Autoimmune Defense
A Not Entirely Serious Look at How Los Angeles Resists
Darren McBride was a corporal in the California National Guard and had been ordered into Los Angeles to help put down what was being referred to as riots. At 22, a lifelong resident of Bakersfield, his experience with Los Angeles was limited. Previous visits had happened at high speed with specific destinations—typically strip clubs or theme parks—in and out with all the rapidity that the congested highways would allow.
Deployment wasn’t something they talked about a lot, but when they did, it was always either overseas, which seemed less and less likely (thank goodness), or for some sort of natural disaster, which was always likely. The idea of going to Los Angeles to put down riots was not something they considered or talked out much. Now it seemed obvious. That said, he wasn’t sure exactly what the National Guard’s role was going to be here apart from being a physical obstruction—just a large person with a rifle.
He certainly didn’t want to use it. Standing in the road, the street, or a highway face-to-face with radicals, maybe dodging bricks, maybe getting a bottle of gasoline with a burning rag tossed at them, he didn’t want to shoot anyone.
They had seen burnt police cars on the way into the city, downtown area, and there were a lot of people, and there was a lot of smoke—but a lot of it was from canisters rather than fires.
As always, there was a lot of gossip. Talk of non-lethal ammunition, tear gas, closing off streets so the police could box protesters in and contain them, maybe trample them with horses. He wasn’t sure he saw the benefit of that. In all honesty, none of this seemed like a good idea. In his imagination, he could look back at the entire history of Mexico and California, Central America and the United States—what he understood of it—and it all seemed needlessly complicated, hopelessly tangled, and profoundly hypocritical.
He’d known dozens of undocumented—or illegal, or whatever—people in his life. They’d never been a particular problem or even particularly noteworthy. He’d hired undocumented people to help him move. They didn’t steal anything—although that wasn’t everyone’s experience—but hiring day workers just what people did. If you had an unpleasant job that needed doing and you had $100 you could probably get Mexicans to do it for you.
But it wasn’t his job to ask these questions. It was his job to be a physical presence in a street or roadway, preventing people from entering or leaving an area. He didn’t know when he was getting lunch. He didn’t know where he was going to be sleeping that night. And although the city was loud and there were scores of people with masks, waving flags of various countries, many blaring music and shouting—nobody had thrown anything at anybody. Not yet. Everyone said it was going to get really bad at night, and that made him wonder where he was going to be sleeping, because he was on duty all day, and they couldn’t expect him to be out here all night.
Hours passed. They marched in loose formation back and forth along various streets.
He suspected something was wrong when a corporal named Artie—whom he’d known one weekend a month for the last eight months—asked him to cover for him.
“What do you mean, cover for you?” Darren asked.
“I’m gonna go,” Artie said.
“What do you mean, you’re gonna go?”
Artie moved his head slightly; his eyes did most of the work to indicate that Darren should look down the street. There was a white man, probably in his early 40s, cocky stance, tight golf shirt, hair slicked back, expensive-looking watch. He didn’t look like he belonged to a protest.
“What about that guy?” Darren asked.
“He wants to read my screenplay.”
“Wait you have a screenplay?”
“No, I don’t. But I’ve had ideas. I have ideas for what would make a really good film.”
It kind of stuck with Darren that Artie said “film” instead of “movie.”
“He wants to hear about your movie idea?” Darren asked, unbelieving.
“Yeah. He started asking me about what it was like in the National Guard. Then he heard I was from Salton Sea, and he said that was really fascinating. I said yeah, we always used to talk about the salt monster. And he said it was crazy no one’s ever made a movie there before. And I said, I know—it’s crazy.”
“You’re crazy. This whole thing is crazy. You can’t just go off and talk to some guy about whatever the hell you’re gonna talk about. You’re gonna get arrested, put in the stockade or something.”
“Man, look around you. I’m not the only one. Like, 15 guys have gone.”
Darren did look around. This was pretty much true.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said.
“We’re going native,” Artie said. “People are saying we should get headshots. People are saying they can get us in a commercial. One guy’s gonna do porn. Gay porn. He’s not even gay—but when he heard how much money is in it, he was like, holy shit. Like, this is just Los Angeles, man. Hollywood!” He said the last word as if it explained everything.
“This is insane, you can’t—”
“Did you eat yet?” Artie asked. “Because Richie over there is gonna buy me lunch. At a place so fancy I don’t even know how to say the goddamn name. I think it’s Austrian.”
Darren realized he didn’t know anything about Austrian food. Were they the waffle country?
“Yeah, that’s right. Arnold Schwarzenegger hangs out there. The governor. The governator! He’s got a new show on Netflix with Carrie Anne Moss. Who knows where this lunch could lead.”
Whatever had gotten a hold of Artie, Darren couldn’t talk him out of it. As the sun set, more and more soldiers disappeared, fading away into alleys, restaurants, nail and hair salons—stripping off their fatigues to sit in uncomfortable metal chairs at outdoor cafés, drinking espresso with lactose-free, plant-based foam. Suddenly very interested in residuals from streaming appearances. Some of them, already—within the time they’d been deployed in the city—had started podcasts with sponsors Darren had heard of.
By the time the ocean had completely swallowed the sun, he was staring unbelievably at a billboard where two of the guardsmen he’d been deployed with that morning were looking down with huge smiles, inviting everyone in the city to choose them for representation and expert guidance when licensing their independently produced music to film and television and streaming.
Darren realized this was how Los Angeles was going to win. It was going to win the way America always won- a low class cultural offensive.
He was starving. He looked around and saw he was alone—the last National Guardsman of the 2,000 that had entered the city eight hours ago.
“Hey, what are you up to, big man?” Darren turned and saw a smallish man with thick eyebrows, slick black hair, and a severe goatee.
“You look like an upright young character who can handle himself,” the man said. “Come on—I need you to work the rope at a VIP in my club. All you gotta do is keep your mouth shut and look bored and intimidating. Yeah, just like that. Come on, we’re gonna get you a jacket and a black T-shirt.”
“Can I maybe get a taco?” Darren asked.
“Whole place is catered. Just don’t eat in front of the guests. That’s why we gotta get you in there now—you gotta get all that shit taken care of, and then you gotta stand…”
And Darren was gone, absorbed by the city—one more story in a town that had a million of them.