Hella Nation - Evan Wright [48]
The two other passengers who have joined us now occupy the backseat: Panic, a wiry, unsmiling revolutionary in his late twenties, and Siren, a young woman about eighteen who assures me she is not a runaway. One of them has a boom box on which they blast their favorite anarchist punk bands, the Subhumans and Crass.
Siren, who does not own shoes, rides with her bare feet draped over the front-seat headrests. Her jeans hang in ragged strips at her ankles. Her dyed-black hair is dirty blond at the roots. She has a pierced nose, and the skin rises around her piercing in a gray-pink bubble that indicates a nasty infection.
Six weeks ago, Siren ran away from her parents’ home in Southern California and landed in Eugene, where she lived under a tarp by the river.
Her flight had as much to do with her parents as it did with a young anarchist named Austin. “I left town to get away from Austin. We split up. Austin and I did everything together, every day for two years.”
When Siren arrived in Eugene, she dabbled in being a hippie but quickly grew disenchanted. “Hippies call themselves a family full of love and beauty. But I found out hippie men think I’m weak and stupid and lie to me. Because I’m a girl, and I’m on the street.”
Siren met up with anarchists in Eugene shortly before their excursion to Seattle. “Anarchists give me hope. When I’m around them I forget there is racism and sexism.”
In L.A., she aims to hook up with her ex-boyfriend and make another go of their relationship. Her involvement in vandalizing Seattle during the WTO convention has inspired her to write more songs for the band she had with Austin. Her only fear of coming back is the off chance that she might encounter her parents, though she plans to crash with Austin at an anarchist co-op.
Despite her youth, Siren has the voice of a calm, centered thirty-year-old woman. She punctuates her sentences with laughter that sounds like humming. It catches you off guard when she talks about how much she hates her family in those soothing tones, with her gentle laughter.
The chief cause of her estrangement from her parents, she explains, is the fact that they are Christian fundamentalists. “My mother doesn’t even listen to music. She is not human. She only listens to Dr. Laura,” she explains. “My father is the ugliest man in the world. I can’t stand his smell. I can’t eat meals with my family. The sound of my father chewing makes me want to vomit.”
Siren describes a violent home life, though laughing lightly she admits she was the cause of most of it. She claims that her father has a permanent quiver in his hand that is a result of her punching him in the back so hard it caused nerve damage. “That’s what he claims,” she says. “But I don’t believe anything he tells me. When we fight, he cries and cries. My mother doesn’t even love him.”
She chose Siren as her name because, as she explains, “sirens sang the most beautiful song, and it killed men. Isn’t that crazy? I want to paint a picture of that in my mind.”
Panic, twenty-nine, is shirtless in a pair of black overalls. He is tall and thin, to the point of looking starved. He is going to L.A. to attend a three-day anarchist get-together called Solidarity Fest. Panic says he has been an anarchist since he got into punk at the age of ten.
Panic grew up in Southern California but has lived in anarchist-punk squats in San Francisco, New York and Berlin. It wasn’t until he moved to Eugene a few years ago that he became active in the environmental wing of the anarchist movement. He recently enrolled in the University of Oregon in Eugene to study forest ecology. Panic says it has taken him a long time to find himself.
On the outskirts of Fresno, California, Panic makes a confession. “I was