Still, I went down to the protest with low expectations. I imagined it would resemble all the others I’d been to since the days of the Iraq War protests. There’d be a small crowd on a street corner, hollering conflicting slogans and waving signs for five dozen different causes. I’d stand around, feel vaguely embarrassed, then leave without telling anyone I’d gone. I kept going to protests in the same way many go to church: because I really ought to, no matter how futile it was, and it couldn’t do any harm.
At first, Occupy didn’t shatter my expectations. With a crowd closer to a few hundred than the twenty thousand Adbusters had hoped for, this was no American Tahrir. At least I showed up, I thought. After standing dutifully for half an hour, I left.
As the day passed, though, the Occupy Wall Street crowd swelled to two thousand. Then, as night fell, a hundred or so protesters started camping in Zuccotti Park.
Just a block from our apartment, Zuccotti was an unlovely square of concrete, half a city block in size, owned by Brookfield Properties, a real estate company. In the spring, construction workers working on the Freedom Tower across the street sometimes ate their lunch in Zuccotti. Otherwise, it was empty, as sterile as all corporately owned public space.
Still, there in Zuccotti Park, beneath Joie de Vivre, a seventy-foot sculpture made of crimson beams, the protesters stayed.
Later that night, I stopped by the occupation. That was a rainy September, and I came bearing an armful of plastic tarp to protect the protesters. A few people stood with their “We Are the 99%” signs. I saw a few crustpunks in sleeping bags, some dreadlocked white dudes pounding it out in a desultory drum circle, a few tarps tied to Zuccotti’s trees as makeshift shelter. Someone had left a stack of books on the long ledge bounding the north side of the park.
At the park’s Broadway entrance stood a card table with a small, hand-lettered sign reading “Info.” It was empty, and no one seemed to be in charge. I left the tarps next to the tree, hoping they’d be put to good use.
I spent a week in London, working on some art commissions. On September 24, the day after I returned, I met a few journalist friends for lunch in the East Village. Since winter, we’d all been obsessed by the previous year’s student protests in England. The conversation turned to Occupy.
“What do you think?” I asked my friend, who’d recently written a short piece on Occupy. “Is it just the same old white guys with dreads doing the same old protest?” I secretly hoped she’d say no.
She said she admired what she’d seen, but was still skeptical about the movement’s future. “We’ve all seen too many mediocre marches that burned out and solved nothing.”
I took a bite of my bacon. “Plus, can we kill all drum circles?” I asked, pretending not to care.
I left lunch early to get back to an illustration job. That afternoon, the sun shone hot. As I walked toward the subway at Union Square, the sunlight blinded me. I heard the march before I saw it.
“All Day! All Week! Occupy Wall Street!”
Broadway was flooded with hundreds of protesters. They were walking right down the center of the street, blocking cars with their bodies. Drivers honked, many in approval. They were far from the white hippies my prejudices had led me to expect. These were old ladies and young black women and hard-looking construction guys. One girl held a sign that read, “One day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich.” She was black, with a round lovely face framed by braids.
“Join us,” she screamed.
I gave a brief thumbs-up as I watched her go by.
As I stared at the crowd, shame filled me. My dismissal of Occupy over lunch was nothing but a defense against disappointment. These were the protests I’d been hoping to see in America. But why wasn’t I joining them? Sure, I had work to do, had my drawings and deadlines. But if I didn’t join them, why should anyone?
I looked over my shoulder as I walked away.
Later, from the news, I learned that the September 24 march had ended when the NYPD brandished its orange netting—a stiff plastic material designed to contain human beings. The cops whipped it out faster than the protesters could run. As they stood there, trapped, an NYPD officer named Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed two girls in the face.
The girls sank to their knees. They screamed in agony, their slim hands clawing at the air. Their screams were uploaded to YouTube, then replayed on TV. Still photos of the incident ran in the papers. The NYPD has killed or beaten thousands of black men, but these girls were a different story. White, slender, lovely, these girls’ screams won Occupy international sympathy, even as they exposed one of its greatest problems.
That day, several brown male protesters were also assaulted by the police. While those attacks were also caught on camera, they got nowhere near the media coverage. Focusing on police abuse of white protesters often meant diverting attention from those whom the police have always abused.
The next day, I went over to Zuccotti Park.
The occupation had grown since I first visited. What were once a few sleeping bags had swelled into a mini society, a ragtag David dogging the heels of Goliath. After the economic crash of 2008, the government had bailed out criminal banks, deeming them “too big to fail.” Banks who helped crash the economy squandered $18 billion of this money on bonuses.
“People come here because they want to work hard and get paid a lot for working hard,” one anonymous investment banker told the New York Times, in defense of his bonus. In the same article, an insurance broker claimed that criticizing these bonuses was a slippery slope to “socialism.”
Ruined homeowners received no such handouts.
In the fall of 2011, anyone could see there were two Americas: the America of the ultrarich, and the America of everyone else.
Economics aside, Anthony Bologna’s pepper spray was the fuel that made Occupy’s fire spread. More people came down to the park to check out the protests they’d seen on the news. An activist sat at an info table greeting new visitors. There was a tech tent, with its own Wi-Fi hotspot to handle livestreams, and laptops from which press people dealt with the endless media inquiries. There was a soup kitchen, sometimes run by a gourmet chef who’d been laid off from the Sheraton, and a medical tent with real doctors. Protesters created two newspapers: The Occupied Wall Street Journal, and the Spanish-language IndigNación. Later there would be a toy-filled area for kids to play. Union members hung one tree with their helmets. There was even a table offering free hand-rolled cigarettes. Strangers worked together, planning to reform the economy or take down the museum system or just make sure Zuccotti Park stayed clean.
I walked over to the north side of the park, where that pile of books had sat on the first day. Now the stack had swollen to a battery of crates—labeled “Politics,” “Theory,” and “Fiction,” all organized by real librarians. A whiteboard listed a schedule of signings by famous authors. Ever since they’d appeared in the Puerta del Sol protest camps of 2011 in Madrid, Spain, libraries had become a fixture at occupations worldwide. What was more peaceful than a book? Or more dangerous?
I added some books from my shelves at home.
As I walked west, the tents grew thicker. This was the side of the park where a hundred people lived. These crustpunk kids were the backbones of Occupy; without their presence, the square would have been evicted within days. A boy in a Guy Fawkes mask—the symbol of Anonymous, the hacktivist network—beat a drum. On the sidewalk of the park’s northwest corner was a luxuriant display of cardboard signs. “Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit.” “Take Money Out of Politics.” “All Cops Are Bastards.”
Occupy was a participatory uprising. Anyone was welcome, and everyone was needed. You didn’t have to speak theory. You could cook food, wash dishes, or donate books. Or you could just stand your feet on Zuccotti’s concrete, occupying ground in the most literal sense. In a city where every use of public space is regimented from the top down, Occupy allowed people to build something up from the bottom.
For the first time, outside of my $pread sex worker activism, I felt like I had a right to contribute to a political space. Leftists can be as welcoming as vipers, but in Zuccotti they came together. Teamsters stood shoulder to shoulder with Brooklyn party promoters. The park’s generosity rubbed off on me, even if my conversation partners sometimes nodded off from heroin. But mostly I was silent, wandering and smiling.
Every day, marches took off from the park to locations around Manhattan. Occupiers marched in solidarity with striking art handlers and victims of police violence. Leaflets called these marches “trainings.” Their purpose was to build bridges to unions and anti-incarceration groups, and thus to make the movement grow.
There were small marches, on sidewalks rather than in streets. Police officers darted into the crowd at random, arresting people who’d been profiled as leaders. The arrests I saw were violent; one person was thrown to the concrete, a boot on his back.
After Occupy began, the police barricaded the financial district’s most potent symbol: the Wall Street bull. Ironically, the giant bronze bull was not a commissioned piece of art but a guerrilla one, left there by the artist years ago as a gift to New York. Its testicles had been polished by the hands of a million tourists, but if protesters touched those balls, capitalism might have fallen.
The barricades stayed up for three years.
Zuccotti enchanted me. Fred and I had some money, and our loft gave the illusion that we had more. But I remembered the powerless girl I’d been. I’d beaten a treacherous system, but the system was still broken, and my hold was precarious at best. No matter how far we’d come in New York, or how fancy our high heels were, my friends and I were always a slip from ruin. I wanted to help in any way I could.
At first I was too intimidated to talk to the Occupy organizers, afraid they’d see me as a flaky former naked girl. Fortunately, Occupy had a webpage set up to take donations for bailing out protestors who had been arrested. I started giving them a percentage of money from my print sales. Then I auctioned off some original art on Twitter. I also drew a poster of a vampire squid—the journalist Matt Taibbi’s metaphor for rapacious banks—that was bold enough to work as a protest sign, and put it online. It was downloaded all over the country.
Soon I was coming to the park every day, bringing art supplies with me, quietly absorbing the unfolding scene. Because I wasn’t close to the organizers, Occupy seemed to me a miracle of decentralized protest—something enabled both by the Internet and the Occupiers’ constant presence in an outdoor public space. I’d be standing somewhere in the park, and someone would shove a flyer into my hand, advertising a protest later that day. I’d go home, draw, then come back for the march. I was a follower, not a leader. I lent whatever support an extra body was good for.
“Guys, are Occupy Wall Street or other related activities gonna continue until the weekend? If they are, and I can stay with you, I’m on a bloody plane tomorrow. SAY YES SAY YES,” read Laurie Penny’s email.
Outside my window, protesters screamed: “All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street!”
I wrote back. “My apartment is probably the most convenient place in NYC to cover the protests from. Been visiting every day. It’s still lots of crust punks and consensus decision making, but for god’s sakes the kids are doing something and I’m tentatively hopeful and have been supporting as best I could . . .
“The people aren’t as awesome or together or organized as in London, I warn you.”
Since last December, Laurie’s profile had exploded. She had argued on the BBC and debated old men at the Oxford Union. The media used her neon hair as a signifier of rebel youth. But Britain eats its favorites, chewing up women with special delight.
Conservative bloggers tried to blackmail Laurie with old photos of her drunk and topless at university. Leftist protesters excoriated her for being too ambitious, too credentialed, too posh. The media was cruel enough to label her the voice of her generation. Her generation didn’t think any one person should be its voice.
When Laurie showed up on my doorstep to cover the two-week-old occupation for The New Statesman, she was chasing a protest high that was fading fast in London. But she was also looking for a space to be more than her media caricature.
Laurie stayed with the journalist Sarah Jaffe but she often slept on my floor. She wrote her columns at my kitchen table, hunched over a laptop covered in stickers reading “Make Out Not War.” I drew her portrait as she worked. Every so often, she’d take a break and show me music videos made from footage of students smashing the Tory headquarters at Millbank. Broken glass flew like tinsel. An acquaintance down at the People’s Library, Stephen Boyar, a queer kid with glitter-lined eyes, was compiling a Zuccotti Park poetry journal. I sent him my drawing of Laurie at her laptop; he put it on the anthology’s cover.
Laurie and I stayed up all night, smoking and drinking milk-drowned tea, and discussing the Greek and Spanish antiausterity protesters. We talked about Egypt, where the revolutionaries had succeeded in toppling Mubarak, but it looked like the Muslim Brotherhood would win the first democratic elections in the country’s history. We talked about the London student protests, which were fading into nostalgic memories. In the fall of 2011, everything felt connected: crowds rising up against police repression; the Internet out-organizing established institutions; tent cities across the world; mutual aid; single, brave individuals like Chelsea Manning standing against governments.
Politics needs stories. These were lovely, if simplistic, myths, and they served us well that autumn. But myths aren’t enough, for a person or a movement.
Though protests like those in Greece, Egypt, Spain, or New York spread quickly, they were rarely preceded by the dull years of organizing that movements have traditionally required to grow and sustain themselves. Because of that, they stood on fragile ground. Governments are old machines, built more strongly than we realized. They kept outflanking the ecstatic explosions of networked protest.
Since I lived across the street from Zuccotti, my living room floor soon turned into a home for wayward journalists and activists involved with Occupy. They drank my coffee, plugged their laptops into my outlets. The journalists were always on deadline, racing time across their keyboards. Sarah Jaffe came, of course. Meredith Clark, a journalist then fact-checking at Rolling Stone. Melissa Gira Grant, a journalist I knew from sex worker activism. Later we were joined by Eleanor Saitta, a hacker, and Quinn Norton, a journalist covering hackers for Wired. We were all finding our voices in Zuccotti, and my fake oriental carpet was a temporary home.
We often talked about police violence. Cops attacked protests constantly. White-shirted superiors would point into the crowd; then blue-shirted officers would dive in, yanking someone off to jail. During the course of Occupy, cops broke the thumbs of Shawn Carrié, a classical piano player. They ran over a legal observer’s leg with a scooter. Each day we saw the police punching, kicking, beating protesters who almost never fought back.
Cops were particularly vicious to black occupiers. Hero Vincent, a daily presence at Zuccotti, was violently arrested over and over again. After the dancer Sade Adona told cops to leave a fellow protester alone, two hulking officers smashed her to the ground. One pinned her head to the concrete with his boot, while the other beat her shins bloody with his baton.
At Occupy, journalists had little protection from police attacks. Theoretically, the press could get passes, but the system was controlled by the NYPD, who made it near impossible. Without that pass, you were fair game. John Knefel, a journalist friend of Sarah Jaffe’s, was arrested while covering the protests for his podcast, Radio Dispatch. “Got press credentials?” a cop shouted at Knefel. Seconds later, the cop threw him facedown on the pavement. Police officers pounced on Knefel as he scrambled for his glasses. He spent thirty-seven hours in jail.
We were not traditional or objective journalists. At marches, we participated as much as we covered. After beatings and arrests, after long nights, waiting outside 1
Police Plaza for our friends to get out of jail, we had little faith in any authority. But Occupy gave us an urgency to see clearly and write sharply. The group of writers that came together at Zuccotti is still friends today.
By this time, scads of people were turning the park into their personal art project. A photographer using a nineteenth-century camera, complete with bellows, made wet plate portraits. A woman dressed as a steampunk Emma Goldman lectured on anarchism. Dozens of photographers, videographers, documentarians, and journalists wandered through, shoving cameras or mics into the faces of anyone who’d let them.
I took iPhone shots of the crowd, went back to my studio, and got out my paints, eager to capture the protestors in portraits. These were fast watercolors, done hot in the moment. One showed a woman lifting up her shirt to reveal the Lawyers Guild’s telephone number scrawled in sharpie on her stomach. Another was of a construction worker holding a sign reading, “Give a Damn.” A young veteran, originally from Bangladesh, held a placard reading “First I Occupied Iraq. Now I Occupy Wall Street.”
I wanted to draw it all. I wanted to show myself there was still a reason to draw. We live in the most image-saturated age in history, and a thousand cell phone pics mark the occasion whenever a cop cracks a protester’s skull, but I wanted to prove that artists had a reason to leave the studio—to show that illustration had something to say.
That September, the days felt long and urgent. More and more drawings poured from my hands. John and I riffed the compositions together. He wrote the copy. I did the art. We made a poster for the Occupy Medics, portraying them and their patients as kindly animals who treated everyone who came—even the nasty fat cat. Another poster, “We Are All in This Together,” showed a massive cat, costumed like a French aristocrat. At her feet, a mouse dressed in a suit fought over a small cookie with a mouse dressed as a construction worker. “Are you going to let that union guy steal your cookie?” the cat purred. She sat on a towering pile of cookies.
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