Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!
switch•blade (swĭch’blād’] n.
a different slice of hardboiled fiction where the dreamers and the schemers, the dispossessed and the damned, and the hobos and the rebels tango at the edge of society.
THE JOOK
GARY PHILLIPS
I-5: A NOVEL OF CRIME, TRANSPORT, AND SEX
SUMMER BRENNER
PIKE
BENJAMIN WHITMER
THE CHIEU HOI SALOON
MICHAEL HARRIS
THE WRONG THING
BARRY GRAHAM
SEND MY LOVE AND A MOLOTOV COCKTAIL! STORIES OF CRIME, LOVE AND REBELLION
EDITED BY GARY PHILLIPS AND ANDREA GIBBONS
PRUDENCE COULDN’T SWIM
JAMES KILGORE
NEARLY NOWHERE
SUMMER BRENNER
“Introduction” copyright © 2011 by Gary Phillips and Andrea Gibbons. “Bizco’s Memories” copyright © 2011 by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, English translation copyright © 2011 by Andrea Gibbons. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and “Darkness Drops” copyright © 2011 by Larry Fondation. “Nickels and Dimes” copyright © 2011 by S John Daniels. “The El Rey Bar” copyright © by Andrea Gibbons. “Poster Child” copyright © 2011 by Sara Paretsky. “The Lunatics” copyright © 2011 by Kim Stanley Robinson. “Murder … Then and Now” copyright © 2011 by Penny Mickelbury. “Piece Work” copyright © by Kenneth Wishnia. “Gold Diggers of 1977 (Ten Claims that Won Our Hearts)” was first published by Virgin Books, 1980, as The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, and was revised in 1989 © 1989 by Michael & Linda Moorcock. “Cincinnati Lou” copyright © 2011 by Benjamin Whitmer. “Berlin: Two Days in June” copyright © 2011 by Rick Dakan. “Orange Alert” copyright © 2011 by Summer Brenner. “Masai’s Back in Town” copyright © 2011 by Gary Phillips. “I Love Paree” originally published in Asimov’s, December 2000, copyright © 2011 by Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet. “A Good Start” copyright © 2011 by Barry Graham. “One Dark Berkeley Night” copyright © 2011 by Tim Wohlforth. “Look Both Ways” copyright © 2011 by Luis Rodriguez.
This edition © 2011 PM Press
Published by:
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover designed by Brian Bowes
Interior design by Courtney Utt/briandesign
ISBN: 978-1-60486-096-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010916479
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A big thanks to all of the authors who submitted their work for this collection, and PM Press for making it possible. Thanks also to Allan Kausch, David Cooper, and Shael Love for their help with “Gold Diggers of 1977 (Ten Claims that Won Our Hearts)” by Michael Moorcock, and Gregory Nipper for his splendid copyediting.
Contents
Introduction
Gary Phillips and Andrea Gibbons
Bizco’s Memories
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Larry Fondation
Nickels and Dimes
John A Imani
The El Rey Bar
Andrea Gibbons
Poster Child
Sara Paretsky
The Lunatics
Kim Stanley Robinson
Murder… Then and Now
Penny Mickelbury
Piece Work
Kenneth Wishnia
Gold Diggers of 1977 (Ten Claims that Won Our Hearts)
Michael Moorcock
Cincinnati Lou
Benjamin Whitmer
Berlin: Two Days in June
Rick Dakan
Darkness Drops
Larry Fondation
Orange Alert
Summer Brenner
Masai’s Back in Town
Gary Phillips
I Love Paree
Cory Doctorow & Michael Skeet
A Good Start
Barry Graham
One Dark Berkeley Night
Tim Wohlforth
Look Both Ways
Luis Rodriguez
Contributors
Introduction
Get your grind on: From the streets of Athens to Watts ’65; the Velvet Revolution; sit-in strikes in Flint, Chicago and beyond; the MPLA taking Luanda to the attack on the barracks at Moncada; the Bolsheviks; the Poll Tax Revolt; Stonewall; the Mothers of the Disappeared; the Black Panthers; the Gray Panthers; the Yippies and on and on … the fight for a better world has involved various ways to challenge the status quo and change up the relationships of power.
The foregoing was the opening grabber in the solicitation we sent to our potential contributors concerning the anthology you now hold in your hand. It’s a bit fuzzy today as to the exact origins of Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! though the title came from a punk song by the UK band The Flys that PM Press’s publisher Ramsey Kanaan suggested. We knew we wanted an eclectic mix of contributors to this collection, and the two of us are quite pleased with the results we believe you’ll enjoy in this edition. Most of the pieces are original. A few are out of print or being made available for the first time in a U.S. publication.
We have tales set in the past (or where the past haunts the present), to stories ranging from the tumult of now to futures where uncertainty and the iron heel reign. Herein you’ll find renditions of lust and ideals, avarice and altruism, ruthlessness and hope, the left and the right and points in between, the fantastic and the crushing banality of bureaucracies. Yet shot through all of the stories, stories where politics big and personal play a role, is the contradictory and often surprisingly resilient nature of the human animal.
Certainly one of the aspects that made putting this collection together so cool for us as editors and contributors was our respective backgrounds in activism and community organizing. The lessons we took away from those experiences were not only about the need for a incisive power analysis and being aware that goals and objectives have to be constantly readjusted, but just how indomitable are the spirits of everyday working people, be they dealing with faceless slumlords, police abuse, rights on the shop floor or simply banding together to get a stop light erected at a street corner for their kids.
Stuart Hanlon, one of the attorneys who helped overturn the framed-up conviction the FBI orchestrated against former Black Panther leader Elmer Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, stated in regards to the $4 million or so in damages his client and friend received post his release, “If you didn’t have anything or want anything, they couldn’t take anything from you.” But that was of course only about material things. As a freedom fighter, the late Ji Jaga long ago learned in all those years on the streets and in prison to keep going forward, to not let the system beat you down. The interesting characters you’ll find in these pages are in some respects in the mold of what Ji Jaga, Septima Clark, Emma Goldman and so many others stood for in their pursuit of certain freedoms and truths—maybe not on a world-shattering scale, but for stakes that meant something to them … and us. Mind you, some of the other folks you’ll encounter in these pages you wouldn’t want to meet in a well-lighted alley under any circumstances.
We know though you’ll find the stories in this collection entertaining, insightful and damn good reads.
The struggle, as always, continues.
Gary Phillips & Andrea Gibbons
Bizco’s Memories1
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Bizco Padilla became a soccer player in prison, so he saw the game in
a unique fashion, like a war where anything went. Nothing could’ve been further from the supposedly British spirit of honorable competition or the prescribed Olympic ethos. His was a warlike soccer, country or death, the kind from which no one was exempted: not mothers, refs, busybodies, spectators nor the cities, nations, or races involved.
We got into the habit of watching the Pumas’ games every Sunday on TV. We were the ideal companions: me because I had a thirty-five-inch color television inherited from a stale marriage, and him because he acted as commentator for the match, filling in for the sound that had long ago died in the appliance and that I had never bothered getting fixed.
El Bizco would arrive half an hour before the match to wake me up. Without much consideration he’d kick out my casual ladyfriend from Saturday night’s sad fever and start to smoke, pacing around the bedroom while we talked politics.
Once the game started, his squinty eyes would fixate on the TV and the ashes from his little cigar would start to fall all over the place, most substantially around the curve of the kitchen stool he sat on.
Bizco’s rules did not include off-sides, a pansy charge by the refs to disallow goals and make themselves hated. He considered infantile any punishment that didn’t involve the guilty party eating dirt and getting trampled on. He permitted pulling the goalkeeper’s pants down as the goalkeeper jumped up, and said that hand balls were only a foul if they saw you. For a good game there had to be at least two or three beatings and the red liquid had to flow. A broken leg and bleeding from the nose seemed to fall within the parameters of what he considered normal.
Bizco possessed a clairvoyant sense of the players’ psychology. After having seen them touch the ball three times he could anticipate both their movements and their motivations. Bizco knew a lot about egos, manias, and displays of manliness. Above all, he knew a lot about fears.
“Now López is going to make a run along the edge of the field, looking to get behind Guadalajara’s defense.”
“Look at that prick, complaining for nothing. The guy barely pushed him! If he doesn’t like it he can go home, stupid-ass.”
Curiously our dominical meetings were teetotal. Prison had made Bizco a ferocious militant for Alcoholics Anonymous. My nonexistent author royalties at the time had condemned me to lemonade with a little sugar. Coffee sometimes—when the Pumas trashed the other team.
We had promised ourselves that when our economic situation improved we would go to the stadium instead of this ritual gathering in front of a mute TV. Bizco agreed to it then, even knowing that part of the enchantment was in the remoteness, the distance, the world that remained outside. The sensation of being prisoner that protected him.
Bizco was so cross-eyed that it was the same to him whether he looked at you face-to-face or sideways, and his scar filled you with fear, crossing his right cheek from his ear to his lip. Just another of the footprints left by prison. They’d thrown him in the joint at the end of the ‘60s, almost into ‘70, the last day of the year. All because when he was seventeen he was a messenger for a guerilla force that never took action, and that had been so heavily infiltrated it was the police making decisions on the national committee by a simple majority. Having committed no crime didn’t save him from two weeks of torture and a month of preventative imprisonment that was so bad it would’ve been better if it had ceased to exist in his memories. Later he was sent to Oblatos prison in Jalisco, in those days the highest-security prison the federales had.
That’s where he became a great soccer player, not through kicking around a ball in the barrio or on interscholastic teams. It never had anything to do with sport: just the fucked-up soccer of prison. Gangbangers from crujía siete, rapists, sexual predators, and parricides all against the “P,” what they called the political prisoners. Guards against inmates. An average of seven wounded, and two or three goals by Bizco per game.
“A header, forcing the goalkeeper to dive to the ground so there’s no chance he’ll get the rebound.”
And then to celebrate you get close to the fallen goalkeeper, spit on him, and say:
“I fucked you, bro.”
That’s how it went until things began to get bad. Bizco wasn’t used to talking about that either. He wasn’t used to talking about a lot of things, like where he was born for instance. He didn’t talk about his personal life. From what I remember he didn’t have any family. To the question of where he was living he would answer with nonspecifics.
“Over there Fierro, in an apartment like a closet.”
And then he’d return to the central theme: “Kill him already, asshole, what do you have elbows for? You see that, Fierro? That kid’ll go far, he’s slick, a true athlete”
One Sunday he disappeared. When I had just started to get worried, he reappeared the next, and from the doorway he told me in a whisper: “If I tell you, you will probably write it down, and if you write it down, then probably I will stop seeing it at night.”
It seemed to be the prologue to everything, to the long-hoped-for history surging from the past. I asked him: “Do you have nightmares, Bizco?”
“I have everything,” he said, sitting in front of the television that he hurried me to turn on.
As the Pumas came out onto the field in their gala uniforms, the gold and the black, in the less-than-full stands the capricious fans carried off half a wave.
“Who knows why the authorities wanted to screw us and told the director to throw us in with the common population. In the “P” zone we were maybe 150 political prisoners, and there were six thousand inmates. There wasn’t a day or a night that they didn’t fuck with us. They took hold of a dude from Saltillo and they raped him in the middle of the yard, forced us to watch with their knives in their hands.
“Pure law of the jungle. Punishments at all hours, months without letters, not even permission to go to the library, no visits, cells turned upside down, regular beatings, torture, and so we went with no sleep, our balls shriveled up from living with pure fear. The one who ran the whole operation and passed his time inventing ways to fuck us was a real skinny dude, Flaco, who was in the tank for having killed his mother to steal from her. He’s the one who got the green light from the director and started arranging things here and there, handing out money and permissions and packets and favors, and they let him traffic coke and marijuana.”
“And then?”
“We organized. We started a mutiny and took over the guardroom. The way things were it was better to die of a bullet than die of fear. The whole of the inside perimeter was in our hands. We got hold of like fifteen shotguns. The rebellion lasted three days until we negotiated with the federales.”
Another silence, the Pumas had scored an early goal and Bizco had let it pass unnoticed.
“And then?”
“Well, it was a question of pounding some fear into the bodies of those assholes, but we couldn’t start killing all of them because that wouldn’t have put an end to it, one of them dead and they’d just be back for revenge … And so we organized a football game. Just us, political prisoners against political prisoners, without a fucking ref, with only one goal, just kicking the ball around, all 150 of us, even the ones who didn’t know how to play. And we were playing it hard for half an hour there in the main yard with all the rest of the inmates watching. I scored a goal.”
“With your head?”
“How could I? The only head that counted was Flaco’s, that’s what we were using for a ball, Fierro.”
That’s where he left it. Then he returned to narrating the Pumas game with the same flavor as always.
1 Bizco here is being used as a nickname; it means cross-eyed in Spanish. Translated by Andrea Gibbons.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Larry Fondation
We sit in a café.
The coffee is strong.
You are unarmed.
The wind blows hard and the waiter closes the door.
“Hercules,” you say.
I ra
ise my eyebrows, silent.
You understand me.
“The wind is strong, the waiter is stronger,” you say.
I understand you.
“I must,” you say.
“I know,” I say.
“Do you?” she asks.
I try to hide that her remark has hurt me.
She starts to speak again.
I put my finger to my lips.
Unmistaken, she draws her body across the table, and—unveiled—she kisses my lips.
Sand straddles our table. The waiter was not quick enough.
I return her kiss.
She leaves and I order another coffee. I linger a while and I read a thick book by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a history of the world. Night crashes quickly, crescendos to darkness, like the clap and bang of a falling bomb. I return to my barracks.
The Wagner morning comes suddenly. Neither night nor day can last. Despite the dust, I can see clearly from the compound window. In the mile or so that separates us, the uprooted air lifts matter, dark and real, dead and alive, heavenward like the Ascension. The dawn is punctuated. I make the sign of the cross and I speak aloud in Latin: “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.” I fall silent as the base alarm sounds full alert. I fall to my knees. I rise again within seconds as I am called, with my company, to the scene.
Nickels and Dimes
John A Imani
“Fuck it. I ain’t been arrested lately.”
UCLA—May 11, 1972
It was a beautiful day that no one noticed. Least of all me.
The knot in my midsection was churning. Burning. Bubbling. Bursting. Turning itself inside-over like a pack of sharks threshing and slashing their way through what used to be calm shallow waters now chummed and become bleeding foam. But, as I stood there watching, the bloodletting going on inside me wasn’t because of the impending menace of the row after row of armed and armored cops heading towards them.
The pigs were John Wayneing their way slowly—sashaying down Main Street at High Noon in their minds—savoring their own swagger, licking their own (pork)chops, greedily but patiently anticipating the thuds of their truncheons, the slash, the crash, the crush of flesh, skull and bones. The “bad guys,” a pack of tied-dyed long hairs, sat grouped about “King Bruin” himself, the latest and perhaps star of UCLA’s high-flying perennial National Championship basketball teams, all yelling today’s favored slogan, “Fuck Chuck.” They were camp squatted sitting in the street fifty feet to the left of me right in front of the school’s administration building.