her past, she must’ve been really hurt by some guy.

This part we more or less deduced by her determined stoniness to advances from either of us.

Her life was like a Lou Reed outtake. Easy to poke fun at. Except that it was all too real for her.

A few months after we met Fiona, Uncle Karl died of a heart attack.

So much for retirement.

We were amazed as hell to learn he had willed his old house to Burr, along with a few thousand dollars.

Fiona helped us move our junk in the Ranger.

When we had carried in the last box, it somehow didn’t surprise me when Burr said, “Now we’ll go for your stuff.”

“Okay,” said Fiona.

That night, over dinner, Fiona said, “You know, we’re pretty lucky. A roof over our heads, food, money … Let’s have a toast to Uncle Karl!”

We clinked our glasses, full of cheap jug wine.

“We’d be pretty irresponsible,” Fiona continued solemnly, “if we didn’t take advantage of our good fortune.” Burr smiled as if he knew exactly what she meant. I realized with a start that I kinda did, too.

“Meaning …?”

“Meaning that the time for talk is over. Now it’s time for action.”

“Poetic?” Burr said.

“Creative?” I asked.

“Anarchistic!” Fiona replied.

I pulled up in front of an unmarked steel door at the rear of the mall and put the Toyota in park, leaving the engine running. Odors of french fries and plastic clothing seeped in.

I turned to look at Fiona. She was sitting primly in the passenger seat, knees together, clutching a patent-leather purse in her lap by its gold chain. Sodium light lit her from overhead. I burst out laughing.

Fiona wore a teased and frosted wig. Her face was made up so she looked like Tammy Faye Bakker’s slightly more sophisticated sister. A frilly blouse, madras skirt, opaque pantyhose, and pumps completed her outfit.

“Who’s your husband again?”

Fiona’s rough voice had somehow been transformed into that of a pampered suburban hausfrau. All that phone sex, I guessed.

“Councilman Danvers. And he’s going to be so worried unless we find little Jennifer right now!”

Her voice had escalated into a kind of peremptory hysteria on the final phrase, and I found myself utterly convinced, even though I had helped write the script.

“Great. Buy us half an hour, and then we’ll pick you up right here.”

Fiona locked gazes with me then, only her pirate eyes familiar in her strange face. “Don’t forget me in there,” she urged in her normal rasp.

I was taken aback by her intensity. I couldn’t think of what to say, so I reached for her hand.

The mall door opened, and someone hissed.

“Okay, you guys—hurry!”

The weird moment ended. Fiona jacked open the car door and hustled inside the mall. Burr took her place.

“No one will see her come in without little Jenny,” Burr chortled. “There’s nothing down that corridor but the rest rooms, and that’ll be her excuse out.”

I was kind of irritated that Burr had chosen just then to break up whatever might have been about to happen between Fiona and me, even as I told myself I shouldn’t be. “I know all that, man. We’ve been over the plan a hundred times.”