Why does this always happen? Why does he have to pay for any triumph with sadness and blood? All his victories end in sorrow. In some ways, he’s still that disappointed eight-year-old thinking bad things about Tommy Skrumpf. He feels the sting of that day all the way to his marrow, still.
Why do the best things in life leave such deep scars?
Which is exactly the kind of self-destructive, negative-type thinking the management consultants were brought in to fix. He repeats his confidence mantras. I’m a winner. He cancels the order for the vitamin C. He gets dressed. Gets back to work. Sic transit gloria mundi.
27
OLD CRONKITE LISTING to his right, leaning on his desk in a manner that plays on TV as serious contemplation and the strong-willed constitution of a man whose job it is to deliver bad news to the country, leaning like this and cocking his head and staring into the camera with a pained look on his face, a kind of father’s this-is-going-to-hurt-me-more-than-it’s-going-to-hurt-you look, and saying, “The Democratic convention is about to begin”—then a long dramatic pause here for this next part to really sink in—“in a police state.”
Then adding “There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it” for the benefit of his producers, who he can imagine are right now shaking their heads in the control van at his blatant editorializing, again.
But something needs to be said for the benefit of the viewers who are at home and plainly not getting it. The CBS switchboard has been going nuts all day. The most calls they’d gotten since King was shot. Well sure, Cronkite said, people are mad, the police are out of control.
Yes, people are mad, his producers told him, but not mad at the police. They’re mad at the kids, they said. They’re blaming the kids. They’re saying the kids are getting what they deserve.
And it’s true that certain protestors are not entirely, let’s say, easy to like. They try to offend your sensibilities. They try to push your buttons. They are unkempt, unclean. But they are only a tiny part of the mass gathered right now outside the Hilton. Most of the kids out there look like normal kids, anybody’s kids. Maybe they’d gotten themselves into something they didn’t understand, swept up in something larger. But they aren’t criminals. They aren’t deviants. They aren’t radicals or hippies. They probably just don’t want to be drafted. They are probably just sincerely against the Vietnam War. And, by the way, who isn’t these days?
But it turns out that for every poor kid shown getting his head drubbed by a nightstick, CBS gets ten phone calls in support of the cop who held the stick. Reporters got gassed in the street and then came back to HQ to find a telegram from a thousand miles away saying the reporters didn’t understand what was really happening in Chicago. As soon as he heard this, old Cronkite knew he’d failed. They’d been covering the radicals and the hippies so much that now his viewers couldn’t see past them. The gray areas had ceased to exist. And old Cronkite had two thoughts about this. First, anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion. And second, Nixon is definitely going to win this thing.
28
IT IS BAD PLANNING on the part of the police to demand that protestors leave the park but give them no obvious way to do so. It is no longer legal to assemble in the park, but it is also illegal to cross a police barricade, and the park is barricaded on all sides. So it’s your classic double bind. Actually, the only place not barricaded is a spot on the eastern edge of the park, by the lake, exactly where the tear gas landed, stupidly. So here they come, the protestors, because they have no other choice; there’s nowhere else to go. The first of them flow onto Michigan Avenue and into the walls of the Conrad Hilton like runaway waves. They splash onto the concrete and brick and they’re pinned there as the police recognize that something has shifted in the rhetoric of the day. The stakes have changed. The protestors—with their numbers and their new desperation—now have the upper hand. And so the police push back, crush them into the walls of the hotel, and swing away.
Sebastian and Faye are in there somewhere. He’s squeezing her hand so hard it hurts, but she doesn’t dare let go. She feels herself caught in this moving human river and pressed at all sides and sometimes even lifted off her feet for a moment and carried, a sensation like swimming or floating, before being dropped again, and the thing she’s thinking about most right now is keeping her balance, staying on her feet, because these people are panicked and this is what ten thousand panicked people look like: like wild animals, huge and insensate. If she falls she’ll be trampled. The terror she feels about this goes way beyond terror and into a kind of calm clarity. This is life or death. She squeezes Sebastian’s hand harder.
People run with handkerchiefs on their faces, or with their shirts wrapped around their mouths. They cannot stand the gas. They cannot stay in the park. And yet it’s becoming clear to them now that this was a mistake too, going this way, because as they get closer to the safety of the dark city beyond Michigan Avenue, the spaces they can fill are getting smaller and smaller. They are being funneled by heavy equipment and fencing and barbed wire and lines of cops and National Guardsmen thirty deep. And Sebastian tries to get to the Hilton’s front doors but the crowd is too thick, the current too strong, and so they end up off target, carried to the side of the building instead, and up against the plate-glass windows of the Haymarket Bar.
That’s where Officer Brown sees them.
He’s been watching the crowd, looking for Alice. He’s standing atop the back bumper of a U.S. Army troop carrier, several feet above everyone else, looking at the crowd, the baby-blue helmets of the Chicago PD, en masse, like a colony of agitated poisonous mushrooms, it looks like, from up here. And then suddenly a face pops out of the crowd, over by the bar, a woman’s face, and he feels a surge of optimism that it’s Alice, because it’s the first time all day he’s had any flash of familiarity, and the film that’s been running in his head—that Alice sees him clubbing hippies and thus recognizes him for the brutal man she’s always wanted him to be—starts running again until the face resolves itself and he realizes with crashing disappointment that it’s not Alice he’s seeing, it’s Faye.
Faye! The girl he arrested just last night. Who should be in jail right this moment. Who is the very reason Alice left him.
Fucking bitch.
He leaps into the crowd and unholsters his club. He presses forward, shoves his way toward the plate-glass window Faye is trapped against. Between him and her are several lines of cops and a mass of stinking hippies trapped and flapping like tuna in a net. He shoulders his way through the crowd, saying, “Coming through! From behind!” And the cops are glad to let him go because that’s one more guy between them and the front line. And he’s getting closer to the boundary between the cops and the protestors, a boundary visible by the nightsticks in the air coming down fast like a typewriter getting all jammed up in itself. The closer he gets, the harder it is to move. Everything seems to heave, like they are all part of one great, sick animal.
And at that moment a squad of National Guardsmen—one of them carrying an actual flamethrower, though, thankfully, not using it—carves through the protestors on Michigan Avenue, effectively flanking them, cutting them off from the rest of the herd, and so this small group by the Conrad Hilton finds itself trapped: police on one side, National Guard on the other, hotel walls behind them.
There is nowhere for them to go.
Faye is crushed against the plate-glass window, her shoulder pressed hard into it. Any harder, she thinks, and it’ll pop, the shoulder. She’s looking into the Haymarket Bar, through the window that seems to wobble and creak, and she sees two men in suits and black ties staring back at her. They sip their drinks. They seem to have no expression at all. Around her, protestors squirm and duck for cover. They get clubbed in the head, get jabbed in the ribs with the blunt end of a nightstick, and as they go down they are dragged to paddy wa
gons, which seems to Faye preferable. Between a knock to the head and going to the paddy wagon, she’ll take the wagon. But she can’t even turn here, much less go to the ground, such is the tightness of the bodies pressing into her. She’s losing hold of Sebastian’s hand. There’s someone between them now, another protestor between Faye and Sebastian doing exactly what they’re doing, which is to say trying to flee, putting off the beating as long as possible. This is simple and irrational survival kicking in. There’s nowhere to flee, yet they flee anyway. And Faye has to make a choice right now because if she keeps holding on to Sebastian’s hand like this, her elbow might break where this guy is pressing into it. Plus she’s such an easy target like this, her back to the cops. If she turned around maybe she’d be able to duck out of the way of their wild swinging. So she makes the decision. She lets go of Sebastian’s hand. She lets his sweaty fingers slide away, and as she does so she feels him grasping for her harder, really clamping down, but it’s no use. She’s free. Her arm snaps back to her and the man between them collapses into the plate-glass window—which trembles at the impact, and sounds a sharp crack like boots on ice—and she turns around.
The first thing she sees is the cop bearing down on her.
They lock eyes. It’s the cop from last night, who arrested her at the dorm. His is the first face she sees in that way someone’s face seems more illuminated when they’re staring right at you. That face, that awful man who last night wouldn’t look at her as she cried in the backseat of his police cruiser and she pleaded with him and urged him to let her go and she stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror and he didn’t say anything except, “You are a whore.”
And how he found her again, here, now.
His face is psychotically calm. He swings his club quickly and emotionlessly. He looks like someone out trimming the grass, feeling nothing about it except that it needs to be done. And she looks at his big brutal body and the strength with which he swings his nightstick, its speed as it dashes into heads and ribs and limbs, and she knows her plan to avoid a police beating by athletically dodging it was both naïve and impossible. This man can do whatever he wants. She can’t stop him. She is powerless. He is coming.
And what she does here is try to get really small. It’s the only thing she can think of. To become the smallest target she can. She tries to shrink into herself, draw in her arms and duck her head and bend at the knees and waist to get below the level of the people in front of her.
A posture of supplication, it feels like. All her alarm bells are going off, and she feels the panic attack starting as it always does, with that iron weight in her chest like she’s being squeezed from the inside. She thinks Please not now as the cop continues to punish whoever happens to interrupt his path to Faye. And the protestors yell “Peace!” or “I’m not resisting!” and they hold up their hands, palms out, surrendering, but the cop clobbers them anyway, in the head, the neck, the belly. He’s so close now. Only one person stands between him and Faye, a young wiry man with a big beard and camo jacket who is very quickly getting the message and trying his best to squirm away, and Faye’s lungs are locking up and she’s feeling that head-rush dizziness that makes her all trembly and unsteady, and her skin feels cold and wet, and the sweat erupts out of her, so quickly is her forehead damp, while her mouth is chalk-dry and gummy so that she can’t even tell the cop not to do whatever he’s going to do—all this happening as she watches him shove aside the camo-jacket guy and press into the crowd so that he’s within range of Faye, and he’s trying to angle his body so he can get to her, trying to raise his weapon in all that human chaos, when from behind them they all hear two pops, two light pops that sound like someone’s hand beating the open end of an empty bottle. And before today a sound like that would have had no meaning, but now the protestors are all veterans at this and they know: that sound means tear gas. Someone behind them has fired more tear gas. And the crowd reacts to this—the sound and then the inevitable smoke cloud that erupts a second later—predictably: They panic and surge away from it, a wave of bodies that reaches Faye just as the cop lunges for her, and all of them at the same time crash into the plate-glass window together.
This, finally, proves too much for the window to bear. This is well beyond its tolerances.
The window doesn’t even really crack so much as explode sharply everywhere all at once. And Faye and the cop and the great rush of protestors pushing themselves against it all collapse and tumble backward into the people and smoke and music of the Haymarket Bar.
29
THE DAY HAS THUS FAR BEEN so unusual that it takes a moment for the patrons of the Haymarket Bar to recognize something has happened that is even more unusual. The plate-glass window shatters and in tumble protestors and cops and great sharp shards of glass, and for a moment they simply watch this happening as if they’re watching the television above the bar. They are mildly fascinated. They feel drawn to it, yet also separate from it. They are spectators, not participants.
So for a few moments as the protestors and cops all wrestle around regaining their lost balance in this scrum of humanity on the black-and-white-tiled Haymarket floor, people in the bar watch with a passive interest, like: Wow.
Neat.
Wonder what’ll happen next?
What happens next is that the tear gas leaks in and the cops get extremely pissed off and pile through the new opening in the side of the bar and sprint from the lobby because the thing that was never supposed to happen in Chicago has now happened: The delegates and the protestors are in the same room, together.
Their orders were very clear on this point: The delegates were to be met at the airport, right as they stepped off the plane, taken in police cars to the Hilton, taken in big buses with military-grade escorts to the amphitheater and back—shielded, bubbled, cut off from the hippies because the hippies are trying to disrupt and threaten our democracy, which is what the mayor said every day in the newspapers and on television. (The protest leaders’ responses that a democracy has ceased to be democratic when its representatives must be shielded from the people they represent went for the most part unreported and for sure unanswered by the mayor or his press office.)
Anyway, here they come, the police, red-faced and running, moving as quickly as allowed by jangling heavy utility belts full of weapons. And this is about the time that things get very real for the patrons of the Haymarket Bar. Coughing and crying suddenly because of the gas, clipped by running police or errant billy clubs, they realize they are not really spectators to this event; they are now part of it. This is how quickly the reality outside the bar penetrates and obliterates the reality inside the bar: with a simple pop of glass. The bar is now an extension of the street.
The front lines have shifted.
How long, they wonder, before the lines shift further? How long before their hotel rooms are at risk? Their own homes? Their families? For many of them, the protest was mild street theater until this moment, when they themselves are getting gassed. They think of bricks perhaps someday flying through their own windows, or they think of their daughters growing up and getting seduced by bearded long-haired smoke-smelling men, and even the most pro–peace plank among them stand back and let the cops do their brutal work.
So it’s all chaos, in other words. Chaos and panic. Faye lands hard on her side and under several other bodies all clacking heads and jaws together and she’s seeing stars and fighting to regain the wind that was knocked from her when she landed on the floor. She tries to focus on little things, to see through the green-purple starry screen of her vision to the checkered floor, the bits and chunks of glass around her, some sliding like hockey pucks as they’re kicked and battered by the melee now occupying the bar. It all feels very far away. She blinks. She shakes her head. She sees the feet of police as they run toward her, the feet of patrons as they run away. She runs her fingers over her own forehead and feels a lump the size of a walnut growing there. She remembers the cop who was a moment ago c
oming after her, and sees him lying faceup, halfway in the bar and halfway out.
30
HE’S NOT MOVING. He stares straight up. What he’s seeing is the jagged edge of the plate-glass window—what’s left of it—about eight feet above him, an equator in his field of vision. North of it is the tin ceiling of the Haymarket Bar. South, the sky, a hazy vaporous dusk. When he fell, he twisted and turned and crashed down backward and felt a bolt of pain at the landing. He’s lying perfectly still and thinking about what he feels now. Nothing, is what he feels.
Around him, police jump through the broken window and into the bar. He feels like he needs to tell one of them something, though he doesn’t know what. Just that something doesn’t feel right here. And he doesn’t understand what’s going on but he senses that it’s important—more important than the delegates or the hippies or the bar. He tries to speak to them as they leap around him, over him. His voice comes out small and thin. He says “Wait,” but none of them do. They crash into the bar, where they yank hippies off the floor and eject them onto the street, where they club the hippies and maybe even a few delegates too because it’s dark in there and hard to tell the difference when you’re swinging like that.