Short Story Alert III

Aisle
2
The Futile Act

“Tom, I’m just not sure this is going to work.”

“I’m sure George Hewes felt the same way,” Tom said. “But what he participated in was the spark that helped the American colonies throw off British rule to become an independent nation.”

I won’t ask, Rich thought. Because he’s going to tell me, anyway.

“Hewes, by the way, was one of a band of patriots that boarded seven ships anchored in Boston Harbor,” Tom continued, making sure the nylon stocking stretched over his face was in place. “The men threw ten thousand British pounds’ worth of tea into the harbor, to protest being taxed without representation in their government. Even though the East India Tea Company was now selling the tea less expensively than smuggled Dutch tea, Boston’s patriots wouldn’t drink it – because the price still included the hated tax. They threw a bunch of cheap crap into the harbor, even while they were spending more for the tea they were drinking. Symbolically, they were telling the British they wouldn’t sell their souls for inexpensive goods. We’re doing precisely the same thing. Now put your stockings on.”

“Maybe I’d feel better about this if we were in war paint,” Rich said as he pulled the plastic egg holding his nylons out of his pocket. “And if you weren’t channeling Nicholas Cage.” Tom ignored the remarks. Rich snapped open the egg and pulled the stockings over his head, mashing his nose and ears. “I feel like I’m in an episode of ‘Starsky and Hutch,’” he said. Both men zipped up black jackets and pulled black knit caps tightly onto their heads.

“Concord Regiment, fall in,” Tom whispered into a walkie-talkie. The talkie instantly chattered as members of the team checked in, stating their readiness. When it grew quiet, Tom switched channels. “Revere to Adams, Revere to Adams, Concord is ready; repeat, Concord is ready.” He lowered the talkie, listening to the affirmative reply: “Ready for Griffin’s Wharf. Griffin’s Wharf in ten minutes. Mark.”

Other teams, he knew, were also checking in with the group’s Samuel Adams, a man Tom himself had met only twice, both times at a rather effeminate bar in Rodeo Drive. He didn’t know his real name, but suspected he’d married – or at least knew – a woman named Gloria, since her name was tattooed above a skull and crossbones on the man’s hairy left bicep. Not quite the image he wanted to retain of a revolutionary leader, but he supposed, as he and Rich skulked along the shadowed edge of an immense warehouse, that some may have balked at Adams’ bald head ringed by a wild fringe of grey hair. Somewhat romantically, Tom imagined the original Adams himself had a tattoo – much smaller and of better taste – concealed under the rough muslin shirts he wore in his ale house. Never expect your leaders to be perfect, he reminded himself. Just concentrate on your shared ideals. That is the path to perfection.

They’d planned the act for months. They raided offices for shipping schedules, studied ample weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security’s measures to keep unwanted guests out of the port area and found sympathetic dock workers who would see strategic overhead lights were shot out or accidentally blotted by enormous piles of cargo.

And now they were doing it. Striking a blow for the working man, enslaved by a corporation’s reach, wealth and power that made the East India Trading Company – indeed, the old British Empire – appear as sinister and powerful as a local street gang.

“The other corporations – the competition – only worry about No. 1 because they’re not it,” Tom said to Rich, more than a year ago, as they watched a group of fourteen screaming toddlers in their church nursery. He was on a recruiting mission for the Patriots, as they called themselves. “They won’t help us at all. They all get their goods from the same factories in China, where little kids work fourteen hour days, seven days a week. What we’re planning is a blow against evil, a blow that will show not all Americans are consumer zombies, selling their birth right for a cheap set of table and chairs or a kid’s blanket – kid’s blankets! We wrap our kids up in these things at night! And they’re not made here. They’re all made over there. In China.”
Tom recalled that conversation, as he and Rich slipped through the darkness, crawling on their bellies between two low stacks of crates as a night watchman idled nearby, spitting tobacco juice into the water.

Through an already stifling August night, individuals joined into groups of twos and threes. They climbed fences. Dashed warily across access roads and freeways. Some from the North, some from the West, a few from the East. One daring man climbed the tall ladder to an empty cargo crane, prepared to light a powerful lantern should he receive word from the rear guard that the police had entered the dock area. Most of the slinking crew had walkie-talkies chattering quietly, as group leaders kept their men dispersed, but moving forward, and as the rear guard radioed progress to Adams’ Ale House, their headquarters. They leaped over ruins of rusted chain, navigated mazes of massive cargo crates, sticking to the shadows, dodging the scanty crew of night watchmen and graveyard stevedores that could not be bribed or, frankly, didn’t speak enough English to be a threat.

Their target: the mighty Won Pi Gau.

Through spies at Long Beach who knew dock workers in Canton who wanted an authentic pair of Levis – and by authentic, the man insisted on a pair made in the United States, not abroad – they’d found the Won Pi Gau, their target vessel, bound from Canton to Long Beach. The ship’s cargo was known precisely to the leaders only, though most in the group had an inkling it would consist of the ordinary effluvia of American life, ironically now mostly excluding tea.

They would throw it all into the sea.

Tom, as he approached the dock where the enormous vessel stood to, again wished the ship were a prim British cargo ship, sails furled, decks smelling of tar and sea salt and astringent soap. Born too early, he said to himself again. “But for Revere and Hancock and Graves, they were taking on the epitome of modern power, modern in their time,” he said to Rich, who long ago gave up listening to Tom’s impromptu history lessons. “They walked over commonplace cobblestones to a commonplace dock and climbed aboard seven nondescript ships and tossed a whole lot of ordinary boxes of boring India tea into the harbor they’d known their whole lives. What they did – and who they did it for – was absolutely contemporary.”

“These itch,” Rich said, scratching at the nylon stretched over his cheek.

Tom glanced at him. “You’ve got a run.”

They arrived at their designated staging point, a scant thirty yards from a rickety steel staircase the ship’s crew would use to embark and disembark in a few hours. Others were near similar staircases. Stallone-types were abandoning plans including stairs, going instead to monkeying up the long chains holding the vessel in place.

Early on, some in the group doubted the effectiveness of the act. “With so much coming into the country, is anyone really going to notice if we stop just a tiny fraction of it,” asked Earl, leader of the dissenters, at a gathering of Patriots held six months prior to the act. “Let’s face it. We’ll be lucky to toss off the contents of one of those crates, before the cops get wise and corral us. Maybe one store, two, three, will be affected. But more of that crap comes in every week, every day. It’s a drop in the ocean.”

“It’ll be noticed, Earl,” said the Patriots’ Sam Adams. “The media will see to that. They hate the corporation. And when they get the news release, the live video, the photos, we’re going to feed them of the act, both before and after the police arrive, they’ll jump on it. We’ll be worldwide, instantly. Especially when we give them Tom’s Revolutionary War connections. The only thing the media likes more than lambasting the rich is making fun of right-wing kooks.”

The comment still rankled Tom, though in his patriotic fervor he was able to overlook it. Also rankling was their leader’s decision to make them all wear pirate eye patches. Tom knew from long research that while the Patriots at Boston Harbor wore Indian headdresses and other such regalia, there were no known uses of pirate patches. He so wanted this event to be historically accurate.

The signal came over the talkie: “Two lights in the Old North Church. Proceed to Dartmouth. Repeat, proceed to Dartmouth.”

Tom’s heart thumped wildly as he raced up the steel stairs, Rich and a number of others following. Two lights. That meant the three night watchmen in the general area of the Won Pi Gau were having a smoko near the Porta-Potties on the dock near the ship’s stern, far enough away from the stairs to allow the men to race up without worrying about the noise their shoes made on the metal.

Other calls came over the walkie-talkie as Tom’s men raced up the stairs, directing other teams to proceed to “The Beaver,” and “The Elanor,” with the Dartmouth, the tea-bearing ships the rebels boarded and emptied in Boston. For the men scrabbling aboard the Won Pi Gau, the names meant the three stairways linking the ship’s deck to the dock below.

"How much of the ship do you think we'll empty," Rich whispered as he and Tom
scrabbled up the last few steps to the ship's deck.

Tom stared at the ship's bulk. There weren't any masts, or sails, or wooden trap doors, or salty sea dogs to give him a reference for size. Only long, dark boxes stacked like blocks, making the ship look exceedingly top-heavy. Somewhere in the maze, he assumed, was the ship's bridge. For all he knew, they looked out their front windows at a wall of cargo and steered the ship by camera and remote control.

For the first time, a little doubt crept into his mind on the effectiveness of the operation. "Well," he said, finally. "We'll do what we can. Enough we'll get noticed."

"And thrown in jail," Rich asked.

Tom ignored him. He straightened his three-point hat - bought from a Hollywood second-hand costume shop - and did a quick headcount. All men present. "Concord to Adams, Concord to Adams. Ready at the top of Dartmouth," Tom whispered into the walkie-talkie.

The device crackled. "Affirmative, Concord. Proceed, Sons of Liberty."Tom gave quick signals, sending some men racing down the track between the enormous container stacks, while others leaped to the nearest pile and quickly opened the bottommost container.

"Where's this stuff bound, matey," one of Tom's more jocular team members said, pulling a squat cardboard box from the container, hefting it experimentally. Tom consulted his log book, looked at the label on the box, then stared at the log book again. The book was supposed to contain a manifest of the ship's cargo, but Tom was dubious of his ability to interpret it enough to find a match from book to box label. "I think it's going to a Cible discount store," he said, indicating the logo on the box label. "Damned if I know where. Throw it overboard."

The man darted the scant yards to the ship's port side and heaved the box over. Tom counted three seconds before he heard a distant splash.

"Just like that, but much more quickly," he said. His men formed a chain from the box to the ship's rail and began emptying the container - forty feet long, as large as a semi trailer.

Similar chains, accompanied by similar splashes, quickly indicated activity aboard the Won Pi Gau. Chatter over the walkie-talkies, frequent and enthusiastic at first, slowed to a trickle as the men set to work. Ten minutes passed, and as far as Tom could tell, no one yet had noticed the activity, nor sounded any audible alarm. The guetters set to watch the night watchmen reported they'd finished their smoke and had resumed their patrols, but dockside, far from the splashes on the seaside of the ship.

Clearing the port of stevedores – who work 24 hours a day – hadn’t been easy. In the end, through some of the group’s shadier members’ shadier connections in the Los Angeles underworld, they had fomented a Teamsters strike that had the port shut down for nearly a week as laborers and management haggled. Even the watchmen on the docks that night were scabs, happy for a few days’ quiet work while ships stood to between Long Beach and Catalina, waiting for the port to open.

As the night wore on, the men relaxed. A few opened some of the boxes they were tossing and reveled in tossing container and content into the water. Soon, the sea alongside the Won Pi Gau bobbed with pillows, stuffed animals, odd bits of furniture and a flotilla of basketballs, while microwaves, boxes of clothing, folding chairs and dolls sank to the muck on the harbor bottom.
He had quick visions of replicating container - and ship - distasters he'd seen on the Internet: Containers toppled like dominoes, some sinking to the bottom of the harbor as they fell overboard. Some crushed like tin cans, their contents a mangled mess of cardboard, pressed wood, weak cloth and foam pellets. Ships capsized under the weight of toppling mounds of garbage merchandise.

Tom, unfortunately, wet his pants when lights seared on and klaxons blazed aboard ship about fifteen minutes after the men started their deed. Panicked, he screamed to his men, "The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!" A few of his men darted by, running to the stairs, scattering the handbills they'd plastered on containers, boxes, the ship itself, proclaiming, in a stiff English borrowed from his hero George Hewes:

“We free Sons of Liberty were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the boxes of IMPORTED CHINESE TWEE and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the boxes with our knives, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water. In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every box to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.” He was quite proud of his iteration of Hewes’ text. Then to cement the message, Tom had written: “We tossed these hated, imported items into the Long Beach harbor as a patriotic protest against the weakening of the American economy by consumers seeking increasingly cheaper foreign goods, and the retailers selling the soul of our country to oblige them. The Sons of Liberty have spoken.”

He wasn't sure how much time he had to dash down the staircase - or if indeed security would meet him halfway up. He was certain none of his men, fleeing into the darkness of the docks and the ship itself, had seen the pee stain on his pants.

The security guard he met at the top of the stairs, however, did notice.

LONG BEACH ‘TWEE PARTY’ screamed the Los Angeles Times the next day. Below the headline was a photo of police leading Tom, still in his three-pointed hat, through a corridor at police headquarters.

He felt he looked rather rakish and defiant. He was actually proud his nylons had been torn off in a scuffle with security at the dock, so as to present to the nation a rational, American face on an act once again meant to spark a shot heard ‘round the world.

Self-described revolutionaries, the paper said, boarded a Chinese cargo carrier and tossed an undisclosed amount of consumer goods into the sea, mirroring what one of the group’s leaders – who had only given the name Paul Revere to police – the defiant Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773.

In fact, the paper said, the self-described leaders of the group wore Revolution-era costumes they rented from a local costume shop. “I”ll say they’re the best-dressed freaks we’ve ever arrested,” Police Captain Kirby Wilson said.

For some reason, however, the paper noted, all participants wore pirate eye patches.
“Rather than targeting one hated imported good like their revolutionary idols,” the paper said, “the men tore open what harbor spokesman Angelo Rotini described as boxes of clothing, bedding, childrens’ toys and other consumer items, most bound for discount stores ranging from Cible to Bil-Stor, mostly in the Pacific Northwest.”

“’Who knows what motivates some people,’” the paper quoted Rotini as saying. “’We’ve had all sorts of kooks slip into the harbor area, from vandals to thieves to some weirdo who was certain Captain Nemo was going to appear in the harbor with the Nautilus to take him below. You think in Los Angeles you’ve seen all the kooks. But then more weirdos come out of the woodwork.’”

“Anne Chapman, spokesperson for the American Retailers Union, said while a ‘minority’ of US residents occasionally complain about the flood of good entering the US from China and other countries by far, most Americans welcome the opportunity seeking goods on the world markets afford them in stretching their paychecks.”

“’This certainly ranks as the most unique protest I’ve ever seen,’ Chapman said. She said it’s highly unlikely, however, that the act – which she deplores as larceny and vandalism – will cause much more than a ripple in the nation’s retail landscape. ‘People are too used to getting what they want at prices that keep going down,’ she said. ‘No amount of destruction or disruption, short of a nuclear war, is going to alter the status quo.’”

“Nuclear war,” Tom muttered as he folded the paper and stowed it on the jail cell mattress at his feet. “They’d be for that, too, if they could figure out how to sell the bombs for $8.90 apiece.”

He jammed his hands in his pockets. Pulled his left hand out, bearing a small, crumpled piece of paper. He smoothed it out. He stared at the picture on it. It had come with his pirate patch. He shook his head. And for the first time, read the words beneath.

“Damn.”

He threw the paper to the floor and covered his eyes.