by Nathan Hill
“Listen,” Sebastian says, cocking his ear to the sky. “Everybody’s here.”
“How did you do that?” Faye says. “We walked right by those cops. Why didn’t they say something? Why didn’t they stop us?”
“You have to promise me,” he says, grabbing her by the arms, “you’ll never mention this. Not to anyone.”
“Tell me how you did it.”
“Promise, Faye. You cannot breathe a word about it. Tell them I bailed you out. That’s it.”
“But you didn’t bail me out. You had a key. How did you have a key?”
“Not a word. I’m trusting you. I did you a favor, and now your favor back to me is to keep this a secret. Okay?”
Faye considers him for a moment, and understands that he is not the single-entendre student radical she had taken him for—he has mysteries; he has layers. She knows something about him no one else does, has power over him no one else can wield. Her heart swells for him: He’s a kindred spirit, she thinks, someone else whose life is hidden and vast.
She nods.
Sebastian smiles and takes her hand and leads her to the end of the alley and into the sun, and as they round the corner she sees the police and the military and the blockade and beyond the blockade, the great teeming mass in the park. No longer shadows on the wall, she sees them now in detail and color: the soft baby-blue police uniforms; the bayonets of the National Guardsmen; the jeeps whose front bumpers are coils of razor wire; the crowd moving as a surging beast presently surrounding and taking over the statue of Ulysses S. Grant opposite the Conrad Hilton, the ten-foot-tall Grant on his ten-foot-tall horse, the crowd climbing up the horse’s bronze legs and onto its neck and rump and head, one brave youth continuing up, climbing Grant himself, standing atop Grant’s huge broad shoulders, teetering but erect, raising his arms in double peace signs above his head in defiance of the police who are right now noticing this and are ambling over to pull him down. This will not end well for him, but the audience cheers anyway, for he is the bravest among them, the tallest thing in the whole park.
Faye and Sebastian slip by the mayhem and into the anonymity of the crowd.
22
OFFICER BROWN CONTINUES to bust heads and around him the cops have removed their badges and name tags. They have pulled the visors of their riot helmets over their faces. They are anonymous. The news is not happy about this development.
Police are beating people with impunity, the journalists say on CBS News. They demand transparency. Accountability. They say the police have removed their badges and hidden their faces because they know what they’re doing is illegal. Comparisons are made to the Soviets rolling into Prague earlier this year, running down and overwhelming the poor Czechs. The Chicago PD is acting like that, the journalists say. It’s Czechoslovakia west. Czechago is a word it does not take long for someone clever to make up.
“In America, the government is accountable to the people, not the other way around,” says a constitutional law scholar sympathetic to the antiwar movement on the subject of the anonymous police.
Officer Brown is whaling away, the most excited among all the cops to really clunk the hippies in vital and deadly places: the skull, the chest, even the face. He was the first to appear minus a badge or a name tag, and all the officers around him have lowered their visors and removed their name tags too, but not because they want to join him in his frenzy. Rather the opposite. They see he’s going a little nuts now and they can’t really stop him and the cameras are clicking away, attracted as they are to any moment of police brutality, and so all the nearby officers tuck away their badges and lower their visors because this fucker is asking to lose his pension, but they sure as shit won’t lose theirs.
23
CRONKITE KNOWS this is his punishment for editorializing. Doing this interview with the mayor and serving up these cream-puff questions. It’s because Cronkite called the Chicago police “a bunch of thugs,” and he did it live, on the air.
Well, that’s what they are! And that’s what he told his producers, who said he’d made a judgment, which was wrong, since it was up to the viewers to decide whether the police were or were not thugs. He countered that he’d made an observation, which is what they paid him for: to observe and report. They said he’d expressed an opinion. He said sometimes an observation is inseparable from an opinion.
This was not convincing to his producers.
But the police were out there cracking open skulls with nightsticks. They were taking off their badges and name tags and lowering the visors on their riot helmets to become faceless and unaccountable. They were beating kids senseless. They were beating members of the press, photographers and reporters, breaking cameras and taking film. They even punched poor Dan Rather right in the solar plexus. What do you call people like that? You call them thugs.
His producers still were not convinced. Cronkite thought the police were beating innocent people. The mayor’s office told them the police were protecting innocent people. Who was right? It reminded him of that old story: A king once asked a group of blind men to describe an elephant. To one of them, he presented the head of the elephant, to another he presented an ear, a tusk, the trunk, the tail, and so on, saying, This is an elephant.
Afterward, the blind men could not agree on what an elephant really looked like. They argued with each other, saying, An elephant is like this, an elephant is not like that! They fought each other with their fists, and the king watched the whole spectacle, and was delighted.
Probably as delighted as the mayor is right now, old Cronkite imagines as he lobs him another softball question about the well-trained and heroic and completely supported by the public Chicago PD. And the gleam in the mayor’s eye is just about the most insufferable thing old Cronkite has ever seen, that sparkle the mayor gets when he’s beaten a worthy opponent. And Cronkite is a worthy opponent indeed. One imagines there were lengthy phone calls between the mayor’s office and the CBS producers, much debating, many threats, some kind of compromise was reached, and thus old Cronkite stands here extolling the virtues of men he called thugs not three hours ago.
You gotta eat a lot of shit in this job sometimes.
24
NEAR THE END of the day, just before sunset, there’s a lull in the trauma. Police hang back sort of stunned and shamefaced. They have stopped raising their nightsticks and raise their bullhorns instead. They ask the protesters to please leave the park. The protestors watch them and wait. The city has the feeling of an injured child. A toddler will knock its head and, after a slight delay during which all the chaotic sense-signals resolve into pain, it begins to wail. The city is inside that delay now, between injury and lamentation, between cause and effect.
The hope is that the lull will persist. This is Allen Ginsberg’s hope, anyway, that once the city gets a taste of this peace it won’t want to fight again. Grant Park is calm now and he’s stopped his chanting and ommmming long enough to move about the beautiful crowd. In his bag he always carries two things: The Tibetan Book of the Dead and a silver Kodak Retina Reflex camera. It’s the Kodak he reaches for right now, the thing he’s used to document all the luminous moments of his life, and this moment is luminous indeed. The gathered protestors all sitting and laughing and singing songs of joy and waving homemade flags with their cleverest slogans hand-painted on them. He wants to make a poem out of it all. His Kodak is a worn-out secondhand thing, but it’s sturdy, its guts still sound. He loves its metal girth in his hand, the black grips rippled like alligator skin, the mechanical gear-noises as he advances the film, even the Made in Germany sticker stamped so confidently on the front. He snaps a photo of the gathered crowd. He walks among them, their bodies parting for him, their faces open to his. And when he sees a familiar face he stops and kneels: one of the student leaders, he remembers. The olive-skinned pretty one. He’s sitting with a pleasant young girl with big round glasses who rests her head on his shoulder, exhausted.
Faye and Sebastian. They lean aga
inst each other like lovers. Alice sits behind them. Ginsberg raises his camera to his eye.
The young man gives him a wry, sidelong smile that just about breaks his heart. The shutter clicks. Ginsberg stands and smiles sadly. He moves on, swallowed by the vast crowd, the incandescent day.
25
THE POET WALKS AWAY and Alice taps Faye on the shoulder and winks at her and says, “So did you two have a good time last night?”
Because of course Alice doesn’t know what happened.
And so Faye explains to her about the mysterious cop who arrested her and the night she spent in jail, how Faye doesn’t even know the cop’s name or what she did to deserve all that, how the cop told her to vacate Chicago immediately, and Alice is stricken because she knows right away it’s Officer Brown. Of course it’s him.
But she can’t tell Faye. Not right now. How could she possibly admit in the middle of this crowd of protestors throwing angry insults at the police that she’d been having a pretty passionate love affair with one of these very cops? There’s no way.
Alice hugs Faye tightly. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But don’t worry. Everything will be all right. You aren’t going anywhere. I’ll stick by you, no matter what.”
And that’s when the police gather on the edges of the park and announce via bullhorns: You have ten minutes to clear this area.
Which is a laughable request, because there’s like ten thousand people here.
“Do they really expect us all to leave?” Alice asks.
“Probably not,” Sebastian says.
“What are they gonna do?” Faye says, looking around at the great stubborn mass of humanity occupying the park. “Move us all by force?”
Turns out, this is exactly what they’re going to do.
It begins with a soft pop of compressed air, a gentle-sounding and almost musical burst as a canister of tear gas is launched into the park. And for those who watch it come, there’s a strange delay between seeing it and understanding what it means. It soars in its parabola up into a sky far too pretty to accommodate it, and it seems to hang in the air above them for a split second, a North Star to some of them, their compasses now pointing at this thing, this strange new flying fact, which then begins its descent, and the yelling and the screaming begin roughly now as the people in the projectile’s landing zone start to accept what is coming right at them and understand this is the de facto end of their sit-in. The canister is already leaking its contents, leaving this tail of orange gas, a comet on a collision course. And when it lands it thuds into the grass like a golf ball and kicks up the turf and ignites. It spins and spews jets of toxic smoke as more little pops are heard coming from the direction of the Conrad Hilton and one or two more flying bombs come hurtling into the crowd, and this is how fast relative peace and order can fall into madness. The crowd starts running and the police start running and almost everybody in the park is simultaneously crying. It’s the gas. The way it attacks your eyes and throat. How it feels like burning oil splattered right into your pupil, the way you can’t keep your red swollen eyes open without the pain, no matter how much you rub them. And the coughing as sudden and urgent as drowning, that reflexive hacking that bypasses all willpower. People are crying and spitting and running anywhere there is not gas, which presents a basic problem of volume: The gas was fired—purposefully or accidentally, it’s not known—so that it landed behind most of the crowd, which means the only way to avoid the misery of the gas is to run the other way, in the direction of Michigan Avenue and the Conrad Hilton and the vast police blockades, and so the volume problem is that there are way more people wanting to be on Michigan Avenue than there is currently space on Michigan Avenue for these people.
It’s your unstoppable force meeting its immovable object, the body mass of ten thousand protestors running headlong into the teeth of the Chicago PD.
And Sebastian with them, towing Faye by the hand. And Alice watches them and understands this is exactly the wrong way to go, that the only direction where there are no police is back into the tear gas itself, the cloud that hugs the ground like an orange fog. She calls out to them to stop, but her voice—raw and ragged from the earlier chanting and now blown to bits by the gas—cannot be heard above the roar and screams of the crowd, all of them running, bouncing into one another, scattering. She watches Sebastian and Faye as the crowd collapses around them and she loses them in the mass. She wants to go after them, but something holds her back. Fear, probably. Fear of the police, one of them in particular.
She will go to the dorm and wait for Faye, she decides. And if Faye doesn’t come back she’ll stop at nothing to find her, which is a comfortable lie she tells herself to get out of the immediate situation. She will, in fact, never see Faye again. She doesn’t know this yet, but she senses it, and she stops running. She turns back toward the protest, the park. And at that moment Faye is tugging on Sebastian’s arm because Alice isn’t with them. Faye stops and turns around. She looks back at where they came from. She hopes Alice’s face will pop out of the chaos, but between the two of them is an orange cloud of gas. It might as well be a concrete wall, or a continent.
“We need to go,” says Sebastian.
“Wait,” says Faye.
Faces fly by her, none of them Alice’s. People clip her shoulders, dodge her, keep running.
Alice is on the other side of the gas now. She can see the lake. She runs to it and splashes her face to calm the sting of the gas, and she slinks northward along the shore, where to avoid drawing attention to herself she ditches her favorite sunglasses and army jacket in the sand and pulls her hair back and tries to look for all intents and purposes like a normal bourgeois law-abiding kid, and this effectively puts an end to her protest career forever.
“We need to go now,” says Sebastian.
And so Faye agrees, for Alice is gone.
26
HUBERT H. HUMPHREY in the top-floor presidential suite shower digs under his fingernails with the hotel’s complimentary bar of Dove soap, which during his lengthy shower has slivered down from its original kidney-shaped girth.
The agents keep popping their heads in: “You okay in there Mr. Vice President sir?”
He understands there’s much to do and little time to do it and taking a ninety-minute shower was not exactly on his campaign manager’s itinerary. Still, he would have been worthless had he not gotten that stink off.
His fingers are beyond pruned and into this supersaturated territory where his skin looks like an afghan draped loosely over his actual skin. The mirror is opaque and slate gray by now in the humid, dense air.
“Yes, I’m fine,” he tells the agent.
Only he’s not fine, he realizes, as he speaks. Because there’s a sudden tickle in his throat, a slight scratchy pain behind his Adam’s apple. He hasn’t spoken in an hour and a half and now that he’s spoken he feels it, that first leading edge of illness. He tests his throat—his precious and golden throat, his vocal cords and lungs, these bits of him that are all he has to give as he addresses the country and accepts the nomination for president in a few days’ time—he verbalizes a few notes, just a little solfège, a little do, re, mi. And sure enough he feels it, that spike of pain, that friction burn, that swelling on the soft palate.
Oh no.
He turns the water off and towels himself dry and robes up and crashes into the suite’s main conference area and announces that he needs vitamin C right now.
When the group looks at him funny, he announces “I may have a sore throat” with the kind of gravity a doctor might use to say The tumor is malignant.
The agents look at each other uncomfortably. A few of them cough. One of them steps forward and says, “Probably not a sore throat, sir.”
“How would you know?” Triple H says. “I need vitamin C, and I need it right this goddamn second.”
“Sir, it’s probably the tear gas, Mr. Vice President sir.”
“What are you talking about?”
&n
bsp; “Tear gas, sir. Your typical motivational weapon, sir, used to disperse crowds nonviolently. Irritating to the eyes, nose, mouth, and, yes, certainly sir, the throat and lungs.”
“Tear gas.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In my hotel suite.”
“It came from the park, sir. The police are using it on the demonstrators. And today, you see, we’ve got an easterly wind—”
“At about twelve knots,” adds another agent.
“Agreed, yes, thank you, a sturdy wind that pushed the gas back across Michigan Avenue and into the hotel and even, yes, up to the top floor. Our floor. Sir.”
Triple H can now feel his eyes watering and burning, that feeling like when you’re standing over chopped onions. He walks to the suite’s large front windows and looks out at the park, which is a chaos of running, terrified youths and pursuing cops and clouds of orange gas.
“The police did this?” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
“But don’t they know I’m up here?”
And this is almost the breaking point for poor Hubert H. This was supposed to be his convention, his moment. Why did this have to happen? Why does it always have to turn out like this? And suddenly he’s eight years old again back in South Dakota and Tommy Skrumpf is ruining his birthday party by having an epileptic fit right there on the kitchen floor, and the doctors take Tommy away and the parents take their kids home still carrying the unopened presents that were supposed to be Hubert’s, and a small ungenerous part of him broke open that night and he wept not that Tommy might die but wishing that he would. And then he’s nineteen years old and he’s just finished his first year at college, and he got good marks and he likes it, college, he’s good at it, and he’s made friends and found a girl and his life is finally shaping up and that’s when his parents tell him to come home because they’re out of money. So he comes home. And then it’s 1948 and he’s just been elected to the United States Senate for the first time and at that moment his father up and dies. And now here he is about to be nominated for president, and all around him is fighting and tear gas and butchers and shit and death.
