Suiting Up, Crusting Down

Recently London was tousled by a series of riots led by outraged anarchists who were probably just really bored. As usual, it looked like a good time. But it also made us wonder who really has the superior lifestyle: hand-to-mouth agitators or the city-boy* capitalists they abhor? So we assigned one staff writer to pose as a punk and another as a plutocrat to investigate. Here’s what happened. *“City boy” is the London equivalent of “Wall Street scumbag.”

CITY-BOY CRITERIA:

1. Drink champagne and brandy and smoke cigars every night

2. Dress like Charlie Sheen in

Wall Street

3. Travel by tube or black cab—no walking allowed

4. Eat only sushi, dim sum, or food from gastropubs

5. Frequent Central London strip clubs

6. Read the entire

Financial Times

every day—even the bits that look like binary code

7. Pretend to be stinking rich at all times

CITY-BOY DIARY
BY BRUNO BAILEY, PHOTOS BY JAMIE LEE CURTIS TAETE AND JUSTIN MULCHAHY

MONDAY

I usually walk to work, but my new suede brogues (£150 from Gentleman’s Traditional Shoes in Camberwell) aren’t meant for the trudging peasantry. The nearest appropriate transportation was the Underground. It was jam-packed with hundreds of stressed-out, grumpy city workers and the waft of coffee mixed with expensive colognes and rancid morning farts made me want to vomit.

Looking around at my fellow travelers I suddenly realized my beard was déclassé. When I arrived at my destination, Liverpool Street Station, the heartland of London’s bankers, I booked myself in for a wet shave.

At lunchtime I went to All Bar One, an appropriately soulless chain of gastropubs that serves sausage and mash for £10 a go and pints for £3.50. I overheard one of the suited fellows next to me refer to the waitress as a “right spastic cunt,” which was a lovely way to start my meal. Eventually I sauntered back to the office but, being disinclined to work, I went home early and puffed a cigar in the garden. So far, being a city boy was simply wonderful.

TUESDAY

My face was still sore from the shave. Sure, I’d taken the piss a bit with my productivity on Monday, but today I was determined to work at the computer for a few hours. My duties consisted of cruising various social-networking sites before an early lunch.

Canary Wharf is the towering hub of British and European finance. Feeling important, I headed over to have an overpriced club sandwich (£9) al fresco, right at the foot of One Canada Square, the epicenter of this glorious monument to success.

The gorgeous stench of billions of pounds wafted around me as I sat picking bacon fat from my teeth and smoking Montecristo Number Four cigars. A fellow capitalist grimaced at me for blowing fine Cuban tobacco smoke onto his eggs Benedict. I thought I was doing him a favor.

To satisfy the hunger for culture that comes with being a master of the universe, I booked a ticket to the Royal Opera House to see Wagner’s

Lohengrin

. I sipped on a few brandies at a nearby pub before puffing another cigar on the steps of the opera house.

My ticket came with a glass of champagne that I slurped down in the foyer. As I looked for my seat, I realized that I had booked a standing-room ticket to a production that lasted nearly five hours. This was clearly a touch of idiocy left over from my poorer days. After fidgeting for three and a half torturous hours and being frowned at by the elderly couple in front of me, I left on the verge of tears. Pretending to be filthy rich was beginning to wear on me.

WEDNESDAY

Somehow I had neglected to secure appropriate lodging. After surveying my humble residence, I decided my windfall of make-believe success allowed for a viewing of an obscenely expensive apartment near Canary Wharf. I felt a bit guilty about leading the estate agent on, so I lied and said I was waiting for my fiancée (who worked in a renowned Spanish art gallery) to accept my marriage proposal before I could really consider buying the place. Shaking my low-class scruples was proving more difficult than I’d thought—and it was getting embarrassing. I left in shame with some paperwork.

But soon a reliable source informed me that after a hard day of wiping their asses with £50 notes atop platinum-plated shitters, many city boys retire to vast, vapid bars on the edges of the Square Mile, London’s old financial hub, to watch sports. So off I went to watch football at the Barracuda Bar on Houndsditch. As I strolled purposefully, some bike couriers near Aldgate looked at me like I was off to sell shares of a company that makes tainted baby food to rich, trusting widows. And I soon learned that the Barracuda is a South African bar. By halftime it was too much to bear.

THURSDAY

Today I realized that since I’ve been dressing up like a fop, I haven’t taken the time to enjoy music—not on my iPod, not at work, not even at home. I hadn’t even noticed. My theory is that this suit is sapping my ability to feel joy.

By early afternoon I needed a good meal, and being a modern man of means I opted for the exotic and worldly delicacy known as Oriental fusion. I thought it would be prudent to bone up on my “Eastern culture” now that the Chinese are set to rule the world. I know this because the articles in my new daily read, the

Financial Times

, have been hinting at it quite a lot.

By the time I had finished my lunch it was about 4 PM, and I contemplated heading back to work. But I was pooped. Instead I went to a fancy bar to relax, sip on a couple Remy Martins, and enjoy a choice variety of D’Angelo tracks. I can’t drink too much brandy—it makes me gag—so I switched to whiskey, which makes me retch slightly less. No one spoke to me even though I was wearing the right stuff. I think I might have been missing the lingo. I found myself contemplating the logistics of jamming a portfolio of mergers and acquisitions up one of their asses.

The truly prosperous must be in tip-top condition so they don’t tire from fucking over as many proles as possible. With this in mind, I trotted along to an upmarket gym for a game of squash. I was feeling pretty sozzled, but no one likes a quitter, so I staggered through 45 minutes of painful degradation. I tried to smoke another cigar after the match to regain some poise, but it made my esophagus feel as if I’d been fellating exhaust pipes all day. I went home drunk, unwell, and unhappy.

FRIDAY

This morning I felt like a gold-leafed piece of shit. My diet of overrich food, cigars, brandy, and beer top-ups was clearly taking its toll. In an attempt to repair my discouraged body, I ordered some sushi for lunch. I ate it on the street, which was not very dignified, but I had a cigar for dessert. This time it got my head straight.

Disappointed with my lunch, I went to the city boy’s favorite retreat—the titty bar. Talking to girls makes me nervous, so stripping is something I have studiously avoided until now. But being an abuser of the weak and a champion of the commercial means paying to look at a vagina (and maybe even a butthole) or two on a Friday afternoon.

The Griffin is one of those pound-in-a-pint-glass sorts of places. Mixed in wonderfully among the motocross and snowboarding displayed on numerous massive screens via obscure Sky channels, surprisingly attractive girls disrobed to a Nickelback soundtrack. During one awkward silence I heard the blokes next to me say, “As far as sports go later in life, cricket really is the only option.” Unless it was a metaphor I didn’t catch, these guys didn’t have much use for naked woman gyrating to awful music. Turns out I didn’t either, so I went home and felt relief wash over me like a bucket of cheap lager.

Now that my time as a city boy was over, I loosened my cotton yoke and tended to my blisters, all the while gorging on free-trade biscuits and tofu. Being a capitalist pig is far too much work.

ANARCHIST CRITERIA:
1. Don’t engage with the system in any way—no mobile phones, bank cards, or public transportation 2. Live in a squat 3. Hang out with a dog 4. Don’t pay for food 5. Look like a member of Extreme Noise Terror (or at least Doom) 6. Make some new crusty friends 7. Attend at least one punk show

ANARCHIST DIARY
BY JAMES KNIGHT, PHOTOS BY JAMIE LEE CURTIS TAETE AND MICHAEL OTERO

MONDAY

Everyone knows that no true anarchist would live in a place where you pay for things like hot water, electricity, and slaves of the state to come and take away the trash. Accordingly, my home for the week was a squat off Walworth Road in South London. I’d given myself a budget of £5 to last the five days, so for lodging, free had to trump comfort.

After settling into my bed on the floor and washing my face in a pool of stagnant water that had been in the sink for nearly 24 hours, I decided I needed a style update. It was an easy decision: LA posi-crust-hardcore punk from when more than ten people cared about Final Conflict.

I left the squat and lurked around a branch of the corporate pharmacy chain Boots awaiting an opportunity to nick some green hair dye. Boots supports vivisection. It is also fine with squirting shampoo into bunnies’ eyes and making them wear lipstick on their skin and electrodes on their brains. I had absolutely no qualms about stealing from this outhouse of the bourgeoisie.

Of course, I had to have a mohawk. But the only implement we could find at the squat to shear my hair was a pair of blunt stationery scissors. This gave me an appropriately DIY (that is, awful-looking) appearance. Punks don’t care much about things like health and safety and hygiene, so bleach was applied directly to the remaining strip of hair by my new squat girlfriend, Karley. The only precaution she took was wearing a mangy goalkeeper’s glove during the application process. It was all satisfactorily punk.

While the bleach settled I learned a new skill: sewing. No self-respecting crusty leaves home without a Los Crudos patch, and I made an adequate attempt at affixing some flair to an old denim jacket with cutoff sleeves.

Washing the toxic chemicals from my hair in the freezing shower was uncomfortable, but I kept up the don’t-give-a-shit pretense until the dye was splooged all over my noggin and I realized that my forehead was rapidly turning green.

TUESDAY

Luckily the dye didn’t stick to my skin like it stuck to my hair. It was like a rather punk tuft of grass had sprouted out of my skull. Night one in the squat had involved surprisingly little debauchery: My squatmates had a TV and watched politicians spewing their filthy lies through the corporate media machine on

News at Ten

. I drowned out the elitist bullshit with a scratched copy of Conflict’s

The Ungovernable Force

on a record player from the 1960s that somebody had brought back from Berlin.

Aside from waking up on the floor and feeling like I’d never be able to walk again, it was quite a letdown. There was no all-night weed smoking or heated political discussion. There wasn’t even a police siege.

To amend matters I decided to pack up my sleeping bag and have a drink at the Foundry—a bar-art space-slophouse for Spanish cycle couriers with tribal tattoos and the single-dreadlock-that-looks-like-a-turd-log-jutting-from-the-back-of-the-head hairstyle. Surely I’d find like-minded souls here? The answer was no. But there was an organic ale that tasted of mud and parsnips.

After stealing six cans of cider from a nearby newsagent, I walked across Hackney Downs and went to borrow my friend’s dog, which was overly pleased to have someone with Astroturf for hair to play with. When we got back to the squat he savaged my mobile bed in excitement.

Factory-manufactured dog leads are tools of oppression, so I lassoed the mutt with my belt and headed out wandering. It was pretty fun watching people cross the street with looks of total panic on their faces, but the police car trailing me all the way back across the river to South London was not so enjoyable.

WEDNESDAY

Forty-eight hours in, it was time for a celebration. My squat buddies told me that they were up for partying so I went down to the local off-license booze store and discovered how punks can afford to get drunk: Three liters of White Ace cost only £3. In a flush of excitement, I spent £9 of my new friends’ money on nine liters of the stuff and retired to the squat.

I can now confirm that, coupled with the occasional bump of ketamine, drinking several White Aces leads to an almost lysergic experience. This is especially true if the person hasn’t eaten for two days because all his money went to rotting his guts with cider that even street-sleepers wouldn’t touch.

Fuzzy headed, I collapsed in a corner and woke up intermittently to throw up into a shopping bag riddled with holes. The upshot was that the vomit had leaked all over my t-shirt and increased the authenticity of my getup. When I finally awoke I felt like someone had kicked my head in. My t-shirt for the week was saturated with a nice coat of bile, and I had unexplained cuts all over my forehead. Now I was finally getting somewhere! The taste of freedom was sour and painful but intensely liberating.

THURSDAY

I haven’t eaten anything since Monday. I slept most of the day to try and kill the hunger pains but was jostled awake by my new squat buddies, Lauren and Kerri. They told me about some bins behind the local Marks & Spencer, in Elephant & Castle, that were a gold mine for just-out-of-date food. We headed over to see what the trash was serving for dinner.

Kerri was pretty optimistic after previous raids had yielded untold gourmet wonders. She brought along one of those shopping trolleys that your great-aunt Edna might use. Everyone was in high spirits. As we rounded the back of M&S, disaster struck: A huge security fence had been erected around our expired morsels.

Like good crusties, we pulled the fence apart so Kerri could slip inside. After a root around in the huge dumpsters, our worst fears came true: We had been beaten to the punch by fellow freegans. All that was left were some chocolate éclairs. My stomach was eating its own lining at this point so I started stuffing my face. Each slightly sweaty, turd-shaped dough popsicle tasted better than the last.

FRIDAY

After a week of drinking cider and sleeping on floors, I decided it was time to get back to nature. I’d heard that West Coast power-violence veterans Capitalist Casualties were playing at crust hangout the Grosvenor in Stockwell, so I decided to spend some time in a park close to the venue before catching the show.

I felt inexplicably uncomfortable and decided a couple cans of Special Brew would make everything a little better. As I sank my second I realized that in the same way Rastafarianism legitimizes smoking weed everywhere you go, being a crusty punk is just a big excuse to be a functioning (or at least semifunctioning) alcoholic.

Capitalist Casualties missed their plane. Very punk. Concertgoers were pretty sad, but there was a real sense of community and beery commiseration all round. I left feeling good about anarchy in general.

I might not have slept very well this week, and I never really ate, but drinking my body weight in cider and palling around with a few slightly smelly instigators is still preferred to mingling with the odious suited hordes that come spilling out of All Bar One every night.

In conclusion: Being a champagne-swilling millionaire who shits on the weak and downtrodden while raking in profits culled from the genocidal rape of the earth causes heartburn and makes you miserable as sin.

By contrast, people who lie in the gutter begging for change while drinking a rusty old can of Special Brew as a dog dribbles on their filth-encrusted combat trousers are happy, morally praiseworthy humans. We cannot recommend becoming one highly enough!