War of the Wooks Part IV
The Other Side of the Coin has been pummeling the Mole People nonstop since the formation of the United Tunnels of Vegas. Since yesterday’s press conference, the wooks have occupied hundreds of feet of new territory past the Rio-Caesar’s Palace junction, rapidly approaching the entrance to the Mirage tunnel, which is also under OSOC control.
Mole Person Liberation Front operatives trapped between these two fronts have been rapidly surrendering to join the United Tunnels of Vegas, a wook-run Mole Person shadow government headed by True Prime Mole Grubby Busch. The UTV has been transporting all of these surrenderees to a processing center in the Rio tunnel; Mole People are questioned at length before being either ejected from the tunnels or offered the opportunity to assimilate and pledge their loyalty to the UTV.
Of course, the day-in and day-out of activity of the conflict underground has fallen to the wayside in the light of the Big Revelation; that legendary jam band promoter Peter Shapiro has made and is making significant financial contributions to OSOC. When Shapiro’s very own jam band news outlet, Relix, broke the story, he didn’t deny it—instead, by freely admitting to financially supporting OSOC, he has been gradually building up public support.
It is interesting to note that the journalist from Relix who broke the story, my new nemesis Syke Ortak, was fired from her position after publishing the article. I would normally be outraged at such a bold act of retaliation against a journalist doing her job, but in this case—though I of course condemn it—I imagine that Ortak had it coming.
Shapiro wrote in a Relix article that he began making financial contributions to OSOC as early as the Phish residency. “Vanguard is simply right;” he wrote, mentioning the head of OSOC, “the wook fanbase needs a place they can live here in Vegas. More people living here means more great jam band shows.”
And there it is, clearer than glass; with no need for an investigation, frantic phone interviews, or secret informants: the Motive on a silver platter. Vanguard’s vision of a wook ethnostate may appeal to an egotistical hunger for proof of the subculture’s exceptionalism, but for Shapiro, it’s about profit. He wants wooks to live rent-free in Las Vegas so that they can be a sort of captive audience to the shows he runs and promotes.
But his support has pushed things far outside of his control: Vanguard stated publicly that attacks on the MPLF will not end until all hostages are returned, and the MPLF is making no concessions.
I received a phone call from my editor, who suggested I visit the MGM tunnel to try to make contact with the MPLF, who, thus far, have been totally unresponsive to my attempts to reach out for interviews.
“You expect me to just waltz on into this hostile area?” I asked with frustration. “Who do you think I am, Joseph Morton?”
“I could never think that about you because I don’t know who that is,” he sniped. “Anway, I’m sending you there with a new correspondent I’ve hired. She has already made connections with the MPLF and you can get in safely with her.”
I felt the wind get knocked out of me—it was as if some occult hand had reached out of the ether and punched me in the gut. “A new correspondent? Who?”
“Skye Ortak. You’ve met. She was fired from Relix after she reported that Peter Shapiro made financial contributions to the Other Side of the Coin.”
For a brief moment, I considered abandoning the whole mission and getting on a plane back home just so I could walk into my editor’s office and slap him clean in his face. “You cannot possibly make me work with Skye Ortak. One of us will kill the other before we even get to the MGM. Is that a legal conundrum you want to sort through?”
“Nobody is going to kill anybody. You’re going to have to be professional about it and figure out a way to get along with your new partner.” He hung up.
I spent five minutes fuming, cursing my editor with every vile and explicit phrase it was within my cultural and demographic right to utter. I invoked the name of every deity I could remember—including Avalokiteśvara, bodhisattva of compassion—begging somebody to strike down Ortak, my editor, or both.
“What’s going on now?” my advisor asked, jolting out of bed.
“Our editor is forcing us to partner with—” I stammered, barely able to get the name out, “—with Skye Ortak! She lost her job at Relix and he hired her!”
“Skye’s not that bad, you know. It’s your fault you have such a hostile relationship with her.”
“My fault? How dare you?” I screamed, then had a small aneurysm and blacked out. I regained consciousness a minute later and stood up.
“You’re so tense, man!” my advisor said. “When will you learn to relax?”
“I’m going to the bar,” I huffed, heading to to door.
“You sound like me!” my advisor chuckled. “It’s not even 9:00 A.M.!”
“Well, now you sound like me!” I slammed the door behind me.
I tried to loosen up with a few mimosas but was still tenser than the patellar tendon of a runner at the top of the Mount Niesen staircase. I stared at the surface of the bar, lost in a ruminative cycle of dread and contempt, when I sensed someone sitting next me. She turned out to be the very object of my deep disdain.
“Hey there, partner!” Ortak said with a bright smile. “Ready to get to work?”
Overwhelmed with dismay, I found myself at a loss for words and began to cry.
“There, there,” she purred, patting me on the back, “you’ll be okay. If you think you’ve got it bad, just imagine how I feel about the pay cut I took when I accepted this job.”
I perked up a bit at the idea of her misfortune and ordered another mimosa.
“Make that two,” Otek said. “So, what do you say?” she asked when the drinks arrived, clinking her glass to mine, “now that we’re officially working together, can we start fresh?”
I looked up into her eyes. “Absolutely not.”
As we left the hotel, we conveniently ran into Smitty Finkligan and Patriciana Blinkspinkulli, the co-founders of MPLF allies Deadheads Advoating for the Freedom of Mole People. Yesterday, during an OSOC press conference in which Vanguard announced the formation of the UTV, True Prime Mole Busch made clear that he was willing to enter into a dialogue with the group.
I asked Finkligan and Blinkspinkulli if they had taken advantage of the offer, and it turned out that against the wishes of OSOC, they had actually had a long meeting with Busch, who just treated the activist couple to Waygu flambe and Japanese whiskey at Wakuda—the Venetian’s most expensive restaurant—before bringing them to Sphere for the Dead & Company concert.
“I will say this about Grubby Busch,” Finkligan told me, “even though we don’t see eye-to-eye on the issues in the tunnels, he’s a genuinely good man.”
“He bought us foie gras!” Blinkspinkulli added with a smile, welling up at the memory.
“Lobster foie gras,” Finkligan elaborated in a similar reverie.
“Don’t you think,” Ortak asked the couple, “that from an outsider’s perspective, it might appear that Busch is using Peter Shapiro’s money to buy your approval?”
Finkligan balked. “Buying our approval?” he repeated, making a great show of being aghast. “It’s gonna take a lot more than his lobster foie gras and wagyu to buy my approval.”
“And the seabass,” Blinkspinkulli added.
“The seabass marinated in authentic miso from old Kyoto,” Finkligan emphasized.
“And anyway,” Blinkspinkulli said, “DAFFOMP will never support the United Tunnels; it’s the same colonizing movement in different wrapping. With a neatly tied bow of internalized prejudice.” She paused and turned to her boyfriend. “That’s good. Put that in the Instagram story.” He obeyed.
“Maybe,” Ortak said, “he’s not asking you to support him. Maybe he’s asking for a kind of ideological compromise, the same that the Other Side of the Coin asked of him. I mean, you guys are strong allies of the Liberation Front. DAFFOMP has accumulated some real power in the tunnels. If an external party entered this situation, say, the Las Vegas Water Authority, couldn’t your opinions sway them one way or the other?”
The couple was taken aback. “I literally don’t understand what you’re insinuating,” Finkligan said blankly. “Babe? Do you understand what this lady is saying?”
“No,” Blinkspinkulli muttered. “I don’t even know who she is. Who are you?”
“Skye Ortak, writer for Shrieks & Whispers.”
“Impressive.”
Feeling out of the loop, I finally interjected. “There’s nothing impressive about it,” I snapped. “But we’re trying to get somewhere, we have to go. Make good decisions.” Ortak and I left them silently behind.
“What the hell was that?” I asked. “Those were very leading questions! Maybe that’s the kind of unprofessional bullshit that flies over at Relix, but here at Shrieks & Whispers we actually value objectivity!”
“What does objectivity have to do with it?” We began walking toward the opposite side of the casino toward the MPLF’s base tunnel.
I squinted at her. “I know you know something that you’re not telling me. What’s this talk about the Water Authority?”
She sighed. “I got in touch with the LVWA, but the director would only speak to me off the record. But I guess I can tell you because he’ll probably make the announcement any minute.”
“What announcement?”
“The LVWA is finally getting involved. I don’t know in what capacity.”
“DAFFOMP finally broke them down?”
“Could be. But Blinkspinkulli and Finkligan seemed uneasy when I brought the Water Authority up. Makes me think that somebody else is behind their sudden involvement. Did you know that DAFFOMP has never actually been in contact with the LVWA?”
“Are you serious?”
“The director told me himself. All those cries from the Deadheads for the water authority to get involved and they never even bothered to call them.”
“Unbelievable.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t at least know that. Did you never call the LVWA for comment?”
I began to admit that I hadn’t but trailed off.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose you’re preoccupied working on those little human interest sections for your articles. Real classy stuff last night, by the way.”
“I defer to my advisor on those issues. Take it up with him if you have an problem.”
“Right, your advisor. Listen, if you want to let me cover this part of the article so you two can visit Wet Republic or something, let’s definitely do that.”
“Absolutely not. I’ve been covering this story since…”
“Wednesday?”
“Right. Are we at the tunnel yet?”
The MPLF had built up significant reinforcements by the entrance to the MGM Grand tunnel. A plywood fence had been constructed around the area, and Mole People armed with slingshots were perched above the entrance. Two Mole People holding baseball bats stood outside the fence, and Ortak waved at them. They were expecting her, so they let us in with a curt greeting.
The inside of the tunnel was bleaker than OSOC’s territory; there were no cinderblock structures or offices, and MPLF members carried flashlights instead of relying on the overhead lights that I had grown accustomed to in the wook zones.
One Mole Person in a wheelchair approached us; Ortak introduced him to me as Grit Sumpump, Chief of Public Relations for the MPLF.
“Who the hell is this?” Sumpump asked Ortak.
“My new partner for the story,” she said. “A coworker at Shrieks & Whispers.” I winced at the words “partner” and “coworker.”
“Well, when I read your article about Peter Shapiro I somehow guessed you’d lose that job at Relix,” Sumpump said.
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk about. What has the liberation front’s response to Shapiro’s financial contributions coming to light been?”
Sumpump grimaced. “Not good. We’re losing members to the UTV every day, and now the average Mole Person is even more aware of the power imbalance. Assimilating is unfortunately looking like the best option to many tunnel-dwellers.”
“Does Zepeda have a plan to try to compete?” Ortak asked.
“She’s working on it. But the Mole Person Liberation Front is never giving up.”
I cleared my throat. “Can I ask about the wooks that you are holding hostage? Now that you know that OSOC has Shaprio’s resources behind them, does that change your ideas about releasing them?”
“I can’t answer that at this time,” Sumpump told me. Ortak glared at me, as if I had brought up a touchy subject.
My phone rang; it was OSOC Press Officer Sleeve, who had been dodging me for two days. I stepped away to take the call.
“Hey man, big news is going to be coming out soon,” he began. “By the way, I know that you’re just doing your job, but you’ve been, like, a huge thorn in our side since you got here. Between the Nitrous Mafia and Peter Shapiro news coming out, I’ve, like, barely slept since Thursday.”
“Sorry, Sleeve,” I replied, “but that’s just the way the news goes. Speaking of news, what’s going on?”
“I’m telling you this because you were one of the first reporters to pick up the story, and you’ve been, like, the least critical of OSOC.”
“I’m neither critical nor uncritical. I’m objective like a journalist should be. But go on.”
“Okay man, whatever. In less than an hour, Virgil Hidewhittler, Chief of the Las Vegas Water Authority, is calling an emergency summit. At Sphere.”
“A summit?” I asked.
“A summit, to like, negotiate hostage release and decide whether or not wooks should be allowed to live in the tunnels. OSOC, the UTV, the MPLF, and DAFFOMP each will get a vote.”
“That sounds like an obvious tie. Will Hidewhittler break it?”
“If it ties, negotiations will be ongoing until somebody changes their mind.”
“Well, OSOC must be pretty upset about this. You’ve been against the idea of LVWA intervention from the beginning.”
“We’re just going to try to, like, make the best of this situation. We’re wooks, we adapt, man.”
I thought for a moment. “Let me ask you this: who finally convinced the Water Authority to step in?”
“Must have been the goons at DAFFOMP. They were the only ones who really wanted this.”
I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing. “You know,” I said, “I heard that DAFFOMP has never actually been in contact with the Water Authority.”
“Really?” Sleeve asked. “Neither has OSOC, at least not until, like, ten minutes ago when Hidewhittler reached out to tell us about the summit. I know he had meetings with True Prime Mole Busch—” he cut himself off.
“What?” I asked. “Busch and Hidewhittler had meetings?”
“No, man, no way… where did you get that from?”
“You just said it!” I shouted into the phone.
“Listen, man… that needs to be off the record, okay?”
“You can’t take something off the record after you say it! You’ve been Press Officer long enough to know that!”
He hung up the phone without responding. I hastily returned to the conversation between Ortak and Sumpump.
“…and that’s why we will always be against the Water Authority intervening,” Sumpump was saying, finishing a point. “Prime Mole Zepeda insists, as we all do, that there is no solution for the tunnels that includes wooks or Peter Shapiro. And that is a victory that needs to be won by Mole People for Mole People.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?” Ortak asked.
“Even if the LVWA does intervene—and I don’t think it’s likely at this point—and they rule in our favor, they would in a way be robbing the MPLF of the victory we deserve. Wooks have displaced us and ruined our lives, and we should be the ones to take the tunnels back.”
Ortak and I were in a tricky spot; as journalists, to share unpublished information about the imminent intervention by the LVWA would be unethical. “Hey, Sumpump,” I said, “do you maybe need to take a phone call or something?”
“I don’t have a phone,” he replied.
“Oh. Do you think you should check with anybody to see if anything interesting has happened lately?” Ortak shushed me, and Sumpump looked confused.
As if on cue, a Mole Page tapped him on the shoulder. “Prime Mole Zepeda is calling an emergency meeting,” they said, and Sumpump abruptly began wheeling himself away.
“Should we ask to come to the meeting?” Ortak asked me.
“Oh, you and your politeness,” I dismissed. “We’ll just go in and hope they don’t kick us out.”
“My politeness?” she sniped. “I’m more seasoned than you might think, you know. I was in the crowd covering Astroworld the year those Travis Scott fans crushed each other to death.”
“Not hard enough, apparently.”
“Prick.”
We followed Sumpump deep into the tunnel, where Prime Mole Zuri Zepeda herself sat at a picnic table with several members of her MPLF cabinet. She looked exhausted, with deep bags under her eyes betraying the immense stress that she had been under. Ortak and I lingered a few meters back.
“We’ve received word,” Zepeda began, “that the Las Vegas Water Authority is going to intervene in the tunnels.” There was a collective gasp among the cabinet. “We need to discuss ways to bend this to our advantage.”
“Here’s the situation:” another Mole Person said, presumably some kind of ambassador to the LVWA. “The Chief of the Water Authority, Virgil Hidewhittler, is hosting a summit outside Sphere. After all this time, after all our struggles, he’s putting the issue of the wooks up to a vote. We get a vote, DAFFOMP gets a vote, and so do the Other Side of the Coin and the United Tunnels.”
Another cabinet member pounded the table in frustration. “A vote? These crusty wooks invaded our home, and now they get to vote about whether or not they deserve to live there? How is that fair?”
“It’s not fair,” Zepeda interjected, “but we have to tread carefully here. The public at large supports DAFFOMP, and DAFFOMP supports the LVWA.”
The angry cabinet member groaned. “DAFFOMP! I am so sick of those yuppie activists! I swear to you that they’ll be the end of us.”
“They’re basically our only financial backing,” Sumpump reminded him. “We need their support.”
“And it’s important that they get a vote,” Zepeda added. “You could argue fairly that they don’t deserve one, but it works in our favor. It’s going to come out to a tie.”
“And how is that in our favor?”
Zepeda buried her head in her hands. “I don’t know!” she shouted. “But it’s better than losing. It’ll buy us some time, maybe?” she looked desperate. “First we find out that Peter Shapiro is funding the wook invasion… how are we supposed to face those kinds of resources? We’re losing members to the United Tunnels every day, and now this situation with the Water Authority is coming up? What are we supposed to do?”
“There’s also the matter of the hostages,” Sumpump said timidly. “If OSOC truly has Shaprio’s money behind them there’s no telling what they can do, especially if so many people are leaving us to join Grubby Busch. We might need to consider releasing them—”
“We will never release the hostages!” Zepeda screamed, interrupting her Chief of Public Relations. “Not as long as the wooks are still living in our tunnels! The hostages are the only leverage we have left!”
It was clear that the MPLF was on the verge of collapse. Hemorrhaging membership and facing an enemy with nearly unlimited resources, she seemed to be caught between a hammer and an anvil.
“Wait a minute,” the cabinet member said, squinting into the shadows where Ortak and I were standing, “who are you guys?”
We looked at each other, unprepared for confrontation. “Looks like we took, uh, a wrong turn… have a nice day!” We turned around and fled.
On the way out I feverishly recounted what I had learned about Busch’s meetings with the LVWA on my phone call with Sleeve to Ortak, who listened intently.
“So the Busch administration is playing every side in this conflict,” she muttered. “What’s going to happen?”
“We’ll have to see. The Sphere Summit isn’t for a few hours, though.”
Outside Sphere, the LVWA had constructed a small stage with PAs and a podium. The sun beat down mercilessly on the crowd, and the massive light-up venue loomed ominously, taking on a new significance; more than just a venue, Sphere’s gravitational pull had attracted a militia of drug-crazed wooks—and along with them controversy, scandal, violence, and pain. No matter what happened, the landscape of the tunnels would be forever changed.
Protestors stood in the crowd, holding signs reading “WHERE’S SHAPIRO” and “JUSTICE FOR MOLE PEOPLE.” The pitch was fevered; the stakes were high. My advisor stood on my left, scarfing down a lukewarm burrito he had bought from wook selling them out of a dripping burlap sack. Ortak stood on my right, eyebrows burrowed in concentration.
A protester with an “NO ETHNOSTATE / NO WOOKS” sign walked by and I tapped him on the shoulder. I asked if he would answer a few questions, and he refused.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m a reporter. People far and wide will hear about you and your opinions.”
“In that case, fire away!” he exclaimed.
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“Obviously, the vote will come to a tie and the LVWA will take power. They’ll finally get the wook menace out of the sewers, which rightfully belongs to the Mole People!” he raised his fist into the air. “Mole Power!”
“What do you expect the LVWA will do to get the wooks out?”
He shrugged. “All I know is that supporting the Mole People is the right thing to do, and I’m doing it as publicly as possible. Will you plug my Instagram? It’s @crustyactivist420.”
“No. Have a nice day.”
Ortak began conducting crowd interviews, too—my advisor was on the lookout for more food—and the consensus across the board was the same: whether they supported the wooks or the Mole People, nearly everybody expected a tie followed by the eventual ouster of the wooks.
“This is going to be interesting,” Ortak said ominously as Virgil Hidewhittler took the stage, surrounded by representatives from each relevant group: Vanguard looking confident with his chrysanthemum hairdoo towering over everybody else, Busch with an air of confidence, Zepeda staring at the both of them with utter hatred, and Finlkigan seemingly nervous to be in front of a crowd. For the first time, the leaders of every faction were together—the minds behind every hostile or defensive move in the conflict present in one spot, an intricate web of allyship and hostility, ideological clashes, secrets closely held and scandals bitterly uncovered.
“For years,” Hidewhittler said, “the tunnels below our beloved city have been a peaceful home for our subterranean friends, the Mole People. But for the past month, the tunnels have been filled with violence. This cannot continue any longer. I have had discussions with all of the involved parties, and I believe that I have developed a solution. Each group has taken time to deliberate, and we will soon put it up for a vote.”
The crowd murmured, everybody wondering what possible solution he could have come up with.
“My proposal is as follows: the United Tunnels of Vegas will become the official governing body of the tunnels,” he declared. “The Mole Person Liberation Front will dissolve and release its hostages.” A mix of cheers and protests came from the crowd; Zepeda looked enraged.
“Furthermore,” Hidewhittler continued, “The Other Side of the Coin will dissolve and end its advance down the tunnels. The Rio, Caesar’s Palace, and Mirage tunnel system will all become a designated wook zone, while the MGM tunnel will become the Mole People’s home. They will both be under the jurisdiction of the UTV. We will now collect our votes.”
Busch stepped up to the podium. “The United Tunnels of Vegas votes in favor of the proposal and all its terms.”
Vanguard was next. “The Other Side of the Coin votes in favor of the proposal and all its terms.”
Zepeda approached the podium. “The Mole Person Liberation Front votes against the proposal and thinks you should all go fuck yourselves.” Cheers from parts of the crowd.
Finkligan stepped up, looking sweaty. He took a long pause and made his nervous announcement. “Deadheads Advocating for the Freedom of Mole People votes… in favor of the proposal and all its terms.”
The crowd erupted into a deafening pandemonium—wooks and assimilated Mole People celebrating their newly guaranteed homeland, MPLF supporters enraged at Finkligan’s betrayal, and Deadheads condemning or supporting depending on which side of the issue they fell on.
On the stage, Zepeda looked furious but stood still as she watched Busch and Finkligan shake hands. Vanguard said something to them and they all laughed together.
“The parties have voted in favor of the proposal,” Hidewhittler announced. “All terms must be met by the end of the day.”
I knew that we had mere moments until riots broke out. I shouted for Ortak and my advisor to get the out of the crowd, and we sprinted away from Sphere, fights beginning to break out around us.
I tripped on an empty whippet canister and turned around to see people climbing the surface of Sphere. I didn’t know if they were wooks and their supporters celebrating or the opposition protesting—they probably didn’t even know, and it probably didn’t even matter.
“They’re gonna cancel the show!” my advisor shouted in dismay.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Ortak condescended. “We’re witnessing a moment of civil unrest!”
“Of course he’s worried about that,” I said, “that’s why we came here in the first place!”
I looked helplessly at the chaos around me, wondering, not for the first or last time, just how the hell I got caught up in such a disaster.
A Deadhead protester suddenly pounced onto my back and knocked me to the floor, taking me by surprise. I pushed myself up off the ground and elbowed him in the ribs; my advisor took him in a tight chokehold and let him collapse to the ground once he went unconscious. We peeled a rabid wook off of Ortak, who had been similarly tackled.
The surface of Sphere was now covered with the bodies of the protesters who were scaling it. It felt as if all the pent-up hysteria of the last few days had finally built up to and surpassed its breaking point.
Over a hundred arrests later, Dead & Company announced on their social media that the show would go on—it would have presumably been a bigger pain to refund all the tickets. Andy Gustafon, who had been missing since our visit to the Peppermint Hippo the night before, seemed to materialize out of thin air at Sphere’s Radius Bar, where even Ortak was guzzling cocktails, just trying to take the edge off.
I had never been more tense; in the past three days we had put ourselves through an immense ordeal, and bodies and minds were beginning to shut down at incredible rates. The four of us were all seated together, and my advisor passed around pills and we swallowed them obediently and without question. When the band walked out and I heard the opening licks of Cold Rain and Snow I began to think that things might just work out for the best—as long as I never again had to confront reality.
Updates to this developing story will be posted daily for the duration of the June 6-8 Dead & Company residency.
Shrieks & Whispers 
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