Screed 32: WRITING ON THE WALLS
On Friday and Saturday, May 3 and 4, most of the media attention seemed destined to go to the Zebra killings. These were now established as the work of a cult of young Blacks calling themselves "Death Angels" and having some indistinct relationship to the Nation of Islam or so-called Black Muslims. In a daring news conference Mayor Alioto of San Francisco alleged that the fourteen previously-identified San Francisco racial shootings were part of a series of nearly eighty recent Black-white murders, mostly in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, but spilling into other parts of the state. Several cult-killer suspects were arrested and the expectable outburst of anti-police protests and civil-rights lawsuits instantly broke out.
The SLA response had been organized a week earlier, when a fragment of the SLA moved out of their small apartment at 1827 Golden Gate Avenue, in the Western Addition or WAPAC area of San Francisco. The apartment had been rented in mid-March by a white girl who gave her name as Louise Hamilton. The small apartment house, the street, and the surrounding neighborhood were all racially mixed, so that neighbors paid no attention when a Black man moved in with her.
Ultimately four people, that is Marshal Cinque and three of the white girls, lived there. Tania Hearst had spent at least part of April there. The fact that she had gone out alone to buy groceries seemed to prove that she was not under duress, much less in captivity.
Contrary to the injunctions of their Codes of War (Screed 23), the SLA soldiers had been terrible housekeepers. It was the cockroaches which flowed out into neighboring apartments which caused the manager to investigate and thus to discover who his tenants had been. He found the place filthy, battered, and stinking. Police and reporters alike, when they finally arrived, were amazed by the "indescribable filth" and "overpowering stench" of the little headquarters. Besides odor, dirty underclothes, junk hardware, sleeping bags, and an old bicycle, police found the bathtub full of an evil-smelling concoction of household chemicals. The apartment boasted no fireplace, and the chemicals had been used to melt away papers and letters belonging to the group. At the bottom of the tub were several keys, including the ignition key of one of the rented cars used in the bank robbery.
Noticing Hegel's remark that all the great events of history repeat themselves, Karl Marx added that their first occurance was as tragedy, but the second only as farce. In abandoning their little headquarters, the SLA screedspeople, who now included Tania Hearst, wrote their messages in the emptily mocking style and the graffito medium generally employed by wicked little children. They had been transformed into "old news" by the rush of Bay Area events; they had created some squabbling, but no real race riots, much less revolutions; they were becoming the object, now, of laughter rather than fear or hate; they were still free, but they were intimately known by the police and by much of the public, and were facing capture and trial at any moment. Dirty, weary, nervous, bored, the world-renowned Symbionese Liberation Army was returning to the nothing it set out from.
The writings were done via felt pens on off-white painted walls. The "Charles" in Graffito A is Charles Bates, the FBI leader who still stumbled along in charge of the case. Its author was probably Nancy Ling Perry, or Fahizah. The poem "A New Year's Resolution", doubtless the work of Camilla Hall, the SLA Sappho, takes us back past the Hearst operation to the days of attack on the Oakland schools and Oakland police. "Ho" is Ho Chi Minh, the North Korean leader in whom the radical youth of the 1960's found their hero and prophet. Cinque and Tania identify their more modest contributions. Odd obscenities and old mottoes are by no particular author. Four cobras, each with its inconvenient seven heads, writhed among the messages on the walls.
A. A Toilet Message WARNING!
To the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, NBC, and CBS:
There are a few clues in this bathroom. However, you will have to wait until they are dry.
An additional word of caution: 1/2 (one-half) lb. (pound) of cyanide (potassium cyanide) crystals has been added to this "home brew." So, pig, drink at your own risk.
There are many additional juicy SLA clues throughout this safe house. However, remember that you are not bullet-proof either.
Happy hunting, Charles!
B. Miscellany
Da da, Oh my
Books, once read, make good bullet-proofing.
Death to the fascist insects that prey on the life of the
people.
