The Occupiers

---

New York City – September & October, 2011

When Iggie was thirteen, he went on a kind of Rumspringa. His adoptive father, Reggie, had a relative in NYC named Jairo, who graciously allowed Iggie to stay with him for the duration of his eighth-grade year at Horace Mann. Jairo lived in a high-rise in Long Island City overlooking the Pepsi sign on the banks of the East River. Jairo worked as a pediatric surgeon at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Washington Heights. In comparison to his father, Reggie, who made roughly $40k a year as Camphead, the man was loaded. Jairo hated working, though, & preferred to do two back-to-back twenty-four-hour shifts, usually on Tuesdays & Wednesdays. To remain alert on the clock, he would take quick power-naps in unoccupied patients’ beds—of which there were few—between operations. He was the antithesis of how doctors ought to live. Well into his thirties, & with an already significantly pronounced widow’s peak, by cause of hair loss at the side, he was a huge stoner & ate almost exclusively either ribeye or loaded jerk chicken burritos from the meal truck parked outside his complex. On the days he didn’t work, he would drive Iggie to school. But on Tuesdays & Wednesdays, Iggie had to take the E train to 50th, switch to the 1, & get off at 242nd, across from Van Cortlandt Park. From there, it was a brisk five to ten-minute walk to school. Sometimes, Iggie liked to trespass onto the nearby golf course & go sit by the artificial pond near the practice range, stare into its pristine body & imagine himself doing tricks in the koi’s wakes, like he used to on Lake Liquorice, back at Camp.

For the most part, Jairo left Iggie alone. He spent the majority of his time with his live-in partner, Pat, or his half-sister, Marguerite. It wasn’t clear what connection his father had to these people, or if he had one at all. From what Iggie could discern—given the minimal information he’d been provided, along with tidbits he picked up from Jazz, his fellow Campmate—these were Reggie’s step-siblings. The story goes like this: shortly before, or shortly after, Reggie left home for college, his mother—a chronic manic-depressive—killed herself. Or divorced her husband. Or ran off with another man. It didn’t matter. But somebody mentioned lithium poisoning once—which is something you can really only contract on purpose—so it was safe to assume she had killed herself. Again, the details were hazy. In any case, Reggie’s father remarried to a woman named Carolina, Jairo & Marguerite’s mother, almost immediately. They’d met on an online dating chat board, back in the early days of the internet, which was also possibly a human trafficking scheme, & he flew her up from Brazil within weeks of their first exchange. This was more or less the extent of what Iggie knew about his father’s life prior to Camp. The effect these things had on Reggie was hard to ascertain. He never mentioned them, which was probably a sign they affected him a lot.

Iggie left Camp because his father thought he should see the horrors that corporations inflicted upon the Working Class for himself. He arrived in late July, which afforded him a little over a month to explore the city before the start of school. At first, he just walked around the neighborhood, too scared to wrangle the metro, which Jairo said even lifelong residents struggled to navigate sometimes. But Manhattan’s skyline proved too alluring to resist.

He wanted to go to the Statue of Liberty, but Jairo convinced him that once you’d seen it—from afar or up close, it didn’t matter—you’d seen it. Plus the lines for the ferry were exorbitantly expensive & therefore not worth the wait, which—no matter the season—were bound to be long. So Iggie took it upon himself to go sightseeing. He hit all the spots: starting from Jairo’s apartment, he made his way to Harlem, where he saw the Apollo, then to the Guggenheim, then Central Park, MOMA, the Rockefeller Center Garden, Times Square, Hell’s Kitchen, top of the Empire State Building, the Strand, Washington Square Park, Stonewall (which he could only see from where he stood outside, on the curb), & finally, all the way down to Ground Zero, which he found extremely morbid & departed almost immediately. By the time school started in early September, he figured he’d seen about all there was to see. No longer did he constantly stare up at all the glittering behemoth buildings. That was what a tourist would do. He was, in short order, a New Yorker.

Once the semester started, he worried about making friends, as all teens would at that age, but especially those plopped into a new school, new city—new everything. All his life, up to this point, he’d only known his other Campmate, Jazz, & his father. & Davey, the guy who drove them into town for supplies at the end of each month, but that was a superficial relationship. Plus Jazz, at more than double his age—at 28—practically had one foot in the grave already! What could she talk to him about? His interests? He had none, other than whatever occupied him at a given moment.

Last summer, it was trying to somersault with his kneeboard into the air. He’d make it to the upside-down suspended portion, but would, inevitably, slap down—hard—into the water, which hit him like concrete. He could never stick the landing, the coming back down part, & so gave up, but, to his credit, only after the water turned cold. It just wasn’t the same in a wetsuit, with little bullets of infernally cold water stinging him in the eye, the ankle, the groin. & what was Jazz interested in? Other than getting better. Which is different than bettering oneself. Very different. It’s not like, for example, he could waltz up to her & say, “Hey, how’s the not doing heroin going? Good? Good. Glad to hear it!” because that’s not a polite topic of conversation. & he couldn’t talk to her about girls, even though they had that interest in common, because there were no girls his age to talk to!

At first, he was simply ignored by his classmates. But he preferred this treatment to what he imagined would happen. A cohort of ultra-rich kids sporting finely tailored outfits, à la Gossip Girl—a reference he wouldn’t get; Reggie enforced a strict Hays Code—it was obvious for Iggie’s classmates to turn their noses up at a kid like him: a backward, almost grotesquely Midwestern boy with a cleft lip, who spoke in a way that immediately betrayed his homeschooled background. That word—homeschooled—he never mentioned to anyone, not even during mandated back-to-school icebreakers. If somebody asked him why they hadn’t seen him around last year, if he was new—he just waved his hand & wrinkled his nose, as if he were in on some kind of joke, & said that he was from “a small town in Minnesota nobody’s ever heard of,” after which most teenagers—if they’d developed the synapses for sympathy yet—got the idea, nodded in pity, & dropped the subject.

Thus, he was pleasantly surprised when, one day, an unscrupulous group of ragamuffins invited him to sit with them at lunch. He’d noticed them before, constantly risking dress-code violations, always stealing the opportunity to wear their collared shirts untucked—in the bathroom, in the hallways between classes, & certainly immediately after the last bell let out. One boy, Matvei—who, self-admittedly, styled himself after the goth kid, Michael, from South Park, & thus had to explain South Park to Iggie—was particularly nice to him. So Iggie made his first friend in life.

Matvei, like everybody else, came from old money. His great-grandparents immigrated to Brighton Beach after the October Revolution, well before the other Russians jumped ship in the 70s. According to him, his prababushka & dedushka had been classic aristocrats, close with the Tsar, & possessed no discernible source of income. They were wealthy simply because they were already wealthy & always had been. Their mere existence allowed them to accrue more wealth, which the Bolsheviks, obviously, didn’t like. So they shipped their fortune to a relative in Montclair, New Jersey—apparently a popular destination for exiled Russian gentry—ahead of their arrival & lived well off of it for several years before the Great Depression forced them to find a different source of income in another locale. This came in the form of a jewelry company on 6th Street that the family acquired after the original owners defaulted on their mortgage payments. The logic behind opening a diamond shop in the middle of a global economic downturn was dubious. But then again—diamonds never lose their value, at least not to the rich, who will pay any sum of money for anything to prove they can pay any sum of money for anything. It occurred to Iggie, fleetingly, that he knew more about Matvei in a week than he ever knew about his own father. His adoptive father.

Then, barely two weeks into the school year, all hell broke loose in the city. It was the eleventh day of the semester, September 17th. Matvei convinced Iggie to cut class with him so they could putter around Manhattan. Eventually, they ended up in Bowling Green Park, gawking at scantily clad female joggers, which was thrilling for Iggie & secretly for Matvei, too, who, although he had lived his whole life in the city, had never really done anything bad before. But a commotion arose, & people began passing them in waves, angrily flooding into the street & angrily chanting slogans. The boys liked anger—naturally, they followed it to its source. As they tracked the irritation, they found themselves, like ants, in a colony of people mostly wearing patchwork parachute hemp pants. They all reeked of, well, something.

Iggie had never seen so many people gathered in one place before. Of course, at Camp, the trio—he, Jazz, & Reggie—dined at the Mess Hall, same as the other Campmates, who sometimes jokingly referred to themselves as inmates, for every meal, but there were never more than two dozen or so people eating together at one time. Each fork remained distinct from its neighbor; each visually divisible by its four prongs. If, for example, somebody’s lips were smacking too loudly—something both he & his father hated—Reggie could Cartesianally single that prisoner out & banish them to the exterior rocking chairs, the ones positioned by the life-size chess boards, for the remainder of their meal.

This procession was something altogether different. A parade, maybe—a parade of anger! Heads blending into heads. So many heads fusing, interweaving, coming apart—a formic, multicellular body of fiber: blonde, brunette, green, blue, pink, salt & pepper, purple, everything. One really, really long wig that stretched from right next to him—Matvei’s tightly packed black curls—& got tangled behind him, at The Battery, matted itself ahead to Trump Tower, & pleated from east to west, along both rivers.

Stealing a glance over the crowd on his tippy toes, Matvei informed Iggie they were standing in front of the Charging Bull statue, but that it was barricaded. People were attempting to climb over the fence with one hand while juggling red spray paint cans in the other. Cops—pigs—stood guard, thrusting people back into the crowd with their batons, indiscriminately snatching men & women alike off the Bull & hauling them away into their paddy wagons. But the people resisted, surging all the way to Zuccotti Park, where, it turned out, they planned to stay for some time.

This was how Iggie spent the latter half of September & the entire month of October: skipping classes with Matvei & heading over to Wall Street to be with their brethren, the 99%, where they received a different, invaluable kind of education. There was a lot of talk of big bank bailouts, subprime mortgages & homeowner’s insurance, of bubbles & of the stock market. There were teach-ins about the history & efficacy of other economic protests, too, such as the Haymarket Affair, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Bonus Army, & the Poor People’s Campaign. Neither of them really understood anything anybody was saying, but they were perfectly happy to pretend that they did.

They met many characters. There was one guy who looked & acted exactly like Lieutenant Dan—Reggie loved Forrest Gump, for some reason; father & son frequently rewatched it in the Rec Center together—& even had almost the same backstory, except instead of Vietnam, he ‘served’ in Iraq, which was another one of the many bad things America had been up to lately. There were these preppy-looking guys from Columbia University who called themselves Vampire Weekend that every girl in school had been geeking out over. They met a guy who used to be a Harlem Globetrotter—he had pictures to prove it & everything. They met the entire New York City chapter of Dykes on Bikes—Iggie made Matvei snap a Polaroid of himself with them to send back to Jazz. The most memorable, though, was a Times Square performer who showed up every day, still covered in silver paint, still refusing to speak, to do the robot for the people, usually to the tune of Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys. Everybody loved him.

They also met a bunch of older kids, mostly the children of guilty baby boomers who never got the chance to be real hippies & were making up for that lost time as Occupiers in penance. Both were eager to fit in with the emergent motley crew, but Iggie especially so. The punk-crusted luster of this new batch of bad boys & girls was undeniably more authentic than the paltry feigning of his cafeteria buddies. He felt like he was playing a game of Cool leapfrog, hopping from his starting point at the outermost ring of civilization, total asocial rurality—to the very center of the Universe’s action, the core of the Big Rotten Apple. Thus, his classmates were among the first casualties of his Cool Crusade.

But not the first. Though Jazz wore a vintage black leather BMW motorcycle jacket—one of those articles of clothing that have an inexplicable martingale strap sewn onto the back with clasps that attach to nothing—nearly every day, & though, yes, she did do drugs, &, yes, drugs are cool—among the coolest of things to do out there, actually—the way she did drugs was in a decidedly uncool fashion. That is, she was addicted to the point of involuntary commitment. Iggie admired many things about her, mostly the traits that opposed his father’s. Whereas Reggie loved to watch pots never boil, Jazz was all free-form physics, an unobserved electron quantumly acting up. In the clouds; down to earth. Placing a bookmark horizontal across a page & sliding it down to reveal the next line versus blitz-reading with a flashlight under a blanket. Tortoise, hare—that sort of thing.

Meeting people his own age—which they were, people, not just kids; the Occupiers accorded equal respect to everyone—Iggie began to notice a change. It was happening inside of him, inside his brain, & it was difficult to describe. But something was definitely changing. There would be moments spent occupying when he suddenly became aware of what he was sitting on. Asphalt. Concrete. Iron & wood. A pothole. A manhole. A curb. A stoop. & he’d realize some of these were things he’d never sat on before. Particles arranged into materials entirely foreign to him; the elements, physical. Then he’d think about all the things he had sat on before. The unpaved driveway leading up to the cabin he shared with his father. Rocks. Dirt. Dust. Weeds.

The advertence got bigger, spread, like the spate of hair bogarting lower Manhattan, to the neat lines of his memory. Three people—Reggie, Jazz, Davey—plus himself; these were his cardinal directions. In almost every recollection, he was by himself in just one location: his room. If he tried to think, he could triangulate the probable location of the other three: his father upstairs in his study—so, North—tinkering with his beloved ham radio; Jazz, to the West, unfurling a hammock at the edge of the lake, preparing to doze the afternoon away; Davey milling about the sandlot next to his house—South of the cabin—where he kept his seemingly infinite cache of old Chevys, randomly selecting one to enter so that he could clear out the cobwebs from the gun rack above its back seat. But these were simply his imaginings.

Where he really was: alone. Not watching TV, not texting or calling or even emailing anyone, not going on Wikipedia rabbit holes, not beating the next level of Super Smash Bros, not reading, not scrapbooking, not drying out orange slices to display in the kitchen window, not playing tag with the kid down the street, not wagging a finger in a sibling’s face & hollering “I’m not touching you!” Not doing anything. Just sitting there by himself, staring. Staring at what? He didn’t remember. Maybe it was the wall, or his navy-white striped pillow; could have been a piece of paper in his hand with nothing written on it, or the plum tree not budding just outside his window. Always, he was not doing something, which is quite different than not doing anything. Maybe that was the change, being able to recognize this difference. Jazz wore a black leather jacket. Davey had a lot of old cars. His father liked to listen to the radio. So what. So what?

One small step for man! A hop, skip, & a jump away; by leaps & bounds! There was no basis for cool. No axis for it. Now he had one. Now he had the Occupation. He had Matvei & the older teenagers, now introducing them to the city’s underground: basement shows, illegal raves, urban exploring, etc. & drugs—hard drugs—which Matvei greedily partook of. Iggie, on the other hand, predisposed to wariness regarding any permanent alterations to his cognitive chemistry, dabbled only in the basics: LSD, shrooms, & cocaine.

Once, to see what all the rage was about, he snorted heroin off a surprisingly clean mirror that somebody—the Globetrotter, as it turned out—had hot-glued onto a cat-scratched-to-shit ottoman. He didn’t know heroin came in powder form, which was a much less scary—and, indeed, more pleasurable—way to ingest drugs in comparison to, say, an intramuscular injection to the dorsal digital vein located at the point of conjunction between the proximal phalanges & metatarsals of digits two & three—your index/pointer & middle toes—otherwise known as the bipennate second dorsal interossei muscle, or, more simply: your toe web. But, by & large, Iggie abstained from drugs that necessitated the use of needles. He claimed injections made him feel nauseous, which, as soon as he told Matvei this, he wished he hadn’t—because from then on, anytime Matvei went to stab his foot to get high, he would look at Iggie & make fake retching noises. This, inevitably, would cause Iggie to retch as well; except, instead of dry-heaving, things really did come up. He did, however, find that he liked weed. So he smoked weed.

It came to the boys’ attention on the first weekend of October that Tom Morello—the very same Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine—Iggie was learning about these things on his own now—would be performing a set outside the Equitable Building. Since they didn’t know the exact time Tom would be on, they forewent school entirely & spent the morning & afternoon in the encampment. They waited as patiently as they could, nervously chittering with other attendees—many of whom were posers, only there to rip it to some Rage, but unwilling to rage against the machine itself. Finally, Tom showed up, every bit as glorious as they envisioned him to be.

When he played The Fabled City, the boys nearly passed out. They moshed, & moshed hard, exchanging elbows with their comrades in the hardcore vanguard, whose stenches had been—unfortunately to everyone except themselves—embellished by their time spent occupying. Matvei decked some girl, thinking she was a dude, & got his face punched by her boyfriend—or was it her girlfriend? There was no telling with these people. Morello’s chords ripped through Iggie’s body & bumrushed the border of his cortex, forged an association between what was happening to him in the present & what had happened in the past. He was thinking of his father, tirelessly working away at his radio—that radio, which Iggie had known his whole life. Its superb fidelity; its signal clear as day; its volume control so sensitive that if someone so much as walked by too quickly, the rush of air they created might make the nob jump several notches in amplitude.

After the gig wrapped up, Matvei tapped him on the shoulder & informed him about the afters—a new word to add to the non-stop party lexicon he’d been building. There was a burlesque show happening later that evening at a club on Fire Island called Ice Palace. One of the older kids promised he could get them in—they had to go. & so they did.

Along the route, Matvei & Iggie shared little bottles of Jamaican tonic wine. Secretly, they were expecting vodka, either straight out of the bottle or with some atrocious mixer, like green Gatorade. Thus, they arrived—swaying slightly—upon the shores of that island so famous for its debauchery. They giggled to themselves, elated with the secrecy of teenage indiscretion—the thrill enshrined in cusp-of-manhood pacts that boys make with each other. Thrill, which got them more intoxicated than any spirits they had imbibed thus far, or would imbibe that night, which—to be sure—was plenty.

At first, they were spooked by the bouncer: a no-nonsense, positively jacked man with a thick North Jersey accent & dressed head to toe in black—the words SECURITY embossed in reflective white across his deep cut v-neck, like an airport’s strip landing. When he saw the gaggle of gangly passing-for-twenty-somethings approach, he flashed a smile—a most unsightly smile. All of the incisors on his bottom jaw had either rotted away completely & were death-gray, or replaced with gold crowns, or covered in a blue-ish glow-in-the-dark filament, like his shirt. In any case, he waved them through, maybe because he knew the group ring leaders— it didn’t really matter to the duo—& in they went.

An Ice Palace on Fire Island, now that was clever, Iggie thought. Anybody could admire the perfection of such a simple, yet instantly unforgettable bon mot—he didn’t know from where he learned this term, but he liked to use it; in the same way he liked to throw the word bubble around when he was among the circle of occupiers he’d grafted himself onto lately, watching smugly, as they nodded their heads in approval at his budding class consciousness—something his father would be proud of, too. The club’s architecture, both inside & out, had a very Florida vibe, like a home-away-from-your-home-away-from-home country club. It catered to a snowbird’s delicate taste for things that look expensive & exotic but are, in actuality, quite affordable & domestic. At the same time, it maintained the elegiac sensibility of a Garden State shore town on the brink of economic ruin—a town laden with casinos & overpriced boardwalk crab-fry shacks. In a word, it was camp.

Ice Palace formed a horseshoe shape, with two main screened-in banquet hall dancefloors connected by a subsidiary structure at the back of the building, which doubled as a makeshift black room for the more eager persons looking to get down to business. In between the two buildings was a pool that, despite the October cold, remained uncovered, bifurcated by a walkway of floating buoys in the shape of lotuses or coconuts. On one end of the pool, the side closer to the black room, male strippers helicoptered their penises in the faces of drooling older men, who reached into their pockets every so often to give the performers one-dollar bills. On the other end, closer to the entrance of the club—where Iggie & Matvei were—was a stage. Attendees could easily slip over to either side via the aquatic thoroughfare, or along the porcelain-paved sidewalks, & purchase drinks from pop-up tiki huts presided over by bartenders wearing lei necklaces & not much else—grass skirts for the girls & grass thongs for the gents. Some younger men were swimming, trying to coax their sugar daddies—add to the flashcards—into joining them via false promises of the water not being “that bad.” A few topless girls, besides the bartenders, dotted the audience, gliding as they hung onto the arms of their GBFs—gay best friends.

Somebody was finishing up an impressive rendition of Cabaret on stage. Then, somebody else, wearing David Bowie lightning make-up, took the place of butt-naked Fräulein Sally Bowles. They were wearing huge orange go-go boots that came up to their groin & an ‘80s pink-fluorescent-orange-&-lime-green aerobic leotard. It was impossible to tell their gender. They looked more like a big cat than anything else.

Somebody cut the fairy lights strung along the wrap-around balcony above. Feedback screeched out of a pair of mounted speakers as one of the bartenders took the stage & introduced the drag star, Ziggy Stardust. Another worker, dressed in all black, quietly rolled a backdrop panel into view. Painted on it was the cover art from the eponymous album. Two other stagehands brought out a pole & drilled it into the middle-back of the stage.

Ziggy approached the microphone & looked to the DJ booth situated on the opposite balcony. “Check, check, check; one, two, three; George Bush is a criminal, as you can see.” Then they threw up a pollice verso at the MC, who nodded back. They smiled in a coy, vixen way & started delicately scanning the audience, making intimate eye contact with everyone for at least half a second. They paused, looked stage left, & took a breath. All eyes were on them.

In one motion, with that same smile fixed to their face, they took the mic stand in their left hand, extended their right in the opposite direction like a swan—or else a very elegant goose—shaking pond water off its feathers, firmly planted their weight on their left leg, jutted their right out, exposing the delicious flesh of their upper thigh to the ultra-bright green-yellow overhead lights. Swooshing their right arm down in a half-circle air guitar, they hurled an imaginary D power-chord into the audience as the speakers roared to life.

Iggie had never heard the song Moonage Daydream live—only on his father’s radio—but he knew this was the closest he’d ever get to seeing David Bowie perform in his prime. Ziggy made their way down the set—all the greatest hits off Stardust—twining their body up & around the pole, then uncoupling their limbs from each other & the metal in zero-gravity fashion, gradually shedding articles of increasingly complex industrial clothing, taking crinkled bills & dropping them discreetly to the floor or stuffing them in their boots. All this, while nailing every single note of each song, & somehow, somehow, managing to maintain that—okay—erotic eye contact with everyone simultaneously, thereby making every onlooker feel special—very special indeed—until they were completely naked, & alone, on stage, half-wailing, half-crying, in earnest, along to the lyrics of Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.

Iggie remained motionless throughout, having come in his pants about one quarter of the way through the rendition. When Ziggy came crawling on hands & knees over to him, with their tongue out like a dog—or, perhaps a Cheetah?—& a look in their eye, Iggie bent down & offered themself to Ziggy thinking, “You’re not alone.”