Frank is Emptiness

Later on Wednesday, April 26th, 2017.

 

Disneyland

“As we contemplate the horror

Of the senseless things men do

In this search for rhyme or reason

One must finally come to view

This recurring nightmare madness

As merely Man’s attempt

To prove that nothing’s sacred

That no one is exempt

So, let the wayward children play

Let the wicked have their day

Let the chips fall where they may

We’re all going to Disneyland”

Dis Land from Timbuk 3

 

Getting arrested is a lot like getting on to a rollercoaster. Once you are on, there are no more decisions to make, and you can’t get off the ride until it comes to a complete stop. Our ride lasted over twelve hours.

The cops put us into the paddy wagon and took us for a short drive to a different part of the air base. Just as an aside, the police had two paddy wagons at the place of our arrest, along with thirteen squad cars. They were ready for anything. It reminded of the part in Alice’s Restaurant when Arlo Guthrie gets busted for littering and says that “when we got to the scene of the crime, there was five police officers and three police cars, bein’ the biggest crime of the last fifty years and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it”. That pretty much sums up the situation at Creech.

The police took us out of the vehicle and walked us over to an enclosed area that was set up for processing miscreants. Once again, a bit over-prepared. People in plain clothes were there too. FBI. The cops took all of our possessions and put them into paper bags. We filled out paperwork. We traded the plastic restraints for handcuffs that were attached to a chain that went around the waist. Then it was back into the van. We were going to Disneyland. Two squad cars followed the van…just in case.

We arrived at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas. That’s where I did all my gambling. The first activity after leaving the paddy wagon was to remove our shoes and socks. With the shackles it was too much of a challenge for us to do that on our own. A police officer took mine off for me. I asked him if this was the best part of his shift. I don’t remember his response.

From that place in the garage we went inside the CCDC to sit on a bench. We did a lot of bench-sitting during the next several hours. Every once in a while, somebody would yell at one of us to come and do something. It reminded me a great deal of my first day as a plebe at West Point. They patted us down again, they looked into our mouths. Then a brief medical exam. While sitting there, we talked, and waited. There were no clocks in the room. Time there has no meaning. Mike of the many buttons said to me, “I guess we forgot to tell you about the boring part of being arrested!”

At one point they fed us, sort of. Each of us got a brown plastic tray with something resembling food on it. My tray had two slices of bread, a mixture of potatoes and ground beef, carrots, and a broken cookie. I got the opportunity to smell the food, but not to eat it. I couldn’t get the plastic spoon to my mouth while wearing the handcuffs. The longer I looked at the meal the more certain I was that not being able to eat wasn’t all that bad. The best part of the experience was the fact the tray had served as the cover for the tray of food beneath. That way the warm moisture from the tray below my tray was able to soak through my jeans as the tray rested on top of my lap.

We were fed again later in the day. That meal was just as good as the first go around. Mike the Guitarist and I determined that nobody could make food this bad by accident. Somebody had to try to cook something this nasty.

At one of the stops to fill out even more forms, a lady asked me if I was a vet. I told her “yes”. She got out a big ink stamp and stamped “VETERAN” in bold letters in the middle of my charge sheet. I’m not sure why they care about that. Maybe they won’t want to have a civil disobedient vet in the courtroom. I don’t know.

A policewoman called for people one by one to check some paperwork. She called out, “Francis Paul”. I got up off of the bench and went to her. I told her that “Paul” is not my last name.

She looked at me funny and said, “Then I got to find this ‘Paul’ guy…”

“No, no, no, no! That’s my paperwork! It’s just that my last name is misspelled! It should be ‘P-A-U-C’.”

She looked again at the form. “Okay, we’ll fix it. Just respond to ‘Paul’ when somebody calls for you.”

That’s what I did for the rest of my time in jail. Not once did anybody use my real name. One guard told me that they had fixed it on the paperwork, just because they didn’t want me to have an alias. I guess having an alias would be kind of cool. Oh well.

The last activity in that room was a kiosk where I signed a form which authorizes the police to release me on my own recognizance. Then the handcuffs came off and I got to move to the next big room where they have “unicorns and rainbows”, as one of the guards told us. Actually they have TV’s that play “Family Guy” and “American Dad” over and over. They also have more benches. They do the mug shots and fingerprinting there too.

A policewoman called me over to her desk to ask me more questions. She seemed kind of perky. She smiled and asked me, “So, how do you like our new jail?”

Really. What the hell kind of question is that?

The hall is next to the holding cells. Several times a guy from one of the cells screamed loud enough to be heard over the sound of the television. That was disconcerting.

Eventually, I heard a guard yell, “Paul!” I got up. He took me to a holding cell.

I got sit on another bench.

 

 

We will start on Wednesday, April 26th, 2017. That is not an especially auspicious date, but the events that occurred then were at least amusing.

 

“He said, ‘Kid, we only got one question: have you ever been arrested?’ ”

Arlo Guthrie, from Alice’s Restaurant

We’re sitting in a circle. The afternoon sun of Nevada is beating down on us, and a constant wind is blowing fine particles of tan dust across the plain. We are surrounded by sage brush and creosote bushes. We all left our cell phones far away, in fear that the intel guys across the road at Creech AFB might be monitoring our conversations. We are trying to decide on a course of action for the next morning’s demonstration, which promises to include “direct action”, which translates into English as somebody getting busted for doing stupid shit. The discussion is interesting and inconclusive. We are all independent thinkers and would be anarchists, so we have difficulty reaching any type of agreement.

Brian is desperately trying to get a plan set up for tomorrow morning. This is important because some people are willing to risk arrest, and some people really don’t want to go to jail. There is a show of hands of those people who are willing to be arrested: Mike the guitarist, Mike (who is the guy with all the buttons on his hat), Sharon, Brian, Dennis, and Ray. I don’t raise my hand. Somebody says that not many people are volunteering to do anything. That bothers me. I want to help, but I’m not interested in leaping into the unknown.

Nothing is really decided except that we will carry signs that look like tombstones to remember the kids killed by drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan and wherever. There is a kind of ritual that has been established between the cops and the protestors at Creech AFB: they know we will break the law, but they never know exactly where or when. The police allow us to block the entrance to the Air Force Base very briefly. They give us five minutes before they start arresting people. Everybody knows the rules of the game. Nobody likes surprises.

I told my family before I left for Creech that I had no intention of getting arrested. It didn’t make sense. I was doing volunteer work in Milwaukee, and I couldn’t do it if I was incarcerated. If I got busted at Creech for my opposition to war, it would not help the people who depend on me back home. I give rides to Syrian refugees so that they can get to their ESL classes. I teach a citizenship class. I visit the boys in the psych. ward at the local VA hospital. If I’m in the tank, I can’t do those things.

Dawn breaks. Nevada has beautiful sunrises. I stumble out of my tent, shave in a haphazard way. I grab a sign. I wander over to the far side of the state highway. It’s cold. I’m only wearing a t-shirt, but it says that we support our troops. I need that shirt. It reminds me of my son, Hans, and of his pain from participating in the most recent war in Iraq. When I wear the shirt, I suffer with my son. I live with him.

We stand in the cold at the sidelines. Joseba talks with me as the sun rises and my spirits lift. The wind blows as Joseba and I stand by the fence at the entrance to the air force base. Joseba talks to me about his life as a Basque. We talk about the anniversary of the bombing of Guernica (of Picasso fame). I tell Joseba about how my wife’s family fled before the Russian cannons in Silesia at the end of WWII. We talk about war. We talk about how it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Show time! The sun is up. We have to decide if we want to block the road to the base, and for how long. At about 6:30 AM we go into the street. A car tries to push Dennis out of the way. A cop beats on the window of the car, and he makes it clear to the driver that shoving a protestor is not cool. We stand at the entrance to the base and hold our signs.

Power speaks. The boys in uniform explain to us clearly and patiently that we would be arrested. A sergeant from the police announces over the PA that we have five minutes to get our shit together. He uses other words, but the meaning is obvious.

Five minutes can be long time. Or maybe not. For me, the five minutes in the street was an eternity. Suddenly, it was time

to live. The game was over. The police were going to do their job. The cops were working their way down the line, from left to right.

I had no intention of getting arrested. I thought it was stupid. Maybe it is. In the last five minutes I wrestled with this thing. I thought, ” This is mindless. This will have no effect”.

Ray stood next to me. He turned to me, grabbed my hand, and said, “Frank, I’m glad that you’re here.”

Time stopped. I said to myself, “Fuck this. I can’t leave his guy. I will stay here.”

The cops came. They took Dennis. They took Brian. They took Ray.

They took me.

“You are under arrest. Put your hands behind your back!”

I did.

Two cops escorted me from the street. They were professional and they were respectful.

I told them, “I know you are only doing your job.”

One cop told me, “Hey, it’s all about freedom of speech. You know what I’m saying?”

I told him, “Yeah, I guess I do now.”

I always start a book in the middle. I select a page at random, and I read. It feels more like my life if I begin like that. I came into this world in the middle of my parents’ story. Actually, I arrived in the middle of many different stories. You are coming into the middle of my story. I considered putting my essays into chronological order, but that won’t help. The connections between these tales don’t necessarily follow a particular order. There is no linear sequence.

Some churches have labyrinths. These aren’t mazes. They have no dead ends. They are meandering paths that people walk in order to meditate or pray. The labyrinth is shaped like a circle. There is only one way into the circle, and only one way out. The trail winds from the outside of the circle to the center, and then twists back out again. The interesting thing is that the person walking the path often returns to nearly the same place. The walker revisits a location, but sees it from a slightly different perspective. My essays always come back to certain topics, in a roundabout way. I am always revisiting places and people.

You will too.

The name of the blog will probably only make sense to somebody who has read (or chanted) the Heart Sutra. It’s a joke (I mean the name of the blog, not the Heart Sutra). The idea is that whatever you read in this blog may be profound or meaningless, depending on how you perceive it. I say nothing that is inherently important. I would hope that I write something interesting, but you will decide if that is the case. I might write something that touches you, but that doesn’t mean it will affect anybody else. The subject matter of this blog will be eclectic, and at times confusing. Expect to read about Zen students, Texas rednecks, war veterans, Harley riders, Orthodox Jews, Catholic Workers, Syrian refugees, homeless people, born-again Evangelicals, marijuana farmers, and God only knows what else.  My interests are diverse and my opinions idiosyncratic. There is no unifying theme to this blog.

During meditation practice, sometimes people ask the question: “What am I?”

The standard Zen answer is: “Don’t know.”

If you are asking, “What is all this about?”

My answer is: “Don’t know.”