someone to put a cattle-trank on God’s green weed was just like killing the twins. I was… radicalized by the experience.
“Hayzooz used to fly with some of the FALNs, those Puerto Rican nationalists? I got in tight with them and threw my first bomb. The office of Hooker Chemical. Before long the pigs were closing in. Hooker and heat.
“I had to cool off. I moved across town to Little Italy, got a job running a sewing machine and studied radical politics at the Free University. One course had an anthology of terrorist writings. The best thing was a piece called Stadtguerilla by the Red Army Faction. The old Baader-Meinhof gang. I got the idea that revolution is riper for the plucking in Europe. I decided to go to Italy, since that’s what I can speak.
“Peter and I started really relating. He moved in with me. We both wanted to get the fuck out of Amerikkka, but we didn’t have the bread.
“This room I was living in was like upstairs from a grocery. Gino’s Superette. Gino was a real pig. He had a brother in the police, and they were always busting shoplifters. We decided to burn his ass.
“What we did was to reserve tickets on a Sunday morning flight to Rome out of JFK. Pick ’em up there and pay cash. Saturday afternoon Peter stole a car and we loaded all our luggage in it. I had a hot machine gun I’d gotten off Hayzooz.
“Just at closing time Saturday night…two in the morning…we step into Gino’s. His cash register was bulging. He’d been selling beer and wine all evening. He had his pig cop off-duty policeman brother there for security. Since Gino knew us, they hardly looked up. And then Peter wasted them.
“It was beautiful. We didn’t want to stop shooting. All the cans of spinach busting open and exploding, the ricocheting strung-out racket of explosions and in my head rock-and-roll radio playing Patti Smith: never return to this piss factory!
“We were out at the airport before the cops even knew. On the flight over we decided to call ourselves Green Death for the spinach. Peter got us hooked in with some movement people in Rome. They set us up in Mestre.
“Mestre’s right near Venice, but it might as well be Newark, New Jersey. A whole town of working people breathing pollution-death. We liquidated a refinery and executed an environment-criminal or two. Things heated up and Peter split. I stayed too long and got popped.
“I’d pitched my passport, so they didn’t really know who I was. I said I didn’t either. My picture was in the paper. Some old guy came in claiming he was my father. But he was really a brother anarchist! Told me when and where to hijack the reactor fuel! But that comes later. Meanwhile the pigs decided to check me out for crazy before trial. Sent me to a white-coat. And that was Giulia.”
How Green Death Came to Rome
Imagine yourself a disembodied eye, a movie camera if you will…watching when and where and what you want.
Flat country. Factories on the right, smudging the sky. On the left is a large, yellowish-white compound surrounded by a ten-meter wall. A prison. You move along the road towards it, along a potholed two-lane road. It’s a February noon with a high, smogged-out sun.
The prison wall looms overhead, its surface scarred and scumbled. At the bottom is a small door, a rusty metal door propped open with a case of empty wine bottles.
A man’s booted feet rest on the case. He is tilted back in a wooden chair, guarding the entrance with a machine gun in his lap. He is beautifully uniformed and badly shaven. The boots are black and very shiny. Staring into them you can almost see yourself…or is that the chalky sun?
A VW bus with one occupant pulls up in front of the prison. The slightly built, red-haired driver gets out: it’s Peter Roth. He is dressed in white, like a hospital orderly. He walks slowly up to the prison guard, a sheaf of papers in his hand. His breath steams in the air.
From behind the guard you can hear sounds: the
“Hayzooz used to fly with some of the FALNs, those Puerto Rican nationalists? I got in tight with them and threw my first bomb. The office of Hooker Chemical. Before long the pigs were closing in. Hooker and heat.
“I had to cool off. I moved across town to Little Italy, got a job running a sewing machine and studied radical politics at the Free University. One course had an anthology of terrorist writings. The best thing was a piece called Stadtguerilla by the Red Army Faction. The old Baader-Meinhof gang. I got the idea that revolution is riper for the plucking in Europe. I decided to go to Italy, since that’s what I can speak.
“Peter and I started really relating. He moved in with me. We both wanted to get the fuck out of Amerikkka, but we didn’t have the bread.
“This room I was living in was like upstairs from a grocery. Gino’s Superette. Gino was a real pig. He had a brother in the police, and they were always busting shoplifters. We decided to burn his ass.
“What we did was to reserve tickets on a Sunday morning flight to Rome out of JFK. Pick ’em up there and pay cash. Saturday afternoon Peter stole a car and we loaded all our luggage in it. I had a hot machine gun I’d gotten off Hayzooz.
“Just at closing time Saturday night…two in the morning…we step into Gino’s. His cash register was bulging. He’d been selling beer and wine all evening. He had his pig cop off-duty policeman brother there for security. Since Gino knew us, they hardly looked up. And then Peter wasted them.
“It was beautiful. We didn’t want to stop shooting. All the cans of spinach busting open and exploding, the ricocheting strung-out racket of explosions and in my head rock-and-roll radio playing Patti Smith: never return to this piss factory!
“We were out at the airport before the cops even knew. On the flight over we decided to call ourselves Green Death for the spinach. Peter got us hooked in with some movement people in Rome. They set us up in Mestre.
“Mestre’s right near Venice, but it might as well be Newark, New Jersey. A whole town of working people breathing pollution-death. We liquidated a refinery and executed an environment-criminal or two. Things heated up and Peter split. I stayed too long and got popped.
“I’d pitched my passport, so they didn’t really know who I was. I said I didn’t either. My picture was in the paper. Some old guy came in claiming he was my father. But he was really a brother anarchist! Told me when and where to hijack the reactor fuel! But that comes later. Meanwhile the pigs decided to check me out for crazy before trial. Sent me to a white-coat. And that was Giulia.”
How Green Death Came to Rome
Imagine yourself a disembodied eye, a movie camera if you will…watching when and where and what you want.
Flat country. Factories on the right, smudging the sky. On the left is a large, yellowish-white compound surrounded by a ten-meter wall. A prison. You move along the road towards it, along a potholed two-lane road. It’s a February noon with a high, smogged-out sun.
The prison wall looms overhead, its surface scarred and scumbled. At the bottom is a small door, a rusty metal door propped open with a case of empty wine bottles.
A man’s booted feet rest on the case. He is tilted back in a wooden chair, guarding the entrance with a machine gun in his lap. He is beautifully uniformed and badly shaven. The boots are black and very shiny. Staring into them you can almost see yourself…or is that the chalky sun?
A VW bus with one occupant pulls up in front of the prison. The slightly built, red-haired driver gets out: it’s Peter Roth. He is dressed in white, like a hospital orderly. He walks slowly up to the prison guard, a sheaf of papers in his hand. His breath steams in the air.
From behind the guard you can hear sounds: the
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