Miami and the Siege of Chicago

by Norman Mailer

  Not here for a travelogue—no need then to detail the Loop, in death like the center of every other American city, but what a dying! Old department stores, old burlesque houses, avenues, dirty avenues, the El with its nineteenth-century dialogue of iron screeching against iron about a turn, and caverns of shadow on the pavement beneath, the grand hotels with their massive lobbies, baroque ceilings, resplendent as Roman bordellos, names like Sheraton-Blackstone, Palmer House, red fields of carpet, a golden cage for elevator, the unheard crash of giant mills stamping new shapes on large and obdurate materials is always pounding in one’s inner ear—Dreiser had not written about Chicago for nothing.

  To the West of the Lake were factories and Ciceros, Mafia-lands and immigrant lands; to the North, the suburbs, the Evanstons; to the South were Negro ghettos of the South Side—belts of Black men amplifying each the resonance of the other’s cause—the Black belt had the Black-stone Rangers, the largest gang of juvenile delinquents on earth, 2,000 by some count—one could be certain the gang had leaders as large in potential as Hannibal or Attila the Hun—how else account for the strength and wit of a stud who would try to rise so high in the Blackstone Rangers?

  Further South and West were enclaves for the University of Chicago, more factories, more neighborhoods for Poles, some measure of more good hotels on the lake, and endless neighborhoods—white neighborhoods which went for miles of ubiquitous dingy wood houses with back yards, neighborhoods to hint of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Tennessee, a gathering of all the clans of the Midwest, the Indians and Scotch-Irish, Swedes, some Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Finns, Slovaks, Slovenes—it was only the French who did not travel. In the Midwest, land spread out; not five miles from the Loop were areas as empty, deserted, enormous and mournful by night as the outer freight yards of Omaha. Some industrial desert or marsh would lie low on the horizon, an area squalling by day, deserted by night, except for the hulking Midwestern names of the boxcars and the low sheds, the warehouse buildings, the wire fences which went along the side of unpaved roads for thousands of yards.

  The stockyards were like this, the famous stockyards of Chicago were at night as empty as the railroad sidings of the moon. Long before the Democratic Convention of 1968 came to the Chicago Amphitheatre, indeed eighteen years ago when the reporter had paid his only previous visit, the area was even then deserted at night, empty as the mudholes on a battlefield after a war has passed. West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon. Endless files of animals were led through pens to be stunned on the head by hammers, and then hind legs trussed, be hoisted up on hooks to hang head down, and ride along head down on an overhead trolley which brought them to Negroes or whites, usually huge, the whites most often Polish or Hunkies (hence the etymology of Honkie—a Chicago word) the Negroes up from the South, huge men built for the shock of the work, slash of a knife on the neck of the beast and gouts of blood to bathe their torso (stripped of necessity to the waist) and blood to splash their legs. The animals passed a psychic current back along the over-head trolley—each cut throat released its scream of death into the throat not yet cut and just behind, and that penultimate throat would push the voltage up, drive the current back and further back into the screams of every animal upside down and hanging from that clanking overhead trolley, bare electric bulbs screaming into the animal eye and brain, gurglings and awesome hollows of sound coming back from the open plumbing ahead of the cut jugular as if death were indeed a rapids along some underground river, and the fear and absolute anguish of beasts dying upside down further ahead passed back along the line, back all the way to the corrals and the pens, back even to the siding with the animals still in boxcars, back, who knew—so high might be the psychic voltage of the beast—back to the farm where first they were pushed into the truck which would take them into the train. What an awful odor the fear of absolute and unavoidable death gave to the stool and stuffing and pure vomitous shit of the beasts waiting in the pens in the stockyard, what a sweat of hell-leather, and yet the odor, no, the titanic stench, which rose from the yards was not so simple as the collective diarrhetics of an hysterical army of beasts, no, for after the throats were cut and the blood ran in rich gutters, red light on the sweating back of the red throat-cutters, the dying and some just-dead animals clanked along the overhead, arterial blood spurting like the nip-ups of a little boy urinating in public, the red-hot carcass quickly encountered another Black or Hunkie with a long knife on a long stick who would cut the belly from chest to groin and a stew and a stink of two hundred pounds of stomach, lungs, intestines, mucosities, spleen, exploded cowflop and pigshit, blood, silver lining, liver, mother-of-pearl tissue, and general gag-all would flop and slither over the floor, the man with the knife getting a good blood-splatting as he dug and twisted with his blade to liberate the roots of the organ, intestine and impedimenta still integrated into the meat and bone of the excavated existence he was working on.

  Well, the smell of the entrails and that agonized blood electrified by all the outer neons of ultimate fear got right into the grit of the stockyard stench. Let us pass over into the carving and the slicing, the boiling and scraping, annealing and curing of the flesh in sugars and honeys and smoke, the cooking of the cow carcass, stamp of the inspector, singeing of the hair, boiling of hooves, grinding of gristle, the wax-papering and the packaging, the foiling and the canning, the burning of the residue, and the last slobber of the last unusable guts as it went into the stockyard furnace, and up as stockyard smoke, burnt blood and burnt bone and burnt hair to add their properties of specific stench to fresh blood, fresh entrails, fresh fecalities already all over the air. It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case—no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there. So be it. Chicago makes for hard minds. On any given night, the smell may go anywhere—down to Gary to fight with the smog and the coke, out to Cicero to quiet the gangs with their dreams of gung ho and mop-up, North to Evanston to remind the polite that inter faeces et urinam are we born, and East on out to Lake Michigan where the super felicities in the stench of such earth-bound miseries and corruptions might cheer the fish with the clean spermy deep waters of their fate.

  Yes, Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood, and if one did not protest and take a vow of vegetables, one knew at least that life was hard, life was in the flesh and in the massacre of the flesh—one breathed the last agonies of beasts. So something of the entrails and the secrets of the gut got into the faces of native Chicagoans. A great city, a strong city with faces tough as leather hide and pavement, it was also a city where the faces took on the broad beastiness of ears which were dull enough to ignore the bleatings of the doomed, noses battered enough to smell no more the stench of every unhappy end, mouths—fat mouths or slit mouths—ready to taste the gravies which were the reward of every massacre, and eyes, simple pig eyes, which could look the pig truth in the face. In any other city, they would have found technologies to silence the beasts with needles, quarter them with machines, lull them with Muzak, and have stainless steel for floors, aluminum beds to take over the old overhead trolley—animals would be given a shot of vitamin-enrichment before they took the last ride. But in Chicago, they did it straight, they cut the animals right out of their hearts—which is why it was the last of the great American cities, and people had great faces, carnal as blood, greedy, direct, too impatient for hypocrisy, in love with honest plunder. They were big and human and their br
other in heaven was the slaughtered pig—they did not ignore him. If the yowls and moans of his extinction was the broth of their strength, still they had honest guts to smell him to the end—they did not flush the city with Odorono or Pinex or No-Scent, they swilled the beer and assigned the hits and gave America its last chance at straight-out drama. Only a great city provides honest spectacle, for that is the salvation of the schizophrenic soul. Chicago may have beasts on the street, it may have a giant of fortitude for Mayor who grew into a beast—a man with the very face of Chicago—but it is an honest town, it does not look to incubate psychotics along an air-conditioned corridor with a vinyl floor.

  2

  If the face of Chicago might be reduced to a broad fleshy nose with nostrils open wide to stench, stink, power, a pretty day, a well-stacked broad, and the beauties of a dirty buck, the faces in the crowd of some 5,000 Eugene McCarthy supporters out at Midway Airport to greet the Senator’s arrival on Sunday, August 25th, could have found their archetype in any one of a number of fairly tall slim young men in seersucker suits with horn-rimmed glasses, pale complexions, thin noses, and thin—this was the center of the common denominator—thin nostrils. People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste disposal—they must, they take in too much. Whereas, the parsimonious end up geared to take in too little—viz, Chicago nostrils versus McCarthy nostrils. Of course, the parsimony of the McCarthyites was of a special sort—they had hardly been mean with funds in supporting their candidate, nor small in the boldness of their attempt, and no one could claim that the loyalty of their effort had been equalled in many a year—certainly not since Adlai Stevenson, perhaps not since Henry Wallace. No, like all crusaders, their stinginess could be found in a ferocious lack of tolerance or liaison to their left or right—the search for Grail seems invariably to proceed in a straight line. It was no accident that an extraordinary number of McCarthyites seemed to drive Volkswagens (or was it that an extraordinary number of Volkswagens bore the white and blue psychedelic flower?—if psychedelic it could truly be called, since the blue was too wan and the white too milky for the real sports of psychedelia land). Support of Eugene McCarthy was, of course, a movement whose strength was in the suburbs and the academy—two bastions of that faith which would state that a man must be allowed to lead a modest and reasonable life without interference by large forces. If corruption in politics, opportunism, and undue ambition excited their contempt, and injustice in race relations their disapproval (because injustice was inflammatory to reason) the war in Vietnam encouraged their most honorable suppressed fury for it spoke of a large and outrageous outside force which would sweep their lives away. In the suburbs and the academy, parents and children came together in detestation of that war.

  The moral powers of the vegetarian, the pacifist, and the nationalist have been so refined away from the source of much power—infantile violence—that their moral powers exhibit a leanness, a keenness, and total ferocity which can only hint at worlds given up: precisely those sensuous worlds of corruption, promiscuity, fingers in the take, political alliances forged by the fires of booze, and that sense of property which is the fundament of all political relations.

  Talk of that later—for now, at the airport, enough to observe that the crowd of 5,000 at Midway waiting for Gene McCarthy were remarkably homogeneous, young for the most part, too young to vote, a disproportionate number of babies in mother’s arms—sly hint of middle-class Left mentality here at work! (The middle-class Left would never learn that workingmen in greasy dungarees make a point of voting against the mother who carries the babe—the righteous face of any such mother reminds them of schoolteachers they used to hate!) Yes, the rally taking place in a special reserved area of the parking lot at Midway gave glimpses of faces remarkably homogeneous for a political rally. One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a fifty-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippie allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in side-burns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals—suggestion of vitiated blood in their complexion—to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left. One of their ranks, a pretty brunette in a red dress, was leading a set of foot-tapping songs while the crowd waited for the Senator’s plane, the style of the lyrics out on that soft shoulder between liberalism and wit, and so reminiscent of the sort of songs Adolph Green and Betty Comden had been composing and Tom Lehrer singing for years. “The special fascination of ... we think he’s just sensational ... Gene!!!” two notes sounding on “Gee-yene,” so humorous in its vein, for the lyrics implied one was team with a limited gang of humans who derived from Noel Coward, Ogden Nash, and juke hill-billy—“Gee-yene! Gee-yene!”

  Song went on: “The GOP will cry in its beer, for here is a man who will change the scene. Gee-yene! Gee-yene!” Depression came over the reporter. Try as he would, he could not make himself happy with McCarthy supporters. Their common denominator seemed to be found in some blank area of the soul, a species of disinfected idealism which gave one the impression when among them of living in a lobotomized ward of Upper Utopia. George Wallace, pay heed!

  Of course, the reporter had been partisan to Bobby Kennedy, excited by precisely his admixture of idealism plus willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overloads of corruption. This had characterized the political style of the Kennedys more than once. The Kennedys had seemed magical because they were a little better than they should have been, and so gave promise of making America a little better than it ought to be. The reporter respected McCarthy, he respected him enormously for trying the vengeance of Lyndon Johnson, his heart had been given a bit of life by the success of the New Hampshire primary campaign. If there had then been little to make him glad in the abrupt and unhappy timing of Bobby Kennedy’s immediate entrance into the race for nomination, he had, nonetheless, remained Kennedy’s man—he saw the battle between the two as tragic; he had hardly enjoyed the Kennedy-McCarthy debate on television before the California primary; he had not taken pleasure in rooting for Kennedy and being thereby forced to condemn McCarthy’s deadness of manner, blankness of affect, and suggestion of weakness in each deep pouch beneath each eye. The pouches spoke of clichés—eyes sitting in sagging brassieres of flesh, such stuff. He knew that McCarthy partisans would find equal fault some-where in Kennedy.

  A few nights after this debate, the reporter was awakened from a particularly oppressive nightmare by the ringing of a bell. He heard the voice of an old drinking friend he had not seen in two years. “Cox,” he shouted into the phone, “are you out of your skull? What do you mean calling at three A.M.?”

  “Look,” said the friend, “get the television on. I think you ought to see it. Bobby Kennedy has just been shot.”

  “No,” he bellowed. “No! No! No!” his voice railing with an ugliness and pain reminiscent to his ear of the wild grunts of a wounded pig. (Where he had heard that cry he did not at the moment remember.) He felt as if he were being despoiled of a vital part of himself, and in the middle of this horror noted that he screamed like a pig, not a lion, nor a bear. The reporter had gone for years on the premise that one must balance every moment between the angel in oneself and the swine—the sound of his own voice shocked him therefore profoundly. The balance was not what he thought it to be. He watched television for the next hours in a state which drifted rudderless between two horrors. Then, knowing no good answer could come for days, if at all, on the possible recovery of Bobby Kennedy, he went back to bed and lay in a sweat of complicity, as if his own lack of moral witness (to the subtle heroism of Bobby Kennedy’s attempt to run for President) could be found in the dance of evasions his taste for a merry life and a married one had become, as if this precise lack had contributed (in the vast architectonics of the cathedral of history) to one less piton of m
ooring for Senator Kennedy in his lonely ascent of those vaulted walls, as if finally the efforts of brave men depended in part on the protection of other men who saw themselves as at least provisionally brave, or sometimes brave, or at the least—if not brave—balanced at least on a stability between selflessness and appetite and therefore—by practical purposes—decent. But he was close to having become too much of appetite—he had spent the afternoon preceding this night of assassination in enjoying a dalliance—let us leave it at that—a not uncharacteristic way to have spent his time, and lying next to his wife now, TV news pictures of the assassination rocketing all over the bruised stone of his skull, he hated his wife for having ever allowed such a condition to come to be, hated her subtle complicity in driving him out, and then apart, and knew from the other side of his love that he must confess this afternoon now, as if that would be a warrant of magic to aid Senator Kennedy on the long voyage through the depth of the exploded excavations in his brain, and did not have the simple courage to confess, stopped in his mental steps as if confronting a bully in an alley and altogether unable to go on—the bully in the alley no less than his wife’s illimitable funds of untempered redneck wrath. So he did what all men who are overweight must do—he prayed the Lord to take the price on his own poor mortal self (since he had flesh in surfeit to offer) he begged that God spare Senator Kennedy’s life, and he would give up something, give up what?—give up some of the magic he could bring to bear on some one or another of the women, yes, give that up if the life would be saved, and fell back into the horror of trying to rest with the sense that his offer might have been given too late and by the wrong vein—confession to his wife was what the moral pressure had first demanded—and so fell asleep with some gnawing sense of the Devil there to snatch his offering after the angel had moved on in disgust.