Chapter Seventy Nine:     Washington DC

We left Atlantic City just before Wednesday noon, our next concert scheduled for Friday evening in Washington DC. The plan was to spend our two extra free days seeing the Capitol and various sights. It had not been our plan to arrive in a city undergoing massive political unrest due to multiple street demonstrations by hysterical activists versus semi-brutal police/military committing acts of quasi-illegal violence. But we were locked into our tour dates and had no choice but to carry on.

In fact, all our nicely-conceived plans began unraveling about 2:00 in the afternoon, while still on the freeway halfway to DC, when we got a call from Art in the Hacienda. He announced that our top-secret family document had been leaked: Adam out of Eden was now Adam Out of the Bag.

We pulled into a big truck stop and saw that the National Inquisitor and other tabloids were already revealing all our most private secrets to everyone in the world. They must have printed it all over the USA the day before, to be distributed everywhere at once and Art had first been informed after the fact. I admit it; I fretted a little, but Liss just laughed. We'd all known it had to happen someday, sooner or later; it wasn't that big a surprise.

Still, big & bold text: SCANDAL EXPOSED and in smaller sub-text, my name & Addy's. The Whore of Babylon and the Antichrist in colored photos. One of Liss and me and Addy sneak-taken at Naked Lake last year, two CENSORED blocks just barely covering our tits. Good thing I had my incognito shades on, there were lots of people at the truck soup but nobody was looking or pointing at me, yet. Our squatches had been smart enough to stay in the bus.

We moved on. When we got to DC traffic was a mess. Cars stopped everywhere, in the roads, up on sidewalks, and where there was any vehicular motion police sirens were constantly howling about it.

Good thing we had made camping reservations because the campground was filled up to capacity with activists from out of town, hundreds of them, sleeping in vans, many camping in small nylon tents. It wasn't easy getting our three busses and the semi into place, tents and piles of sleeping bags overlapped all the pathways.

At least people were happy to see us, figuring we were here to support their cause with our celebrity power-- Black Lives Matter, Women's Rights, Climate Crisis, Save the Whales, whatever. Just don't say the wrong buzz-word to the wrong crowd; motivations ran high here.

We had several projects to deal with in DC, beyond performing our scheduled concert Friday evening. Washington DC had been rocked by enormous political demonstrations for several days now; including riots, massive destruction of property, lootings. The Black Lives Matter/Police Brutality factions had set up camp in Lafayette Park, right in front of the White House, and the Climate people had occupied The Ellipse on the back side of same building. Fortunately, our band's local concert was to be held at The Anthem venue by the waterfront, located a bit to the west of the conflicts. But the demonstrations seemed to be very volatile and could easily migrate that way by Friday evening.

Here at 8:00 pm Addy had to go online with Skype to partake in the Hacienda's press conference, which we did from inside our bus. That was easy; we use Skype pretty much every day, so camera, mikes and speakers were already set up, just plug and play. We had already rehearsed variations of this press release for years, pretty sure it had to happen someday.

Addy fell back on his oldest technique for dealing with problematic truths-- never lies, but simply says "that's a secret" and refuses to divulge any more info than that. He claims his right to privacy. This too, you've already read in the previous chapter.

After that we went out of our busses to mingle with all the protest-people in the campground. There were all sorts out there; a real hodge-podge of ages, races, sexual persuasions, political orientations, whatever.

We were constantly being approached by dedicated activists who wanted us famous rock stars to come and give speeches for their particular cause, but some of them were fringe crazies with whom we had no wish to associate ourselves. Like the Nazis For Fun bunch and the Kill the Pigs enthusiasts. Even some of the Black Lives Matter folk were just too racist --anti-white-yellow-brown (& squatch?) --for us to offer any support.

Climate Crisis was something that best dovetailed into the Nokon Nation Project's own political aims and ambitions, so Addy agreed to give a talk that evening on the stage at the Ellipse. Needless to say, we did not do any tourist things our first day in town, there was just too much going on.

I'm not complaining: it was all very social; there were interesting socio-political discussions to join into, philosophical workshops; there was an inter-discipline group field-kitchen making organic food for everyone in camp.

Magga and Masnia became quite caught up in the food project, and then when they were asked for some "good Bigfoot recipes" had to explain that authentic Bigfoot cuisine is deliberately boring because Atli forbids that eating be enjoyable. The logic being that gluttony leads to obesity and the innumerable lifestyle illnesses that many humans suffer, while some Nokhons live to be two hundred years old. The natural human reaction to that is usually "but who wants to starve for 200 years?"

There was also lots of music going on, we were not the only professional bands in the crowd, and of course, there were many amateur players of folk-music among the politically aware. It was like being in summer camp. Except that some people would come back from protesting and marching in the streets with wounds and bruises from the infamous police brutality, rubber bullets and pepper bombs. Some did not come back but ended up in hospitals.

The more radical protestors became enthusiastic about Addy and Magga joining their ranks and taking on the brutal police with some Bigfoot Power. Addy had to tell them that his size and strength were really of no advantage against cops and soldiers armed with guns and gas. "I just make an bigger target," he said, quite uninterested in performing any illegal heroics against cops, especially because he didn't want to harm them or anyone else. Or get shot himself, naturally.

It was an easy walk over to the Ellipse, where Addy was to give a speech about the Nokhon ideal of ecological conservation. I say an "easy walk", but it took a while anyway. The streets were full of running and still-standing people, chanting, singing, shouting, so it was tricky to wedge on through. Although Addy and Magga's size did help, people tend to shift back a step when a Bigfoot or three come heading for your toes.

Size also helped when some unmarked soldier-cops (?) moved in to get rough with some peaceful protesters. They seemed to be looking for trouble, deliberately arrogant and belligerent, but Addy stepped into their way, discretely cleared his throat to catch their attention. They simply all did a double-take, then turned and left. There was evidently nothing going on there that really needed policing anyway.

Addy did his speech, basically a re-run of other speeches he'd given about keeping our American wilderness intact, for the Nokhons and for all of us. Of course, it was preaching to the choir in that place at that time, there was really nobody against the preservation of nature, except the "big corporations" and none of them were interested in standing in demonstrations day & night. Whereas over at the BLM gathering there were all sorts of anti- and anti-anti variations of opinion and definition, very contentious and subject to rabble-rousing, deliberately heading for violence. A quasi-KKK parade showed up at one point and it seemed the mystery (who?) militia was about to back them up with tear gas and pepper spray. We, and especially Addy, were doing our best to stay out of it.

Inside the White House, the President was also doing her best to stay out of it. The Secret Service was seen remaining passive, as long as there was no threat to the White House. Both demonstrations were more or less under control, there was no rioting and no looting, at the moment anyway. Democracy in action.

We, that is the 20 of us (both bands including roadies), had remained in a semi-cohesive group wandering through the crowded streets of night-time DC. It was like parades going in every direction, groups criss-scrossing each other, totally disorganized. It wasn't quite 4th of July yet, but there were plenty of fireworks going off all around us and a constant wail of sirens, police and ambulances, a city gone crazy.

As did the drinkers among us, seems there was free alcohol to be had everywhere, which might just be counterproductive to peaceful demonstrations. Made us wonder just who was financing the free booze.

All explosions were scary; we couldn't tell if they were rubber bullets being fired our way-- which are supposed to be nonlethal but will certainly blind you if they hit your eye --or the flash-bang blasts that hurt your hearing. But it was also adrenalin-rush exciting to be there, so we prolonged the experience for a while, nervously wandering through the scene. But rather than to press our luck, we finally headed back to our busses for the night. It was clearly dangerous just being there.

We were all asleep when Art called us again at 5:30 in the morning, this time to say that he and Elaine had been attacked that and we needed to watch out, as you've already read about in the previous chapter.

Addy said he might have to go to FBI Headquarters here in DC and talk with them next day. But they came to us instead, at 5:45 in the morning.