I have been living together since New Yearâs, 1997. That day when he showed up, it had been roughly twenty years since I swallowed my luck in the form of the coin from a New Yearâs pie, and ten years since the show for graduates of the School of Fine Arts, when I thought painting was the most important thing in the world. Just five years since Aunt Amalia died, and since we adopted the slogan âI bleed, therefore I am.â The socialists are still in charge of the country, they built a subway and a few highways to placate the populace. But we didnât give in: we made posters urging an occupation of the Attic Highway. We painted the facades of a few banks with Day-Glo paint. Lots of people still think weâre just pranksters. That a revolution based on colors, music, and demands for a better life is childish. And of course those were difficult years to be launching protests in Greece: all of a sudden the country was flooded with new money, fresh capital that pulled the wool over peopleâs eyes, tricked them into thinking the prosperity was real. So we started to attend demonstrations in more affluent countries, where people had a better sense of what it meant for that flood of money to drown you, in the end. In 1998, in Geneva, Kayo and some others overturned the Central Bankdirectorâs Mercedes and we spent two nights in jail. In 1999 we sat on a crowded bus for days just to go back and shake the hands of the Zapatistas, members of the Indian KRRS, the landless of Bangladesh, people of all stripes who were protesting third world debt, genetically modified food, and the colonization of the global South. In June of that same year we flew to Nigeria to shout slogans against the oil companies, standing in a crowd of thousands to welcome Owens Wiwa as he returned to his homeland from exile. I was hesitant, but in the end I decided to go to Ikeja, where I located our old house. Kayo and I stood there for a while watching a couple of white kids playing in the yard. But thatâs another story.
Five months later was Seattle. Kayo and I vomited side by side at the barricades. It was the most tear gas weâd ever experienced. And yet it was a perfect moment: no central committees, no leaders, no dogma. Look, Anna , I kept thinking, itâs happening, itâs actually happening . It had proven impossible to follow her parting advice, to live like an amoeba.
In the breaks between protests we come home, take hot footbaths, look for work. This year I found the school, Kayo is doing some underwear modeling. At night he prints T-shirts with old situationist slogans: In a society that has abolished any kind of adventure, the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society . In the morning I find him curled up with Anna-Maria in my parentsâ old bedroom, a Kodachrome icon of the Virgin Mary that my mother left to protect me hanging on the wall above him. Kayo adores it. Itâs a bad habit he picked up in New York: heâs always coming home with the cheapest, kitschiest junk. A mismatched family of characters, childish yet lurid, occupies his bedside table: a pink plastic Hello Kitty, a music box topped by a fake ballerina with gold pointe shoes, a plastic camera that squirts water, one of those flowers that bobs up and down on its stem when thereâs music playing, a Statue of Liberty made of hot pink foam.
I sleep in my childhood room. Thereâs nothing angelic or little-girlish about it. âItâs an absolute mess in here,â Kayo mutters when heâs in a bad mood. But I like it that way. Amid the newspaper clippings, posters, books, packs of anti-capitalist stickers, Iâm somehow able to find myself. â Lose yourself, you mean,â he says. To keep myself from hitting him I psychologize his own mania for cleanliness: heâs biracial, the son of a white woman who washed him incessantly when he was a kid, and ironed a new shirt for him every day so that
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