Side Roads and Dandelions

by W.H. Harrod

  ~~ Chapter Twelve

  “Ernest,” said Sam, “will you reach up front here and pinch the individual riding shotgun to see if she is still awake. I haven’t heard a sound from that direction in some time now. I’m beginning to get concerned.”

  Without giving a verbal response, you could hear Ernest moving his large frame into a position where he could carry out Sam’s request. Before he got to the pinching part of the request though, he received a warning from the passenger in question.

  “If you place one finger upon my person I swear I will get out my cell phone and call Rosa Lee right now and give her a minute by minute report of your misbehaving,” threatened Allison.

  “Sounds like the same Allison to me, Sam,” said Ernest as he retreated to his former position.

  “Just for the record,” said Allison, “neither of you have any credibility with me from now on. Nada! If my head is on fire and I can feel it burning, even if I smell the smoke, I won’t believe it if it’s one of you who warns me.”

  “I can certainly understand you doubting Ernest’s wild story,” countered Sam, “but I hope you’re not suggesting that I have not been entirely forthright -”

  “You know, somehow I knew the first time I ever laid eyes on you the night Ernest, Bobby and the professor carried your bloody carcass into his house and placed your body on the floor that you probably deserved it. I would imagine that over the years this has happened to you quite often, hasn’t it?” Allison waited for Sam’s reply.

  Sam didn’t respond immediately. Allison’s remark, although offered in jest, seemed to have struck a sensitive area.

  “No, Allison, I’m pleased to be able to say that nothing like that has ever happened to me again. Maybe at times as you said I probably deserved it, but fortunately, it never happened.” Sam’s voice trailed off as he finished his statement.

  Allison regretted making the stupid statement as soon as the last syllable rolled across her lips. She didn’t mean a word of it. She simply had not engaged her brain before letting the words loose.

  “Sam, I didn’t mean that. It was a stupid thing to say. I was trying to be a little too cute, I guess. Will you forgive me?” Allison’s plea sounded genuine.

  Sam showed no indication to Allison that he thought she actually meant what she said. Maybe he recalled the frightening sight of her bloody face in ‘69 when he first looked around to see where the strangers who found him in the vacant lot had brought him after the sheriff’s deputies beat him senseless.

  “I know that, Allison. When I saw you for the first time that night it broke my heart to think that there were people in the world who were capable of doing harm to such a pretty girl like you. Although, when I think about it, I don’t know how I knew you were pretty as you laid there battered and bloody,” said Sam.

  Not for thirty-four years had Allison been in the company of so many individuals who knew first hand the intimate details of that fateful day in 1969 -- the day the city of Berkeley went crazy.

  “Where were you, Sam, when things started happening that day?” asked Allison.

  Sam hesitated before responding. “I was at ground zero. I was still loosely involved with the SDS and as soon as we heard what happened that morning we went to Sproul Plaza where the protest started. The students were really pissed off because the university had taken back the park from the people, especially after so many volunteers had worked so hard to turn an unsightly muddy lot into an attractive park that could be used by everyone in the community. About noon some dumb cop cut the wires to the speakers at the rally and all hell broke loose. Five thousand students headed down Telegraph Avenue to the People’s Park and surrounded the place. The university had an eight-foot-high chain link fence erected around the entire park early that morning to keep people out, and it was guarded by hundreds of cops in full battle gear carrying loaded shotguns.”

  “Did you see how the violence got started?” asked Allison. “I’ve read various accounts of what happened over the years, but most of them don’t corroborate one another.”

  “I remember seeing mostly peaceful activities initially. People were placing flowers in the chain link fence and talking to the cops. I could see that the cops were nervous and who wouldn’t be with thousands of angry students surrounding them. You could tell something was going happen, and it did. Over on Telegraph Avenue some protestors opened up a water hydrant that attracted the attention of more protestors as well as cops. Before you knew it, the cops fired tear gas into the crowd. The protestors started throwing rocks, bottles, and anything else they could pick up and hurl at the cops who came to turn off the water. Shortly after that, the shooting started. I couldn’t believe it! The cops actually fired their shotguns at the students. Anybody that was not a cop was a target: deliverymen, store employees, sightseers, journalists, and photographers. I even saw a cop fire in the direction of a lady pushing a baby carriage! It was insane. You couldn’t wrap your brain around what was happening.”

  “What happened to you then?” asked Allison.

  Sam wrapped his fists tightly around the steering wheel causing his knuckles to turn white. All during the time he talked he stared straight ahead as if his audience was ahead of him instead of right beside him in the bus.

  “I moved out of the cops’ range when they switched from birdshot to double-ought. They tried to hurt people bad. Hundreds were wounded, and I heard of one guy sitting on a roof watching who was shot and killed. He was just watching, and they killed him! When the tear gas and the double-ought shot dispersed most of the protestors onto side streets, the cops began to roam up and down the blocks firing at targets of opportunities. People who had absolutely nothing to do with the protest arrived at the hospitals full of shotgun pellets.”

  “After that,” continued Sam, “things were pretty much a blur. We broke up into smaller groups and threw rocks and even pieces of rebar at the cops who were being reinforced by the state police. Later they sent in the National Guard. The governor made his career from that move. He had promised if elected governor ‘to clean up the mess at Berkeley.’ The university didn’t want him to do it. From then on it was a running battle for the rest of the day into the night. No matter where you were around the university you could see smoke from fires and hear shotguns going off.”

  “When did you get caught?”

  “I had gone non-stop the entire day along with thousands of other protestors and was exhausted. I knew they enacted a curfew so I began to make my way back to a friend’s apartment where I had been staying. He lived a few blocks west of the park. I wasn’t armed, and I had no marks on me to show that I had been part of the protest so I felt fairly safe walking that far away from the action. About a block away from the apartment, I cut through a vacant lot to save some time. That’s when the deputies grabbed me. I hadn’t noticed them standing under a big tree. I wasn’t running or anything, so they had no reason to think I had done anything wrong. The next thing I knew I was on the ground being beaten and kicked. They didn’t ask my name or where I was going or anything. I never saw their faces and all I heard was obscenities before I blacked out. I came to as people I didn’t know were carrying me away. The first time I ever set eyes on any of you guys was at the professor’s house. I saw you there, beaten and bloody but alive, and I began to hope that I was going to live. I saw the bloody towels around you, and I knew someone was trying to help us.”

  Allison reached across and placed her hand on to Sam’s rigid right arm tightly affixed to the steering wheel.

  “Did you see the whole thing, too, Ernest?” asked Allison as she turned partly towards the rear.

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t get there until later in the day. I remember how odd it was to see white people shooting at other white people. I told myself, these are, for sure, some crazy SOB’s. They must not like anybody. They shoot black people, brown people, and even other white people.”

  “Then why were you there if not for the protest? You had to know what w
as happening.”

  Ernest considered the question for a time before answering. “I was there on business, Black Panther business. I came over from Oakland to find a guy and give him a message.”

  “During all that was going on you came there to find a person and deliver a message? Excuse me, but that doesn’t sound very wise under the circumstances.” Allison looked at Ernest quizzically.

  “Actually,” replied Ernest, “the guys that sent me thought the noise and activity would be a fitting background for the special message I was delivering.”

  “Just what kind of message would fit in with that noise?” asked Allison.

  Ernest once again thought about the question posed to him. “The sound of another gun going off,” he answered.

  “Another gun going off?” said a confused Allison.

  “I was sent there to kill an informer,” added Ernest, tiring of the inquisition.

  Both Allison and Sam glanced back at Ernest as if they disbelieved their ears.

  “You said you didn’t kill anyone!” proclaimed Allison.

  “I didn’t,” said Ernest, “I only said I went there to do it.”

  “What happened? What stopped you?” Ernest had Allison and Sam’s complete attention.

  “I met a strange man,” responded Ernest. “I’m standing in an alley with my gun in this guy’s chest and he’s crying and pleading for his life, when up walks this goofy white guy with a long ponytail who asks me how it’s going. I can’t think of anything to say, so I tell him I’m kind of busy at the moment and that he should move along. He ignores me and starts talking to the guy I’m supposed to shoot. That guy is crying so hard he can’t even answer. I start to tell this nut that he better move on if he knows what’s good for him, but before I get the chance he starts quoting philosophy to me. Right there in the alley while I got a gun pointed at this informer’s chest. It was so weird that I will never forget what the guy said. ‘I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and, therefore, may be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.’”

  “By this time I’m wondering, who should I shoot first, the snitch or the philosophy nut? Before I can make up my mind he starts up again. He says, ‘Through what we do, we learn what we are.’ He smiles and tells me there are angry deputies at each end of the alley, and I will never get out of there alive if I don’t get rid of the gun and turn and walk away with him right then.”

  “What did you do?” asked both Allison and Sam simultaneously.

  Ernest showed a look of surprise. “What do you think I did? I’m alive today, aren’t I? I handed him the gun which he tossed into a dumpster as the snitch bolted for another part of the world. I decided I wasn’t quite Black Panther material and went home with the nut to hook up with a ride going east as soon as the streets quieted down. The rest is history.”

  Allison and Sam looked at one another. “Putzkammer!” they said in unison.

  “That’s right. Professor Helmuth Putzkammer of the Philosophy Department at U.C. Berkeley. I believe we owe the man a huge debt of gratitude. He saved all three of our butts that day.”

  “He was the most amazing man,” said Allison. “I’d met him a few months earlier when I moved to Berkeley from the Haight. A lot of other people did the same thing. The Haight-Ashbury district had degenerated into an infested slum by then. It was not a safe place to be anymore. Almost as soon as I started to move around the Berkeley campus area I met Helmuth. We hit it off and he invited me to park my bus behind his house located in the foothills above the campus. He was a straight up guy. I had a place to park the bus and sleep as well as the use of his extra bathroom and shower located in the rear garage apartment. I expected him to try and hit on me but he never once did. The guy was simply a genuine human being. This seemed even stranger when I learned he was a believer in the teachings of Schopenhauer who was the world’s greatest pessimist.”

  “I’ve thought often what my life would be like today if I had stayed a member of the Panthers,” added Ernest. “I’m certain I would not have become a doctor. I very possibly would not have gotten out of the ‘60s alive. The government unofficially proclaimed open season on the Panthers everywhere. I don’t think I quit because I was afraid of being killed. I think the professor summed it up perfectly when he said, ‘Through what we do, we learn what we are.’ If I had killed that snitch, I would have become a murderer. I knew standing there with that gun before the professor even came up to me that killing that low life wasn’t the answer, nor was killing white people. The professor helped me at a critical time to not take the easy way, the violent way, and to become willing to go home and fight racial injustice one unjust event at a time. He helped me to become willing to work hard to overcome the white man’s stereotypical image of black people, one white person at a time.”

  “I didn’t even know the guy,” said Sam. “If he hadn’t come along, the deputies may have killed me. I was unconscious for a while, so I don’t know what happened after they started beating me. I remember coming to when the professor, Ernest, and Bobby carried me into his house. I was warned earlier that the cops were on the lookout for SDS members and, especially, any of the Weatherman sects. If they had time to find out who I was I have no doubt they would have finished me off. The police acted absolutely insane that day. The only other time I ever saw anything like that was at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968. Daly’s cops went wild there, too. That’s one of the reasons I came out west. Things had gotten crazy back east. The Weatherman faction of the SDS promoted violence at every opportunity, and I wanted no part of it. I never really believed that the governor would follow through with his campaign promise. Who would have imagined that here in America cops and soldiers would shoot and gas students with chemicals condemned as inhumane by the Geneva Convention.”

  Both men looked to Allison to contribute her part to the groups revisiting of the seminal event underlying their extraordinary relationship. She was absorbed in her own thoughts.

  “Where were you while this was going on, Allison?” asked Ernest after a long pause. “How did you end up becoming one of the victims?”

  Hearing her name spoken awakened her to the discussion that had been going on for some time. What should she say? She could tell them about the blood, about the physical scars that eventually required cosmetic surgery to repair, or the horror of watching the butt of the rifle as it was raised in preparation for smashing it into her face as she lay helpless on the ground. She could tell them that. But she couldn’t tell them everything, about what happened after she became unconscious or about what Bobby did to save her life because she didn’t witness those events. The person asleep on the floor of the bus they were riding in had never talked about it since that night. They would soon, but not today.

  “Believe it or not,” said Allison, “I was less than a mile away from the action that morning, and I knew absolutely nothing about it. I had crashed in the bus after staying up the previous night listening to the professor completely destroy some poor student’s preconceived notions of life having some ultimate meaning or purpose. When the professor was through with him the guy was looking for a knife to slit his own wrists. The professor had convinced him that real happiness was impossible, that life was about misery, and the only hope was for a person to eliminate all desire along with any will to live. He loved screwing with students’ young pseudo-intellectual minds. He is to this day the greatest contradiction I have ever met. Intellectually he was an avowed pessimist while in action he was a tireless promoter of people helping other people.”

  “Bloody Thursday, May 15, 1969, arrived for me in the afternoon. I woke up to the distant sounds of popping noises. I had no idea what they were at first. I actually thought someone might be shooting off firecrackers. Finally, the professor came running up the driveway from the street in a complete lather. The distress in his demeanor shocked me. He cou
ld hardly talk. His first words to me when he regained control of his emotions were, ‘They’re shooting people! They’re shooting people! The crazy bastards are killing students!’ He was so overcome that he sat down on the concrete and put his face into his hands and wept. As I started past him to go and see for myself, he grabbed me and told me not to go towards the People’s Park because that’s where the police were beating people with their clubs.”

  “I couldn’t believe what he was telling me, but in the background I could hear the loud popping sounds. The professor told me they were sounds of shotguns being fired at anyone in sight. He convinced me to stay there until it stopped. He then left to go and meet with other faculty members to see what they could do to get the police to stop shooting.”

  The next part of Allison’s story was much more personal. “I waited all afternoon until after dark for the firing to stop, but it never did. The professor had not returned, and I was afraid he may have gotten hurt or arrested. I couldn’t wait around any longer to find out what was going on. I walked towards the park where I expected most of the action to be centered. As I walked, I heard sirens from all directions, and it was obvious the riots had spread out to other areas of the city. The smell of smoke as well as the odor of tear gas grew stronger as I neared the east end of the park off Telegraph Avenue. In the distance I could see fires burning and people running back and forth. Voices of people shouting and yelling grew louder the closer I came. I got close enough to see the police, and I also saw groups of guardsmen with helmets and rifles with fixed bayonets walking around. I went only a little farther before I was abruptly halted by a guardsman who demanded to know where I was going, where I had been, and what I was doing in this area. He didn’t look any older than me, and he looked sort of familiar. Later I was told that many of the National Guard troops sent to quell the riots were actually the same students that had been involved in starting the riots that morning. They went home only to find the governor had called their units out, so they put on their uniforms and headed back to the same place, but this time with a rifle and a bayonet to fight the same people they were rioting with that morning.”

  “What happened next is he let me go and told me to go home and get off the streets as a curfew was in force. I turned around to go back to the professor’s house and became aware that I was being followed. At first it didn’t bother me. I thought he only wanted to make sure I got off the streets. You know the rest. He waited until I was away from the activity and then attacked me and dragged me into an empty lot. Bobby saved me and brought me to the professor’s home. Fortunately, the professor had gotten back and he helped stop the bleeding and bandage my cuts.”

  Allison hoped neither Ernest nor Sam would ask her any more questions. She was well aware of the gaping holes in her story. Where did Bobby come from? Why didn’t he take Allison to a hospital? Was she sexually molested? Why didn’t she ever report the incident to the authorities? These questions and others awaited answers, but not yet. Maybe someday, but not yet.

  “That was the most disappointing, painful, and unbelievable experience of my entire life so far,” said Sam to himself as much as anyone else. “An American community filled with armed soldiers with fixed bayonets and policemen with shotguns shooting down students. They beat them with clubs then threw them into concentration camps where they were beaten again. Barbed wire was strung up and down the streets of Berkeley. Choppers flew low over the university dropping chemicals banned by the Geneva Convention on students herded into fenced off areas supposedly for the purpose of peaceful assembly. Officers of the law took off their badges so they couldn’t be identified later by the people they shot with their shotguns or beat with their clubs. All of this because some ambitious neo-fascist governor had grandiose political ambitions that necessitated him sucking up to a man who turned out to be one of the greatest frauds in the history of the country, one Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. That sick bastard had been pushing for this to happen in Berkeley for years, until he finally got a guy in office who would do the job for him.”