Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (11 page)

A few of the Ron Paul supporters jockeyed to fight the guy, but were held back. I pushed past them and dragged Todd out of the line of fire. The Giuliani supporter gradually backed away and the group of them retreated back toward their SUV, perhaps realizing they had crossed a line.

Todd was uninjured, but stunned by the incident. He developed a red handprint on his face for the next few minutes. The 9–11 truther with the stringy hair thanked Todd and flirted with him for the rest of the visibility march.

In the late afternoon we retired to an Irish pub called Murphy’s Taproom for beers and hot food. Murphy’s served as the unofficial HQ of Ron Paul supporters in Manchester. We warmed up and had beers and swapped war stories with other groups of Paulites.

While Todd and the truther paired off to talk about having crazy 9–11 is a hoax babies I mingled with some of the other patrons. It was just a stroke of luck that one of the main topics of discussion was Internet organizing. Several supporters had laptops out and were updating blogs or using ronpaul2008.com, a campaign and social networking site that has since been taken over by Dr. Paul’s Campaign for Liberty PAC.

The common denominators among the Paulites seemed to be youth, an interest in the Internet, and general disgust with conservative belligerence and liberal “political correctness.” Taxes were also a big topic and some vague idea that liberals wanted to “tax us to death.”

Among the younger Paulites there seemed to be an inordinate number of lawyers and people who could at least believably pretend to be “constitutional law” experts. The younger Paulites also seemed fairly affluent, whereas many of the homegrown New Hampshire Paulites seemed to be salt-of-the-earth types.

The hostility between the young and old was still evident in the way people grouped together in the bar. Here the tension seemed lessened after a tiring day of walking together and holding signs. Spirits were further buoyed by beer and the excitement of the upcoming town hall. When one of Ron Paul’s painfully awkward ads came on the TV, the bar fell silent and then cheered wildly at the sight of the Ron Paul supporters featured in the ad.

“Live free or die. New Hampshire,” said one of the men in the ad.

The rest of the ad was drowned out by the deafening cheer in Murphy’s. After it had died down I walked over to the bar to get another beer.

“I think that chick from the commercial is on my Facebook,” said the man standing next to me at the bar. “The hot one.”

I wasn’t sure who he meant.

I was on my fourth or fifth Boddingtons, living free and not dying, when word began to spread that we were mustering to move out to the Ron Paul town hall. A woman I believe was campaign staff arrived with a huge printed banner for us to carry. Many of the Paulites were drunker than me. A few had brown smudges around their mouths from peeling and eating chocolate coins stamped
RON PAUL LIBERTY DOLLARS.

The building where the town hall was being held was a large multistoried red brick compound that resembled a cross between a schoolhouse and a mental asylum. The choice of venue was purely utilitarian: one of several companies leasing space in the building was Manchester’s public access station MCAM-TV 23. This was the station that carried a simulcast of Dr. Paul’s town hall discussion across much of New Hampshire and on the Internet.

Dozens of us marched through the snow, chanting and hollering and attracting honks and shouts from passing cars. The groups of Ron Paul supporters were converging on the public access studio. Their ranks had thinned out some as many left to travel the short distance to Milford and protest the Republican debate. The anger at Ron Paul’s exclusion from the debate was bubbling.

“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” remarked one particularly heavyset Paulite.

“They won’t forget us,” agreed his friend. “They will remember the name Ron Paul.”

Another one of the Paulites was concerned that we might be killed by Republican agents.

“Should have brought my guns,” he joked. “We could set up some sandbags and make sure they don’t try to stop us.”

“I’d die for that,” someone pitched in, and the conversation temporarily shifted to fantasies about a bloody battle to protect Ron Paul while he bravely transmitted his town hall.

Most of the remainder of the march was given over to a discussion of fiat currencies and the monstrous injustice of the Federal Reserve. This was a favorite topic of Paulites, but I was unable to feign interest in “worthless paper money.” If Amazon.com wanted to start accepting sacks of gold nuggets then I was fine with the currency switch, but it was hard to care.

The legendary Hutch was waiting for us at the station. He was a tall, chinless white guy in his thirties. He had thinning brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and he wore big wire-frame glasses and a jean jacket with
REVOLUTION
embroidered on the back. He referred to his Blackberry and murmured into his Bluetooth earpiece frequently as he directed the arriving groups of Paulites to set up along Commercial Street.

I wondered aloud what all the hype was over Hutch.

“He’s one of the guys who came up with the fund-raising stuff,” Junior told me.

Not the moneybombs or the campaign’s branding. That was Lyman, the genius behind the blimp. Hutch was somehow involved with the way Paul was handling his campaign donations. He seemed to be a dull process figure within the campaign, but the supporters claimed he had official ties to Paul and spoke with authority.

Though disappointed, the Paulites deferred to him when they learned they would not be allowed into the town hall. Word had already gotten out about that, but many had hoped to find a way inside.

Hutch produced a laptop and directed Paulites to an exterior wall of the building where an open wireless network would provide Internet access. Tech-savvy Paulites practically orgasmed over Hutch’s attention to detail as they crowded around the window hijacking bandwidth from a router named “LAB2.”

I held the fort atop one of the snow drifts lining Commercial Street, waiving a Ron Paul sign and motioning for passing cars to honk. The supporters near me took turns stealing over to the laptop and trying to get the TV station’s website to load the streaming video. There was a lot of griping about crashed sites and dead video streams, but the feeling by the end of the town hall was that Ron Paul had knocked one out of the park.

The mood was jubilant. People were hypothesizing about “hidden support” in New Hampshire not being detected by the polls. Some theorized that America might have watched Fox News, but the locals watched Ron Paul and that was all that mattered.

Supporters hugged one another. I saw Todd making out with that 9–11 truther girl near the wireless hotspot.

I saw Hutch smoking a cigarette by himself and I sidled up to ask him about the town hall.

“It was amazing,” he said with a grin. “We are going to kick some ass in New Hampshire. Giuliani is going down.”

He smiled and tossed his cigarette into the snow. At that moment former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was polling third in New Hampshire.

The Post–Ron Paulcalypse

Rudy Giuliani went down. He was a complete failure of a candidate, a humorous footnote in the margins of the campaign history book.

And Giuliani beat Ron Paul in New Hampshire.

Giuliani ended the night in fourth place with 9 percent and Paul had only 8 percent. The two of them were fighting for the scraps near the bottom of the Republican roster.

New Hampshire was Ron Paul’s best hope, the place selected as the home to libertarianism’s utopian Free State Project. A New York neocon beat Ron Paul there. It was a crushing blow to the movement.

“I can’t believe this.” Todd called me from New Hampshire as the results poured in.

I was in my hotel room in Boston on the day of the primary, enjoying some sort of lung infection and trying to eat my way through the room service menu.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“They’re stealing it from him!” Todd shouted, his voice quivering with emotion. “Those motherfuckers are stealing the election from him. There are counties with zero votes for him and Carol knows people who voted there.”

“Who is Carol?” I asked.

“My girlfriend,” he said, as if I should have known. “We met on the campaign.”

I recalled the stringy-haired truther from a couple days earlier. I took a burning swig of overpriced room service Scotch and hit
REFRESH
on the ABC News results page. Obama was losing.

“Obama is losing,” I said.

“What? Who cares? They’re stealing the election!”

We were two sinking ships passing in the night. Cut off by the fog. Semaphore flashing uselessly.

“I’ve gotta go,” I said, and hung up the phone.

It was selfish to dismiss his angst, but I was almost as invested in my man as Todd was in Ron Paul.

I can only imagine how the poor Bill Richardson supporters felt that night, huddled in their adobe houses, pondering the crushing defeat of their bumbling Latino hero.

Who didn’t love Bill Richardson and all those stories he told? There was that time he showed Saddam his shoe and almost started another war with Iraq and there was that time he accidentally dropped nuclear secrets and spilled them all over the Chinese. Who didn’t want to pinch that fat little face and those freckles drawn on his cheeks?

But, vote for Bill Richardson? Really? No way. I loved
Life Goes On
but I didn’t write in Chris Burke for president.

Barack Obama went on to recover from his defeat and engage in a historic and brutal primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Ron Paul carried on as well, but for all intents and purposes, the cold stony earth of New Hampshire was the final resting place of his 2008 election bid. He was always a long shot, but to be dealt such a crushing defeat in the state most ideologically in line with libertarianism dispelled any illusion of victory.

Ron Paul’s Internet supporters were among the last to give up on their candidate. Many refused even after Dr. Paul had conceded in June 2008. Seeming to sense that he could end his campaign, but did not even have the power to disband the community that had formed around his movement, Ron Paul for President transitioned to Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty.

This lively PAC supports libertarian candidates with absolutely no chance at winning and libertarian causes that most Americans find crazy. Presumably, they have been active in the fight to legalize colloidal silver and blood root salves, have worked to inform Americans about the dangers of aspartame, and are getting to the bottom of why the Pentagon was shot with a stealth cruise missile on 9–11.

Nah, that’s a cruel straw man of the beliefs of Internet libertarians. I am sure Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty supports real libertarian ideals like charging people money to drive on your personal road and eliminating superfluous government agencies like fire departments, police, the Center for Disease Control, and whatever that agency is where Hellboy works. If you want the faerie king and a bunch of Nazis to unleash the golden army, then Ron Paul is your man.

While Ron Paul’s PAC continues to trudge along, the most interesting developments in the Paulosphere are the result of independent ventures from supporters. That delightfully enterprising spirit that brought America the Ron Paul blimp is alive and well.

One such idea is Paulville. Located on the salt flats in Hudspeth County, Texas, the goal of Paulville according to its website is, “to establish gated communities containing 100 percent Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty.” It’s a “privately held co-op” or, to put it another and more amusing way, a libertarian commune. When your philosophy decries collectivism at any level, how successful can you expect your collectivist community to turn out?

As of the writing of this book Paulville has attracted dozens of libertarians…to post on their forums. Most of the more recent posts on the forums either come from foreigners and people with better ideas for Paulville than “buying up a tract of remote salt flats and selling them back to people.” It’s hard to come up with a worse idea than that, but the Ron Paul supporters on the Paulville forums have certainly tried.

Begun in March 2008, Paulville is a resounding success on par with the Free State Project in New Hampshire. According to the Paulville website, to date “a couple members” have stopped by the fifty-acre plot of land to “check out the area.”

No utilities, no paved roads, no shopping or commercial development. Who wouldn’t want to pick up their life and move to Paulville to eke out an existence on a salt flat? Maybe you could become a subsistence farmer there.

I wonder what sorts of crops grow in salt. Turnips? How many gold Pauloons could you get for a salt turnip?

I called Todd Glenn to get his opinion of Paulville and find out when he planned to move to Texas.

“Fuck off,” he replied, and hung up the phone.

It seemed like the right answer.

Pretty much anything with caffeine is related to dragons.

 

 

I
n my experience, when you are living in the countryside, you notice every excruciating detail of your environment. You notice the stone goose in a pink frock someone has placed next to their driveway and wonder what terrible chain of mistakes and miscalculations led to its arrival in their yard.

You notice the misspelling of “electronics” as “eletriconics” on a hand-painted window display and contemplate the belligerent inattention to detail something like that would require. You even notice the secondhand baby clothes store that looks so depressing you can almost hear the sobs of multi-miscarriage moms shuffling in with bags full of unworn onesies.

The city isn’t like that. The city is so full of sensory information that you can’t process all the details or your brain would overheat. After about a week of living in a city the kaleidoscope of nail salons and shoe stores and weird Greek pizza places might as well be the dark outlines and simple colors of a cartoon background. It gets so bad you expect muggers to leave clouds of dust in their wake as they flee or your brain reduces an entire neighborhood to a repeating row of condos and dog parks.

To notice country-level details in the city you need to be trapped on foot with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Aimlessness and listlessness are prerequisites to processing more than just the contours of the overflowing urban environment.

Being locked out of your apartment or car is a good start. When you’re in that situation everything you desire is trapped just out of reach. You have to stand around and let the normally blurry details of the city come into focus while you wait on someone to come to your rescue.

Someone like a locksmith. The same one who made you wait for two hours in a Best Buy parking lot when your car’s steering column locked up inexplicably. What an asshole.

“Locked out,” I told the locksmith.

“Where?” he asked.

I told him.

“Half hour,” he said, and hung up the phone.

“Half hour” is locksmithese for, “Two hours, if you’re lucky, and you’ll thank us for showing up at all.”

I walked from the pay phone to a nearby gas station, bought a soda and something with a cream filling, and tried to drown my sorrows in carbohydrates. It worked for a while, but I had unwittingly sat down on a curb frequented by a homeless guy I like to call WBE or Worst Beggar Ever.

WBE, as you may have inferred from his name, was the worst beggar I have ever seen. He was white, which is already a huge homeless demerit. Business guys in suits downtown, regardless of their race, don’t want to hand money to a white panhandler. It’s too close. It messes with too many preconceptions.

It’s like seeing your dad crying or your mom kissing another man on the lips. White bums are very upsetting for a lot of guys in the prime begging demographic.

WBE was appropriately bearded and smelly, but he looked young. All too often youth is wasted on the homeless. Young and white suggested a slacker who had just slacked a little too aggressively. Maybe he was the sort of guy who passed up a rent check for an ultimate fighting pay-per-view and ended up on the streets and stoned out of his gourd. There are plenty of homeless people like that, but alas, WBE had even greater demerits against him.

WBE had a dog. Not completely uncommon, although I think it’s inappropriate for someone without a home to take on a dependent. It was a little, white fluffy dog with a brown kerchief tied around its neck. The sort of dog a very fat woman might own.

“It’s a bison frise,” I imagined him telling a gorgeous woman. “His name is Meatball.”

Then she would pat the dog on its head and slip WBE her hotel key. Later that night they would all orgasm dozens of times. Even Meatball.

Yes, I was jealous of a homeless man. You never saw how happy he looked when he was sleeping.

The dog was just as annoying as the owner. It was so well behaved. No yapping or chasing other people walking their dogs. I have taken dogs to obedience training and could not get them to stop barking at geese flying at a thousand feet overhead. I wanted Meatball to be startled by honking horns or run wild at the sight of a pigeon.

WBE and his Lassie-like puffball dog had a final trait that eclipsed all others as an irritant. It was a trait I witnessed firsthand many times while getting gas or something to drink. It was a trait I ran afoul of that day I was locked out of my apartment.

“That’s where I sleep,” WBE groused at me. “Got a cigarette?”

He asked for a cigarette before I even processed his initial comment. I stood up with a grunt.

“You’re smoking one,” I observed.

“Yeah.”—he took a drag from the cigarette in his mouth—“this one’s almost out though.”

I gave him three cigarettes. He nodded and put them into the plastic bag wrapped around his wrist.

Then he stretched out on his back in the shadow of the gas station. He set a tin can next to his head and closed his eyes. There were a few pennies in the can. This was how WBE went to work. He fell asleep on the concrete curb next to the air machine for tires and assumed people would leave him change.

No sign. No security measure. No effort.

Maybe Meatball would finally show some emotion if someone messed with the tin can. I abandoned the thought of kicking his can across the gas station lot and I walked back in the direction of my apartment.

I realized I still had a good deal of time to kill, so I settled on a bench across from a barbershop. It had a generic name, something involving a pun and the word “shear” or one of those other words reserved for usage in hair-related puns. Beneath the name on the wooden sign was the phrase, “Come in nappy, leave out happy.”

The barbershop seemed empty and dark even though the sign on the door declared it to be open, but it was difficult to see inside. Too many posters cluttering the front window. During my interminable wait for the locksmith, I studied the details of each of them.

The one that sticks in my memory depicted a black woman in her twenties contemplating the dire state of her frizzy afro.

“This thing is out of control,” she seemed to say with her rolled eyes and six-inch-wide purple collar.

There was more to this woman and her lawless tresses. She had the time to fantasize about what her life would be like with a different hairdo. In this fantasy, depicted in a second photograph inside a thought bubble, the woman’s hair had a chiseled, Grace Jones look.

This haircut was evidently pleasing to a man wearing an 8-ball leather jacket. He was dancing next to the woman and her new haircut and this seemed to be making the woman very happy in the smaller photo.

I questioned the scientific validity of the woman’s thought experiment. In addition to her hair, she changed out of her purple jacket and was wearing a gold lamé top and a leather skirt belted with what looked to be parts from an aircraft engine.

The new haircut I understood, but that outfit too? She should have known better than to introduce two variables.

Large white text on the poster advised the use of a spray-on hair product so that you could “become the person you’ve always wanted to be.” It was a curious affirmation to employ on a poster advertising a sculpting spray for women’s hair.

Was it a call to nostalgia? To a childhood dream of gold lamé shirts and hot nights with an Arsenio lookalike? Or was it a suggestion that this spray would burn away the person who was standing there reading the poster? Maybe a new you, the ideal you, would arise like a phoenix from the damp hair clippings surrounding the barber’s chair.

I spent more than an hour on that bench across from the barbershop, watching customers enter nappy and leave out with a smile on their face. The clientele was uniformly Puerto Rican, young, and tended to favor close buzz cuts and fades with Spanish words carved into the back. The customers were nothing like the woman in the poster. Their hair didn’t sparkle.

My mind wandered back to that poster and that phrase. I began to imagine myself in the gauzy purple world of the woman in the poster. Arsenio Halls and gold lamé receded into the misty distance. I had plenty of time to kill with a single question: who was the person I’ve always wanted to be?

Robocop seemed like a good start. He can shoot through a woman’s dress and hit a rapist in the crotch without injuring the woman. I figured that could be adapted into a pretty solid stage act. He can also see through walls, which would come in handy a lot more often than you think. Just off the top of my head, Robocop would never be served with court papers. Good luck with that subpoena, Dick Jones.

Being Robocop wasn’t too realistic. I don’t live in Old Detroit and I’m not a cop, but I was still able to fantasize about possessing the qualities of Robocop. He’s stoic, he upholds the public trust, and he always does what’s right even if it means he can’t defenestrate the bad guy.

I also recognized that emulating Robocop would have its disadvantages. Robocop is not particularly communicative. He spends his free time asleep with a titanium spike in his brain dreaming about being murdered and losing his family. He can’t take off his pants or make love to a woman since only the front half of his face is still human.

I reasoned that there wasn’t much use to punching through a cinder-block wall if there was never going to be a gorgeous woman on the other side. What I ultimately came up with as I sat there on that bench was a fantastic chimera.

The me I always wanted to be was a cross-pollination of Robocop and Zorro maybe with a little bit of the pickup artist Mystery thrown in. I would be the sort of cyborg who would burst through the wall of a drug den, shoot a “Z” into the rapist’s crotch, and then stand framed in the hole in the wall and ask Senora Isabella what she would do if she could never see me again.

It would be amazing as long as she wasn’t an OCP employee. My programming prevents me from neggin them.

Somewhere during the imagined process of being profusely thanked by Isabella on piles of gold lamé pillows I spotted the locksmith’s van driving past my bench. After paying him way too much to pick the door of my apartment I returned to my fantasy.

It was ridiculous. I could never be a cyborg Casanova. Omni Consumer Products would never manufacture a Zorro line of cops. It was pure fantasy. Hardly worth entertaining. I blamed the damned poster for sending my mind off on a tangent of disappointment.

I realized, to my great chagrin, that Worst Bum Ever was probably the closest I could ever come to my fantasy. I would slide out of society, abandon my responsibilities. Then I would make a fortune while I slept in the shadow of a gas station, a bag of cigarettes around my wrist, my loyal dog at my side, and a gorgeous woman slipping her hotel key into my change can.

That stupid phrase from the poster has stuck with me ever since that day. “Become the person you’ve always wanted to be.” I wrote it down on a scrap of paper and taped it to the mirror in my bathroom.

It’s a de-affirmation. It reminds me to set my sights lower. To stay realistic with what I can accomplish.

It’s that poster reaching out and telling me that I just can’t be anything I want. There are reasonable limitations. I believe I can’t fly. I believe I can’t touch the sky.

I think that wisdom applies to everyone. You can’t just decide to be what you’ve always wanted to be.

There is a thriving subculture on the Internet of those who disagree. They believe you don’t just have the potential to be whatever you want; you
are
whatever you want.

Other Than Human

According to version 4.0.1 of the Otherkin FAQ, Otherkin are, “Those people who believe themselves to be spiritually and/or physically other than human.”

So that rules out humans, leaving us with…well…basically everything else.

The majority of Otherkin draw their identities from mythology. Dragons and elves, Tolkien and ancient mythology, anime, and video games. Other creatures of folklore like vampires, werewolves, and space aliens are also very common identities. The FAQ even mentions previously unknown types of Otherkin “that have not shown up in known legends or fiction” and lists as examples “star-dragons” and “Elenari.”

If you’re interested in keeping track, Elenari are elves, but they are from a different planet or dimension. Their sub-races include the Tulari, Draestari, Listari, Dai’ari, and Kalthilas. I gleaned this information from the Elenari FAQ, which was in turn compiled from the writings of TalLeonan. Is he an ancient druid from space? Perhaps, but he did all his writing on Usenet and a mid-1990s Otherkin mailing list called Tir Na n0c Digest.

It’s easy to look at five hundred pages about space elves and dismiss it out of hand. I admit that was my first instinct.

But, looking past the seeming implausibility, many Otherkin genuinely believe in the mythology they have adopted. They can be openly hostile to newcomers and those they view as “faking” becoming an Otherkin. Indeed, the efforts of pranksters from sites like Portal of Evil, 4chan, and even Something Awful have created an inherent distrust of outsiders.

I recognized this could make finding volunteers willing to participate in my book a difficult process. I had already resigned myself to trickery with some of the subcultures covered in the book, but I wanted to stay honest when dealing with the Otherkin.

I contacted six Otherkin who frequented related forums or ran their own websites. I explained the purpose of my book, to explore without prejudging them, and I convinced two of these initial six to meet with me in person. One was a young man named Christian who was new to the subculture, and the other was a more experienced veteran by the name of Roger.

I wanted to find out how committed these two were to the lifestyle, their own personal takes on the mythologies, and how being other than human affected their relationships with normal humans.

The Dragon

“I love dragons, man,” said Christian Joseph Heathcliff Ross.