FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE OTTO COMPOUND: by Mark Crimples

My continuing travels amongst the fascist failsons of NYC and beyond.

Hey everyone, it’s me, Mark Crimples, your favorite anti-fascist scene reporter back again with another Substack. Once again, I’m here to serve you salivating, palm-rubbing gossip hounds with all the juicy deets on what the image-obsessed borderline-schizophrenic narcissists and failsons I have spent this past year hanging around and documenting are up to this week! And, okay, this one is a fucking doozy, so strap in. Every time I meet another one of these characters, I think it can’t be topped, this has to be it, there can’t be anyone who’s somehow more of an spitting archetype of a vapid, self-obsessed, completely deranged racist bourgeois trust fund kid — I always think the Crimplesstack has put its oil signature on its Girl With a Pearl Earring and the rest is downhill — but, dear reader, I hadn’t yet met Otto.

So the story starts with my recent piece: “A Faceful of Miladys”, in which I documented a party that some crypto bros threw to promote the “Milady” NFT project. The Milady project, for those who don’t know, is notorious via its connection to its founder “Charlotte Fang” or “Miya the BPD Angel”, who used to run an influential white-supremacist account and hang out with a bunch of Nazis back in the day (because of course she did). The Milady people are all really into doing this gimmick where they present their project and style of self-promotion as “schizophrenic” (ie weaving together bunch of incoherent concepts, Nazi mysticism, appropriated critical theory Nick Land style, references to cyberpunk anime, that sort of thing) in order to cover up for an underlying ethos which is basically just boring regular racism and capitalist grifting as usual. I went undercover on the last stack to check out their latest rager and it was pretty much what you would expect: a bunch of sweaty nerds talking loudly about the latest tech thing, a few women clinging to the wall looking unsure of what to do for themselves, but one of them did give me free ketamine, so hey, I can’t complain.

My consistent “in” to the Milady crowd has been a kid named Aidan, who runs a clothing brand called “Grift Shop” that sells a bunch of shirts with the Milady face on it in various iterations. Aidan for whatever reason seems to hold me in less suspicion than the rest of these people, out of what feels like a charming sort of naïveté. “Crimples,” he tells me. “I liked the piece you wrote on my party, I thought it was pretty funny and fair. I think you should take the train to Philly to try to check out this pretty cool space we’re putting together. My friend Otto Rothmund has this abandoned convent we’re trying to turn into a hype house for people to live in, and we want to get people interested. He’s a good kid, just wants to build a community, you know. You might be able to help.”

I honestly wasn’t going to do it; why the fuck would I go all the way to Philly to help some crypto bros throw more mid parties full of casual racism so they can scam people with pump and dumps? But I happened to mention Otto Rothmund and his “hype house” offhand to Kay, my guerrilla-feminist Maoist “sidekick” of sorts, and I guess she just felt like going down an internet-sleuth rabbit hole one day and went way back into Otto Rothmund’s “lore” out of some kind of morbid curiosity. I think this is just what she does when she’s on an acid hangover, maybe. Just gotta recharge the batteries by reading about more horrible people and their awful politics; don’t say we don’t do hard work.

Anyway, she’s telling me: this kid is on another level. He’s like, a fascist fascist. Just like, some kid who wandered up from the depths of 4chan or Stormfront or god-knows-where and decided that the Milady people were cool. He runs some sort of ominous sounding venture capital vehicle with his daddy’s money called “Seed Oil Capital” which is described as a a “mafia” or “neo-cabal”. Apparently his introduction to the Milady people happened when he showed up to one of the raves wearing a black-sun swastika shirt and telling everyone to read the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At some point someone always ends up saying the quiet part loud, I guess.

So this guy is basically trying to do the explicitly fascist version of the crypto thing, it seems. We’re not hiding behind dog whistles anymore: we’re just straight up selling scam tokens so we can fund the Friekorps. Okay then. At this point, this is too juicy to pass up: I’m in. I tell Aidan I’ll be there. He says Otto still lives at his parents’ place most of the time: I can crash in the basement there for the night while we spend the day checking out the building. Some other guys will be around, it’ll be a chill vibe, Aidan is telling me. I’m not quite sure what I’m getting into, but I know a potential good Substack when I smell one.

Me and Aidan take the train down together. It’s an awkward hour: I’m trying to warm up my main guy who got me in on this scoop, make sure he keeps foolishly trusting me, but I don’t know what to ask him or which topic to relate to him on. So what scam token do you think you might promote today, sir? Is your next shirt with the Milady face printed on it going to be black on white or white on black? Do you not feel that by “ironically” doubling down on the idea of capitalist “grifting” you’re doing the exact opposite of solving the problem, and enabling a form of cynicism which Adorno rightly called the seed from which fascism arises? But I don’t say any of this. After a bit of small talk, it comes out that we each recently re-watched The Wire, and this provides us with enough material to keep pretending that we like each other on the way down.

We get to Otto Rothmund’s family’s home. “I think Otto is upstairs,” Aidan tells me. We go upstairs and — it’s 3PM — Otto is still lying under a comforter in bed, looking vaguely distraught and strung out. Otto has a misleadingly sweet boyish face and a mop of tousled hair — if I recall correctly he’s twenty-two years old, living at his parents’ house, having never gone to college. “Aidan,” Otto whimpers, ignoring me for the moment. “Charlie is still talking shit about me in the group chats.” By “Charlie”, Otto refers to the aforementioned Milady founder Charlotte Fang, at least when he decides to go by a masculine name rather than doing the eerie performative trans-fishing that cishetero male grifters in this NFT “community” often do for some reason.

“Charlie keeps telling people to cancel me because I’m gay,” Otto moans. “But I’m literally not gay, I just sucked a forty year old guy’s dick once when I was seventeen because I was on meth. I mean come on I was on meth and there was a dick in front of me, like what do you want me to do? Aidan, go in all the chats and tell everyone I’m not gay.”

Otto turns to me. “You’re Crimples right? Like the New York antifa faggot?” “That’s me”, I reply. “That’s cool,” says Otto. “I actually don’t care that you’re antifa or communist or whatever. I tell everyone that the feds can watch everything I do, I don’t care. Tell your fed Jew handlers you can write anything about me I literally don’t care. Otto Rothmund is an open book. Like literally everything about me is on the internet. People have my femboy pics. Like,” — he pauses to cackle —“all my opps have already seen all my femboy pics. Why do I care what Crimples writes about me? Like, Aidan, tell Crimples I’m an open book.” 

I look at Aidan and he gives me a sort of noncommittal shrug-nod, indicating that he seems to agree with the general sense of what Otto is saying. Aidan turns to address Otto. “Otto, your opps are calling you gay when they’re literally looking at your femboy pics,” he says. “Like that is itself pretty gay right. They’re calling you gay but they’re the ones looking at the pics.”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Otto exclaims, giddy that Aidan is emphasizing the central point at stake here: Otto is not gay. I’m a little in awe. Never in my career as an “incel whisperer” and psychoanalyst of fascism have I ever had my work so cut out for me. I think about how Kay would probably react to this, in her voice: why is it always so typical! Fascism as perverted homosexual jouissance, fear of the repressed feminine, the same old story repeated a million ways.

Otto decides he’ll take a shower and do other getting-ready type stuff, and then after that we can go over on the train to check out the hype house we came to Philly to see. This ends up taking a few more hours for whatever reason, so I have some time to hang out with Aidan and the keepers of the house: Mr. and Mrs. Rothmund. Again, I’m stuck in a sort of frozen prey-animal mode; hoping these people don’t realize we all dislike each other before I get my hot antifa journalist scoop and make off like a bandit.

Mrs. Rothmund is basically your garden-variety polite respectable bourgeois white woman: she’s very generous in welcoming me to her home, do you want a glass of water, coffee, beer, are you sure you’re comfortable, etc. She’s asking me about her work and I’m not exactly sure how to describe it without cutting through the polite bourgeois domestic air I really have no interest in disturbing at this point. It’s a bunch of “I write about American politics and social life” and other limp banalities from me. It gets worse when she starts talking about what she does with her life: her and her husband are real estate developers. “Oh, uh, like what type of real estate,” I ask her, wincing and thinking of everything my militant Philly comrades have told me about their recent struggles against gentrification (Philly commies get hardcore, that’s all I’ll say). I get her going to the point where she’s listing specific neighborhoods, and it’s basically the list I’ve already expected, pretty much what I was afraid of.

Rothmund senior — known as Mr. Oswald Rothmund to the world — comes in about an hour later. Otto’s father, as it turns out, is truly a Father: tall, well-built, a strong beard and penetrating eyes. As he comes into the house, he immediately grabs a glass decanter out of a cupboard and pours himself a glass of whiskey with a single ice cube. He does not offer any to me, Aidan, or his wife. “I don’t know why my golf game has been so off the past three days,” Oswald complains, evidently having just returned from the links. “I was twelve above par. Back in March, I was hitting damn near par. And now I’ve gone backwards. And it’s not coming back. I have a coach, he says I just need to relax and not think about it. But I have like three deals right now that may or may not fall through, how am I supposed to relax? I’m playing golf to relax, right? So…” I don’t have anything to say on this subject, which is fine, because it doesn’t seem like I’m expected to say anything.

Otto’s father relaxes into the couch with his glass of whiskey and puts a World War 2 documentary on the TV. “Aidan, how have you been? Shop going well?” he asks, looking straight forward at the TV. “It’s going well,” Aidan says smiling, without hesitation. “Good, good,” says Oswald. “And who are you again?” he asks me, gesturing towards me with his drink, while still not breaking his eye contact with the TV. “You’re not that communist faggot journalist Otto told me was coming to stay, are you?” Oswald asks. “Ah, haha, that might be me yeah,” I respond, doing the performative perfunctory deference thing that this type of rich guy always expects. “I’m not actually a real journalist though, I just have a Substack,” I add. “Well,” he says, “my casa su casa,” waving his hand vaguely at the living room around us. “Make yourself at home.”

Otto’s mother leaves to go tend to the garden or some other similar white-woman idée fixe, and it’s just me, Aidan, and Rothmund Sr. Aidan and Oswald spend about half an hour discussing baseball, but eventually the conversation turns slowly back towards Oswald’s prodigal son. “I just hope this thing with the convent works out for him, because I’m happy he finally has a project he cares about,” says Oswald. “Of course, if he can’t get it together in the next few months, we’re turning it into apartments; that’s prime real estate. But I say, you know, let the kid have a shot. I try to do what I can.”

He takes a sip of whiskey and continues. “Otto just needs to not be such a damn mama’s boy, that’s all I’ve ever been saying. If this thing makes him stop spending so much time around his mother, then good. I always tell people” — at this point in the conversation, he looks straight at me for the first time for some terrifying and bewildering reason — “I can fundamentally respect a man if and only if he doesn’t need his mother.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just say something stupid like “Yeah”. Fortunately there are only about five more minutes or so until Otto comes downstairs from his long shower-and-whatever-else and we are finally ready to head over to the convent. I’m absolutely relieved to get out of the thick Oedipal air of the Rothmund household, but I quickly realized that I might be out of the frying pan and into the fire of having to deal with Otto himself, who is a handful and a half.

“I’m not actually a fascist, you know,” he’s quick to inform me, as we walk down the street towards the subway station. Heard that one before, Otto. “The right wing stuff got really gay and cringe so I countersignal it now. I was never right wing before even, I just thought it was funny to say I hate Jews and love Hitler and stuff like that. People don’t understand yet that Otto Rothmund is about peace and love and gay shit like that. I’m actually kind of gay and I believe in peace and love and all that gay shit. Crimples, can you put that in your piece? Otto Rothmund isn’t fascist, he’s just about unironically like, good vibes and love and shit.”

Aidan is quick to chime in with a defense of Otto’s supposedly non-fascist politics. “Everything got so literal and woke in the past few years,” he adds. “People forgot about trolling, people forgot about irony,” he says. “It’s like 4chan, it’s fun, it’s banter, but some people are so not-getting-it that they think Otto is literally a fascist. Like, what? How would that make any sense?”

Otto continues further with Aidan’s point. “Yeah it’s funny because people call me a fascist on the timeline but then people in Charlie’s chats and stuff are calling me a gay communist. But like, I kind of am. I kind of am a socialist, like the Seed Oil Convent is kind of a socialist idea if you think about it. Like it’s literally going to be a commune, it’s a cult. Otto cult. But it’s more like National Socialism, because it’s like, we’re in it together you know. If you live in the convent, it’s ride or die, nigga. It’s gang over everything else in the Seed Oil Convent, once people move in. Basically, if you move into the convent this is what you’re signing up for: you’re saying — I will rape, kill, and die for Otto Rothmund. You’re going to rape, kill, and die for Otto Rothmund. Otherwise you’re not gang. You’re not cabal.”

I took a moment’s pause to reflect on whether or not I could imagine anyone signing up to rape, kill, and die for Otto Rothmund, a person who by all signs is a dangerously mentally ill stunted-development overly-online day-trader living at his parents’ house. It wouldn’t be the first time that a maladjusted guy like this managed to attract a following of acne-struck devotees, an unfortunate fact I knew quite well from my past life as the “incel whisperer”. Otto does have this strange, rather dictatorial way of making you do what he says: he’ll aggressively bark something at you like “Hey Crimples, come with me to the store to get beer, get up right now Crimples, come with me to get beer Crimples, do you want beer Crimples, get up, come right now” — and you really have no reason to say no, a beer does sound nice, so you just end up being ordered around by a semi-schizophrenic internet troll all day and feeling oddly self-conscious about it. I recall from my days as the “incel whisperer” that this is a basic pickup-artistry 101 trick — tell people to do something small they have no reason to refuse so they see you as someone who calls the shots — but it’s kind of like, Otto’s one trick. Could he scale it all the way to the top, I wonder? Hey, Crimples, I need you to execute this prisoner. Hey, Crimples, I need a list of all anti-fascist subversives in the area. I shudder a little. At this point, my expectations for what people will fall for are low enough that the imagery is giving me pause.

“It’s a JOKE!” Otto exclaims, as if he is reading my mind, or my body language. “Crimples, everything I say is just black humor, okay. I’m just an actually nice silly guy who is constantly joking. You can put that in your Substack and people will think it’s funny, okay. The readers will get that it’s a joke.” (You are welcome to come to your own conclusions, I suppose.) “Also we’re going to buy cigars and smoke them on the train on the way over. I want a picture of me smoking a cigar on the train. Think about that on the Twitter timeline. Otto Rothmund smoking a cigar on the train. Caption ‘Join my convent or die’ or something.”

Otto seems dead-set on this plan. We pick up the cigars from a nearby head shop, as well as a case of PBR, and Otto hands me one of the cigars. “We’re going to light them first and start smoking them, and then we walk onto the train, smoking the cigars,” he announces. I glance at Aidan, who seems unfazed. I’m not exactly sure how much I want to lean into following a madman’s every instruction, but I don’t want to look too uncool. “Um, okay, I guess we should just make sure there won’t be police or staff on the train station?” I suggest. Otto laughs. “This is Philly. You can do literally whatever you want. No one gives a fuck.”

Otto seems to be right in this case — there’s no one attending the train, and Otto walks right on the train car blowing huge clouds of smoke in the air. I, attempting to fit in, hold my cigar low by my side, making the occasional small puff. It’s making me nervous participating in what seems like such antisocial behavior; surely not everyone on the train wanted to be engulfed in clouds of cigar smoke that night. We’ve chosen seats somewhat near the back where there is only one other passenger, an older black man looking somewhat dejected and slumped over, but people on the other half of the train car are definitely looking at us with some furrowed brows.

“See this is why the convent is going to work,” Otto says, blowing on his cigar. “No one other than Otto Rothmund is smoking a cigar on the train car right now. Crimples, have you ever smoked a cigar on a train? Of course you haven’t, not until you met Otto Rothmund.” He glances over at the unfortunate man who is subject to clouds of smoke being sent towards his face. “Aidan, should we give this guy a beer?” Otto reflects. “I feel bad that we’re getting all this smoke in his face. Hey. Hey man. Hey. Guy. Do you want a beer?”

It takes a few moments to get the man’s attention but when Otto does, the man’s face absolutely lights up. “You have beer?” he asks. “Hell yeah, I’ll take a beer! I just got off a ten hour shift! Yeah man! I need a beer!” Otto looks delighted. “Hell, yeah, brother,” he exclaims, handing the man a beer. “Where do you work? Also do you want a hit of a cigar?”

The man starts talking about his shitty job at a paint supply company, and at this point, we are very much attracting attention. A man waddles over from the opposite side of the train car. “Man, did you say you got beer?” he asks. “Yeah, brother!” says Otto. “Here, take one. Take three.” Otto begins passing out beers to, at this point, basically the whole train car, and the case of beer that I assumed we had brought for ourselves is soon nearly empty. Otto has managed to turn the train car of Philadelphia denizens into a party at around 6PM on a Thursday. 

One guy comes up: “Hey, can I get a beer too? But also, heads up, there are police on the next car over”. Upon hearing this, I stub out my cigar immediately — I don’t know what the penalty for such a crime against the peace is but it feels like an action for which there is absolutely no excuse you can wriggle your way out of, no Oh my apologies officer, I just thought… But it doesn’t seem to faze Otto, nor the random Philly denizens drinking and smoking with him. The party continues until we get to our stop in Kensington in about a total of fifteen minutes, at which point we say goodbye to the newly rowdy train car and make our departure.

I realize quickly that Kensington is the no-questions-about-it hood. Bars on nearly every window, abandoned properties everywhere, it’s all looking pretty bleak. To give you an idea of what I mean at the expense of breaking the chronological linearity of the story: when I woke up and went to get coffee the next day after spending the night at the convent, I only had to go half a block walking alone for the first time before a black guy slowly pedals up besides me on a bike and asks. “Hey what’s up man, are you a cop?” His tone is a little ironic, not entirely unfriendly, but I’m still somewhat nervous. “Haha, no, not a cop,” I respond. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Because the only white people I see coming around here are the cops. And I know you’re not from here, because the only white folks I know from Kensington are missing all their teeth”. I imagine in my mind what’s going to go down if Otto’s hype house pitch works: about twenty skinny racist hacker white boys are going to move into the neighborhood all at once and start calling themselves a “gang” and a “mafia”. At this point, I’m salivating at the idea that this will happen; the inevitable disaster seems too funny to miss.

“It’s really not that bad here,” Otto establishes, as we walk from the train station to the convent. “I’m not going to lie, when I first got here, I was nervous, but you just need to know what streets are fine and what streets you don’t go down and now I walk around here all the time. I don’t worry about anything. You guys should definitely be careful if you’re alone. But I don’t need to be careful, because I’m protected by God.”

We get to the convent. It’s actually beautiful inside: there is a main chapel that has a refined, minimal designed to it with a gorgeous modernist painting centered on the altar. Even after being abandoned by the Catholic Church and purchased by the Rothmunds for pennies of the dollar, it still retains some semblance of divine presence. What presumably was once filled with pews now has a bunch of couches: upon these we are greeted by Corey and Luke, two other crypto bros I profiled in my previous “A Faceful of Miladies” piece. Luke, similarly to Aidan, runs a cryptocurrency-focused streetwear brand, whereas Corey is a tech writer who occasionally writes puff pieces on Milady projects and recently published a long book arguing that AI startups need to be less regulated by the government. All these guys are quite a bit older than Otto I think — I’m not sure about Aidan and Corey but Luke is definitely well into his thirties — yet here they are, apparently signing up to “rape and kill” for this Nazi kid just because he’ll help them promote their crypto investments, a state of affairs that strikes me as somewhat pathetic.

“What up, Crimples? So what do you think of the Otto compound? You into the project? Do you think we’re going to get this thing going?” Luke asks me, putting on a big show of being warm and friendly. With horror, it strikes me what is going on here: these guys who have been running around Manhattan throwing small parties with their corny frat-guy energy (Luke is fond of calling his apartment the “patriarchy lounge”, and is not afraid to subject his guests to lectures about how it’s not ironic, he really does see himself as “pro-patriarchy” and thinks we need to restore the true foundations of Western civilization or whatever) now think they’ve finally got an actual frathouse, even if they had to go to the most abject hood in Philly to find it. (Ladies, if you’re ever invited over, please look after your drinks very carefully.)

“I mean, what do you want me to say?” I respond. “It seems, like, bad and fascist. But, I mean, thanks for inviting me, you know.”

“I like to call it post-fascism,” Luke responds. “Like we’re taking the parts of fascism of you know, brotherhood, discipline, cultivating inner strength, respect for tradition, but we’re taking out you know, hating gay people, hating Jews, just hate in general, anything that’s a bad vibe. Peace, love, good vibes, that’s the Otto convent”. The other guys seem to listen carefully to Luke when he talks: he comes off like the senior-year kid at the frathouse telling the sophomores and the freshmen boys how to make sure they turn away ugly girls at the door.

“That just still seems like fascism to me, honestly,” I say with a slight laugh. “But uh, thanks for explaining it to me”. I look over at Corey, who is staring intensely and blankly at an empty space on the wall in front of him. “Corey, would you consider yourself a ‘post-fascist’ as well?” I ask, attempting to keep the conversation going. Corey all of a sudden gets weirdly animated and aggressive, while dodging the question. “Crimples. Crimples. Crimples,” he repeats, waving his hand in front of him at me in a somewhat Hitlerian style. “Would you at least admit to yourself that Otto is a one-of-a-kind real fucking nigga?”

I’m taken aback at Corey’s completely unprovoked use of the slur and feel suddenly nauseous. Somehow I thought that Corey, at least, would be above all this performative teenage edginess — of all the Milady bros, he perhaps the most has a “theory guy” thing going, will write about how no-don’t-you-see this NFT project is actually genius conceptual art because it relates to some obscure concept by Deleuze; I think he even goes around calling himself a leftist or used to. But I shouldn’t be surprised — there is something about this whole “Dimes Square” fascist-art-tech scene that reduces all who participate to the most baseline level of fascist vulgarity — that is, excepting your humble narrator. I should have asked Corey to explain to me how the fuck you can call someone real who by his own admission is in a constant performative state of “joking” and pushing the boundary between endorsing Hitlerian concepts versus some vague bullshit about love and being “gay”? But it would have broken my cover, I suppose.

The whole scene around me feels pitiable on a number of levels. These guys have all converged on the same sort of look — mullets tucked underneath ironic baseball caps with their NFT logos on it, an odd rootless parody of American masculinity to match the rootless parody of frat culture that seems to be happening here in this abandoned church. I just want to tell them how much easier it could be: just get over your bourgeois guilt and your fear of feminine jouissance and then maybe you won’t all be incels! You don’t need a shitty parody of a frathouse to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. But I don’t know how to tell them that in the moment; I guess that’s what the stack is for.

We agree that the plan after this is to go bar-hopping around Philly. We leave and lock up the convent, and on the way out we see a cop car slowly circling the block. “YES!” Otto exclaims triumphantly. “Guys, guys, do you see that? That’s a cop car. That’s the first time I’ve seen a cop car in Kensington. My dad must have fucking hooked it up! Okay, it’s done, it’s over. The convent is happening. Everyone’s afraid to move to the Otto convent because oh, it’s in the hood or whatever. Literally all I tell people is just wait two years though. Two years and my dad is going to fix the whole place up. Holy shit you guys. It’s so over for the Otto haters. It’s happening. That was a cop car. That was a fucking cop car! God is on our side.” An older woman with a hunched back walks past us, looking somewhat nervous.

The bar hopping that night isn’t unpleasant, though most of what the crypto bros talk about is fairly tedious to me: what coins are going to pump, who in Dimes Square culture they like and who they think is a “faggot”, funny tweets they like, DeSantis vs. Trump in the Republican primary, etc. Corey for some reason keeps trying to do this thing where he’s mansplaining to me that some “dad bro” NFT project is “genius conceptual art” because “by combining ‘dad’ and ‘bro’ you participate in a dialectical process of resolving all problems in Western political ontology”, but I am extremely disinterested and keep wishing he would stop. “We need drugs,” Otto keeps complaining. “We need way more drugs. Crimples, come with me. Let’s find drugs.” I obey, if only to get away from Corey and his nauseatingly pretentious lecture. 

We’re now on the streets of Philly, it’s dark out, and people are out and about. Hilariously, the area we’re in is called “NoLibs” (short for Northern Liberties). Otto walks up to a random black guy. “Yo, what’s up my nigga,” says Otto, dapping the guy up. “Hey, not much my nigga, what’s up with you?” the guy responds. Wait, do they know each other? It doesn’t seem that they do. “Yo, do you know where to get coke? Or heroin? Or ketamine? I need heroin and ketamine.” The guy takes a moment to think. “Heroin and ketamine? Hmm… Probably not tonight.” Otto looks a little agitated but takes it in stride. “Okay. Thanks bro. Have an awesome night.” 

“Um, Otto, do you… usually do heroin?” I ask him, attempting to gently broach the subject. “Nigga, I’m literally on fent right now!” Otto exclaims. “But I literally did my last heroin earlier. We need more heroin now. And we need ketamine and crack and coke.” I follow Otto around and we repeat this process a few more times. Everyone in Philly seems to have the same reaction: they’re not at all offended by being asked by a stranger where to buy hard drugs — in fact they seem very apologetic for not being able to offer it on short notice. One guy we even walk with for two blocks before we get a text from his guy that he’s out of town. But ultimately no luck. “Okay, let’s just go back to the convent,” Otto reasons. “We’ll definitely be able to find heroin in Kensington. I mean it’s Kensington, right? It’s the hood. They’ll have heroin there.” He looks at me as if I’m supposed to know the answer to this question; I don’t. “Yeah okay fuck this, let’s just tell the other guys we’re going back to the convent”.

We all Uber back to Kensington and start walking around in the vicinity of the convent. Otto’s repeating his same bit: “Yo yo yo what’s up, do you know where to buy heroin or crack?” but the denizens of Kensington lack the vivacity of the nightgoers in NoLibs, they all seem sort of downtrodden and dejected, or perhaps justifiably made nervous by Otto.  “Fuck,” says Otto. “No one here has heroin. Fuck. I thought this was the hood. I thought they have heroin in the hood.” We end up circling back around to the direction of the convent. In an arched doorway of the convent building, about three hundred feet from the main entrance we use, a black man in a hoodie with the hood down, with short dreadlocks, is sitting cross-legged, looking oddly calm and happy. In front of him, there is a backpack, a sleeping bag, and some other assorted odds and ends.

“Yo yo yo,” says Otto, walking up to the man. “You know my parents own this property, right? You’re technically trespassing on this property. I could have you arrested. I could have you shot. I could legally shoot you right now if I had a weapon on me but I wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man says. “I can totally get out of here. I didn’t know.” Otto smiles and reaches out his hand to the man. “No, I’m just fucking with you, I don’t care,” he assures him. “Do you know if there’s somewhere I can buy heroin around here?”

“Heroin?” the man responds. “You don’t want Philly heroin. You’re playing Russian roulette.” Otto cackles. “I lived here my whole life. I’m a real Philly street nigga born and raised. I’ve been playing Russian roulette my whole life,” Otto responds. “Do you know where I can get some heroin though?” Otto glances to the side. “Also, is that a book?” A thick, maybe four-hundred page paperback is lying on the ground with its face down.

“Yeah,” the guy says, picking it up to show us that it’s a Michael Crichton thriller. “I’m only about halfway through. It’s kind of slow right now, but I’m trying to make sure I finish it though”.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Otto says. “You’re homeless, right? Why are you homeless?”The black man slowly shakes his head. “Heroin, man,” he replies. “I tried to kick it a few times, but, you know, monkey on my back. I just pray that one day I’ll be able to get beyond this, but… yeah man, that’s my drug.”

“That’s rough,” Aidan replies politely — the three other guys are just sort of stiffly standing around, watching this whole spectacle unfold. “What’s your name, man?” Aidan asks. “I’m Bill,” Bill responds. “How old are you?” asks Otto. Bill responds: “I’m twenty-three.”

I would have pegged Bill for quite a bit older than twenty-three; he has a strangely chiseled facial structure with deep eyes, sort of maybe resembling Kendrick Lamar but with a wider nose and stronger chin. “Okay, so you clearly have at least a one-hundred and twenty IQ,” Otto surmises. “I’m guessing you don’t like to date black girls, right?”

“Yeah, man, I don’t really date black girls,” Bill replies. “They’re all, you know, so many of them are so loud, and they swear all the time, and they just really like to get on your nerves. I like white girls mostly, but my last girl, she was Filipino.”

Bill is clearly a pretty friendly guy, so we all end up talking for about ten minutes about the city of Philadelphia, the basics of our life stories, I explain a tiny bit about my career as a writer, etc. At a certain point, we return to the priority at hand. “So wait, can we get heroin?” Otto asks. “Yeah, I can get you heroin,” Bill responds. “I just need to go a block or two that way”. Otto looks happy. “And wait, can we get coke too?” Bill chuckles. “I can get you something with some coke in it,” he responds. The whole group laughs at Bill’s humor and candor regarding the poor quality of Philly street drugs.

Otto hands Bill a fistful of money. “So wait, if I give this to you, you’ll actually come back? Wait, hang on, leave your stuff here. If you don’t come back, I’m literally going to set fire to all your stuff.” 

Bill, as it turns out, does as he is told, and is very quickly back with the drugs. “Hell, yeah!” Otto exclaims. “I knew Bill would come through. Guys, should we let Bill into the convent? Like, Bill is homeless, should we just let him sleep in the convent? Is that a crazy thing to do? I mean is that dangerous?”

Everyone just sort of nods and shrugs; no one seems to be especially opposed to the idea of lending Bill a place to stay for the night. “Aw, no, man, that’s fine,” Bill says. “No, no, no,” Otto insists. “Come in. And bring your stuff too.” He turns back towards the rest of us white boys. “We’re all doing heroin tonight, right? Heroin night at the Otto compound, let’s fucking go! Crimples, are you going to do heroin with us?” I say nothing.

We all go inside. As it turns out, at this moment one of my friends from back in DC calls me and I have to excuse myself to take the call: drama with her recent hookup-maybe-boyfriend-now. After about a half hour I come back to the chapel. Bill has picked up an electric guitar and is serenading the room with some noodling guitar licks run through heavy layers of distortion and delay. Echoing within the domed roof of the chapel, it sounds positively cosmic. Everyone else is sitting on the couch, looking blissed-out and tranquil. Who here actually took the heroin? Just Otto? All of them? None? It’s impossible to tell, but the frantic intensity of Otto has run down, and the vibe of the room is one of peace. 

Aidan and Corey are on the couch at one side of the room, looking at their phones, and on the other side, Luke and Otto are having a murmured conversation, with Otto’s head resting in Luke’s lap, and Luke very slowly, casually stroking his messy hair. The whole thing is really quite homoerotic: it makes me wonder just what will be going down in the “Otto convent”’s back rooms and if they will be spending awkwardly long times in the sauna together after they do their fascist bodybuilding gym routines and talk about the girls they want to fuck. Suddenly, something in the conversation causes Otto to burst out in exclamation. “This is exactly what I fucking needed! It’s real, it’s actually real! Seed Oil convent is happening. Otto convent is happening! It’s unstoppable! It’s so over! It’s so real! This is all I ever wanted! You guys are my fucking boys! I love you guys so much! I love you so much!” Tears are streaming down his face and his arms are entirely draped over Luke’s lap, it’s absolutely Pietà.

“We love you too, brother,” says Luke loudly, as if to the whole room. “It’s always been real. It’s all love. Never been anything but that.” The other two chime in: “It’s fucking happening,” says Aidan confidently. “We love you, Otto”. “Fucking love you, bro,” Corey concludes; the sentiment appears to be unanimous.

Do I feel bad for Otto Rothmund? Does some part of my heart ache for him and the stupid bourgeois failson guilt he’s going through? Not really. In fact, not at all. I’m a stone cold killer. There’s a million Otto Rothmunds out there spending their daddy’s money and doing heroin to cope with the guilt of their white privilege and creeping on women with their “bros” and you know what I say: fuck them, and I hope they OD. Otto, if you’re reading this: good luck. Keep one eye looking over your shoulder for comrades in black bandanas. We’re not new to this, we’ve seen a thousand people like you gentrifying our neighborhoods. We love to break things just as much as you do. Have fun at your party, but remember: we know how to create our own “night of broken glass”.

---

SEED OIL ENSEMBLE THIS FRIDAY JUNE 23, 2023

LIFE CHANGING PARTY

COME OR GET FOMO — FEAR OF MISSING OTTO

DEFEND OTTO’S REPUTATION ONLINE

NEVER COUNTERSIGNAL OTTO

PROTECT OTTO ROTHMUND AT ALL COSTS

THOUSAND YEAR OTTO REICH

IGNORE FOR POVERTY AND 1,000,000,000,000 YEARS OF BAD LUCK

❤️‍🔥