Evasion

[savagefreedom]

As part of my new "do-something-mildly-productive" campaign, I bring you, hand transcribed, the wonderful book EVASION by Anonymous, published by Crimethinc Press. Or some of it, anyway. Stay tuned. Edited 6 times.

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It was a romantic life, maybe to be looked back upon as the glory days of youth. If it was poverty it was poverty only on paper. Poverty is a mathematical equation, an expression of how much one can buy. What about how much we can steal? Doesn't that count for anything?!

And poverty in pocket means richness of experience. We had spent uneventful periods of our lives paying rent and long practiced the dull habit of paying for things. But those years of school, work, and middle-class lethargy are a blur. Being "born again" for us wasn't finding "God," but shedding convenience. Then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think - "What to do tomorrow?" and the answer was always "As we please".

Unemployment when one's role in life shifts from passive observer to active participant. When "every day is April Fools' and every night Halloween." When we stopped shopping inside stores and began shopping in back. When we stopped going to the mall to buy things and started going to collect derelict baby strollers for the 75c refund. When we looked at the big, crazy urban chaos and suburban sprawl, and it all began to look suspiciously close to a big playground.

Late night mob action advances on the thrift store donation bin, long bike rides through the industrial ghetto, shopping cart races, and competitions to see just how many times we could make the "Police Blotter" column of the local paper. We left behind the other kids, their path - working, drinking, and being grown-up - and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative, and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were to be lived. Life serves the risk taker.

Some of us read all day, others chanted and held signs, some were full time defendants. Every day, and every plan and plot were a reaffirmation that our lives were our own. Notebooks of conspiracies, crimes, schemes, and maps to abandoned buildings ... When everything was possible, but there wasn't enough time for everything. And even though we never completed The Complete Manual for Urban Survival, made the front page, aired the dumpster diving public access show, stole every "No Skateboarding" sign, or patched things up with the bread delivery guy from whose truck we stole fresh bagels every morning, well then we were content knowing it was possible.

They said not working would never work. I mean, you have to eat right? We ate ... we ate what they threw away, whatever we could fit in a basket and walk out with. Ironic that as perceived "struggling" and "starving" kids, we maybe gave away more than we ate. What does a vegan do with fifty packages of Chips Ahoy anyway? And why did Walgreens through them all away? We began to think maybe they were on our side. Until the manager flew out the back door, shaking his fist, demanding to know why we were in the dumpster. We explained our positions as "free-lance excess reduction engineers engaging in the reallocation of surplus." He told us to get a job. We reflected on past dives in that very dumpster - the functioning CD player, nutritional supplements, photo department discards with scandalous pictures of former high school classmates ... A job? "Well if you didn't make unemployment so easy..."

Our philosophies evolved - from general dislike of work, to the feeling of exploitation, then seeing the American way of life for what it is and turning our backs to it.

Our skillz evolved - from starving, to subsisting on table scraps at the food court, to humbly scraping by on discarded American excess, to an extensive dumpster diving/shoplifting course. And when we felt like the craftiest kids in suburbia, a new all-you-can-eat salad bar would open and we would laugh at suburbia's endlessly accommodating nature. "What's next? Dumpstering money at the bank?" Somehow, at that time, in that places, it seemed possible. But the easily liquidated video games from Blockbuster were just as good, and we found plenty of those...

"You're not free..." they would say on their way to work, "you're homeless and you're poor." Money means freedom? It was an interesting theory. One we ponder on long plane rides overseas and cross-country car trips. Homeless? If rent ligitimizes a residence, we were homeless - because in our homes, we didn't pay any.

They said, "You can't live this way forever." Some of us agreed, and secretly planned to leave youth behind one day. Others thought - "We're good now, in ten years we'll be pros, and in twenty we'll conquer the world!" Some hoped not. They wished people wouldn't throw so much away - food, books, whole buildings. That one day the means of production would by returned to the people so we wouldn't need theirfood, or their houses. They made the mess, may as well dance in it. Some of us shrugged and said, "Why not?" Others found the implication odd that they could live their way forever - working and drinking and watching TV - and why they would want to.

Could it last forever? We wondered, and while we played and plotted against the Man, none of us wanted to acknowledge the impending obsolescence of our lifestyle, signs they wouldn't let us get away with our fun forever. The loose door on our favorite apartment building hot tub - fixed. Video and police night surveillance of the thrift store. Dumpsters being replaced by trash compactors. Our favorite supermarket removing their microwave, and along with it our simple pleasures that fueled the fight - oatmeal, tea, and the only method we know of to freshen a stale bagel. Then the same supermarket stopped leaving out the keys to the motorized handicapped shopping carts and we had to begin walking home...

Some of us went off to school, or went gangsta. Others crossed the line into a bourgeois void. Some of us are still here, taking the holy war national and even global. Back in the old hood one can still find scars in the landscape from a time when some of us lived dangerously. Signs of ancient battles when we armed ourselves with ambition, passion, stale bagels, and fought back - the salt water residue around the dollar slots of every Coke machine in town, blotted out graffiti, and the crowbar marks in the door of the poor old lady whose decayed home turned out not to be abandoned...

Something happened when we quit our jobs, quit paying rent, quit paying for anything. And I think back to the early days - when, like clouds parting to reveal the sun, we discovered what we were told had been lies, that it could be done, and that it would mean the time of our lives.

Those first moments... A new house, a new life... Artists, vandals, philosophers... Up on our favorite rooftop, with a view of the city, passing dumpstered granola and thinking - "Maybe we're on to something..."

~§~

additional copies of this book can be obtained for $6ppd from:

CrimethInc. HQ
2695 Rangewood Dr.
Atlanta GA 30345
USA

or get current information at:
www.crimethinc.com

anti-© 2001

Printed on recycled paper in Canada.

Exluding all corporations, the text from this book may be reproduced without permiddion in any form and quantity by any means necessary.

All events transpiring within these pages are purely fictional - so, no, you can't use this as ecidence, grounds for prosecution, entries in the Guinness Book of World Records or to develop crushes. All scams, crimes, the taking of food without paying, the cool part where our antagonist sleeps in a ditch, and the book in its entirety are offered for informational purposes only.

The author will not be held accountable for the use or misuse of the ingormation contained within - no matter how righteous or liberating.

All names appear as they are to expose the guilty. If you are a lawyer or somehow involved in law enforcement you can now stop reading this. For the rest of us: imagine a world where we don't have to say all this disclaimer nonsense - what do you think this section would say then?

~§~

EVASION

five - the wrong train / free boars, retirement leisure, starvation etc

four - memoirs of a dumpster diver / exposing industrial waste and eating it / dumpster love / picking up what you want and running for it / loss prevention exposed / gainful unemployment

three - making it up as I go / usa on a dollar a day

two - gate crashing / all dressed up and nowhere to go (but out the door) / scam-trak

one - deja-greyhound / git on 'em and go / California scheming

five - the wrong train / free boats, retirement leisure, starvation etc

It was a cruel trick - putting a naive and aspiring hobo on the wrong train, telling him he was going to Minneapolis and sending him to Missoula. The wrong train, unplanned adventure... perfect. I always secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn't limited by my imagination. That way anything can, and always did, happen. Being stranded in Missoula would make my summer dangerous again. If everything "Worked out," if I pulled off my plans without deviation, I would be on that train towards Minneapolis to visit friends and follow my favorite band around the Midwest. Maybe not a bad plan, maybe a great plan. Best to travel with a plan and hope for chaos. Either way I win.

The Wrong train on the wrong day.

The storm broke like a Sammy upside the head, and I scurried to seek refuge - climbing between boxcars, dashing over tracks, racing through this ghetto... The long run to the University of Montana library was with it... for about five minutes until it closed. I tried blending into the wallpaper, but they threw me out into the heaviest rainstorm I had ever seen. As an amateur hobo, I think it was what they call "paying your dues." But it's always to be trusted that one who leaves home alone with little money and a sketchy plan will be looked after. Any person who takes this leap of faith can be guaranteed the time of their life.

So when I found the back door to a computer lab in the student center unlocked, I wasn't really surprised, I just wondered how I would fit a hard drive in my backpack and if the pawn shop would ask for ID. Still wet, but warm and happy, hidden away in the computer lab - I could just listen to my walkman and play on the computers all night! So I "surfed the net" taking notes and making new plans. The band my friend was on tour with was playing Chicago, a Cold Crush Brothers reunion in NYC... When the janitor walked in at 1 a.m., I ignored him, but he interrupted my research. "Excuse me, do you, uh, work here, or...?" Despite a lifetime of "getting caught" experience behind me, my best acting, the power of suggestion, social engineering... nothing could preserve my position. "How did you get in?!"

I really liked Missoula, the downtown core and college neighborhood was free form chain store homogenization with a little record store, coffee shop, and vegetarian restaurant. There was definitely a history to that town, and I wanted to read about it, but I couldn't find the library. So I wrote a letter in the coffee shop, explored the riverfront, and thought maybe if I had a personal crisis and needed to escape, maybe I would move to Missoula. But I had a train to catch.

Grasping for human connection in a state where every car was a truck, and every truck had a gun rack, I found something close on aisle 8 of Safeway. Two friendly kids, with unreserved admiration for a third who looks at freight trains and jumps on them. They followed me to the train yard to see me off. We talked about like in Missoula, and they spoke of a street character who would grant anyone who could answer his riddle one wish! That sounded like a pretty good deal. We sat on the loading dock of a warehouse alongside the train yard. After hyping them up about freight-hopping, and kicking my stores, there was pressure for action. They clearly wanted a show, a dramatic drive into a quickly moving boxcar as they cheered me on. But hopping trains - I had learned - was a lot of waiting, hiding in bushed, kicking rocks... So the kids were quickly bored, and we parted. But if I was ever really down and out, I thought, I was going to find that riddle guy...

Waiting for trains is almost as much fun as riding them. Like watching another crazy rainstorm from the loading dock of that warehouse, or four barefoot kids putting on a ghetto fireworks show, and just eating bagels for hours. But I had eaten a lot of bagels, and I was beginning to wonder if the train yard was abandoned, or a diversionary front, or the hallucinatory mirage of a city kid in Montana. I cornered a brakeman who told of a massive derailment in Idaho, and that Northern line train traffic was shutdown until at least 1 a.m. Golly, a big train disaster.

Maybe, I thought, it was the train to Minneapolis I should have been on, maybe that lying hobo saved my life. It was moments like this that made an atheist believe in god. I still didn't believe in god, but evidence was mounting to suggest the presence of a Hobo God - an eternally filthy and drunk celestial guardian who saved punks from train crashes, left doors unlocked at critical moments, and made rational people throw everything imaginable into dumpsters.

By 6 a.m. I had listened to every tape I had, eaten many bagels, and felt threatened a few times by crazy old hoboes prowling and pacing the yard, but, no trains. Exhausted, dehydrated.... Then another storm broke! The wind angled the rain in my direction. Life was plainly trying to provoke a fight, but I was having too much fun to notice, and as the rain poured, I was still totally convinced this was the most exciting life had ever been.

The sun had risen, and I left the dock for the trendy coffeehouse. The paper that morning confirmed the yard worker's story - big derailment, traffic halted until an undetermined time, no casualties... But no train pulls out of a yard in the Northwest without a hobo hiding in the shadows of an empty boxcar. I gave a moment of silence.

On the I-90 on-ramp, I recalled past rides... The masturbating truck driver, the girl in L.A. I still haven't gotten over, and the shady gangsta from Long Beach - "Do you know Snoop Dogg?" I asked. "Mmm... I seen 'im around." I don't know, I thought that was awesome. As hitchhikers, we play the role of actor, ego stroker, counselor, etc. There are the small town secrets, scandalous confessions, tears even. The rides where I am outside myself thinking life couldn't get and crazier, or more real, or more dangerous. My ride out of Missoula wasn't dangerous, but he told a good story. He was a middle-aged, working-class man who had recently divorced his wife, freaked out, and hitchhiked around the country for three months, ending in a climactic ride with a woman who just gave him her car! Though, that didn't seem too incredible.

When traveling, crazy things like that happen in desperate moments.

It was often awkward the way many lonely drivers latched onto me. I had been given money, lodging, a knife, two bibles, and lots of good advice before. Certainly if I hitch hiked long enough, I too would be given a car, or written into a will, or something.

In Bozeman that night, the townsfolk were in the streets celebrating, all happy about something. Ooops, it was the Fourth of July, I had totally forgotten. Lucky me, dropped off in the home of Montana's largest fireworks show. I was feeling festive. I wasn't a patriot, but I had feelings bearing a guilty likeness to "loving my country." I loved the free coffee and liberal return policies, the intrigue, danger, the crazy small towns, not really ever having to work...

In the West, there is always a Safeway nearby, and in the west, no one needs to go hungry or pay. I stole very animal-free, very un-American food for the celebration. The streets surrounding the fairgrounds were a sea of flag-waving, hooting, and tailgate barbecues. For a good view of the show I crawled onto the giant arched roof of a church across the street from the fairgrounds. This was patriot country - a rodeo, high school matching band, and fireworks. "Patriotism..." I looked at the fireworks, tasted the unpaid-for-food, and savored the open-ended craziness of it all. Yes, "patriotism," I can almost see it now...

Looking for a train yard the next morning, I found a single lane of tracks and a wall of uninspired hobo graffiti under the overpass. The hoboes definitely needed an ambitious artist to inject life into the stale graffiti scene. I made an effort, and hoped the next hobo that passed under that bridge would take as much from the Unbroken lyrics I scrawled as I have.

Now where are those trains...

Trains, hitchhiking, Montana, Miami.... either way, I was free! I rode to Livingston with an employee of Montana Rail Link, a railroad company. He drove me to the Livingston train yard, and then into the Livingston train yard! The guard waved us in, the yard workers saluted... My new friend was a man of great influence. He pointed out the train I wanted and promised to put out the word around the yard that I was "OK." So, I had free, unobstructed run of the train yard. For a hobo, it was a moment of rare privilege. And surely he thought he was doing me a favor. But take away the risk of hopping trains, the danger, and so goes the fun. Free run of a train yard, great. There would be no sneaking, running, or hiding from the bull. No cat-and-mouse thrill. The tense moments I relish, glued to the interior boxcar wall, the sound of crunching gravel closing in - it's the bull, and he's coming for you. My new friend thought he was doing me a favor. What a jerk.

He hated hoboes, but I wasn't "like them," he said. Not yet maybe, but whatever it takes to get there - I'll do it!

I felt better at the mini-mart across the street - where I could drink tea, write letters, and feel a little less welcome beneath the "No Loitering" sign. And I shared the loiterer's bond with the bored teenage youth of Livingston. Together, we traded cookies and traded hitchhiking stories. The nicest kid of the bunch had recently moved to Livingston, and wished he was back where he had come from: Astoria, Oregon. Livingston or Astoria... I wasn't sure myself. They love hitchhikers in Oregon, but my potential fan-demographic in Montana had yet to surface. Hitchhiking out of Astoria, the woman from Burger Barn saw me in the rain, all sad with my soggy sign, and brought me coffee. Before hitchhiking out of Livingston. I would be shamed for an oddly shaped parcel by the postal clerk, who would then lose my package. In Astoria, I slept under an abandoned trailer. In Livingston, I slept in an abandoned trailer. Livingston had cheaper used cars, Astoria had more abandoned houses. I knew no one within 500 miles of Astoria, but after three hours in Livingston I had connection with the local railroad workers and knew half of Livingston's "Class of 2001." Livingston or Astoria... My choice was clear: both. And everything in between...

"Where are you from?" the sketchy driver asked.
"Um..." It's sort of a little game that is played while hitchhiking: telling a different, completely fabricated story to each driver - all to flex acting skills, practice creative storytelling, and avoid being tracked down by an obsessed driver. And this driver was clearly bonkers.
"Um... Idaho!" I said.
His look was possessed, his stare fixed. "Idaho... yeah." he mumbled raspingly, the words passing through barely parted lips. "Idaho... our storm is brewing in Idaho..."
The storm? Hmm... The labor movement? Nazis? The vegan revolution?!?!
"What is your destination?" His voice was hoarse, nearly inaudible.
"Florida," I said.
"Florida... yeah..." Gulp. There was dire in his eyes. "Our tide is rising in Florida..."

On the side of I-90, dazed, I tried to make sense of it all. So... the aliens had landed, and in fact were among us. No doubt, I agreed with that. But the balance... After a massive meeting of militia representatives the previous month, it was decided that it was time to turn up the heat.

"They're talking next fall," he warned, and only those with stored food and rural property would survive the revolution but I felt those precautions for the downfall for society were overrated. In the impending Darwinian scene he painted, dumpster diving, I was sure, would be the most functional survival skill. Trains provided a means of travel untraceable by Big Brother, and a fully-stocked arsenal of unlicensed weapons would never yield the results of an angry have-not with a crowbar at midnight. By economic collapse or armed militia revolution, I couldn't wait for society to crumble. The social elite of today just might be on their knees begging me and my friends for shoplifting tops after the next Great Depression. But there sure will be a lot of poseurs riding the rails.

A young gazanksta girl gave my a ride to Laurel, and left me with a warning - "Stay out of Billings," she said. her friends were waging a gang war, and she didn't want me caught in the crossfire. The way I was dressed, she said, I was dead, guaranteed. I looked "Southside," and if seen, the Northside rivals might pull a "drive-by." Looking myself down, being mistaken for a Southside Billings gangster seemed unlikely, I was confused. So, the Montana gangstas listen to Chain of Strength?

My next ride slid a little too close to me as I went to get out and said, "Promise me you'll stay in Billings tonight." He was an insurance salesman - and an overprotective insurance salesman. "If you get stuck in the reservation tonight..." he said, handing me his card, "give me a call." Going beyond Billings, he told me, would put my in the Bighorn County Indian Reservation, with the savages, which would mean certain death. "The start drinking and take out their anger on white people." (Social commentary: drinking alcohol, uncontrolled stupidity... suspiciously like the behavior of most white people! Ninety-five percent of the punk scene, eighty percent of "progressive activists," etc. etc.) All across the North and later in South Dakota I would hear this racism, of the raving mad red man drinking and getting riled up, burning tourists' cars and randomly attacking people with bottles. No one I talked to was sympathetic to the Native American condition - majority rates of alcoholism, general hopelessness - I heard only contempt. Well, I had a lengthy list of life goals to accomplish before I was ready for martyrdom, but I had to make the choice between death by bullet in Billings or beer bottle in Bighorn.

Late into the night I read in the 24-hour truck stop near the I-90/I-94 junction, and slept on the grass outside. The next morning - after a sloppy shoplifting attempt at IGA resulting in banishment for life - I walked back to the on-ramp, hungry but anxious. There was so much to look forward to - the Corn Palace, the world's largest truck stop, vast expanses of nothing, small town hospitality, high school parties in abandoned buildings, retribution for 500 years of genocide... who could say?

On the ramp, waiting for a ride, a couple approached on foot. They seemed nice, but distant, hard to pin down. The woman was pregnant and carried only a small backpack. Their situation looked maybe a little desperate, and I offered them my spot on the ramp. No, no, they said. They were walking. They had walked, I learned, along interstates the entire distance from Southern California. Occasionally cars would stop and offer rides, but mostly they had walked, humbly, for thousands of miles. Everything they spoke of was related in vague terms - I suspected a religious pilgrimage. Maybe it was their faraway gaze, maybe it was their tattered homemade sandals. They made no direct reference to god, only indistinct allusions - “We're looked after” and “We are never of want, everything is provided.” Ooops! God forgot to provide you with shoes! Ha ha ha. We wished each other well, and they left, walking, up the ramp onto the mighty I-90. I had met such people before, guided by the “voice of God.” Certainly a voice telling people to do something adventurous and subversive like traveling and living simply was positive, even if it was the voice of god. I respected that voice more than the one that whispered in the ears of my friends - the “middle-class work ethic voice,” or the “voice of spontaneity after obliteration by blender and small explosive devices.”

One ride later, that afternoon, after four hours on one spot I was certain I would die on the Indian reservation - of head, boredom, isolation... It was the loneliest ramp in the West, and when cars did pass, they only slowed, pointed, and laughed. So I found a ride back west, to Hardin, where there was sure to be more traffic. Hardin was great, having a hotel with water slides, and at the IGA I dumpstered a whole bag of cherry pies! Meanwhile, shoppers were inside the store paying for food. What were they thinking?! I sat on the on-ramp and ate an entire cherry pie, while shocked passersby recoiled in disgust. There was still a whole bag of pies left, and I left them organized in a neat stack for the next hitchhiker.

My next ride, a jovial and obnoxious Latino man, spoke proudly of his truck while pounding his fist on the dashboard, and shouted his distrust of women - both popular themes of conversation with drivers in rural America. His rough 'n' tough old truck sputtered and hissed as we entered Sheridan, Wyoming, and finally broke down on the edge of town. He groaned and rested his head on the steering wheel. I had my eye on the Safeway across the street. You can't trust women or trucks I guess.

“Never hitchhike at night,” they say. But I wasn't going to stay there, not in Sheridan. If the Indians in Montana didn't kill you, the Wyoming cowboys would. That was another thing they said. And Sheridan, I was told, was cowboy capital USA. And the crystal-meth capital - that's Casper, 150 miles south. Sheridan was the Old West town archetype; and I saw the saloons, cowboy hats, wooden shutters and thumbs in belt loops. Maybe it was genuine culture frozen in time and isolated in space, but today it seemed a bad parody of itself. I walked down Main Street, though in Sheridan it felt more like sauntering down Main Street. Maybe it was the sun, or the sugar; but I was drawn into the Old West atmosphere and I created for myself a delusional role of a shadowy stranger, a roughish nomad in a town not big enough for the “both of us”... Women peered from behind curtains, men sat on windowsills stroking shotguns as I passed. A mysterious high plains drifter, an outsider certain to commit an inexcusable offense and by run out of town by an angry mob, driven from one town to the next, one step ahead of my past. An outlaw, thieving loot, and with a final tip of my hat to the ladies, fading into the wind...

Yes, there was a very thick air of patriotism. Sheridan prided itself on being the last vestige of the American West, and of course throwing edible food in a dumpster was as inseparable form American cultural practice as roping cattle. As a dumpster diver, pulling fruit from Safeway's trash, I was a proud practitioner of “rugged individualism.”

“I'm a cowboy, in a steel horse I dive.”

Everything was working out great. Crosswalks were always green, my maps always folded up properly on the first attempt, and they say crime doesn't pay - and sure, my karma was a mess - but I had more money than I'd left home with. “There will be quiet before the storm” - something disastrous had to happen, right? Well maybe, but not that night. My ride out of Wyoming was a ride with the rockinist girl in the high plains. The two hundred miles to Spearfish, South Dakota were through some of the most desolate and quiet regions in the country. We talked about our youths, our ambitions, she versed me on Native American culture and I broke down for her a few theories I had been working on. She picked them apart, showed me the holes, and cut them down. Golly, she was smart. And I felt comfortable with her, so I wasn't embarrassed when she told me I had cherry pie on my face. It was a three-hour ride, and when we pulled into Spearfish I told her she could just drop me off in one of those cornfields, or maybe there was a ladder to the roof of Wal-Mart, or... or her couch? That would be fine too, I said. Not as thrilling or touch as an abandoned barn, but...

We read each other passages from books we were reading, she played me the Grateful Dead and I played her Turning Point. I schooled her in vegan cooking and we ate and laughed and it was all very crazy - eating cookies with a girl in South Dakota.

When I woke the next morning I folded my blanket, left her a big letter on my pillow, and went to go steal food somewhere...

At some point on the spectrum of comically easy shoplifting targets - between the chain book stores at the mall, and every other store in my hometown - are the WalMarts of South Dakota. Oh my god. The absence of any anti-theft precautions was almost insulting. No alarms or phony security guards, and sometimes at 3 a.m. - no employees! Well you have to run around to find them anyway... So in the rural Midwest, in the small towns and back roads, I feared there may not be consistent opportunity for receipt scams. And though I really only spent two or three dollars a day, jobs in my field wouldn't always be as easy as they were in South Dakota. So I decided to employ a scorched-earth policy on South Dakota and forget about working for awhile. Wal-Mart was a store a socially conscious criminal could feel good about stealing from - even if twas only vitamins. My plan was three-fold: liberate and sell easily liquidated CDs; exploit Wal-Mart's soft cash refund policy (no receipt/less than 20 = OK) by returning smaller, expensive items (vitamins, etc.); and do the receipt scam. Looking at me, it should have been obvious to everyone that I wasn't a paying customer. I couldn't have been more conspicuous unless I wore a shirt stating “Born to shoplift.” but I had left that shirt at home. After waiting a few minutes I returned the vitamins and got my $19 cash. I was set for a week, at least. The huge, creepy, South Dakota Walmarts - where “suggested retail price,” really, is only a suggestion.

A Rapid City firefighter drove my to Sturgis. A town of 30,000 which swells to 200,000 each year for the “Sturgis Biker Rally,” the largest gathering of bikers in the world! He worked security for the event and listed the celebrities who turn up each year: Jay Leno, Dennis Rodman, and one year, he told me, at the height of their fame, Poison showed up on their Harley's and played a surprise set! Hitchhikers hear the best stories!

I couldn't remember where my obsession with small towns began, but for months I had done research on and dreamed of a hundred random Midwest small towns and the adventures I would have - eating cookies in cornfields and chatting with locals at the Ole Greasy Spoon. New York, D.C., Atlanta - I'd heard enough of those travel stories. And if I had a friend in New York, I suppose I would like to visit there too. But there was a theme I wanted to explore - that of a big city stranger in a small farming community, and an adventure-seeking youth's drive to explore uncharted punk territory... Without ever having visited most of the larger cities, I already felt familiar with them through the endless hype. But no one, search as I may, could tell me about the dumpster scene in Lemmon, South Dakota; or the Mexican restaurant in Galena, Illinois that leaves corn chips back by the door. So there, in Sturgis, it almost felt risky and spontaneous when I thought I just might part with I-90 and take the smaller two-lane highways to Minneapolis, through the more forgotten and lawless regions of the Great Plains. And I felt that exploring the isolated small towns would be an opportunity to finally take notes and addresses of the empty and abandoned structures in America's dying farming communities, to line up a few potential rural squats to hide out in when it all goes down. I'd been putting that off for a long time...

It was my gateway to rural country - the moth of state highway 79 - and I was a little nervous. Huge supermarkets were as life-giving to me as the blood through my veins, and without such conveniences off I-90, well, this may be the part in the story where the boy becomes a man. No all-night truck stops to read in, hotels to swim in, or record stores, or any of my favorite fun places. On the shoulder of Highway 79, with my thumb, my thoughts always returned to the supermarket issue, and that I draw the line on adventure at paying for food. No way. But I left the highway culture behind for vast cornfields, grain elevators, and huge, creepy, gray buildings set far in the distance - where if you listened closely, one heard the dying shrieks of slaughtered pigs...

My first ride was a sympathy offering, because no one would pick up a hitchhiker outside the largest halfway house/drug rehab center in the state, right? It was a path I had chosen randomly - north on state Highway 79 and east on highway 12, both lightly traveled two-lane highways into a great void, total emptiness from every perspective. It was empty space on the road atlas, whiteness on the train maps, absent from the Beastie Boys tour-day list, and on the Thrasher Magazine Skate Park Guide - nothing.

I paced Main Street in Newall and wished everyone would just quit staring at me. Newall was a sad model of decaying small town America. I had read of the emigration trend towards urban centers, the slowing flux of young people into positions in community and industry needed to sustain an economy as they fled to the cities. After exploring Newall, I had guilty feelings that my small town interest was somewhat exploitative, like South Dakota was a dead world and I was probing the corpse, laughing. To a city kid South Dakota was a novelty - the wood and nails Newall jail, the one room library, and the big old house for rent: $200 a month. It was a sad scene of isolation and desperation. Nonetheless, someday I would likely end up living in South Dakota. When reading my favorite magazine - Rural Property Bulletin (Your Guide to Cheap Rural Land), I saw the ads - “South Dakota - $99 an acre!” they read. Certainly one day, all old, angry, and clench-fisted, when most of America was a paved over strip mall, and no band ever did take me on tour with them, I would return a few boxes of cereal and laundry detergent at Safeway and buy a $99 acre. I would grumble and growl, read too much, and give out razor blades on Halloween. In my disconnected and hopeless state I would adopt lifestyle choices contrary to my nature such as going to the town bar or joining a militia, and to compensate for my guilt at having sold out completely, I would swerve to hit hitchhikers and throw rocks at trains. It was all too depressing. But $99 sure is a great deal anyway...

In Mud Butte, I was a thousand miles from home, or another vegan, or any place I would ever be ever again. No people, just a post office, an occasional passing car, and me - rolling around on the shoulder. All I recall about the ride away from that place were my parting words - “Thanks, you saved my life!” In Faith I watched a softball came, slept in a field, and in the morning got a ride through vast expanses of wheat fields and grain elevators to Lemmon. I toured the world's largest petrified forest and noted Lemmon as a choice town for criminals - where one could commit brazen crimes, cross the street, and taunt the police from North Dakota! “Tell you what,” the old man said as we entered Mobridge, “let me buy you a burger.”
“Oh, well thanks...” I said, “...but I'm a vegetarian.”
His countenance shifted to indignation. “Vegetarian huh?” he mumbled, “You just keep that to yourself...”

My surroundings in Mobridge - and the prior two days - were alien, confusing, and completely messed up. I wasn't sure if it was still America, and I had to check the grocer's dumpster just to be sure. There was always the consistent and confounding thread running through each town and region in America: edible trash. And Mobridge's trash was of exceptional quality. I dumpstered countless boxes of ghetto brand Cap'n Crunch and went to hang out by the train tracks and check out the forgotten-and-boarded-up warehouse district. Along the tracks I hopped the fence to an abandoned car junkyard. From the roof of a car I watched the sun set behind the abandoned buildings and felt the beginning of a light drizzle. The mist turned to rain, and I wondered where a vagabond might sleep in Mobridge. I looked at the boarded-up house, under the warehouse loading dock... and while the rain fell even harder, I tried desperately to rip the sun roof off that car. I was getting nowhere and I thought maybe I would go find a big rock somewhere and bust in desperate-drug-fiend style. But, oops! I was soaking wet before I checked the car door. Reclined in the seat and laying motionless in my sleeping bag listening to the rain beat on the roof, I thought of staying in Mobridge, leaving in that car, hanging out by the tracks and eating ghetto Cap'n Crunch for a few days. It almost sounded like a worthy plan.

I had at least enough cereal for a week stashed behind the grocer's dumpster... Well, maybe next visit. I had a country to explore...
“Hello, do you have and throwaways?” I was outside of Mobridge at a mini-mart on highway 12 around 8 a.m. and the bread tuck man was making deliveries. It was an old trick, legal but effective. The driver scowled, “Sorry you're going to have to pay like everyone else!” Ha! Oh yeah?

After another ride I was in Aberdeen - South Dakota's third largest town. Maybe Aberdeen did have “glory days,” or even the rich history I had read about, but had at this point sold out to the paved and neon ghettoization of America by the chain stores... which served my immediate interests: stealing CDs, scamming money from Wal-Mart, and eating. Aberdeen was a town where I was sure I had been before - endless streets of obnoxious lights, broken concrete, and choking exhaust. Aberdeen became the ghetto standard, and from that time - whenever lost, lonely, failing or desperate, I would think - “At least it's not Aberdeen...”

People often ask - after “Where do you get your money?” and “Why don't you get a job?” - “How do you stay clean?” I open my wallet and show off my extensive collection of hotel key cards! Swimming in hotel pools is a great leisure activity, and a fun way to stay clean. The Aberdeen Best Western didn't have the expected hotel amenities like banquet leftovers in the ballroom, or the free and convenient “continental breakfast buffet” in the lobby, so I was feeling a little cheated. But every hotel has a pool, and a spa, and careless maids who leave cards exposed on top of their unguarded carts. The card I took wasn't working on the pool door, so I showed my card to the maid and shrugged. She let me in, and it felt great to kick-it in the spa and stare at the ceiling. Then a group of girls - in town for a horse show or something - turned on the jets and climbed in. It was like a gangsta rap video!

Life's most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3 a.m., just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something. Like when the guys at the construction site back home left the keys in the steamroller, or when the paint store left their back door unlocked. I was definitely inspired to stay up all night, but the maddening swarms of mosquitoes had me confined to the 24-hour Food 4 Less. I tries sleeping, walking, rapping, everything; but the mosquitoes were inescapable. So using a well thought out “broken car” story I was able to stay up in the Food 4 Less cafe - all night!

In the morning the mosquitoes had retreated and the sun was rising. I'd had all night to think about life, stare out the window, and get all introspective. Morning customers drifted in with bagels and coffee, crowding my space and crampin' my style. I thought for a moment, and decided that when people want to be alone and think about their place in the world, just be emotional and enjoy solitary moments of regrets and reflection, they walk along train tracks. After ten hours, I was on a casual first name basis with the entire cashier and janitorial staff of the supermarket, and they gathered to see me off - “Good luck with your car!”

The tracks took me to a small train yard a few miles west near downtown. My plan was to crawl into a random car, fall asleep; and if I awoke in Fargo, or where I'd come from, or off the edge of the earth, well at least it would be away from Aberdeen.

Usually younger kids only visit train yards to throw rocks at me and my friends the hoboes, so when I awoke alongside the tracks with a kid on a bike hovering over me - I was scared. But he asked me a few questions, and turned out to be down with the hoboes! Where was I from? How did I come to be in Aberdeen? And why was I sleeping in a train yard? I explained my situation, told him Aberdeen was the most ghetto town ever, that I was going to kill the cashiers at WalMart for not taking back the headphones I had stolen, and be on the next train out - guaranteed! When he heard I planned to hop a freight, my status ascended to Godhead. My friend was a train fanatic who lived in a house along the tracks, spent all day riding his bike around the train yard studying trains, and waited for the one day a hobo passed through his lonely town. He knew all the important information - what trains were going where, and an excellent abandoned caboose with an elevated view of the yard. So we hung out in the caboose all day while Lil 'Bo versed me on the location of every Midwest railroad transfer point, and the history of South Dakota railroads. One day, he said, he too would hop a train out of Aberdeen and on to better things. Lil 'Bo was a shining star in the vast wasteland of uninspired 90s youth. So I get excited thinking of Lil 'Bo out hopping trains, carrying the tramp torch... Certainly he was a radiant example of what Youth of Today referred to as “positive youth.” So if you ever see a short silhouette in a distant boxcar as it rolls across the prairie - it's Lil 'Bo, and he's trying to make it home for dinner!

There were no trains going out that night, the yard workers snarled at us, and Lil 'Bo had a curfew to obey; so I made other plans. I walked the two or three miles back along the tracks to the mall and pushed my way through a crowd exiting the movie theater and into a back door.

There. No mosquitoes or cars or ghetto, and I could almost write a letter by the light of the screen. My very innocent eyes were averting a love scene, and my glance fell upon the curtain below the screen.

The film ended, the theater was emptied, and I crawled beneath the screen and went to sleep.

The I-12/I-29 junction was a crossroads with several options, and I say outside a truck stop with my walkman to think it over. Continuing east on 12 would be the most efficient path to where I thought maybe I was going at some point. South was Sioux Falls, where in the evenings the crazy mean slaughterhouse workers get drunk and drag people like me to the banks of the Missouri for a high plains beating. Or maybe I would visit that little town named after the best book I'd read recently - Ivanhoe, Iowa. I folded up my Midwest map and took out the full US one. Then I gave up on thinking about it and listened to my walkman.

Ooops! I was, like, a thousand miles from home! It seemed habits such as traveling thousands of miles to see one person, or see a single show, had diminished my appreciation for distance. So, when, outside that trucks stop, a young couple made an unsolicited offer for a ride to North Dakota, a detour of hundreds of miles, it didn't seem odd enough that I might go to North Dakota. Wherever that was.

During the ride I read the paper in the back seat and sifted through my memory to make one connection to North Dakota, any point of reference - a band, or a famous criminal, or piece of history... I had struggled with South Dakota, but come up with a Tom Petty song and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Montana had hosted the Unabomber. But no person or Hardcore band of consequence ever rose from the cornfields of North Dakota, I was almost certain.
“We're going to the casino, do you gamble?” the woman asked. Gamble? Not for money. I gambled with my life, friendships, my legal status and my future. All that I valued... not money. I may need it someday when technology renders shoplifting obsolete.

Moments after arriving it was clear my new friends were two well-connected people of high standing in the casino scene, i.e. big casino scenesters. The I.D. checker nodded, the guards waved, they received handshakes from everyone, and I couldn't be sure, but I thought the doorman smiled, made a gun with his fingers and shot at my friends! High plains coolness!

Someone had left a casino-money card in a video poker machine with 2 dollars credit, and I supposed it would be permissible to meet my ethical judgment halfway and gamble with other people's money. But after reading over the rules, pacing around, looking over shoulders, witting down and hitting random buttons, I had only confused myself and the computer. Gambling was silly.

Elsewhere around the casino, security carded people randomly, and occasionally escorted a sneaky teen to the door. I felt safe with my big-shot friends. Surely the guards were whispering to each other - “He's ok. He's with, you know, them...”. But what if they did card me? Would I make the cut? What's the legal age for being a passionless, uninspired zombie anyway?

It was late, too late to hitchhike. They understood this, and invited me to stay at their home in Whapeton. We stopped at a bar. Not my first - my second actually - but it still felt like a real big event. They even ordered me a beer! Yuck! It was 1 a.m. or 3 a.m., and I'd covered a lot of ground that day, so I fell asleep at the bar. When I awoke, someone had drank my beer! Sort of like the old joke every straight-edge kid hears - “Straight, huh? Well... (burp) more for me!”

That night was my first exposure to the life that I was supposed to be living at my age. I don't know, I didn't get it. “You'll get a job, hate your life, and you'll want to drink too!” they always say. To my left, two men were having a touchingly honest discussion about a woman by the door, or parts of her. Behind me, several others labored at a commitment to total manliness by way of female conquest. Gambling, beer, meat... I'm never growing up! Ever!

The next morning they drew me a little map to the freeway and brought me a surprise meal from McDonald's.
“Vegetarian, huh? Well, more for us!” Ha ha ha...
Take it! Take it all! Big Macs, beer, and the 40-hour work week! Bye!

She picked me up at the mouth of highway 210 on the Minnesota border and launched into her story - “Blah, blah, poverty. Blah, blah, homelessness...” We had a lot in common. “Blah, blah, unemployment...” All very liberating circumstances, possibly the optimum conditions for a dull, rich life. Then she told me of her dying daughter and exploded into tears. I was helpless to do anything but shake my head at the tragedy of it all. Entering Fergus Falls, Minnesota I spotted a Wal-Mart. “Uh, you can let me out here...”

It was a storybook life - hitchhiking the West, subsisting on misdemeanor theft. All credit and love is, of course, due to the Wal-Mart corporation for their long hours, generous refund policy, and conservative use of today's anti-theft technology! And romantic in more thematic ways - the enchanting tale of youth discovering America and the exploration of rural culture. The most revealing glimpses of which came not in the miniature towns, but the rides in-between. Old farmers barreling down the two-lane highway to bring in the hay before the rain hits - the rain they know is coming, because they can read the sky, or because Old Man Huxley is saying rain, and the old-timers are never wrong... Talking with the lifetime residents of remote prairie towns who had never left their county and did not get out often - “Did you pass through Rapid City? Isn't it crazy? Isn't it wild!?” A region of the country where asking someone what they did for a living was to ask what species they exploited - “I got me some hogs...” Where somehow it wasn't so surprising to lift the dumpster lid behind a small town grocery and find the entire front half of a cow, fur and frozen expression of death and everything. And each day, walking down Main Street, feeling the weight of suspicious stares... Old hobo books are often tinged with sentiments of migration, exploration, and vagabondage as a civic duty - “Every read-blooded American should hop a freight once in her life.” You know, “Go West young man...”

The landscape started to become a little more rolly, the conversation a little more stimulating, and Minneapolis was just ahead. My best Minneapolis friend wouldn't be in town for another week, and phone numbers to other friends had been left at home. So I thought maybe I'd hang out on rooftops in the suburbs for a few days. I got a ride into the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, and wasted no time reacquainting myself with the chaos and drama of the more paved regions of this country.

Activity centered around a whirlwind receipt scam campaign striking brutal blows of underclass justice against the corporate retail community. Stimulating enterprise included all forms of unproductive and irresponsible behavior disregarding the establishment of any groundwork on which to build a stable future for myself. A smiling transient, eating bagels - all day! The proudest moments: pacing the aisles of greater Minneapolis' colossal supermarkets - maybe the largest in the world - at 1 a.m., eating bagels and drinking tea in the Cub Foods cafe, plotting and scheming on the roof of Dunkin' Donuts, watching the Beastie Boys record release frenzy at the stroke of midnight, shaking my fist at a Catholic priest when ordered out from under the church awning and into a crazy Midwest rainstorm, pleasant conversation with a sweet girl at the donut shop, and haggling with the buyer at the used CD place of fair payment for the new Master P CD - “Look man, it's a double CD set...

Maybe it was luck, or the consumers in Brooklyn Park throwing away a lot of high ticket receipts, or something, but somehow after those two days I had earned enough to retire for the summer, and in another week - maybe for life. Wait a minute ... I had retired four years ago! Well, even if digging through trash and returning lots of expensive vitamins never really felt like work, it would be great not to see another Walgreens for a couple months anyway.

It was a surplus of what is known as “discretionary income,” and my new place among the ranks of the middle class inspired me to take a bus into Minneapolis and visit Extreme Noise Records - where I spent obscene amounts of money on vinyl. Outside the store I say on the sidewalk and held my records up to the sun. My condition and behavior were a disconcerting detachment from romantic poverty from a not too distant time when I took blank tapes down to the listening station of my favorite record store and covertly dubbed records onto cassette... How soon one forgets one's roots.

Assuck and Reversal of Man were playing, and I found several of the people I had been looking for at the show. My friends - without phones, and often without homes - can be difficult to locate, and I appreciate that about them. Rockwell was a big scenester from the straight-edge old school, and has the lyric sheet “thank you” lists to prove it. Still vegan, still drug-free. We had met the previous summer, and I had marveled at his record collection and free-rent arrangement. We caught up outside the show. He had just returned from Europe. So had I, I said. The past winter he had hopped trains around the country. Oh really...? And had received a ticket the previous week for dumpster diving.

Stop it, I thought, you're only telling me what I want to hear. The late 80's Hardcore scene had borne some of the biggest drunks and most successful capitalists of the 90's. But, I gave him the test, and he was solid! I detected no career-mindedness or middle-class aspirations. Nope, he was all tramp! Rent-free youth, true 'til death!
“I'm sick of this place...” he said, scanning the crowd. “Let's go to Chicago.” Did we know anyone in Chicago? Who cares! We're tramps!

24 hours later we were huddled in the shrubbery on the edge of the Fridley train yard, known as one of the “hottest” in the West. The train cops were everywhere, but, as thieves in the night, we spotted our train and within minutes were on a hotshot to Chicago.

We threw rocks, rolled through the small towns, and dove off on the edge of Chicago. The El train, bootleg rap tape vendors, and after listening to Paul's Boutique for ages, I got to jump my first turnstile! It was all so exciting!

Off the train and on the streets. And in Chicago, it really was “the streets” - sketchy zombies, long shadows, adult bookstores - and it wasn't South Dakota anymore, where if you're tired, you just crawl into a cornfield and sleep. Our references included extensive lists of every vegetarian restaurant and record store in Chicago, and phone numbers of two people not home. We walked to a vegetarian restaurant to sit and assess the situation. Rockwell ordered a plate of something. I eyed the menu suspiciously. Really I hadn't eaten anything that day, but I wasn't going to sell out to save my life, hungry as I was. So, they give you food, and a napkin, and ask you to pay It sounded pretty sketchy...

Chicago was hot and the streets were mean. Well, if there was anything I excelled at, certainly it was vagrancy. Faced with no resting place in downtown Chicago, hmmm... I looked at it as a little transient test. It didn't seem the standard “roof of a strip mall” stand-by plan would be applicable in the surrounding skyscraper sprawl. We could maybe hide under the table in that restaurant all night, or if the peep show booths were in fact 23c for give minutes like the sign said, well them camping out there was still less than Best Western. We settled on the roof of an apartment building garage. Rats can't climb walls, can they? What about crack zombies? Oprah Winfrey?! You see, we were very new at this...

In the morning we followed up on our second lead - Rockwell's friend who worked at the natural-food supermarket chain Whole Foods. A woman told us Rockwell's friend was on vacation until Friday. So it was a dead end, but a great dead end - where we could graze on bulk foods and free bread samples, soak up the highbrow atmosphere, read Vegetarian Times, and sit in the sun all day in blatant violation of Chicago's anti-loitering laws! Whole Foods' bulk foods selection was first class. At a certain point, after several hours of grazing on carob chips and dates, perilously in view of shoppers and employees who may or may not be on our side, we had to adapt ourselves tactically to avoid detection, employing covert techniques such as the “off-balance reach of support” and the more brazen “hit and run.” Thew were one step ahead of us, however, and had included in the store's design a perch above the bulk foods, where a lookout was quickly posted to our dismay! This unsporting maneuver inspired me, in a final act of symbolic resistance on behalf of the hungry hoboes everywhere, to steal an armload of food before making our escape!

The unspoken purpose of the trip - besides loitering - was record shopping. There was simply no end to the hours spent in record stores pouring over 99c LP and 10c 45 bins. Rockwell was a rabid collector of 80's pop music, while I sought early 80's hip-hop and modern Hardcore records. Entire days were spent zig-zagging across Chicago following up leads on record stores and flipping through dusty bins in dimly lit shops, all the while coping bravely with our incessant guilt over spending money acquired dishonestly. The number of great records stores in Chicago was overwhelming. One record storew as so vast we spent six hours going through records, at which point the shopkeeper sensed we were “down,” and took us through a back door and down a staircase into a vinyl dungeon - a music cellar filled with endless stacks of unsorted records. Maybe somewhere in that basement I could find that record, the one I'd been looking for the past month, of that song, the theme song of my summer, the one that reminded me of that girl. Maybe in one of those stacks was that record...

One of my earlier rides that trip had been with a sly and beautiful girl, another in my medium-sized list of hitchhiking crushes. “Tell me a story,” she said. I told her the curious and totally made-up story of the time I threw a water balloon through my parents' bedroom window, shattering it, to later find the water balloon unbroken on their bed! She was the kind of girl you wanted to impress. I looked through her tapes - all Madonna! “You like Madonna too?” she asked. I did. “I think I'm going to like you,” she said. We listened to Like a Virgin, the entire album, all the way to her destination. The tape ended as her exit approached. There was a long moment of uncomfortable silence... “Let's listen to it again,” she said, and grove on - 40 miles past her town! The very best song of the album - “Angel” - became the anthem of my trip, something to sing to myself late at night in ditches on the side of two-lane highways and get all emotional over. And to this day, when I hear that song, I think of that very sweet, very angelic girl.

Finding a top 40 hit that sold millions shouldn't have been any trouble, but somehow each time I asked for it, the record store people either didn't have it, or busted out laughing. Well, I found the 12” single in that cellar, and it only cost me a dollar.

Each day, after shopping all day, we would find a park and show off our finds to each other. I think Rockwell was impressed with my gate fold double LP dramatic recreation of the Chicago 8/7 Conspiracy Trial. And I was maybe a little jealous of his “Over the Edge” soundtrack to the punkest film ever - a true story of frustrated suburban kids who take over their high school, blow up cars, set fires, and even take their teachers hostage! Too often overlooked in discussions on punk film. At some point, after admiring our purchases, talk would turn to the very serious issue of just how much money we had spent. Our behavior was an uncontrollable and guilty exercise of unwise spending habits - it was sheer reckless fiscal irresponsibility!

The “Revelation Records Tour” was in town. Rockwell opposed any mention of going, and I was only casually interested in the festive nature of it all - the hoarse-throated dinosaurs of Hardcore and sporty new-jacks getting all “positive” after being “let down” and “stabbed in the back” and everything. He grumbled and I growled, then he caved and we were on our bus...

Ooops! We arrived very late. An error definitely to be blamed on our little regard for an artificial man-made system of time. Long-term unemployment: We suffer the consequences... So when we arrived we had almost missed the entire show... almost. Our timing was in fact perfect, though I didn't appreciate it until later. We slipped past the doorman and onto the floor of the Fireside Bowl. Inside it was 110 degrees and completely packed with white-bread kids. Hardcore figurehead Ray Cappo was on stage. The only words I heard were - “This is our last song. We wrote this 12 years ago. It's for everyone who's straightedge. It's called 'TAKE A STAND`”. The place exploded. It was 2 ½ minutes. And it was the best show I had ever been to.

The kids poured onto the street. We sat outside Fireside and Rockwell pointed out every Hardcore big-shot scenester. “That's Dan O'Mahoney.” Mmhmmm. “That's Tony Victory” Right, ok. “He did (such & such) label.” “he was in (blah blah band).” Rockwell remarked he thought Ray Cappo was wearing leather shoes. No way, I said. When Youth of Today pleaded “Meat eating, flesh eating, think about it!” I listened. They weren't leather, not a chance, I said. Only analysis at the straight-edge crime lab could make me consider otherwise. Although, I don't know... I mean they all sell out, right? “Ray of Today” may betray the cows, but he'll never betray “the kids!” Go!

Sitting on the sidewalk - watching the well-groomed and domesticated kids - I was thinking that Hardcore needs more bums. Like I wanted to bust out the “Will Work for Food” sign, or just fall asleep on some cardboard outside the show or something. Maybe Rockwell and I weren't asserting our “bum” status loudly enough, I thought. But then, after the crowed had mostly faded, the Fireside Bowl bouncer walked past several straggling clean-cut straightedge kids, right up to us, and told us to leave! We didn't even have to break out the spare-change cup!

Rockwell swore he had friends in Chicago, though after three nights of sleeping on rooftops with the cockroaches, I wasn't sure. But after the show, he connected with Einstein who came down right away and picked us up in a big cargo can. Einstein was a wacky middle-aged eccentric making me instantly nervous with his wildly animated demeanor, flailing arms, and afro like Abbie Hoffman. Einstein was a lifetime Chicagoan, and as we drove around Chicago he pointed out points of interest and seemed well versed in Chicago history. My knowledge of Chicago history was limited to readings on the exploits of the Yippies at the '68 Democratic Convention, several books on the Chicago mafia, and Upton Sinclair's turn of the century depiction of the Chicago stockyards in The Jungle. Last fall, sick and stranded in a small coastal town, with two weeks to wait for my ride, I had holed up in the little library and read several of the “classics.” The Jungle made a big impression...

In the late 19th century the major meat companies of the day consolidated their operations in Chicago's Southside, creating “the Jungle,” an entire square mile of slaughterhouses. “What do you know about the Jungle?” I asked. “I'll show you!” he said, swinging a u-turn. We were going the the Jungle! ...or what remained. The Jungle - as depicted in the book - no longer stands, and was condemned in the early 1970's due to community pressure and as a business decision by the meat companies. The wholesale murder corporations moved their operations to the countryside near the farms to cut down on the cost of transporting cows by train. (There was an old hobo trick - when it's so cold you might die, ride with the cows!)

I was a little worried about visiting a place that had inspired so many nightmares, but thought of it as a history lesson. Though really it wasn't history at all - the same bloodshed was going down at that moment in big shadowy fortresses off in the countryside. We arrived at the entrance. The Jungle, which no longer stands in its entirety has been given “historical landmark” status, and many monuments have been preserved - like the huge arch at the entrance with a giant looming cow head sculpture. The murder of billions as proud history... shameless.

We drove slowly through the neighborhood, now mostly an industrial manufacturing district. We did, however, find a few slaughterhouses still in operation, with the sickening stench of death and rows of cattle trucks lined up outside. We heard the roaring machinery, the clanging of metal, and saw the cows sticking their noses through holes in the trailers for their last breaths of air. Earth Crisis/Vegan Reich lyrics seem a