Kamikaze Lust Read Online Free

I’d never crossed a double yellow line before. I felt rebellious, nihilistic even. Shade and I couldn’t stop smiling, as we headed west toward the second parking garage of the day.
    Only when we left the jeep and started walking toward the picket line did it hit me that this strike could get expensive. Very expensive, indeed.

    Unlike the molluscan mass outside the courthouse, the crowd gathered in front of The City News formed an amorphous and angry blob swallowing anything in its wake. I stayed along the outskirts of the police barriers, while Shade adapted more quickly to the scene. Someone handed her a placard, and I lost her to the sea of black jackets, television cameras, and receding hairlines, until she returned and dragged me kicking and screaming to the center of the crowd where a few other reporters had staked out turf next to a hot dog stand.
    I was uncomfortable with the spectacle of these hereto-fore mild-mannered, Clark Kent and Lois Lane reporters morphing seamlessly into fiery Bolsheviks. There were James, the Asian mensch as Shade called him, raising his fist in the air, and Carrie, the twitchy City Hall reporter who always wore business suits, wielding a placard that said: Union Rights = Human Rights. They had to know how ridiculous they looked. The whole scene was as absurd as a song and dance number from the Broadway musicals my mother revered. Even Shade was screaming loud enough that her voice became Lauren Bacall husky. Slowly, however, amid all of the shouting and sloganeering, a strange energy overwhelmed me, and I wondered whether I was the one who appeared ridiculous among the frenzied ralliers. Testing myself, I took a step forward, raised my fist and shouted: “Back off union busters!” My cheeks flushed, but nobody seemed to notice. I was just another voice in the crowd. A few more chants and I felt invigorated, unraveled, as if my life had a discernible purpose, if only temporarily. Soon, I was cheering along as strikers threw bottles at armored delivery trucks and chided any mutt who crossed the line. I became indignant when reporters from the other dailies, gathering material for tomorrow’s papers, descended upon us. Was frozen as photographers snapped our pictures.
    Later, other unions joined a solidarity rally. Thousands of people gathered around us, the nucleus, chanting, carrying signs, even hurling a few cans or old newspapers. The smell of sauerkraut stained the air.
    At once, we’d become part of history, descendants of the Boston Tea Party, brothers and sisters to the Pullman Strikers, United Auto Workers, and Air Traffic Controllers. We were the working-class darlings of the moment, which, after a while, made me nervous. For we in the media should know better than anyone how quickly the moment comes and goes. Tomorrow, as the fringes of this angry mob reported for work, we would remain in the streets alone.
    I broke from the cacophony and leaned back against a grimy, brick office building. Looking westward I spotted the sky, a magical cast of blue peeping in between the buildings as if the atmosphere itself had been artificially manufactured, pink and blue as far as my eye could see. This was the sky I’d imagined in those junior high science classes when I first tripped the magic of acids and bases, the sky I’d even earlier taken it upon myself to draw with a rainbow of Crayolas.
    “Moron girl!” Rowdy had said. “There ain’t no pink clouds.”
    “There are,” I tried to explain, recalling something Dad had read to me from the encyclopedia about the sun’s rays being refracted, which I’d heard as reefer-acted, like the reefer Rowdy and Neil smoked. There was smoke and there was light and it all came from the sun.
    “When the sun moves,” I said, “it paints the clouds different colors, it makes them pink.”
    “Pink like your cunt,” Neil said, barreling into the living room with his tongue wiggling around his lips. “Pink to red and then you’re a