Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

collection trashed was sufficient to radicalize someone, a revolutionary situation would exist in Britain within weeks.

We responded with two further actions. Leo and Claire planted a bomb in a gambling club patronized by senior American officers, which demolished the entire rear elevation of the building, a mansion house in St. James’s. Because of Agent Orange leaching into the earth of Cambodia, because of white phosphorus burning through the skin of small children. Britain is not a safe haven for the strategists of extermination. Nowhere in the world will they be protected from the guerrilla, acting in support of the people of Indochina. We phoned in a warning and the place was cleared, though we heard the next day that two people had been hurt by flying glass. They were our first casualties, but I don’t remember any particular discussion about them. I think we blamed it on the police. A second bomb, placed outside an air force base, failed to detonate. It was suggested in the underground press that the attacks were the work of neo-Fascists, trying to discredit the Left. We read a dozen theoretical demonstrations of the objectively counterrevolutionary nature of our actions, a dozen more of the historical inevitability of our failure, but it seemed to us that history was on our side. Every week there were more strikes. Dockers, car workers. Ninety Soviet diplomats had been expelled from Britain, accused of spying. An anti-Communist panic was sweeping the country, which seemed to be completely polarized between those who were more terrified of Moscow and those who were more terrified by the binary madness of the Cold War. It was a question of gut feeling: you chose one kind of fear or the other. Not being afraid wasn’t an option.

A message to all those comrades who feel that revolutionary action is not appropriate in the U.K. because this is a place where the forces of reaction are strong. If you believe, as we do, that Imperialism is a paper tiger, then nowhere can be excluded as the site of struggle. You say we are

squandering revolutionary energy, that adventurism is a characteristic deviation in times of weakness. We say agitation and propaganda are insufficient. If that’s the sum of your ambitions, you should be ashamed.

Sometimes it felt as if we were spending more time arguing about money than about strategy. Like our failure to discuss the injuries at the gambling club, this should have been a warning to me, a sign that things were beginning to degenerate, but we were desperate for funding and prepared to do more or less anything to get it. A friend of Jay’s worked for a record company. Through him we were introduced to an underground character called Nice Mike, who wanted to score fifty thousand hits of acid off some Liverpool gangsters who had a lab down in Devon, at a farmhouse out on Exmoor. Nice Mike didn’t trust the people he was involved with and wanted to take along some protection. Jay suggested us.

It was risky. We knew nothing about Nice Mike’s contacts. We didn’t know a great deal about Nice Mike himself. I disliked him on sight, an overweight south Londoner with shoulder-length hair and loud Carnaby Street clothes, who set up our first meeting in a trendy bar and seemed incapable of answering direct questions. He laid out his proposition in an exaggeratedly soothing tone, as if lulling children to sleep. We told him nothing about our political activities; he seemed satisfied with the story that we were ordinary criminals, connected with some unspecified east-London gang. He was prepared to pay cash up front plus more when he’d sold the drugs. Despite our misgivings, we agreed.

He wanted to drive down to Devon, which was fine, but on the appointed day he turned up in an absurdly conspicuous car, a bright blue Bentley, loaded with gadgets that he insisted on demonstrating to us, like a salesman. The heated leather seats, the eight-track built into the dashboard. On the road he played acid rock and clicked his many elaborate silver rings on the steering wheel, bragging about the famous groups he dealt to when they were passing through London. It was all birds and

backstage and Jimmy this and Mick that, clicking his damn rings on the wheel in time to the beat.

It soon became apparent that Mike was very nervous. As he drove he smoked joints, stubbing them out in the ashtray, weaving alarmingly in and out of the traffic, occasionally freaking himself out about phantom objects in his peripheral vision and pulling the wheel round to avoid them. Luckily the car handled like a boat or I swear he would have spun it. He wasn’t helped by his glasses, big octagonal things with a heavy blue tint that must have increased the weirdness several-fold. When we passed Stonehenge he insisted on stopping, as if we were on some kind of excursion. The three of us — Sean, Jay, and I — trailed after him while he wandered round the stones, waving his arms and intoning a lot of faux -Druidic nonsense, invoking the pagan gods to bless our endeavor and promising to “make a sacrifice upon our return.”

When we got back into the car, which was parked on the grass shoulder by the roadside, Mike scrabbled around in the glove compartment and pulled out a plastic bag of pills. “Want anything? We need to maintain our edge, yeah?” I told him I thought what we needed was to keep our shit together and he got very defensive. Who was I to say who did or didn’t have their shit together? Who the fuck was I? He kept repeating it, his tone increasingly self-righteous. “I mean, who the fuck are you? How do I even know you have your shit together?”

We ate a tense fry-up at a Little Chef somewhere in Somerset, wreathed in cigarette smoke and mutual distrust. In the middle of the crowded diner, Mike decided to start talking about guns. We’d brought guns, right? We were packing, because we needed to be packing, because he hadn’t paid for fucking amateurs, OK? He’d thought we were going to look heavier. We didn’t look heavy enough. He was speaking very loudly. The subject of guns seemed to tug his accent partway across the Atlantic. People were staring. Young families, truck drivers.

The only way to shut him up was to walk out, so that was what we did, leaving our plates of food half finished on the table. When

we got back to the car, I took his keys and Sean shoved him into the back seat of the Bentley, still protesting about his eggs and his second cup of tea. Jay kept watch, leaning on the car, as Sean and I got in beside him and shut the door.

Sean was direct. “Now, look here, you decadent little fucker. If this goes bad I’m going to cut your balls off and make you eat them, you understand?”

Nice Mike’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Don’t you dare rip me off. If you rip me off you’ll regret it. I’ve got friends, man. You touch any of my money and I’m telling you right here and now that you’ll regret it.”

We quizzed him again about the people we were going to meet, what he knew of their background, who else he’d told about the deal. He was evasive, panicky. Then we locked him in the car while we went for a quick walk round the forecourt.

“You know what?” said Sean. “We should just dump the cunt. Take the money, take the car and have done with it. We don’t need to go to Devon.”

“It’ll come back to us,” argued Jay. “He’s not kidding about having friends.”

Like Sean, I’d had enough of Nice Mike. “Fuck his friends,” I said. It was two to one, so we went back to the Bentley and told him how it was going to be. When he argued, Sean stuck a gun in his mouth, to prove he was “packing.” We took Mike’s briefcase of cash and his bag of pills and drove away in his ridiculous car, leaving him kneeling by the side of the road, his eyes tightly shut and his hands clasped in front of him, as if in prayer. If he had friends, they never found us.