Hella Nation - Evan Wright [37]
Wingnut’s mask, a black bandanna that he wears around his neck but which can be pulled over his face at a moment’s notice, is a tribute to another of his heroes, Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico. Wingnut claims his bandanna is identical to one he saw worn by the Subcomandante in a photograph. When not wearing his Zapatista mask, Wingnut’s face is obscured by a woolly, Unabomber beard. Dreadlocks spring wildly from his head. Woven into a dreadlock by his left ear is a large wingnut, a fashion statement that also serves as inspiration for his current alias. Wingnut brags that he has not cut or combed his hair in five years. His dreadlocks, he says, are flame-proof, which is a lucky thing because he chain-smokes “rollies”—all-natural, hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes that seldom stay lit and require constant relighting. Wingnut uses a lighter with a torch-like flame he calls his “pocket dragon.” When he fires up a rollie with the massive pocket dragon flame, his dreadlocks spark but never catch fire.
Seated with his friends at Out of the Fog, Wingnut shares exploits of the previous days’ rioting. Recounting how a riot cop in “full Darth Vaders”—body armor—swung at him with a club, Wingnut says he blocked it with his hands and taunted his attacker, shouting, “Hit me! Hit me!” He laughs. “That probably wasn’t the best tactic.” Additional riot cops piled on Wingnut, clubbed him and shot his eyes full of pepper spray. Wingnut was saved when several anarchist Samaritans “unarrested him”—pulled him from the cops. Much as he laughs about it, the riots have taken a toll on Wingnut. He has a terrible cough from breathing clouds of tear gas and pepper spray. One of his ribs is cracked from a cop’s baton. There are doughnut-size bruises on his back from getting shot with rubber bullets. He has tinnitus in one ear from a concussion grenade that exploded near his head. More alarmingly, on the second night of the riots Wingnut suffered a seizure. He had been drinking tea in a warehouse in Seattle, when he began to sweat. Then he blacked out. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and his legs began to twitch uncontrollably. Wingnut snapped out of it after a few minutes, and now shrugs it off as probably a normal side effect of being exposed to the military CS gas employed by the National Guard. Wingnut discusses his riot-induced aches and pains with the same cheerfulness with which he speaks of all his endeavors, as if war against the state is one giant Halloween adventure of toilet-papering the neighborhood. “Just ’cause revolution is hard doesn’t mean it can’t be fun,” he says.
Out of the Fog serves only one kind of coffee, a militantly correct brew allegedly made from beans picked by supporters of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico. Drinking cup after cup of the black brew the morning of their return from Seattle, Wingnut’s fellow anarchists are blitzed on triumph. “The inferno is way out of control,” says Shade, a local rabble-rouser. In his mid-thirties, with thinning blond hair, Shade is one of the oldest anarchists in Eugene. Before moving to Oregon, he fronted a Seattle punk band called Total Toxic Rebellion. “The Man just wants to tighten his fat fucking white ass on the throne,” says Shade. “They can’t crush us like in a Raid commercial. If they try, it’s going to be North Vietnam all over again, and this country will know what it’s like to lose a big one.”
It is freezing cold outside the coffee shop, but a half-dozen kids sit outdoors since no smoking is permitted inside. Everyone smokes rollies, and no one has any matches, since they rarely go into a 7-Eleven except to steal.
Seated nearby at a crude, scrap-wood table, a young man in a knitted cap offers to sell me a hunting knife for $6.50 so he can buy strings for his