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We were sitting at the counter beside the coffee lids and the cream and Jackal was slugging the cream, drinking whole glasses full. I watched him. Each of the four fingers on his left hand was tattooed with a letter. "F-U-C-K," read his fist. Jackal had done the needlework himself. In fact, Jackal had also wrought the tattoos coating his arms -- the black skull, the indigo dragon, the logo of a punk band called the Misfits. He once inked skin for a living. Now he makes drawings that tattoo shops buy from him to use as templates. He earns about $200 a month -- enough, he says, to get by.

"The Drunk Punks," he explained, "they showed me how to survive. They showed me how to take a crowbar and bust open a building, and how to get food for free." Jackal subsists mainly on stuff scavenged from dumpsters; sometimes he robs supermarkets. And sometimes he gets in serious trouble. "A few years ago," he said, "I was in Florida with my road dog, David Owens, and I was on a bad acid trip. I went into this convenience store, and the guy told me he wouldn't sell me milk, so I put a bayonet to his neck and I told him I was going to kill him. I didn't, but they caught me. I got nine months in jail."

We finished our lunch. We went outside, onto the sidewalk. It was drizzling now, and several teen protesters were huddled beneath a store awning. One was slender and pretty, with a single cheap handcuff inexplicably attached to her wrist. Jackal approached her, then toyed with the dangling cuff. The girl was too naive to be frightened. She smiled. Jackal related his war story.

"I'm not a peaceful protester," he said. "Me and my friends, we tipped over some dumpsters last night. We broke the windows at Starbucks and looted the place. We got McDonald's real good. It's cool. People are standing up and fighting for what they believe in. They're tearing down the corporations and battling the WTO because it's screwing over the world."

The girl, perched on a metal railing, said nothing. Jackal latched himself into her spare handcuff. "I want to kidnap you," he said with coarse affection. "I want to take you so deep into the underworld that you won't know where you're at. How old are you?"

"Fifteen."

"Oooo," Jackal said, still teasing. "Now, that made me scared."

He unlocked himself and the girl bolted and then, a few minutes later, Jackal and I were alone in the rain.

"I'm too ugly to have a girlfriend," he said.

I tried to shrug the comment away. I laughed.

"Really," Jackal persisted, "It's true. I'm too ugly. Put that in your story."

I didn't see Jackal again until quite late that evening. He was hunched in the stairwell at the squat then, about to embark on what he cryptically called "a mission." Outside, an emergency curfew was in effect: Black-clad anarchists were not likely to get a warm reception. Still, Jackal rounded up a couple of underlings -- teenagers named Pixie and Real -- and the squat's self-appointed security guard, surmising there were no cops in sight, gave us clearance to exit. "Go! Go! Go!" he implored. We surged out the door and then, for roughly five minutes, kicked around, aimless, at a bus shelter.

"What are you guys going to do?" I asked Pixie finally.

Pixie had to think a moment. "If people are acting out against corporate greed," he said, "well, then we'll assist them."

Soon a passerby told us of mayhem up on Capitol Hill, a mile away. We hurried off and found ourselves, eventually, in a thick cloud of tear gas in the parking lot of a gas station surrounded by police. The cops stepped toward us. One got down on his knee and aimed his gun at our heads. I could see his face behind his helmet visor. "Get back!" he said.

I retreated, hands up, but Jackal did not and, as I rushed down the hill, I heard gunfire. It occurred to me that maybe Jackal was dead, and that I could do nothing to help him. I took refuge in a bar, got a drink, made some calls. Then, as I left, I saw Jackal again. He was standing on the corner, holding a liter of water and salving the burning eyes of anyone who'd been stung by the tear gas. "Water?" he asked over and over. "Want some water?" The people who needed it took the bottle from Jackal and dripped it onto their eyes and groaned in relief and handed the bottle back and told Jackal, "Thank you. Thank you." Jackal stood there until the bottle was dry. Then he walked home to the squat, perhaps happy that, for once, what he'd done mattered to someone.
salon.com | Dec. 8, 1999

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