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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A young punk who lives on the streets of Los Angeles tried to make his mark during the WTO protests in Seattle.
Dec 8, 1999 | I first met Jackal on a cold and gray Seattle morning, and the city seemed stilled. Over 100 protesters of the World Trade Organization meeting -- placid hippies, mostly, and earnest college students singing "America the Beautiful" -- had just been hauled off to jail, and police were rolling armored tanks through the streets. Jackal was standing on the hood of an ancient Plymouth Valiant, kicking in the windshield. The smack of his combat boots echoed through a desolate parking lot just east of downtown, and shards of glass danced to the pavement.
"Fuck!" Jackal said when he saw me. "I wish I had a fucking crowbar!"
His voice carried rage, certainly, but it was also convivial. Jackal was pleased, it seemed, to find someone intrigued by his labors, and me? I was quite curious. This gnarled, 25-year-old punk in baggy fatigues and a black hooded sweatshirt emblazoned "Profane Existence" seemed archetypal. Here was the angry soul of the anarchist horde that had, the night before, shattered windows and looted downtown Seattle, prompting the city's mayor, Paul Schell, to call in the National Guard. Jackal had helped trash both McDonald's and Starbucks. I stepped toward him, squinting in the shower of glass.
The car, it turned out, belonged to Jackal himself. Well, kind of: "My best friend gave it to me a couple days ago," he said. "It was having mechanical problems, so he wanted us to beat the shit out of it." Jackal pried the hood open and, with a screwdriver, tore a metal band off the carburetor. "Check it out!" he said. "No more VIN numbers." The vehicle was bereft of license plates too -- of any numbers that would make it identifiable to the police -- and now Jackal announced plans to "hop in and go flying right into downtown. I ain't gonna stop for any cop that comes near me," he said. "I'm gonna leave this car there in the road, blocking everything."
Jackal, who lives on the streets of Los Angeles, longed to become legendary. He wanted to become a hero back at "the squat," the abandoned Seattle warehouse that he and roughly 100 other young WTO protesters seized on Nov. 28. The squat, which the protesters vacated late last week, had 12 cavernous sleeping rooms, a makeshift kitchen, even an indoors "anarchist basketball court" featuring a hoop fashioned out of a milk crate.
Jackal had helped make the place habitable, hauling 5-gallon buckets of water up a long flight of stairs into a kitchen that lacked running water. Still, his co-tenants spurned him. He was a hard-bitten thug, a virtually illiterate ex-con, and the anarchists around him were naifs. They were college kids and suburban teen runaways who'd taken over the building peacefully, in order to secure housing for Seattle's homeless; they spent most of their time at the squat talking about things like veganism and animal rights. Jackal didn't fit in, and his solitude became painfully clear now in the parking lot as two fellow squatters approached. Jackal told them of his plans to drive the Valiant through police barricades, into downtown.
"Like that car's fucking bulletproof," said one of the kids.
Jackal stuffed his hands in his pockets and backpedaled a couple steps toward the car. Then the other kids left and together he and I meandered away to talk over lunch.
How much can you believe of what you are told by a guy who gives you a fake name -- a name that is typically used to describe wild dogs? I don't know. All I know is that, over chicken burritos that afternoon, Jackal delivered a colorful story.
"My parents were heroin addicts," he said. "I only met them once, when I was 16 and they'd just gotten out of prison. I was living in this abandoned building and they came by and chatted to me for 15 minutes and then left. They wanted nothing to do with me."
Jackal was raised in Dallas by devoutly Baptist foster parents -- a lawyer and a nurse, he claims -- and at times his childhood was idyllic. He remembered Lake Ray Hubbard, near Garland, Texas, where he angled for catfish with his foster dad, and remembered a certain foster grandmother he loved. Violence was a more prevalent motif, though. "Ever since I was a little kid," Jackal said, "I've had problems with having my space invaded. If I get put in a corner, I flip. I was the only white kid in an all-black [grade] school. Everybody hated me. They'd jump me, 15 people at once, and I'd try to tear their fucking heads off. I'd kick ribs. There'd be broken arms every once in a while, broken legs. I'd twist the body parts and listen to the bones snap."
At home, Jackal had nightmares -- "nightmares of dying by the government, of gunshot wounds. There'd be the sound of helicopters and of sirens, loud screaming fucking sirens. It scared me to death. I'd wake up shaking and crying. I'd hide under the bed. I didn't tell my foster parents. I didn't think they'd care, because whenever I told them about the fights at school, they were like, 'So?' They were cold."
They were also liars, Jackal said. "One day when I was 10, I broke into my foster grandmother's cedar chest, just to see what was in there, and I found my original birth certificate. I was disappointed. I was pissed off. I left my foster parents a note -- "Why must you lie?" -- and I escaped. I jumped out a second-story window with no plans of going back, ever."
