by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
Owner:
Z? is one of those beautiful lumpen-proletariat guys who laiows who his enemies are and gets jobs just to fuck with his employers. I heard that when he was tired of his last job (night shift at UPS), he took a package being shipped by a chewing gum company, set it dovm in front of a surveillance camera, opened it up, took out a piece of gum, and, looking straight into the camera, began chewing it. The next morning when the manager found the opened package still sitting there, he checked the tape and saw Z? staring him in the eye, smacking his gum.
J- went to Z? and told him that he'd forgotten to book a show for a band that woidd be arriving on Saturday Z? drawled, "Well, I'm working every night this week," and it was arranged: USA Is a Monster would play at the Handy Pantry at 2 a.m. on Saturday night.
Now, the Handy Pantry is not some out-of-the-way convenience store. It's in the middle of the main drag by the college campus, a center of Greensboro night life (to the extent that there is such a thing), next to all the coffee shops and restaurants, and it shares a parking lot with Kinko's . . . and with the university police station. The police station is about two hundred feet away: you can see it clearly through the windows of the convenience store. So we weren't even talking about a risky proposition, we were looking certain catastrophe in the eyes and offering it a formal invitation. I think that's what appealed to us most about this idea: more than any of the Reclaim the Streets or Critical Mass actions of the previous year, more than the noise parades or any of the nocturnal breaking, entering, and exploring we'd done, this was something crazy enough that the outcome couldn't be foreseen or even imagined. We had to do it just to thrust ourselves out into that dangerous space where everything comes as a surprise.
Word of the show spread long before J-- put up the fliers, and by the last night every mouth was whispering about it. J- and I went to a going-away party for M?, who was departing to spend the next month teaching art in another city, and then went to a show in nearby Winston-Salem, at the collective warehouse there, at which we were to meet USAIAM themselves. They showed up around midnight, just when we were starting to worry, and we went out to the parking lot for a briefing.
They seemed like good kids, and they were trying as hard as we were to act like this was a normal thing for them?but, to our surprise, there were eight of them, including two drummers with fuU sets, and a keyboard player with crazy electronic equipment. It wasn't going to be easy to run their stuff out the back door when the pigs came?not that there was a back way out of the lot behind the 'Pantry, anyway. They followed us back to Greensboro in their van, and I spent the ride talking J-- out of his apprehensions: "This is our chance to put punk rock where it was never supposed to be, where it's still dangerous. This is payback for all the nights we've had to walk around watching
^^^^^^^?K^dh^l^ Police Station M
usaisaH fl
Flier on Handy Pantry Window
Cuerrilta Performances
You can put on guerrilla theater
performances in public areas, to
get ideas across; utilize humor and
shock, take advantage of props and
points of reference provided by the
environment, refuse to acknowledge
that your educational presentation is
an act. For example, next Christmas
season, dress up as Santa Claus,
and give away items in a department
store, until the owners catch on^
think of the impression it will make
on children, when the police force
them to give back their gifts and lead
Santa away in handcuffs!
Guerrilla Performances
2J2
this town do nothing, man?this is revenge for that flag they put on the moon!" When we arrived, he turned to me, reassured, and declared, "We're going to malce Greensboro history, man,"
I agreed. For the sake of everyone in that dead-end town, there was no choice but to make Greensboro, as we'd all known and loathed it, history.
