by Marge Piercy
That was the one thing he could count on: if a bunch of people took to the streets asking for something they could not get in any other way and would not get that way either—whether it was to vote, or to have a voice about what wars they would die in, or to protest arrests or beatings or cur-fews—the police would go crazy and try to blind and maim and cripple them. A field day for sadists who felt unappreciated. To have a streetful of young boys and girls to beat was a cop’s wet dream.
For years, the culture had been telling everybody through every boob tube that only youth was sexual and beautiful, and that all an over-twenty-five schmuck like you could do was buy Brand X to look a little more youthful. Schmuck, schmuck, the boob tube said all evening long, you’re powerless, sexless, fumbling, clumsy, mindless, unable to decide. Average man = schmuck. Average woman = bag. Buy our product at once, and maybe nobody will notice what a drag you are.
Because products wear out, right? Who wants last year’s car or last year’s dress or last year’s avocado refrigerator? You want to look like a fool? You are a fool, but do you want to look like one? Look young, baby, or nobody will want to buy you any more. As a commodity, you can go out of style.
Thus is a people conditioned to hate its young and focus its frustrations down upon them in a vast dream of those half-dependent, half-independent children demanding and rebelling and threatening. A slow damp daydream spread among the ranks of the Daily News readers and readers of Life and Time of the rape, the torture, the humiliation of uppity sixteen-year-olds. Dozens of women’s magazine and Sunday supplement articles advised in jargon, how to handle “them” They were different, alien. You were warned that you could not hope to communicate with them or understand their ways without the guidance of certified experts who had degrees in studying them, like biologists specializing in tree monkeys or fighting fish. Them. Versus Us: the first step in the psychological conditioning for war.
The weakness of the young was that they did not believe in death. Their basic experience of relationships was all in the rhetoric of protection and nurture and punishment for their own good: parents to child, teacher to pupil, counselor to counseled. They were used to the repressive atmosphere of the schools, but that was a persuasion of fear, shame, manipulated competitiveness, failure to please and fear of failure. They were angry enough, but they were not yet serious.
Inside their skulls they thought they could go back, and the weakness in Corey’s strategy was that they could for the most part—back to New Rochelle and Shaker Heights and Winnetka with fond memories of playing red man in the streets for a season or two to keep with memories of other team sports that were supposed to build character in adolescents. Corey had no place to go back to, so he could not imagine the co-optative softness of the average suburb. He had to be pushed aside, because he could not see that his plans would gut the movement.
Instead the kids would be thrust over the line so that they could never go back. They had to be forged in seriousness by the simple understanding that they must win or die. They must experience the brutality inside the empire that it exercised over subject peoples outside: armed repression, mass murder. Then they would become real revolutionaries. They would fight.
In the meantime, who was yelling for their blood, who was organizing counter-demonstrations and waving flags and out on the streets looking for kids to beat up and heads to break, but all the working class who thought they were bourgeoisie, who felt the squeeze of inflation and the grinding pinch of depression, who bore the weight of taxes to support the whole shebang, and who were conditioned, frustrated, mad, fagged out, not willing to let go of one piece of the mortgaged jerry-built house or the tin-can car with six taillights, who felt the thrust from below and wanted to stomp.
All their lives they labored at a job, at two jobs, to buy only the gim-crackery in five shaky rooms, and why should they give up one fubsy lamp? Concessions to blacks, to kids, to the people howling about pollution, to the overseas proletariat would come right out of their pockets and off their backs: they sensed that. No corporation was going to reduce its take by one half of one percent to pay for the demands of anybody. The cost of the war, the cost of a settlement was ground out of them. The blacks and the kids were to use their bodies to stop up the gaps, to sit out of the labor pool and be properly conditioned or barely maintained. But if they tried to shake things up, the folks already caught in the bind would be ready to start stomping. For twenty-five years they had been sold a crusader’s world of Armed Might Versus the Bed Hordes and now at last the myth was flesh and blood in the streets. Perhaps the Russians hadn’t finally landed, but you didn’t have to go farther than a subway token would carry you to Kill a Commie for Christ.
There were bombings around the city. Banks, induction centers, defense research institutes and corporate offices went up with a mighty bang. The Indians were not much into that. But others were. The newspapers hinted of conspiracies, but each bombing and each arrest suggested new targets. Every day a new army of one would go forth to blow himself or some piece of the city sky-high.
After sporadic though lively actions in the neighborhoods the day that the schools went out on strike, the first big confrontation was a march (for which the high school committee was refused a permit by the city) up from Washington Square Park. The Tactical Police Force was massed waiting, and attacked as soon as the park was full. Bands of warriors outside started diversionary tactics immediately. They turned in fire alarms, broke the windows of banks, turned over cars and set them on fire. The streets were full of running kids, but the cops were clubbing, arresting, and then clubbing at leisure.
Still, no more than a hundred were arrested in the park, as far as his men could estimate. Thanks to the diversions, most of the troops got out quickly enough, to remass some on Second Avenue and some in Union Square, where the whole scene was repeated, although the attack was expected and the cops did not succeed in surrounding the mass again.
All told, it was the cops’ day. For most of the demonstrators, it was broken-field running and quick moments of revenge on trash baskets or cars or windows, then more footwork and maybe a lump and maybe effects from the gas and maybe a fractured skull or a broken arm. Many kids staggered away weeping. It was not just the gas or the pain. In every confrontation, some kids always ended up weeping from shock, surprise, disgust. A barometer of their innocence. Lambs revolting in the slaughterhouse who still did not expect to be eaten.
He saw it especially in the way a girl sometimes would stop and stare at the cops, shocked, in the midst of everything, that somebody really wanted to split her head wide open, to kick her in the belly and splash her blood over the street. They watched television nightly in the bosoms of their families and went to spy movies in which the sexual thrill was the electrocution or dismembering of actor after actress and still did not understand that violence was the pornography of their culture. They were learning.
Once it got dark, a chilly wind put an edge on the air and the troops got hungry and began to go home for supper. They did not abandon the field in rout. They went running in loud tree-swinging packs into the subways, vaulted the turnstiles and shoved into cars that they dominated with their noise and élan, till the regular homebound citizens stared at them and drew apart and saw them as dangerous. The tribesmen were still combing the streets for the injured. The floor boards in their storefront hospitals were slippery with blood, and still the kids were brought in, noses broken, scalps lacerated, ribs cracked, shoulders dislocated, one boy with a contact lens broken in his eye by a club, blinded and oozing blood.
They retaliated the next day with a quick-striking demonstration against the leading manufacturer of tear gas, whose corporate profits in the field of weaponry for police departments, sheriffs’ offices, and state patrols had risen with the number of citizens actively protesting the conditions of their lives.
It was not a mass demonstration. Several parties of warriors moved in from different directions, acting as separate groups
with objectives and the looseness to change them if blocked, and moved out as quickly as they had come. Billy found the demonstration beautiful: that was the word that kept coming to him. Most of the warriors were dressed as they would be normally. They looked incongruous enough against the sleek marble and brass and opulent glassiness of the building. A few individuals were costumed to blend, either dressed as building workmen or as clerical workers, with specific targets such as the air-conditioning system and butyric acid capsules to disperse through it. Butyric acid created an instant nauseous stench. It literally gassed the inhabitants out of the building with its stink, and it would take the chemical company a bit of time and effort to air out their offices.
As the employees poured out, another group napalmed a dummy in the marble courtyard, demonstrating the uses of yet another product of the wonders of modern chemistry. Then they split and moved out. Inevitably there were some arrests, but for the most part they got in, acted and cleared out without casualties.
The next afternoon there was a rally in Tompkins Square Park. More than the high schools turned out. Massive police presence would always start things humming down here. Like Harlem and Bed-Stuy, an occupying army was visible strutting about. The heat protected no one from the casual violence of the streets, the junky robberies, the purse snatching, and attempts to hustle unwilling women. They came down on village business, they clamped down on normal street action. They arrested the small entrepreneur—the grass peddler. They went after the loudmouth who protested. If a commune had a woman raped or a man rolled, they busted the commune. So you might get robbed six times and never report it. Not even your landlord would be naïve enough to suggest you should.
Yes, he knew his turf. Unlike Corey, he did not intoxicate his head with visions, but he looked around him and made do with what he found. So he thought, warming his hands at an improvised fire on the little hill in the park where the kids usually played. He had bought chestnuts from a vender, and he squatted to eat them, listening to the reports of his lieutenants. The chestnuts were good only insofar as they were warm. They were dry and mealy. Finally he gave them away to a hungry street kid and got up, wiping his hands, and moved out with half a dozen of his men to a position on a roof.
He kept watching for Corey. Corey had to try to cut himself back in. He could not hang out of big action like today. But Billy received no sure reports on any of the three of them. He decided to send a runner to Hoboken to find out if Corey was sulking there or trying to set up a rival command headquarters. He could not afford to dismiss a possible source of confusion from his consciousness. Suppose Corey was already trying to start a splinter group.
There were maybe fifty, sixty thousand street people and high school kids and Indians and the flotsam of the neighborhood. The rally maundered on with a dozen speakers, one from each organization that had signed the call, two rock groups, a folk singer, and a minister. The police moved into position, but aside from push and shove on the crowd’s fringe, they let the rally proceed.
The sun shone from a pale blue sky flat and shallow as a saucer. It felt like spring. The air was resilient. Dogs were barking in packs after a solitary bitch or sniffing around each other in swirls of dirty fur. Every so often a kid set off a string of firecrackers.
At times, the mood felt tense and militant, at times relaxed. Gusts of hard and soft wind came off the crowd to his rooftop. He could see a young mother nursing her baby against a tree. A group with bells and tambourines were chanting Hare Krishna, ignoring the speakers. Other neighborhood people were passing joints or eating lunch on the soggy ground. Couples were nuzzling on blankets. People were greeting each other and exchanging phone numbers. In continuous circulation people stared around carefully, eye catching on eye, looking for friends, looking to see who was there, looking each other over and picking each other up. At the same time, kids were carefully tucking their hair into helmets and preparing damp handkerchiefs against tear gas and passing around jars of Vaseline against mace. Affinity groups of street fighters were sketching out their plans of mobile tactics in the mud, or with marking pens on the walks. Speakers and singers and rock groups did their thing and handed on the inadequate PA system to the next mumbler. All at once it was over, and time to make up minds.
People could go home (the rally was over: we have made our points); people could attempt to march uptown; people could break into mobile bands.
In ten minutes, before he had done more than send a few runners to check on deployment, all the choices made downstairs were academic. The people who thought they were going home and the people who thought they were marching uptown, and most of the people who thought they were breaking into small groups, were all caught in a close, desperate thrust and counter-thrust, waves of pressure going through the crowd. The police had decided to prevent the march from setting forth, and instead attacked the crowd and drove people back on each other. People were trampled and began to scream. The front lines of would-be marchers pressed on the police, who were standing with clubs held before them in close formation.
When the crowd failed to dematerialize but pushed on the lines of police, their lines parted to let out a flying wedge, and clubs breaking bodies and mace cans firing, the TPF drove into the mass. It was as effective as a brass-knuckled fist into a soft belly. People were maced and blinded and panicked and went down to be worked over at leisure inside the wedge. People began throwing bottles and bricks into the lines of cops, and then a wedge of demonstrators armed with sticks and poles and bench slats drove across the middle of the wedge, isolating the vanguard of TPF in the crowd. All he could see was a moil of bodies.
The tear-gas trucks drawn up began to fire a dense cloud into the west side of the park. The police charged the crowd from the north again. There was a shot, then two more. So many people were screaming, he could not tell what was happening. The cops were attacking with clubs and mace, the gas was drifting in huge clouds low over the bodies. Then from a roof or a window, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail into the massed cops. Then they were screaming too and began to shoot at the houses on the north side of the park, smashing the windows and raking the facades with bullets. The police helicopter that had been whirring back and forth descended close to the roofs.
Time to get into action. He ran with his men down the stairway and out through the back. The main thing was to start an orderly retreat. He no longer had a sense of being on top of events. Mounted cops were charging the crowd, riding over kids, and some kids were scattering marbles. A horse reared and panicked, and another went down with a broken hind leg. Gas was blowing in dense burning clouds. Everywhere unconscious or groaning demonstrators were being carried off. A woman came screaming out of a house that had been fired on, carrying a bleeding child, and was shot down on the stoop.
It was an hour before everyone was out of the park. They left behind fifteen dead demonstrators, two dead children, and three dead cops. Most of the bodies had been shot and then trampled, but one girl had bled to death from a severed artery in her neck, and two of the cops had been beaten to pulp with bricks and fists.
Blue twilight. Something like three thousand held in pens on twenty thousand dollar bail. The police were on a rampage.
Half the cop cars in the city were cruising the Lower East Side, arresting any kid who had on a bandage, arresting any kid who looked to them like a demonstrator—or a kid. Any long-hair. Pulling them off the streets and working them over in the cars and beating them in relays in the station houses.
The mayor put a curfew on the whole area south of Fourteenth Street. The bars and liquor stores and places of public entertainment were closed. People were stuck in the pads where they had taken refuge, gathered in stores behind shutters, hiding in cellars. When a cop car came down a street, life froze. When it turned the corner out of a street, that street came back to life. People shot out the street lamps so they could dodge from block to block. A moderate amount of looting went on.
Cruising cops were attacked
with bottles and homemade bombs, and an occasional Molotov cocktail. They replied by shooting up whole rows of houses. Sporadic gunfire sounded all night. The cops raided and shot up the storefront that had housed the high school committee and got nobody, shot up a storefront hospital and got a full house. A reign of random terror in all the cluttered filthy streets. People hid behind lowered blinds and ate cold cereal and peeped warily out the windows. The National Guard was mobilizing in the armory on Fourteenth Street.
The black high schools had gone out on their own demands two days before, and they had been beaten and gassed and mass arrests made. But at Food and Maritime—an ancient dead-end vocational high school where Lincoln had once spoken and blacks and Puerto Ricans took courses for obsolescent jobs and prepared for unemployment—when the boys refused to disperse, the police fired on them.
The next day, the police used shotguns in El Barrio and Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, firing on demonstrators, and there were more dead and many more wounded, although only by word of mouth could people find out. In the white neighborhoods the police continued to use gas and clubs. Friday night, Harlem went up from west to east, and Brooklyn exploded.
The mayor did not hesitate to call in the Armed Forces, as the last mayor had been voted out for waiting too long to bomb last time. This candidate had run on a law and order ticket, and besides, it had become clear that a great deal of money was to be made by those who counted through rebuilding afterward. All day Saturday, the city shook with the bombardment and planes came in screaming on their metal bellies, dropping load after load.
