Another Little Piece of My Heart (27 page)

Rational politics wasn’t a strong suit with leftist fringe groups in the late sixties. Yet nearly all their members escaped the fate of the Panthers, whose leadership was hounded and sometimes ambushed by the authorities at all levels of government. Why did these black militants summon up the most primal emotions in their enemies? It wasn’t just because they were armed (that was legal in California), or simply because they were effective (at its height they operated in twenty cities and their newspaper had some 250,000 readers), or merely because they were so good at spectacle. (You can check out the clips of them marching on the Oakland courthouse, chanting, “The Revolution has come! Time to get you a gun.”) They inspired terror because of what they revealed about race—the nightmare and the reality. Race was a fantasy that shaped our identities. It had been central to my coming of age in the early sixties, and now it was at the core of the nation’s destiny.

As a program, the Revolution was never very popular, but as a concept it pervaded the counterculture in 1968. Even the Beatles felt compelled to address it. The official lyric of their song “Revolution” reads, “When you talk about destruction … you can count me out,” but in one recorded version John Lennon sings “count me in” as well. That was pretty much the way I felt. Though I was caught up in the mania, I had my doubts. An uprising of the oppressed was easy to imagine, but how could it possibly succeed? Who would provide the weapons to resist the heavily armed government? And what would happen after the inevitable bloodbath? I was certain that the end result would be a backlash of stunning proportions. There were some very dark forces in the military, and the prospect of a coup seemed credible to me. So I found myself torn between wanting the Revolution and dreading it. This wasn’t just a political dilemma. It was a conflict between warring aspects of my
personality, one part learning to love and the other eager for the rush of rioting. Many young people were faced with a similar dichotomy—we wanted to fight, but also to boogie. A quote from the anarchist icon Emma Goldman decorated a lot of dorm walls: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” And dance we did, all the way to the billy clubs.

As the unraveling accelerated, wild rumors spread, some of them deliberate hoaxes. One of the most notorious appeared in a hip satirical magazine called
The Realist
, which published “evidence” that Lyndon Johnson had fucked the corpse of JFK in the neck wound. Even a year after that story appeared, when the editor admitted that it had been fabricated, some of my friends believed it, and how could I convince them otherwise when so many unfathomable things were actually happening? Who could have imagined that the CIA would send a harmless gas through the New York subway system in order to experiment with aerosolized LSD as a weapon? It was inconceivable, but apparently true. Our most paranoid fantasies about the government were less extreme than the plans actually hatched. Please consider this when you wonder how people like me could have set out to destroy liberalism and its compromised emblem, Lyndon Johnson. I’m not sure that the foot soldiers of any revolution focus on the future they are ushering in. The urgency of the situation is the only thing that counts. For us, that meant ending the war, and the primary question was the one that inspired my favorite marching chant: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The answer: more than we could bear.

I still wrote about rock occasionally, but it was much less central to my life than radical politics had become. My column mostly chronicled the adventures of the New Left. Songs without a political message were like a march without slogans to me, and I was big on slogans—my favorite one was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” I can only imagine how strange this concept of generational solidarity must seem to young people today, prompted to think that only cliques and networks matter, and bound together by the illusory intimacy of social media, what Susan Sontag, referring to snapshots, called “self-surveillance.” But young people in the sixties were united much more broadly by a war we didn’t believe in, and also by a set of great global expectations. From this perspective it seemed clear that America had to be rescued from its own forms of tyranny. I’m well aware that Tea Party partisans say the same thing, but the point of our movement wasn’t to defend wealth and property.
This is the difference between their radical sentiments and ours. They want to preserve their privilege; we wanted to overcome it. Our enemy was the government and the military-industrial complex. Their enemy is the government and … us.

I’d been following the Yippies since their first major demo, in 1967. This was the event that launched Norman Mailer’s career as a New Journalist. The target was the Pentagon. Abbie Hoffman had calculated astutely that the sight of ten thousand kids (and several famous authors) chanting before the building, in an attempt to levitate it, would terrify the authorities. They could easily have coped with a purposeful march, but this was a signal of how cryptic our resistance had become. The open display of irrationality was intended to reveal the true nature of a “rational” war. But it was also an attack on the illusion of coherence. By violating the rules of plausibility, we embodied the disintegration of the order. Abbie called this strategy Groucho Marxism.

I could never decide whether he enjoyed the violence that his tactics unleashed, or whether he regarded it as a necessary evil. Perhaps he felt exhilarated by escaping into reality, as I did. I can’t say, but I do understand the fire that was in his eyes. To commit violence for a just cause is a pleasure—you literally see red. But to present yourself for abuse, to let your head run bloody in the name of a belief, is an even more powerful experience. A violent act propels you to focus entirely on your feelings. You stop thinking. But receiving violence in a demo empties your feelings and replaces them with the purity of a principle. Your thoughts crystallize. This is why many protesters go limp when they are hit. It’s a kind of consummation. I realize that this sounds like masochism, but such terms are useless when it comes to forcing change. Injustice doesn’t relent of its own accord. It demands victims and the witness of the nation, and nothing plays better on TV than the blood of the beautiful being shed.

As our rebellion spread and we approached the brink of confrontation with the state, I could sense the shift on all sides, from protest to mayhem. An explosion seemed inevitable. I thought of America as a swollen boil. Over the fateful spring and summer of ’68 it burst, and so did what little remained of my equilibrium. Jolt after jolt shattered my sense of order. Holding back became impossible.

In April, as the trees budded, I covered a bloody student uprising at Columbia University. It was sparked by newly discovered evidence that
my alma mater had been doing research for the defense department, with a direct bearing on the war. Moral considerations aside, this meant that the university was supporting a military operation that could place its own students at risk once they graduated. But the protest also had a local agenda. One of the issues was Columbia’s decision to build a gym in the park used by Harlem residents. The community would be granted limited access to the facility through a separate entrance. This was an outrage to an already seething neighborhood. Prominent militants joined black students in occupying a dorm, renaming it Malcolm X University. White students seized other buildings, with much of the faculty declaring its support. Soon the whole place was shut down.

When I arrived to cover the protest, it looked like a cross between a strike and a Living Theatre performance. I remember one student climbing a tree and shouting for all to hear, “This is a liberated tree, and I won’t come down until my demands are met.” Inside the dorms there was a festive air, with pizzas donated by sympathetic merchants, and guitars everywhere. I spent a fine afternoon flirting with students and shilling for quotes. This had the makings of yet another piece about the heroic struggle of the young. But then the administration made a deal with the black occupiers, who marched out of their occupied building with raised fists. That left an opening for the police to move in.

As they entered the campus, in the dead of night, all telephone connections were severed. Then the clubbing began. It had the look and feel of a baby seal hunt. Students were kicked, pummeled, and dragged by the hair down flights of stairs. Their screams echoed across the quad, along with the ululating rebel cry of Arab women that everyone knew from the revolutionary film
The Battle of Algiers
. It rang from every dorm. By the time the raid was over, seven hundred people had been arrested and a hundred fifty hospitalized. I toured the university chapel, now a makeshift infirmary where dozens of students lay bleeding. But the image that stays with me is the plaza before Columbia’s library. It had been full of people when the raid began, and at some point the police charged the crowd. After the space was cleared I saw dozens of sandals littering the sidewalk. Students had jumped out of their shoes to get away.

How did I remain immune from the clubs, even though I looked just like the protesters? The answer lay in the magic credentials that dangled from my neck. As usual, I was protected by my press card, and it allowed
me to witness the bloodletting up close and untouched. At some point that night I stumbled into the dorm next to the building where I’d once studied journalism. About a hundred students cowered in the lobby, and soon after I joined them they locked the doors. But the police used battering rams, and the doors came off the hinges and collapsed. As the cops barged in, I flashed on an old silent-movie cartoon with antique officers swinging their clubs in a cloud of smoke. I raced up the stairs to the mezzanine, and from there I saw the cops beating people in the lobby. The whole thing was in slo-mo—that’s the kind of thing adrenaline will do. The shrieks of the students became a hissing in my ears. The police began climbing the stairs. I calmly opened a window and jumped, falling two stories and hitting the ground on my feet.

I picked myself up and walked to the subway, my mind a block of ice. I took a train to the
Voice
office and spent the next few hours writing my piece. Then I handed it in and headed home, still in an uncanny state of calm. When I closed the door behind me a cramp gripped my belly, and I dropped to the floor in a spasming ball. I had met my deadline; only then could I feel pain.

By that point I had come to regard political violence as part of my daily life. Only three weeks before the skull bashings at Columbia, Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was not so well insulated when I heard the news. I felt as if the top of my own head had exploded. As city after city erupted in flames, and Lyndon Johnson appeared on the White House lawn to plead for restraint—I remember him saying, “For God’s sake, live within the law”—I noticed how shriveled he seemed. The president’s impotence was nearly as devastating to me as the murder of King. I wandered through streets full of people in a daze, the traffic moving slowly, almost somberly. There are moments in the film
Taxi Driver
that remind me of the eerie ambience that night.

I saw a car parked, with its radio playing. A group of Black Muslims in suits and bow ties were sitting inside. One of them opened the door so I could hear more clearly. We listened together, not looking at each other but sharing wordless grief. It was a moment I will never forget, that recognition of what it means to lose an idea of what is possible. King’s concept of America as the “beloved community” was powerful even to these separatists, despite their dogma. One of them reached across me to turn up the volume. I was prepared for the cold courtesy that Black Muslims typically extended to whites. One of them had rung my bell
erroneously a few years earlier. “Pardon me, white devil,” he’d said politely. This time there was no etiquette to express our feelings. I saw their silence as a vision of the future. But their willingness to share the radio with me was more mysterious. I think it showed a sense of how fragile we all are when a leader is killed. This is the purpose of assassinations, even when they are committed by a lone, crazed gunman. They produce a profound feeling of vulnerability.

Then, in June, Bobby Kennedy was murdered. Like some white lefties and quite a few black people, I’d regarded him as the great hope of electoral politics. Most of my friends preferred Eugene McCarthy, who was running a more cerebral antiwar campaign. He didn’t appeal to me, for the same reason that the peace movement never seemed as urgent as the struggle for civil rights. I didn’t believe in peace; I believed in justice, and that didn’t seem like the same thing. I’m not saying I was right about Bobby, only young and subject to the charisma that he had in abundance. He was visceral in a way that invited not just optimism but ecstasy. Crowds surged to touch him, tearing at his clothes. Watching him campaign, as I did once, was an almost mystical experience. After Johnson declined to run for reelection it seemed likely that Kennedy would be the Democratic nominee. The announcement had just been made that he’d won the California primary. It was after midnight, and I turned off the TV. Then Robert Christgau called and told me to turn it back on. That’s when I saw the ballroom erupt in screams.

I watched for several hours and finally fell asleep in front of the set. When I woke up they were announcing Bobby’s death. The networks showed pictures of him lying on the floor of the kitchen where he’d been shot, his face pale and distant, the tie around his neck askew. His helplessness was terrifying to behold, and the feeling persisted long after that night. It was something I wouldn’t experience again until I saw the column of black smoke rising over the Manhattan skyline on 9/11. But this was far more personal. The sense that all the heroes of my political life were being killed made me feel emasculated, literally. My balls shriveled up against my belly for protection, and for several weeks I was unable to get an erection, no matter how I enlisted my fantasies.

By July I was ready for a Mayan death star to strike the White House (as one of my friends predicted). Everyone around me seemed hooked on apocalyptic expectations. Hysteria had become a habit; I was living on
what might be called, in today’s elaborate diagnostic terms, adrenal bulimia. But I focused my feelings on Don McNeill. He represented every hopeful and delicate impulse that was being crushed. And now he slunk around the office, his shoulders sagging. I felt more protective toward him than ever, but I was too frantic to offer him the support he needed—also too overcome with guilt. A few months earlier I had pushed him to write about the Yippies. I argued that he couldn’t understand how the hippies he reported on were evolving unless he hung out with Abbie Hoffman. I tried to convince him that antiwar demos were now part of his beat. I suppose he came to agree, because he decided to cover a Yippie protest at Grand Central Station. I offered to go with him, mainly because I didn’t think he knew how to handle himself around flailing clubs. But there was only one press card. In those days the police thought they could decide what constituted the media, and we were issued just a few credentials, which meant that most of our reporters had to share them. Since Don would be writing the piece, he got the card.