Another Little Piece of My Heart (29 page)

I was struck by how similar the strategies of the French revolt were to Abbie Hoffman’s sense of revolutionary theater. I mentioned this to him once, and I asked if he’d read anything by the Situationists, a French anarchist group of the time. “Only in the original Yiddish,” he replied. Abbie was a very smart guy, but he didn’t pay a lot of attention to the intellectual currents swirling around him, certainly not to philosophers with a European pedigree. A passing knowledge of McLuhan was as close as he came to theory. But ideas were absorbed by osmosis in those days; someone told someone, who told a friend, who wrote a song that Joan Baez sang at a rally, and soon it was common knowledge. Generational solidarity was a very effective communications tool, and rock was a tom-tom, its beat-borne messages cryptic to the straight world but quite dear to us. When you think about it, this is how Yiddish functioned for Jews, with an alphabet that couldn’t be deciphered by those outside the tribe. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the student strikes in Paris (back then he
was known as Danny the Red; now he’s a prominent Green), has recalled that he synchronized plans with radicals in other countries, without alerting the authorities, by using Yiddish.

What was the driving force behind our unity? The very situation we were born into, the combination of comfort and oppression. For us, I think, chaos and impulse were the alternative to the leaden regularity of an overly regimented system. We had never known an impediment to our desires; we’d come of age with a multi-billion-dollar economy dedicated to meeting our adolescent needs. We harbored a profound belief that change was waiting for the action that would realize it. These qualities—confidence and flight from stasis—are what’s distinctive about anthems of youthful rebellion from the late sixties. A typical example is the repertoire of the MC5, a group of stoner revolutionaries who played during the protests at the Democratic convention (a hot dog vendor supplied the current for their amps). I saw them a year later in their hometown of Ann Arbor. They took to the stage in a clamor of clanging chords, screaming, KICK OUT THE JAMS!!!! I described their sound as “spasm rock.” It was the classic message of rock ’n’ roll but gone political, the adolescent’s urge to resolve tension in an explosion of feeling amped by all the instability, the constant agitation, into a kind of hysteria. It was irresistible to me.

I’d seen the most incredible images on television: the heads of my political heroes blown apart, cities across the nation smoldering. Anything was possible—that was how it felt on a daily basis. I walked around in a state of disorientation, as if I were experiencing the aftershocks of an earthquake that hadn’t happened yet. But the strangest thing about this sensation was that it drove me forward. The imminence demanded that I take action, and whatever I might do seemed very important, as if it could make a decisive difference. There’s a joy in that conviction, a delight that overcomes the dread. This desire to know the brink, to leap over the edge and into the Niagara, is my most vivid memory of 1968.

The Democratic Party was about to nominate a man who, for all his progressive leanings, couldn’t bring himself to oppose the war—another good liberal with a cowardly streak. In late August, Hubert Humphrey headed for Chicago to be consecrated, and we headed there too, thousands of us: radicalized hippies, hardcore lefties, adrenalized potheads, students who would soon be susceptible to the draft. Everything was
converging. All signs pointed to a showdown. I had a feeling that we were about to kick out the jams, big time. What I didn’t realize was that this moment of release would have enormous consequences. It would be the crucible event in a year when America experienced its gravest domestic unrest since the Civil War.

“You afraid?” I asked a kid from California. He filled his palm with a wad of Vaseline, then smeared it across his face to protect himself from Mace. “I dunno,” he said. “My toes feel cold, but my ears are burning hot.”

We were standing in Lincoln Park, not long after a curfew declared by the Chicago police. The cops had gathered on the rise above us, in formation. The festival I’d fussed and fretted over never took place, though there were a few impromptu concerts. The only event of note was a ceremony nominating the Yippie candidate for president, a hog named Pigasus.
Pig
was what we called the police. “Pigs eat shit!” had replaced “We shall overcome” as our chant of choice. As the police line tightened I saw kids holding Spalding balls studded with nails and tacks. My new friend from California pulled a canister from his pocket. It was pepper spray.

Following his lead, I wrapped a towel doused with water around my face. “Better take off those credentials,” my comrade advised. “They’re going after the press.” And they were. Even Hugh Hefner had sustained a minor injury. But most journalists were safe inside the convention hall, which had been cordoned off from the demonstrations. I didn’t see any other reporters in the crowd of kids, and I felt the tremble of elation that comes when you realize that you’ve got a scoop. But this wasn’t just a professional high. The moment when I removed my press pass was also the instant when I crossed over from the regretful life of the insulated to the thrilling zone of risk. Everyone here had seen, if not shed, blood. They were the hardcore, and I was finally among them.

The police advanced a bit after midnight, behind two massive trucks. You could sense the fear in their bodies, the same foreboding that was gripping the whole nation. Though they were very well armed, with steel-tipped riot batons, shotguns, an assortment of pistols and ominous canisters in their belts, when you got close to them you could see terror in their tight lips, and you knew that nothing in their training had
prepared them for this. They’d handled riots, but not with TV cameras following their every move; they’d shot at people in the ghettos, but not at the children of middle-class whites. These men were as alarmed and as pumped with adrenaline as we were. When you sense that in a cop, you know that what follows will be out of control.

It remained only for the signal to be given, and when it was, the police advanced down the slope. Floodlights mounted on their trucks shone bright orange. Then tear-gas canisters exploded—putt, putt, putt—and you could see that the police were wearing masks, which made their vision even more imprecise. Soon the kids were engulfed in an orange cloud, and we ran in every direction, looking for rocks to throw and windows to smash and something to feel besides fear. Because one thing about tear gas: if it doesn’t knock you out, it makes you crazy.

That was the first night. The following day was the main event, which began with a demo in the park that bordered Michigan Avenue, just across from the Hilton, where many of the delegates and much of the press corps was staying. Tear gas was useless here, because the wind would send fumes into the hotel. Already reporters were throwing things out of the windows—rolls of toilet paper and even typewriters. Some demostrators threw balloons filled with cow blood from the stockyards. These missiles burst on the cops, along with bags of animal shit, smearing their uniforms like works of abstract art. That was when they really waded into the crowd. Cameras were snapping; TV trucks were gathering. And meanwhile, in the convention hall, Hubert Humphrey’s name was placed in nomination. When one speaker excoriated the city for the violence in the streets, the mayor of Chicago, an old-school boss named Richard Daley, could be seen in TV close-up, shouting what seemed like “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.”

I don’t remember when the National Guard arrived, but we knew that they’d be more disciplined than the police, and we cheered as they positioned themselves between us and the pigs. It was clear from their eyes where their sympathies lay. Kids started putting flowers in the barrels of their rifles. A few soldiers mustered peace signs. The folksinger Phil Ochs, who had been performing through it all, yelled into a mike, “If any of you are human beings, take off your clothes.” To my astonishment, a number of soldiers removed their helmets. It was one of the most moving moments I experienced in the sixties, proof that my hunch had been right—they were young, and the young were one.

I stood in a knot of journalists, the few who dared to cover the demo from its midst. To my right was an editor from
Esquire
whose job was to protect the star writer from Paris whom the magazine had imported to cover this event. He was none other than Jean Genet, the sacred monster of modern French letters. Genet was transfixed by the beefy flab of the Chicago police. “Those bellies!” I heard him exclaim in French. The police were clubbing people within earshot of our group, and the editor from
Esquire
was worried that his charge might submit to a steel-tipped embrace. He ushered Genet along like a parent dragging an unwilling child across the street.

Suddenly I realized that someone had his arm over my shoulder. It was Ed Sanders, the poet I’d met in 1962, when he ran the Peace Eye Bookstore. By now his beatnik band, the Fugs, had had an unlikely hit and he was something of a celebrity. “Stay with me,” he said. I still remember the protective look in his eye. It always came as a shock when someone who didn’t want something from me showed concern for my body or my soul. But I didn’t stay with Ed. I had my escape route mapped out in advance—I always did at demos—and I crossed a bridge a few blocks away. Whatever the danger, I had to witness the action.

I ambled onto Michigan Avenue, where the police were still deployed. By now night had fallen, and they were foraging for stray protesters. I needed the safety of a group, and I let myself get swept up in the crowd around the Hilton. A line of cops started pushing everyone back against the plate-glass windows that framed the lobby, flailing away at whomever they could reach. I heard glass break behind me. People were falling through the windows and into the hotel, shrieking with one breath and apologizing for stepping on toes with another. I saw clubs moving in slow motion—the same cartoony experience I’d had at Columbia. I stared at a kid whose arms had been twisted behind him in the crush. I felt the
Guernica
in his eyes; the same terrified expression that the big horse had in the painting was on his face.

All of a sudden floodlights on TV trucks broke the darkness. The street looked like a studio, and in the glare everyone started shouting, “The whole world is watching.” It was a spontaneous chant, born of the knowledge that we were on the air, live, just as Hubert Humphrey was accepting his party’s nomination—the networks showed a split screen. We had accomplished what we’d come for, spoiled the party for the party of war. Even better, we’d taken our hero Henry David Thoreau’s
advice: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” I found something else as well: the joy of knowing that I was risking it all for the Revolution.

Once again, my diminutive height came to my rescue. I managed to scurry under people’s legs, and I slipped out of the crush at the Hilton. I scampered down the street, shaking badly. A few blocks from the hotel, I heard a police car screech to a stop. Three cops got out, ready to arrest me, or worse. I sprinted up the stairs of the Art Institute of Chicago and took refuge in its arched arcade. In the street below I saw people who weren’t even in the demo carrying TV sets. (Black residents would call this “the white riot.”) My eyes burned with gas. My hands shook with fury. “Pigs eat shit!” I screamed. Suddenly I heard a gun go off. For the second time in my life, I felt all the hairs on my body stiffen, as I had at the White Castle riot.

The cop standing behind me must have fired over my head, or maybe his gun had blanks. At any rate, I wasn’t hit. Instead I had a kind of blackout, mentally disappearing from the spot. When I came to, I was three blocks away, with no memory of how I’d gotten there. A police car skidded along the street under a hail of rocks. A kid standing next to me was preparing to heave one. “The first time’s hard,” he said to me, “but after that it’s easy.”

I don’t think I threw anything. I was too overcome by an immense feeling of fatigue, sudden and almost paralytic. I sat on the sidewalk to catch my breath, and slowly I made my way back to my motel. I plopped onto the bed and turned on the TV. Everything I’d been through was on the air—the clubbing, the turmoil, the hapless politicians in the convention hall, and that incredible chant:
The whole world is watching.
The blurry black-and-white images rendered all of it far more extreme and significant than it had seemed while I was actually going through it. I learned a lesson that made me rethink my dismissal of McLuhan. TV was not teaching us to think in depth or turning us into a tactile society, as he claimed. But it made strange things seem realer than real.

Something similar was happening in Czechoslovakia, where, a year earlier, I’d seen the glimmers of a liberal Communism that was fated to be repressed. Just a week before our marauding through Chicago, Soviet tanks had entered Prague. I’d seen footage of students pleading in vain with Russian troops. It added to my sense that we were fighting a global battle against a tyranny that was much bigger than the U.S. government
or even capitalism. Years later I would understand that this was a battle between a patriarchal order and the forces of change, and the streets of Prague and Chicago were bloody with the effects of machismo run amok. But whatever drives people to risk their lives in the name of liberation, whatever the moment contains that makes revolutionary energy decisive—it was missing in Chicago. Something stopped us.

We had glimpsed the precipice, seen the potential for vast violence, felt the viciousness of a threatened state, and sensed the power of the backlash that would surely ensue from its collapse. Call it cowardice and you won’t be entirely wrong. But it was also the product of an unexpected perception. The moment of our victory in the streets was also when we had to confront the consequences of our acts. Did we really want our country to fall apart? That was the question Chicago presented, and for most of us the answer was a definitive, if unarticulated, no. It was like the hatred you feel toward your parents when you’re young. You may want to kill them, but you don’t want them to die. This is the origin of the love that eventually replaces filial rage. It doesn’t usually arrive until the parents are feeble, and that was how the government now seemed to me. Suddenly I felt bound to its fate. I’d left New York determined to smash the state, but I left Chicago an ambivalent patriot. It prevented me, or saved me, from the fate of a warrior. And this, I’ve come to think, is why our revolution fizzled.