Occupy All Streets

To call the movement scattered was beyond accurate. To call the movement scattered was a rhetorical ploy to undermine any legitimacy and to then proceed to the next logical step of infantilizing the protesters. To call the movement scattered was a description of its epidemic nature as it spread to more than 70 major cities across the United States. To call the movement scattered was to attempt to diffuse, an attempt to defuse the fear, the uncertainty everyone was writhing in.

Joe knew this, he had to, if not explicitly, then indirectly like a scatter shot, a shotgun blast, a lethargic grenade lobbed lugubriously into a crowd of people. Upstairs, behind glass curtains, men and women sipped champagne and nudged one other with pointed elbows as they commented on how queer the goings-on below seemed.

What class warfare really needs is more guns, Joe thought, as a bum rustled against him, begging for change. Joe lifted a lazy finger, indicating the direction in which food could be found. The bum cursed Joe under his breath and shambled on.

We are the 99%, Joe thought. And I wish I knew what freedom tasted like.

A woman kicked and cursed nearby, being dragged out by police officers as a man in a green shirt rammed a recorder in her face, demanding her last name and date of birth. Demonic squeals escaped her lungs.

Freedom, Joe thought.

And this will all be forgotten, all overlooked, over tomorrow. Today is October 20th, 2011. Tomorrow, the world ends. But everyone has already forgotten that, too. Joe thought.

It was getting cold. It wasn’t freezing yet, but some people acted like it was. Joe had met a girl named Candace from Alabama earlier that morning. She arrived on a day it rained; she was bold and spewing conservative rhetoric. It started small. A bum asked her for a buck. She had to help an army vet across the street. A quiet, wrinkled old woman fell on her ass and was nearly trampled to death as work let out in the five o’clock rush. A man asked her to hold a sandwich board up while he tied his shoe. Now Candace was huddled a foot away from Joe, wheezing in the night, asleep. She’d bitched about the chill until she was out. But she was kind of cute, and Joe wasn’t quite ready to let her go yet. At least it wasn’t raining anymore.

But when she got there, Joe had thought up a spontaneous poem:
In the downpour,
rain,
bows and Eros.

He only wished he knew how to fall in deep, deep love. But he’d have to be a person before he could learn to care.

Because they were too scattered, too schizophrenic.

Meanwhile, the signs on the insides of windows were slowly peeling:
“We are the 1%.”

A man in a business suit bumped against Joe, his elbow catching Joe in the jaw.

“What the fuck?” Joe screamed.

“Sorry,” the man said, carrying on. It was an accident, one of a million chance encounters.

More guns, Joe thought.

More bodies pressed against him. Sandwich boards, chanters, signs, more suits, journalists, spectators, the dispossessed, those with nothing left to lose, and people who never had anything to lose in the first place.

A man tripped over Candace. She screeched, cutting the night air into pieces. The man toppled into Joe, who promptly pushed him off. The man went spiraling away.

Embittered, enraged, Joe chased after him and caught him by the shirt collar. He tried screaming in his face, he tried to articulate his pent up rage, but just couldn’t find the words to say it. The man slung a balled fist, just missing Joe and connecting with another man crowding nearby for body heat.

Joe took the first bite.

He cracked his jaw and plunged his teeth into the man’s neck. On the other side, the suit-and-tie jumped in, digging his incisors into the man’s arms. People converged, biting and gnashing, ripping flesh away. Others ran in from every direction. Candace screeched as more flashing teeth descended, and it wasn’t long before she got scared and didn’t know what else to do, too many hungry eyes leering on the periphery, sizing her up and down. She clawed at the nearest man’s face and tore his lower lip off in between clenched teeth.

Joe felt a warm liquid oozing down his face. He felt nothing but frustration, desperation. He broke away from the crowd, shambled across the park, and tackled the first woman he saw.

She tasted like an unwashed salt lick, and at the back of his tongue, if he could just fit her fingers in deep enough, past the second knuckle, before snapping her digits off her mangled hands, he thought he tasted freedom.

People’s arms and legs flailed wildly around him. Gunfire started. Above everything was the stench of bewilderment and blood.