The Revolutionists

By Christopher Anderson

"Kam" is an ex-environmental activist who has hit bottom: His wife has left him, he lives in a rat-infested apartment in town, drinks too much and suffers from blackouts. "Brenda" is a woman with whom Kam used to engage in Edward Abee style monkeywrenching, until she and her husband were busted and went to prison.

When she is out on parole and while her husband is still in prison, she re-establishes the affair she had once had with Kam. Kam also develops a strong bond with Brenda's twelve-year-old son.

Abbie is an ex-revolutionist from the 1960s. He used to rob banks with the George Jackson Brigade, was arrested and served time in prison. He is now an old hippie living hand to mouth. When he meets Kam, his old revolutionary ideals are restored.

When Brenda's husband is released from prison, this small group of misguided idealists decide to resume the revolution against capitalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098317843

Christopher Anderson

Christopher Anderson is an internationally recognized photographer who is a member of Magnum Photos and Photographer in Residence at New York magazine.

Book preview

4

Part I:

Kam

Chapter 1

I didn’t know where I was. The cracked plaster ceiling was vaguely familiar. A similarly distressed coffee table lay beside me. An empty whiskey bottle lay on its side. There was a glass, half-full of a dark liquid, smudged with lip prints.

It came to me; I was in my own apartment.

I looked for the time, and then for my watch, which wasn’t on my wrist, nor was it on the coffee table. My wedding ring was still intact, however, too tight to remove.

About eight a.m., I surmised from the position of the Sun peeking through the corroded Venetian blinds. I was shaking from the cold. I pushed off the sofa, with a grunt, in quest of my wool sweater, wherever that might be. The stench from outside filtered through my single pane window.

I found my sweater, slipped it on, and put water on to boil. I pulled up the blinds to gather in the passive warmth of the December sun. Below, life bustled. It was Monday.

And in the compressed world of my neighbors, most of whom were as unemployed as I was— on disability, social security, or Medicaid— from different levels of misfortune and missed opportunities or both.

The woman across the hallway carried the scant remnants of what was once, no doubt, a pretty woman. I would have loved to quiz her about her life, but that was impossible since she was insane— a loose prognosis on my part since I am not a psychiatrist; but in the months that I had known her, I’d yet to hear from her one rational sentence. You might say, Have a nice day, and she might reply, Do you understand string theory? In fact, we had this exact conversation. I replied, No, I don’t, and she said, Harper Lee. It was then that I had arrived at my layman prognosis.

The old boiler below bellowed the one-hundred-year-old brick apartment shuddered; my steam radiator radiated. The water came to a boil. I poured it over the funnel of Folgers, nourished by the sweet smell of strong black coffee— a healer. The Mayans, I think it was, knew that.

I remember reading somewhere that a study of alcoholics concluded that those who drank coffee all day and alcohol all night avoided liver cirrhosis.

I sat with my steaming coffee. Speaking of cirrhosis, I picked up the novel by Roberto Bolano, 2666. I was on page ten. I put the book down and looked for something palatable to have with my coffee, to ease the ailment of my swollen abdominal region, and couldn’t find anything, except for, alas, the half-full glass of whiskey. I’m a ‘glass half-full’ kind of guy. I poured it into the coffee for added sweetness.

Coffee and whiskey imbibed, I entered a state of reasonable consciousness, unlike my poor neighbor. I returned to the coffee pot for more sustenance. The whiskey, unfortunately, was gone.

The old brick building again juddered in a gust of winter wind; it leaked through the shoddily cocked windows and grazed my cheek. I shivered at the thought of that freezing air. Where was the damned global warming when you needed it?

I needed sustenance for my hungover body.

I went to the bathroom to pee and brush my teeth. The ceiling of my bathroom was shorter than my six-feet-two inches. I leaned into the mirror in quest of what was once a handsome face, encountering a sort of vague familiarity, yet bloated and pink. I looked away. I couldn’t go face to face with myself. I washed my face and scrubbed it dry with a mold-scented towel.

I put on the goose down sweater I’d bought at REI decades ago and ventured out. The skyline was peppered with construction cranes, busily developing the area. It wouldn’t be long before they offered my landlord a deal he could not refuse, and my home too will be razed for the sake of development and growth, forcing us poor people out onto the streets with nowhere to go, homeless in an unforgiving, supposedly ‘liberal’ city. This is called progress—growth with finite borders—much like the neoliberal globe itself, with no foundation in place to support it.

I, at one time, addressed these matters. I was an activist. I have a degree in environmental science. The ‘Sierra club,’ at minimum wage, employed me. I marched, protested, even monkey wrenched. I was an optimist, as Marx was about social evolution. I believed in the inevitability of the revolution. I joined the kayakers in Elliott Bay protesting a Shell oil-drilling rig, resting before resuming its journey to the Chukchi Sea in Alaska to drill for oil, taking advantage of the melting ice glaciers. Irony has no place in capitalism. I joined with others to stop a coal train from passing through Seattle. I was here in 1999 shutting down the WTO conference. I was a midnight warrior. More on that later.

The problem with Marx’s sensible theory is that the social body didn’t evolve. It instead capitulated to the dog eat dog theory of the survival of the fittest. Capitalism won and Gaia lost. Society devolved with the advance of capitalist greed. As carbon dioxide leached into the environment, as the plankton in the oceans was destroyed with chemicals and plastics, as the coral reefs bleached like Clorox cleanser, as toxic GMOs destroyed farmland and pollinating insects, as billionaires and billions of poverty-stricken people expanded, the rich with their obsession for private profits won. The triumph of capitalism marches on victoriously!

My stomach reminded me that I was hungry. Clouds appeared. The harsh wind maneuvered its way around pedestrians with their iPhones and youthful eagerness. The cranes swayed ominously in the wind, like some alien in a sci-fi flick. I looked at Elliott Bay. Ferries cut through the white-capped waters; barges teetered with trailers of cargo being towed to their destination. The bay too was polluted with commerce. The bay’s famous octopuses were a delicacy at the more expensive restaurants. It all was blurry through hung-over eyes, but there it was nevertheless- the world teeming with the excesses of capitalism.

Across the bay, West Seattle hovered over it all in an orange haze, multi-million-dollar homes, perched at the crest, doomed to slide into the rising bay.

I took stock of my assets: nada. I was forty-five years old, middle-aged goes the euphemism. A modicum of fat encircled my waist just below my navel. That could be dealt with promptly with a bit of exercise and a proper diet. Quitting drinking might be a thought. I was of above-average intelligence, I believed. A caffeine confidence emerged from the hangover.

I resumed my march to the market for breakfast.

Chapter 2

My wife and I were buying a house in West Seattle. Deb made the money in our household, working as a legal assistant. I was still with the Sierra Club, writing for the ‘Sierra Magazine.’ I felt useless.

I had strolled by the nearly finished development, six blocks from our house, with my arthritic thirteen-year-old golden retriever, Che. I made sure I did not focus on this recent malignancy in our neighborhood, not wanting to draw attention to myself. However, I couldn’t help but smile with a smug feeling of satisfaction as my peripheral vision caught sight of young burly Latinos muscling cheap sheetrock through the front door.

It was to be my third beauty project.

My clandestine operation began six months earlier. West Seattle had once been a quaint part of the Greater Seattle region, sparsely segregated from the city with a drawbridge that drew up at the most inopportune times, scaring people away from settling there. And that’s the way the West Seattle residents liked it. Then, one day, an apparently drunken ship’s captain steered his ship into the bridge, and the north span was stuck open until another bridge could be built over it. Once built, quaint West Seattle began its conspired process of gentrification. Home prices skyrocketed, along with parasitic development.

Now they were bulldozing away beautiful old single-family bungalows, to make way for ugly rectangular apartment buildings with hardy board siding.

Urban village nonsense. For every one of these filled units, no one could tell me it wouldn’t come with a vehicle. What it did come with was clogged streets, nearly impossible to maneuver through in any reasonable amount of time, and once at one’s destination, unable to find a parking spot. They kept building and building with no concept of any kind of infrastructure to support it.

Six months before this, I had been walking with Deb and Che to the same coffee shop we had been frequenting since buying our house, when I saw a construction sign that informed us that another beautiful craftsman house that we adored was about to be removed and replaced with a 28-unit apartment building, with no parking available. It was then that I decided that I’d had enough.

The coffee shop was C&P, owned by our good friends Cameron and Peter. There was a Starbucks closer, but Deb and I boycotted Starbucks, just as we boycotted Nike, ExxonMobil, and Walmart.

The alarm went off at 03:00. I groaned and pushed myself out of bed and into my warrior gear- black clothes and black stocking cap, quaffed a cup of coffee, went directly to the tool shed, put on black work gloves, grabbed the bolt cutters, and a two-gallon can of gasoline.

I stealthily opened the gate at our side yard and slipped out into