Hella Nation - Evan Wright [36]
I found Wingnut’s group of cohorts on the third night of the riot. They were sitting along the curb of a side street in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle, resting while a few blocks away riot police were launching tear gas canisters and concussion grenades on Broadway, the main commercial street of the district. There were no civilians out on Broadway at the time. Police were apparently just trying to keep it clear, or perhaps were simply blowing off their less lethal weapons out of frustration. Coming upon Wingnut and the other black-clad kids (some as young as sixteen), I introduced myself as a reporter. They spoke cautiously at first and denied being responsible for any of the vandalism in the city, until Wingnut stepped forward and told me he believed that destroying property was a valid form of protest. He invited me to follow him on a “direct action mission” to find a Starbucks whose windows were still intact and smash them.
I followed Wingnut and a hooded girl (whose face I never saw but who sounded to be in her mid-teens) to a Starbucks near Pioneer Square, about a forty-five-minute walk distant. The girl produced a heavy crescent wrench from a knapsack and handed it to Wingnut as we neared the shop. She remained across the street to serve as lookout. Wingnut asked if I was interested in going with him up to the window. It was a dare.
Since he was about to commit a relatively minor act of vandalism, I didn’t experience much moral angst about the deed itself. The more important question was whether my presence as a journalist would be inciting the act, altering my subject’s behavior, which would in the strictest sense falsify the reporting. But given the enthusiasm Wingnut expressed for property destruction I concluded that he was probably going to break that window this night whether a reporter was with him or not.
So I followed him to the window. His first blow bounced off the glass. The second made a wrench-size slice in the glass. Wingnut wound up for a harder strike, but the girl across the street shouted a “Hey,” indicating that someone was coming. The three of us walked off. For me, it was a disappointing foray into revolution. But my willingness to follow Wingnut seemed to satisfy him that I could be sort of trusted. Wingnut and his friends invited me to follow them to a warehouse loft they were sleeping in across town, and the next day we left for Eugene, driving in an old Chevy Cavalier borrowed from an anarchist sympathizer.
Wingnut is about five-eight and slightly built, but with the large, powerful hands of someone who is good at physical labor, such as laying bricks, fixing cars or learning to assemble land mines from objects commonly available at the hardware store—all of which are activities Wingnut discusses with ease. (While Wingnut claims to know how to build bombs, he maintains he has not yet used one. He later admits to helping set fires to burn down an empty ski lodge in Colorado, and when discussing the evils of corporations that sell genetically modified crops he argues that the final solution may be to “blow up the motherfucking buildings.”)
Wingnut lives on food scavenged from trash dumpsters or shoplifted from stores. Theft from corporations is an honorable means of survival, according to his anarchist code. It ensures that as little capitalist lucre as possible dirties his hands. He does not own a car, rent an apartment or sleep in a bed, ever. Before his stay in Seattle, Wingnut had spent just about every night of the past eighteen months sleeping in a “tree sit”—a ten-by-twelve-foot pad—perched 170 feet up a fir tree outside Eugene that was slated to be cut down by a local lumber company.
Aside from the practical benefits of Wingnut’s black hoodie—it keeps him warm, shades him from the sun and makes him blend in