This is the first in a series of excerpts from Jim Gober’s book titled “Deep in the Heart of Occupy Austin.” A new excerpt will be published at OccupiedStories.com every Wednesday, so come back next week to follow Jim though the evolution of Occupy Austin. 

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“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938.

Chapter 1 The Thinking Tree

It was a blistering hot afternoon at the end of September, 2011, and I convinced a long-time friend named David to give me a ride to my first Occupy Austin planning meeting. It was taking place under a huge pecan tree in Austin’s Zilker Park, near the famed Barton Springs. We brought along a cooler filled with ice and a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to drink while waiting for the meeting to begin. As the Occupy Austin contingent arrived, they disturbed a handful of grossly intoxicated homeless men seeking refuge in the shade of this massive pecan tree, now known as The Thinking Tree by the occupiers.

Thankfully, the summer of 2011 was drawing to a close. It had not been a typical Austin summer. With no rain for almost a year and daily temperatures well over 100 degrees, the city looked like an overcooked cheese pizza. As the 50 or so occupiers settled in, they sat cross-legged or lounged on fresh blankets among the bewildered and bedraggled homeless. The occupiers appeared very optimistic, as if they were the super-warriors who were finally going to slay the fire-breathing hydra of Corporatism, Fascism, Oligarchism and Plutocracy that not only ate their future, but the lives and fortunes of millions of others throughout history.

So on this screaming hot September afternoon, the Occupy Austin arm of the Occupy Wall Street movement was born, for me anyway, although there was an earlier meeting at the La Zona Rosa coffee shop a few days before. The occupy group was as serious as any I’d ever seen, and true to Austin’s form, the homeless alcoholics who peppered the crowd were being surly and uncooperative. When a list went around for people to sign up and speak, a shirtless bum named Tommy signed up, but when his name was called to speak-at least five times-he awoke from a drunken slumber, and then slowly and clumsily sat upright. He wiped the slobber off his chin with the back of his hand and mumbled, “You gonna have to give me a minute,” then he fell back and passed out again. His hairless white beer belly was aglow in the slanting afternoon sun. He looked like a dead goldfish floating belly-up in an old fish bowl, dusty and forgotten on the bottom shelf of humanity.

I watched the Occupiers, mostly young people in their 20’s and 30’s, get things arranged to suit them. A recording device had to be put in the right place. Then they had to make sure the sun wasn’t in their eyes, so they could see the person speaking, play with Facebook or text somebody on their iPhones while the speeches were being done.

Then a dreadlocked mediator started with the hand signal thing that would be pervasive throughout the occupation. Today was mostly an introduction to the sparkle fingers. That’s where you wiggle your fingers above your head if you like something, at waist level when you are neutral, and down low when you don’t like something.

A discussion began about how we intended to post pictures and record everything on Facebook. This went on for 10 minutes, and I suddenly lost my patience and shouted out of turn. I loudly stated it was ludicrous to feed all your personal information into Facebook, a giant corporation, while using a device made in a sweatshop in China for another giant corporation, Apple. This outburst was met by a shirtless man, refreshed from a dip in the springs, who yelled, “Well, you’re drinking a beer!” I replied, “Well at least this beer’s not taking all my personal information and storing it for the fascists we are trying to fight in this movement to use against us.” That was met with plenty of down-low sparkle fingers. Was I missing something here? A fat young man, with an impressive Jew-fro, ran over and attempted to calm me down. He was very nice as he tried to find “common ground,” and I apologized for floating such a far-out idea and for being a little drunk myself.

While the older radicals, like myself, would have given up right there, I swore I was going to see this thing through and record the lives of these people. To dig deeper and see what motivates them, and maybe find out more about myself in the process. And of course, there is something to be said about what you can learn from seeing a society develop from the ground up. Maybe we can find something we missed the first time around. And I also knew the story of Occupy Austin would have an end, just like it had a beginning.

David and I became frustrated with the slow pace and irony of everything the group talked about, and the fact we hadn’t experienced this type of ordered meeting since grade school-so we were out, for that day anyway. On the way home, I told David regardless of how things went today, I believed in what the Occupy Austin people are trying to accomplish and wanted to be part of it.

David screamed, “You’re crazy, you know that! You are fucking insane!” Then we made fun of a few of the characters we saw so he would settle down and stop calling me crazy. But in my heart, I knew there was something more to the movement than just a few drunks and posers. I knew there were people with a lot of passion involved and this was serious business for plenty of folks, not just in Austin, but around the world.

The fact is, our world is in crisis and the occupy movement is like a festering boil. At some point, it will make the fascists uncomfortable and will have to be removed by any means possible. But on this late-summer day, and seared by the Texas sun, I was as optimistic as any of the occupiers, and as happily drunk as my homeless counterparts. I was ready to roll.

-Jim Gober-

This is the first in a series of excerpts from Jim Gober’s book titled “Deep in the Heart of Occupy Austin.” A new excerpt will be published at OccupiedStories.com every Wednesday, so come back next week to follow Jim though the evolution of Occupy Austin. 

NEW YORK – The one time I visited the occupation in the park, I also wandered down to the exchange and was struck by its pillars crumbling. On Christmas Eve day I visited 60 Wall for the first time. It was absolutely freezing. A woman with a baby was standing on a nearby corner, asking for change. I was taking something to the potluck I read about online. I knew that was happening, so I told her about it and we started talking. It turned out she was homeless, just stopped in to shelter in the Occupy atrium, and hadn’t eaten for three days. She pointed me to the door of the lobby that wasn’t broken.

I wandered in and stood around for just a minute before a young guy sitting pretty far away, all bundled and hooded for the cold snap, spoke up with “Happy New Year’s Eve,” flashing a huge grin. He was hanging out with a guy playing guitar and a bunch of people listening, typing, blowing on their hands. I walked over and when the song ended, started talking to the guy still smiling. Maybe you know him? A super sweet kid named Frankie. He’s just 21 and joined the occupy movement when he was sitting at home watching the march over the Brooklyn Bridge on the news. He said he nudged his little brother, said “Watch this,” then ran out of the house to join.

Frankie and I talked for a while in the atrium. I ended up giving him the food I brought and he took it over to where people were gathering. We hung out for a few hours, first looking up numbers for shelters (and WIC and other assistance) for the woman outside, then we went for a walk so he could show me other OWS sites. We went to SIS–Shipping, Inventory, and Storage. I was a little self-conscious about blundering through OWS admin work or whatever, but it being Christmas Eve and Frankie being so warm and winning, it felt like a minor worry. We met some other people just walking around and then made it to SIS where he introduced me to Nick and Nick. I ended up hanging out with them a little, hearing their stories of getting to New York. One of the Nicks was a Marine vet who’d been passing through on his bicycle and decided to stay. Really nice guys. There was a lot of talk about family and Christmas and a little talk about the frustrations they had with the OWS protocols — mostly telling stories about big personalities that broke rules / caused problems.

After they closed SIS, they took me for pbr at Charlie’s Place, I think it was called. It was a short walk, but very, very good to get out of the cold again. At 60 Wall St. earlier, Frankie and I had taken turns closing the doors on either side of the atrium because the cops kept propping them open. Fucking annoying. I was exhausted at the end of a few hours and can’t even imagine how people who are also staying in shelters, like Frankie,  feel — but even with all of the short, antagonistic bickering I saw, one still peeled off to join for the beer; and one of the Nick’s offered food to another right after a confrontation. The coolest thing was hearing each of them talk, warmed up by beer, about still being deeply committed to the whole, no matter how stupid the problems. I really can’t wait to see these people again.

-Amanda Gill-

MUSKEGON, MI – When the banks were bailed out a few years ago, I fucking lost it. Call me hot-headed, but I made up a series of three signs with slogans I don’t even remember— all slapped up in red paint— and hammered them into my front lawn. I lived in a shitty old house at the edge of the northern wealthy section of town, but it was the shitty old house my grandfather had died in and nearly all my friends and family had lived in at one time or another. For those reasons the house embodied many fond memories; it was the kind of place you always wanted to live in until you do.

Anyway, watching the government give up billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars to the very people who had screwed us in the first place, I fucking lost it. I lost my faith in dissent, in people, in the solidarity of mass protest … What could I do? I was just some guy with three wimpy signs in his yard— and it rained constantly, drooping the cardboard until you could no longer read my short stab at the government, blindly swiping at big business, mega-banks and the auto industry. And there were the airlines and a morbidly obese defense budget slaughtering people all over the world in the name of democracy and commerce to boot, too, but that was old hat by then— it’d been done for so long people didn’t know any different. It seemed like no one cared enough to scream and shout anymore. A dissenting voice to the Great Bail-Outs of the 21st century was nowhere to be found.

“We’re behind enemy lines, man!” I’d tell my wife. “Jesus… no one gives a shit! If this doesn’t get people in the streets, what the fuck will?” She’d shrug and we’d eat dinner with the kids. “Eat your fucking rice,” we’d say. “Good fucking beans.”

“SHIT, MOM!” my oldest son would yell. “THE GODDAMN BANKS ARE STEALING MY FUTURE! ASSHOLES!”

“No b-word at the dinner table,” my wife and I would scold him. “You know how we hate that fucking word.”

This is the caricaturized domestic life of a man who was not censored, who grew up memorizing late-night comedy routines on cable, who rolled and cried with bellyaches on the floor at George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy till his mother came home drunk from the bar and would lay down the most basic of life’s lessons— “Tell the truth,” she’d say. “Your life will be a lot easier.” So, I gave myself permission to express myself however the hell I pleased, like those funny people on cable, as long as I was honest, as long as it was the truth and sincere, and as long as the heart was involved.

A year floundered by and the world continued to stink, spin, and spew on down the line. Sure, there were puppies who found homes, bake sales were held. There’s a different colored ribbon for every f-ing cause under the sun. But anyway, a year went by, and in that time my wife and I purchased our first home.

“Put these fucking boxes in that room, and put those fucking boxes in this room,” we told the kids— even our toddler.

“DAMN IT, MOM! OUR GOD DAMN MORTGAGE IS FUCKED!” our eldest son yelled, storming off for the boxes, which our youngest echoed in tearing off his diaper, bending over and shaking his ass in the air.

Our mortgage was not fucked. It was quite fucking good, actually, but by then the media had crop-dusted so many Aqua Net politicians across the news, proclaiming and analyzing fault with the housing market, that our son began parroting all that b.s. back at us. “VARIABLE INTEREST RATES ARE STEALING OUR JOBS FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!” There was no real need to explain it all to an eight-year-old, but a good mortgage didn’t matter so much in the end anyway, either. He might as well have been right. Two years later, my wife lost one of her jobs, and the jobs we had left started providing less work. “THOSE DOUCHE BAGS ARE RUINING EDUCATION! CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE!” My oldest yelled again from behind the boxes, helping his little brother learn how to flip the bird—a prediction we agreed with long before.

By then, the whole country had its legs straight up in the air; my household’s income dropped by 75% soon after.

“This shit is all over the world!” I’d shake my head at my wife.

“Yeah, it’s disgusting,” she’d agree, shaking her head, too.

Then one afternoon, pissing away some time on the computer, avoiding discussions in my online classes and working on a novel that’s been ready for a final edit for months now, I came across the Occupy Wall St. movement.

“Some people are camping out in the middle of New York for a protest,” I told my wife.

“In the fucking city.” “Really?” she said. “What for?”

What for is old news now, but that afternoon I was still in my pajamas, still bleary-eyed and willing down a cup of coffee, waiting for it to shock the monkey back to the steering wheel, when this strange protest— this camping protest that had been going on for a little more than a week by then, with no immediate plans to stop— woke me right up, like I pissed myself ice-fishing or something— a sudden, exciting chill grabbed me and shook me around feverishly. “This shit is interesting!” I said, turning to find an empty room, my wife evidently somewhere else.

I’d been interested in counter-culture movements for years. It was always what I considered my passionate hobby reading— mostly 60’s revolutionary swag. I read a lot of books about (and by) a number of Black Panthers. I read a fair amount on the White Panthers, too, and a whole slew of bio books on different 60’s rock groups. I came across AIM at some point, and the Weather Underground, the Motherfuckers and the Yippies, which all came naturally after my earlier interest in the existential Beats, the Wobblies, the Diggers. My father is a musician and my mother’s a medicine woman; I’m Irish and Eastern Cherokee. My grandpa was a junk man and his brothers were hobos who used to fish for chickens from an old shack along the Flat River— I’m primed for this shit, and my wife knows it. Hell, I didn’t even mention Che Guevara, Martin, Malcolm, and Means…

For three or four days and nights I couldn’t work, I couldn’t sleep. Every few minutes I was back on the computer rummaging around the Internet for more news and developments about the movement. “Holy fuck!” I’d blurt out now and then. After a while, my wife didn’t even respond. I had to come up with something else to get her attention. “Holy fuck!” no longer did it. I combed every social website I could think of looking for Occupy Wall St. news, marveling at how fast it spread, and how far! Hell, it had already reached New Zealand! People were talking! Online, that is; mostly online, and I followed. I made it my personal duty to help the various Occupy pages stay connected, shuffling through the various sites obsessively, doing anything I could to feel part of it, helping to spread the information and solidarity.

And then BAM!— 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. Watching the footage, my mouth fell open like a rockslide. I shook with a chill that went from my nuts to my chin and all down my spine. An involuntary grin pulled itself up from out of nowhere and put a gleam in my eyes— that wild spark that always makes my wife look at me as if my name is Willis, still pushing Different Strokes after all these years: she sees a scheme in my smile and deflects it with a prudent smirk that makes her squint her eyes slightly.

“Look at this shit!” I told her, pulling her away from her own online classes.

“They arrested 700?” she said, “What the fuck?” ”They kept chanting, ‘THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING! THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING!’ and ‘SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!’ at the police! I have to go!” I told her. “You know me; I’ve talked about this for years! I have to go … It gave me chills just watching it. I have to do this!”

Then I said, “Holy fuck!” again, because I knew that this time I meant it. This time, I saw something I felt instinctually different about. The energy and approach of it all was too high. Liberty Park was constant high noon; it was a line in the sand. Camping out in front of the White House had been something I’d ranted about for years. “I should just take a fucking tent and go set it up right outside that damn place,” I’d say, coming out of the bathroom, tightening my bathrobe, running my hands through my hair, checking for thin spots. “What the fuck have people got to lose?” But camping out to take over Wall St. made even more sense than D.C. You’ve got to show up on the doorstep of power, and OWS had its finger on the bell from the beginning.

But, primed as I was for a more liberal outlook on life, I still gave myself a cushy excuse for inaction. My claim: I didn’t know where to start, how to get involved in a way that makes you feel like you’re making a difference, that you’re not just some asshole pissing away his time when he should be at home, showing the kids how to swear in new and interesting ways so they can really wow their friends on the playground and around the daycare. Those old Andrew Dice Clay rhymes don’t cut it anymore, trust me. Ya, hear? So, recognizing where and how-the-fuck to start can be a catalyst for major change in the way a guy like me lives his life. It can help lend enough direction to spark continuous action— a lifetime of it!

When I saw Occupy Wall St., I knew; I just knew, right from that first sleeping bag unrolled in the name of freedom and democracy— I was Occupy through and through. Suddenly, I had a location and a purpose. I had the interest, the motivation, and I begged, borrowed, and scrounged for the money to get to Liberty Park. The arrow had been released.

Before I left, I called up my cousin and said, “You want to go to New York for a protest?” and he said, “Why, hell yes!” He had to sell a deer rifle to do it. We left two days later, having assembled funds and donations from a handful of kind souls in the local community.

As we drove east on I-80, facing a good twelve hours of driving into the night, I wondered what would be in store for my cousin and I, whether we would be beaten, arrested, or both; whether we would get separated and whether we would be able to find our way back to each other; where we would sleep, use the bathroom and shower … Having gotten a late start, the sun was well above as the wheels spurned us forward. In my head was rock and roll; every movement I’d ever studied; every revolutionary I’d ever had the honor to meet and speak with, learn from; and the last protest I’d been a part of—the sky gray above the land, old WWII bombers circling and roaring in the rain, fake bombs bursting in the mud around me— the lone person who saw fit to call foul on celebrating Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets’ presence at the local air festival in order to raise ticket sales— a festival that has since collapsed.

My sign read, “F the A BOMB!” and “THE A BOMB IS NOT CELEBRITY!” Both sides were printed over large orange mushroom clouds I’d painted days before, and stood out against the darkness like a sudden torch in the metallic gloom.

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-Dylan Hock -

http://www.youtube.com/embed/WIyZcfergWY