The Nix(139)

It was hard not to feel personal about all this. When some new bad element moved into the neighborhood, it was hard not to take it personally. It was personal. Officer Brown’s own grandfather had moved to this neighborhood as a very young man. He was Czeslaw Bronikowski until he reached Ellis Island, where he was given the name Charles Brown, a name then bestowed on the family’s firstborn sons each generation since. And even though Officer Brown could have done without the teasing this name prompted when kids began reading that goddamn comic strip circa first grade, still he loved it—it was a good name, an American name, a consolidation of his family’s past and its future.

It was a name that fit in.

So when some out-of-town doper, some punk peacenik, some longhaired hippie freak sat on the sidewalk all day scaring the daylights out of the old ladies, it was, indeed, personal. Why couldn’t they just fit in? With the Negroes it was at least reasonable. If the blacks didn’t particularly appreciate America, well, he could wrap his head around that one. But these kids, these middle-class white kids with their anti-America slogans—what gave them the right?

And so his job was simple: Target and annoy the bad elements in the city as far as the law allowed. As far as he could go without risking his pension or publicly embarrassing the city or the mayor. And yeah, sometimes somebody appeared on TV, usually some East Coast idiot with no idea what the f*ck he was talking about, who said the cops in Chicago were harsh or brutal or obstructing people’s First Amendment rights. But nobody paid much attention to that. There was a saying: Chicago problems, Chicago solutions.

For example, if a beatnik was walking through his precinct at two o’clock in the morning, it was a pretty easy matter to bust him for curfew violation. It was well known that most of these types did not carry any form of identification, so when they said “The curfew doesn’t apply to me, pig,” he could say “Prove it,” and they absolutely could not. Simple. So they spent an uncomfortable few hours in a holding pen while the message sunk in: You are not welcome here.

And that had been an acceptable job for Officer Brown—he was aware of his own talents and limitations, he was not ambitious. He was content as a beat cop until, almost by accident, he got to know and earn the trust of a certain hippie leader, and when he told his bosses that he had “made contact with a leading student radical” and now had “access to the underground’s inner sanctum” and asked to be assigned to the Red Squad—specifically the division investigating anti-American activity at Chicago Circle—they reluctantly agreed. (Nobody else on the force had been able to infiltrate Circle—those college kids could sniff out a fake easy.)

The Red Squad wiretapped rooms and telephones. They took covert photos. They tried to be as generally disruptive as they could be to the antiwar fringe. He saw it as a simple amplification of what he did on the street—annoying and detaining hippies—only now it was done in secret, using tactics that pushed the boundaries of what was, at face value, legal. For example, they raided the office of Students for a Democratic Society, stole files, broke typewriters, and spray-painted “Black Power” on the walls to throw the kids off. That seemed a bit questionable, yes, but the way he thought about it was that the only change between his old job and his new one was the method. The moral calculus, he figured, was the same.

Chicago problems, Chicago solutions.

And now he had been given the gift of a new name to investigate, some new fringe element recently arrived at Circle. He wrote the name down in his notebook. Put a star next to it. He would get to know this Faye very soon.





3


FAYE, OUTDOORS, in the grass, back leaning against a building, in the shade of a small campus tree, gently placed the newspaper on her lap. She smoothed its crinkles. She bent the corners where they’d begun to curl. The paper did not feel like ordinary newsprint—stiffer, thicker, almost waxy. Ink smeared off the page and onto her fingertips. She wiped her hands on the grass. She looked at the masthead—Editor in Chief: Sebastian—and she smiled. There was something both brazen and triumphant about Sebastian using only his first name. He had achieved enough renown that he was publicly mononymous, like Plato or Voltaire or Stendhal or Twiggy.

She opened the paper. It was the edition Sebastian had been printing last night, full of letters to the editor. She began to read.

Dear Chicago Free Voice,

Do you like hiding from the pigs and those other people that stare at us put us down? Because of our clothes and hair? I mean I used to but I don’t anymore I talk to them. Get them to like me and become friends and then tell them I smoke grass. And if they like you they might smoke it with you sometime and listen. You will help add one more of us to our ever growing number I think 50 percent of the USA is doing it and Narcotics Officers think we’re all mental patients haw haw.



It was hot today, and bright, and buggy: The gnats dove into her face, black dots between her eyes and the page, as if the punctuation marks were fleeing. She shooed them away. She was alone, nobody around; she’d found a quiet little spot on the northeast part of campus, a patch of grass separated from the sidewalk by a small hedge, back behind the brand-new Behavioral Sciences Building, which was roundly the most loathed building on the entire Circle campus. This was the one all the brochures talked about, designed according to the geometric principles of field theory, a new architecture meant to break the old architecture’s “tyranny of the square,” the brochures had said. A modern architecture that abandoned the square in favor of an overlapping matrix of octagons inscribed by circles.