We Are the 100% by Quinoa / Chris Kirk
I
left my home because houses are not an emotionally sustainable way of life for me. I called my friend Johan in Brisbane and he suggested we hitchhike down to Byron Bay. We were delighted to be together and to shake off our suburban perversion with a touch of chaos. Before we began hitchhiking we fuelled ourselves with the finances he accrued by accosting guilty capitalists on the streets of Brisbane on behalf of Greenpeace; corn chips and a longneck of beer, “liquid bread”. We caught a ride to Byron with Lindsay, a young guy who has so many mutual friends that getting to know each other was a needless formality. In the Byron streets we wandered around listening to the street music and looking at the drunk backpackers, before departing for quieter waters, Broken Head. Johan and I built a fire and lay our beds beside each other on a tarp on the beach. We weren’t asleep for long when it began to rain and we folded the tarp over us like a carelessly makeshift tent. We were forced to retreat to Lindsay’s van, from the beautiful chaos of the wild lonely beach, where we slept awkwardly in the front seats. In the morning Lindsay dropped us off in town, we buried our bags in the bush and rubbed our hands together for an unknown day of youthful folly. The first step for Johan was buying alcohol. He got the cheapest red wine and the cheapest sugar-free cola and created a half-andhalf mix that we could openly drink in public. We stumbled upon Occupy Byron Bay as the speakers were finishing and they were preparing to march. We marched through the streets, kindly roadblocked by police, in protest of corporate greed taking precedence over human need, or just for the fun of it. We marched to the beach where someone announced we were going to stay until things changed. So Johan and I gathered food from the busy stupormarket and brought it down to the beach, placing it all out on the table. People took what they wanted into private piles to take home, so we rescued the sausages, cooked them up on the free barbecue and offered them around exuberantly. We found some of Johan’s Brisbane Greenpeace friends to hang out with, but when the sky 16 RFD 183 Fall 2020
became thick with black clouds and frequent lightning they all decided to drive away together from the impending storm, claiming no room for us two homeless vagabonds. I put up my tent in the bush and we retreated with our stuff into the intimate space. Johan played us some strange intense vibrations with his didgeridoo and djembe. I lay across Johan’s reclining body and sang “Visions of Johanna”. As I drifted to sleep Johan stared at his glowing phone and silently made plans. Ghosts of electricity howled in the bones of his face. The rain fell away and he announced he was heading back out into the urban night. I was half asleep and would have followed if he had encouraged me but instead he borrowed my shoes and jacket and departed without me, never returning. The following day I felt a bit lonely without my friend, stumbled upon an anti-coal seam gas mining rally and half-heartedly marched through the streets again. I had no interest or patience to listen to hours of politically-minded speakers announce repetitively why it is wrong to rape the earth for the purpose of maintaining our hysterical denial of the darkness of night. I sat alone with my thoughts for a while before deciding to obtain a large bag of food to give away. I approached individuals or groups and offered them food directly, bananas or blueberries for the children and gluten-free chocolate biscuits for the adults. Some people backed away from the alarming prospect of free food, others thankfully accepted and moved on, and some invited me to sit down and join them while we both enjoyed food, conversation and sunshine. I watched a beautiful man across the sand who seemed to be watching me back and drawing me towards his group, four guys from Spain, Germany, Britain and Holland. I drank goon with them until they decided to retreat to their hostel to watch rugby, deciding not to invite me back with them. I discovered the mutual delight of exchanging food for alcohol and companionship and moved from group to group all night, getting drunk, cooking sausages and swimming naked in the dark until it was time to go to bed, all my friends
