Since meeting in kindergarten, they’d had only one serious fight. When Rick was killed. Harrington could not believe, could not stand, could not countenance that Bill wasn’t going home for the funeral.
“Whatever happened between you two, it’s going to last after the kid’s dead?” They spoke by phone, and Bill walked out of his college apartment. The semester was over, and he stood in the street watching a sorority girl try to pack piles of dirty laundry into her SUV.
“We didn’t all drop out, Harrington. I graduate next week.”
Harrington’s end of the line was silent.
“It’s not about Rick,” Bill continued, trying to explain the inexplicable. “It’s about what the spectacle represents. As long as the Rick Brinklans of the world are held up as heroes, and we’re celebrating their pointless deaths with patriotic parades, all this shit rolls on.”
Harrington still said nothing.
“Dude,” he demanded.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Bill. You don’t hear how selfish you sound? You’re hiding behind some bullshit political reasoning because you’re still mad at him over—over who the fuck even remembers.”
Bill’s skin crawled with righteousness. “You don’t get it, and why would you? You always wanted to stand in the middle and play peacemaker. Not because you can’t think for yourself but because you’re afraid.”
“Man,” Harrington started, then stopped. “Stacey’s not going. Lisa never wrote me back. I’m just— What the fuck is with you guys? He was our friend.”
“Christ, Harrington, we were children. We didn’t have a choice who our friends were. Oh, this kid lives down the road from me? I can ride my bike to his house? Sure, let’s be best pals. That’s over. And yes, what I’m telling you is that he no longer means anything to me. Not enough to go be a part of some jingoistic spectacle. It’s a narrative, man. It’s a narrative they want everyone to swallow—that what he did was honorable. It wasn’t.”
That phone call ended badly, but unlike with Rick, they patched things up.
Four years later, after Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Bill was back in Columbus looking for a job, ranks of temp agencies failing to call him back for ten-dollar-an-hour call center work, when he saw the story on CNN. He booked his bus tickets, routing through Pittsburgh, that same night.
He spoke to Harrington on his way to New York, telling him that depending on what happened in Zuccotti Park, maybe he’d come stay with him in L.A. afterward.
“And take a corporate airline?” said Harrington in his gentle tenor. The voice that made twenty-year-old coeds mad with desire. “You already selling out, bro?”
“Harrington, the day you figure out your albums are radical documents of protest…”
“You know those evil sons of bitches only take money, right? Have you heard of money? Currency? Here, I’ll give you a primer…”
His Occupy experience was a novel in and of itself, complete with villains and minor antagonists and a low-rent threesome he had in a tent one night with a Palestinian dude and a woman who smelled of onions. The park thronged with Guy Fawkes masks, kempt reporters with stiff hair products, percussive music that thrummed in the fillings, gawkers, NYPD standing at the perimeter, rigid and bored, the active murmur of hundreds of simultaneous conversations convening to a river’s roar. It was thrilling, it was maddening, it was fascinating. He made friends he thought he’d stay in touch with the rest of his life. They would smoke cigarettes at night and watch the glowing cinders of the park. Mere blocks away, the new One World Trade Center tower glowed the color of molten steel. As the movement grew and other occupations erupted across the country, then the world, he and his new friends had the sensation of a wildfire catching the right wind.
Yet he wasn’t around in the end when the weather turned cold and the park filled with drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless—all the people society had cast off, drawn like moths to the flame of Zuccotti. He wasn’t around when in November the police put on their riot gear and cleared the park; armed with NYPD vans, corrections buses, plastic zip-tie handcuffs, and pepper spray, they carried the bodies of nonresistant occupiers while helicopters thundered above and searchlights beamed up the apostasy. Flatbed trucks stacked with metal barricades moved in while a backhoe clattered down Broadway like an Imperial Walker, loading the books, boxes of food, sleeping bags, tents, duffels, clothes, suitcases, and mattresses into soggy dump trucks that delivered it all to nowhere, just more cast off effluvium of the American experience.
He wasn’t there because five weeks into his time at Liberty Square, he saw he had a voice mail. Only his parents still left voice mails. He had to walk down multiple blocks to get enough quiet from the drum circle, and then he called his mom.
It was difficult to hear her and even more difficult to process. “Ben,” she choked. “There was an apartment fire. I can’t believe this—I’m so sorry, baby.” His skin went cold, and he thought irrationally that this was his fault. That he’d somehow brought this on.
The details were even more harrowing. Harrington had overdosed in bed with a lit cigarette in his hand. Heroin, according to the autopsy. He also killed a couple who lived above him, newlyweds from Mendocino, who’d just moved in the month before. They died of smoke inhalation. Bill slipped into that kind of stunned that settles in after impossible news, those random acts of freewheeling madness that change everything in one blood-draining beat.
He hung up on his mom and sank against the side of a building outside a deli. He stank. He hadn’t showered in a week. Occupiers chanted from down the street. We. Are. The Ninety-Nine Percent. Bill found himself thinking of grade school. They’d had this thing called the Angel Award that went to the most well-behaved student, which Harrington won every single year, much to his dismay. They gave him such shit about it. Called him “Angel in the Outfield.” Then when they got to sixth grade, their lunch table gathered a pool of money for the man brave enough to poop in the girls’ bathroom. Harrington stood up, shrugged, and said, “No more Angel Award, so I’ve got nothing to live for.” He took a detention for it and everything.
Bill lowered his head into his lap as despair erupted in his chest. Then he wept for a long time. The way you will.
He thought about staying in Zuccotti. Who knew where all this was going? How could he leave now? Harrington wouldn’t know the difference, and maybe this was it—the event that would change things. But of course it wasn’t. In the end he caught a bus back to Ohio for the funeral and watched the NYPD clear Zuccotti on the TV in his parents’ basement.
Following the funeral, Bill got in touch with his Occupy friends. One was in prison for assaulting a police officer. The cop had grabbed her breast during the clearing, and she’d cracked him with her elbow. To put a five-foot-nothing woman away for such “assault” was to codify the illegality of dissent. Another friend, Arthur, told Bill he was going to Mexico for this collective farming thing, and Bill promised to meet him there. Bill’s became a life of Greyhounds, sunglasses, and overpasses; of weeded lots and dry-docked cars on cinder blocks; of joints rolled and smoked just out of reach of the street lamps. A week later he was in the cracking, sunbaked plains of Sonora, getting advice from a kind woman with a snaggletooth and gnarled arthritic hands on how best to avoid confrontation with the cartel enforcers who not so secretly ran the town. Arthur never showed.