Miami and the Siege of Chicago (20 page)

Somber thoughts for a stroll through Lincoln Park on a Sunday afternoon in summer, but the traffic of the tourists and the curious was great; one had to leave the car six blocks away. Curiosity was contained, however, in the family automobile: the burghers did not come to the park. Young tourists and cruisers were there in number, tough kids, Polish and Irish (not all plainclothesmen) circulating around the edges of the crowd, and in the center of the southern part of Lincoln Park where the Yippies had chosen to assemble on an innocuous greensward undistinguished from similar meadows in many another park, a folk-rock group was playing. It was an orderly crowd. Somewhere between one and two thousand kids and young adults sat on the grass and listened, and another thousand or two thousand, just arrived, or too restless to sit, milled through an outer ring, or worked forward to get a better look. There was no stage—the entrance of a flatbed truck from which the entertainers could have played had not been permitted. so the musicians were half hidden, the public address system—could it work off batteries?—was not particularly clear. For one of the next acts it hardly mattered—a young white singer with a cherubic face, perhaps eighteen, maybe twenty-eight, his hair in one huge puff ball teased out six to nine inches from his head, was taking off on an interplanetary, then galactic, flight of song, halfway between the space music of Sun Ra and “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” the singer's head shaking at the climb like the blur of a buzzing fly, his sound an electric caterwauling of power come out of the wall (or the line in the grass, or the wet plates in the batteries) and the singer not bending it, but whirling it, burning it, flashing it down some arc of consciousness, the sound screaming up to a climax of vibrations like one rocket blasting out of itself, the force of the noise a vertigo in the cauldrons of inner space—it was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of mind. And the reporter, caught in the din—had the horns of the Huns ever had noise to compare?—knew this was some variety of true song for the Hippies and adolescents in the house, in this enclave of grass and open air (luxury apartments of Lake Shore Drive not five football fields away) crescendos of sound as harsh on his ear, ear of a generation which had danced to “Star Dust,” as to drive him completely out of the sound, these painted dirty under-twenties were monsters, and yet, still clinging to recognition in the experience, he knew they were a generation which lived in the sound of destruction of all order as he had known it, and worlds of other decomposition as well; there was the sound of mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels, hearts bursting, literally bursting, as if this were the sound of death by explosion within, the drums of physiological climax when the mind was blown, and forces of the future, powerful, characterless, as insane and scalding as waves of lava, came flushing through the urn of all acquired culture and sent the brain like a foundered carcass smashing down a rapids, revolving through a whirl of demons, pool of uproar, discords vibrating, electric crescendo screaming as if at the electro-mechanical climax of the age, and these children like filthy Christians sitting quietly in the grass, applauding politely, whistles and cries of mild approval when the song was done, and the reporter as affected by the sound (as affected by the recognition of what nihilisms were calmly encountered in such musical storm) as if he had heard it in a room at midnight with painted bodies and kaleidoscopic sights, had a certainty which went through gangs and groups and rabble, tourists and consecrated saints, vestal virgins with finger bells, through the sight of Negroes calmly digging Honkie soul, sullen Negroes showing not impressed, but digging, cool on their fringe (reports to the South Side might later be made) through even the hint of menace in the bikers, some beaks alien to this music, come to scoff, now watching, half turned on by noise so near to the transcendencies of some of their own noise when the whine of the gears cohabited with the pot to hang them out there on the highway singing with steel and gasoline, yeah, steel and gasoline exactly equal to flesh plus hate, and blood plus hate; equations were pure while riding the balance of a machine, yes, even the tourists and the college boys who would not necessarily be back contributed nonetheless to the certainty of his mood. There was a mock charade going on, a continuation of that celebration of the Yippie Convention yet to come, when Pigasus, a literal pig, would be put in nomination. Vote Pig in '68, said the Yippie placards, and now up at the stage, music done, they announced another candidate to a ripple of mild gone laughter across the grass, Humphrey Dumpty was the name, and a Yippie clown marched through the crowd, a painted egg with legs, “the next President of the United States,” and in suite came a march of the delegates through an impromptu aisle from the stage to the rear of the crowd. A clown dressed like a Colorado miner in a fun house came first; followed Miss America with hideous lip-sticked plastic tits, stars of rouge on her cheeks; Mayor Daley's political machine—a clown with a big box horizontal to his torso, big infant's spoon at the trough on top of the box, and a green light which went on and off was next; then the featured delegate, the Green Beret, a clown with a toy machine gun, soot, and red grease on his face, an Australian bush hat on his head. Some sort of wax vomit pop-art work crowned the crown. Yes, the certainty was doubled. Just as he had known for one instant at the Republican Gala in Miami Beach that Nelson Rockefeller had no chance of getting the nomination, so he knew now on this cool gray Sunday afternoon in August, chill in the air like the chill of the pale and the bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat, that trouble was coming, serious trouble. The air of Lincoln Park came into the nose with that tender concern which air seemed always ready to offer when danger announced its presence. The reporter took an unhappy look around. Were these odd unkempt children the sort of troops with whom one wished to enter battle?

The justifications of the March on the Pentagon were not here. The reporter was a literary man—symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than himself. The fact that he had been marching to demonstrate against a building which was the living symbol of everything he most despised—the military-industrial complex of the land—had worked to fortify his steps. The symbol of the Pentagon had been a chalice to hold his fear; in such circumstances his fear had even flavored his courage with the sweetest emotions of battle.

But in Chicago, there was no symbol for him. Not the Amphitheatre in the stockyards, for he had a press pass to enter, and had entered indeed—it did not seem as much of a protest to march to a building he had entered already. Besides, the city would not allow a march: one was offered then the choice to be tear-gassed or abstain. Of course, there was the Conrad Hilton for a convenient symbol, but it was Democratic Party Headquarters and Press Headquarters, and he had a room in the Hilton, in fact it was the only Hilton Hotel he did not dislike, for it was old, not new, and had thousands of little rooms, or so it seemed, like the St. George in Brooklyn, plus a dingy rear twenty-five stories high with the sad legend, “World's Largest and Friendliest Hotel” painted in black and white on the weary color-dead elephantine brick. There was Lincoln Park, and anyone who wished to protest the horrors of the continuing war in Vietnam, or the horrors of this Democratic convention which would choose the candidate least popular and least qualified by strength, dignity, or imagination to lead, could bed down in Lincoln Park. The city, we may remember, had refused to issue a permit to the Yippies. So they could not sleep in the park. They had been ordered to vacate it by eleven. Their leaders had even told them to vacate it.

Paul Krassner:

“Sleeping in Lincoln Park after 11
p.m.
isn't as important as living our revolution there the rest of the day (the park opens at 6
a.m.
).”

Jerry Rubin:

“... Chicago is a police state, and we must protect ourselves. The cops want to turn our parks into graveyards. But we, not them, will decide when the battle begins.”

In fact, as everyone knew, many were not going to vacate the park, they were going to force the police to drive them out; so one could protest with one's body, one could be tear-gassed—with what unspoken later damage to the eyes had never necessarily been decided—and one could take a crack on the head with a policeman's stick, or a going-over by plainclothesmen. The reporter had an aversion to this. Besides, he was afraid of his
own
violence. It was not that he was such a good fighter, but he was not altogether courteous either—he had broken a man's jaw in a fight not so long before, and was not certain the end of that was yet heard; it had left him nervous and edgy about fights. He was not afraid of his own violence because he necessarily thought it would be so heinous to break a policeman's jaw, good law-abiding citizen that he was! It was more that he was a little concerned with what the policeman's friends and associates might do to him immediately afterward. He had taken a hint of a bad beating once or twice in his life; he was, conceivably, ready to take much more, but he could not pretend that he welcomed it.

So he went that night—after the visit to the park on Sunday afternoon—to a party, and from there to the Hilton and a quick visit on impulse to Humphrey's private headquarters, where, late at night, there was nobody to receive him but six or eight young Secret Servicemen or F.B.I. with bullet-faces, crew cuts, and an absurd tension at the recognition of his name.

The mission to see Humphrey fruitless as he had known it would be, he had merely wanted to look at the style of Humphrey's cops, he then went down a few floors and to bed, and did not know until the morning that there had been a battle already in Lincoln Park, and the Yippies driven out long after the 11 p.m. curfew with tear gas, and what was more sensational some reporters and photographers showing press cards had been beaten with the rest.

Monday night, the city was washed with the air of battle. Out at the stockyards, some hours after the convention had begun, the streets were empty but for patrol cars and police barricades at every approach. The stench of the yards was heavy tonight, and in a district nearby where the Mayor lived like the rest of his neighbors in a small wooden frame house, the sense of Chicago as a city on the plains (like small railroad cities in North Dakota and Nebraska) was clear in image, and in the wan streetlights, the hushed sidewalks, for almost no one was out in this area, the houses looked ubiquitously brown, the fear within almost palpable outside. The average burgher of Chicago, cursed with the middling unspiked culture of that flat American midcult which lay like a wet rag on the American mind, was without those boulevards and mansions and monuments of the mind which a thoroughgoing culture can give to paranoia for enrichment; no, the Chicagoan hiding this Monday night (as he was to hide Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night) inside his home was waiting perhaps for an eruption of the Blacks or an avalanche of Yippies to storm the chastity of his family redoubts. So fear was in these empty streets, and the anger of the city at its own fear, an anger which gave promise not soon to be satisfied by measures less than tyranny.

Seven miles to the northeast, just so far as from Greenwich Village to the middle of Harlem, the air of men ready for combat was up in Lincoln Park. It was after eleven, even close to midnight, and police cars were everywhere, and platoons of policemen every few hundred feet, enough for a parade. In the meadow in the angle between North Clark Street and LaSalle Drive, where the reporter had heard the music the afternoon before, there were now a few hundred people milling about. In the dark, there was no way to count, perhaps a few thousand in all of the park, youths up for an event with every muted mix of emotion, fear as clean as skiers before a steep downhill run, and vigorous crazy gaiety in the air like college pranksters before a panty raid; with it, the night nonetheless not without horror, very much not without horror, as if a fearful auto accident had taken place but ten minutes before and people wandered about now in the dark with awareness that bodies wrapped in bloodstained blankets might be somewhere off a shoulder of the road. In the near distance, the blue light of a police car was revolving through the dark, the menacing blue light turning 360 degrees around and around again, and a white-silver light pierced the retina in alternation, lighting up the faces of boys not twenty-two, not twenty, some of them in Indian blankets or ponchos, others in white shirts and khaki pants, sleeves rolled up, some with jackets, some with bikers' helmets, others with football helmets, a fencing jacket or two, and the hint of a few with private weapons, spade cats drifting in and out, emitting that high smoke of action carried from night to night in the electrified cool of the blood.

Twenty or thirty of the kids were building a barricade. They brought in park benches and picnic tables, and ran it a distance of fifty feet, then a hundred feet. A barricade perhaps six feet high. It made no sense. It stood in the middle of a field and there were no knolls nor defiles at the flanks to keep the barricade from being turned—the police cars would merely drive around it, or tear-gas trucks would push through it.

It was then the reporter decided to leave. The park was cool, it was after midnight, and if the police had not come yet, they might not come for hours, or perhaps not at all—perhaps there were new orders to let the kids sleep here—he simply did not know. He only knew he did not wish to spend hours in this park. For what was one to do when the attack came? Would one leave when asked—small honor there—why wait to offer that modest obedience. And to stay—to what end?—to protest being ejected from the park, to take tear gas in the face, have one's head cracked? He could not make the essential connection between that and Vietnam. If the war were on already, if this piece of ground were essential to the support of other pieces of ground ... but this ridiculous barricade, this symbolic contest with real bloody heads—he simply did not know what he thought. And he had a legitimate excuse for leaving. One of his best friends was with him, a professional boxer, once a champion. If the police ever touched him, the boxer would probably be unable to keep himself from taking out six or eight men. The police would then come near to killing the boxer in return. It was a real possibility. He had the responsibility to his friend to get him out of there, and did, even encountering Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Richard Seaver and Terry Southern on the way in. They had the determined miserable look of infantrymen trudging to the front; and Ginsberg, who had no taste for the violence ahead, and no conception whatsoever of looking for a way to avoid it, gave him a friendly salute, free of prejudice, and shuffled on forward to the meadow while Genet, large as Mickey Rooney, angelic in appearance, glanced at him with that hauteur it takes French intellectuals at least two decades to acquire. Burroughs merely nodded. Nothing surprised him favorably or unfavorably.