40. SQUATTING GYPSIES

"One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk."
                     -- Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota 

    The Eighties - "We push, we struggle, we kamikaze 'til we get there"1.... going nowhere, along with the rest of the unemployed queue, poverty-stricken in Montréal. By the Summer of 1982, we had no money, no  prospects, and were subsequently evicted. Up against (a no longer visible) wall, we decided to squat. We'd seen photos shared by fellow boho punks of squatter communities in Berlin, London, and the rest of Europe (most notably, the famed Freetown Christiania, in Copenhagen, Denmark, where folks built creatively-inspired, whimsical, art-shelters, behind barricaded streets, declaring siege to the world, brazenly defying gentrification). 

                                                         Mural at Christiania
     Consisting of hippies, squatters, collectivists, and anarchists - Christiania originated in 1971, with the following mission statement - "The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and ever individual hold themselves responsible over the well-being of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining, and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted."

     It takes extremely resourceful and autonomous individuals to co-organize living off-the-grid, without running water, electricity, or heat, until alternative systems are (hopefully) created. Closer to home, we saw huge banners proclaiming "RENT STRIKE", hanging from tenement buildings in the East Village. We were familiar with NYC's ABCNoRio housing advocacy group, from whose mandate we learned the sad, statistical truth : ONE BILLION PEOPLE (one in six!) planetary-wide are homeless, living on the streets, and/or barely eking-by in squats, slums, shantytowns, favelas, and refugee camps. "Yet squatting is largely absent from policy, or academic debate, and is rarely conceptualized - as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement".2

                                                                                 Rocinha favela, Rio de Janeiro
     We lost no time casing a series of vacant apartment complexes awaiting demolition, on the ritzy end of Boulevard Mount Royal, facing the park. We slipped through the minimally locked gates to explore hundreds of rooms. Devoid of "civilization", they satisfied our doomsday, sic-fi obsessions (whereby the human race extincts itself from bird-flu / mad-cow / AIDS / Ebola / The Andromeda Strain3 / nuclear holocaust / ad infinitum, and we are its sole survivors).

     The walls of the squat were stained with creepy molds and mildew, the ceilings leaked, the stairways were rotted....Ace Vampire Headquarters! My fascination with mirrors provided hours of trendy "Art Installation" fun. I created a "Cracked Mirror Dimensional Fetish Chamber" from the pried-off, shattered glass of each bathroom's medicine cabinet, paying no heed to the "seven-years-bad-luck" syndrome. Smashed mirrors were my "fling" (just ask my ex-boyfriends). By rudiment calculations, I'd already wracked up an Immortal's worth of entropy and backwards writing........

     M and F practiced martial intrigues, and hosted mad percussion jams, in the cavernous wet maze of basement tunnels, echoing eerily like medieval dungeons, resounding in spooky drum orchestras on hollow water pipes, tanks, and radiators. Guess who joined in?!!! (who else? our best friends - ghosts!). Disembodied spirits roamed freely, the usual bored denizens, rattling chains and bemoaning their fate, like in some god-awful B-movie (we urged 'em to elect a spokesperson, form a union, and upgrade to using technology). The squat was one freaky place to trip, the walls were saturated with once-intimate postures, emotional overloads and greasy cooking, merging rancid memories and splattering thick, icky, Archaeologically Phantasmal, Ectoplasmic Slime.

     Empty apartments seem surprisingly like caves. The auric web was so damp, we decided to squat on the roof. What little possessions we had were stowed up there, mostly blankets and bedrolls (like little hobos!). What happened next was too sad....even for clowns! Over the course of the summer, we naturally befriended / infiltrated the neighborhood kids, and vice versa (admittedly, we resembled larger-than-life, cartoon characters, with nothing to do all day but play! play! play!). Emboldened by our punk-Pippi-Longstocking-charm-school (Fifi Brindacier, in French), we attracted a sizable posse of the lil' rascals, smuggling us left-over food, snacks (Poptarts! or else!), and soda-pop from home, until one of the @##$%^& miscreants either told their parents about us, or got caught ransacking the cupboards for our sake. We returned one morning to our hidden rooftop kingdom, to find our meager stash of worldly possessions gone! gone! gone!

                        Cruel judgmental world!

1 Killing Joke, "Eighties"
2 Neuwirth, Robert, Shadow Cities : A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
3 Crichton, Michael, The Andromeda Strain