Malicious Mischief

IN FEBRUARY 1985 at around two o’clock in the morning, I painted—along with five fellow Maoist fanatics and devoted liberators of the earth—political graffiti using cellophane covered rubber foam and crimson-colored latex on a concrete wall of a huge downtown building of the city’s power company. Whether our look-out was overwhelmed by panic or just plain stupid for not signaling us of an oncoming jeepload of para-military men in uniform, we never knew. We stopped dead on our tracks like deer to oncoming headlights and were arrested in flagrante delicto.

At every summer's turn, our elders—youthful adventurers—hike and spend the night at the peak of this majestic mountain.

The six of us were booked and charged with inciting to sedition and detained, manhandled and badgered overnight inside the city’s police command camp. The balding police chief met us armed with a wide grin showing his nicotine-stained dentures. Ironically, we found out later that he, too, was a former Maoist revolutionary but turned into a rabid anti-communist after a friend of his was killed by the guerillas.

Inciting to sedition in this country is a capital offense and, juvenile or not, our entrails shook with the thought that we would soon rot in prison. Luckily enough, a lawyer-politician who was a fellow activist—and later on in the 90s became prominent for figuring in a video sex scandal—came just on time, bailed us out and was completely elated by the fact that we vandalized a property owned by his business nemesis. He further reduced the felony to, what else—malicious mischief.