Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 01/20/2009
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

Section II

The years flew by. I dreamed. I dreamed big. I dreamed of useless mundane shit. I dreamed of empires falling. I dreamed of Capitalism collapsing in upon itself. I dreamed of Nelson Mandela becoming president of a liberated South Africa. I dreamed of people talking to themselves out loud in their cars and walking down the street. I dreamed of surfboards and police officers. I dreamed of robots wearing women’s jeans with tiny little zippers. I dreamed of becoming a big brother. I dreamed of running away. I dreamed of a place I belonged. I dreamed of KC giving birth to a beautiful baby boy. I dreamed of friends who would die for our sins and live for each others. I dreamed of girlfriends and war in the Middle East. I dreamed of black men being beaten down in the street and rising up to become presidents. I dreamed often of men, often of violence and always of love. 

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev 00. - 11/17/2000
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

 November 17^th 2000 Cincinnati…

We can win this war.

N17 Battle Report: CINCI –

Today we won this city’s streets. Tonight, out of burning dumpsters, we hold feast to our victory! Years of protest–years of yelling at cops and klan–years of feeling like there had to be more to it than waiting for someone else to light the match–are over.

Finally, I understand why we call it a riot. 

Three days ago I dreamed of Moses:

I stand before a sea of blood with the promise of freedom on the distant shore and death behind me. Hand in hand, Miriam and I place our faith in this moment–that what will be will be–the red waters would part and my people–our people–will walk to freedom. Stories from the future tell me that Miriam was Moses’ sister. Feeling the warmth in her had, I knew this must be true in the way that these stories must always be true–when the love between a married man and true prophet save an entire people from death or slavery. But I was there. I looked into her eyes and knew God will deliver us. There will be sadness, and lies written on skins that will never be forgotten. Women will suffer for the sins of men and I will die alone and in the desert.

But I will be free.

We will be free. 

And we will never be slaves again.

Before 11:30 am I did not know the taste of tear gas. I did not know how hard a rubber bullet hits you when you can see the fear–liquid in the eyes–of the man shooting it. I did not know what it was like to trust a stranger like a sister, and to know she will stand by my side under an onslaught of pepper spray and steel reinforced batons.

Before 11:30am, I did not know that this revolution was even possible. But know I know. I know that the will of 350 dirty kids and uncountable local citizens could break the will of one of the most racist and violent police forces in the United States, and it will again tomorrow.

FUCK YOU, TOM STREICHER!

You let your officers get away with strangling Rodger Owensby Jr in policy custody. You let your officers shoot Jeffory Irons as he was being arrested for stealing a bar of deodorant. You let this happen days before your city would be hosting a summit that was drawing in anti-authoritarian revolutionaries and radicals from all over the world, and yet you remained so arrogant and assured of your ability to “take out the trash” and yet we caught you off-guard? May you and all those who follow you stay so fucking stupid.

It all began with the first planned march of the day. 

Fountain square: Four blocks from the National north of the Underground railroad freedom center. Five blocks from the International headquarters of Proctor and gamble. Two blocks from the OMNI hotel and Meeting place for the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue.

THEM: The police. The pigs. The enemy–had cordoned off a route from fountain square plaza to the hotel and lined that route with men and women hiding their humanity behind bullet-proof shields and full body armor.

US: A random assortment of kids in hoodies with rags tied over our faces. 

The Unions and social justice organizations that planned this officially sanctioned demonstration set off stoically along the designated march route to the OMNI. These professional picketers were almost a thousand strong and the pigs were deployed to cordon off the streets along that route. What the pigs did not expect was for a bloc of radical protestors to ignore the designated march route, pick up the aluminum fence blocking off the road to the east, and march along a route of our own making.

Afraid to pull pork out of rank, the lines of pigs stood and watched as a band of merrily-singing malcontents waving red and black flags  made off with their barricade. 

Two of us…

Ashley and I

…anchored one side of the portable fence–transformed into a mobile defensive-shell-and-property-alteration-device, while two other members of our affinity group…

Michael and Jimmy

…carried the right. A stream of random strangers-turned-sister-brothers took turns supporting the middle as we made our way east along 5th street, destroying corporate property everywhere we could. Years of rage against broken promises and lies took control of our bodies on the streets of Cincinnati. Our unorganized resistance rebellion gained bodies as we went, drawing in locals from the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood as many took to the streets with us to smash the windows of companies that had boycotted the city’s annual jazz festival a few months earlier amidst rumors of building racial tension in the city.

Our growing and growingly militant bloc marched on to Broadway and headed north–thoroughly expressing a myriad of thoughtful and nuanced opinions to the executives of US bank and P&G in words of broken glass and spraypaint. Reserve forces of riot-pigs finally began to arrive by the time we reached 6^th St, but there were too few of them to stop us. They tried to funnel us north but we forced our way west again one block over to sycamore. We were trying to evade the inevitable trap they were trying to set for us, but as a collective group, we were lost in a maze of Graystone monuments that were not our home, not even for the locals. 

No one was in charge and we all knew our only hope was to stick together. 

Outrage over the city’s recent police shootings drew us north towards the sheriff’s department and the city jail at the corner of sycamore and 9th. The pigs had been gathering here in force and, in retrospect, it might not the best strategic decision, but as we got closer, we could hear chanting and yelling coming from the narrow little windows of the correctional facility and it gave us strength. Sensing our building momentum, the pigs finally decided to counter and began firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into the crowd. 

Jimmy dropped the steel fence

to try to pick up a tear gas canister

–to throw back at the police

–but the heat of decompressing gas 

burned his hand.

He dropped it to the ground

And kicked it off into a nearby parking lot.

 The pigs

–with their “non-lethal” weapons

–made him pay for that act of defiance.

Behind us

the bloc had begun to break up

under the onslaught

and  split off in multiple directions.

We had no choice but to run 

or lay down and be arrested.

The caged bird cannot sing. 

The next half an hour was a chaos of toxic clouds, screaming radicals and the droning of mumbling megaphone threats that no one could understand. It is hard to see when your eyes are burning hotter than your lungs, but we had a vision we could share without our eyes.

The police presence intensified as the official march had made it to the hotel and the pigs along the parade route could be cleared out to focus on the rabble running wild to the east. We, the radicals still on the loose, had been fragmented into two main groups. 

I don’t know when it happened

 but Ashley and Jimmy were separated from Michael and I. 

We cannot make mistakes like this in the future.

We cannot let them know we were so easily divided.

Our Bloc rounded the corner of main street on to 5^th only to be met by a line of pigs blocking any further progress East. The pigs trailing us, bashing their batons on their shields, caught up quickly and we were trapped along the wall of a nameless concrete tower. They pushed us with shields and baton out of the street, back up on to the sidewalk and then against the wall. Fifty of us were pinned surrounded by at least twice as many cops, spread out into a single line pressing in around us. Water bottles filled with paint burst forth from our huddled mass of protesters, exploding against the line of cops in front of us into bursts of bright red, coating their clear shields and visors.                                                                                                       

Michael,

for all your rhetoric, 

you never could resist an opportunity for poetry.

In retaliation, Three tear gas canisters were shot right into the middle of our bloc along with a hail of rubber bullets.

 instead of blinding me,

 the tear gas cleared my vision

and right in front of me I could see 

Ashley approaching with reinforcements

behind the line of cops.

While the pigs had corralled us in, several groups of reconverging radicals swooped in behind the pigs, hoping to break through the line and giving us a chance to pull ourselves off the wall. The plan looked to be failing badly as the other bloc of protesters no bigger than our own was met by fierce violence from the pigs blocking off 5^th street. The police fired off a volley of rubber bullets before charging the second group.

 Ashley took a rubber bullet to the leg

 And went down right in the middle of 5^th street. 

her head hit pavement as she fell

Only a few feet in front of me, 

on the other side of a sea of pigs.

I could see blood, red 

rushing down her forehead.

An officer with a fire extinguisher

–filled with pepper spray

–blasted her in the face

As he moved through prone protesters

Trying to keep them

–us

–down in the street.

Something inside me snapped.

I stepped forward 

one hand extended

one holding Michael’s.

I shouted over the din

“Ashley, you are hurt. I am right here. I will help you.”

I do not know why,

But the two officers in front of me

–covered in paint

–lowered their red shields

Enough for me to reach down

and grab Ashley’s outstretched hand.

Like a wave–

whose force had already crashed against the shore–

the line of officers melted away

and I was able to pull Ashley up 

onto her feet.

Amidst a sea of violence and chaos sown by police officers lost in the monstrous urge to destroy those that resisted their authority, the two groups of protesters were able to part the gauntlet of pigs and reunite in the street once again. We made our way south and I have no more memories of the police following. 

We were exhausted. 

Blind from chemicals, tears, paint and blood.

But we knew that in the face of their worst they could not keep us apart. 

Rejuvenated, we ran–screaming–laughing–banging on street signs–and singing our hymn:

Hey Hey all the kids around say, 

Hey hey all the kids around say, 

take no prisoners take your streets today. 

HEY! HEY! HEY!

Take no prisoners take your town tonight. 

Fight, fight, fight, FIGHT,  FIGHT!

Hey Hey…

***

It was at that moment that I fell in love with Ashley.

Like a sister, I will tell myself

but like the Moses in my dream loved Miriam as well.

This will lead to sadness, and disaster

and it will certainly mean pain for KC

–whenever I find the courage to tell her

–but not tonight

Tonight we are free.

I will have to burn these words after writing them

they could put all of us in jail 

for a very long time

but while others reflect the day’s battle 

howling at the moon

and dancing naked in our new parking lot village

I know that the secrets I hide 

can only be shared between myself and I 

Promises must be kept.

Author: Benjamin C. ROy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 07/06/2001
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

Editor’s Note: Originally found as a torn page from an old journal in the Mark Spitzer Memorial Animal Liberation Front Library.

July 6th, 2001 – Farmageddon, MO

After Cinci, nothing will ever be the same. Our victory was as much a shock to us as it was to them. and we started to believe in the bold promises we were making to each other and to the sky above. This planet does not need us to hide behind money and blind ourselves from the damage we are doing–to it, to ourselves and to each other. We do not need to build cages of metal bars to protect us from ourselves. If we all can start seeing each other as allies worthy of our trust instead of enemies to fear, we wouldn’t need to hoard away the wealth of this planet while letting each other starve. 

Our lives have changed so quickly, of course feelings followed. KC is the person I had loved since our days  playing witch doctor together as children. I’ve always known I was going to spend the rest of my life loving her, but now I find myself starting to questioning whether it is healthy to think that there can be only one person  that can squeeze the blood from my heart. 

With songs of triumph beating in my head, it’s too easy to invent a reality in which love–unrelenting– unbridled by rules or restrictions–is going to be our weapon against the fears we had had beaten upon us for so long. The more we grew to love one another  the more unstoppable our revolution becomes. Like the sacred band of Thebes in the battle of Leuctra, we will fight to our last dying breath, not to save some world bigger than our ability to conceptualize, but to save each other. In our intimacy, we can shatter the  shackles of social constraints which exist only to limit the burning potential in each of our hearts.

That weekend in Cinci, we were invincible and it is easy to forget how much differently a beast will act backed into the corner than running wild in the field.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 05/08/2013
Rev .01 - 03/09/2022

September 11th…

I received no precognition of 9/11. No dreams of planes or buildings or new york or 343 firefighters losing their lives to pull just one more person from a teeter-totter hours–then minutes–then seconds away from tumbling to earth. 

Why? 

Were the 2996 people who died as a result of 19 men on a mission from their God not a great enough tragedy for my God to consider noteworthy? 

Was my God preoccupied with the 30,273 children who died of starvation that day, the 30,273 children who died the day before, and the 30,273 children who would die the next?

I don’t know.

What I do know now is that my lack of foresight then made the event unbelievable in the moment of it’s happening. 

Jimmy yelling through the door,

“Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade towers”

KC and I barely heard

lost in lust and laughter 

continuing to play balls deep 

for the rest of the morning-turned-afternoon. 

For whatever the reason of non-prophecy, The crushed blue velvet walls of the makeout-room formed a Chrysalis sheltering KC and I in our playful delights, away from a world stopped in fear. 

We emerged later that day red faced, sweaty and ready for an early evening breakfast. The roommates  were unusually absent for a Tuesday evening, so we headed to campus to see if there was an art opening or catering event that had drawn everyone away to a free meal. Kirksville, MO was a ghost town. The streets were empty of traffic and had we been paying attention to anything but each other, we might have noticed that there were no students out walking around to their late classes either. It was not until we walked into the Student Union that the gravity of that day caught up and pulled us back to earth. 

Hundreds of people–students, professors, janitors, cafeteria workers, and us–stood watching the news pour out of the television. Buildings had crumbled into the earth. Terrorists had hijacked the airways. Flames of anger and fear were igniting across the United States, while for the briefest of moments, the entire world shed tears for the loss of lives in New York, DC and Pennsylvania.  

For that moment there was an opportunity for this nation to show the world how a responsible entity can suffer hurt. We could have let our healing be an open process of accepting weakness and letting others help us come to terms with our feelings of loss and anger. We could have demonstrated how a nation could acknowledge this horrible tragedy, and use it to grow, to step forward and remove the false walls and boundaries that separate us from other nations. 9/11 could have been a moment the US began seeing itself as a part of an empathic and supportive global community.

But the men capable of taking that step, had no intention to face loss like real, vulnerable human beings. It was their intention from ground zero to turn the hurt around and reflect it back upon this planet–to use hurt as a weapon against “enemies” real and imagined that would allow them to perform a wild power grab in the name of reasserting “the strength of the United States of America.” They did this with very close to the full consent of the people of this nation. We were a people who allowed the lies of fear and hate to transform a moment ripe for the promise of rebirth into a trail of unending violence and death. 

My God did not show me in prophecy the overwhelming world tragedy that 9/11 would come to represent. The immediate event, and its fallout caught me by surprise and would put our revolutionary struggle its back foot.

Although we would neither understand it or acknowledge it for years to come, our movement was set on a course of backpedaling away from victories won in cities like Seattle and Cincinnati. We would still fight and try–we are still fighting and trying–to turn the tide, and some times small victories would still be achieved. But the shadow of doubt was cast on that day that would haunt our movement like ghosts for years to come, and me personally forever.

I had been betrayed by the source of my power to take action when it still could have mattered. Our tactics grew more desperate with each fresh wave of repression against us–justified in the name of national security. We went from being labeled protesters, to radicals to extremists to terrorists. Labels wich would succeed in separating us from those we claimed to be struggling for, as well as starting to separate us from each other–and ourselves.  

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 10/02/2012
Rev .01 - 08/12/2014
Rev .02 - 03/09/2022

Michael Oak Flanagan

Michael Oak Flanagan was born to a pair of High School teachers in Small Town, USA. Not Mike or Mikey but Michael.  Michael never really gave a fuck about anyone until he turned 13 and fell in love with Elsa Green. 

Elsa Green was the only black girl in Michael’s class–one of three black students attending California Middle School in California, Missouri. Michael and Elsa’s year long romantic affair was juvenile and sweet. He brought her Pawpaws in the spring and she gave him an OP Ivy/Green Day mix tape for Christmas. Their relationship ended brutally the following May when Elsa was beaten down to within an inch of her life by a small gang of high schooler’s that didn’t get along with Elsa’s older brother. Mr. Green would allow no one in to see Elsa at the hospital and the whole family moved to Kansas City by the time Elsa recovered from her injuries. 

The perpetrators were caught with in days, and the entire town of California was outraged by what had happened. 

Outraged? 

Really?

 A small town in central missouri 

outraged by violence against women, black women?

We have to believe that stranger things are possible.

Two of the young men, Harry Tuggle and Tomas Wilson, both Seventeen and the time of the crime, were tried as adults and sentenced to an imaginary number of years at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.  The third boy, Darren Wilson, only fifteen, pleaded that the other two boy’s had forced him into participating and ended up spending three years in the Boonville Training School for Boys, before returning home on juvenile probation.

Michael’s rage at losing the love of his life–to the violence of a racist and sexist America–grew into a fiery and militant Anarcho-nihilism. Michael’s mother, known to all as Momma Bear, had grown up a hippy roaming around the open roads of America following flower-power jam bands and playing an indirect support role in the SDS chapter at Iowa State University from 1966 to 1968. She then dropped out to join the Prairie People’s movement, a decision which led her to mother seven children and settling down on the land of Michael’s father. She too was incensed by the crime against Elsa, as was her buried radicalism. She encouraged her son to study increasingly more revolutionary texts about the role of racism in preserving the existing capitalist structure. By the time Michael was 16 he knew the history of the Black Panthers and the current fate of the Black Liberation Army as well as he knew the history of the colonial oppressors. It was always his mother’s hope that her son would realize–through the rich history of black resistance movements in the United States and South Africa–that the best form of solidarity white allies could show to their black brothers and sisters was using their position of privilege to work their way into the system and help subvert it. 

On the surface, Michael did a good job of repeating his mother’s rhetoric back to her, and he quickly became her most favored child. But no matter how well Michael did in school, or how often he participated in state legitimated forms of protest, it was never more than an illusion to please his mother. In his heart, Michael learned the necessity of direct militant action the day three white men assaulted the love of his life and lived long enough to regret their actions. He began learning how to  make homemade explosives the day after being turned away at the hospital and less than 6 months later he was sneaking out to test his “science experiments” in the woods behind his house.

When Darren Wilson was released from Boonville, and returned to California, Missouri, Michael decided it was time to take action. One night, a month after Darren’s release, Michael snuck out of the house and bicycled his way over to the Wilson Residence–a quaint rural/suburban single-story on South Randolf Street, where Darren was to spend every moment of his probation not occupied by work or studying for his GED. Michael had recently gotten his hands on Earth First! zine at an environmental stewardship conference in Kansas City, MO, that laid out a number of a tactics for automotive sabotage to be used against logging trucks in the Pacific North West. Michael was eager to put his new knowledge into practice. 

The technique he settled on was supposed to be nearly undetectable, and even though the Wilson’s had been holding on to Tomas’ ‘81 Jeep Cherokee for their boys to drive when they got out,  instead of freight hauler, Michael thought this vehicle would make the perfect test subject. Michael used a serrated hunting knife to partially cut through the brake lines of the front two wheels. He cut into the cables just far enough to feel the brake fluid  dripping out on to his fingertips. He then took his knife and cut a series of uneven nicks and divots along the rest of the exposed brake lines and powdered them with gravel dust to make it all look like natural wear and tear on the old jeep.

Then Michael returned home. Two days later, Michael overheard his father at the dinner table mention that there had been a nasty accident on Highway 87, down by North Moreau Creek. Darren Wilson had lost control of his Jeep when his brakes failed him. The vehicle skidded off the left shoulder of the road and then rolled over twice. Darren’s left arm had been severed on the second roll and he had to be flown by helicopter up to a Hospital in Columbia, where he was in critical condition. Michael’s father told him the news with a smirk on his face, as if the knowledge was a gift from the Cosmos for his wounded son.

Michael was shocked, not because he felt any remorse at all, but because his plan worked out perfectly and no one seemed any the wiser.. Michael spent 4 months a nervous wreck on the inside, waiting for the police to arrive and take him away for attempted murder, but the county sheriff never came. Michael had done his job well and no one ever once suspected that Darren’s accident was anything more than bad karma come to collect. 

The power and precision of his violent success unnerved Michael for years, and he committed no additional acts of political sabotage for the remainder of his rime at California High School. Michael was not unnerved by any regard for Darren’s life–Michael would have been happy to learn that Darren’s jeep exploded in the crash. His hesitancy came more from the realization that he could be so effective with solitary actions, while at the same time feeling overwhelmed by the lack of control he had once the act had been committed. 

What if Darren had plowed into another car, or innocent bystander, before crashing? Michael knew he could have easily ended up with blood on his hands that would never wash away. The thought of living the rest of his life in a little shack all alone, like the Unabomber everyone was so afraid of, combined with the idea of having to bare the all the consequence for his actions with no one to talk to, was more than Michel knew he would be able to handle. Since there was no one in Moniteau county that even held the same political beliefs, much less inclination for violent direction action, he put his life as a political terrorist on hold and decided to dedicate himself to his studies.

His mother had always stressed the importance of going to college, for both the political and social opportunities it presented. Before the Jeep incident, Michael had felt like higher education was solely an institution dedicated to the perseverance of social and economic stratification. After almost becoming a murderer–over what he realized was a desperate act of revenge–Michael decided that getting out of California, Missouri and deepening his political analysis might be a good idea before committing himself to a road from which there could be no turning back. He applied to colleges up and down the West Coast, but the more pretentious schools rejected him for a lack of extra curricular engagement, and the less exclusive ones were too much money for his parents of seven to afford. Big cities were a little to frightening to consider on his own, and in the end, he decided that Truman State University was the best acceptable alternative.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 05/24/2013
Rev .01 - 03/09/2022

Knowing how to pick a lock is always more interesting than breaking it…

I did not sleep with every woman I took to the Traveler’s Inn,                     

Only one

but that didn’t mean I didn’t try.

The Traveler’s Inn: There was no more luxurious squat in the history of Kirksville Missouri–nor probably the world–than the briefly abandoned Traveler’s Inn. A hotel with a torrid past of KKKlan rallies and conferences for the Society of American Eugenicists; the only time in the building’s history when it’s ownership was not in the hands of truly diabolical villains was when it was in the hands of no-one at all. The last known owner of the building as an actual hotel, and not the apartment building it would later become, disappeared mysteriously months after a funding a decadent remodel amidst rumors of a Russian mafia scandal. One day, the building was nearly ready to open to customers, the next, the doors were locked even to the staff with no warning or explanation.

This left the hotel a treasure trove built on the history of its own odious peculiarities. For example, most recently, the hotel had transferred ownership from a christian cult which went under after being brought into the spotlight for burying children up to their necks in pig shit at their bible summer camp, to a Southern Missouri strip club owner who was known to dabble in all things traded illegally. This left the Traveler’s Inn with a hodgepodge of bizarre, hybrid/fusions-themed rooms like, “Noah’s Ark,” the “Pharaoh’s Tomb,” “Constantinople,” and the “Parisian Bordello.” Rooms that were all abandoned, freshly laundered, and ready for guests, when the management split.

One night, after more than a couple Kirksville Coronas, Ashleigh suggested that we acquire a jug of sangria and find a way in. I had always harbored a fascination for the place after picking up stories about it from locals I got rides with, hitching frequently around the region. I also had an ever increasing fascination with the person suggesting we do the exploring. Far too many dreams were coming true at once for me to say anything other than, “Yeah, sure. That sounds cool, I guess.” 

The building was three stories tall and made of bricks. The roof could be accessed by a fire escape on its southern facade, and the mistake many interlopers made was to believe that it was the easiest point of entry. The ladder was only accessible by moving a nearby dumpster across an alley which couldn’t be done in such a small town without drawing a lot of attention. Additionally, the entire fire escape was visible from the street, and even if you made it to the roof, the only entrance to the building was still visible from the street below and locked. Countless college and high schoo; students had been rounded up by the KPD for thinking they could gain access to the Travel via the roof top. A far more effective and discreet entrance could be found through an unseen basement door in the alcove beneath the porch. Lucky for us, the door was “securely locked” with a thick chain mistakenly held in place with a no. 7LF Master Lock.

Inside the basement was dark–really dark. A darkness all the more terrifying in the days before cell phones. Neither one of us had thought to bring a flash light or even a lighter. We bumbled around in pitch black darkness barely able to tell where the wall ended and the hall began. Stumbling forward, I accidentally kicked a mop, stopping my heart as the handle thudded heavily against an aluminum storage cabinet like a gunshot. We waited in silence for the inevitable sound of sirens, but they never came.  Able to breathe again, we pushed farther into the darkness of the basement, questioning the wisdom of our ill-conceived plan. As we creeped on, it began to dawn on me that there were countless low budget horror films that had exactly this beginning, except the protagonists usually had a bit more light, by the nature of people not generally liking movies filmed in total darkness. Phantoms filled in the darkness and we were really starting to spook ourselves stumbling around in that basement until Ashleigh ripped ass and we both almost fell over in a giggle fit.

Our fear was abated, we kept searching the walls until we finally found a doorway in the center of the building that led to a spiraling stair case that wrapped around the elevator shaft. The stairs were carpeted, soft and slick with over a month of condensation with no running airtime. In the dark and increasingly more drunk, we stumbled frequently trying to climb our way up to the first floor. Inexplicably–in our flailing tumble up the stairs–every misplaced hand seemed to find its way to each other’s junk or trunk–accompanied by giggles and whispered shouts of “Goose!” Pickle!” or “Double Melon!”  Eventually the soft yellow glow of streetlights began filtering into the stairwell and we knew we had finally reached ground level. Most of first floor was an open ballroom/dining room with the windowed facade creating street view visibility on three sides. We thought about crawling along the floor to attempt an exploration of the kitchen and other oddities of the first floor, but worming across the floor without breaking the wine jug seemed like too great a risk for any of the potential rewards from the abandoned kitchen and so we decided to continue groping our way up the darkened stairwell.

The novelty of exploring two floors of Parisian parlors, British bed chambers, and uncomfortably erotic biblical fantasy suites kept us busy through three fourths of our gallon of sangria. By the time we got to door 321, We were well past tipsy and finding it difficult to remain upright, much less attempt to navigate the stairwell again. Opening the next mystery door, we were delighted to discover a room that could only be christened “the Dog Pound.” The walls were adorned in real classy paintings of Bulldogs smoking cigars and poodles parading around with parasols in négligée. The bed sported a multitude of pillowed portraits of distinguished hounds and Labradors wearing hats. We wouldn’t fully soak in the grandeur of the room until we woke up the next moring and could see it all in the morning light filtered through the silky curtains, but we spent the dregs of the jug of wine, plopped down on the queen-sized bed trying our best to recreate the conversation that led to the genesis of this kennel.

With the drink drunk as drunk as could be, we abandoned the jug to the floor and sprawled out across the bed. It is a little difficult to remember all that we talked about, or for how long, but I vaguely remember talking about boys and girls and school and what the world would look like if we just started living it instead of trying to plan it out. We talked about Cinci and our first real taste for life unadulterated. We talked about how she had made out with Jimmy in the front seat of the Lincoln Towncar we had used as our temporary autonomous zone the night after the our first riot, and about how I had not made out with Michael in the back. 

Out of nowhere except years of repressed fantasies, I blurted out:

“Do you think we should just start making out now?”

while staring at the ceiling and sweating balls over having finally asked a question burning whole through my heart.

She responded quickly, as if this a was a question she had had to be prepared to answer from the moment she suggested that a man and a woman explore a derelict building, alone together.

“I don’t think so.”

Young and dumb, the words hurt, but they made sense. I did my best to recover,

“Yeah you’re right. With all of these spectators” I swept my arm out towards all the staring portraits of pups, “it would be impossible to tell if we were doing it for us or them.”

The words came out awkwardly, but she laughed and we returned to our conversation about rock and roll and getting the band ready for summer tour.

***

It would take a long time for me to get over the fantasy that Ashleigh and I were going to have some kind of romantic relationship. We stayed friends for many years, but my inability to completely let go of some imagined tension I sensed between us eventually built a wall that closed off my ability to participate in the revolutionary alliance we had forged on the streets. A moment of rebellious power strong enough to part a red sea of cops. As a man experiencing emotions bigger than the capacity of my head and heart to reconcile, I had made myself a potential enemy to true liberatory solidarity. No promise of understanding I would ever make to her or to myself could guarantee that in a moment of weakness, I was not capable of a violence that would destroy us both.

I used you KC.

Your body.

That same hote room.

The sheets not quite fully made,

the bathroom smelling dankly of stale urine.

To fulfill a fantasy you had nothing to do with.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 11/06/2012
Rev .01 - 03/10/2022

Nachos, more so than bread is better half baked…

Jimmy’s favorite alcoholic beverage was all of them–mixed together and served over ice in a plastic martini glass that never left his hand. His favorite time to drink was very early in the morning. Jimmy always said, “early insobriety is the best defense against expectations for productivity,” and “all days are morally obligated to end in a nap to invigorate us for late-evening frolicks.” Jimmy “napped” frequently. Everyone knew what this meant, and that was a source of extreme embarrassment and discomfort for him.

Jimmy had an intense fear of being caught-out masturbating. 

As a child, Jimmy liked to tie himself up with shoestrings and try to slip out of his clothes while “exciting himself” trying to escape. Luckily for Jimmy, this led only to embarrassment and not strangulation the time that Jimmy slipped halfway out of his top bunk, as well as his soccer shorts.  The strings caught on the post and trapped his hands behind his back, pulling his neon green and purple umbros down between his ankles and knees. Completely trapped, Jimmy had to yell for his mother to rescue him before he hung himself at half mast.  His mother, a true hero of this story, handled the entire situation with calm and without judgment–only giggling once upon opening the door. 

Jimmy was shamed for life.  

He continued to masturbate three to four times a day, as often as he could really. However–from “the incident” on–he always did so with a sense of disgust for himself that he desperately attempted to hide from others. His self-loathing around the subject of masturbation pervaded all aspects of his life, even his dreams. To cope–or perhaps just humiliate himself further–Jimmy became obsessed with writing and performing poems about the perverse nature of these dreams.

You Can’t Control your Dreams #1, by Jimmy the Perv

Neither the writing nor the performing of these poems had any therapeutic value for Jimmy. Instead, they just served to make everyone around Jimmy acutely aware of his fear of himself as a sexual being. His friends–being friends, but maybe not good ones–used this as an opportunity for jest. Jimmy resented being the butt of frequent jokes and tried in vain–with the consumption of excessive alcohol–to suppress his sex drive by surrounding himself with as many people as possible, as often as possible. This escapist philosophy gave rise to the glory days of Jimmy’s Jam sessions.

Jimmy’s Jam sessions: Jimmy would spend the moring baking loaves upon loaves of bread before napping. Then he would awake to nights filled with friends and fruity frivolity: smoking himself stupid off sweet bong rips, downing ungodly amounts of sickly sweet mixed drinks, and satisfying munchies with breads and sweet, sweet preserves. His most successful Jam session  will for ever be the cold, new-moon celebration of February 20th, 2004, recorded in history as Un soir sombre de cigarettes minces et biscuit secrète cuisson.

.

Music listened to on Une soirée sombre:

• Arcade Fire – “wake up”
• Townes Van Zandt – “when she don’t need me”
• Bruce Springsteen – “Nebraska”
• An embarrassing amount of Modest Mouse and The Pixies
• Followed up at 5 am by a depressing foray into giving up: an exercise on soon-to-be-string-less guitars played along with pleas for death to the haunted dismelodies of  Souled American.

Laws broken during or leading up to Une soirée sombre: 

• Title 18 US Code 1708 – Theft or receipt of stolen mail matter generally
  • In the form of one carton of Fine 120 Lights premium french cigarettes, accidentally delivered to and opened at address 201 West Jefferson street, kirksville MO 63501, instead of 201 East Jefferson Street, Kirkville, MO 63501.

• Section 195.222 of the missouri criminal code
  • In the form of 14 grams of premium grade marijuana purchased for distribution amongst evening attendees, street-named trainwreck, and guaranteed to get those motherfuckers riptorn for the duration of festivities. 

• Ord. No 11296, 6,19-97 of the Kirksville MO Code of Ordinances , Appendix A, Article III, Section 25-24.Noise, 
  • In regards to the noise in excess of 72 decibels recorded at the street emanating from maniacally screaming voices and audio amplification system  at the residential property located at 201 West Jefferson. 

• Ord. No. 11177, S2, 4-3-95 of the Kirksville MO Code of Ordinances, Chapter 18, Article II, Section 18-27. Public indecency unlawful
  • *[REDACTED]* Court case still pending.

• Newton’s First Law of Motion, I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
  • In regards to a gentlemen, to whom we shall herein refer to  as The sHadoW, engaging in acts of “gross levitation.”

The masturbatory humor common at these events left a more bitter taste in Jimmy’s memory than deserved. In his heart, Jimmy believed he had far better friends than he would ever willingly admit publically. This became clearer and clearer to Jimmy the further away he got from those late night Jam sessions, and the closer he got to being a fatting bald businessman with far more money than people or time to spend it on. 

It’s not that Jimmy was an unpleasant human being. People liked Jimmy’s parties, and they like him, but just not in the ways he fantasized about regularly, while spreading the jelly in the company of surely strange women and beautiful young men. His sexual-adjecent delusions were only stretched further by the habit drug dependency can have of cultivating states of paranoia. Eventually, Jimmy began to believe he was surfing down a spiral staircase of shame and stagnation. He started wearing a fedora and complaining about how “Jam is such a expired condiment, that just gets too…over the top.” He began experimenting heavily with hot sauce and hallucinogenics, leading him to a life-changing revelation:

Anyone can bake bread, but everyone baked loves nachos.

Jimmy grew a mustache and a new spirit he called “entrepreneurial” but his friends called “duchy.” He began sitting in on a Spanish class at the local university with a teacher he had once made out with, and referring to the strangers he would invite to his parties as “mi amigos nuevos.” He would sometimes unbutton the top button of his shirt before leaving his bedroom in the morning and then button it back up again in the school bathroom when he saw the reflection of what he was becoming. 

Marijuana was often supplemented with mushrooms and people began snorting powdered sugar up off a mirror left on the coffee table. The quality of his guests deteriorated from friends, down to re-fried acquaintances, and finally down to synthetic-cheese-sauce strangers. It was at one of Jimmy’s newly re-christened “Freestas” that he had his million dollar idea.

Unable to stand without supporting himself, Jimmy was off in his own universe, experimenting with his newly discovered superpower of hallucengenic induced synesthesia. Uncontrolled fear of being seen halfway out of the known color spectrum–or his own pants–kept Jimmy from exploring his newly linked senses as deeply as he longed to, so, instead, he focused upon the experience of eating a soggy, bean-sodden chip and watching the colors of the room swirl around in a vortex of delicious madness with every bite. He could vaguely hear the audiovisual wavelengths of someone in his house watching a Charles Bukowski documentary, but the details of that memory were quickly consumed again by nacho-y goodness. The only memory which stuck with Jimmy that nigh–and carried him forward into a bathroom stall of sh/fame–was the limitless cash generating potential of a stoner’s creamy-dream-supreme in the possibility of:

The Inter-nacho-nal House of Nachos.

Jimmy was never seen again.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 05/11/2005
Rev .01 - 03/10/2022

A dream in which they are coming

The first sign I was dreaming should have been how deeply I could fall into her eyes as they stared into mine…

We sat on a couch on a porch listening to the rain fall on the roof. I sat on the outside arm of the couch with my back to the street. It was getting soaked but I didn’t care. We talked for hours about–Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas–running away when there was nothing stopping us but comfortable routines and personal delusions. 

I couldn’t remember where I had met her, but I had known her my whole life.  Her hair was cut short everywhere but on top–or maybe it was just long in the front. It was shiny, dark and soft to the touch. She wasn’t expecting me to brush back that lock that had fallen between her eyes and mine, but I could see the relief in them when I left my hand on her face. She turned and kissed my thumb. It was not a graceful kiss, but it was honest in its intentions…and beautiful. My lips opened in appreciation.

“I want to kiss you.”

I am not good at asking for what I want, but words are important to me and I can’t enjoy sucking someone’s face unless I know with certainty that they consent to having their face sucked.

She responded to my question/statement by flinging her entire body into mine. The wet arm of the couch beneath me held no traction and I flew back into the porch railing. The force of the bar against my spine hurt with the most pleasure I had felt in years. The banister held me up while I held on to her. Between sputtering rain drops, our lips made warm and wet welcomes. 

My second favorite place to run tongue over a new “friend’s” body is that hidden valley between neck and jaw–just beneath the earlobe. My mouth was too preoccupied getting to know its counterpart for a migration though, so I let my fingers do their own exploring. My left hand went back and forth between the the bridge of her ear and the the short clumping spikes of hair forming behind it.

 Minutes passed in seconds.

Eventually my kisses dared the trail across her cheek and my eyes stole their first glance down at the low cut V in the neckline of her shirt. The rain had left the collar sodden and stiff. As she leaned into nibble at my ear, I stared shamelessly down into her glistening cleavage as it moved up and down on my chest. My reaction to the perfection of this moment was felt by both of us in the non-existent space between our entwined thighs. The entire world outside of her body and mine ceased to exist…

…except for her dog. 

The brindled Hound was running back and forth in front of a giant mirror along the fence, barking wildly. 

No wait!…

…that is not a mirror…

…that is another dog…

…No it is the exact same dog–only it is scared shitles–

Her hand–that wasn’t supporting her weight up off the rail–found the button to my trousers and I stopped caring about any stupid mutt. My eyes closed in pleasure, and through my lids, I could see her face; carefree in the fading rainlight. The corners of her mouth pulled back into a smile. Lustful–wicked– hungry. 

Her lips continued to pull back, grinning…to her ear…

…past her ears…

…pulling back from the flesh beneath them–Exposing bone made of metal; and teeth–green with the slime of organic decay.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 08/13/2012
Rev.01 - 03/10/2022

And we will be ready for them…

With Rooster versus Robots: Kirksville’s first revolutionary army posing as a Chaos-punk, Rock n’ Roll Supergroup. Rooted in tactical models of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist affinity cells, the band’s membership and strategic objectives varied drastically from show to show. Refusing to be another spectacle, With Rooster vs. Robots spectacular displays of mutiny masquerading as music was situationally reimagined for every show in response to the rhetorical needs and abilities of all who sought to participate.  Our second performance was fast approaching—scheduled for a planned parenthood fundraiser in less than a week—and we were having round-the-clock rehearsals to coordinate: the light show: choreographed martial arts dance numbers; distribution of propaganda; costume and makeup design;  pyrotechnics;  and occasionally, song writing.

We—allies of the Rooster in his battle vs the Robots—had high stakes riding on this next gig as the first show ended in disaster. The ROBOteers had wildly out fought the ROOSTettes during the interpretive dance-battle-dream-sequence-interlude. And then—to add salt our poultry wounds—the robot effigy I had stayed up the whole night before the show to finish and paint, had refused to ignite for our grand finale—because some dipshit used fire resistant spraypaint for their finishing coat. The first show ended with one hundred disappointed fans  standing in the streets watching the band beat their cock’s combs against the unburning machine before them , wondering if this war between Life and Death could even be fought.

Ashley, KC, Riley and I were at Cock’a’Doodle-Do Headquarters working on a prototype design for an ultimately combustible adversary: A replicator-enemy that could be guaranteed to erupt in flames at the slightest spark. Our preliminary design—tested in the street at the upcoming performance—was going to be a brilliant explosive success that would take with it my eyebrows, eyelashes and nearly my life, but that is a story for another time. This is a zombie story about the holy spirit and the miracle of Life.

KC and Riley were stuffing shredded Newspaper into the abdominal chassis of our robot effegy, while Ashley and I worked on modeling the face of evil into cardboard and duct tape. Suddenly, a catastrophic—SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETCH—of rubber on pavement came from the street just outside of HQ.  We rushed to the window expecting to see a violent collision from the intensity of the noise, but instead of mutilated bodies of people, livestock or automobiles, we discover a single car, stopped in the street directly in front of our door. 

An older gentleman was sitting in the driver’s seat staring up at the roof of his car, engaged in a passionate debate with either the ceiling, or an unseen voice above him. There was no sign of any near or actual collisions, but the car had skid marks trailing back from its tires almost half a block long.  It was all a bit strange but didn’t strike us as dangerously weird until the man got out of his car and started shuffling towards our door. 

This guy moved like he did not know where the muscles in his limbs were taking him. Herky-Jerky—like a white man impersonating an early 90’s Venice Beach/West Coast-style breakdancer. He tilted his head at us in an awkward, impossible angle as he rounded the front of his car and turned in our direction. He neared the building with his arms extended and a cold chill ran through the building, even though the door was still closed. The four of us backed away unspokenly sharing a collective fear that our brains would be soon eaten. 

The man stood there fumbling with our front door for over a minute before finally managing to pull it open with a limp hand. From the moment his fleshy fist  made contact with the metal handle all of us were frozen in frightful tension, spellbound in place. He entered the room, his paralytic magic unconquerable by reason or by the obvious need to flee, screaming.

The man—

Was it, he, still a man?

—stumble-blundered straight towards me, raising his hands to neck hight as he lunged forward. For the first time, I saw past his tortured and contorted face to that he was holding a sheet of paper, now in both hands—held like a lover—which he proceeded to rip violently in two. Beyond  the the freshly split page, I saw a terrifying grin creep across his face as he leaned forward with the scrap held out in his right hand. Somehow, I found the courage to my eyes to his. 

An abyss greeted me, its depth not horrific but profound—filled with a wisdom that finally dispelled the paralyzing, deathly fear that had previously seized my limbs. This was no plague zombie from a horror movie. He was a messenger—possessed with the spirt of his message.  Still tentative, I slowly reached up and took hold of the half page he presented to me. As I took the page, the man nodded and his clenched fist released the paper gingerly into my care. 

I turned it over and saw that he had given me the eastern half of a United States road map. The grain of the tear followed highway 63 nearly clean down the center of the country leaving  our town a fractured -ille in the north east corner of missouri. A star had been drawn in yellow highlighter over a city along the eastern seaboard—the only only splash of life on an otherwise monotone and faded photocopy. Confused, I looked back up into the face of the mystery messenger and asked bluntly,

“Are you trying to tell us something?”

He responded in a thunderous croak—like stones crushing stones:

“GOD IS MOVING.”

Before my miraculously un-consumed brain could process the words that had just been bestowed upon me, the man turned and stumbled back out into the street. When he reached the driver’s side door of his car, a ray of sunshine streamed down upon him—suddenly shredding the specter of undeath that had haunted him just seconds before. His humanity returned to his posture and gait as he shook his head, looked around, and then got back in the still running car and drove back off to the certainly ordinarily life he had just momentarily departed. 

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 08/15/2002
Rev .01 - 03/10/2022
Author’s Note: One of many letters I should’ve sent.

Ben and Mikey Fuck…

KC,

I kinda feel like I fucked up. Again. I know the way we have defined things I shouldn’t be so hung up on guilt for having feeling for other people or even acting on them…but I do, and I did last night. 

I don’t really know how to talk about this kind of stuff seriously so I will just write it like a joke I am telling you to try to turn you on:

Their fingers burned with one thousand splinters. Smashing every last piece of furniture in the place had left them both bleeding and breathing heavy. They stared deeply into each other’s eyes. Impermanence was coursing through them but it was not alone. 

Cat attack! 

The two men, whiskers and all, were sucking face and then some—like octopus tentacles wrapped around cucumbers. Awkward hands discovered each other’s continents, knowing exactly where dig for buried treasure and yet hesitant over nipples and cocks, hovering just close enough for magnetic fields to dance nuclear-fucking-bonds into each millisecond of physical contact. 

“There is nothing stopping us.”

He whispered. Praying it was true.

And I rose to the challenge. 

Pants were never quite successfully discarded, the only things left limp and hanging, around knees and ankles, while hairy legs tied knots into the fabric of time and the space between testicles and that little cleft between ass check and hamstring. A temporary hideout for bandits sucking and fucking everything that stood in their way.

Grabbing my dick and guiding it like a Shepherd into His holy embrace—I came. A fire hose, hopeless against a tide of protest.

We were both covered in semen and it was all mine. 

Selfish and confused, I grabbed my trousers by the belt and ran for the stairs.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 09/11/2014
Rev .01 - 03/10/2022

Author’s Note: A letter with no one to send it to.

Letter to Michael…

Yesterday, I was thinking about that time we walked around downtown Kirksville with balloons stuffed into the front of our trousers. I still can’t believe it was you that came up with such a silly and ridiculous idea. Michael—the stoic resistance fighter—the one who would live and die by The Revolution—came up with an elaborate boner joke.

All the marches, all the covert direct actions, all the arguments and day-long consensus meetings—where we bared and bashed our souls together to build a collective movement—and all I want to think about is our adolescent boy antics. The moments I will never forget you for you.

• Drawing penises on deer crossing signs in Iowa.
• Throwing bowling balls into couches to see how high they could fly.
• PandaMoanium: In the Streets!
• And that night we had nothing better to do than stuff our pants and make a big show of grabbing each other’s crotches.

Nobody knows if that nail bomb you were building went off on purpose. 

Maybe not even you.

But I know I have a terrible habit of hurting people I care about. I know that I am also prone to egomania and assuming everything bad that happens is something I should have been able to prevent. But in this case, I know that we never did talk again after that night in the Aquadome, about what that meant to either of us, or actually anything, ever again. The next day, I ran away to Minnesota and you dropped out of school and moved back in with your folks.

It is pointless to pretend like I am not blaming myself for your death, but even more than giving a shit about my guilt, I just wish I could have told you how much I love you, and how much I miss you now.

Heart,

benjamin  

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 07/11/2010
Rev .01 - 9/28/2011

Love Made in Blood…

At the risk of contradicting myself and exposing myself as a hypocrite, I do not believe that I ever truly learned what love was until I engaged in an act of love-making that nearly killed KC.

We were young, educated and researched-ly dedicated to the principle of polyamory,. You would think that knowledge and access to reliable birth control technologies would lead to better risk management than trusting in half-assed attempts to adhere to a “Rhythm” method and honest communication between all partners involved. Unfortunately, finding faith in the myths we want to be true has always been easier than accepting evidence which contradicts our desires. Fear of chemicals and the pharmaceutical industry combined with the desire to fuck as frequently as possible made poor decision making entirely too easy. Monthly cycle calendars were religiously started and rarely finished. Given our sexual irresponsibility, it i pretty remarkable that we escaped our years of free love with zero STIs and only one fertilized egg. 

KC had decided to pursue her master’s degree at the University of Missouri in Columbia. On the surface, this decision made cold logical sense. As long as KC could remember, she wanted to be a newspaper reporter. The School of Journalism at MU was one of the strongest in the country and the program prided itself on its high marks in graduate placement.  The father of her son was living in Columbia, as were many of her closest friends from Highschool. The support network for a single mother there was far more rooted in the realities of parenthood than what either she, or the boy, were going to receive in the free-spirited—fuck the future anarchy of Kirksville. Any one of these facts alone fully justified such a move.

Sometimes facts only obfuscate reality.

Had I treated KC with even half the respect and love that she showed me, facts would never have mattered.

Instead, I had used her as a physical and emotional crutch to support the fragile hold I had on my own sense of self-worth as a man, while I paraded the virtues of refusing the privileges of masculinity to everyone around me. I wanted to be free to fuck anything that struck my fancy—all the while unable to handle the fact that the people I wanted to sleep with were not things for me to control. How could I questions the loss of faith that she was willing to place in the words I had always used to describe the relationship between us?  

I fucked up.

I know it, but things will change.

Things always change.

As a part of the move, the nature of our on-again/off-again nebula of a love affair took a less-passionate pause. Thus it came as a surprise one Tuesday night at 11:30 pm when I received a phone call from KC at the house I was staying at that night.

“Ben?”

She said.

“Yes.”

I responded.

“I am scared.”

I could hear it in her voice.

“What is wrong?”

My concern was genuine.

I am not a monster…?

“ I am bleeding.”

she said uncomfortably.

“ok…” 

I responded with a pause, 

“Is that a bad thing? It has been a while right?”

“2 months, yes, and it is not that kind of bleeding.” 

she replied with frustration,

“There is a sharp pain in my left side. It gets worse when I am moving around. The discomfort  was manageable for most of the day, but I cannot get up from my bed without it stabbing me like a knife.”

“You need to go to the hospital! Right now.”

Her fear had spread and I my response was bordering on panic.

“I cannot afford to go to the hospital right now. I called planned parenthood earlier in the day when the pain was not so bad and scheduled an appointment for tomorrow at ten, but that was before it had become so incapacitating. Now I am not sure I’m going to be able to drive there in the morning or get him to school in the morning. And it just hurts so…” 

I interrupted her,

“KC, it sounds really, really bad. If you go to the hospital they have to treat you, even if you cannot afford to pay…”

She interrupted me,

“And fall even deeper into debt for the rest of my life? I’m calling you for support not to get myself worked up. I have an appointment tomorrow. I just need to calm down and wait.”

Her words were so logical and certain, but still I responded,

“ Only you know your own body and what you need…but I am scared too.” 

“I wish you were here.”

she said, changing the subject.

“I’m going to be, as fast as I can.”

I said, leaping upon the opportunity to take action instead of having to stand by helpless.

“you can’t hitch down here this late at night. You’ll be lucky to make it down here by the time of my appointment.”

She replied skeptically.

“I won’t hitch. I’ll be there tonight. I’ll steal a car if I have to.”

I boasted.

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

she said with justified concern.

“Says the woman refusing to go to the hospital while she bleeds out of her vagina.”

I evaded with humorless humor. It was ill timed. She laughed and I could hear the pain it caused her.

“Don’t do that.”

she said in her lightest tone of the evening. 

I replied,

“I’m sorry. I am on my way. If the pain gets even one percent worse, promise me, PROMISE ME, that you will go to the hospital. One of your roommates can drive you and the other can stay and watch the boy. They will understand. They care about you too. If I get there and you are gone, I will search every hospital in the state of missouri until I find you.”

Again she giggled and I regretted my overly enthusiastic bravado. 

“Stop it.” she said, still giggling in pain,

“Don’t steal a car. Don’t do anything stupid. But get here if you can, as fast as you can. i need you. And I promise, I’ll go to the hospital before I die.”

I was not reassured but I knew time was too much of the essence to argue.

“I love you”s were exchanged in excess. Before the sappy exchanges could drag on for another hour, I asked one last time if she needed me to call an ambulance. It was a request she denied with another giggle and then a hung up phone. Immediately I set out to find a car that could be borrowed at midnight on a weekday and would not be missed for the two to three days I expected it would take me to return it.

I was in columbia by 1:15am. 

Thank you

will never be enough

The light in KC’s bedroom was still on so I knocked on the window and whisper-yelled through the metal and glass. She was still awake, but the front door was deadbolted and she didn’t think she could get up to open it. I pried the screen out of its frame and pushed the unlocked window up so I could climb through. 

She told me the that the pain had lessened and she was finally able to just lay down and relax. I did not completely believe the words she was telling me, but she did seem much more calm and relaxed than when we had spoke last on the phone. It started to seem possible that waiting the almost nine remaining hours until the morning appointment was both possible even if I was uncertain it was the best course of action. 

The time passed quickly as I held her hand and we whispered promises and prayers back and forth through the night. In the morning, I took the boy to school and agreed to be there that evening to help complete a massive lego space castle we had started two weeks earlier. I returned to find KC still living and ready to escorted slowly, first to the car and then to her appointment. The security officer responsible for patting us down at the front door, upon seeing KC’s condition, notified the office adminstrator that we were going to need urgent care and we got waived straight through to the offices of doctor K______.

NOTE WORTHY OF IMMEDIATE INTERRUPTION:

Planned Parenthood is treated as little better than a terrorist organization by many in the state of Missouri. As the only public clinic in the state, outside the city of St. Louis, performing elective abortions, the Columbia clinic—and everyone working at it—was under constant threat of violence for the services that they were providing. While I do believe that heroes and heroines who stand up for women’s rights deserve recognition, I will not force public recognition upon those whose lives and livelihoods such recognition could jeopardize. 

In 2011 the columbia clinic was pressured into suspending indefinitely its status as an abortion provider. This leaves—at the time of this original writing—Missouri as one of six states that has just one public abortion provider. It is difficult to support a woman’s right to make her own choices in regards to her body when the resources to make that choice are hundreds of miles away and buried beneath mountains of bureaucratic bullshit and the constant fear of men’s violence. It is my sincerest hope that by the time you find the words written in this book, none of these threats to women’s health and freedom  are still present and this warning can just serve as a reminder of a time before we a society could trust the women in our lives to make the best choices for themselves.

RETURN TO NARRATIVE

Doctor K_________ had a look of concern upon her face which communicated the same message as her words after she performed a brief physical and a targeted ultrasound. KC was suffering from the result of a ectopic pregnancy was well into its 9th week of development. The mass of cells had been dividing within her fallopian tube and were in immediate threat of causing it rupture inside of her. She was going to require an immediate surgical abortion to save her life, and due to the difficulties of performing the procedure at such a late stage, there was a large risk of  reduced fertility or even complete infertility. The doctor called ahead to Boone Hospital Center as I helped KC into the car and we drove straight there. We tried to keep our conversation light and filled with statements of positive assertions of confidence in the knowledge that everything was going to be alright, while our eyes filled with tears and fears.

An emergency room attendant helped KC from the car and into the waiting room while I parked and ran into join her. A financial officer was following her around trying to record information while the nurses were getting her onto a bed to take to a surgical prep room. Luckily the authority of doctors still outweighed that of the accountants and the paperwork would have to wait. The nurses pushed her through the waiting room doors and I collapsed into a chair with nothing to do but wait, worry, and think.

Instead, exhausted, I fell asleep and dreamed…

I am atop a mountain. 

Not a bush, but a city burns beneath me to the East.

The flames are climbing the slope but they will not reach me. Not yet.

I am older. 

I have finally grown a real mustache.

There is gray in my whiskers and streaked through my hair.

The smoke rising from below is black with power.

It rises up to consume white temples,

claiming spaces made un-sacred in sterilized death,

For Chaos. For God.

But this victory for which I have prayed

with lightning and matches is no longer important to me.

My life, My future lies to the West.

To a woman and a man who live there in peace.

The man is younger. Barely a man. No longer a boy.

He carries a flag,

but for him it dances weightlessly.

He loves without fear of the men that surround him.

The woman, like me, is older.

She bears scars from battles she has fought and won

on her wrists and on her belly.

There is another there,

inside her,

growing,

ready to shine new life

filled with love into the ashes the fires will leave behind.