Calculated Chaos

My backpack is filled with the tools of my trade: five cans of Molotow Premium, five extra fat caps, two canisters of tear gas, one black balaclava, one taser, one burner flip phone, and one plastic bag of reticle stickers. The cops have been trying to swipe left on me for years and there’s an underpriced bounty on my head (an insulting $3,000) so I resolved to make tonight a particularly special night of irrepressible revolution. Every mortal thread of my being is perfectly aligned and primed for the calculated chaos of cultural deconstruction that has come to define my place in this materialistic cesspool of human suffering and I’m determined to sink my teeth in and take a messy bite while everyone sits back and watches me eat.

“Yo, wassup!”

“Wassup, yo!”

I’m walking west on 125th toward Malcom X to catch the 2 train downtown for the first stop on my grand tour of mayhem. Everyone in the hood knows me because I’m fighting for what we’re all fighting for and I’ve always refused the easy way out. They used to call me Robin of the Hood when I was ganking drunken Wall Street traders at their after-work watering holes and redistributing their wealth to the local businesses in our neighborhood, but I gave all that up because it put too much of a target on my back.

“You’re a real one, bruh. I don’t care what they say.”

“What do they say?”

“You know what they say.”

“Wait til you see what I got planned. Listen to the After Midnight stream tonight. They’re interviewing me at the top of the show.”

“You gonna be on After Midnight?”

“Gotta drop some bombs on the city beforehand. Stay up!”

“Bet, brother!”

It took months of negotiation for me to agree to be on the city’s most popular late-night livestream, and I still think it might be a setup, but I want the world to know what I know. That you don’t have to be powerless. Not everything is about the money. And happiness can still exist even when hope is lost.

I hop the 2 train headed south and hop off at Wall Street near the stock exchange with my regular clothes on under the thrift store suit I specifically selected for this educational lesson in the law of retaliation. Last week my cousin was hanging with her homegirls in the Financial District at some douchebag bar when some douchebag asshole ran up on her and stuck his hand halfway up her designer skirt while groping her over her designer shirt. My cousin is a bad bitch, but it fucked her up, so I’m here to even things out as the opening act before my main event.

My cousin’s friends found this guy’s profile through a friend of a friend, and I’ve been tracking his stupid ass ever since. I do my best to look the part as I enter the dimly lit upscale restaurant a few blocks away from the exchange building and immediately spot the American Psycho sitting at the bar scrolling his phone while his buddies chat dividends and slurp overpriced martinis. I’ve been stalking this dude’s socials and he’s a textbook case. His entire waking life revolves around gambling all day at the stock market casino then getting wasted after work while hitting on every woman in sight by bragging about his portfolio’s pilfered assets. It’s classic addict behavior.

“I just bagged this client who doesn’t even have a dedicated accountant.”

Peals of belching laughter disgorge from the gaggle of identically dressed bros as I walk up behind them.

“Bartend! Another round!”

I want to kill this guy just for being so fucking mid but I’m not a murderer, so I act casual and conceited as I approach them with air of a fellow financial asswipe.

“Excuse me. Are you Andy Ryan?”

They all look at me with their mouths half-open like a gang of moronic monkeys.

“Yeah…”

“Someone sent me. To give you an inside tip.”

“A tip, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Ok, well, spit it out.”

“Follow me. We need some privacy.”

There’s nothing like dangling the prospect of illegal profit in front of a Wall Street trader’s face to get them to abandon all sense of reason and follow a complete stranger out into the street and around the corner and into a back alley and get split-second dropped by a sucker punch to the gut.

“What tha… fuck… bro?”

I grab the taster from my bag as Andy the day trader struggles to catch his breath, and I shove it into his crypto crotch and ring his bells for a few hard seconds. Andy spasms and squawks like a strangled chicken which I was entirely unprepared for so instead of continuing his lesson I slap a reticle sticker on his forehead and flick open my flip phone and take a pic.

“This is for Victoria, motherfucker.”

“Who’s Victoria?”

“She’s every woman you’ve ever touched without consent, fuck-face.”

Andy rolls on the ground clutching his jewels and whining extra loud like an extra large baby, while I pull on my balaclava and throw up a quick caricature of baby Andy on the alley wall with the words: ANDY RYAN IS A R@PIST. I take another pic and shoot it to my homie to post on social as I rush down the backstreet and shed my thrift suit and mash it down in a trash compactor just as Andy’s friends find him in the fetal position pointing plaintively in my direction.

I head uptown zigzagging through various lanes and parks to make sure I’m not being followed and hang a left on Canal Street to the grand opening of an elite art gallery that’s exhibiting a series of all-white paintings on all-white walls for their inaugural launch. The gallery is already overflowing with ostentatiously dressed collectors and vulture capitalist investors with a winding line of wannabe art consumers waiting patiently to enter the sanctum.

The gallery is a billionaire’s soggy wet dream with the sole purpose of serving up for the ultra rich a fulsome stream of artistic flotsam designed strictly for storage and resale value only. The featured artist doesn’t even paint his own canvases and is obviously unaware that Robert Rauschenberg already did this same shit back in the 1950s when it actually might have meant something. These schmucks standing in line have no idea they’ll never get inside because they don’t have the required purchasing power and their only role is to increase the perceived value of the commodity currently on display and promote the idea of exclusive access.

I stroll up to the front of the line still wearing my balaclava as the bouncer has his back turned, and I pull the pins on my two canisters of tear gas and casually roll them inside like little noxious bowling balls. Everyone gasps and chokes as the canisters sputter and spew, and I hand out my reticle stickers to everyone in line while the gallery patrons pour out the front door like a retching horde of poisoned rats.

“Listen to After Midnight tonight and all will be revealed!”

I slap two reticle stickers on the side of the building for good measure and scamper off into the anonymous urban night knowing that one of my strategically positioned homies has been streaming the entire time. I hear him in my rearview as I hastily pull off my balaclava and turn my t-shirt inside out.

“Godspeed, brother!”

I spend the next few hours bombing the city with anti-gentrification graffiti using my five precious cans of Molotow Premium to paint the city’s portrait. This is my true calling and where my true skills shine. I head further uptown while navigating a pre-plotted plan to hit five prime spots I picked for maximum public exposure. I bless the built environment with a polyptych of detailed compositions depicting the city devouring itself like a corporate ouroboros worm. I sign each piece with a reticle sticker while making my way toward my ultimate destination in the belly of the institutional beast for my date with the mass-market devil.

I head through the fog of war to tourist-infested Times Square for my interview with the host of After Midnight who I consider a fake and a fraud because he’s simply a shill for the largest media conglomerate on the entire goddamn planet. But I need his platform for what I have to say even though I know it’s probably a Faustian type of deal.

This city used to be a home for seekers and artists, but now it’s just a killing field for the rich and famous. The neighborhood I grew up in is still hanging on by its fingertips, but no one has any hope anymore because they’ve all been divided and conquered. I don’t expect everyone to understand, but I want to represent a life lived differently and show you can do what makes you happy and prove it’s possible to resist. I’ve got my people looking out for me, and that gives me some sense of protection, and we’re all incorruptible because we’ve already been corrupted.

“¡Viva la resistencia!”

“Viva!”

My flip phone rings and my homie says the coast is clear.

“Yo, we gotchu! Palo is posted up front, and I’m in the parking garage. We’re all clear.”

“No pigs?”

“No bacon.”

“Then I’m going in through the front.”

“You sure ‘bout that?”

“You said no cops, right?”

“Hundred percent.”

“Alright then.”

I stride confidently into the sliding glass entrance of the After Midnight studio which is situated smack in the center of the hustle and bustle. I spot Palo in a gray hoodie standing beside some shaggy bushes and give him a nod before being swallowed by the fluorescent lobby. I’m ushered into the recording room without a pat-down just like we agreed, and I sit across from the distracted host as they mic me up with earphones and wait for him to acknowledge me.

There’s a countdown clock clicking down on the wall, and as it ticks off the seconds to livestream, I study the sleazy host and his slicked-back hair and his bleached white teeth while I rehearse exactly what I came here to say. I know there won’t be much time to get my thoughts out before he bulldozes me with his garbage commercial slop of meaningless shallow questions and glib conversational diarrhea, so I steel myself for what’s about to come but right before we go live my flip phone pings with a warning that the cops have just arrived.

I stare at the host and shake my head as he smirks at me with a fake-ass grin, and I wonder if he’s planning to have me arrested as an on-air stunt or if he’s going to wait to collect his reward after we finish our interview. I run through every possible scenario and how I might respond and right before he introduces me and without being able to utter a single goddamn word I jump up with my backpack and head for the emergency exit. I sprint up the stairs to the second floor construction site where I previously scoped some outdoor scaffolding, and I shimmy out onto the ledge through an unsecured open window.

I’ve already calculated my route of escape from a recent recon three days earlier because I knew this exact fucking situation was a distinct fucking possibility, but it all happened so goddamn fast that I never got to state my case. I desperately wanted to have that classic revolutionary moment where I tell everyone their life has value and to get up and go to their window and stick their head out and yell. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

But things don’t always work out the way we plan, and I’m a realist as much as an idealist, and I want to live to fight another day, so I head to a nearby bodega to grab a 40 ounce and cool my mind and clear my spirit. I take big long gulps and guzzle down the entire bottle to sedate my anger, and then I remember, I had one more stop on my tour. I hastily helm myself due north to make my way to a late-night guerilla dance party in Central Park to celebrate the success of our rent strike against our slum lord millionaire to make sure we have heat this winter.

Sometimes the small victories matter most. When we can breathe free however briefly. That’s when happiness can find a way even if hope is lost. It doesn’t matter how much you have or don’t have. You can always be free.