The Nix(158)

All over the city, people were doing this. And there might have been a moment here, an opportunity that, if grasped, could have prevented all that followed. If everyone involved took a deep breath of that fertile springlike air and realized it was a sign. Then the mayor’s office might have given the demonstrators the permits they’d been for months requesting, and the demonstrators could have peacefully assembled and not thrown anything or taunted anyone, and the police could have bemusedly watched them from a great distance, and everyone could have said their piece and gone home with no bruises or concussions or scrapes or nightmares or scars.

There might have been a moment, but then this happened:

He had just arrived in Chicago on a bus from Sioux Falls—twenty-one years old, aimless drifter, probably in town for the protest but we’ll never know. Dressed in the ragtag fashion—old leather coat cracking at the collar, beat-up and duct-taped duffel bag, brown shoes bearing the scuffs of many miles, begrimed denim pants that bloomed outward at the bottom in the manner currently favored by the youth. But it would have been the hair that identified him to police as an enemy. Long and tangled, reaching down past the collar of his leather coat. He brushed it out of his eyes in a gesture that always struck the more militant conservatives as really girly-looking. Really feminine and faggoty. For some reason, this particular gesture caused them so much rage. He batted the hair out of his eyes, pulled at it where it caught like Velcro to his mustache and wiry beard. To the cops, he looked like any other local hippie. To them, his long hair was the end to a kind of conversation.

But he wasn’t local. He didn’t have the local counterculture’s predictability. Say what you want about the Chicago left, at least they let themselves be arrested without too much fuss. They might call the cops some dirty names, but their general reaction to handcuffs was an annoying limpness, sometimes elevated to full-body flaccidity.

But this young man from Sioux Falls was of a different idiom. Something had happened to him along the way, something dark and real. Nobody knew why he was in Chicago. He was alone. Maybe he’d heard about the protest and wanted to be part of a movement that must have seemed very far away in Sioux Falls. One can imagine the loneliness he might have felt, looking the way he did in a place like South Dakota. Maybe he’d been hassled, taunted, bullied, beaten up. Maybe he’d had to defend himself against the police or Hell’s Angels—those self-appointed defenders of love-it-or-leave-it culture—one too many times. Maybe he was exhausted by it.

The truth is that nobody knew what had happened to him that made him hide a six-shot revolver in the pocket of his worn leather jacket. Nobody knew why, when police stopped him, he pulled the gun from his jacket pocket and fired it.

He must not have known what was at that moment happening in Chicago. How the police were taking every idle threat seriously, how they were on edge, pulling double shifts, triple shifts. How the hippies threatened to give all of Chicago an acid trip by dumping LSD into the city’s drinking water, and even though it would take five tons of LSD to pull this off, still there were cops posted at every pumping station of the municipal water supply. How the police were already patrolling the Conrad Hilton with bomb-sniffing dogs because the hippies had threatened to blow up the hotel that housed the vice president and all the delegates. There was word that the hippies were planning to pose as chauffeurs at the airport in order to kidnap delegates’ wives and then get them stoned and have inappropriate relations with them, and so police were giving escorts directly from the runway. There were so many threats it was hard to respond to them all, so many scenarios, so many possibilities. How do you prevent the hippies, for example, from shaving their beards and cutting their hair and dressing straight and faking credentials to get into the International Amphitheater where they’d set off a bomb? How do you stop them from gathering en masse and turning over cars in the street, as they’d done in Oakland? How do you stop them from building barricades and taking over whole city blocks, as they’d done in Paris? How do you stop them from occupying a building, as they’d done in New York, and how do you extract them from the building in front of newsmen who knew that trumped-up claims of police brutality moved papers? It was the sad logic of antiterrorism that had them on edge: The police had to plan for everything, but the hippies only had to be successful once.

So they built a barbed-wire perimeter around the amphitheater and filled the inside with plainclothes cops looking for troublemakers, demanding the credentials of anyone who didn’t seem in favor of the current administration. They sealed manhole covers. Got helicopters into the sky. Put snipers atop tall buildings. Prepped the tear gas. Brought in the National Guard. Requisitioned the heavy armor. They heard about Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Prague that week, and a small, complicated part of them felt envy and admiration for the Russians. Yes, that’s how you f*cking do it, they thought. Overwhelming force.

But our man from Sioux Falls could not have known any of this.

Or else he might have thought twice about pulling a gun out of his pocket. When the cop car drove past as he walked this night, this clear clean moment when he could see all the stars hanging over Michigan Avenue, and the car stopped and those two pigs got out in their short-sleeved baby-blue shirts, walking toward him with all manner of gadgetry bouncing on their belts, and they said something vague about curfew violation and did he have any identification, had he known what was happening all over Chicago right at that moment, he might have found it preferable to spend a few nights in jail for possession of an unregistered and concealed handgun. But he’d come all the way to Chicago on that horrific thirty-hour bus ride, and maybe he’d been waiting for this protest all his life, maybe this was some kind of turning point for him, maybe the idea of missing the whole demonstration was too painful, maybe he hated the war that much, and maybe he didn’t want to lose the gun, which might have been his only security, having spent a rough adolescence in the Dakotas, where he was different and alone. In his head, it went like this: He’d pull the gun out and fire a warning shot and while the cops ducked for cover he’d run down the nearest dark alley and get away. It was as easy as that. Maybe he’d even done this before. He was young, he could run, he’d been running all his life.