Swamp's Last Day on Earth . . . And Other True Tales of the Anarchist Underground

Then Swamp'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."

The drive from Eugene to L.A. takes approximately sixteen hours. Swamp catches a ride with two other anarchists, Siren and Panic.

Swamp expounds on the evils of civilization and focuses his ire on the common toilet. "A toilet is a fucked-up thing," Swamp says. "The first rule of living in the forest is, never piss or shit in good drinking water. What's a toilet? You piss and shit in good drinking water -- push a button and throw it away."

Siren's pants hang in ragged strips at her ankles. Her dyed-black hair is dirty blond at the roots. She has a pierced nose, and the skin rises around her piercing in a gray-pink bubble that indicates a nasty infection. In L.A., she aims to hook up with an ex-boyfriend. She is estranged from her parents, who are, she says, Christian fundamentalists: "My mother doesn't even listen to music. She is not human. She only listens to Dr. Laura. My father is the ugliest man in the world. I can't stand his smell. I can't eat meals with my family. The sound of my father chewing makes me want to vomit."

Six weeks ago, Siren ran off to Eugene and lived under a tarp by the river. "Anarchists give me hope," she says. "When I'm around them, I forget there is racism and sexism." She chose Siren as her name because "sirens sang the most beautiful song, and it killed men. Isn't that crazy? I want to paint a picture of that in my mind."

Panic, who is in his late twenties, is tall and thin to the point of looking starved. He says he has been an anarchist since he got into punk at age ten. He has lived in anarchist-punk squats in San Francisco, New York and abroad.

On the outskirts of Fresno, California, he makes a confession. "I was a Nazi," he says. "Just a few months in high school. My girlfriend helped me get out of it. She came over to my house one day, and she said, 'This is not you.' She brought out my old records, she got me back into my punk." Panic's second-most-shameful episode occurred during a dark period when he worked for a bank and wore a tie. "It all happened during a really fucking bad acid trip," he says. "I heard my dad's voice telling me I was all wrong, that I was a loser." Shortly thereafter, Panic got a job counting money in ATM machines. It lasted only a few months. "Yeah, punk brought me back to sanity again," he says.

At a refueling stop outside Bakersfield, Siren wanders barefoot on the asphalt, looking for a ladies' room, while Swamp and Panic go across the street to a McDonald's. When they return a few minutes later, they are in getaway mode. "Let's go, quick," Swamp says and piles into the car. For a few minutes no one says a word; then Swamp and Panic crack smiles.

"We wrote 'McMurder' on the walls of the men's room," Panic finally says. "The red paint dripped perfectly, like blood."

"Break it! Break it!" Swamp says in a Beavis voice.

Panic and Swamp giggle together.

"You guys?" Siren says, frowning. "I'm left out of things because I'm a woman. I wish you guys would include me in everything."

The L.A. co-op is a ram-shackle stucco house in a suburban section of Inglewood, under the landing path of jets flying into LAX. A FREE MUMIA banner is draped across the backyard fence. There are car seats on the lawn. Inside, more car seats serve as living-room furniture. Posters tacked up in the kitchen depict small, furry animals being tortured in scientific labs. The four full-time residents are all vegans.

A harried-looking twenty-year-old named Kendra is the only co-op member home when the Eugene anarchists show up. Kendra and her three housemates are helping to organize an event called Solidarity Fest, a three-day festival of punk bands and political workshops at a community arts center downtown. It is scheduled to begin tomorrow.

Siren finds her ex-boyfriend in the living room; he's a sixteen-year-old who is sitting on the floor fiddling with wires on a guitar amp. In happier times, they carried protest signs that read "You're eating kak burgers" outside a local McDonald's (Siren explains that kak means vomit, penis or come, depending on the context). But today their reunion is strained. Siren sits in a car seat across from him and smiles. He avoids eye contact with her.

"What are you doing for the holidays?" Siren asks.

"Dose on acid to write songs for the band," he mumbles. "Fry some more on Christmas. Go to San Diego on New Year's and luck shit up."

As the sun sets, a cluster of punks from Phoenix arrive in two beat-up vans. Among them is a sixteen-year-old girl who ran away from her home in Texas. She says her parents had her under virtual house arrest. She escaped by propping the automatic garage door open with a paint can and wiggling out after her parents had gone to sleep. "I'm not really an anarchist," she whispers. "I'm just looking for a place to stay until I find my sugar daddy."

A gangly boy comes up the driveway with a guitar and a backpack slung over his shoulder. His name is Sorrow, and he rode a freight train into L.A. two days ago. He has walked approximately forty miles across the city looking for the coop. He is dead tired and famished.

Sorrow, 16, came to L.A. from the Minnehaha Free State, an organized blockade of a highway expansion across sacred Native American grounds in Minnesota. Like Swamp, he has battled Freds from atop a monopod and lived in a tree. Unlike Swamp, Sorrow identifies himself as a "nonviolent anarchist."

Swamp offers Sorrow a smoke, and he joins the circle of young punks sitting at Swamp's feet. Swamp begins to tell the young punks about the Unabomber manifesto and the need to take up armed resistance against the state.

"The Unabomber just killed people," Sorrow says. "It was wrong."

Swamp asks, "If people broke into your house and were raping your mother, would you fight back by any means necessary? What about Mother Earth?"

"You can't win against the U.S. Army," Sorrow says.

"A single Molotov can take out twenty-five troops," Swamp counters.