Hella Nation - Evan Wright [51]
The room is silent.
DESPITE WINGNUT’S DETERMINATION TO HIDE his pre-anarchist identity, he lets slip innumerable details. He describes wet snow that fell in the small New England town where he was raised in a close-knit Portuguese family. Growing up, he says, he wrecked several cars even before he got his license, nearly chopped his thumb off with a hatchet, burst the cartilage in his nose and drove a four-inch screw into his ass cheek by wiping out on a skateboard. Wingnut’s grandmother gave him the nickname mosca tonta, Portuguese for “dizzy bug.”
Not surprisingly, his school years were characterized by rebelliousness, which began when teachers asked him to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “I didn’t believe in saluting a piece of cloth,” Wingnut says. “I may as well salute my pants. Pledge of allegiance to the flag. Why? So I’ll run into a burning building and pull it out? Fuck no. I’ll be the one lighting the flag on fire to start the building burning.”
Wingnut says anarchy sounded like a good idea to him ever since he heard the Sex Pistols sing about it when he was a kid. He also credits Metallica and the death-metal band Sepultura for being major influences on his political development.
Wingnut brags that in high school he failed gym three years in a row. “I don’t think a coach would have had much for me unless he showed me how to throw rebar through windshields like a javelin, or showed me how to tackle a cop. I don’t see any point in learning competition. I just want to win.”
His real education, he says, began after he took twenty-five hits of LSD one afternoon when he was fourteen. “I wouldn’t be who I am without acid,” he says. “In general, if I take acid, I hallucinate so hard I don’t even know I’m a being anymore.”
Against his free-spirited nature, Wingnut describes a decidedly working-class upbringing. His father was what Wingnut describes as a “hard-core Reagan Republican.” He attended trade school and studied auto-body repair. He apprenticed for three years with a brick mason. His dad, an NRA instructor, taught him marksmanship and respect for firearms.
Eventually he drops enough clues about himself that a twenty-minute Web search yields the phone number of his parents’ house. Wingnut’s father corroborates Wingnut’s description of him as a Reagan Republican and a gun advocate; he adds that he was a combat engineer in Vietnam. But he has no problem with his son’s chosen path.
“I wish that more people had more guts to do a little bit of civil disobedience,” he says. “He’s happy, he’s healthy. He’s not filthy. The dreadlocks don’t look clean, but that’s what he’s happy with. He’s living in a tree—who cares what he looks like?”
Wingnut’s mother gets on the line. She emphasizes that her son “from a child has always been very sensitive to living things, animals. We’ve always had cats and pet fish. He used to go hysterical when a fish died. He’d get upset that we were going to flush it down the toilet.”
Wingnut’s father says his boy takes after his own older brother. “My brother was a fisherman. He was what they called a pirate, because he would shell-fish at night. He had a code of ethics, but it did not agree with the law. [Wingnut] is in the same mold.”
Then Wingnut’s father launches into a tirade, accusing the federal government of training Russian troops in Texas to fire on U.S. citizens. He praises the Michigan Militia as an outfit that “keeps the government a little bit honest.”
IT IS JUST AFTER SUNSET on Wingnut’s last night in L.A.—his final hours as Wingnut. He emerges from a Marina del Rey supermarket, the pockets of his camo pants bulging with tubes of Super Glue he’s lifted, along with a box of Top tobacco for making rollies.
The plan tonight is to bring some revolution to L.A., and I am the designated driver.
“Let’s hear some fuck-shit-up music,” Panic says, sliding a CD by Crass, his favorite anarchist punk band, into the boom box.
Panic missed the WTO protests in Seattle due to exams in his forest ecology class. Tonight will be an opportunity