18
ERNIE BANKS PROBABLY FEELS SOMETHING ELSE, too, whenever he hits a home run. Along with the sense of professional mastery, there’s probably this other, uglier feeling—what would you call it? Payback? Retaliation? Because isn’t one reason men are moved to greatness partly the need to respond in a grand way to the people who cut them most deeply? For Ernie Banks, it was the older and bigger boys who said he was too skinny. Or the white boys who wouldn’t let him play. The girls who left him for smarter guys, bigger guys, guys with more money. Or the parents who told him to do something better with his life. The teachers who said he wouldn’t amount to nothing. The beat cops who were leery of him. And because Ernie couldn’t defend himself then, he defends himself now: Each home run is his retort, each sprinting impossible center-field catch part of his ongoing vindication. When he swings his bat and feels that delicious thwack, he must feel a powerful sense of professional satisfaction, yes, but he must also think: I proved you fuckers wrong again.
So that’s an essential part of it, too. That’s what’s going on in Officer Brown’s head right now. This is, in some ways, a reprisal. This is righteous.
And he thinks of those nights with Alice, those encounters in the backseat of his police cruiser, and how she wanted him to be violent with her, to shove her around and choke her and grab her roughly and leave marks. And how he felt bashful about it, demure, shy. He didn’t want to do it. Felt himself incapable of it, actually. Felt like it required a different kind of man altogether: someone unthinking and brutal.
And yet here he is now, clunking hippies on the head. It turns out he had deep reserves of brutality that were, up till now, unprospected.
In a way, this makes him happy. He’s a fuller and more complicated man than he thought he was. He imagines himself in dialogue with Alice right now. Didn’t think I could do it, did you? he says as he clobbers another hippie. You said you wanted me to be rough, well, here you go.
And he imagines that for Ernie Banks the best home run is the one when the girls who broke his heart are in the stands to see it. Brown imagines Alice is here watching him, right now, somewhere in the fray, observing his new vitality and strength and brute masculine dominance. She’s impressed. Or she will be, as soon as she sees him and sees that he’s changed, that he’s exactly what she needs him to be now: Of course she’d take him back.
He clunks a hippie on the jaw, hears that pregnant crunching sound, and there’s screaming all around him and hippies running terrified and one of the other cops grabs Brown by the shoulder and says “Hey buddy, settle down a little” and Officer Brown sees that his own hands are trembling. They’re quaking, actually, and he waves them in the air like they’re wet. He feels ashamed of this and hopes that if Alice is indeed watching him right now she did not see that.
He thinks: I am Ernie Banks rounding the bases—the very picture of calm, serene delight.
19
IT IS REMARKABLE how quickly extraordinary things turn ordinary. By now the patrons of the Haymarket Bar do not even flinch when some thrown projectile strikes the plate-glass windows. Stones, chunks of concrete, even billiard balls—all have made their way through the air, over the heads of the assembled police line, and whacked against the windows of the bar. People inside have stopped noting them. Or if they do note them, they do so condescendingly: “The Cubs could use an arm like that.”
The cops are generally good at holding the line, but occasionally a wedge of protestors breaks through and a couple of kids get beaten up right in front of the Haymarket windows and dragged to a paddy wagon. This has now happened so many times that the folks in the bar have completely stopped watching it. They ignore it in that strained way they walk by homeless men on the street.
On the television, the mayor is back with old Cronkite and the latter appears as penitent as ever.
“I can tell you this,” the journalist says, “you have a lot of supporters around the country.” And the mayor nods like a Roman emperor ordering an execution.
“It’s your basic jingoistic sucking up,” says Agent A——. “Your basic dezinformatsiya.”
Outside, a police officer strikes a bearded man wearing the Vietcong flag as a cape, strikes him with his rifle butt right in the middle of the cape, sending the guy sprawling forward like he’s diving into home plate, face-first into the Haymarket’s thick leaded windows with a dull crunch that is eaten up in the bar by Jimmy Dorsey’s sweet, sweet saxophone.
Old Cronkite is saying, “I have to compliment you, Mr. Mayor, on the genuine friendliness of the Chicago Police Department.”
Two cops descend on the bearded man at the window and clunk him on the head.
“That is the look of someone who’s given up,” says Agent A——, pointing at old Cronkite.
“Put him out of his misery, please,” says Agent B——, nodding.
“You want to see what a fighter looks like when he knows he’s lost? There it is.”
The bearded man outside, meanwhile, is dragged away, leaving a smear of blood and grease on the window.
20
SAY A SEAGULL, old Cronkite thinks. He recently took in a game at Wrigley and saw how, in the ninth inning, the seagull masses were drawn from the lake to the stadium. The birds were there to clean up the popcorn and peanut scraps left under the seats. Cronkite was amazed at their timing. How did they know it was the ninth inning?
If you saw the city from this view, seagull-view, way up high, what would it look like? It would be quiet and peaceful. Families in their homes, the blue-gray color of televisions flickering, a single golden light in the kitchen, sidewalks empty but for the occasional stray cat, whole motionless blocks, and he imagines soaring over it and noting that everywhere in Chicago that is not the few acres surrounding the Conrad Hilton Hotel is the most peaceful place in the world right now. And maybe that is the story. Not that thousands are protesting but that millions are not. Maybe to achieve the balance CBS is looking for they should take a crew to the northern Polish neighborhoods and western Greek neighborhoods and southern black neighborhoods and film nothing happening. To show how this protest is a pinprick of light in a much larger and gathering darkness.
Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that’s the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that’s the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that’s Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it’s his job to prevent this closure.
But how to say it right?
21
SEBASTIAN LEADS HER by the hand out of the small makeshift jail and into a completely gray and anonymous cinder-block hallway. A police officer hurries out of a room and Faye jerks back at the sight of him.
“It’s okay,” says Sebastian. “Come on.”
The cop walks right by, nodding as he goes. They pass through a set of double doors at the end of the hall and into a space decorated lavishly: plush red carpet, wall sconces emitting a golden glow, white walls with ornate trim that suggests French aristocracy. Faye sees a sign on one of the doors and understands that they’re in the basement of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
“How did you know I was arrested?” she says.
He turns to her and flashes a rascally smile. “Grapevine.”
He takes her through the belly of the hotel, passing police and reporters and hotel staff, all of them hustling to somewhere, all of them looking grim and serious. They reach a set of thick metal exterior doors guarded by two more cops, who nod at Sebastian and allow him to pass. And in this way they are delivered into a loading dock, and then into the alleyway, into the open air. The sound of the protest reaches them here as an indistinct howl that seems to be coming from all directions at once.
“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.