Apocalyptic Reflections of a Reluctant Road Warrior

“I remember a time of chaos… ruined dreams… this wasted land.”

-Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Back in May I wrote a piece reflecting on the Mad Max film series and my adventures behind the wheel, and received some positive responses via e-mail. One person concluded his note by saying that he hopes we don’t end up with the Mad Max version of the world. While I didn’t belabor the point in my original piece, part of what I was circling around in it is that, in certain crucial respects, we already live in that world.

The extent to which this is apparent largely depends on one’s level of economic insulation. For example, a woman I know who spent the last several years getting vastly overpaid to work in the cryptocurrency field has had no problem affording a luxurious life full of fancy dinners and designer drugs, first in San Francisco, then in Denver—two of the most expensive cities in the country. Not bad for a white woman with a master’s degree, born to a middle-class family. She may have had a stint or two in rehab, a few nervous breakdowns, an abusive boyfriend, and a rich friend or two who overdosed, but hey.

However, there are other people I know—people with full-time jobs—who’ve had to spend months on end living out of their cars. They slept with weapons close at hand.

***

Within a ten-minute drive of my home in East Oakland there are several large camper villages, and any number of smaller tent villages. Their curbside locations are flooded with garbage. On 12th Street heading toward Lake Merritt, there’s an entire shanty town built of wood pallets and other usable refuse. Just a few weeks ago I was coming home from work early in the morning and saw firefighters milling around the last smoldering ruins of a charred RV. Many times I’ve driven past the remains of tents and campers that accidentally caught on fire—or were subjected to arson, a common occurrence.

***

For three years prior to the covid apocalypse I was self-employed, teaching workshops on comic art, creative writing, hip hop culture, and social justice at schools in Oakland and San Francisco. Now I work graveyard shifts as a security guard—sitting in my vehicle, parked in industrial lots, on the lookout for trouble. If and when trouble arrives to our particular sites, it sometimes comes in the form of entire motorcades of armed and desperate hooligans. In the last year, one guard at my company had his car shot up, and another had to dodge a hail of Molotov cocktails from a deranged homeless man.

Hoping we don’t get the Mad Max future? I’m already a road warrior. In the words of street boxer Kimbo Slice, this how a n***a eat!

***

This is the only job I’ve ever had where almost all of my co-workers are black men—demonstrating, yet again, that we are disposable.

***

When I did the training sessions to get certified as a guard and to carry a firearm, the instructor told several hilarious stories about pepper-spraying belligerent people and getting into shoot-outs. He, along with all the trainers at the police range where we did our shooting qualification, clowned me for using a .22 caliber revolver—that is, until they saw my shot groupings. And by the way, ammosexual assholes—revolvers don’t jam, they’re easy to maintain, and .22 rounds have remained readily available despite the panic-induced drought of ammunition.

I didn’t bother to tell them that my first line of defense is to get the hell out of dodge at the first sign of danger. I’m not going to shoot someone, let alone get shot, for somebody else’s money. And despite what Hollywood would have us believe, even a Dirty Harry hand-cannon wouldn’t amount to shit against a whole crew of urban banditos. The best chance for survival is escape.

***

One of my kungfu students is a retired federal agent. Shortly before retirement, he barely survived a massive heart attack, induced by stress from the job. Hearing tales of his career, it’s clear that many of his former bosses and co-workers are dangerous, incompetent weirdos—our tax dollars at work.

***

On the weekend before the Summer Solstice I held the first gathering I’ve had at my home since the pandemic began. That’s over two years without seeing more than a couple of my friends at a time. The gathering was small, less than twenty people total, all of them coming and going in bursts of two or three. I set up my turntables and played records. There were transgendered folks, lesbians, laborers, teachers, artists, and a union organizer. My sweat-lodge brother came with his two young daughters. He tended my ancient charcoal grill while I showed the girls how to work the turntables.

Shortly before the event began, I got a text from a friend telling me she wouldn’t be able to make it to the barbecue… because she’d been shot. She texted me from a hospital bed.

As it turns out, there’s currently a man driving around the city of San Jose, shooting random women with a high-powered pellet rifle. My friend was in downtown San Jose in the afternoon to look at a used car for sale. She heard a pop and felt something like a rock hitting her back. The friend she’d come with pulled her down behind the car for cover. My friend was bleeding. The pellet had penetrated the thick bone of her scapula and punctured her lung; it stopped mere millimeters from one of the major arteries of her heart. If the round had been of a caliber any larger, she probably wouldn’t have lived to make jokes with the emergency room staff.

It took a week of grief and worry before I was finally able to get her on the phone and hear the story. Despite having survived a wide array of horrific and traumatizing experiences in her life, this incident left her especially confused, triggered, and distraught, because of its sheer and senseless randomness. Listen to her voice as she tells me about it, comparing it unfavorably to past horrors: Even after all of the times I was sexually assaulted…

All of the times.

***

That friend has had a hellish year; in January her twenty-something daughter tried to commit suicide.

***

Speaking of suicide, the last I heard about another friend was that she was in a coma after attempting to take her own life. One of her family members informed me of this via the friend’s phone. That was in February. The number is now disconnected. I don’t know if my friend is still alive or not, and if so, in what condition.

***

Speaking of sexual assault, most of the women I know are survivors of it. Many of them have been practicing surviving it since childhood.

***

My dad’s voice on the phone several months ago, telling me a story I’d never heard him tell: The first time I saw someone get murdered…

The first time.

***

I received a rather hostile e-mail in response to another piece I wrote about the need to destroy the anti-life machine we call industrial civilization. The guy was incensed that I would dare write something that might “incite young, impressionable people” to take actions that could get them “sent to prison” or “tortured” at some government black site.

It’s always amusing when people set out to chastise and insult you, and instead end up telling on themselves.

Perhaps this person is unfamiliar with the current incarceration rates for black, Latino, indigenous, and poor people. Or the tremendous amount of sexual assault, murder, child abuse, poverty, and police brutality suffered by those same people. Or, for that matter, the incalculable number of nonhumans who are exterminated by industry, locked in cages, or tortured in scientific experiments.

It is a condition of phenomenal privilege to be able to cower with immobilizing terror at the possibility of incarceration and torture; for the rest of us, our lives are made of these things.

The concrete jungle is an open-air prison—and, for most nonhumans, a death camp.

***

In February I started taking a yoga class, held at a studio that has as its primary vocation the teaching of Japanese bondage to yuppies. The studio is in a heavily gentrified part of town. Its walls are covered with art depicting women tied up, their faces twisted in pain or ecstasy—monuments to sexually-fetishized torture.

The yoga class is attended by a rotating cast of bourgeois, comfortable people who are often haunted by despair in their hollow, android lives. I dearly love both the exercise and the instructor, who is wonderful… but at the beginning of class when we introduce ourselves and I have to listen to everyone announcing their pronouns, referring to any group activity as being “in community,” and giving brief summaries of the emotions they’re “bringing to the space,” sometimes it’s all I can do to contain my rage. Every aspect of you is welcome here, the teacher says, her perfect white acrobat’s body rippled with muscles, her face mask-free.

Every aspect of me? I doubt it. But really, her words are for the squares and kinksters; no aspect of us savages has ever been welcome in Babylon… except as resources to exploit.

***

In the last year, two of my closest friends have disappeared from my life. One was a roommate; I kicked him out last summer after his increasing hostility and resentment finally became intolerable. The other flaked on plans we had back in March and I haven’t heard from him since. Thanks to mutual friends I know that he’s alive and well, which means that he simply abandoned me. I don’t know why.

***

On two separate occasions last autumn, within a month of each other, I gave many hours of my time to sorting through the belongings of dead men. One of them was my cousin. He was only 62; he died from a stroke, partly a consequence of a lifetime of addiction to coffee and cigarettes (which I am also rather fond of, thank you very much). The other man was my friend’s uncle, in his early 50s, who died from the slow suicide of crystal meth use.

***

Since 2019, two of my other cousins have died from substance abuse; one, in her early 30s, from the cumulative effects of alcohol and heroin; the other, in his mid-20s, from a fentanyl overdose.

***

I’ve been on the hunt for stable roommates. Since May I’ve been paying rent on an empty room in my house, after the latest roommate—a certifiable kook and borderline personality if I’ve ever met one—decided to go live in a camper van so she could avoid rent… in order to pay for summer festivals. After living here for a mere eight months, she managed to leave the room looking like a crime scene.

Soon, my other roommate is going to move out after eight years, to help take care of a family member who just a month ago was strung out on every drug there is and living in a cardboard box next to a dumpster.

***

On a recent sunny afternoon, when I came out of the liquor store at an intersection a few blocks from my house, the corner out front was populated as follows: one severely emaciated homeless woman who was panhandling, two grossly obese women dressed like hookers, and two skinny young boys on bicycles. All up and down the block, children were playing in driveways and carports. A gigantic pick-up truck, worthy of Immortan Joe, came thundering down the residential street at over 50mph and roared right through the intersection’s four-way stop sign.

***

I can’t speak for you, dear reader… But all of this sounds very Mad Max to me.

Malik Diamond is a hip hop artist, cartoonist, author, educator, and martial arts instructor. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is the descendant of kidnapped Africans, conquered Natives, and rural laborers of the Scots-Irish, Swiss, and German varieties. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with two brown humans and a white cat. E-mail: malikdiamond (at) hotmail (dot) com