8
THE DAY BEFORE THE RIOTS, the weather turned.
The grip of Chicago’s summer loosened and the air was springlike and agreeable. People got a good night’s sleep for maybe the first time in weeks. In the very early dawn there appeared on the ground a thin, slick dew. The world was alive and lubricated. It felt hopeful, optimistic, and therefore disallowable as the city prepared for battle, as National Guard troops arrived by the thousands in green flatbed trucks, as police cleaned their gas masks and guns, as demonstrators practiced their evasion and self-defense techniques and assembled various projectiles to lob at cops. There was a feeling among them all that so great a conflict deserved a nastier day. Their hatred should ignite the air, they thought. Who could feel revolutionary when the sun shone so pleasantly on one’s face? The city instead was full of desire. The day before the greatest, most spectacular, most violent protest of 1968, the city was saturated with want.
The Democratic delegates had arrived. They’d been police-escorted to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where they assembled nervously inside the ground-floor Haymarket Bar and maybe had a little too much to drink and did things they wouldn’t do under less extraordinary circumstances. Regret, they discovered, was a flexible and relative thing. Those who would not normally engage in exuberant public drunkenness or casual sex found this particular setting encouraged both. Chicago was about to explode. The presidency was on the line. Their own fine America was falling apart. In the face of calamity, a few small extramarital affairs seemed like background static, too quiet to register. The bartenders kept the bar open well past closing. The place was busy, and tips were good.
Outside, across Michigan Avenue, cops on horseback patrolled the park. Ostensibly, they were there to find troublemakers and saboteurs. What they found were couples in the bushes, under trees, on the beach, youths in various states of undress slithering over each other so ensconced they didn’t even hear the horses’ hooves approaching. They were necking (or more), doing unspeakable things right there in the dirt of Grant Park, in the sand off Lake Michigan. The cops told them to run along, and they did, the boys waddling uncomfortably away. And the cops might have found this funny if they didn’t also suspect these very boys would be back tomorrow, yelling, fighting, throwing things, getting beaten by the cops’ own hands. Tonight, it was carnal. Tomorrow, carnage.
Even Allen Ginsberg found a few moments’ relief from the melancholy. He sat naked in the bed of the skinny twentysomething Greek busboy he’d discovered that afternoon, at the restaurant, where he met with the youth leaders as they conspired and planned. They wondered how many people would be showing up for the protest. Five thousand? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? He told them a story.
“Two men went into a garden,” he said. “The first man began to count the mango trees, and how many mangoes each tree bore, and what the approximate value of the whole orchard might be. The second man plucked some fruit and ate it. Now which, do you think, was the wiser of these two?”
The kids all looked at him, eyes as blank as lambs.
“Eat mangoes!” he said.
They didn’t understand. The conversation moved along to the great crisis of the day, which is that the city had finally denied their applications to demonstrate downtown, to parade through the streets, to sleep in the park. Hordes of people were showing up tomorrow and they had nowhere to sleep but the park. Of course they were going to sleep there, of course they were going to demonstrate, and so they debated the likelihood of police intervention now that they lacked the proper permits and credentials. The likelihood, they decided, was a hundred percent. And Ginsberg tried to pay attention, but mostly what he noticed was how the busboy reminded him of a sailor he saw in Athens one night walking the old streets under the skeleton-white Acropolis and seeing this sailor plant his lips earnestly and tenderly on the lips of some young boy-whore, right there in the open, in the land of Socrates and Hercules and statuary everywhere all muscle-smooth and polished to solid cream. The busboy had that sailor’s face, that same hint of debauch. He got the busboy’s attention, got his name, got him up to his room, got him undressed: skinny boy with a huge cock. Isn’t that always the way? Now curled afterward under the covers and reading to the boy from Keats. Tomorrow there would be war, but tonight there was Keats, there was the window open for the pleasant breeze, there was this boy, there was the way this boy gripped his hand, lightly squeezing like he was inspecting fruit. It was all too beautiful.
Faye, meanwhile, was scrubbing. She had purchased several teen magazines and something all of them recommended brides do before going all the way was to scrub vigorously and thoroughly and relentlessly with many different scrubbing media: soft cloths, porous sponges, emery boards, rough pumice. She spent most of her week’s food budget on things to make her allover smooth and invitingly fragrant. She’d been thinking about the posters in her high-school home economics classroom, the first time in months. They were no less horrifying even at this distance, now that she was the one going all the way. Sebastian would be here soon, and Faye was still scrubbing, had yet to apply certain strong-smelling unguents she worried would sting, jellies that smelled so powerfully of roses and lilacs that they actually reminded her of a funeral home, the way funeral homes set out flower bouquets to overwhelm that chemical death smell that was always there, underneath. Faye purchased perfumes, deodorants, douches, salts she was supposed to bathe in, soaps she was supposed to scrub with, alcohols minty and prickly she was supposed to gargle with and spit. She was beginning to grasp that she’d underestimated the time it would take to pumice, scrub, clean, shampoo, never mind squirting and applying her new solvents and salves. Her bedroom floor was littered with dainty pink cardboard boxes. She would not have time to do everything before Sebastian arrived. She had yet to polish her nails, spray her hair into place, choose the right bra-and-sweater combo. These things were not negotiable, not at all skippable. She finished work on her left-foot calluses. She decided to triage pumicing the right foot. If Sebastian noticed calluses on one foot and not the other, hopefully he would keep it to himself. She vowed to keep her shoes on until the last possible moment. She hoped he wouldn’t be paying attention to her feet by that time. Her stomach flopped when she thought about this, about actually doing this. She concentrated again on her brand-new beauty products, which helped to keep sex vaguely and safely abstract, a kind of marketing idea and not something her body would really do. On her date. Tonight.
She had three different colors of nail polish, each of them some variation on purple: there was “plum” and “eggplant” and the more conceptual purple called “cosmos,” which was the one she eventually chose. She painted her toenails and did that thing with the cotton balls between each toe and walked around her dorm room on her heels. Hair curler was warming up. Little glass jars of cream-colored powders she dabbed on her face with a sponge. Cleaned out her ears with a Q-tip. Plucked a few eyebrow hairs. Replaced her white underwear with black underwear. Then changed back to white, and then back again. She opened the windows and smelled the city’s cool air and, like everyone else, felt hopeful, optimistic, sensually physical.
All over the city, people were doing this. And there might have been a moment here, an opportunity that, if grasped, could have prevented all that followed. If everyone involved took a deep breath of that fertile springlike air and realized it was a sign. Then the mayor’s office might have given the demonstrators the permits they’d been for months requesting, and the demonstrators could have peacefully assembled and not thrown anything or taunted anyone, and the police could have bemusedly watched them from a great distance, and everyone could have said their piece and gone home with no bruises or concussions or scrapes or nightmares or scars.
There might have been a moment, but then this happened:
He had just arrived in Chicago on a bus from Sioux Falls—twenty-one years old, aimless drifter, probably in town for the protest but we’ll never know. Dressed in the ragtag fashion—old leather coat cracking at the collar, beat-up and duct-taped duffel bag, brown shoes bearing the scuffs of many miles, begrimed denim pants that bloomed outward at the bottom in the manner currently favored by the youth. But it would have been the hair that identified him to police as an enemy. Long and tangled, reaching down past the collar of his leather coat. He brushed it out of his eyes in a gesture that always struck the more militant conservatives as really girly-looking. Really feminine and faggoty. For some reason, this particular gesture caused them so much rage. He batted the hair out of his eyes, pulled at it where it caught like Velcro to his mustache and wiry beard. To the cops, he looked like any other local hippie. To them, his long hair was the end to a kind of conversation.
But he wasn’t local. He didn’t have the local counterculture’s predictability. Say what you want about the Chicago left, at least they let themselves be arrested without too much fuss. They might call the cops some dirty names, but their general reaction to handcuffs was an annoying limpness, sometimes elevated to full-body flaccidity.
But this young man from Sioux Falls was of a different idiom. Something had happened to him along the way, something dark and real. Nobody knew why he was in Chicago. He was alone. Maybe he’d heard about the protest and wanted to be part of a movement that must have seemed very far away in Sioux Falls. One can imagine the loneliness he might have felt, looking the way he did in a place like South Dakota. Maybe he’d been hassled, taunted, bullied, beaten up. Maybe he’d had to defend himself against the police or Hell’s Angels—those self-appointed defenders of love-it-or-leave-it culture—one too many times. Maybe he was exhausted by it.
The truth is that nobody knew what had happened to him that made him hide a six-shot revolver in the pocket of his worn leather jacket. Nobody knew why, when police stopped him, he pulled the gun from his jacket pocket and fired it.
He must not have known what was at that moment happening in Chicago. How the police were taking every idle threat seriously, how they were on edge, pulling double shifts, triple shifts. How the hippies threatened to give all of Chicago an acid trip by dumping LSD into the city’s drinking water, and even though it would take five tons of LSD to pull this off, still there were cops posted at every pumping station of the municipal water supply. How the police were already patrolling the Conrad Hilton with bomb-sniffing dogs because the hippies had threatened to blow up the hotel that housed the vice president and all the delegates. There was word that the hippies were planning to pose as chauffeurs at the airport in order to kidnap delegates’ wives and then get them stoned and have inappropriate relations with them, and so police were giving escorts directly from the runway. There were so many threats it was hard to respond to them all, so many scenarios, so many possibilities. How do you prevent the hippies, for example, from shaving their beards and cutting their hair and dressing straight and faking credentials to get into the International Amphitheater where they’d set off a bomb? How do you stop them from gathering en masse and turning over cars in the street, as they’d done in Oakland? How do you stop them from building barricades and taking over whole city blocks, as they’d done in Paris? How do you stop them from occupying a building, as they’d done in New York, and how do you extract them from the building in front of newsmen who knew that trumped-up claims of police brutality moved papers? It was the sad logic of antiterrorism that had them on edge: The police had to plan for everything, but the hippies only had to be successful once.
So they built a barbed-wire perimeter around the amphitheater and filled the inside with plainclothes cops looking for troublemakers, demanding the credentials of anyone who didn’t seem in favor of the current administration. They sealed manhole covers. Got helicopters into the sky. Put snipers atop tall buildings. Prepped the tear gas. Brought in the National Guard. Requisitioned the heavy armor. They heard about Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Prague that week, and a small, complicated part of them felt envy and admiration for the Russians. Yes, that’s how you fucking do it, they thought. Overwhelming force.
But our man from Sioux Falls could not have known any of this.
Or else he might have thought twice about pulling a gun out of his pocket. When the cop car drove past as he walked this night, this clear clean moment when he could see all the stars hanging over Michigan Avenue, and the car stopped and those two pigs got out in their short-sleeved baby-blue shirts, walking toward him with all manner of gadgetry bouncing on their belts, and they said something vague about curfew violation and did he have any identification, had he known what was happening all over Chicago right at that moment, he might have found it preferable to spend a few nights in jail for possession of an unregistered and concealed handgun. But he’d come all the way to Chicago on that horrific thirty-hour bus ride, and maybe he’d been waiting for this protest all his life, maybe this was some kind of turning point for him, maybe the idea of missing the whole demonstration was too painful, maybe he hated the war that much, and maybe he didn’t want to lose the gun, which might have been his only security, having spent a rough adolescence in the Dakotas, where he was different and alone. In his head, it went like this: He’d pull the gun out and fire a warning shot and while the cops ducked for cover he’d run down the nearest dark alley and get away. It was as easy as that. Maybe he’d even done this before. He was young, he could run, he’d been running all his life.
But as it turned out, the cops didn’t duck for cover. They didn’t give him the chance to get away. At the gun’s first report, they unholstered their own revolvers and shot him. Four times in the chest.
Word got around pretty quickly, from the police to the Secret Service to the National Guard to the FBI: The hippies were armed. They were shooting. This radically changed the stakes. A day before the protest began, this was, they all agreed, a very bad omen.
The students asked around their ranks to see if anyone was expected from Sioux Falls. Who was he? What was he doing here? Spontaneous candlelight vigils popped up for this young man who might have been a brother to them. They sang “We Shall Overcome” and wondered privately about whether they’d die for their cause. His protest, they thought, was greater than all the riots that whole long year—greater in its privacy, its intimacy, its stakes. He broke their hearts, dying in Chicago the way he did, before anyone even knew his name.
And when Sebastian heard the news he was in the office of the Chicago Free Voice giving an interview to CBS and the phone rang and he was told that someone had been shot, a drifter in from South Dakota. And Sebastian’s first impulse, the very first thing that rushed unwillingly into his brain, was how great the timing was. CBS News was right there. This was gold. And so he called up some outrage and announced to the journalists that “the pigs have murdered a protester in cold blood.”
Boy did that get their attention.
He ratcheted up the rhetoric with each new telling. “One of our brothers has been shot for the crime of disagreeing with the president,” he told the Tribune. “The police are killing as indiscriminately as the bombs in Vietnam,” he told The Washington Post. “Chicago is becoming the western outpost of Stalingrad,” he told The New York Times. He organized even more candlelight vigils and told the TV news crews and photographers where the vigils could be found, sending each outlet to a different gathering so that each of them thought they were the one getting the scoop. The only thing journalists liked more than getting a story right was getting it first.
This was his job, to add heat.
In the months before the protest, it was Sebastian who had printed those outrageous stories in the Free Voice about spiking the city’s water supply with LSD, about abducting delegates’ wives, about bombs going off at the amphitheater. That no such plans were ever actually considered was irrelevant. He had learned something important: What was printed became the truth. He vastly inflated the number of demonstrators expected in Chicago, then felt a surge of pride when the mayor mobilized the National Guard. The message was getting out. This is what he cared about: the message, the narrative. When he imagined it, he imagined an egg that he had to hold and protect and warm and coddle and nourish, one that grew to huge fairy-tale proportions if he did it right, glowing and floating above them all, a beacon.
It was only dawning on him now, on the night before the protest, the implications of all his work. Kids were coming to Chicago. They would be battered and beaten by the police. They would be killed. This was more or less inevitable. What had been up to this point all illusion and fantasy and hype, an exercise in the molding of public opinion, would tomorrow become manifest. It was a kind of birth, and he trembled at the thought of it. So here he was, alone, doing the last thing anyone would expect from brash, confident, fearless Sebastian: He was sitting on his bed in tears. Because he understood what was going to happen tomorrow, understood his odd role in it, knew that everything up to this point was done and unchangeable and set solid in the infuriating past.
He was a lighthouse of regret tonight. And so he was weeping. He needed to stop thinking about this. He remembered vaguely that he had a date. He splashed water on his face. He threw on a jacket. He looked at a mirror and said, Pull yourself together.
Which was exactly what a certain police officer was telling himself across town, sitting on the back bumper of his patrol car, parked in the usual dark alley, sitting next to Alice, who appeared to be breaking up with him. Pull yourself together, he thought.
Just like everyone else in the city, Officer Brown was hoping to get laid tonight. But when he met Alice, she did not get in the car and make any funky requests but rather sat heavily down on the trunk and said: “I think we should take a break.”
“Take a break from what?” he said.
“From everything. All of it. You and me. Our affair.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I want to try something new,” Alice said.
Brown thought about this for a moment. “You mean you want to try someone new,” he said.
“Well, yes,” Alice said. “I’ve met someone, maybe. Someone interesting.”
“So you’re breaking up with me for this new person.”
“Technically, to break up we would need something to break, a commitment to each other that, obviously, we do not have.”
“But—”
“But yes.”
Officer Brown nodded. He stared at a dog on the other side of the alley getting into the trash of a local diner. One of the city’s many strays, a bit of the German shepherd in it but muddled and runted by a swirl of other breeds. It pulled out a black garbage bag from the tipped-over bin, yanked it with its teeth.
“So if it weren’t for this new person, you wouldn’t be breaking up with me?” he said.
“That’s irrelevant, since there is a new person.”
“Humor me. Go with it. If this new person didn’t exist, you’d have no reason to end our affair.”
“Okay. Sure. That’s a fair assessment.”
“I want you to know I think this is a mistake,” he said.
She gave him that condescending look he couldn’t stand, that look communicating how she was the interesting and far-out one and he was the one stuck in a bourgeois middle-class hole from which there was no escape.
“What can this new person give you that I can’t?” he said.
“You don’t understand.”
“I can change. You want me to do something different? I can do that. We don’t have to meet so often. We could meet every other week. Or once a month. Or you want me to be rougher? I can be rougher.”
“This isn’t what I want anymore.”
“We’ll keep it, you know, loose. Informal. You can be with this new person and me, right?”
“That’s not going to work.”
“Why? You haven’t given me any good reasons.”
“I no longer want to be with you. Isn’t that a good reason?”
“No. Absolutely not nearly good enough. Because there’s no explanation. Why don’t you want to keep doing this? What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing. You did nothing wrong.”
“Exactly. So you can’t punish me like this.”
“I’m not trying to punish you. I’m trying to be honest.”
“Which is having the effect of punishing me. Which is not fair. I did everything you asked. Even the weird stuff. I did everything, so you can’t just up and leave for no good reason.”
“Will you please stop whining?” she said, and she jumped off the car and walked a few paces away. Her sudden movement caught the dog’s attention; it tensed, evaluated her intentions, guarded his scraps. “Will you please be a man about this? We’re done.”
“All those things we did together, all those strange things. They made a promise. Even if you never said it out loud. And now you’re breaking that promise.”
“Go home to your wife.”
“I love you.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“I do. I love you. This is me saying I love you.”
“You don’t love me. You’re just afraid of being alone and bored.”