America Essaus Pt X - The Dreams They allow Us To Dream

Hours passed on the empty highway. Occasionally a car passed by going the opposite direction, or a group of teenagers in a hot rod blew by me at suicide velocity. But overall this was a land that belonged to nature. The environs were so harsh that it was not even worth exploiting. There was not a thing man-made to be seen as far as the eye could see.

Man-made objects are full of sharp angles, parallel lines and bold geometric repetitions. Nature is a soothing chaos, smooth random curves and irregular jagged edges. Chaotic, yet there is a sameness to it.

The curves of the sand massage the mind like a Japanese shiatsu, urging you to relax and expand your thoughts. Or urging confession to an unseen therapist or a priest whose curtain is the Earth and skies.

It seems that much of my personality has been shaped by poverty. In America a man is judged by his material wealth. I have heard women in New York say they look at a man’s shoes, if his shoes don’t look expensive enough they don’t bother to speak to him.

To be an artist is to be a bum. Unless you’ve made a lot of money at it, of course, but otherwise it is a joke from which the artist is often advised to grow up and get serious about life. To take the left hand path, to devote your life to gaining spiritual wealth is to be a pauper, if not a bit cuckoo to boot.

The house I was born in was a little cement block building in a little hamlet called Alfarata.
More often than not the house had no running water and my mother and sister would trudge out into the field to bring water from an old metal hand pump. Eventually the house was turned into a stable for horses.

As I child I couldn’t have cared less about my family’s lower class status. The only time it bothered me was when my parents were upset by it. In those days the bill collectors would come right to the door and just about pound the thing of its hinges. Often we would hide until they left. I believe it was a ritual played out in working class homes across America in those days.

To me this all seemed a big game, but I could sense the sorrow it caused my mother, and my young mind eventually took on her sense of shame. My sister would have her friends drop her off a few blocks from our street because she was embarrassed by our ramshackle old house.

By my teen years these class issues became more important. In high school class became apparent at first glance. Besides the obvious things like clothing, the rich kids walked and spoke with more confidence, and they had a sense of entitlement that seemed to magically pave their way through life. It was a confidence that we denizens of trailer parks and backwoods shanties sorely lacked.

This lack of confidence naturally created a social order. We on the lower levels automatically took our place at the back of the bus. We knew we were not winners in life’s game, and we protected ourselves by not reaching for the brass ring, and in fact, by mocking the entire system in which others naturally succeeded and we naturally failed.

Although I’m no longer one who takes a seat at the back of the bus, this outlook on life shades my approach to the world even today. The system seems to me to be a rigged game, so I am always looking for an outside angle, a novel approach with which to beat that rigged game. If the herd is moving in one direction, I assume there must be something wrong with that direction and go in the opposite. I mistrust the masses at every turn. I immediately place myself as an outsider at odds, at war, with the status quo.

I suppose this outlook was enhanced by the fact that during my childhood there was still a dying whiff of 1960’s spirit in the air. Although my parents were of another era, somehow those anti-establishment values seeped in from the media and from the music my older sisters played on their stereos. These values lodged themselves in my heart before I was old enough to develop a critical mind. Or perhaps they just seemed logical to me, because certainly the values of racism, conformity, blind patriotism, and sexism were just as, if not more prevalent.

In the fifth grade an older neighbor girl gave my friend a fistful of old rock albums; Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones. At that time my friend was learning to play the bass guitar and I was learning the drums.

The music on those crickly slabs of wax were an elixir of life which poisoned our souls to the world of the nuclear family, the Protestant work ethic, and blind allegiance to authority. But it also made our spirits swell with a sense of purpose and an alternative system of values.

Suddenly, freaks that we may have been, we were connected to something larger. We were initiates into a cult that existed right under the noses of parents and teachers, yet which they failed to see or understand. And even more, they failed to understand that their children were gone forever. We were little lost heathens who were likely cursed to be trampled underfoot by the realities of survival we would soon encounter. Many like us would find themselves never quite able to join the straight world, but completely unable to make it as an outsider.

The old rock and roll albums we listened to often carried a political message that resonated with me. It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time when rock and roll was taken seriously as an art form. The best of those artists were seen as spokespeople for their fans, and leaders for a generation of social revolutionaries. But oh how times have changed.

The political idealism of the music fit right in with the anger and frustration I felt because of the poverty. Beyond my own poverty, I saw injustice all around me. Most of the people I knew lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Unless they won the lottery there was little hope for a better life. And when people lack hope, all sorts of problems follow.

In my hometown there was a spirit of nihilism that permeated the culture and lead to drug and alcohol addictions, criminal behavior, self-destructive sexual practices, a high suicide rate, and random violence of all sorts.

As a young man and a struggling artist I vowed that I would never forget where I came from, and to try to find a way to create a better world for my hometown and the thousands of towns like it all across America. This is what underlies my drive towards political expression and social activism. As I look back on that vow, although I have never forgotten my roots, when it comes to affecting social or political change I must admit complete failure.

During my high school years my family’s economic problems reached the level of high farce. By the eighth grade we were bouncing from house to house as fast as the back rent would pile up. I could always tell when things were getting bad because we would start eating potato soup. Often flavored only with stale bullion cubes or garlic powder.

At one point we lived in a double house and our electricity had been shut off. My father crawled over the attic wall and ran an extension cord from the neighbor’s outlet so that we might have a few hours of electric light each evening.

When I graduated from high school, college wasn’t even an option that could be considered. By then I was playing drums in a punk rock band called Friction and drinking and using drugs. One evening I took a hit of LSD and at night’s end returned to the trailer that I lived in with my parents. The electricity was shut off again and my mother was asleep in a chair in the living room. She had lit a candle that had melted onto the coffee table and then down onto the floor. I sat down on a chair on the other side of the room and watched her sleep. The sight filled me with anger and despair. My father was out on the road trying to make a buck and she looked so lonely in the dark room. She could have easily burned the place down with the melted candle. I hated that she had to go through such things. This is still one of the most heartbreaking memories I carry.

While acid is known for disconnecting people from reality, for me it always made me face the cold hard facts of reality. In that moment I got it into my head that I was a burden to my parents and needed to go out on my own. I moved out the following week.

I worked a series of minimum wage jobs. I’ve spent more years wearing a paper hat and polyester uniform than I care to remember. During those days I recall sitting in the back seat of a car smoking dope with a group of my loser friends when the Sex Pistols, “God Save The Queen,” came on the stereo. Although it was many years after the fact, the lyrics spoke to me.

“We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in the human machine
There’s no future for you
There’s no future for me”

“Yep, that’s me, that’s us,” I thought.

My girlfriend Leilani and I lived in a tiny apartment beside the McDonald’s parking lot. Our lives were a drug filled haze. These were the days when CNN first reached the backwoods, 24 hours a day it brought images of violence and fear into the homes of simple country folk. I sat watching it all, mesmerized by the non-stop display of human folly. Between CNN and the pothead introspection, I was carried away by a bad case of existential angst. I felt like a monk sitting on a mountaintop viewing the insect-world of human society with sorrow and disgust.

I felt so at odds with the pillars of church and state that I began to think that I should join the Weathermen or some other armed militant organization to fight against the government I despised. I decided that before I made such a dramatic decision I needed to think things through and clarify my own beliefs. To this end I began looking for a political ideal to work towards. I looked at communism, socialism, even anarchy.

To make things more complicated I began to realize that before I could solidify my political beliefs I would have to re-evaluate my spiritual and moral beliefs, because these are what political ideals rest on. This lead to a whole other life-transforming journey that we won’t go into here, but I came out of it all with a spiritual concept from Hinduism and Buddhism that seemed to lead to socialism as an ideal political system. It seemed that the spiritual unity that Eastern religions proposed would be best exemplified with a social/political structure where all were working towards a common good, the whole above the individual.

In the highest order of certain Hindu priests, society was structured without individualism. Even the body didn’t belong to the individual and was shared by all, leading to a sort-of free-love community that echoed the ideals of the 60’s generation.

At this opportune time as I was struggling with these thoughts, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was one of those moments of synchronicity when a perfect book comes to you just when you need it. In that book Huxley took those same concepts from Eastern religion and turned them into a political system, only in his vision that system was a strange nightmare of repression. In the end, the book’s hero is banished to an island where the individualists and free spirits lived in freedom, but outside the social order. It made me suspect that even within my own ideal system I would still be outside and against the system.

The problem with political systems based on common unity is that the only way to make them work is if everyone behaves in the same manner, and that can only be achieved with the heavy hand of fascism. The proof of this could be seen all too easily in China and the U.S.S.R.

I was back to square one, knowing the American political system felt wrong, but having no clue what I could hold up as an alternative ideal.

My spiritual inquiries where going through a similar process of revelations that led to brick walls, but as my struggles for knowledge continued an image began to seep in from the edges of my consciousness. It was an image of chaos that at first scared me, a frightening peak below the surface of things that was both horrible and magnificent beyond comprehension.

From this concept of unity within chaos a political parallel began to come into focus. It appeared to me that politically speaking, chaos was essentially freedom. The less government, the less rules, the less corrupt politicians, the better off we were. At best government was a necessary evil.

This idea might lead one to embrace anarchy, but I was no longer naïve enough to believe that such a lawless ideal could create a functioning society. The question became; what system could allow the greatest degree of chaos/freedom while still providing the protection and services that a society needs to function effectively?

As I looked around the world studying the various political systems I never even bothered to look at democracy. Not democracy as we see it in practice, but democracy as a pure concept. Although Western governments are an utter failure at making the most of its potential, the theory of democracy presented the greatest possibility for chaos and freedom. In theory, within that framework one could live as a socialist on a commune, or push the boundaries of anarchy to the limits within the law.

My journey has taken me full circle to embrace the concept of democracy, while truly seeing what a failure our political leaders had made of this great ideal. This presented and still presents a baffling quagmire for those who want to change the system. Since we already had a system that was based on a democratic ideal, it seems that the only answer is to throw out the bums who were running the show. The problem is that we essentially have a revolution every four years at election time, yet nothing ever really seems to change.

To paraphrase Henry Miller, “We can never change the world until we change the hearts of men.” And it is easier to move a mountain then change people’s hearts and minds.

At age 20 I wrote my first song to try to express the frustration and confusion I was feeling. It is called Dancing Now and was the title track to Friction’s first E.P. In those days people thought punk rock might become a social/political movement like in the 60’s, but when we played in clubs all that I saw was a bunch of kids drinking and partying. I found it hard to imagine that these people would ever be the base for a grass roots political movement.

We're angry now, but sedated still
We've been drugged, and too much time to kill
The media can always pacify
It's just another propaganda lie
Preaching the American way
Society has gone astray
Violence has filled the streets
Soon they'll be turning up the heat

*We're dancing now
But we could be shooting
We borrow now
Soon we may be looting
And it's so damned hard to appreciate
The things you've always had

Sit in your comfort so secure
Believe your future is so bright and pure
He way I feel these days you can't be sure
Anarchy may be outsider your door
Say that it can't happen here
The USA has nothing to fear
Iran screams and the Irish burn
But narrow minds will never learn*

They will call the gunman mad
Talk about the wealth they had
There's revolution in minds and hearts
But chaos ends where frustration starts
If you're brave turn on the news
Or try to hide if you choose
But when your children start to turn
You may wish you'd been concerned*

This period of political and spiritual introspection was a bit harrowing psychologically. Over a period of six months I had completely deconstructed my value systems and attempted to rebuild them based on conscious reasoning. After it was over I felt like I had overdosed on modern life and had pushed my brain to the edge.

I felt I needed to drop out of the world for awhile, so I moved into a little house deep in the forest. The house sat in a crevice between two valley ridges. A stream came down through the front yard and a large dogwood tree stood in front of a large porch. The house was surrounded by trees on all sides, and a few old sheds sat on the property.

In those days jobs were hard to find in small town America and Leilani and I lived in extreme poverty. We had no phone, no hot water, one channel of television, and the only heat was from a wood-burning stove that could only warm a small part of the house.

They were tough times and wonderful times. The surroundings were beautiful. We had a dozen chickens so we always had fresh eggs to eat. We learned to brush our teeth with baking soda and made hot bath water by boiling pans on the wood stove.

I started each morning by chopping the day’s firewood, feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs. In the summer we bathed in the stream and lazed on the front porch watching the wild birds flit about the bird feeder we made out of an old piece of driftwood.

It was also a time of intense study. Each week, if we could get my old jalopy to run, we would make the fifteen-mile trip into town to visit the public library. My reading list during those two years in the woods included War & Peace, The Golden Bough, Dostoevsky, Darwin, Plato, and Aristotle. I read science, history, literature, it didn’t really matter what I read I was so hungry for knowledge.

On the weekends Friction was playing shows at some larger venues. So the weekends were cocaine-fueled parties with crowds and chaos, and the rest of the week I lived in isolation.

The darker side of this idyllic life was that there were just no jobs and no money. Each week I would go to every factory and every retail store in the entire county in search of work. Eventually they refused to let me fill out applications I had filled out so many already. I was literally begging for a job. Some business owners looked at me with sympathy in their eyes, but if there are no jobs, then there are no jobs.

I was raised to never steal. Not even a candy bar from a convenience store. But out of necessity we soon began to steal food and clothing. I would go into the Weiss Market and cram a couple pounds of ground beef into my pants and head out the door. On one occasion someone saw me, a manager chased me out the door and ordered me to stop. He looked me over from about ten feet away. He must have seen the desperation on my face because he walked up to me and half-heartedly tapped my jacket pockets then whispered, “Just get out of here.”

Leilani was a much better thief than me. She was cool as a cucumber. I think she much have been a criminal at heart.

On day my shoes were falling off my feet so we went to the Jamesway department store and Leilani slipped a pair of sneakers under her jacket. On the way out the door she met a friend of hers and the two calmly chatted in the doorway of the store. The friend told her that she knew of a waitress job at a local truck stop. We drove right to the truck stop and they hired her on the spot. The only problem was that now she needed shoes to start work, so we went right back to the Jamesway and stole a pair of work shoes for her.

The whole mess makes me a little sick to the stomach to think about it, but you do what you have to do. If you’re a young man the federal government ain’t going to give you no help, Mr. Reagan made sure of that. When there’s no opportunity for honest work you still have to survive. Every day of the week in America, poverty makes criminals out of honest men and women.

For over two years I couldn’t find work. Then a small miracle happened. Leilani and I bought a scratch off instant lottery ticket. It was called the Baker’s Double.” When we scratched it off we won $5,000, and that was doubled to $10,000 thanks to another slot that contained an image of a loaf of bread.

Ten thousand dollars doesn’t seem like much, but to me it could’ve been a million. I had never been around any money before this, so I didn’t really have a clear idea of what it meant. Given my lack of experience with money I didn’t do too badly with it.

I had never had a checking account of a credit card, so banking and interest rates were all a mystery to me. The problem you have when you’re from the lower class is that you can’t get access to credit. In order to build up a credit rating I put the money into a money market CD and borrowed against it. This way I still had the original money, but I was building a credit rating as I paid off the loan.

After I won the lottery money I bought a decent used car and was able to go to the next town and find a job at the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I believe I made $3.15 an hour, hardly a living wage.

Around that time I made another investment that changed my fortunes. A dope-dealer friend convinced me to take an ounce of weed and sell nickel bags to my pothead buddies. By that time I had lost interest in using drugs myself, but it is amazing how much money you can make selling small amounts of pot.

Soon between the lottery money and the pot money I owned an eight-room house, a rental property, a fifty-per cent share in a recording studio, and a rather extravagant collection of Asian and African artwork.

During these years I studied art, music, performance, and film, as best I could in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. It was during this time that I developed the concept that would one day become The Imperial Orgy.

But at the same time my political and spiritual pursuits receded into the background. Being stuck in a small town makes one feel irrelevant. It seems egotistical to think one can change the world.

At very least I tried to express my political frustrations through music and performance. Friction’s music often had political lyrics and the group had a general anti-establishment attitude, but more often than not our words fell on deaf ears. People wanted cute pop stars singing loves songs and party anthems, not angry punks bitching about the state of the world.

I was the most radical of the band members, often taping photos of Ronald Reagan to my drum kit or draping half-burned flags over the bass drum. Overall though, I felt like we were running into a brick wall as far as using music to express political messages. In the age of MTV people no longer thought of rock music as anything more than nice non-challenging entertainment. The days when music was seen as a force for social change were long gone, drowned in the rising tide of conservativism that was sweeping the culture.

I generally had a sinking feeling about it all. Friction was having no success commercially within the music industry, and therefore we had no access to a wider audience to get our message heard. Behind the scenes the Reagan and first Bush administrations were pressuring the record labels not to support artists who promoted social activism. Distraction and complacency where the dictates from above.

Meanwhile the more comfortable I got financially, the more lost I felt spiritually, politically, and artistically. Security and contentment are the artist’s greatest enemy. There are always forces urging you to grow up, settle down, and conform.

Just as it looked like I would follow that path and surrender to conformity, I tool a sharp left hand turn and threw it all away.

Thanks to the pot money I was able to attend college at the Penn State University where I studied filmmaking. In the university film department I found a lot of support from the left-leaning faculty for my non-conventional film work, although behind my back the students whispered that I shouldn’t be allowed to attend classes because of the raw images and ideas I confronted them with.

Although my reputation caused most of the students to avoid me, a few bolder spirits sought me out. Mhina Dada, a Jamaican fellow who would one day help found The Imperial Orgy, became my partner in film crimes that shook the little film department.

Another fellow named Donn Garton, the handsome son of a New Jersey preacher came to me after class one day and said, “I’ll do anything, I’ll get down on my knees, I just want to work with you.”

Although we never managed to actually work together, I soon became his unspoken mentor as he struggled with issues of sexuality, religion, and politics.

My first project with Mhina was a short documentary on the issue of Flag Burning. For a bang-up ending we burned a flag in the middle of town and filmed the resulting chaos. As the flag burned two young marines ran out of nowhere and put it out, then proceeded to threaten to kill me. As the filmmaker I felt like I couldn’t take sides, so I stood nonchalantly as the angry jarhead screamed into my face from two inches away, “Why don’t you get out of MY country homeboy. The next time I see you burning one I’m gonna hunt you down and I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

Oddly a couple of hippies that I never met before suddenly ran up and one shouted “I helped him burn it!”

Quickly an angry debate ensued that verged on the edge of violence. Each side expressed the traditional arguments on the issue, sometimes with hilarious clarity. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

“The flag is a symbol. We need to protect the freedom not the symbol,” the hippie explained.

“Yeah, then you’re a traitor. Do you know what traitors do? They get fucking killed, assassinated…by death!” the marine replied.

“Why is he a traitor for burning a piece of cloth?” the second hippie replied.

“Why don’t you go try to say that shit in fuckin’ Russia and see what happens? Why don’t you go wipe your fuckin’ ass on some toilet paper,” was the marine’s well thought-out response.

Thinking I was well outside the camera’s frame, I turned to Mhina, who was behind the camera and gave him a knowing nod and a broad smile, as if to say, ‘look what we created!”

Little did I know that the camera was in a wide angle and my gesture was caught on the edge of the frame as the melee ensued in the foreground. To viewers it appeared as if I was looking right at them and inviting them in on a naughty joke. When the film was eventually viewed by film classes the students burst out laughing at my gesture, but it also perpetuated the image they seemed to hold of me as a reptilian force that manipulated people and places to create havoc and disorder.

The irony of the project was that we got a zero grade on it. Most of the students were complaining that they had to spend four or five hours editing their documentaries. Mhina and I got the keys to the film building and locked ourselves in the deserted editing room for a week straight over the Christmas vacation.

When we asked the faculty to look at the film they said we were past deadline and would get a zero grade. The next semester we convinced the professors to show the film to the students just to share our work. As the film came to a close our professors stood up and left the room. Soon they returned and asked us to come with them. They took us to the next classroom and immediately screened the film there. Later the film was screened for the dean of the communications dept.

I don’t think it was really that the film was that great, as much as it was that we were working at a different level than the rest of the students. And although we got a zero grade on the project, the film is still used as a teaching tool by film theory professors at the university as an example of documentary filmmaking.

The Flag burning scene caused a controversy among the students even before we filmed it. Senior level students were wisely counseling us that it was immoral for us to carry out our plan. They felt that we were crossing a line by creating an event that could lead to violence. I didn’t give a fuck about their line. What I saw when it was over was that people were excited, they were thinking, they were talking about issues. I had achieved my goals as a filmmaker, let the timid spirits tow the line.

To see an excerpt from the flag burning documentary click here

I did another social/political film project with Samantha, who would one day become The Imperial Orgy’s background singer. We drove the length of the East Coast, hitting cities between New York and New Orleans, filming homeless people, street musicians, prostitutes and beggars. We went into the shelters and into their cardboard box communities, trying to understand why they were homeless, why they couldn’t start a new life, but mainly, just allowing them to tell their own stories.

Samantha’s father was an X-army man, and although a seemingly good-hearted fellow, the family had a straight edge Republican view of the world. Because of this Samantha’s initial view was that homeless people were simply bums too lazy to work. It was an interesting process to watch her confront a reality that was far more complex than what she had been taught to believe.

The experience was an emotional roller-coaster ride. The first interview we did was with an old war veteran who was in line at a soup kitchen. As tears rolled down his cheeks he said, “I fought for my country in two wars, Mr. Bush sends all this food overseas and look where I am. This ain’t no life…This ain’t no life.”

Listening to him made my limbs go weak with sorrow. I knew this was going to be an adventure that I would never forget.

Throughout the trip we learned three main lessons. First, people are homeless for a variety of reasons. Some are mentally ill and have been shunned by family and medical facilities, others are people who threw their lives away with drugs and alcohol, many are Vietnam veterans who were never able to make life work after the war, but others were just average working class people who suffered a few tough breaks and found themselves on the streets.

Men told stories of working many years at the same job, and then one day the factory closed down and they were unable to find work. One man counseled us, “You might not want to believe it, but you’re just one paycheck away from where we are.”

The second lesson was that once you become homeless, the experience affects people in a way that makes it almost impossible for them to build a new life. The sense of failure and despair, the humiliation and degradation, essentially the experience makes one mentally ill. The spiritual depths that people sink to are a black hole that is very hard to crawl out of. One man explained to us with consternation, “If I go and ask for a job as a dishwasher or something they say, ‘give me your resume and we’ll call you.’ Now how are you gonna call me when I live on the streets?”

The third and most shocking lesson was that the homeless situation has created a business structure that many profit from. Charity organizations depend on public donations and government funding for their survival. On man in Atlanta explained it this way, “If you get one foot outta that grave they try to suck you back in, cause they need homeless people. These soup kitchens and shelters, somebody’s making a profit off this. It’s not done just to help people.”

The conservative view that homeless people are just lazy bums is a simple-minded view that cannot stand the test of reality. The conservatives say that people live off welfare programs because they are too lazy, and if you force them to stand on their own two feet they will become productive citizens. While this sounds good in theory, if people don’t have opportunity to make a better life, they will do what they have to do to survive. Without either support or opportunity, people will become criminals and society will deteriorate into chaos and fear.

One young man in a homeless shelter in New Orleans spoke about his experience. He seemed just a little slow in the head, and wasn’t someone likely to find a job very easily. “Well, I might go up to someone and ask them to lend me about two dollars or so. If they say ‘no’ I just might come up behind them and poke my knife in their neck a little bit and then take the money from them.”

It was chilling to hear. His spoke so matter-of-factly. But as I know from experience, poverty makes criminals out of people every day of the week. At least he was standing on his own two feet and doing what he knew to survive.

As we filmed the homeless documentary, little did I know that one day I would be joining their ranks, and learn to understand their humiliations all too well.

During my college days my old life began to unravel. Friction came to an end without a bat of the eye, my relationship with Leilani came apart in an ugly feud, I lost my business thanks to some shady dealings by my business partner, I was chased out of town by corrupt elements in the police force and sheriff’s department, and soon after I lost my home.

I lived through crisis after crisis, dazed by the events that had taken my life. When I look back I realize that I was at war with myself. My conscious mind fought to be loyal and true to the people and things of my past, but in my heart I felt that the past was a prison that limited my horizons and compressed my spirit. My unconscious mind led me kicking and screaming down a path of self-destruction. If I had been a little smarter I could have broken with my past with much less pain and financial loss, but I clung to the past even as I destroyed it.

Malcolm McClaren once said of the punk band the Sex Pistols, “Sometimes you have to destroy in order to create.” I can testify that this is a cruel truth, a truth that I lived with horrifying results.

When it was all over I found myself living in a basement apartment near an airport by the Penn State University. Mhina and I were plotting a new documentary on the ‘Trail Of Tears.” A horrible chapter in American history when the Cherokee people, after being repeatedly betrayed by the U.S. government, were forced to walk from North Carolina to a reservation in Oklahoma. Along the way about a third of the population died. A few remnants hid in the mountains and later formed a new community hidden in a valley in North Carolina. These people are now known as the Eastern Tribe.

I am part Cherokee on my mother’s side, and I felt passionate about telling their story. In order to get permission to do the documentary we had to appear before the council of tribal elders to appeal our case.

On a cold December day Mhina and I began the drive to Cherokee, North Carolina to meet the elders. I was sick as a dog and we only had a few bucks between the two of us. The air was freezing and snow littered the sides of the roads. For supper we found a convenience store that had large bags of popcorn for 59 cents, and we bought a box of week-old doughnuts. Most of our cash was spent on a cheap motel room that was discounted during the winter months when no tourists come to the reservation.

In the morning we split the last of the stale doughnuts and scarfed down the rest of the popcorn. By this time I was so sick and feverish that I could barely speak. I wrote out my presentation and told Mhina he would likely have to speak for me.

When the moment came we walked into the council room to find a tall desk like a judge sits at, except it made a long U shape around three sides of the room. The council elders sat around the table high above us. Mhina and I stood on the floor inside the U looking up at them. After a middle aged man gave the council an overview of why we were there he asked that a letter I had written many months before be read, A fragile old woman at the center of the table began to read the letter with a shaky voice.

I no longer recall exactly what I said in that letter. I know I spoke of having pride in my Cherokee ancestry, and of believing that film was a medium for social change. But listening to this elderly Native American woman read my words moved me nearly to tears. The oration must have affected the others as well because as soon as she finished they took a quick vote and unanimously Oked our film project, then they came down to the floor and showered us with handshakes and warm embraces. I left feeling proud, although I’m not quite sure of exactly what I was feeling proud of.

Mhina and I got on the highway right away. We dove late into the freezing night. During the drive we fell into one of those soul-mining conversations that one sometimes shares with friends late in the night.

Although I was excited about the new film project, something was turning within me. As soon as I left college I landed a job as an audio editor at an industrial film company. I bypassed the whole intern process and went straight into a pretty good position. At the time I thought, ‘I made it, I’ll never have to wear another paper hat and serve up greasy chicken again.” Of course the company was only paying me $6.50 and hour, even though they sometimes charged clients $120 and hour for my services, but it was still more than I’d ever earned before.

When you work in the creative arts, you have to be careful about earning your pay in the same medium where you work as an artist. It can spoil your love of the art form. This was happening to me with film. My company sent me on shoots on endless boring subjects. I made films on pharmacies, on cancer treatment, college recruiting films, and on rehab clinics. I knew more than you’d ever want to know about potatoes, fertilizer, and hip replacements.

I was beginning to feel the need to return to the immediacy of live performance. There is nothing like looking your audience straight in the eye. To this end I spoke to Mhina about the concept that would soon become The Imperial Orgy. Mhina was learning to play the drums. A few days later we met with another film student who played guitar and was obsessed with James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic. He was a perfect fit.

It was late December and by spring we were doing test runs as a four- piece band, by the next fall our little reign of musical terror had begun.

I thought my life as a fast food peasant had come to an end, but another hard lesson was on my heels.

The world was changing. The Berlin wall had fallen and the Soviet Union disintegrated. As the first Bush administration came to an end the economy was sinking. Business at the film company dried up and I was out looking for work again. To my surprise there were no jobs. And I wasn’t being snooty, I was filling out applications for furniture stores, factories, any damn thing that paid the bills. Eventually, when I was even turned down by McDonalds I knew I was in trouble.

By this time the rest of The Imperial Orgy had moved to New York City and soon I was homeless and living in the back of my car. I went to a town called York, PA in the Southeastern part of the state because I heard I could get work as a scab at the Caterpillar plant. To test to see if I had the ability to do the job I had to add the numbers 7 and 8 on a math quiz. From the looks of things inside I am guessing some of my co-workers might have been struggling with that one.

What a horrible mess it all was. I had no driver’s license, yet I was living in my car. I had no place to shower or use the bathroom. In order to save money I was trying to only eat one meal a day, and that meal was at the factory cafeteria. When the morning sun hit the windshield there was no sleeping so I was up at 5 AM each morning. It was a hot summer and soon my body broke out in a nasty rash from the unsanitary living conditions. It was truly a new low that I had reached.

By the time I got to New York my health was a wreck from months without proper food or sleep. By then it was November and I walked the cold city streets with resume in hand. One day I walked the West side in a cold rain. Although I had an umbrella, by day’s end I was soaked from head to toe.

The next morning my shoes were still too soggy to wear so I borrowed a pair of black work shoes from Samantha that could have passed for Men’s. They were a few sizes too small so I had to walk all day with my toes curled up. It was another rainy day and by evening my toes had turned purple and red from the abuse.

After a few months of this nonsense Samantha found me some part time work in the office of a multimillion-dollar children’s theatre company she worked for called Theatreworks USA. We lived in Staten Island and to get to the job we had to take a bus, then the ferry, then a train. On the first day of work I didn’t have a buck in my pocket, but I had one subway token to get on the train.

As we got off the ferry Samantha and I got separated in the crowd exiting the boat. As I walked I held the subway token between my thumb and index finger. Just then someone bumped into me and the token flew out of my fingers and rolled off into the crowd. It was lost in the sea of feet that streamed past me.

I felt like God wanted to slap me down one more time. With no money for another token I had to call my new boss and explain the humiliating details of why I would be late my first day. I had to walk about thirty blocks to get to the job. During that walk I felt about as low as you can go.

As first it felt good to be in a 9-5 job, even if it was a poverty wage. Once your sense of self-worth has been trampled down for so long, you’re proud to have the crumbs from the table, to even get near the table. This state of mind is a curse that turns many a young man yellow, makes them walk with their heads down for a lifetime to come.

In time I bounced around from one shitty job to the next, but always seemed to land back at Theatreworks. I didn’t stay grateful for the crumbs any too long. I was too angry for that, had seen, had lived with too much injustice.

After a couple years I began to get very angry at Theaterworks. Most of the people there made good pay and had good benefits. The boss in the office across from me was bringing in $200,000.00 a year. The place was a non-profit organization and the money for his salary was coming from public donations and government NEA funds, so it burned me up all the more. Other people in the place were making 90, 80, and 60 thousand a year. It was only the five or six peons in my department that got less the $15,00 a year and zero benefits. The lack of medical benefits was the thing that really pissed me off.

All the people in the place were snooty liberal types who saw themselves as always on the right side of every issue and morally superior to everyone else. But when it came to their own back yards they were just as greedy and heartless as the biggest right-wing fat cat.

I started bitching about it to the top dogs. They would twist themselves up like contortionists trying to find a way to justify their behavior. One of my favorites was that it was an honor to work there, a stepping-stone into the elite world of theater. I knew none of those people were trying to break into anything but a hot meal. One guy was a single father working two jobs to raise his kid.

As is usually the case in the corporate world, those who get paid the least do the hardest work. Our job was to schedule field trips with teachers all across the country. Most days the phones would be ringing off the hook until you wanted to go mad. I used to hear the things in my sleep.

If you want to cure what’s ailing our education system a good place to start is with the teachers. Many of them couldn’t do basic math or speak coherent English. Lots of ‘em were liars and thieves to boot. The worst ones were from the ghettos of Chicago and New York City.

Anyway, I kept stirring the pot until I had the whole group so riled up they were planning to walk off the job the next Monday if we didn’t get a raise. I wrote a letter to the boss demanding a three dollar an hour raise and medical benefits. But these people were just smart enough to know how to play the suckers, just how to keep the rabble quiet.

Come Monday they took us all into an office and announced a fifty cent an hour raise. It was just enough to keep the mules in the harness, but not enough to make a damn bit of difference. As far as I was concerned they could have taken their fifty cents an hour and shoved it up their highbrow asses.

But the others were happy as clams. I was the hero of the day for getting everyone a raise. But I wasn’t buying it. This wasn’t success, it was a sucker-pop without a lick of value in real terms. I quit soon after that and when the tech boom hit I landed a job designing websites for a porn company. Then after that I went to the electronics company at ground zero where I worked when 9/11 hit.

Back on the highway in Nevada I snapped out of my reverie to find that I was grinding my teeth and my fingers were white from gripping the steering wheel. A hundred miles of desert had passed without my noticing. The world had faded away and I drove on autopilot. I was probably lucky to be alive.

I switched on the radio and scrolled through the dial. Judging from the number of stations I must have been getting close to civilization again. Scanning the dial was like viewing a mosaic of the world’s troubles. The stock exchange was now open, but the president still had not spoken to the nation after 9/11. Reporters described lower Manhattan as a place where armed militiamen patrolled with machine guns in tow. I wondered just what kind of nightmare I would one day find when I returned to New York.

We lived in a new world. A dark new era. To be an activists had a different meaning now. To be anti-establishment would be a dangerous game. People like me usually believe in America as I ideal, and think we can work to perfect the ideal, but now everyone would be focused on protecting the ideal from outsiders who were clearly worse. My place in this world was not clear to me at all.

It reminded me of another political action I once carried out. One that would never be tolerated in this new era. It was a street theater piece called ‘Our Daily Bread.’ I had bread in the back of my mind for years, ever since I read Salvador Dali’s account of how he came to America with a loaf of bread strapped to his head.

For Our Daily Bread I rounded up a group of people from The Imperial Orgy circle and dressed them in peasant outfits. Everyone made a mask that had some kind of money theme to it. Isabelle, the Orgy’s keyboard player talked the people at Wonder Bread into donating a hundred loaves of bread to use in the project. Then we went down to Wall Street and placed a loaf of bread every five feet along the sidewalk around the stock exchange. Attached to each loaf of bread was an advertisement from Satan offering to buy people’s soul in exchange for materialistic prizes. The letter read:


Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I have an exciting new offer for you! An offer that's so very exciting that I know you cannot say no!!!

Now don't get frightened until you've heard the details of this fabulous new offer -I'm paying top prices! And if you act now, in exchange for your soul, just look at all the beautiful prizes you'll receive.

You'll get a new Hi-Fi Stereo System! A Clock Radio! A 25" Color TV!! An entire new wardrobe with all the latest fashions! A new Toyota Minivan with a full tank of gas!!! (seats 8!), Shower Massage with Rotating Head! A new Credit Card featuring the classic rock superstars 'Kiss'!, A VCR! A new High Speed Computer System! The complete Bon Jovi Compact Disc collection!!! A beautiful Microwave Oven with Spinning Rotisserie! The Popeil Pocket Fisherman! Great Sex with beautiful partners of your choice!! Free Movie Tix! Night Club Adventures! Attractive Friends! More sex!!! Instant Popularity! More Sex!!! Fun! Fun! Fun!!! Sex! Sex! Sex!

Plus if you act now! For a limited time you'll also receive - A Pocket Calculator, 20 Ginsu Knives, a personally autographed picture of Darius Rucker, A Wireless Telephone, Free Phone Sex, a Pinball Machine, Free Sex, 324 Channels of Cable TV, A snow white Shit-zu named 'Koko,' plus Sex! Sex! Sex! and much, much, more...

And here's the best part! All you have to do is this - look in the help wanted ads, or hurry out to your local employment office, and get a 40-hour a week job in a factory or office. It must be work doing something that is totally meaningless to you. Preferably making money for a corporate fat cat.

Then with your paycheck, buy all the things listed above! Yes, it's as easy as that! Then after you've settled in, I'll come and take your soul. I'll do it slowly, bit by bit, so you'll never even notice it's gone. You'll be too busy to even care.

It's true that at times you might wonder if your life is passing before your eyes as the best part of your time and energy are sucked away for economic slavery. Perhaps, in quiet moments, your life might seem meaningless. But what the hell, it's a small price to pay for all the great stuff you'll receive from this generous offer. Besides, spirituality is a greatly overrated thing in my book. Absolutely Passe! So just don't even think about it. You'll have a million mindless diversions to keep yourself from looking inward. Just enjoy your goodies and do your work with a vacant, obedient smile.

See you in hell.

The performance was a great, fun experience. At one point I looked around Wall Street and as far as the eye could see there were businessmen and women reading the letters with confused looks on their faces. Soon the cops came zooming in, bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in to inspect the bread for explosives, it was a regular circus. In the video of the event Samantha can be seen hugging the bomb-dog as he wagged his tail happily.

One man came up and yelled at me, “Pick this up, you can’t leave bread on the streets!”

“Why not?” I asked.

He got a confused look on his face as if he’d never thought about it before, then caught himself and bellowed, “You just can’t!”

The performance created an open debate on the streets with a bunch of passing students. By the time it was over we were taking pictures with European tourist in front of George Washington’s statue, and even the cops seemed to be smiling and laughing.

In an ominous note a middle eastern man came up to me and passionately explained that you can create change by doing art stunts, you have to use violence, guns and bombs to create change. I guess there is some pragmatic logic to what he said, but all through his speech I kept thinking, “There is a higher principle that he just doesn’t get.”

When we look back on history we see that Gandhi led his people to freedom without ever firing a shot, yet the Palestinians use violence and only dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.

That night we all went to celebrate at a club called Naked Lunch in honor of the book by William Burroughs. By chance they were filming a scene for one of the TV police dramas in front of the club. The club was playing come Imperial Orgy music over the sound system that happened to be written for a girl that was a casting director for the show.

The show’s main actor, a large black man with a suave demeanor, came in and joined our group. Scanning the scene he said, “What is this? Andy Warhol holding court with his retinue?”

In that moment I think we all felt like we were alive and doing something. Even if it didn’t amount to a hill of beans politically, at least we were out there expressing ourselves, making waves, waking people up for a moment.

I created the Daily Bread performance because I was feeling numb and losing my own soul within the mechanical grind of the corporate world. Every day I seem to lose myself a little bit more. The mundane existence of day-to-day survival pulls me into a fog where l I can only see myself as a regular working stiff, a schmoe of schmoes.

But a working stiff has limited horizons, limited abilities. In order to achieve anything extraordinary, to affect any real change in the world or in my own life, I must see myself as something more, as someone capable of more. And for this reason I find myself wandering across the United States, through deserts and between cornfields, across prairies and through forests, just trying to taste a little freedom and clear that fog from my head.

Sometimes when I feel lost I watch videos of my past work or read things people have written about me. I view my reflection as a stranger. “Who is this person?” I wonder. How could I ever inhabit this myth? So many extraordinary things have happened to me. Some many times I have led friends and fans into lovely flights of madness.

Looking at my image reflected in those words and images I shake inside. Perhaps like the Incredible Hulk in his moment of transformation into monster. Or like a voodoo priestess when the spirits capture her soul.

I know the things I see and read are true, I can vaguely recall living them, yet they are alien to me. I try to find this being hidden in the soul of the commonest of common men.

Over the years I have had a pretty rough go of it from time to time. But I’ve also been handed some gifts without ever having asked for them, handed to me gratis by an unknown force.

The truth is that every day I feel like a failure. A failure for not having used those gifts to their fullest potential. Every time I plop down in front of the idiot box to watch some prime-time drama, I feel like I have betrayed whatever force imbued me with potential.

So many times in my life people have handed over their lives to me, whether for the length of a pop song or for years on end, they gave their destinies to me, dreamed my dreams, and saw the world through the visions I painted. How can I feel any way other than that I failed each and every one of them?

Sometimes as I walk through the streets the vision of the world I see, the secrets I believe myself to have been initiated into, make me want to scream. Yet I feel mute. I want to grab people by their lapels and shake them awake. I feel like I possess gold, but it is invisible to the naked eye, and therefore cannot be shared.

I grew up believing that art and music would be my voice, my medium to communicate. But these days the corporations control everything, all that is spoken, and all that is heard. The last things they want expressed are screams of love and destruction. The last thing they want is a piper calling their obedient children to awaken from the dream they have so laboriously created, and so painstakingly perpetuated.

Because in the end, the greatest work of art is the illusion that this is the way it is, and the only way it could ever be, this myth of materialism and drudgery, this nightmare of obedient automatons, and this dance of soulless livestock whose only dreams are of new electronic gadgets, flashy cars, and empty mansions, this swarm of humanity that only dares to dream the dreams that they allow us to dream.

But I can’t help believing there is something more. I have glimpsed it on a few occasions. I have seen it reflected in a young woman’s eyes, heard it in the spirit of music of bygone days, seen the echoes of disappointment of that promise in the faces of junkies and alcoholics, felt the frustrations of that promise in bar fights and war cries, in crimes of passions and suicide notes. But this other dream alludes us with such perfection that few dare even speak of it, few dare to even admit if possibility in their secret hearts, because compared with this dream the reality of life is too heartbreaking to face.