King of the Californias, Pt VI

by Monk Eastman, New York City, USA

There is a story about Cecilio Goncz that comes to me as he rushes from the bedroom, chrome pistol in hand. It's a second-hand story, something I heard from a survivor in the Watts Refuge about three years ago.

The first wave of emergency workers descended on Southern California shortly after the Little Big One. Historically, the area known as the Inland Empire suffered the worst casualties. Nascent attempts to coral survivors into 'rescue stations' soured relations from day one. The Sharon J. Carter Center's archives have survivors' video records that show crowded camps hemmed by razorwire, without plumbing, electricity, or potable water. Security was provided by a dozen private firms, which in the days before the United Nations Private Military Oversight Committee, were quite literally at war with each other in hot zones across the globe, and only barely committed to defending the rescue effort. Such conditions made a difficult relief effort almost impossible. Movements such as the San Bernadino Popular Front, Claremont Defense League, and Twentynine Palms Irregulars were born in those days. But before Tweaks Neuman armed his first IED, or Kelvin Black organized his first slaver ring, there was the Moreno Valley riots, where BRK private security killed over 143 people, in full view of a busload of refugee children, up from Pico Union. By nightfall, those children were cycled into the camp's general population, while camp veterans were forced to pile their dead neighbors into funeral pits at gunpoint, and spray them with decompiler foam. It was all very unsubtly painted over. News was sequestered, video lost, blogs blocked by service providers. In later years, we would discover these were not isolated incidents. The ineptitude and corruption were persistent, institutional malfunctions that contributed more to the President's famous 'Southern California is no longer viable for reclamation' than the actual earthquake.

As the abuses at Moreno Valley continued, the children took it worse, without guardians or legal status. In the aftermath of the riots, these orphans were known as los polvos, dustbabies, raised on casual violence, systematic brutality, and sparse rations. Southern California had a tradition of gangsterism known across the globe, but its latest iteration, remixed in the deep shadows of the rescue stations, was perhaps its most vicious. Initiation rites were not complete until a child had taken the life of at least one person from their camp, with proof of kill. Rewards were usually meager: an extra ration bar perhaps, or a new blanket.

It is said that in exchange for a teddy bear, the sole reminder of his dead parents, a ten year old Cecilio Goncz returned one night with a guard's genitalia, removed with scalpel precision.

And that it, along with the teddy bear, is the one souvenir he left Los Angeles with when the provisional government took over.

Some take this as a tale of sentiment, or innocence lost.

I take it as a cautionary tale, of a man who knew even at ten what he wanted, and was quite capable of anything to get it.

King of the Californias, Pt V

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

As its guest book reads like a who's who of global atrocity-makers, disposal of dead bodies has become a premier feature at the Palma de Baía. Oakland's foremost hotel has an experienced staff of morticians, equipped with forensic-baffling equipment that would give the CIA a mile-long erection. That, and the hotel's love affair with municipal law enforcement, makes the three dead women on Cecilio Goncz's living room a nuisance instead of a felony. From the balcony, I watch the men in papery silver jumpsuits strip the corpses naked, and clumsily dump them into transparent bodybags filled with some sort of icy green fluid, vapor rising sickly. They throw the giant bladders onto gurneys, and trundle out of the room with all the gravity of errant bellhops.

Goncz's prisoner slumps over her crucifixion, long passed out from shock. Hands pinned to her thigh, she looks like a supplicant, bowed in prayer; though I can't imagine to what. Her breath is audibly ragged to even my cheap recorder's amplifier, some twenty feet away and separated by a pane of artificial diamond. Mr Goncz hasn't caught on that I recorded his initial encounter with the assassins, and as he is busy making calls from the bedroom, I have no plan on stopping. I see him in the distance, hands flailing wildly, livetattoos above his eyes dancing through a dozen languages, always the same message: Only God Can Judge Me. When he gets like this, his tone takes an undulating quality: loud one word, quiet the next. It's impossible for my little recorder to make any sense of it.

I observed the first such call upon my arrival in NoCal. I waited at Pivens Aerospace Center for five hours, bleary-eyed from intra-orbital flight, assured by Mr Goncz's assistant that a driver would be there for me shortly. When one finally did, it was the assistant himself, in a rental car. I was told in hushed, cautious tones that the driver, Silvio, had been picked up that morning by agents of the Carter Center. By that afternoon, he'd been tried for war crimes in Los Angeles, and by that evening, publicly sentenced at West Hollywood's Sunset Plaza. Shipped off to Angel Island for some time with the Big Chair: fifty years of sensory deprivation compressed into ten minutes, courtesy of a hack directly into the parietal lobe. Survivors tend to wear diapers, and have trouble producing complete sentences. Mr Goncz spent the bulk of that day screaming at the phantoms on the other end of his communicator, at his assistant, and finally at me: the Piece-of-Shit-Reporter-From-Chicago.

Three days later, Goncz's assistant disappeared.

Another cycle was wasted on Goncz's rant, blasted to his peers across the globe in every medium available. He was unsure if Glen had just run off, been killed by one of his long-standing enemies, or defected to Los Angeles in exchange for leniency. Goncz's greatest fear is still the Simone J. Carter Center for Peace and Justice. Based out of the Watts Refuge, its agents span the globe, wrangling expats back to the Republic of Los Angeles, where their trials have a circus atmosphere: defendants paraded about in bright orange jumpsuits, barefoot, shaven, starved, ball-gagged and drugged; the proceedings little more than a high-verbal horsewhipping before the inevitable sentence, always the same: the Big Chair at Angel Island. The prospect of which sends Goncz into nervous fits, making hour-long calls to anonymous power-brokers, demanding midnight assurances that his position is secure, and the vulture-beaked specter of retribution is well at bay. As he has pointed out, his once-vast wealth is heavily invested in the Northern Republic of California's reconstruction. His belief is that he is insulated from his enemies.

That assessment may have undergone a dramatic turn with today's events.

Assurances aside, it seems to me that Cecilio Goncz's life has become defined by a series of concentric circles, himself at the center. As each surrounding ring is worn down, his response becomes more frantic. I'm concerned that this has yet to translate as violence towards me. My host has a long, documented history of ending interviews at knife-point. Since my arrival, two of his closest companions have disappeared, and now, these assassins. By my own reckoning, I'm bad luck, writ large in neon. What Mr Goncz is thinking is beyond me.

But as he comes from the bedroom, pistol in hand, it is of rising priority that I find out.

Ma’Marie

by Nichole Perkins, Los Angeles, CA, USA

“They wanted more boys, you see,” Marie began, cradling her steaming cup of green tea like the treasure it had become. It was one of the bribes I had to use to get her to talk to me today.

“The war in Iraq, the Little Big One, all of it took so many of our boys, our men, and then the water became infected. Men started dying. Women began having…” she looked around, even though we were the only ones in her studio. “Women began having periods for months on end.” Her forehead folded on itself, the wrinkles hiding the ruins of her former identification number.

“I was 20, maybe 21. Had really started enjoying sex the way it should be, you know, and then I got my period and the shit just lasted and lasted. The third month, I cried myself sick for a week. They’d started rationing tampons!” She looked up at me, and for a moment, I saw panic in her wide eyes before she remembered the now. She lowered her untouched tea and reached out for the basket of peaches—another convincing gift—with her left hand, a hand with four tallies sliced onto its back.

She noticed my glance and tucked it beneath the table.

“Four miscarriages,” she confirmed flatly and turned her head to the window.
I waited, unwilling to speak. Her eyes chased dust motes dancing before the glass pane. I jumped when she abruptly pushed her chair away from the table and approached the window with a salt shaker from the makeshift lazy susan. She layered the grains against the windowsill before returning to her seat.

“The witches—they have to count the grains of salt before they can come in to steal your babies,” she advised, a tilt to her head.

I kept my face neutral. She sipped her tea.

“The bleeding stopped during the fifth month. They came for me during the sixth. My room was very nice, very comfortable. I yielded three, but there were four who knew the best way. They’d give us a month to recover when we lost one. Everybody lost one. So many girls killed themselves that they shortened it to two weeks, but then we’d die from bleeding. So they gave us a month again.”

Marie traced the final notch carved into her hand.

“I ran away after I lost Bliss. One of them—he liked me. I had to kill him, but I think I liked him, too. I made it to Refuge, in former Watts. It took three weeks. There were a lot of Sisters with eraser burns across their foreheads. I was home.”

She picked up her tea, and I knew the interview was over. It was as much as she was willing to give and more than I thought I’d get.

As I climbed onto my bike, I looked back and found her sprinkling the doorstep with salt.