I created this blog as a way of spying on Occupy with more proficiency, by having them post about themselves, and I had some success at first, but this did not last for long before either they caught on or lost interest. Either way, none of the actual occupiers use the blog, so I figured that I would just start posting nonsense like this semi-autobiographical spy novel I was working on.
Who is he? John H. Walker is a person who seems to know too much about New Haven. He carries around too many keys, and he talks with ease to people that oversee places, such as the Grove Street Cemetery. I got a call from Johnny the other day, asking me to be a Special Op in a mission he was working on, to put Occupy in its place.
"The heathens," he kept mumbling under his breath, repeatedly as he methodically staked each post into the earth he deemed sacred. "They don't know what they're doing here. They have no clue what their own message is. It's muddled, that's what it is. They're all heathens. The whole bunch. They don't even know that they're desecrating a cemetery. The town isn't even doing anything about it."
Johnny's father ran a financial firm in town for many years, and his job was basically to be the superintendent for their lowly clubhouse, a stone building on High Street adjacent to the Art Gallery. He carried out both tasks as the same position, wearing the same suit and tie for both tasks, with the latter one being the one he was more concerned with most of the time.
Inside that cavernous place was a veritable museum of artifacts, with little significance to the average eye. But to a person with as much attention to detail as Johnny, each item there was worth much more.
The first time I ever saw the place, he showed me a glass case full of wooden nails and other strange items. "When the dutch first came to New York, they landed their boat right here," he said, as he showed me a map of Manhattan's first street plan, which obviously did seem to center around one particular point and spread out from there. "At that point, all Dutch colonial settlement began. You see this nail? This was found right in that area, beneath the foundation of a building that was being demolished to make way for a much bigger building," he told me, "and I just happened to be there."
Other items in the box resembled things that you would find in a dump. "The excavators stumbled upon a refuse pile. It was probably one of the first trash heaps in America, and it was definitely from the first European inhabitants of America."
Which made it tough for him to continue making his original point about Occupy. I didn't like most of those folks either. I estimated them all to be trouble-making anarchists mainly because when the movement first started, I had never met any of them before in my whole life. I regarded them as invaders just as anyone else would when a random group of strangers arrived into town: with suspicion.
Johnny's point was superceded by a larger point to be made about America as a land. Just as these few drunken stragglers were struggling to stagger into an upright position enough to call themselves citizens for the day, we as a society (as a whole) were standing on a whole country of hallowed ground, which somebody's ancestors took control over. The people that lived here before us on this land had barely any concept of material possession or ownership. They rarely built permanent structures, and were largely nomadic. Having zero impact on the environment was second nature to the Native Americans, and yet it's something that we struggle with everyday.
Therefore to say that because these protestors, even if they were drunk and hadn't had a job in 20 years, were desecrating what used to be a cemetery, became overshadowed by a larger point to be made about American society's role with using, and often taking for granted, our own soil.
"See this?"
Johnny told me one day when we had to go pick up some paperwork left there by one of the new members. The papers were in a brown (manilla) envelope and like always, he wouldn't get into the details of explaining what they were. All I knew was we needed to go pick them up in person, because Johnny never trusted that any courier, including me, would be capable of bringing the documents back to him without stopping by a photocopy machine first.
He discovered this one day for realz when the Flower Lady, Annette, was selling flowers on the corner with parsed slips of Polish census bureau material he had sent someone to get rid of in the library. He said that it made the University seem accountable for doing Nazi paperwork, essentially, and it needed to be destroyed. The operative went into the library dressed like a worker, with proper credentials and everything else, but when it came time to disposing of the documents, the items were simply just tossed carelessly into the recycling. In the name of environmental conservatism, the Flower Lady picked up the documents inadvertently and was wrapping her flowers with them, which she sold on a main corner for a dollar all afternoon one day, until about 5 pm when Walker grabbed her bouquet, tore every single piece of paper off of them, and stormed away in a fit.
Needless to say, the previous intern was more than fired. So I knew better than to ask too many questions, or even question the man himself when it came to running things. Sure, I was along for the ride. The end goal has always been to earn enough to make it on my own as a DJ and ditch Johnny and the whole Syndicate as quickly as possible.
I didn't have as much of a problem with them, at first, but that's because I didn't know what I was getting myself into as a kid. I thought, hey, I could use a job and what they are doing seems to be pretty cutting edge and I've always liked a good spy film, so why shouldn't I? Before long, I found out why, but at that point it was a bit late for reversing direction, turning around, and heading back for the hills where I came from. Initially I was on a mission myself, to see the world, understand things, and become a part of something greater. Seemed that it would certainly take a long time, though.
It started with a few internships, running tasks for Johnny and a few of his more trusted friends. One day in the crypt down there, he showed me a pitcher and told me to take a whiff. "Can you smell that? It's mollasses. That jar is 300 years old and it still smells of molasses. The slaves carried that over." That was an odd experience, with Johnny, to expose me to what he probably believed was the sweet smell of slavery, still saved and lingering in the basement hallway corridor underneath the tomb on High St.
It was times like those when my initial reaction was, of course, I gotta get out of here... But the thought was immediately followed by my resolve to take myself as deep into their world as I would be permitted, for their hubris was far more exposed to their own ranks. I remained resolute to their cause when challenged directly, whether either being called to task or asked a simple question. But in the back of my mind, the thoughts never faded, that one day I would expose this stuff and reveal it to the rest of the world.
I saved most of the documents. I still did this one favor for Johnny the other day, with all the tombstones, but he knows I'm done. The only reason they can't just kill me? It's because Chad left me with all his secrets, and if they lose me, then their sattelite network won't work when they want to shut the internet down. Here's how that works.
In New Haven, there's a club called Toads Place. There, a man whose name is simply Jim, runs the sound and the lighting. They can't get rid of him no matter what, because he built the lighting and the sound system. It would be cheaper in any case to listen to Jim instead of firing him, in any situation especially because Jim's a man of reason. Besides, the way he rigged the place up, there was no way they'd ever find anyone who would know how to operate the place, aside from hiring someone with an actual technical degree, to take the place apart and rebuild it in a more conventional way. Clearly the more affordable choice would be to stick with Jim, so his crazy wiring acts as a form of job security.
That would have been the case with Chad, except he either died or faked his own death. I'll never know either way, because if he ever let me know he was alive, then it would defeat the purpose of having faked his death, because they'd find him and do it for realz. Especially with me still here in town, and not leaving any time soon. I hung out with Johnny just about every day when I first got back, until I realized that he was not my friend like Chad was. In fact, Johnny could care less about my intelligence. I was there to support his ideas, not to suggest my own. It was clear that working with Johnny would be much different, and I resolved myself in these last few days to use it as an excuse to back away from the whole situation, just as Chad had tried to do before he was allegedly kidnapped and never heard from again.
At the very end of his dissent with the Syndicate, as I'd like to call it, Chad was discovering the vast amount of weapons trading that was going on within Johnny's very own office, facilitating the sale of an arsenal to a group in Sudan. That essentially was the last straw for him, and my last conversation with him was about how he had had enough of Johnny's justifications, regardless of how eloquently he phrased his perspective. Chad had had enough.
While we were installing the sattelites, I remember him giving each individual point of access the key codes. But there's something more valuable than a password in a hand built network system. It's essentially that the person, or persons who construct that network have a more intimate understanding of how the operation functions as a whole. With that part understood, one has an advantage to holding their position as "expert' on the infrastructure of the system. That's why I thought Chad was safe.
Maybe he did fake his death, or perhaps he knew about other stuff that was even more concerning than just the weapons trades that he didn't approve of. In any case, I saw my knowledge base as a source of my own protection from my former masters, captors, whatever you'd like to call them. I think faster than all of them now and I'm 10 times more stealth. Why not keep running with them, and be a part of Johnny's art project one afternoon, huh?
Why not...
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