The Nix(138)

The barometer for the health of the country seemed to be what middle-aged men thought about the behavior of college girls.

But for the girls, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of awkward love, embarrassed and nervous and ignorant love. This is what nobody reported, how free-love girls gathered in these dark rooms and worried. They’d read all the stories, and believed them, and thus thought they were doing something wrong. “I want to be hip, but I don’t want my boyfriend f*cking all these other women,” said many, many girls who found that free love was still tangled up in all the old arguments—jealousy, envy, power. It was a sexual bait and switch, the free-love trip not quite measuring up to its hype.

“If I don’t want to have sex with someone, does that mean I’m a prude?” said one of the women at the meeting.

“If I don’t want to strip at a protest, am I a prude?” said another.

“Men think you’re a hip chick if you take your shirt off at rallies.”

“All those nude girls in Berkeley holding flowers.”

“They sell lots of papers.”

“Posing with psychedelic paint on their tits.”

“What kind of freedom is that?”

“They’re just doing it to be popular.”

“They’re not free.”

“They’re doing it for men.”

“Why else would they do it?”

“There’s no other reason to do it.”

“Maybe they like it,” said a new voice, a small voice, and everyone looked to see where it had come from: the girl with the funny round glasses who had been unnaturally quiet up to this point. Faye’s face flushed red and she looked at the floor.

Alice turned around and stared at her. “What do they like about it?” she asked.

Faye shrugged. She’d shocked herself by saying anything, much less that. She wanted to take it back immediately, reach out and stuff it into her stupid mouth. Maybe they like it, oh lord, oh god, the girls looked at her and waited. She had the feeling of being a wounded bird in a room full of cats.

Alice cocked her head and said, “Do you like it?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know. No.”

She had forgotten herself. She had been caught up in the moment—all this talk of sex, all the girls so excited, and she imagined herself at home standing in front of her big picture window imagining some dark stranger walking by and seeing her, when this thing erupted, it just came out. Maybe they like it.

“You like putting on a show for men?” Alice asked. “Parading your tits so they’ll like you?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What’s your name?” someone asked.

“Faye,” she said, and the girls waited. They watched her. She wanted more than anything to run out of the room, but that would draw so much more attention. She sat in a tight ball, trying to think of something to say, and that’s when Sebastian stepped out from the shadows and saved her.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I have an announcement.”

And as he talked the group mercifully forgot about Faye. She sat there boiling and listening to Sebastian—he was talking about the upcoming protest, how the city hadn’t given them a permit to occupy the park but they were going to do it anyway. “Make sure to tell your friends,” he said. “Bring everybody. We’re gonna have a hundred thousand people or more. We’re gonna change the world. We’re gonna end the war. Nobody will go to work. Nobody will go to school. We’re gonna shut the city down. Music and dancing at every red light. The pigs can’t stop us.”

And at the mention of the pigs, the pigs themselves laughed.

For they were listening.

They were packed into a small office several miles south called the “war room” in the basement of the International Amphitheater, where the detectives listened through static to Sebastian’s exhortations, the girls’ inane chatter. They wrote on legal pads and remarked on the stupidity of college kids, how they were so trusting. The office of the Chicago Free Voice had been bugged for how long now? How many months? The kids didn’t have a clue.

Outside the amphitheater were the slaughterhouses—the famous stockyards of Chicago, where the police heard the screams of animals, the last wails of cattle and hogs. Some of the cops, interested, peered over fences and saw carcasses torn off the ground by hooks and trolleys, pulled to death, dismembered, floors covered in entrails and shit, men hacking tirelessly at limbs and throats—it all seemed appropriate. The butchers’ curved knives offered the police a kind of clarity, a kind of purity of intent that gave their jobs a helpful, if unspoken, guiding metaphor.

They listened and wrote down anything, any indictable threat, calls to violence, outside agitating, communist propaganda, and tonight they were given something special—a name, one never mentioned before, someone new: Faye.

They glanced over at the new guy, standing in the corner, legal pad in hand, recently promoted from beat cop to the Red Squad: Officer Charlie Brown. He nodded. He wrote it down.

The Red Squad was the Chicago PD’s covert antiterrorist intelligence unit that was created in the 1920s to spy on union organizers, expanded in the 1940s to spy on communists, and concentrated now on threats to the domestic peace posed by radical leftists, mostly the students and the blacks. It was a glamorous job, and Brown was aware that some of the other officers, the older officers, were skeptical of him and his promotion: He was young, nervous as all hell, had a brief career that as yet lacked distinction—he had, so far, mostly busted screwed-up hippie kids for minor infractions. Loitering. Jaywalking. Curfew. The vague statute against public lewdness. His goal as a beat cop was to become such an annoyance they simply gave up, the hippies, gave up and moved along to some other precinct or, better, some other city. Then Chicago wouldn’t have to deal with what was roundly agreed to be the worst generation ever. Easily the worst, even though it was his generation too. He wasn’t much older than the kids he busted. But the uniform made him feel older, the uniform and crew cut and wife and child and preference for quiet things like bars without too much music where the only thing you heard was the murmur of conversation and the occasional sharp thwack of billiard balls. And church. Going to church and seeing the other beat cops there: It was a brotherhood. They were Catholic guys, neighborhood guys. You slapped them on the back when you saw them. They were good guys, they drank but not too much, they were kind to their wives, fixed up their houses, built things, played poker, paid their mortgages. Their wives knew each other, their kids played together. They’d been living on the block since forever. Their fathers had lived here, grandfathers too. They were Irish, Poles, Germans, Czechs, Swedes, but now thoroughly Chicagoans. They had city pensions that made them a good catch for the neighborhood ladies looking to settle down. They loved each other, loved the city, loved America, and not in an abstract way like kids asked to pledge allegiance but way down to their core—because they were happy, they were doing it, living, being successful, working hard, raising kids, sending kids to goddamn school. They had watched their own fathers raise them and, like most boys, they worried about measuring up. But here they were, doing it, and they thanked God and America and the city of Chicago for it. They hadn’t asked for much, but what they’d asked for, they’d gotten.