Hollywood Babylon

Devan Sagliani

October 2005

Incomplete thoughts from my journal filtered through my head as I watched the sun creep through the windowpane and across the cold floor; totally non sequitur. I had taken a white, spiral bound notebook and scrawled across its glossy face with an indelible marker.

Random. Notes. From. A. Maoist. Anarchist.

I didn’t even know for sure what the words meant because more than anything they were Drew’s words. I didn’t bother to look up their definitions. I just thought it looked cool, subversive, contrary.

Whatever.

It was that same type of mentality that had attracted Drew to me in the first place, the posturing, so fake and transparent, but what else was there to do? Punk for the fuck of it. Nothing to rebel against. I raged out of my lack of injustice, an anemic subversion of conformity.

Where I grew up everyone has two point five kids. They marry young and divorce quickly and remarry right away. They go to church but don’t believe in religion. They vote Republican, no matter what the issue, and hope for the best.

Where I grew up everyone is working hard to be a clone of everyone else and though I couldn’t put my finger on it, exactly, I had been trying since early in my childhood, since I first saw the invisible bars of this nearly imperceptible cage of mediocrity.

Where I grew up everyone is working hard just to blend in with everyone else.

I took to spending weekends in the city, hitchhiking to get there, and returning by Monday morning to the family breakfast table as if nothing had happened. The ‘rents never once mentioned my little Houdini act, at least not to me. They liked to pretend to be blissfully unaware of my absences. My father used to talk about sports with me every morning over his grapefruit and dry toast. I would sneer at him and reply with an assumed English accent like I was Sid-fucking-Vicious.

2 points.

I was so fucking fake back then, but I had no guide to propel my anger and frustration forward, to channel it into something constructive that might make a difference in the world. This was before I even knew what it was that I was fighting against so desperately, before I had heard of Che and the Zapatistas and Chairman Mao. It was before Drew opened my eyes to the suffering occurring all over the world so that people like my parents and their friends could spend all of their lives in a false sense of security, eating steak dinners on the veranda and drinking martinis with the neighbors and playing eighteen rounds of fucking golf while talking on their new cell phones.

2 points, because it was too obvious.

I was hanging out on Melrose, two-toned liberty spikes gelled up with the dried fetus of gooey Knox Blox and pointing like church spires to high holy heaven, black fingernail polish, leather jacket with the Dead Kennedy’s Holiday In Cambodia album silk screened onto cotton then stapled securely on it with cheap studs, safety pins jammed through my ears and ripped, faded, stone washed jeans on.

I was one hundred and ten percent fucking poseur.

I was smoking DEATH cigarettes.

It was what caught her attention the first time she ever spoke to me. She came up to bum one.

I don’t remember a word of what she said to me.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

How could I resist you, Drew Groll?

We got high off some cheap weed she had and I stole a bottle of rum from a shop down near Vine and then she took me to meet Sandra, at her old apartment on St. Andrews, near Western, and I never went home again.

Just like that I made the decision to follow her from the quiet and peaceful existence I was rejecting in the suburban sprawl, that place where my middle class parents had built a dream home for themselves and raised me like a delicately nurtured virus, a test tube aberration, into the wretched belly of the inner city. Just like that I went from living the introverted life of a shy nerd to this extraordinary rebirth as a punk rock street urchin/speed dealer.

It made so much sense to me that it seemed like destiny, like I had been searching for it my whole life.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

The second time we fucked I told her everything, and she laughed at me.

I remember we were eating take-out at the time, greasy noodles with vegetables but no meat, because Drew’s a vegetarian.

I had never drank Thai Iced Tea and I was surprised by how sweet it tasted.

The bookshelves of her apartment were full of weird philosophy and conspiracy books I had never heard of before in my life. I read almost all of them before we got evicted, before we ended up selling them to a store up on Franklin near Birds for whatever they would give us, so we could eat and buy supplies to make sprack.

"You won’t last," Drew said without hesitation.

"You’ll just crack one day and head back to the land of milk and honey where mommy and daddy love you," that’s what she said to me.

"You aren’t cut out for this," she told me.

"You’ll bitch too much."

"You should go back to your local mall and beg them for a job selling motivational posters in expensive frames to yuppies, or making juice smoothies for cheerleaders and their faggot rapist jocko boyfriends."

I never bothered to tell her that young urban professionals had largely given way to DINK’s when it came to being indiscriminately picked on; double-income-no-kids.

I never bothered to tell her that I had no plans of ever going home, that I could tell from the first time I kissed her that I wouldn’t ever be able to go home again, that nothing short of the end of the world would separate me from her.v

The day the world ended I planned on being with Drew Groll.

I was Drew’s shiny new puppy and she knew it right away, so she started training me and teaching me how things in this world really work. She began preparing me for a life of urban terrorism.

I never bothered to tell her that I knew she was only testing me when she said mean shit to me. I smiled and gave her a practiced look and she’d smile too, and then we’d usually change the subject. We never talked about food when we were hungry, sleep when we were tired, or blowing up government buildings when we had just finished making love.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

It wasn’t always like this.

I wasn’t always an alchemist, turning Sudafed into pure gold with common household cleaners, selling super pure meth to hookers and street people and desperate West Hollywood queers, to fund our anarchist brigade.

I wasn’t always obsessed with monkeywrenching in my spare time like some pathetic activist on a rampage after reading Palahniuk’s Fight Club, playing ‘Project Mayhem’ by posting flyers in the middle of the night along deserted streets and vandalizing corporate coffeehouses like Starbuck’s for kicks.

We terrorized the parking structures in Beverly Hills, on Rodeo, super gluing the locks of new SL500’s or A6’s shut, dumping sugar into the gas tanks of 2005 BMW 5 Series no more than a few weeks old. Sandra shit in a Bentley Continental GT, on the driver’s seat, then took plastic gloves from a hair dye kit and smeared it all over the inside of the windshield. With the doors closed and the windows rolled up it must have gone to over a hundred degrees inside the car that day, spoiling the new leather with a smell that was guaranteed to never come out.

We penetrated the tall glass buildings in Century City late at night and demolished their pristine interiors, spraying the walls with obscene slogans, cocks and cunts, and stole sensitive corporate paperwork, then left it at the L.A. Times in-desk. We doused the carpets with hydrogen sulfide, smashing the flat screen monitors or drenching the insides of every computer hard drive in salt water and Coca-Cola, before slipping out undetected in the first rays of the morning sun.

Each successful mission propagated a bigger and more high profile mission.

We were totally obsessed with destruction.

"We are fighting them with their own weapons, eating them alive from the inside out," Drew would say, and then I would quote to her from Audrey Lorde:

["The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house."]

Then she would slap me and I would slap her back twice as hard and then we would start beating each other with our fists until we were on the ground. Soon we would be screwing ourselves, all of our anger, into one another. Sometimes Sandra watched us fuck with a detached look, as if we were a nature program she recalled seeing as a child, replaying on the Public Access Channel; or a porn movie from Eon McKai.

I didn’t used to live in such a kinky and sad melodrama, like a wilting flower hanging out of a melancholy book of unrequited love poems.

I used to be on the fast track to an Ivy League college.

I used to have a full head of hair, neatly coiffed with the strays on my neck trimmed close, instead of a blazing pink Mohawk.

I used to spend all my time surfing the Internet and talking in chatrooms instead of making bombs out of expensive luxury sports utility vehicles with diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, but back then I couldn’t get a date with a girl to save my life.

I had taken to sneaking a lot of porn into my bedroom but could never really get into it because it made me feel bad to think of these chicks having to pose naked or get fucked by strangers for money. I’d close my eyes and desperately try to imagine my fantasy, to keep it intact, then open them again and look at the girl spreading her insides open so far you could almost see up into her lunch. No matter how hard I tried to close them out of my thoughts they kept coming back, the sad eyes embedded in those naked faces, and it would kill my mood. Eventually I would give up and my half-flaccid member would dangle sore and bruised and unfulfilled in front of me like a rag of flesh.

Everything is always in motion.

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer can be effectively used to stimulate the growth of both avocados and broccoli, just two of the fine products growing in Oxnard California, which is where we had to travel to steal a truckload of the stuff from Agro-Chem & Associates.

Everything is always changing, growing or dying.

Considering that the same type of material was used in the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, and all of the noise that everyone had been making about Homeland Security since September 11th, I thought it was going to be a lot more difficult to get our hands on, but it wasn’t. There was no one guarding it. There was no one monitoring who came and went on the property. It wasn’t even locked up. The hardest part of boosting it was having to shovel it into the back of the sports utility vehicle and onto the plastic bags we had glued to the insides of the stolen truck with duct tape, because it stunk and there was a lot of it.

With the rear seat down there is approximately one hundred and five cubic feet in a 2005 Cadillac Escalade. We packed every inch of it we could with fertilizer.

April 19th, 1995 was a perfect, sun-drenched Oklahoma morning in full springtime bloom. Against a picturesque deep blue, cloudless sky, a bright yellow Ryder Rental truck carefully maneuvered its way through the streets of an unsuspecting and blissfully ignorant populace in downtown Oklahoma City. Just after 9 am, the truck came to a stop in a parking area outside the Alfred P. Murrah Building. The driver stepped down from the cab and casually walked away. Two minutes later a deafening roar sounded as the truck’s deadly 4000-pound cargo bomb ignited and the government building was hit with enough force to shatter over one third of the seven-story structure and reduce its north face to smoldering rubble. According to bystanders, a massive ball of fire momentarily outshone the sun as the north side of the building disintegrated. Traffic signs and parking meters were ripped from the pavement, while shattered glass exploded in every direction like a hail of bullets, maiming nearby pedestrians. Timothy McVeigh never heard or saw any of it because he was already blocks away, wearing earplugs to protect himself from the blast, which was so powerful that it lifted some people off the ground up to a mile away.

April 19th, 2005 was a perfect, sun-drenched L.A. morning in full springtime bloom. Against a picturesque deep blue, cloudless sky, a shiny black stolen Cadillac Escalade with run-flat tires on twenty inch "dub" rims carefully maneuvered its way through the streets of an unsuspecting and blissfully ignorant populace in Beverly Hills, down San Vicente towards the Hard Rock café on the corner of the Beverly Center, at the Beverly boulevard intersection.

History was, a decade later, about to repeat itself, with similar deadly consequences.

We might not have been able to provide such an astonishing show of fireworks, but we could still create chaos, we could still disrupt the system.

We thought we could get away with it.

We knew that they would never see us coming. All people saw when they looked at us was three white, punker kids, society’s disenfranchised trash, begging for spare change. We were not terrorists. We were a shoplifting hazard. We were about to change the way the world looked at us all again, like Columbine, like Red Lake. We were ready to set it all on fire, for anarchy, for better or worse, and to take our place in the annals of this fucked up American history, in pop culture, and on a zillion tawdry and meaningless cable news programs around the world; if we lived through it.

We really did think we could get away with it. After all, it wasn’t the first bomb we had set off or the first commercial property we had set fire to. It was just bigger, much bigger, and far more public. It was a full blown airborne media event waiting to happen, as unexpected as September 11th, that would spread the fear and distrust of the system across the planet like a shockwave that no one would forget.

There was no way the parent company, Taubman Centers, Inc., could shut this up.

I think I knew from the first moment I saw it that I wanted to blow up the Beverly Center, that I would have eventually tried even if I had never met Drew Groll. I wanted to see it explode in a rain of glass and fire, all of it, in every direction, showering the jaded civilians in their cars on La Cienega, the diners eating at the Daily Grill across the street, the people watching from across the street while they ate at Jerry’s-fucking-Deli; everyone in L.A. who thought they had already seen it all.

5 points for speaking power to the truth.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

Drew rolled over and opened one eye at me suspiciously, stretching and yawning like a lazy cat. I silently pushed the coffee I had scored from the corner market towards her and she smiled. It was difficult freighting coffee to the building and she knew it.

She leaned over and kissed me and Sandra groaned.

"What the fuck are you doing up at seven in the goddamn fucking morning kissing and making out with one another after we all screwed the night away?"

Drew let out a burst of short, nervous giggles and I kissed her again. Sandra began looking for her drug kit and sharpening a needle on a matchbook with her eyes half open.

Everything is always on its way to someplace else.

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