While researching some info for TJW's thread Actual stories of "Assault Weapons" used in a self defense situation I discovered this.
Originally posted on www.aussurvivalist.com in September 2004 by Texas Arcane in a thread entitled Topic: ’92 LA riots from a military perspective.
I thought it deserved some sharing - it's another reminder of how close the animal lurks underneath all of us.
This content is unedited, and is copied directly from the originating site. If you find anything offensive, let me know and I'll remove it.
It's not my intent to present this as inflammatory, in violation of the CoC or sh*t stirring, but as a "heads up" since many of our younger members - or those who hadn't yet been "awakened" might not remember those days.
-T7
Originally Posted By Texas Arcane:
The truth is that the L.A. Riots were the most extreme physical terror I have ever experienced. Watching the recent remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD last month brought it all back very sharply - the whole movie was just one giant flashback for me.
Solsys, I was working as a security guard at the very high class Rodeo Drive boulevard when the riots started. I knew the verdict was coming down that day on the Rodney King police trial and I had been trying to get ready the best way I knew how, by stocking up on food and buying ammunition. At that time, I was not a true survivalist, just a nascent embryonic paranoid. I knew enough of my American history to be able to predict what the blacks would do based on their previous behaviour the decades beforehand if they did not approve of the verdict. I will say that 99.999% of the people I told to watch themselves before the riots were exactly as lame and feeble as we have often accused them of being here on AusSurvivalist.
The average person just has no idea of what a thin veneer civilization is until it cracks underfoot. I have to say honestly - neither did I before the riots.
The thing rocked my world so violently that I have never really been the same person. I think my personality was altered as a result of the riots and I have kind of been on another plane of awareness ever since. I never really came down off the adrenalin and returned to my sleepy eyed sheeple state afterwards.
Anyway, I had been talking to the celebrity slut that day known as Pia Zadora, a second rate softporn star who was rumored to have had sex with nearly every male and most females in Hollywood. She was asking for assistance with the lift down to the parking garage, which wasn't working. I radioed my supervisor to ask why the lifts were keyed off and he came back over the radio sounding really weird and frightened. He said "We're shutting everything down. I need you to make your security check right now and lock everything up. When you've done that, you are released to go home for the day, we are being relieved by some heavily armed private police who are being shuttled over from Beverly Hills." I asked what the problem was. Pia Zadora was staring at me like she thought this was some elaborate prank. "Listen, Cleve, some really strange stuff is happening. There are apparently spontaneous riots breaking out all over because of the Simi Valley verdict. Lock everything up and get yourself home immediately." I showed Pia Zadora the stairwell access, walked her down to the car and then did my security checks as asked.
I was supposed to meet my wife at Soup Plantation, a well known restaurant down the road. I couldn't get her on the mobile. When I got there and parked, there was a queasy air amidst all the shopping mall splendour and people had a frightened look in their eyes that I had never, ever seen before. The easy listening music in the restaurant was so mundane it was hard to reconcile with the outside windows, which had fire engines, police cars and people running on foot outside. I had planned to just eat quickly with my wife and go home, because I was having trouble absorbing the idea that this thing was possibly even worse than I might have imagined. I thought South Central was so far off, truth is it was about five minutes down the road.
People in the restaurant were watching the television reports, which were growing increasingly more feverish and seemed to just show one new burning building every thirty seconds. I was trying to keep a calm demeanour and went to explain to my wife what was happening.
All of a sudden, a woman in the restaurant screamed. A guy dropped his tray and soup went everywhere. A man was standing in the doorway of Soup Plantation and wobbling on his feet. Blood was gushing out of his forehead which had a nasty gash running right down to his ear. He yelled "They're coming! They are next door in the mall!! They're tearing everything to pieces!"
You could have heard a pin drop. Then the restaurant exploded with activity and EVERYBODY was crawling over the women and children trying to get to their cars in the parking lot outside. I'm talking blind panic here, people smacking into each other like they could not give a fugg less about any human in the world outside of themselves. A guy floored his Subaru and tore the toll gate right off the booth. Everybody else was following him out, the attendant was gone. There was cars hitting each other like bumper buggies at the carnival, nobody seemed to care, everybody wanted to get out to the street.
When we made it out onto the highway, I got my first look at the skyline since I left Rodeo Drive. It looked like the fires of hell were consuming half of the city. My wife was crying, she thought it was the end of the world.
The truth is that the L.A. Riots were the most extreme physical terror I have ever experienced. Watching the recent remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD last month brought it all back very sharply - the whole movie was just one giant flashback for me.
Solsys, I was working as a security guard at the very high class Rodeo Drive boulevard when the riots started. I knew the verdict was coming down that day on the Rodney King police trial and I had been trying to get ready the best way I knew how, by stocking up on food and buying ammunition. At that time, I was not a true survivalist, just a nascent embryonic paranoid. I knew enough of my American history to be able to predict what the blacks would do based on their previous behaviour the decades beforehand if they did not approve of the verdict. I will say that 99.999% of the people I told to watch themselves before the riots were exactly as lame and feeble as we have often accused them of being here on AusSurvivalist.
The average person just has no idea of what a thin veneer civilization is until it cracks underfoot. I have to say honestly - neither did I before the riots.
The thing rocked my world so violently that I have never really been the same person. I think my personality was altered as a result of the riots and I have kind of been on another plane of awareness ever since. I never really came down off the adrenalin and returned to my sleepy eyed sheeple state afterwards.
Anyway, I had been talking to the celebrity slut that day known as Pia Zadora, a second rate softporn star who was rumored to have had sex with nearly every male and most females in Hollywood. She was asking for assistance with the lift down to the parking garage, which wasn't working. I radioed my supervisor to ask why the lifts were keyed off and he came back over the radio sounding really weird and frightened. He said "We're shutting everything down. I need you to make your security check right now and lock everything up. When you've done that, you are released to go home for the day, we are being relieved by some heavily armed private police who are being shuttled over from Beverly Hills." I asked what the problem was. Pia Zadora was staring at me like she thought this was some elaborate prank. "Listen, Cleve, some really strange stuff is happening. There are apparently spontaneous riots breaking out all over because of the Simi Valley verdict. Lock everything up and get yourself home immediately." I showed Pia Zadora the stairwell access, walked her down to the car and then did my security checks as asked.
I was supposed to meet my wife at Soup Plantation, a well known restaurant down the road. I couldn't get her on the mobile. When I got there and parked, there was a queasy air amidst all the shopping mall splendour and people had a frightened look in their eyes that I had never, ever seen before. The easy listening music in the restaurant was so mundane it was hard to reconcile with the outside windows, which had fire engines, police cars and people running on foot outside. I had planned to just eat quickly with my wife and go home, because I was having trouble absorbing the idea that this thing was possibly even worse than I might have imagined. I thought South Central was so far off, truth is it was about five minutes down the road.
People in the restaurant were watching the television reports, which were growing increasingly more feverish and seemed to just show one new burning building every thirty seconds. I was trying to keep a calm demeanour and went to explain to my wife what was happening.
All of a sudden, a woman in the restaurant screamed. A guy dropped his tray and soup went everywhere. A man was standing in the doorway of Soup Plantation and wobbling on his feet. Blood was gushing out of his forehead which had a nasty gash running right down to his ear. He yelled "They're coming! They are next door in the mall!! They're tearing everything to pieces!"
You could have heard a pin drop. Then the restaurant exploded with activity and EVERYBODY was crawling over the women and children trying to get to their cars in the parking lot outside. I'm talking blind panic here, people smacking into each other like they could not give a fugg less about any human in the world outside of themselves. A guy floored his Subaru and tore the toll gate right off the booth. Everybody else was following him out, the attendant was gone. There was cars hitting each other like bumper buggies at the carnival, nobody seemed to care, everybody wanted to get out to the street.
When we made it out onto the highway, I got my first look at the skyline since I left Rodeo Drive. It looked like the fires of hell were consuming half of the city. My wife was crying, she thought it was the end of the world.
When we were driving home, we saw all kinds of bizarre things that were totally out of place. Like right in the median strip, some businessman sitting on his briefcase with blood all over his pants and a tourniquet. A bunch of black guys surrounding some young couple who looked like tourists literally ripping the woman's clothes off one piece at a time. A homeless guy by the edge of Sunset Boulevard holding a cardboard sign reading "REPENT NOW OR BE DAMNED TO HELL." People running everywhere with shopping carts piled high with groceries or possessions. The smoke forced us to close the car ventilation intakes and circulate the air inside.
We stopped at all the red lights until I realized that very few people were and if we sat in place like this we might get rear ended. I was trying to keep my wife from losing it by staying in control myself, but I was having a really hard time convincing myself I was not dreaming. I kept thinking, this is one of those vivid dreams where something so incongruous will happen I will realize it is a dream and suddenly things will be inconsistent and irrational and then I will awaken. I thought there would be riots down in South Central like Watts and they might be bad but there is no way this could have happened to the entire city like this so quickly. That's what I was thinking.
When we pulled into our driveway off Martin Way it is like I was suddenly seeing with new eyes. Our home was right on Sunset Boulevard, close to an alley that accessed a main road on both sides. That was not a good place to be during the apocalypse. It's like my eyes had X-ray vision when we unlocked our front door. We were completely exposed in our one level flat, our door was made of a composite of cardboard fibers and lots of glue. Any man over 200 lbs could probably just tear the door off the frame. It suddenly occurred to me I lived in a fishbowl with full length windows in the front yard. Like most people this just had not struck me as something important until right at that moment. I had been sleepwalking through my entire life.
The first thing my wife did was to rush over to the television and turn it on. I got my Desert Eagle out of the cupboard and I immediately made a tour of the entire house checking to see if all the windows and doors were locked. Then I came back to the living room and sat briefly with my wife watching the news, just as the last rays of the sun were dying behind the drapes. Night was coming. It looked like on television that nobody was going to be in darkness, though, because half the buildings in the city were catching fire.
I was shaking. I could hear loud voices out in the street, some in fear, some in anger. I peered through the curtains and could only see dark shadows moving out on the sidewalk. I turned the porch light off. There was no way I wanted to go out there, I kept thinking we'll keep the drapes closed and nobody will know we are here. I had this really powerful overwhelming urge to want to rush to a strong door down to a cellar, which I would close behind us and have a rush of relief at finding a place with food, water, light and safety. Unfortunately, there was no cellar. We lived in a styrofoam kit house that could likely be pulled apart by hand if somebody wanted to. Only a complete arsehole would live in a home like this, you'd have to be so tuned out you were barely registering as conscious. I took a look through the kitchen at my pathetic "preps" I had bought for those "riots" I was worried about ... some cans of soup, two jugs of springwater, a cheap little flashlight. I just had no idea.
When I went out and sat in the living room and watched some more television, I got one consistent fact from the news ... apparently the police were nowhere to be found, 911 was not answering and the government had completely abdicated it's responsibility to keep order. The people on the news kept saying something about the police waiting for the national guard to arrive. It took a really long time to sink in before I understood what they were saying. The police had camped out in their stations and were not coming out. You were completely on your own.
My wife finally fell asleep on the couch around midnight. I did not sleep a wink and stayed in front of the television all night, making one cup of coffee after another and monitoring the creep of the riots towards us one block at a time from down in South Central. Every few minutes, a helicopter shot appeared of a new building burning at a ferocious rate almost by magic where just an hour beforehand it had been pristine. They never showed anyone running away from the building, no arsonists ... it was just buildings exploding into bright flames glowing like miniature suns one after the other in a slow procession towards Sunset Boulevard. You would have thought the planet had been invaded by aliens made of fire.
Around 6 in the morning, I went out as the sun was rising. Half the horizon was a pillar of dark billowing smoke that looked like a woodcutting from the Old Testament. It was eighty miles high and was reaching the upper atmosphere.
We stopped at all the red lights until I realized that very few people were and if we sat in place like this we might get rear ended. I was trying to keep my wife from losing it by staying in control myself, but I was having a really hard time convincing myself I was not dreaming. I kept thinking, this is one of those vivid dreams where something so incongruous will happen I will realize it is a dream and suddenly things will be inconsistent and irrational and then I will awaken. I thought there would be riots down in South Central like Watts and they might be bad but there is no way this could have happened to the entire city like this so quickly. That's what I was thinking.
When we pulled into our driveway off Martin Way it is like I was suddenly seeing with new eyes. Our home was right on Sunset Boulevard, close to an alley that accessed a main road on both sides. That was not a good place to be during the apocalypse. It's like my eyes had X-ray vision when we unlocked our front door. We were completely exposed in our one level flat, our door was made of a composite of cardboard fibers and lots of glue. Any man over 200 lbs could probably just tear the door off the frame. It suddenly occurred to me I lived in a fishbowl with full length windows in the front yard. Like most people this just had not struck me as something important until right at that moment. I had been sleepwalking through my entire life.
The first thing my wife did was to rush over to the television and turn it on. I got my Desert Eagle out of the cupboard and I immediately made a tour of the entire house checking to see if all the windows and doors were locked. Then I came back to the living room and sat briefly with my wife watching the news, just as the last rays of the sun were dying behind the drapes. Night was coming. It looked like on television that nobody was going to be in darkness, though, because half the buildings in the city were catching fire.
I was shaking. I could hear loud voices out in the street, some in fear, some in anger. I peered through the curtains and could only see dark shadows moving out on the sidewalk. I turned the porch light off. There was no way I wanted to go out there, I kept thinking we'll keep the drapes closed and nobody will know we are here. I had this really powerful overwhelming urge to want to rush to a strong door down to a cellar, which I would close behind us and have a rush of relief at finding a place with food, water, light and safety. Unfortunately, there was no cellar. We lived in a styrofoam kit house that could likely be pulled apart by hand if somebody wanted to. Only a complete arsehole would live in a home like this, you'd have to be so tuned out you were barely registering as conscious. I took a look through the kitchen at my pathetic "preps" I had bought for those "riots" I was worried about ... some cans of soup, two jugs of springwater, a cheap little flashlight. I just had no idea.
When I went out and sat in the living room and watched some more television, I got one consistent fact from the news ... apparently the police were nowhere to be found, 911 was not answering and the government had completely abdicated it's responsibility to keep order. The people on the news kept saying something about the police waiting for the national guard to arrive. It took a really long time to sink in before I understood what they were saying. The police had camped out in their stations and were not coming out. You were completely on your own.
My wife finally fell asleep on the couch around midnight. I did not sleep a wink and stayed in front of the television all night, making one cup of coffee after another and monitoring the creep of the riots towards us one block at a time from down in South Central. Every few minutes, a helicopter shot appeared of a new building burning at a ferocious rate almost by magic where just an hour beforehand it had been pristine. They never showed anyone running away from the building, no arsonists ... it was just buildings exploding into bright flames glowing like miniature suns one after the other in a slow procession towards Sunset Boulevard. You would have thought the planet had been invaded by aliens made of fire.
Around 6 in the morning, I went out as the sun was rising. Half the horizon was a pillar of dark billowing smoke that looked like a woodcutting from the Old Testament. It was eighty miles high and was reaching the upper atmosphere.
That morning everyone on the news was desperately trying to convince everyone of the existence of some sanity in the world and that things would shortly be back under control, but it never was very persuasive because they kept cutting to the cops barricaded inside the station house eating donuts and watching the news and clicking their tongues saying it's terrible, somebody oughtta do somethin' about that.
Lots of pundits and talking heads were telling us the previous night was the worst part and it was over. I climbed to the roof of my house and looked towards the south - I had this sick feeling that this was the beginning, not the end. That feeling was absolutely accurate. That was just the tip of the iceberg of what was coming.
I gave my wife a gun, locked the front doors and drove to the supermarket as soon as it was open and found myself fighting dozens and dozens of people at the doors to get inside and raid the place for as much as we could cart away. I got it right this time and bought what I thought would be serious provisions ... powdered milk, dry staples like beans and corn, canned meats, 30 liter springwater jugs. There was a serious dearth of cashiers and I heard the manager say that lots of people would not be coming in at all. There was a kind of electricity in the air like before a storm. Everyone wanted to get home with stocks and cocoon themselves. Some guy was trying to argue with me over a big pack of "D" cell batteries that I found behind the empty display case, I kept staring at him until he shut up and went away. One really old codger had a radio with an earpiece and he was muttering something about the "looting" starting in earnest while he was waiting in line with me. I didn't know what he was talking about at the time.
I waited at the gun shop for thirty minutes trying to buy a few boxes of ammo but the atmosphere there was very violent and utterly strange. There were lots of guys trying to buy guns off people waiting in line because the gunshop owner had reminded them of the thirty day waiting periods they had voted for in referendum and told them they could apply for a permit but would not be taking a gun out of the shop. These guys were begging for guns to protect their families in these pathetic reedy voices it broke your heart to listen to. Just about then a station wagon filled with black youths drove by playing some bass ugly rap music, everyone in the line was ultra tense thinking they were going to do a drive-by on all the white gun owners waiting in line. The wagon pulled off down the street and finally vanished. I gave up waiting and headed back to the house, luckily I had bought a little ammo the week before the riots.
When I got home, I immediately drilled holes for security crossbars on the front and back door and mounted a two-by-four on each to hold the door if somebody was trying to force it.
Then I turned on the TV again. The illusion that the dawn would bring sanity was completely dispelled. There were crowds bigger than Bible epics filling the parking lots of the all mega stores on La Cienega and they were stealing everything that was not tied down. Anybody watching the news could see the majority of all of them were the new mexican enrichers, not "poor downtrodden disaffected blacks." These guys who were operating leaf blowers for the wealthy the day before were taking advantage of the chaos to show their true colors and were running rampant as animals once they knew the law was not going to show up. They were systematically stripping every single retailer to the west shoreline of anything bigger than a thumbtack - and they were doing it brazenly right in front of television cameras hovering overhead off helicopters.
It was mesmerizing to just watch them swarming into the shopping centers and emerging like little ants loaded down with boxes. Before I knew it the time had slipped by and it was almost noon.
I'll put the rest down as soon as I get a chance about what was going on by that afternoon
Lots of pundits and talking heads were telling us the previous night was the worst part and it was over. I climbed to the roof of my house and looked towards the south - I had this sick feeling that this was the beginning, not the end. That feeling was absolutely accurate. That was just the tip of the iceberg of what was coming.
I gave my wife a gun, locked the front doors and drove to the supermarket as soon as it was open and found myself fighting dozens and dozens of people at the doors to get inside and raid the place for as much as we could cart away. I got it right this time and bought what I thought would be serious provisions ... powdered milk, dry staples like beans and corn, canned meats, 30 liter springwater jugs. There was a serious dearth of cashiers and I heard the manager say that lots of people would not be coming in at all. There was a kind of electricity in the air like before a storm. Everyone wanted to get home with stocks and cocoon themselves. Some guy was trying to argue with me over a big pack of "D" cell batteries that I found behind the empty display case, I kept staring at him until he shut up and went away. One really old codger had a radio with an earpiece and he was muttering something about the "looting" starting in earnest while he was waiting in line with me. I didn't know what he was talking about at the time.
I waited at the gun shop for thirty minutes trying to buy a few boxes of ammo but the atmosphere there was very violent and utterly strange. There were lots of guys trying to buy guns off people waiting in line because the gunshop owner had reminded them of the thirty day waiting periods they had voted for in referendum and told them they could apply for a permit but would not be taking a gun out of the shop. These guys were begging for guns to protect their families in these pathetic reedy voices it broke your heart to listen to. Just about then a station wagon filled with black youths drove by playing some bass ugly rap music, everyone in the line was ultra tense thinking they were going to do a drive-by on all the white gun owners waiting in line. The wagon pulled off down the street and finally vanished. I gave up waiting and headed back to the house, luckily I had bought a little ammo the week before the riots.
When I got home, I immediately drilled holes for security crossbars on the front and back door and mounted a two-by-four on each to hold the door if somebody was trying to force it.
Then I turned on the TV again. The illusion that the dawn would bring sanity was completely dispelled. There were crowds bigger than Bible epics filling the parking lots of the all mega stores on La Cienega and they were stealing everything that was not tied down. Anybody watching the news could see the majority of all of them were the new mexican enrichers, not "poor downtrodden disaffected blacks." These guys who were operating leaf blowers for the wealthy the day before were taking advantage of the chaos to show their true colors and were running rampant as animals once they knew the law was not going to show up. They were systematically stripping every single retailer to the west shoreline of anything bigger than a thumbtack - and they were doing it brazenly right in front of television cameras hovering overhead off helicopters.
It was mesmerizing to just watch them swarming into the shopping centers and emerging like little ants loaded down with boxes. Before I knew it the time had slipped by and it was almost noon.
I'll put the rest down as soon as I get a chance about what was going on by that afternoon
That afternoon, I began hosing down the roof with water to make it difficult for passing rioters to throw a molotov up there and set the house afire if they came by the alleyway. Some of my neighbours were doing same.
The rabid leftist across the street, a guy with a little goatee like Trotsky and an earring, came over and offered me a blank check if I would loan him my .22 pistol for the duration of the riots. He said his girlfriend was so scared she had been unable to sleep and he wanted it to give her a feeling of security. About two weeks beforehand, this guy had given me a long smug lecture about the evils of guns in private hands. I gave him the cold shoulder and told him to go up the street to the gunshop if he needed a gun. He said, "They've got a ninety day waiting period! I already tried!" I told him "You're s**t out of luck, then, I guess. Can you even appreciate the irony? That is called being hoisted by your own petard." It was true. The guy didn't appreciate the irony. He was a creature of emotion and now felt fear, maybe for the first time in his pathetic life. Ah, the utter blindness to self-knowledge of the liberal mind.
I had a roll of rusty barbed wire I ran completely around the property over the little chainlink fence. It was the only thing I could think of to give some measure of safety to our little dollhouse. I actually wired broken glass bottles to the tops of the gates and locked the latches shut from the inside with big thick padlocks. My wife came out with sandwiches while I was working and as usual had a good laugh at me. Not in a mean way, just amused a bit at how grimly I was going about the task. The previous tenant had left the barbed wire, a half dozen animal traps and some buckets of nails. Only the week beforehand I was complaining to the landlord about the big fat coil of rusty barbwire in the outdoor garage. I set the animal traps in the weeds on the other sides of the gates, because they were the most likely spots for a rioter to try to get a handhold to leap over the fence and land on the other side. Then I set my wife to making caltrops out of the nails using some ten penny wire. In about two hours we had made a couple dozen and I spread these all over the front lawn hidden by blades of grass. Since I had never made a caltrop before in my life I had a weird sense of accomplishment at this.
The sun was going down again and everybody on the block was vanishing into their homes on cue. I was starting to feel like Richard Matheson's character in "I AM LEGEND," trying to get back into my shelter with my preps before the sun went down before the vampires woke up. The police helicopters were flying overhead so often it looked like Robert Duvall's attack on the beach in APOCALYPSE NOW.
That night, it was like deja vu of the previous night except ten times worse. They now had burned most of South Central to the ground and were working their way steadily north towards Sunset Boulevard. I had this sense of some epic confrontation approaching when they left the ghetto and started to hit the white neighborhoods the following day.
I went up on the roof to try resting my .203 in various gutter brackets and aiming at different parts of the street to see if I had a clear field of fire if it came to that. A police helicopter passed directly overhead and must have seen me with the rifle, but when he made a second pass after turning around I had dropped it into the gutter with my ammo and thrown some leaves over it, then pretended to be sweeping up on the roof so he might think he had seen a broomstick instead of a rifle. The thing about all this is that it was so out of character for me and yet it all seemed to be so instinctual. I was starting to feel like I had another person inside of me for 27 years and it took the riots to bring my true nature out. I was discovering that I was a survivalist. That was the real person inside of me, it was my real nature coming to the fore under stress.
When the sun went down and the long night began, I crawled down inside the house and set up my vigil in front of the television with a pot of strong black coffee. I had not slept more than two hours in the past two days and I didn't feel tired so much as weary from anxiousness.
Guys, the only reason I have written all this is to set you up for the third day, which is when TSHTF. The rest of this was all just prologue.
The rabid leftist across the street, a guy with a little goatee like Trotsky and an earring, came over and offered me a blank check if I would loan him my .22 pistol for the duration of the riots. He said his girlfriend was so scared she had been unable to sleep and he wanted it to give her a feeling of security. About two weeks beforehand, this guy had given me a long smug lecture about the evils of guns in private hands. I gave him the cold shoulder and told him to go up the street to the gunshop if he needed a gun. He said, "They've got a ninety day waiting period! I already tried!" I told him "You're s**t out of luck, then, I guess. Can you even appreciate the irony? That is called being hoisted by your own petard." It was true. The guy didn't appreciate the irony. He was a creature of emotion and now felt fear, maybe for the first time in his pathetic life. Ah, the utter blindness to self-knowledge of the liberal mind.
I had a roll of rusty barbed wire I ran completely around the property over the little chainlink fence. It was the only thing I could think of to give some measure of safety to our little dollhouse. I actually wired broken glass bottles to the tops of the gates and locked the latches shut from the inside with big thick padlocks. My wife came out with sandwiches while I was working and as usual had a good laugh at me. Not in a mean way, just amused a bit at how grimly I was going about the task. The previous tenant had left the barbed wire, a half dozen animal traps and some buckets of nails. Only the week beforehand I was complaining to the landlord about the big fat coil of rusty barbwire in the outdoor garage. I set the animal traps in the weeds on the other sides of the gates, because they were the most likely spots for a rioter to try to get a handhold to leap over the fence and land on the other side. Then I set my wife to making caltrops out of the nails using some ten penny wire. In about two hours we had made a couple dozen and I spread these all over the front lawn hidden by blades of grass. Since I had never made a caltrop before in my life I had a weird sense of accomplishment at this.
The sun was going down again and everybody on the block was vanishing into their homes on cue. I was starting to feel like Richard Matheson's character in "I AM LEGEND," trying to get back into my shelter with my preps before the sun went down before the vampires woke up. The police helicopters were flying overhead so often it looked like Robert Duvall's attack on the beach in APOCALYPSE NOW.
That night, it was like deja vu of the previous night except ten times worse. They now had burned most of South Central to the ground and were working their way steadily north towards Sunset Boulevard. I had this sense of some epic confrontation approaching when they left the ghetto and started to hit the white neighborhoods the following day.
I went up on the roof to try resting my .203 in various gutter brackets and aiming at different parts of the street to see if I had a clear field of fire if it came to that. A police helicopter passed directly overhead and must have seen me with the rifle, but when he made a second pass after turning around I had dropped it into the gutter with my ammo and thrown some leaves over it, then pretended to be sweeping up on the roof so he might think he had seen a broomstick instead of a rifle. The thing about all this is that it was so out of character for me and yet it all seemed to be so instinctual. I was starting to feel like I had another person inside of me for 27 years and it took the riots to bring my true nature out. I was discovering that I was a survivalist. That was the real person inside of me, it was my real nature coming to the fore under stress.
When the sun went down and the long night began, I crawled down inside the house and set up my vigil in front of the television with a pot of strong black coffee. I had not slept more than two hours in the past two days and I didn't feel tired so much as weary from anxiousness.
Guys, the only reason I have written all this is to set you up for the third day, which is when TSHTF. The rest of this was all just prologue.
I got so sick of drinking coffee all night long watching buildings burn on the televitz that I started drinking Coca-Cola about 3 am in the morning to stay awake. After I finished off a litre bottle, I cut the end off it and tried fitting the mouth over the end of the flash suppressor on the .203 - it was a perfect fit. I leaned the rifle over in the corner and thought that might make a good way to muffle the noise if I had to go up on the roof and snipe from the positions I had picked out the previous evening.
The news was best summarized as saying the gates of hell had opened in Los Angeles. The Koreans were engaged in firefights with looters from the roofs of their stores, in lieu of a police response. The National Guard was on the way, or so the reporters told us. Darryl Gates was getting asked complicated questions like why the police had been holed up inside the station for three days during the worst riots in United States history. He just gave'em dumb looks and shrugged. The looters were getting more sophisticated and organized, confident in the realization they could operate in an unhindered environment by any law and order. The coming day had a quality about it of climax - everybody had a buzz this was the threshold we were going to step over and see what was on the other side of the world we had known previously.
The fires had gone from local regions to widespread, now bursting into flame nearly everywhere and with no warning. The arsonists were using powerful accelerants and were effectively turning entire buildings into ashes in less than a half an hour in some cases. The live feeds were just and endless series of buildings one after another, starting to be addresses recognizable to me as only a few blocks south.
This is what the news told us, aside from martial law and curfew, when I rose from the couch that morning with the smell of woodsmoke in my lungs filling the air and my wife told me she needed fresh milk for breakfast and real bread. She brushed off my suggestion we use the powdered milk and cook the bread flour I had purchased. She didn't like the way it tasted. She pointed out how quiet it was outside this morning and said the rioters were probably sleeping it off indoors ... she said this was the perfect time to make a run to the Quick Mart for some staples. For some reason this made sense at that time. I soon discovered it wasn't so.
When I started to leave with the Desert Eagle in my hand, she screamed and said the police would shoot me if they saw me with it or arrest me on the spot. She said it was only two blocks and that I should just jog over, grab the groceries and jog back. So I left the Desert Eagle at home, thinking she was right and it wasn't worth getting shot by the cops over some milk and bread.
I didn't jog, I walked quietly and calmly down the alleyway with the sun still rising. I could hear birds chirping and some fire engines far away but otherwise the streets seemed empty.
When I turned the corner and could physically see the Quick Mart, a drunken looking black man, about in his fifties, came shuffling along. "You stretched us too far, white motherf**ker!!! See what you got! This is what you got when you stretch a man! How you like it, pink ass porky pecker!"
I turned around as he walked by and grabbed my crotch, facing him as I continued walking away. "Stretch this for me homeboy, I need another six inches on this thing. Do me a solid, homes, give this a good tug for me, okay?" We kept backing away from each other with ugly looks, he finally snorted and kept shuffling off.
I did not see another living soul until I made the front of the Quick Mart, which I could have sworn was closed and locked up like everything else with the lights out inside and one lone car parked out front. I tried the door just as a formality and it swung open. I stepped inside and said "Hello? Anybody in here? The door was open."
This was how the great battle of the Quick Mart began. You will soon hear how I used a 60 oz bottle of Gerber Baby Food as an expedient field artillery shell.
The news was best summarized as saying the gates of hell had opened in Los Angeles. The Koreans were engaged in firefights with looters from the roofs of their stores, in lieu of a police response. The National Guard was on the way, or so the reporters told us. Darryl Gates was getting asked complicated questions like why the police had been holed up inside the station for three days during the worst riots in United States history. He just gave'em dumb looks and shrugged. The looters were getting more sophisticated and organized, confident in the realization they could operate in an unhindered environment by any law and order. The coming day had a quality about it of climax - everybody had a buzz this was the threshold we were going to step over and see what was on the other side of the world we had known previously.
The fires had gone from local regions to widespread, now bursting into flame nearly everywhere and with no warning. The arsonists were using powerful accelerants and were effectively turning entire buildings into ashes in less than a half an hour in some cases. The live feeds were just and endless series of buildings one after another, starting to be addresses recognizable to me as only a few blocks south.
This is what the news told us, aside from martial law and curfew, when I rose from the couch that morning with the smell of woodsmoke in my lungs filling the air and my wife told me she needed fresh milk for breakfast and real bread. She brushed off my suggestion we use the powdered milk and cook the bread flour I had purchased. She didn't like the way it tasted. She pointed out how quiet it was outside this morning and said the rioters were probably sleeping it off indoors ... she said this was the perfect time to make a run to the Quick Mart for some staples. For some reason this made sense at that time. I soon discovered it wasn't so.
When I started to leave with the Desert Eagle in my hand, she screamed and said the police would shoot me if they saw me with it or arrest me on the spot. She said it was only two blocks and that I should just jog over, grab the groceries and jog back. So I left the Desert Eagle at home, thinking she was right and it wasn't worth getting shot by the cops over some milk and bread.
I didn't jog, I walked quietly and calmly down the alleyway with the sun still rising. I could hear birds chirping and some fire engines far away but otherwise the streets seemed empty.
When I turned the corner and could physically see the Quick Mart, a drunken looking black man, about in his fifties, came shuffling along. "You stretched us too far, white motherf**ker!!! See what you got! This is what you got when you stretch a man! How you like it, pink ass porky pecker!"
I turned around as he walked by and grabbed my crotch, facing him as I continued walking away. "Stretch this for me homeboy, I need another six inches on this thing. Do me a solid, homes, give this a good tug for me, okay?" We kept backing away from each other with ugly looks, he finally snorted and kept shuffling off.
I did not see another living soul until I made the front of the Quick Mart, which I could have sworn was closed and locked up like everything else with the lights out inside and one lone car parked out front. I tried the door just as a formality and it swung open. I stepped inside and said "Hello? Anybody in here? The door was open."
This was how the great battle of the Quick Mart began. You will soon hear how I used a 60 oz bottle of Gerber Baby Food as an expedient field artillery shell.
It was dark inside the Quik Mart, except for refrigerator lights in the glass display cabinets way in the back. For a second I thought I heard shuffling to the right in the dark over by the magazines, but just then somebody waved at the cash counter on the far left.
"Ho!" said this guy, about in his late teens, very skinny and looking quite nervous. "Come on back," he waved me on. I walked back to the counter through the aisles, stepping over some smashed glass and bags of powder on the floor. The clerk was dressed in casual clothes and he tried to give me a friendly smile, but he was making me anxious because I could see something had him really scared badly.
"Listen, I'm not supposed to be open," he whispered, folding paperwork on the counter, "I just came in because my boss told me to pick up something in the office and then lock everything up." He glanced over at the right side of the store, where my eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see there were four people standing reading magazines. "These guys came in behind me and they won't leave. Listen, what do you need?" he asked.
I said, "I just wanted to get some milk, bread and butter, maybe something sweet, is that okay?" I said, keeping my voice low.
"Can you help me get these guys out? You're a big guy, are you in security?" It suddenly hit me. I had not changed clothes since I went off duty at Rodeo Drive three days beforehand. "I don't give a rat's ass about the store, you can take whatever you want and I'll lock it up. But first I have to get these guys to leave." I nodded, "Okay, I'll try to help. Are they armed?" I asked, feeling pretty apprehensive.
"Frig, man, I dunno. I'm scared to even speak to them again," he murmured.
I looked over at the four guys mulling around. "I'll get them to leave," I said, speaking with more confidence than I actually had.
As I walked over to the magazine stand I started to gear up my security guard voice and bearing, long honed from dealing with trouble at Park La Brea and Rodeo Drive over the past year and a half. Any of you work security will know exactly what I am talking about.
As I approached them, I could now see them a lot better. All mexicans, two guys so short bordering on dwarfism but obvious gang members. Another guy older who was rheumy eyed like he was drunk or high, slim boned. The toughest looking guy was an ornery looking dude about 200 lbs, muscular build, hateful looking bastard about 5'10 or bigger. So I had weight and height on the big wolf, but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I was confident. Truth is my heart was pounding and I was frightened really badly. For all I know all these guys could draw guns and blow me away in the next ten seconds. Of course I was thinking I could not believe I let my wife talk me into leaving the Desert Eagle at home.
The two dwarves reached for their crotches and start swaying like bad-asses as soon as I got close, smacking their lips and looking pretty loco. These short guys might be the first ones to pull the trigger if they were trying to prove something. I kept my face a blank, innocuous mask, absolutely emotionless. Remember that nothing at all is frequently way scarier for the other guy than a tough expression, angry stance. Complete blankness, a dead focused stare is always the way to go. Telegraph nothing at all, not even hostility. The more emotional the other guy gets, the more completely empty your own expression, it tends to break the nerve of almost anybody.
The thin boned drunken guy piped up first. His three companions were flexing their muscles and swaying like monkeys. "What up?" I heard a lack of certainty in his voice that gave me a boost. Go straight in, don't mince words.
"This fellow at the counter says he is closed. Why are you guys still here?" I asked, staring at the big guy instead of the thinner one.
"f**k you," said the big guy, "this is a f**king dem-ock-krass-see. We have a right to be wherevah the f**k we want to." Strangely enough, there wasn't enough bass in these guys voices. They were putting on a good show, but I could tell they were going to fade.
The little mexican dwarf had a bandanna around his head. "White boy, you probably going to get a cap busted in yo ass you talk like dat." The second the guy said it, I knew instantly these guys had no guns. They were probably gang wannabes and second stringers who mowed lawns for a living but regularly scared white folks with their loco act.
I grabbed the little guy by the hair and arm, immediately started to use him as a shield to shove the others towards the front of the store. As I was pushing, I grabbed something off a store shelf and put it in my pocket. "You guys have been asked to leave. It's time to go. Nobody wants to hear your long winded story. Let's go, you're done."
The biggest guy was yelling and cursing me, bandeho, mericon muthafugga and all that, but he was being carried towards the door like everyone else as I leaned into the dwarf and shoved him into his friends. The thin drunk was looking furious and homicidal but oddly enough now that I knew they did not have guns I was not as scared of any of them.
I opened the front door and packed them all out, cursing, bitching, whining.
As I tried to close the door and lock it, the big one decided then he was going to do something, as he was pushed outside. He stuck his arm in the doorframe and reached for my throat. He started to try to choke me and was cursing me as his friends behind him cheered him on. "Gringo pussy, I will strangle you f**kin' bitch!" He couldn't get a grip on my neck, I bent his fingers back until he screeched and released that hand ... then used the other one to clock a hard right hand on the side of my face. It hurt. His friends were yelling, "Kill his stupid ass, poppy! Kill him!" He went to punch me again and because I was still trying to close the door he hit me in the nose, which really hurt. I started bleeding. The other three were laughing and cursing me, "Haw! Faggit white boy, break his face!"
Once my nose was bleeding, I decided just trying to shove the door shut was not the way to resolve it. So I shoved the big guy back into the street and came out the door myself. His friends were cheering, "Yeah, poppy will kick his arse, man, you a dead white boy!"
You probably think this is the part where I tell you about this big street fight we had where I used an incredible array of amazing kung-fu moves to defeat him.
Well, this will probably be disappointing. The fight lasted approximately one second.
As "Poppy" took a step off the sidewalk, he did something that hispanics often do when they are showing off. He lifted his hands in the air, fingers spread wide, shrugged his shoulders and spun around, as if to show the whole world he wasn't afraid of me, saying, "What the f**k you goin' to do, beyotch?!? Whatch yoo goin' to do?!?"
As he turned around to face me, I hit him on the bridge of his nose with a 60 oz glass bottle of Gerber Baby Food Turkey Mash which I had grabbed off the shelf as we were exiting. I threw it as hard as I could and released it about two inches from his forehead just as he was turning around.
It is hard to describe what happened unless you were there to see it. It was like somebody detonated a thermobaric fuel bomb on the end of his nose with a Turkey Mash payload. I actually had to flinch away and shield my face with my arm to protect myself from the flying glass shrapnel. I reckon the 60 oz bottle when it hit him must have been going well over 100 mph or faster. There was a colossal explosion of baby food, pulverised glass shards and pieces of label up to about ten meters away.
There was this microsecond everybody was frozen. He just stood there, face a blasted bloody mess, eyes welling up with blood, then cupped his hands over his ruined mug and fell backwards with a terrible scream. The other three were so stunned they remained half crouched about five seconds before they could even realize what had happened.
"OH JEESUS CHRIST, HE SHOT ME, f**k ME HE SHOT ME I'M DYING," he screamed, his hands covering his face with blood coming out through his fingers.
The thin guy ran over to him, started sobbing and trying to hold his head for him, "He didn't shoot you, Poppy, I think he hit you with something, oh sheeit man you are fugged up!"
"OH SWEET JEEZUS, MY EYES MAN I CAN'T OPEN MY EYES, I'M DYIN' MAN!" the big guy yelled, blood was gushing out of his nose, his eyes, between his fingers. There was a huge pool of it around where he was sitting. "I GOT TO GET TO HOSPITAL, MAN, I'M DYIN HERE!"
One of the dwarves started hopping about angrily, doing a bizarre little dance. "Oh, yoo is dead white boy! Paco, let's get Benny, man Benny will shoot this psycho f**kin' gringo dead! You see what he did to poppy, man that is sum wicked sheeit!"
The two of them ran off screeching about how they were "going to get Benny."
The thin drunk helped his friend to his feet and was yelling at me, "Sick white muthaf**ka, we just came down here to get beer and you have to do sumthin like that! You sick muthaf**ka, you goin' to pay when Benny gets here, watch and see!" They hobbled off together down the sidewalk, the big guy wailing and clutching his face.
I went inside the store, locked the door behind me. The clerk was shaking with fear and putting all this paperwork into a folder. I started grabbing groceries off the shelf and putting them into a plastic tote bag.
They weren't kidding. They went and got Benny. Then things got interesting.
"Ho!" said this guy, about in his late teens, very skinny and looking quite nervous. "Come on back," he waved me on. I walked back to the counter through the aisles, stepping over some smashed glass and bags of powder on the floor. The clerk was dressed in casual clothes and he tried to give me a friendly smile, but he was making me anxious because I could see something had him really scared badly.
"Listen, I'm not supposed to be open," he whispered, folding paperwork on the counter, "I just came in because my boss told me to pick up something in the office and then lock everything up." He glanced over at the right side of the store, where my eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see there were four people standing reading magazines. "These guys came in behind me and they won't leave. Listen, what do you need?" he asked.
I said, "I just wanted to get some milk, bread and butter, maybe something sweet, is that okay?" I said, keeping my voice low.
"Can you help me get these guys out? You're a big guy, are you in security?" It suddenly hit me. I had not changed clothes since I went off duty at Rodeo Drive three days beforehand. "I don't give a rat's ass about the store, you can take whatever you want and I'll lock it up. But first I have to get these guys to leave." I nodded, "Okay, I'll try to help. Are they armed?" I asked, feeling pretty apprehensive.
"Frig, man, I dunno. I'm scared to even speak to them again," he murmured.
I looked over at the four guys mulling around. "I'll get them to leave," I said, speaking with more confidence than I actually had.
As I walked over to the magazine stand I started to gear up my security guard voice and bearing, long honed from dealing with trouble at Park La Brea and Rodeo Drive over the past year and a half. Any of you work security will know exactly what I am talking about.
As I approached them, I could now see them a lot better. All mexicans, two guys so short bordering on dwarfism but obvious gang members. Another guy older who was rheumy eyed like he was drunk or high, slim boned. The toughest looking guy was an ornery looking dude about 200 lbs, muscular build, hateful looking bastard about 5'10 or bigger. So I had weight and height on the big wolf, but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I was confident. Truth is my heart was pounding and I was frightened really badly. For all I know all these guys could draw guns and blow me away in the next ten seconds. Of course I was thinking I could not believe I let my wife talk me into leaving the Desert Eagle at home.
The two dwarves reached for their crotches and start swaying like bad-asses as soon as I got close, smacking their lips and looking pretty loco. These short guys might be the first ones to pull the trigger if they were trying to prove something. I kept my face a blank, innocuous mask, absolutely emotionless. Remember that nothing at all is frequently way scarier for the other guy than a tough expression, angry stance. Complete blankness, a dead focused stare is always the way to go. Telegraph nothing at all, not even hostility. The more emotional the other guy gets, the more completely empty your own expression, it tends to break the nerve of almost anybody.
The thin boned drunken guy piped up first. His three companions were flexing their muscles and swaying like monkeys. "What up?" I heard a lack of certainty in his voice that gave me a boost. Go straight in, don't mince words.
"This fellow at the counter says he is closed. Why are you guys still here?" I asked, staring at the big guy instead of the thinner one.
"f**k you," said the big guy, "this is a f**king dem-ock-krass-see. We have a right to be wherevah the f**k we want to." Strangely enough, there wasn't enough bass in these guys voices. They were putting on a good show, but I could tell they were going to fade.
The little mexican dwarf had a bandanna around his head. "White boy, you probably going to get a cap busted in yo ass you talk like dat." The second the guy said it, I knew instantly these guys had no guns. They were probably gang wannabes and second stringers who mowed lawns for a living but regularly scared white folks with their loco act.
I grabbed the little guy by the hair and arm, immediately started to use him as a shield to shove the others towards the front of the store. As I was pushing, I grabbed something off a store shelf and put it in my pocket. "You guys have been asked to leave. It's time to go. Nobody wants to hear your long winded story. Let's go, you're done."
The biggest guy was yelling and cursing me, bandeho, mericon muthafugga and all that, but he was being carried towards the door like everyone else as I leaned into the dwarf and shoved him into his friends. The thin drunk was looking furious and homicidal but oddly enough now that I knew they did not have guns I was not as scared of any of them.
I opened the front door and packed them all out, cursing, bitching, whining.
As I tried to close the door and lock it, the big one decided then he was going to do something, as he was pushed outside. He stuck his arm in the doorframe and reached for my throat. He started to try to choke me and was cursing me as his friends behind him cheered him on. "Gringo pussy, I will strangle you f**kin' bitch!" He couldn't get a grip on my neck, I bent his fingers back until he screeched and released that hand ... then used the other one to clock a hard right hand on the side of my face. It hurt. His friends were yelling, "Kill his stupid ass, poppy! Kill him!" He went to punch me again and because I was still trying to close the door he hit me in the nose, which really hurt. I started bleeding. The other three were laughing and cursing me, "Haw! Faggit white boy, break his face!"
Once my nose was bleeding, I decided just trying to shove the door shut was not the way to resolve it. So I shoved the big guy back into the street and came out the door myself. His friends were cheering, "Yeah, poppy will kick his arse, man, you a dead white boy!"
You probably think this is the part where I tell you about this big street fight we had where I used an incredible array of amazing kung-fu moves to defeat him.
Well, this will probably be disappointing. The fight lasted approximately one second.
As "Poppy" took a step off the sidewalk, he did something that hispanics often do when they are showing off. He lifted his hands in the air, fingers spread wide, shrugged his shoulders and spun around, as if to show the whole world he wasn't afraid of me, saying, "What the f**k you goin' to do, beyotch?!? Whatch yoo goin' to do?!?"
As he turned around to face me, I hit him on the bridge of his nose with a 60 oz glass bottle of Gerber Baby Food Turkey Mash which I had grabbed off the shelf as we were exiting. I threw it as hard as I could and released it about two inches from his forehead just as he was turning around.
It is hard to describe what happened unless you were there to see it. It was like somebody detonated a thermobaric fuel bomb on the end of his nose with a Turkey Mash payload. I actually had to flinch away and shield my face with my arm to protect myself from the flying glass shrapnel. I reckon the 60 oz bottle when it hit him must have been going well over 100 mph or faster. There was a colossal explosion of baby food, pulverised glass shards and pieces of label up to about ten meters away.
There was this microsecond everybody was frozen. He just stood there, face a blasted bloody mess, eyes welling up with blood, then cupped his hands over his ruined mug and fell backwards with a terrible scream. The other three were so stunned they remained half crouched about five seconds before they could even realize what had happened.
"OH JEESUS CHRIST, HE SHOT ME, f**k ME HE SHOT ME I'M DYING," he screamed, his hands covering his face with blood coming out through his fingers.
The thin guy ran over to him, started sobbing and trying to hold his head for him, "He didn't shoot you, Poppy, I think he hit you with something, oh sheeit man you are fugged up!"
"OH SWEET JEEZUS, MY EYES MAN I CAN'T OPEN MY EYES, I'M DYIN' MAN!" the big guy yelled, blood was gushing out of his nose, his eyes, between his fingers. There was a huge pool of it around where he was sitting. "I GOT TO GET TO HOSPITAL, MAN, I'M DYIN HERE!"
One of the dwarves started hopping about angrily, doing a bizarre little dance. "Oh, yoo is dead white boy! Paco, let's get Benny, man Benny will shoot this psycho f**kin' gringo dead! You see what he did to poppy, man that is sum wicked sheeit!"
The two of them ran off screeching about how they were "going to get Benny."
The thin drunk helped his friend to his feet and was yelling at me, "Sick white muthaf**ka, we just came down here to get beer and you have to do sumthin like that! You sick muthaf**ka, you goin' to pay when Benny gets here, watch and see!" They hobbled off together down the sidewalk, the big guy wailing and clutching his face.
I went inside the store, locked the door behind me. The clerk was shaking with fear and putting all this paperwork into a folder. I started grabbing groceries off the shelf and putting them into a plastic tote bag.
They weren't kidding. They went and got Benny. Then things got interesting.
The clerk, who I found out was named Peter, told me to stock up and grab anything I wanted. I was snatching stuff randomly off the shelves when my nose started to really gush. My security guard uniform was ruined, I had blood all down the front of it. I was feeling dizzy and weak, I think from a combination of three days no sleep, getting clocked on the nose and coming down off all the caffeine I was drinking.
Peter tore open a packet of handiwipes and wet it under the sink and believe it or not managed to find time to come on to me while he was trying to help soak up blood from my nose. I managed to let drop I was married and I could see him wince a bit but he kept dabbing with the handiwipe at my nose for me. Gay or not, he was a relatively good person.
"Do you think those guys are coming back?" he asked me, dabbing away.
"Nah, you seen the last of them, guarantee you. Mexicans could not organize a bowel movement. They will go get drunk and forget about it," I said, sniffling to try to make a clot form in there so I could get on with it.
Peter nodded and gave me the cloth, I leaned back against the counter and tilted my head up to try to make the bleeding stop. Peter got a diet coke out of the fridge and accidentally broke another one on the floor. "Who cares," he said,"I ain't coming back here. I could pick up these jobs ten times a week if I wanted 'em. My boss was trying to get me to open the store today, no way, you can feel today is going to be bad, everybody knows it. I'm going home to Burbank and I'm going to drink Jack Daniel's and curl up with a good book. The National Guard will get here eventually."
My nose was starting to clot, I flipped the handiwipe over and was dabbing with the clean side, seemed like it was drying up. I caught motion out of the corner of my eye at the front windows. Peter gasped.
The two dwarves were back. Standing between them was the shortest, ugliest Mexican I have ever seen. That's saying a lot, believe me. I did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess this was "Benny." So they were serious. They went and got somebody.
This guy "Benny" was staring at me dead on. One of the dwarves pointed through the glass at me with a crooked finger. Benny had a dead fish stare that I had seen enough in security work to know when you are dealing with the real thing. His two friends might have been wannabes, this guy looked to be the hardest of the hardcore gangbangers. Little trimmed moustache. Dark brown features cut from rock. Although the guy stood about 4'8, he was as thick as a corded tree knot and he exuded bloodcurdling menace. Probably shot a couple of people a week and got away with it, too.
Without taking his eyes off me, he tapped on the window with the butt of a Glock pistol and said something, probably an insult, lips barely moving. Never stopped looking at me. The guy could blister paint off a wall with his eyes.
I almost pissed myself. My wife wanted me to leave the Desert Eagle. Damn, I was going to die because I let her cuckold me again. Ironic. Peter had already ducked down in the dark at the back behind a cheese roll display and gestured for me to "get down." I crouched and slid beside him, tossing aside the groceries I was toting as an encumbrance.
"Peter," I said, "My wife is expecting me back in five minutes from the Quik Mart. I hope you're going to tell me there is another way out of here. I'm not ready to die over a loaf of bread and some milk."
Tapping on the glass with the Glock again. Not hard mind you. Really easy. Scary, scary dude. To this day, I can't be sure or not if these Mexicans really expected me to come to the front of the store and unlock the door so they could shoot me between the eyes.
Peter turned out to be a resourceful guy under pressure. He said "I always imagined this, if a psycho came in and started shooting up the place, how would I get out. Follow me, I know a good way." He didn't have to tell me to stay down, we both crawled to the back.
Air flap doors, through the back into their little stock room. Very dark except for an emergency fire exit sign. "Not that way," Peter said, "stay behind me."
A gunshot behind us, heard glass breaking. Was just about ready to piss down my own leg. Heard what sounded like a lot more than three people rushing into the store, yelling and cursing. Another gunshot. I almost bit off my tongue.
I followed Peter into what looked like a trolley corridor that ran behind the storefronts, all cool concrete cinderblocks. The flourescents were on back here. We had both stood up and were running now. Peter motioned me to turn right and go up a flight of stairs.
We ran through a lobby, everything deserted, Peter seemed to magically know a side door that was unlocked - it led into the foyer of a place called La Cienega Realty. He locked the door behind us as soon as I came inside.
I was shaking and in a cold sweat. I stunk from fear, blood all over my shirt, probably looked like hell. We both stood for a long time listening to see if any noises of pursuers following was audible. We didn't talk, didn't say anything, I was holding my breath for a while and when I let it go I was still concentrating on keeping it as narrow and silent as possible.
Peter said "If you go out the side door of the realty, you'll be right around the corner from Sunset. That's on the other side of the Quik Mart a block away."
I didn't move or say anything. I went over and sat down at a realtor's desk. It looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, a yellow stick-it on the monitor said "EVERYBODY HOME BY 2:30, RIOTS!" I was scared to even turn on the desk light and just sat in the weak light of the sun coming through the front office windows.
Peter sat down and didn't say anything. We sat their very quietly. I closed my eyes and nearly fell asleep, scared witless in spite of it. About 30 minutes went by.
"Pete, I gotta go, buddy, much appreciated," I said and I got up. "I'm going to break for it down Sunset, hoping Benny is not around."
"I'm calling my sister, she owns a cab company. She'll send a cab out here for me to take me to Burbank," said Peter.
I gave him a smile that came out more like a sick grimace, waved so long, went for the door crouching.
Peered out into the street cracking the door. Fresh air came in from the outside, cool morning air with woodsmoke. No sign of anybody. Jeez, I thought, it's only 9:15 am in the morning. I thought it was night time after all that.
I ran across to Sunset, no traffic. Quiet enough in the streets you could hear nothing but birds chirping. As soon as I made the end of the alley that led behind the houses to Martin Way I took off running all out, kept expecting Benny to put a bullet in my head at some point.
I got home, my wife was shrieking at the sight of the blood. I locked all the doors, closed all drapes, took a shower and fell asleep on the couch after three days with nothing but catnaps.
I remember drifting off with my wife asking me, "What about the milk?" and I replied "Put a few drops of vanilla into the powdered full cream milk and chill it for a couple of minutes, it's delicious. Can't talk. Too tired. Love you, hon. I should have taken that gun, don't give me any more advice, okay? From now on I'm running the show here. After the riots end you can henpeck me all you want."
It's good I got a nap in because that afternoon was going to be biblical, no kidding. Apocalypse on a grand scale. You never saw CGI special effects in a movie that could hold a candle to what I saw when I woke up.
Peter tore open a packet of handiwipes and wet it under the sink and believe it or not managed to find time to come on to me while he was trying to help soak up blood from my nose. I managed to let drop I was married and I could see him wince a bit but he kept dabbing with the handiwipe at my nose for me. Gay or not, he was a relatively good person.
"Do you think those guys are coming back?" he asked me, dabbing away.
"Nah, you seen the last of them, guarantee you. Mexicans could not organize a bowel movement. They will go get drunk and forget about it," I said, sniffling to try to make a clot form in there so I could get on with it.
Peter nodded and gave me the cloth, I leaned back against the counter and tilted my head up to try to make the bleeding stop. Peter got a diet coke out of the fridge and accidentally broke another one on the floor. "Who cares," he said,"I ain't coming back here. I could pick up these jobs ten times a week if I wanted 'em. My boss was trying to get me to open the store today, no way, you can feel today is going to be bad, everybody knows it. I'm going home to Burbank and I'm going to drink Jack Daniel's and curl up with a good book. The National Guard will get here eventually."
My nose was starting to clot, I flipped the handiwipe over and was dabbing with the clean side, seemed like it was drying up. I caught motion out of the corner of my eye at the front windows. Peter gasped.
The two dwarves were back. Standing between them was the shortest, ugliest Mexican I have ever seen. That's saying a lot, believe me. I did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess this was "Benny." So they were serious. They went and got somebody.
This guy "Benny" was staring at me dead on. One of the dwarves pointed through the glass at me with a crooked finger. Benny had a dead fish stare that I had seen enough in security work to know when you are dealing with the real thing. His two friends might have been wannabes, this guy looked to be the hardest of the hardcore gangbangers. Little trimmed moustache. Dark brown features cut from rock. Although the guy stood about 4'8, he was as thick as a corded tree knot and he exuded bloodcurdling menace. Probably shot a couple of people a week and got away with it, too.
Without taking his eyes off me, he tapped on the window with the butt of a Glock pistol and said something, probably an insult, lips barely moving. Never stopped looking at me. The guy could blister paint off a wall with his eyes.
I almost pissed myself. My wife wanted me to leave the Desert Eagle. Damn, I was going to die because I let her cuckold me again. Ironic. Peter had already ducked down in the dark at the back behind a cheese roll display and gestured for me to "get down." I crouched and slid beside him, tossing aside the groceries I was toting as an encumbrance.
"Peter," I said, "My wife is expecting me back in five minutes from the Quik Mart. I hope you're going to tell me there is another way out of here. I'm not ready to die over a loaf of bread and some milk."
Tapping on the glass with the Glock again. Not hard mind you. Really easy. Scary, scary dude. To this day, I can't be sure or not if these Mexicans really expected me to come to the front of the store and unlock the door so they could shoot me between the eyes.
Peter turned out to be a resourceful guy under pressure. He said "I always imagined this, if a psycho came in and started shooting up the place, how would I get out. Follow me, I know a good way." He didn't have to tell me to stay down, we both crawled to the back.
Air flap doors, through the back into their little stock room. Very dark except for an emergency fire exit sign. "Not that way," Peter said, "stay behind me."
A gunshot behind us, heard glass breaking. Was just about ready to piss down my own leg. Heard what sounded like a lot more than three people rushing into the store, yelling and cursing. Another gunshot. I almost bit off my tongue.
I followed Peter into what looked like a trolley corridor that ran behind the storefronts, all cool concrete cinderblocks. The flourescents were on back here. We had both stood up and were running now. Peter motioned me to turn right and go up a flight of stairs.
We ran through a lobby, everything deserted, Peter seemed to magically know a side door that was unlocked - it led into the foyer of a place called La Cienega Realty. He locked the door behind us as soon as I came inside.
I was shaking and in a cold sweat. I stunk from fear, blood all over my shirt, probably looked like hell. We both stood for a long time listening to see if any noises of pursuers following was audible. We didn't talk, didn't say anything, I was holding my breath for a while and when I let it go I was still concentrating on keeping it as narrow and silent as possible.
Peter said "If you go out the side door of the realty, you'll be right around the corner from Sunset. That's on the other side of the Quik Mart a block away."
I didn't move or say anything. I went over and sat down at a realtor's desk. It looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, a yellow stick-it on the monitor said "EVERYBODY HOME BY 2:30, RIOTS!" I was scared to even turn on the desk light and just sat in the weak light of the sun coming through the front office windows.
Peter sat down and didn't say anything. We sat their very quietly. I closed my eyes and nearly fell asleep, scared witless in spite of it. About 30 minutes went by.
"Pete, I gotta go, buddy, much appreciated," I said and I got up. "I'm going to break for it down Sunset, hoping Benny is not around."
"I'm calling my sister, she owns a cab company. She'll send a cab out here for me to take me to Burbank," said Peter.
I gave him a smile that came out more like a sick grimace, waved so long, went for the door crouching.
Peered out into the street cracking the door. Fresh air came in from the outside, cool morning air with woodsmoke. No sign of anybody. Jeez, I thought, it's only 9:15 am in the morning. I thought it was night time after all that.
I ran across to Sunset, no traffic. Quiet enough in the streets you could hear nothing but birds chirping. As soon as I made the end of the alley that led behind the houses to Martin Way I took off running all out, kept expecting Benny to put a bullet in my head at some point.
I got home, my wife was shrieking at the sight of the blood. I locked all the doors, closed all drapes, took a shower and fell asleep on the couch after three days with nothing but catnaps.
I remember drifting off with my wife asking me, "What about the milk?" and I replied "Put a few drops of vanilla into the powdered full cream milk and chill it for a couple of minutes, it's delicious. Can't talk. Too tired. Love you, hon. I should have taken that gun, don't give me any more advice, okay? From now on I'm running the show here. After the riots end you can henpeck me all you want."
It's good I got a nap in because that afternoon was going to be biblical, no kidding. Apocalypse on a grand scale. You never saw CGI special effects in a movie that could hold a candle to what I saw when I woke up.
I just want to say - I have been writing it down as accurately as I can, with as little embellishment as possible. I have not tried to make myself ten feet tall or Rambo, because I wasn't. I was scared to death, ill prepared, rather foolish and largely incapable of knowing what was the best course of action to take during the riots. Nowadays, I would have evacuated Los Angeles within an hour of them breaking out or else taken refuge somewhere. Your basic dumb security guard at $14.00 an hour.
Just wanted to say that before I tell you how I could not even execute a citizen's arrest correctly with a gun leveled on somebody because I could not stop dry retching.
Just wanted to say that before I tell you how I could not even execute a citizen's arrest correctly with a gun leveled on somebody because I could not stop dry retching.
I awoke from my long nap with my wife prodding me in a frightened voice on the edge of hysteria, saying "Sweetie, I think you need to get up, you should see this."
As soon as I opened my eyes I realized my throat was raw from breathing in smoke. I had slept on the arm of the couch for about 4 hours. I rose up suddenly and grabbed my wife by the arm. "What is it? What's happening?" I said. I had been dreaming that "Benny" was looking for me and was on the verge of finding me.
"The news said it is in our neighborhood now - right down the street. They are moving towards Hollywood Boulevard," she said with a worried expression.
"Honey, Why did you let me sleep?!? You should have woken me up!" I said, leaping to my feet and reaching for the Desert Eagle underneath a couch cushion.
"I thought you said I should let you sleep when you were tired!" she blurted out.
I glanced at the television. They were panning our neighborhood from the sky and everything was on fire. Hundreds, thousands of people were running everywhere.
"Yes, honey, that's normally a good rule of thumb, except during the collapse of civilization or else when our house is in the middle of a firestorm!!! I yelled, really angry she had not awakened me. "Go to the back of the house and sit in the bathroom near the water cooler. Take the television back there with you and something to eat. Lock the door and stay in there until I come to get you. Run the bathroom ventilator, it will pull air through the house and filter some of the smoke out as it comes under the bathroom door." She knew I was not going to argue with her in a situation like this so she did as I said.
I checked the blinds, took a glance outside the house. Chaos. It was insane. People were running everywhere. Fire engine horns, sirens, helicopter blades whishing over the roof again and again. I took a deep breath, stuck the Desert Eagle under my belt beneath my shirt and ran outside.
A dark haired woman was screaming for help at my front gate. Her mascara was running and she looked either crazy or terrified. She didn't appear to have any marks on her, I helped her to her feet, asked her to stop screaming, what did she need help with. She backed away and ran towards the other end of the block as though she were trying to catch up to someone. Everybody was running down from Sunset past me, mostly all black people, as though something was coming from the east. Some teenage kids went flying past with arms full of cell phones, I thought they were laughing at first but then I realized they were crying hysterically.
I went down to the junction of Sunset and Martin, less than twenty meters from my front door ... people bumping against me in blind terror, some of them staring at me like I was somebody they knew. I had no idea what the hell was going on. The air was thick with smoke and the sheer volume of noise was deafening. Beneath all the emergency horns and sirens, there was another noise, a kind of rushing sound like you might hear come from a seashell if you put it to your ear.
I recognized it. I had heard it at sporting events. It was the sound of thousands of people cheering, yelling, hollering all at once.
I peered around the corner of the drycleaning store to the east, towards La Cienega. The street I had run down in the morning to get to the Quik Mart which had been deserted at the time.
Holy Kee-rist, I thought. This can't be happening.
I am not good at estimating numbers in a crowd. I would guess that I was looking at a mob of somewhere between 20,000 to 50,000 people about four blocks away. It was a liquid dynamic mass of human beings which flowed like a single living organism. They were so obscured by smoke at that distance that sometimes they seem to ripple like a mirage in a spaghetti western.
The entire mob was waiting patiently out in front of the gigantic Walmart super store as two large 18 wheel trucks backed up slowly to the security gates. I could hear the roaring of the engines idling in reverse, slowly backing up. Men jumped off the rear gates and attached chains from the bumpers of the truck to the security gates. Then the crowd drew back in a large circle to give the trucks some room.
There was an ear-shattering roar of approval as the trucks pulled forward and tore the security gates from the front of Walmart, clattering behind in pieces. I saw some of the rioters jump on the gates and ride them like surfboards as they were pulled away.
Then the colossal human mob rushed into the Walmart like air filling a vaccuum. They kept coming and coming, I didn't see how so many people could fit in there all at once.
I had been staring in open mouthed shock as the entire vignette took place, then realized that now looters would be making good their escape once they had their fill of stolen goods. This way, possibly.
I turned and ran back to the house. An alleyway I had passed less than three minutes ago, to the immediate left of the front our house, had been empty. There were now three black guys standing right outside our chain link fence, one of them trying to light the wick on a beer bottle while another held a bottle of kerosene. It so took me by surprise I almost fell trying to come to a halt.
I reached for the Desert Eagle, hands shaking, and pulled the gun out. I had never pointed a gun at another human being in my life. "HEY!!!!!" I yelled, "WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?! DROP THAT BOTTLE!! GET YOUR HANDS UP IN THE AIR!!!"
The three black guys were hard, crusty looking types, all of them dressed in filthy clothing and matted down with dirt. One of them with a big set of dreadlocks spoke before anybody else. "White boy, you must be tripping. Don't even think about pointing that gun at me." The other two nodded at their friend, apparently the leader, but they had frozen irregardless.
"THIS IS A CITIZENS ARREST! GET YOUR HANDS UP!" I yelled, chambered a round in the gun and pointed it at the guy with dreadlocks. "DROP EVERYTHING AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP!" I screamed in the scariest voice I could come up with. I sounded sort of hoarse from all the smoke in the air.
"Sissy bitch, whatchoo think you are? We ain't dun nuttin, not a damn thing! You can't arrest nobody, you punk arse little white boy!" the dreadlocks guy said, but they all dropped everything on the ground. The beer bottle broke and I caught the odor of kerosene immediately from the contents that poured out.
I stared at the liquid as it ran across the floor of the alleyway. I could not believe it. These guys were getting ready to burn us. Of course, we were a corner house with a blind alleyway running alongside us. Our house was the perfect candidate to burn, just like all the other corner houses we had seen on television. Nothing personal, you understand, these guys were getting ready to torch our house because it was conveniently located for just that purpose.
I felt weird all of a sudden. Really weird. The gun wavered. "Okay, nobody ... nobody move," I said, feeling my gorge rising. The three black guys were watching me like a hawk.
With complete astonishment, I vomited a huge mouthful of foul smelling water up into the air, soaking my shirt sleeve. One of the black guys chuckled in amusement. I was trying to keep the gun trained on them and suddenly I was vomiting profusely, gouts of greasy dark water into the air. Nothing like that had ever, ever happened to me before. I think the sheer amount of black tea, coca-cola and coffee I had drunk to stay awake had rubbed my stomach lining raw.
"Don't you f**king move, asshole! I will put a bullet in your ass, I promise you," I said, but I was bent over and fell to my knees as soon as I finished the sentence, dry heaves racking me. I was trying to keep the gun pointed at them and vomit at the same time ... they were already backing away down towards the alley from where they had come. They were all giggling and uttering little expressions of awe at their good luck. I tried to keep the gun on them but they knew I wasn't going to shoot them, they hopped backwards until they were well down the alley and then took off running while guffawing at the spectacle of me dry retching with the Desert Eagle in my hand.
It took me about a minute to clear my stomach where the heaves would stop. I definitely felt a little better, but they were long gone. I stood up slowly, still coughing weakly. All three of them had vanished in the blink of an eye. They could run like the wind, they were probably three blocks away by now.
I suddenly realized how the arsonists had created the illusion of fires breaking out spontaneously and why the newscasters kept claiming they were "organized."
The truth is, nearly all the arsonists were on foot, traveled light and made their escapes simply by running away. Chances are they found bottles for containers as they ran. In a dense urban area like Los Angeles, you could torch a building with a single bottle filled with accelerant and be many blocks away before the smoke attracted a police or news helicopter. It was so simple a child could do it and if you were a fast runner your chances of being captured were nil.
It also would not take many arsonists if they were torching and running on an hourly basis.
That's when I began to comprehend what had happened. The arsonists had destroyed an entire city and brought it to it's knees with empty beer bottles and a few dollars worth of lamp oil available anywhere. Probably less than thirty human beings had ravaged the city of Los Angeles worse than a nuclear weapon might have for less money than what most people spend on lunch. They simply ran away in the time it took for police to respond.
If this were the case, it meant the entire facade of civilization was a complete sham, a brittle fake painted monolith made out of candy glass. If any city could be destroyed by thirty guys on foot with ten dollars worth of kerosene, everything I'd ever been induced to believe in my life about civilization was hollow, false, a lie. We were never more than fifteen minutes away from absolute anarchy in any large metropolitan city.
I tucked the gun back under my shirt and walked back to my house to check on my wife, people running all around me with stolen goods and looted valuables. A helicopter buzzed overhead saying something over a loudspeaker but I couldn't make out what it was ... it was just a weak little warbling noise against a sea of madness all around me.
I will conclude my account by telling you of the last few hours of the riots that afternoon and the moment when I had to produce the combat shotgun.
As soon as I opened my eyes I realized my throat was raw from breathing in smoke. I had slept on the arm of the couch for about 4 hours. I rose up suddenly and grabbed my wife by the arm. "What is it? What's happening?" I said. I had been dreaming that "Benny" was looking for me and was on the verge of finding me.
"The news said it is in our neighborhood now - right down the street. They are moving towards Hollywood Boulevard," she said with a worried expression.
"Honey, Why did you let me sleep?!? You should have woken me up!" I said, leaping to my feet and reaching for the Desert Eagle underneath a couch cushion.
"I thought you said I should let you sleep when you were tired!" she blurted out.
I glanced at the television. They were panning our neighborhood from the sky and everything was on fire. Hundreds, thousands of people were running everywhere.
"Yes, honey, that's normally a good rule of thumb, except during the collapse of civilization or else when our house is in the middle of a firestorm!!! I yelled, really angry she had not awakened me. "Go to the back of the house and sit in the bathroom near the water cooler. Take the television back there with you and something to eat. Lock the door and stay in there until I come to get you. Run the bathroom ventilator, it will pull air through the house and filter some of the smoke out as it comes under the bathroom door." She knew I was not going to argue with her in a situation like this so she did as I said.
I checked the blinds, took a glance outside the house. Chaos. It was insane. People were running everywhere. Fire engine horns, sirens, helicopter blades whishing over the roof again and again. I took a deep breath, stuck the Desert Eagle under my belt beneath my shirt and ran outside.
A dark haired woman was screaming for help at my front gate. Her mascara was running and she looked either crazy or terrified. She didn't appear to have any marks on her, I helped her to her feet, asked her to stop screaming, what did she need help with. She backed away and ran towards the other end of the block as though she were trying to catch up to someone. Everybody was running down from Sunset past me, mostly all black people, as though something was coming from the east. Some teenage kids went flying past with arms full of cell phones, I thought they were laughing at first but then I realized they were crying hysterically.
I went down to the junction of Sunset and Martin, less than twenty meters from my front door ... people bumping against me in blind terror, some of them staring at me like I was somebody they knew. I had no idea what the hell was going on. The air was thick with smoke and the sheer volume of noise was deafening. Beneath all the emergency horns and sirens, there was another noise, a kind of rushing sound like you might hear come from a seashell if you put it to your ear.
I recognized it. I had heard it at sporting events. It was the sound of thousands of people cheering, yelling, hollering all at once.
I peered around the corner of the drycleaning store to the east, towards La Cienega. The street I had run down in the morning to get to the Quik Mart which had been deserted at the time.
Holy Kee-rist, I thought. This can't be happening.
I am not good at estimating numbers in a crowd. I would guess that I was looking at a mob of somewhere between 20,000 to 50,000 people about four blocks away. It was a liquid dynamic mass of human beings which flowed like a single living organism. They were so obscured by smoke at that distance that sometimes they seem to ripple like a mirage in a spaghetti western.
The entire mob was waiting patiently out in front of the gigantic Walmart super store as two large 18 wheel trucks backed up slowly to the security gates. I could hear the roaring of the engines idling in reverse, slowly backing up. Men jumped off the rear gates and attached chains from the bumpers of the truck to the security gates. Then the crowd drew back in a large circle to give the trucks some room.
There was an ear-shattering roar of approval as the trucks pulled forward and tore the security gates from the front of Walmart, clattering behind in pieces. I saw some of the rioters jump on the gates and ride them like surfboards as they were pulled away.
Then the colossal human mob rushed into the Walmart like air filling a vaccuum. They kept coming and coming, I didn't see how so many people could fit in there all at once.
I had been staring in open mouthed shock as the entire vignette took place, then realized that now looters would be making good their escape once they had their fill of stolen goods. This way, possibly.
I turned and ran back to the house. An alleyway I had passed less than three minutes ago, to the immediate left of the front our house, had been empty. There were now three black guys standing right outside our chain link fence, one of them trying to light the wick on a beer bottle while another held a bottle of kerosene. It so took me by surprise I almost fell trying to come to a halt.
I reached for the Desert Eagle, hands shaking, and pulled the gun out. I had never pointed a gun at another human being in my life. "HEY!!!!!" I yelled, "WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?! DROP THAT BOTTLE!! GET YOUR HANDS UP IN THE AIR!!!"
The three black guys were hard, crusty looking types, all of them dressed in filthy clothing and matted down with dirt. One of them with a big set of dreadlocks spoke before anybody else. "White boy, you must be tripping. Don't even think about pointing that gun at me." The other two nodded at their friend, apparently the leader, but they had frozen irregardless.
"THIS IS A CITIZENS ARREST! GET YOUR HANDS UP!" I yelled, chambered a round in the gun and pointed it at the guy with dreadlocks. "DROP EVERYTHING AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP!" I screamed in the scariest voice I could come up with. I sounded sort of hoarse from all the smoke in the air.
"Sissy bitch, whatchoo think you are? We ain't dun nuttin, not a damn thing! You can't arrest nobody, you punk arse little white boy!" the dreadlocks guy said, but they all dropped everything on the ground. The beer bottle broke and I caught the odor of kerosene immediately from the contents that poured out.
I stared at the liquid as it ran across the floor of the alleyway. I could not believe it. These guys were getting ready to burn us. Of course, we were a corner house with a blind alleyway running alongside us. Our house was the perfect candidate to burn, just like all the other corner houses we had seen on television. Nothing personal, you understand, these guys were getting ready to torch our house because it was conveniently located for just that purpose.
I felt weird all of a sudden. Really weird. The gun wavered. "Okay, nobody ... nobody move," I said, feeling my gorge rising. The three black guys were watching me like a hawk.
With complete astonishment, I vomited a huge mouthful of foul smelling water up into the air, soaking my shirt sleeve. One of the black guys chuckled in amusement. I was trying to keep the gun trained on them and suddenly I was vomiting profusely, gouts of greasy dark water into the air. Nothing like that had ever, ever happened to me before. I think the sheer amount of black tea, coca-cola and coffee I had drunk to stay awake had rubbed my stomach lining raw.
"Don't you f**king move, asshole! I will put a bullet in your ass, I promise you," I said, but I was bent over and fell to my knees as soon as I finished the sentence, dry heaves racking me. I was trying to keep the gun pointed at them and vomit at the same time ... they were already backing away down towards the alley from where they had come. They were all giggling and uttering little expressions of awe at their good luck. I tried to keep the gun on them but they knew I wasn't going to shoot them, they hopped backwards until they were well down the alley and then took off running while guffawing at the spectacle of me dry retching with the Desert Eagle in my hand.
It took me about a minute to clear my stomach where the heaves would stop. I definitely felt a little better, but they were long gone. I stood up slowly, still coughing weakly. All three of them had vanished in the blink of an eye. They could run like the wind, they were probably three blocks away by now.
I suddenly realized how the arsonists had created the illusion of fires breaking out spontaneously and why the newscasters kept claiming they were "organized."
The truth is, nearly all the arsonists were on foot, traveled light and made their escapes simply by running away. Chances are they found bottles for containers as they ran. In a dense urban area like Los Angeles, you could torch a building with a single bottle filled with accelerant and be many blocks away before the smoke attracted a police or news helicopter. It was so simple a child could do it and if you were a fast runner your chances of being captured were nil.
It also would not take many arsonists if they were torching and running on an hourly basis.
That's when I began to comprehend what had happened. The arsonists had destroyed an entire city and brought it to it's knees with empty beer bottles and a few dollars worth of lamp oil available anywhere. Probably less than thirty human beings had ravaged the city of Los Angeles worse than a nuclear weapon might have for less money than what most people spend on lunch. They simply ran away in the time it took for police to respond.
If this were the case, it meant the entire facade of civilization was a complete sham, a brittle fake painted monolith made out of candy glass. If any city could be destroyed by thirty guys on foot with ten dollars worth of kerosene, everything I'd ever been induced to believe in my life about civilization was hollow, false, a lie. We were never more than fifteen minutes away from absolute anarchy in any large metropolitan city.
I tucked the gun back under my shirt and walked back to my house to check on my wife, people running all around me with stolen goods and looted valuables. A helicopter buzzed overhead saying something over a loudspeaker but I couldn't make out what it was ... it was just a weak little warbling noise against a sea of madness all around me.
I will conclude my account by telling you of the last few hours of the riots that afternoon and the moment when I had to produce the combat shotgun.
After checking on my wife and making her a glass of tea, I went out the back of my house and crawled up the access ladder to the roof with the .203 slung over my shoulder.
I used a length of rope to pull a broken party umbrella onto the roof and dropped it in the corner as a kind of makeshift tent right in front of the weephole I had scouted beforehand as a good sniper position. I put the .203 underneath the party umbrella. From the air it would look like a typical Mexican house in L.A. with some rubbish left over from a rooftop party piled on it. I didn't want the constantly circling police helicopters to see me on the roof with a rifle.
Before I crawled under the umbrella I took a good look in all four compass directions. Great billowing fires and pillars of smoke reaching up to the sky surrounded the house, it looked like a vantage point in hell. There were flames raging out of control nearly everywhere you looked, occasionally adorned by water spouts from fire trucks trying to douse them.
It was cool and dark under the umbrella but I had an excellent view of the street in front of the house. I watched for the next several hours as looters ran by loaded down with goods, sometimes pulling wheelbarrels or wagons piled high with booty. On occasion when it looked like they might be parking on my street, I trained the rifle on them. They seemed to have a sixth sense and nearly always moved on right about the time I was trying to decide whether or not to move my finger onto the trigger.
Strangely enough, the alleyway was completely empty for the rest of the day, people avoiding it like the plague. I kept worrying the arsonists were going to come back.
Sometimes I would get up to stretch my legs and walk the perimeter of the roof, checking straight down to see if anyone had pressed themselves up against the wall and was sneaking around the outside of our home.
After a long time under the umbrella watching people go by, suddenly a very lean, tall black guy jumped the fence of our house as he passed and looked back and forth, like he was checking to see if anybody was watching. He took one step and put his foot right down on one of our caltrops. He went rigid as a board, silently lifted his foot and then let out a high pitched wail. He clawed at it to pull it out of his sole, dropped over the fence again pulling himself on his elbows and doing that funny whine. I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing, I had tears coming to my eyes. He finally got back up and started hopping down the sidewalk on one foot, leaving a trail of blood droplets behind him. I remember thinking he'd better have a tetanus shot, some of the nails we used for the caltrops were covered with rust.
I did not quite fall asleep beneath the umbrella, but I did drowse at times, falling into a sort of routine watching looters and rioters walk by.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a group of hispanics had parked their asses on the car across the road and were lying across the hood. They had boxes of consumer goods opened all around them and had decided to examine their prizes. It was Trotsky's car across the street, my liberal anti-gun buddy. I could see Trotsky peering through the curtains like a furtive little mouse every few seconds, scared to go outside.
As surely as coded bacteria in a computer simulation, once they had camped out on the hood of the car, other looters began to do the same. They were camping.
I did not need anybody to tell me this was no good. If they camped, they might start a little siesta. Then maybe they'd get bored and decide to get into some trouble. You wanted these guys to keep moving.
I trained the rifle on the guy who was smoking and leaned against the driver's side looking at a laptop computer he had stolen. He was throwing lots of garbage from packing on the ground, along with the manuals and anything else he didn't want to carry. A real animal.
The guys were acting like they owned the block. That was somebody's car they were lying on top of.
If I shot these guys in cold blood with the rifle, I would surely go to prison. It might be convenient but it would not be considered reasonable self-defense.
I would have to go down and confront them.
I crawled down the ladder and went inside the house. My wife was glad to see me and beseiged me with questions about what was going on.
I got the pump action Remington riot shotgun out from behind the water heater. I had bought it three months earlier unbeknownst to my wife, never fired it, along with two boxes of shells. My wife's eyes went wide when I pulled it out and started pushing shells into the breech. "I hope you are not thinking of going outside with that," she said, "because I will divorce you if you do." I said to her, "Honey, if you're ever back this way again, be sure to look me up."
When I got to the front door, my nerves failed. I peered through the curtains. A lot of Mexicans were out in the street. I knew if I stayed here too long I would talk myself out of going out. I just had to do it irregardless of how scared I was. They could not be allowed to just take over the block and sit on cars like that.
As I came down the front walk, I held the shotgun behind my trailing leg in back of me. The Mexicans looked up as my door opened and I came towards them, but because of the chain link fence and a row of bushes they did not see the shotgun when they realized I was coming to speak to them.
"You fellas have somewhere important to go," I said as I walked towards them. "Anywhere but here is a good start."
The hispanic guy who was smoking sneered and took a long draw on his cigarette. "Who tha fugg are yoo sposed to be, mon?" he said, his buddies all moved their hands to their crotches and began squeezing their testicles like it pumped blood to their brains. They all started that swaying and testicle squeezing dance they do.
Then one of the guys closest to the fence saw the shotgun trailing behind me and the sneer disappeared. They all stood up straighter and jumped down off the hoods of the cars they were on.
"You fellas can't camp here, this ain't bean person of colour heaven," I said, then brought the shotgun up around waist level and pointed it towards them. I opened the gate and went into the street. "You need to get the fugg off my block right now." I was sweating so badly from fear it was dripping into my eyes. "What?" asked the hispanic smoking guy, his face getting pale, "Whatzat?"
I said "I'm a white boy with a migraine and a pump shotgun and I don't want to listen to your horsesh*t. No habla espanol." They all started backing away. It's a bit comical to watch about fifty mexicans walking backwards with their hands on their crotches. Some of them turned and trotted off south, leaving their goods in the street or on top of cars.
The hispanic smoking guy, backing up still holding the laptop, said "You ain't gonna shoot nobody, mon. Besides, you can't hit all of us, somebody gonna take that gun away from you and shove it up your arse," he muttered, but I think he was just bluffing.
I starting twisting the choke on the shotgun. "You're right, burrito monkey, I guess I better choke this back to make sure I hit enough of you if I have to squeeze the trigger." I was just bluffing myself. They were all backing up, more and more of them as they got farther away were running off.
The hispanic guy flicked his cigarette at me and kept walking backwards. I was a good 100 meters from the house now. "You ain't sheeit, gringo. Someday this place is gonna be down and brown, porky pig. I'd like to see you try that sheeit again someday."
He turned and trotted off. I stood in the street and kept the shotgun up until the entire street was clear. Then I backed up and went back to the front yard.
Trotsky came out of his house, finally. He looked terrified. "Violence doesn't solve anything, man," he croaked.
I stared at him for a long time before I said, "I hope you don't think that you and I are friends. I can do better than you for friends. I have pretended to be civil with you in the past, in the future I want you to stay away from me. You and I are not alike and never will be." Then I turned and went back inside the house.
I will finish with an epilogue of what happened that evening and the following weeks in my last post.
I used a length of rope to pull a broken party umbrella onto the roof and dropped it in the corner as a kind of makeshift tent right in front of the weephole I had scouted beforehand as a good sniper position. I put the .203 underneath the party umbrella. From the air it would look like a typical Mexican house in L.A. with some rubbish left over from a rooftop party piled on it. I didn't want the constantly circling police helicopters to see me on the roof with a rifle.
Before I crawled under the umbrella I took a good look in all four compass directions. Great billowing fires and pillars of smoke reaching up to the sky surrounded the house, it looked like a vantage point in hell. There were flames raging out of control nearly everywhere you looked, occasionally adorned by water spouts from fire trucks trying to douse them.
It was cool and dark under the umbrella but I had an excellent view of the street in front of the house. I watched for the next several hours as looters ran by loaded down with goods, sometimes pulling wheelbarrels or wagons piled high with booty. On occasion when it looked like they might be parking on my street, I trained the rifle on them. They seemed to have a sixth sense and nearly always moved on right about the time I was trying to decide whether or not to move my finger onto the trigger.
Strangely enough, the alleyway was completely empty for the rest of the day, people avoiding it like the plague. I kept worrying the arsonists were going to come back.
Sometimes I would get up to stretch my legs and walk the perimeter of the roof, checking straight down to see if anyone had pressed themselves up against the wall and was sneaking around the outside of our home.
After a long time under the umbrella watching people go by, suddenly a very lean, tall black guy jumped the fence of our house as he passed and looked back and forth, like he was checking to see if anybody was watching. He took one step and put his foot right down on one of our caltrops. He went rigid as a board, silently lifted his foot and then let out a high pitched wail. He clawed at it to pull it out of his sole, dropped over the fence again pulling himself on his elbows and doing that funny whine. I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing, I had tears coming to my eyes. He finally got back up and started hopping down the sidewalk on one foot, leaving a trail of blood droplets behind him. I remember thinking he'd better have a tetanus shot, some of the nails we used for the caltrops were covered with rust.
I did not quite fall asleep beneath the umbrella, but I did drowse at times, falling into a sort of routine watching looters and rioters walk by.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a group of hispanics had parked their asses on the car across the road and were lying across the hood. They had boxes of consumer goods opened all around them and had decided to examine their prizes. It was Trotsky's car across the street, my liberal anti-gun buddy. I could see Trotsky peering through the curtains like a furtive little mouse every few seconds, scared to go outside.
As surely as coded bacteria in a computer simulation, once they had camped out on the hood of the car, other looters began to do the same. They were camping.
I did not need anybody to tell me this was no good. If they camped, they might start a little siesta. Then maybe they'd get bored and decide to get into some trouble. You wanted these guys to keep moving.
I trained the rifle on the guy who was smoking and leaned against the driver's side looking at a laptop computer he had stolen. He was throwing lots of garbage from packing on the ground, along with the manuals and anything else he didn't want to carry. A real animal.
The guys were acting like they owned the block. That was somebody's car they were lying on top of.
If I shot these guys in cold blood with the rifle, I would surely go to prison. It might be convenient but it would not be considered reasonable self-defense.
I would have to go down and confront them.
I crawled down the ladder and went inside the house. My wife was glad to see me and beseiged me with questions about what was going on.
I got the pump action Remington riot shotgun out from behind the water heater. I had bought it three months earlier unbeknownst to my wife, never fired it, along with two boxes of shells. My wife's eyes went wide when I pulled it out and started pushing shells into the breech. "I hope you are not thinking of going outside with that," she said, "because I will divorce you if you do." I said to her, "Honey, if you're ever back this way again, be sure to look me up."
When I got to the front door, my nerves failed. I peered through the curtains. A lot of Mexicans were out in the street. I knew if I stayed here too long I would talk myself out of going out. I just had to do it irregardless of how scared I was. They could not be allowed to just take over the block and sit on cars like that.
As I came down the front walk, I held the shotgun behind my trailing leg in back of me. The Mexicans looked up as my door opened and I came towards them, but because of the chain link fence and a row of bushes they did not see the shotgun when they realized I was coming to speak to them.
"You fellas have somewhere important to go," I said as I walked towards them. "Anywhere but here is a good start."
The hispanic guy who was smoking sneered and took a long draw on his cigarette. "Who tha fugg are yoo sposed to be, mon?" he said, his buddies all moved their hands to their crotches and began squeezing their testicles like it pumped blood to their brains. They all started that swaying and testicle squeezing dance they do.
Then one of the guys closest to the fence saw the shotgun trailing behind me and the sneer disappeared. They all stood up straighter and jumped down off the hoods of the cars they were on.
"You fellas can't camp here, this ain't bean person of colour heaven," I said, then brought the shotgun up around waist level and pointed it towards them. I opened the gate and went into the street. "You need to get the fugg off my block right now." I was sweating so badly from fear it was dripping into my eyes. "What?" asked the hispanic smoking guy, his face getting pale, "Whatzat?"
I said "I'm a white boy with a migraine and a pump shotgun and I don't want to listen to your horsesh*t. No habla espanol." They all started backing away. It's a bit comical to watch about fifty mexicans walking backwards with their hands on their crotches. Some of them turned and trotted off south, leaving their goods in the street or on top of cars.
The hispanic smoking guy, backing up still holding the laptop, said "You ain't gonna shoot nobody, mon. Besides, you can't hit all of us, somebody gonna take that gun away from you and shove it up your arse," he muttered, but I think he was just bluffing.
I starting twisting the choke on the shotgun. "You're right, burrito monkey, I guess I better choke this back to make sure I hit enough of you if I have to squeeze the trigger." I was just bluffing myself. They were all backing up, more and more of them as they got farther away were running off.
The hispanic guy flicked his cigarette at me and kept walking backwards. I was a good 100 meters from the house now. "You ain't sheeit, gringo. Someday this place is gonna be down and brown, porky pig. I'd like to see you try that sheeit again someday."
He turned and trotted off. I stood in the street and kept the shotgun up until the entire street was clear. Then I backed up and went back to the front yard.
Trotsky came out of his house, finally. He looked terrified. "Violence doesn't solve anything, man," he croaked.
I stared at him for a long time before I said, "I hope you don't think that you and I are friends. I can do better than you for friends. I have pretended to be civil with you in the past, in the future I want you to stay away from me. You and I are not alike and never will be." Then I turned and went back inside the house.
I will finish with an epilogue of what happened that evening and the following weeks in my last post.
Hollywood burned. Including Madonna's bra collection.
They found four dead people a block away from us. One man had been shot to death in his garage.
They stopped the riot just a couple dozen meters from the Chinese theater. Lots of Hollywood landmarks were reduced to blackened ashes.
You had a sense when the sun went down that night, that whatever the affliction was, it had lost its vital force. The rioting had spent itself.
The National Guard finally arrived, way too late to make any difference. Curfew was maintained for weeks, martial law and tanks on street corners. The real purpose of the military presence was to force whites and blacks to go back to pretending to like each other, that multiculturalism actually worked and that there was not a race war of apocalyptic proportions brewing everywhere and anywhere in the near future. It was all about maintaining appearances.
All kinds of repercussions followed and accusations were hurled as the authority figures meekly emerged from their bunkers and viewed the sheer scale of the destruction that had taken place. Shame over abandonment of their posts was nowhere to be seen. Nor did any prosecution for failure to perform duties take place.
The air was filled with the smell of smoke for months afterwards but eventually all the embers were extinguished.
People tried to blot the entire thing out in some bizarre fit of collective amnesia. There was a fake quality to the smiles and kisses, though ... the champagne didn't taste the same anymore. Everybody tried to pretend like they had not looked into the eyes of the dragon and seen the horror that is right underneath the everyday appearance of life, forever trying to break through all the tissue paper thin barrier of rules and laws that white people are tricked into thinking is some unshakeable edifice of authority.
Officially there were more than fifty murders, unofficially some said there were more than two hundred murders, mostly unsolved.
I knew in an alternate universe I had been shot dead in a Quik Mart by Benny. I would have been just a short blurb on the obituaries page, security guard, unknown assailant, services to be held on Sunday, blah blah blah. Like the other fifty people listed in the newspaper supplement amongst the victims of the riots.
At night I had the shakes. I sometimes woke up thinking somebody was on the roof trying to burn the house down. I drank a lot of coffee, talked too fast sometimes, looked at people a little too hard when they were talking to me as if I could see their lips moving but couldn't hear the sounds they were making. I had seen something that I was not going to forget about. Nobody would fool me again.
When we went back to eat in Soup Plantation, I kept waiting for the oracle to wander in with the gash in his head and scream they were coming again. I began to believe that "they" were coming all the time.
If my wife asked me what was bothering me, I told her I thought the riots were deja vu. They woke up a memory in me not of something that had already happened before but of something that had yet to happen. I foresaw a riot where the whole world would burn and the smoke would rise again and blot out the sun forever. I began to see the L.A. riots as my wakeup call, as a kind of canary in the coal mines.
There was a madness in human beings that hid itself in this sheep's clothing and tried to pretend it was under control. It wasn't. The riots in Los Angeles had been the tinest symptom of this decay that was spreading everywhere. Like the first time you hear termites in the walls of your house at night and realize that by the time you can physically hear them they have completely eaten away all of the marrow that kept the house standing.
I had made up my mind that the next time the riots began, I would be ready. Even if they lit up the entire planet. I would not be a poor student, God would not have to show me again. That was my resolution.
They found four dead people a block away from us. One man had been shot to death in his garage.
They stopped the riot just a couple dozen meters from the Chinese theater. Lots of Hollywood landmarks were reduced to blackened ashes.
You had a sense when the sun went down that night, that whatever the affliction was, it had lost its vital force. The rioting had spent itself.
The National Guard finally arrived, way too late to make any difference. Curfew was maintained for weeks, martial law and tanks on street corners. The real purpose of the military presence was to force whites and blacks to go back to pretending to like each other, that multiculturalism actually worked and that there was not a race war of apocalyptic proportions brewing everywhere and anywhere in the near future. It was all about maintaining appearances.
All kinds of repercussions followed and accusations were hurled as the authority figures meekly emerged from their bunkers and viewed the sheer scale of the destruction that had taken place. Shame over abandonment of their posts was nowhere to be seen. Nor did any prosecution for failure to perform duties take place.
The air was filled with the smell of smoke for months afterwards but eventually all the embers were extinguished.
People tried to blot the entire thing out in some bizarre fit of collective amnesia. There was a fake quality to the smiles and kisses, though ... the champagne didn't taste the same anymore. Everybody tried to pretend like they had not looked into the eyes of the dragon and seen the horror that is right underneath the everyday appearance of life, forever trying to break through all the tissue paper thin barrier of rules and laws that white people are tricked into thinking is some unshakeable edifice of authority.
Officially there were more than fifty murders, unofficially some said there were more than two hundred murders, mostly unsolved.
I knew in an alternate universe I had been shot dead in a Quik Mart by Benny. I would have been just a short blurb on the obituaries page, security guard, unknown assailant, services to be held on Sunday, blah blah blah. Like the other fifty people listed in the newspaper supplement amongst the victims of the riots.
At night I had the shakes. I sometimes woke up thinking somebody was on the roof trying to burn the house down. I drank a lot of coffee, talked too fast sometimes, looked at people a little too hard when they were talking to me as if I could see their lips moving but couldn't hear the sounds they were making. I had seen something that I was not going to forget about. Nobody would fool me again.
When we went back to eat in Soup Plantation, I kept waiting for the oracle to wander in with the gash in his head and scream they were coming again. I began to believe that "they" were coming all the time.
If my wife asked me what was bothering me, I told her I thought the riots were deja vu. They woke up a memory in me not of something that had already happened before but of something that had yet to happen. I foresaw a riot where the whole world would burn and the smoke would rise again and blot out the sun forever. I began to see the L.A. riots as my wakeup call, as a kind of canary in the coal mines.
There was a madness in human beings that hid itself in this sheep's clothing and tried to pretend it was under control. It wasn't. The riots in Los Angeles had been the tinest symptom of this decay that was spreading everywhere. Like the first time you hear termites in the walls of your house at night and realize that by the time you can physically hear them they have completely eaten away all of the marrow that kept the house standing.
I had made up my mind that the next time the riots began, I would be ready. Even if they lit up the entire planet. I would not be a poor student, God would not have to show me again. That was my resolution.
Trotsky was beaten to death about a month after the riots and his girlfriend was gang raped and then beaten so badly she was permanently disabled. I never found out whether or not this had anything to do with the riots, it was just one more crazy thing in an era of crazy things. It is possible that Trotsky was in some kind of drug buy that went wrong and that it had nothing at all to do with the riots. I never did figure this one out.
They did go back and analyze a lot of footage and caught quite a few people this way who were dumb enough to perform in front of helicopters with video cameras. So in some ways the media was doing the cops job for them when they were hiding out behind their barricades.
Honestly, my account of the L.A. Riots was exceedingly tame compared to many of those who lived through it.
Our meal at Soup Plantation was interrupted and I had a few confrontations with some Mexicans. No gunshot wounds sustained.
Anybody who doesn't believe my account would truly be stunned by the stories of some of the people who lived on La Cienega farther down - like the accountant who was set on fire with a molotov cocktail on his his body as he ran from his burning home by rioters. I got off pretty easy compared to most.
Our meal at Soup Plantation was interrupted and I had a few confrontations with some Mexicans. No gunshot wounds sustained.
Anybody who doesn't believe my account would truly be stunned by the stories of some of the people who lived on La Cienega farther down - like the accountant who was set on fire with a molotov cocktail on his his body as he ran from his burning home by rioters. I got off pretty easy compared to most.
We moved to Burbank about a month after the riots ended. That's about twenty minutes from Los Angeles. My wife was worried about me because even after I got a new job I couldn't sleep at night, got up about every two hours to check the locks, look out windows, sometimes walk around the perimeter of the house with a flashlight. I had repeat nightmares that I could smell smoke again and that the roof had been set on fire, I had to go outside and check it in the wee hours of the morning.
My wife was Australian and I started asking her what did she think of going back, I had told her when I first met her I had this feeling my whole life I would someday be moving there, how coincidental that I had married her.
I started explaining to her how I thought the next ten or twenty years would play out in America, I explained to her how unless some radical political force changed things that demographics would continue to shift. I don't want to brag but I got 9 out of 10 things correct in the years to come from 1992-2004. I showed her logically how the character of nations changes according to the genes of the people who live in it, I showed her examples from Byzantium, Persia, Rome, India, etc.
I told her how the government would counter-react with stringent new controls on constitutional rights to try to manage an explosive cocktail of conflicting peoples - they would have no choice but to begin to conduct themselves as an empire, how empires always ended in civil war. I tried to explain how as America weakened internally from these conflicts that her countless enemies would begin to see the wisdom of striking her once and for all as she declined in homogeneity. Unlike Rome, in a nuclear tipped world poised on a razor's edge it was possible that America would cease to exist in a single day, rather than decay over a longer period of time like ancient civilizations. I talked to her about so many things, a lot of complex topics I went over point by point with her, much like the stuff I have posted up here on AusSurvival before.
I talked to my wife every day for three months right through until December and she was convinced. I applied for a passport and to enter as her spouse, we were in Australia the following March. We went to my family's farm in Virginia for three months because I wanted to get one last look at America before it disappeared forever.
I hold firmly that everything that has happened since we came to Australia in the past decade has proven my instincts right - my most recurrent errors have been that I was too modest and reserved. I thought whites would not be a minority in California and Texas until after 2020 back in those days. What a laugh - they were minorities by 2004, this year.
My wife was Australian and I started asking her what did she think of going back, I had told her when I first met her I had this feeling my whole life I would someday be moving there, how coincidental that I had married her.
I started explaining to her how I thought the next ten or twenty years would play out in America, I explained to her how unless some radical political force changed things that demographics would continue to shift. I don't want to brag but I got 9 out of 10 things correct in the years to come from 1992-2004. I showed her logically how the character of nations changes according to the genes of the people who live in it, I showed her examples from Byzantium, Persia, Rome, India, etc.
I told her how the government would counter-react with stringent new controls on constitutional rights to try to manage an explosive cocktail of conflicting peoples - they would have no choice but to begin to conduct themselves as an empire, how empires always ended in civil war. I tried to explain how as America weakened internally from these conflicts that her countless enemies would begin to see the wisdom of striking her once and for all as she declined in homogeneity. Unlike Rome, in a nuclear tipped world poised on a razor's edge it was possible that America would cease to exist in a single day, rather than decay over a longer period of time like ancient civilizations. I talked to her about so many things, a lot of complex topics I went over point by point with her, much like the stuff I have posted up here on AusSurvival before.
I talked to my wife every day for three months right through until December and she was convinced. I applied for a passport and to enter as her spouse, we were in Australia the following March. We went to my family's farm in Virginia for three months because I wanted to get one last look at America before it disappeared forever.
I hold firmly that everything that has happened since we came to Australia in the past decade has proven my instincts right - my most recurrent errors have been that I was too modest and reserved. I thought whites would not be a minority in California and Texas until after 2020 back in those days. What a laugh - they were minorities by 2004, this year.
