Dance the Eagle to Sleep (11 page)

Then clear as a hallucination, he remembered the voice of the woman who had lived over Denise, nagging her daughter: “Now stop that crying, Marilyn. You cry all day and all night. You’ll cry your eyes out. Yes you will! You stop that. You know how the rain washes the dirt away? Well, if you keep on crying like that, you’ll cry your eyes out and you won’t have nothing but holes left in your face. You hear me, Marilyn? You hear your mother? You keep on crying like that all day and all night and people’ll say, Look at that girl. Such beautiful blond hair and nothing but lines in her face—Ugh! That’s right, you stop crying before it’s too late. You listen to your mother.”

As he had then, he imagined cutting off the woman’s head. Like clipping off a dead flower with scissors. His mother’s long aristocratic hands. Wave bye-bye, Mommy. Baby’s going away. He had won his battle with them. His money was his own. His mother had gone back into analysis. His father spent longer hours in the law offices of his elegant firm. His father had summed it up: they felt guilty because they had allowed him to go on with his rock music, which clearly had ruined his life, corrupted him, thrown him with unsuitable people, given him the wrong contacts, the wrong values, the wrong reactions. All their social conditioning in vain. They blamed themselves for having been dazzled by the money. The golden showers of Zeus. They had kept thinking that, being a silly fad, it could not last, so why stop it prematurely? Soon it would end and in the meantime the cash came in discreetly and was put to work to reproduce itself. His parents felt guilty, and even that severed them from him, because they felt guilty for the wrong crimes.

He lay on the cot with his eyes closed, pretending sleep. Murmur of voices. Smell of bodies. Socks and sweat. It did not feel like brig except for that sense of bodies. In the riot one of the warriors had come and led him
out, brought him to their commune. He had sat in stupor while people ran past bringing in the wounded and laying them down on tables or the floor. They tended their wounded themselves, except for very serious injuries: those, they carried off to hospitals with forged ID. He stared at the havoc: the bloody heads, the cuts and bruises, the broken arms and broken ribs. Girls whose long hair was matted with blood wept hysterically.

“I’m the one who should be hurt,” he said to the warrior who guarded him. “I wanted to turn them on to their freedom before it’s too late, and all I did was lead them into a trap. I’m responsible for this blood.”

“The system’s responsible.” It was the guy named Billy who answered him, a big heavy-set fellow with glasses still taped on his nose, who seemed to be in charge. “Not you. Don’t kid yourself. And we’re responsible too. Sure. We could let the pigs round everybody up. We forced a confrontation. But that means we got most of our people out. Better a sore head for a week than eighteen months a slave.”

As the night ground on, a new tension rose because their leader, Corey, had not come in. After a certain point in their retreat, nobody had seen him. Billy was clearly irritated by the worrying. He strode back and forth clumping his boots and barked at them. “He’s okay. You’re wasting your time fretting and carrying on. He’ll come in without a scratch. Who’s cutting bandages? Who’s monitoring police radio? None of this dependency shit. We know what to do.”

Billy was not really fat, not in a soft sense. He was big-boned and thick-bodied and built like an ox with a slumped-forward belly and legs like pillars. His hair was short and looked as if he cut it with the blades of a fan. He had regular features, but he scowled too much and smiled rarely. He had a dozen nervous twitches and jiggles, and he was always scratching himself and sticking his neck forward like a turkey. His body fit him like a badly cut suit. It grated on Shawn to watch him move.

But clearly Billy was strong and enjoyed great prestige among the warriors. They told stories about his feats while he pretended not to notice. “Did you see old Billy pick up that bench and go charging through the cops? Shit, if he hadn’t done it, we’d be standing there yet, waiting for the wind to change. They went flying through the air. Jesus, do they wear the hardware! When a pig hits the street it sounds like a car running into a lamppost. Crash, man. Did you see old Billy scatter that line? Wham, and the cops are sailing through the air wondering what hit them.”

“Hey, Billy.” A kid with a bloody bandage on his head and a thick drawl. “Aren’t you never scared out there?”

Billy snorted. “You’re only scared of what you don’t expect. I’m too mean to get scared. I get mad.”

“You know, he’s not shitting you. I seen him pick up a whole one of them metal barrels full of burning trash, and he throw it right at a cop car, and bang! it bust the windshield.”

When Shawn made motions to leave, they sat him down again. When he said he was tired, a warrior assigned to guard him had taken him upstairs and almost tucked him in. “Corey say to take care of you”

Now he lay on the cot. Sun streamed in windows across the front of the loft, but otherwise the air was wan porridge. A girl was scrubbing dark footprints. Kids were still sleeping in the bunks and spread in rows on the linoleum. He did not want to move. He could consider himself rescued or made prisoner.

When he had been given his dishonorable-and-psychiatric discharge, he had thought at first of looking for Denise. When he started to search, he could not go on. He was somebody else. He had wanted a simple thing, to make her as comfortable as she made him. That simple thing had been blown to fragments. They had taken his easiness and given him angers. How could he resume something whose virtue had lain in its gentle ease—his ready-made family? In brig he had learned: frustration, rage, brutality, compulsion, oppression, fear and degradation. The taste of shit and blood. He had also learned that such was normality, the status quo, for most people crawling on the earth. Now he lay like a sick man on a cot, waiting.

A shadow stood over him. Weight plumped on the cot. Somebody sat down against his outside leg.

“Morning” Voice familiar.

He opened his eyes and looked at Corey, who gave back a black serious stare of inquiry. “Well, what do you want from me?” Shawn pulled himself up and sat against the wall, drawing up his long legs against his chest.

Corey sat cross-legged on the cot, facing him. “Your life” He smiled broadly and held out his hands, palms up.

“And my money?”

“That, too, would help.”

Though Corey was dressed and he was in his briefs sweaty from the concert, he was not fazed. It took more than a little skin to make him uneasy. “Are you going to tell me I need you? You plural. Your wild Indians.”

“We’ll be stronger with you along. And you’d be stronger if you join us”

“I’m a rock musician. I’m no street fighter. I’d rather turn people on than harangue them.”

“Turn them on to what?”

“To themselves. To each other.”

“Where does that happen? Where’s a big neutral space for dropping out and digging each other?”

Shawn folded his arms. “Look, I’m sorry about last night. I have to be more careful not to lead people into traps. Maybe what I have to do is buy an old movie theater where people aren’t so vulnerable as in the park.”

Corey tapped his arm lightly. “Whatever do you think you can buy or rent or borrow that is outside this society? The only outside is the other side: with us fighting”

“You aren’t everybody. It isn’t a case of with you or alone”

“Do you know another collective that works for you?”

A collective of three: but the powers had broken that. “The group did. The Coming Thing.”

“And it came and went” Corey smiled engagingly. “Now you play with hired musicians, and it sounds it.”

“Yeah. I’m not working enough to keep a group together.”

“You’re blackballed now.”

Shawn shrugged. “That’s mainly the top-forty-type stations. That wasn’t our league after the beginning anyhow. That isn’t what I want to do right now.” Though he was beginning to sense that he had no idea at all what he wanted. He was flopping. “I don’t feel persecuted, if that’s what you mean. But Frodo and Shep and I were friends. Even then we’d fight. If you aren’t close, you start out fighting”

“We’re into something past all that. Past couples. Past the nuclear family that works so well as a hotbed for breeding neuroses. Past boy scout troops and clubs and teams and parties and unions. We’re a tribe.”

“Yeah, sure, McLuhan says we’re all tribal. I guess because we eat each other.”

“Look, you have a great talent to move people, but where are you moving them to? You don’t want to be a commodity. You want to give your music away free. But it turns out that nothing is free, on their terms. You can’t free people all alone with a turn-on like a magic wand. You’re not free yourself”.

“Maybe I am. You’re calling me to be a servant. Join another army. I didn’t like the first one”.

“Not free. Just alone. They’re still using you. The only way you can stop that is by fighting them. Break down the alienation they’ve imposed on you. Join us. Then they can persecute you, but they can’t use you any more.”

He believed nothing. But here he was. It was a place, anyhow. He was
tired of ricocheting. The quality of his life had been crude and grainy and mean for a while. Since his discharge, he had been living out of hotel and motel rooms. The trouble was that he could not find any place he wanted to be. Nothing that had suited before fit now. He was not easy in the company of other musicians. He was a bad example, somebody who had fucked up his career, fucked up not even over drugs, which was traditional, but over an office manager. He could not get a group together and hold it together. The audience would scream for the old songs, but he felt wrong doing them. Without the sound of The Coming Thing, they felt botched. He wanted to sing the new songs that carried what he was thinking about. But they were strange to the audience. He had to do everything with his voice and his sex. He had to do it all on his performance.

It was not working. He did not like failing. Corey was sitting there waiting and waiting, afraid to push harder, afraid he had not spoken well enough. Shawn clasped his hands over the dirty cloth at his belly and thought: heads or tails. No tails. He could not go back anyplace he had been. They had closed his doors and taken away the landscapes where he had felt good. Heads. Indian heads. “There’s nothing to get but my instruments and my amps—what didn’t get destroyed in the riot. And a change of clothes and my straight-edge razor. Got to have my straight-edge razor.”

Corey waived the sodium pentothal test for Shawn. Billy showed his annoyance. He said Corey was highhanded and elitist and that such a decision must be made by the whole council. The council was called, and Corey won as Shawn waited upstairs. Corey charmed them into letting Shawn through. The test was to keep out infiltrators, Corey explained. One of their best warriors had turned out to be a police fink, and he had caused their first commune to be busted and those who escaped had had to leave Chicago. However, as if to prove to Corey that his position derived solely from the will of the group, the council refused to exempt Corey’s new girl, Joanna, and she had to take the test. Corey was furious and let it show. He disappeared and did not come back for a whole day and night.

Shawn saw Joanna for the first time that evening. He felt sorry for her, a lanky redheaded girl who seemed to wait stolidly, and yet he was sure she was afraid. He felt involved, because he was sure that if Corey had not pushed him through, she would not be obliged to take the test. Then Corey had run out on her, gone off to suffer his dark mood, abandoned her as if to show them they could not punish him through her.

When Shawn went over and took her hand, she gave him a shy smile. “I didn’t think you would remember me.”

“Why not?” Remember her. He did think that he had seen her, but god knew where. At the riot? No. Longer ago. Well, it did not matter and probably she would give him a clue.

She laughed brusquely. She had an odd voice, metallic and husky, that caught in her throat.

“Well, it’s been a year, and it was only those couple of days. I didn’t know who you were.”

“Sure you did. Just me. Right?”

She squeezed his hand and dropped it. “I really didn’t think you’d remember. By the way I’m … with Corey now.” She seemed at a loss for the right euphemism. She gave him another smile as shy as the first but warmer. Then she went out with two warriors to the test.

Corey turned up the next afternoon. He came directly to Joanna and grabbed her against him in a bear hug. “Are you all right? Come on. Come on” He led her away dragging by the hand without looking at anybody else. When he reappeared, he was in a sunny mood.

Most Indians spent their days and evenings out organizing among the kids. Even peddling the bread was a means of connecting people to the group. Basically there were four activities: organizing, defense and intelligence, activities that made for group solidarity, and food gathering and housekeeping.

The lowest level of involvement was contact—kids who looked to the Indians for leadership in street actions and protection in time of raids or dragnets. Then there were those who had taken bread, danced, and considered themselves part of the people. Then there were members of a tribe who had passed the truth test. Tribes lived in a commune and were not supposed to use money. The means of living belonged to the group, which fed and clothed its members.

What they called organizing was largely rapping with kids about their situation, helping them to articulate demands, helping them to get actions started or to protect themselves against street harassment, to recruit them if they could. They tried to reach the dropouts, the evaders and runaways on the Lower East Side, but they also talked to kids in school. They had contacts in eight high schools and one junior high, and they expected soon to have more. Most of the underground papers in the schools were at least sympathetic to the Indians. Some of the organizers were trying to reach kids in the various city corps, although that was riskier and more difficult. Every day they ran off wall newspapers for the neighborhood, and printed leaflets.