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

Swamp launches into his favorite parable, about militiamen defeating the much more powerful British army in the American Revolution. The three punks side with Swamp, and all agree that a violent struggle must be fought. A punk who looks like a young Johnny Rotten sneers at Sorrow. It's a schoolyard look of contempt -- pacifists are wusses. Sorrow takes his guitar and goes off.

The solidarity fest opens at the Aztlan Cultural Arts Foundation the next morning. The building is a barely refurbished former county jail north of downtown. There are still bars on the windows and cells upstairs.

A hundred anarchists and punk rockers in black leather, mostly from the Southwest, arrive by noon. Half of them sit on folding chairs arranged in a circle. A lone black man enters the circle and takes a seat. He introduces himself as Bloodhound, a Blood gang member, and says he represents his chapter in an outreach program aimed at white outlaw groups.

Bloodhound asks the assembled white kids what punk rock means. A few raise hands. The room has the politely strained atmosphere of a twelve-step meeting. A guy with his head shaved down to a mohawk defines punk as "resisting the system."

"That's about the same with us," Bloodhound says. "That we was an outlaw criminal gang was just a smear put on us by the media." Bloodhound then regales his audience with tales of being shot at by rival gang members, being beaten up in alleys by cops who then dropped him into rival gang turf to be killed. He asks whether any punk rockers have similar stories.

The room is silent.

It is just after sunset on Swamp's last night in L.A. -- his final hours as Swamp. He emerges from a Marina del Rey supermarket, the pockets of his camo pants bulging with handfuls of Super Glue he's lifted, along with a box of Top tobacco.

"Let's hear some fuck-shit-up music," Panic says, sliding a CD by Crass, his favorite anarchist punk band, into a boombox.

Siren tears open the containers of Super Glue. "Look at all this wasteful packaging," she frets.

The glue will be used to sabotage select retail establishments by squirting it into their door locks after closing time.

Siren wants to tag anti-corporate slogans on a local Tower Records store.

"What are their specific offenses?" Panic asks. "They're a huge corporation," Siren responds.

"Selling crappy corporate rock isn't good enough," Panic adds. "According to Martin Luther King, the first principle of direct action is identifying a specific offense committed by your target."

Swamp makes a bold proposal. "Let's fill buckets with paint, go into a Gap and heave the shit at racks of clothes."

Swamp's proposal is particularly bold in light of the fact that he is on parole. If he is picked up for even a misdemeanor violation, he will be sent back to jail.

Siren shoots down Swamp's idea as wasteful. They all agree they will try to hit as many Starbucks as possible, though no one can think of a specific offense committed by Starbucks.

"It doesn't matter," Siren reasons. "There are really only six corporations that own everything in the world. It doesn't matter who you hit. It's all the same."

Panic wants to tag a Starbucks with "I came in your coffee."

"That's offensive," Siren counters. "And it doesn't educate people."

An hour later, Swamp enters a Gap in Santa Monica. He pulls his bandit mask over his face and walks up to a customer. She is picking through a stack of khakis. "Did you know these clothes are made with slave labor?" His voice is midway between speaking and shouting.

The woman jumps. In the brightly lit Gap, Swamp is a gnomelike figure in his black mask and hoodie. The woman is blond and in her late twenties. She has probably devoted more time to grooming herself in the past twenty-four hours than Swamp has in the past five years. She hurriedly exits.

Swamp shouts, "The Gap uses slave labor!" A dreadlock falls from his hoodie and shakes over his mask as he repeats himself.

A salesgirl giggles nervously.

Swamp walks out.

Siren and Panic have tagged the outside wall of the Gap with the anarchy symbol in black and the word greed above it in red.

Swamp runs down a side street and pulls his mask down and yanks his hoodie off and jumps into the car with Siren and Panic. Emboldened by their success at the Gap, they spend the next several hours cruising L.A., attacking outposts of capitalist oppression. Between hits, Siren is quiet, focused. Swamp is a font of tips, like, "Hold your cans closer to the wall so the paint doesn't come out flaky."

They write "We won WTO" on the wall of a Jaguar dealership. They tag a Starbucks on Olympic Boulevard with graffiti accusing the corporation of raping rain forests. They hit a McDonald's with "McMurder." By the time they get to Long Beach, Swamp is coughing heavily, a lingering effect of his teargassings in Seattle. He suggests they call it a night. But Panic and Siren want to keep going, so they leave Swamp by the curb and head for a nearby Gap.

Panic and Siren stride to the Gap, shaking their spray cans. They have done this so many times in the past couple of hours, it has become routine. Failing to look over their shoulders or up the street for threats, they cover the wall with a particularly long list of the Gap's alleged crimes of clear-cutting redwood forests, and using child and prison labor.

A cop car zooms onto the curb a few feet from the taggers. Panic takes off down an alley. Siren stays behind and two cops hustle her to the ground.

Swamp watches helplessly from a hundred feet away. He throws down his cigarette and rocks from side to side on his feet, poised to run toward Siren.

Panic's fate is unclear. He's disappeared. Long Beach Police Department and black-and-white sheriff's cruisers swarm on the Gap. A police helicopter beats overhead, washing rooftops and pavement in white light. Rather than run away from the cops, Swamp strides right over to them, a ripe target. He doesn't say anything. A few of the cops look as he approaches. One of them beams a flashlight in Swamp's face but otherwise ignores him, assuming he is just some homeless kid, not a property-destroying felon violating parole. Nor does the cop pay much attention when Swamp walks away shouting "Panic" into the night, looking for his lost friend.

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