The Sixties didn’t spark all that much good writing. Back then, the charm of making it new on the page seemed diminished by other urgencies. And time does its hack work, removing would-be authors from their moment of the Moment. Lucky for us, though, Bob Levin not only felt those Sixties’ urgencies in his nerve ends, he’s managed (fifty years on) to put down in writing what happened as he stretched himself in a year when the country seemed bound for implosion. Check the review above for more context and perspective on Levin’s Lollipop, A Vista Lawyer in Chicago, Sept. 1967 – Sept. 1968. What follows are excerpts from his memoir, starting with the back story of the youth gang he worked with while he was in Chicago.
The Raiders had formed in the late ’50s, ten or fifteen teenagers, from the vicinity of 62nd and Nightshade, swinging ball bats and tire irons at the heads of other teenagers, joined also for union and ferocity as Sin Dukes, Vampires, Red Jackets, and clubbing, gouging, screaming “Motherfucker” back. Each refuse-littered street, every grim and deadly housing project had its own gang to war with over modest strips of territory and the equally modest rewards of triumph: the power to walk down a street without fear of robbery, assault or gundown from behind; the right to demand the lunch money of that street’s school children; the allegiance of the other young people on it. Each block a gang controlled bore its name on building, viaduct and tunnel walls; and any visitor to the South Side could read the brazenly scrawled RAIDERS, SIN DUKES, SULTANS and know who ruled where and that all around this world of gangs and gang wars thrived.
There had been many gangs. But young men aged or died or moved or turned to jail or junk or juice. Gangs disbanded or were smashed by or merged with others. Some names vanished from the walls, while others spread, often assuming a hybrid look. By 1967, the South Side was dominated by two giant youth gang federations. North of 43rd Street, the Sin Dukes ruled and, south, the even mightier Raiders. There were at least 5000 Raiders, all male, all black, all between the ages of twelve and twenty-three, as well as groups of younger boys, the Tinies, and female Raider-ettes. The Raiders contained sub-groups, with their own leaders; but all were led by the Big Dozen, headed by Main Chief Orestes “Simba” Stokes, Vice-Chief Miller “Mad Dog” Burquette, War Lord Anthone “Tater” Poteet, and Spiritual Advisor Jerome “Ice Pick” Duran.
The new gangs were family, church and state to otherwise isolated individuals. In a world of destruction, fragmentation and chaos, the gangs had grown, flourished and brought order. In a world without value or authority, they commanded loyalty and obedience. In a world of deprivation, denial and disintegration, they provided protection, identity, community–even food and drink. The drink might have been port wine and the food BBQ chips, but nothing where they lived offered more.
..
The rise of the gangs coincided with a shift in theory of the sociologists and youth workers who were America’s missionaries to their outland. The old theory–the Blackboard Jungle-Amboy Dukes theory–had been that gangs were evil–robbers-rapers-murderers all – and that good and social betterment demanded their destruction and the release of their members into productive lives. Through the 1950s, into the 1960s, millions of dollars and millions of man hours were spent to break up gangs. Sometimes these efforts succeeded; sometimes they did not; but certain things endured. Robbery, rape and murder for three. No matter what happened to the gang, the quality of the life in the neighborhood it supposedly infected remained unchanged.
So a new theory evolved. It stemmed from the frustrations engendered by the failures of the old theory, combined with an altered socio-political consciousness among some gang workers, who now saw many areas of evil in America, which seemed equally impervious to correction, and reasoned that, perhaps it was not gangs that were evil but America, or, rather, the powers that controlled America. The workers reasoned that it made little sense to destroy a organized, disciplined unit like a gang, when such organizations were needed to battle the disciplined, organized, true evildoers who seemed otherwise impregnable. Eradicating gangs ceased to be a goal. Inviting them to fight for social reform replaced it.
..
In 1965, when Martin Luther King made his unsuccessful assault on Chicago, he invited people to a rally at Soldiers’ Field. Tenants unions, welfare groups, church congregations, and community organizations came. The Raiders came too. Led by the Big Dozen, they marched into the stadium in pairs, some in rags and some in shades and some in red berets. They marched across the grassy field, into the stands, to the uppermost row, where they split ranks and marched in one unbroken circle around the rim of that great bowl. That huge, red-topped line impressed many people. It made the winning over of the Raiders a goal of the new theorists. The Raiders responded with cautious interest. The leadership had little concern for political analysis or debate. If they read, it was comic books or Iceberg Slim, not Mao or Marx or Wretched of the Earth. The movies they queued for were Capone or Murder, Inc., not Battle of Algiers. They sported processes, not Afros, and snickered at dashikis, which were for hippie fools. Their cultural heroes partook more of Detroit Red than Malcolm X. But if Black Power did not draw them, Raider Power did.
Their leaders knew what they wanted. Fine clothes. Flashy cars. Foxy women. Not to be shot at. Not to be beaten by Sin Dukes–or by cops. Get them that, you could be white or black or purple. They had nothing against social change. The question was how it paid. Having social workers around to find meeting places, raise funds, put lawyers on call was fine. As long as the social workers delivered, legitimate was cool.
The Raiders began to speak of community responsibility and making their neighborhoods better for their people. They developed the view that the South Side was theirs, and that they had the right to say what occurred within it. They ordered pimps, prostitutes and pushers out. They marched with SCLC and provided security for King while he was in town. They negotiated periodic, short-lived truces with the Sin Dukes. Though other neighborhoods burned in 1966, the South Side did not, as Raiders defused dangerous situations, ordering ornery crowds to disperse, compelling members attendance at dances or sending them out of town when tensions were high. The Raiders marched for causes, worked for electoral candidates, rolling up a majority for one anti-Daley Alderman, whose size of victory hizzonor’s machine would have envied. They expressed interest in finding jobs for their members and running their own businesses. When OEO funded a job training program for high school drop-outs at Lord’s Church, Raiders helped staff it, earning $120/week, and enrolled members for its benefits, which included a $45/week stipend.
The best known of the Raiders good works was a musical revue, which played several months in Chicago before traveling to Los Angeles for a national television appearance. When I heard the announcement, “And now ‘The Sunday Comedy Hour’ with our guests, Sid Caesar, Glen Campbell, and the Nightshade Raiders,” I envisioned living roomensconced America confronting hundreds of brigands swilling wine, screaming obscenities, and slashing each other with switchblades. But the show’s hip, young host went on, “The Raiders are a good example of what young people in the ghetto can do if given a chance.” The screen then filled with thirty neatly dressed young men and women singing “The Theme from Exodus“:
This is the land God gave me
A land where children can run free
To make this land our home, I’ll fight
I’ll fight until I die
To make this and our home
But the Raiders’ major appeal was also their major drawback. People were not prepared to treat an organized group of teenage ghetto blacks like a garden variety block club. The Raiders were Blue Ribbon-pedigreed South Side malfeasants, whose image no PR campaign or think-tank brain shift could easily reshape. Everything about them–dress, attitude, language, behavior–seemed calculated to incite or scare. Most adults in their own neighborhood–not to mention outside it–hoped for their destruction.
Chicago’s power structure promoted the Raiders’ negatives. The media avidly reported any charge of Raider wrong-doing–and city government and law enforcement were eager to supply them. The official view was that the Raiders were a criminal organization, involved in gambling, prostitution, extortion, and narcotics–and associated with revolutionary groups. Members were forcibly recruited and sworn to kill anyone–father, mother, sister, brother–who’d cross the organization. Anyone who disobeyed orders was beaten or shot. According to the city, the way to treat the Raiders was to crush them. Programs for Raiders were scorned as bribes to keep them from rioting, dreamed up by “misguided liberals” or “romantic goofballs,” or “imbeciles.” These programs, it was said, perpetuated the gangs by rewarding members and providing them an aura of respectability, while insulting Chicago’s honest, hard-working Negroes.
The Raiders’ alleged concern for their neighborhoods masked their desire to control local rackets and establish themselves as a Black Mafia. “The fighting gang,” Daniel P. Moynihan wrote, “was at once a threat to society and an indictment of it … rais(ing) for Americans the nineteenth century spectre of proletarian violence.” Chicago’s police department even created a special Gang Intelligence Unit to combat them.
The Raiders’ supporters responded to these charges with countercharges. The mayor, they said, wished to discredit the Raiders because he feared their political potential. The police exaggerated the Raiders’ threat to win the budgetary increases necessary to combat such a horrendous foe – and then warred on the Raiders in order to protect the existing system which lined police pockets with South Side graft. All of this aligned with the interests of Chicago’s business class, which hoped to profit from the scheduled 1968 Democratic Convention, wanted the Raiders crippled before they exploded and caused its transfer elsewhere.
The supporters could not deny that crime plagued the South Side; but, they argued, the fact an individual who committed the crime was a Raider did not mean he had acted because he was one any more than because he was a Baptist or Camel’s smoker. Crime, they said, was as much part of the Raiders’ environment as air, and it was not surprising if Raiders exhaled it. But this should not obscure the fact that Raiders, not social workers or city bureaucrats could speak best for the poor, the weak, the hungry. For that is who the Raiders were. No one knew more about the problems of the ghetto, and no one had a greater stake in their solution.
But, came the rebuttal, there were so many crimes, so awful and so sad. Where there was smoke, the critics said. And there was so much smoke. On January 1, 1968, a group of Raiders exchanged shots with a group of Sin Dukes, and a fourteen-year-old girl, coming out of a grocery, was struck by a bullet and killed. On January 4, six Sin Dukes stormed a high school cafeteria; one pulled a sawed-off shotgun from his coat and fired; the others attacked Raiders with chairs, bottles and chains. Fourteen people were hospitalized. On January 6, shots were fired into the apartment of a boy who was scheduled to testify against a Raider charged with armed robbery. The witness’s five-year-old brother was killed and his mother wounded. On January 9, two Raiders employed as instructors at the job training center were indicted for beating a student and stealing his watch. On January 11, two Sin Dukes, firing from a taxi, killed a fifteen-year-old Raider and wounded his girlfriend. On January 15, eight teenagers were shot in what the police termed “gang related incidents” on the South Side.
It was into this combat zone that COLA stepped. Most staff members thought the move suicidal, politically if not personally. But if one accepted that the Raiders could become a legitimate community organization, it seemed enticing and wise. The Raiders had the size to have significant legal problems and the potential for political weight. Besides, by tying itself to their notoriety, COLA could establish its own name and credibility.
Our representation had advantages for the Raiders too. Private attorneys demanded fees they could not meet. Traditional legal aid agencies, who already had reputations to protect and constituencies not to offend, wanted no part of them. Anything we did would be an improvement over what they had. And having one’s own attorney, no matter how inexperienced or naive, was gratifying. As one Raider put it, “Ain’t no punk Duke got him no fucking lawyer.”
***
The calls kept coming. I would be out until 2:00 a.m., taking statements; five hours later, the phone would ring, and I would be after more. The more work I did, the more contacts I made. The more contacts I made, the more I had to do. I was beginning to fear my phone. Each time it rang, I worried, What’s happened now? Who’s in jail? Has anyone I know been killed? And each time I answered the phone I had to act. My clients were being beaten. I could not say, “I am busy. Try someone else.” I did not have a secretary to take a message. This was not a business where one scheduled appointments to regulate a calendar or modulate a cash flow. When my right hand picked up the phone, my left reached for car keys.
“This running around is counter-productive,” Woody said. “Ration your efforts. Make your clients respect you. At least, don’t lend them a nickel[1] every time they ask.”
I heard the logic. But I still went when Raiders called. I took their statements. I bought them cigarettes. I lent them coins they would not repay. I believed that their lives had been turned so toxic, their fumes might poison us all. I did not feel safe because certain young men could not walk down a street without being shot or arrested. If it could happen to them, why not anyone? However I helped had to benefit me.
The more I did for the Raiders, the more I wanted to do. It is easy to hate or fear or not care about some abstract gang that has no more solidity than newspaper ink, but this is difficult with people with whom one has joked, talked, had a beer. Arthur Best and Larry Christmas were real. I could see the kicked in doors that scared them, touch the lumps the blows had raised. The police had seen enough bodies on South Side streets to believe the Raiders killers, but I had sat with them and see them not kill. If they could not kill then, why could they not kill forever? They might be killers, but they were not-killers too. If the first side deserved jailing, the second warranted aid. Each Raider, like me, had his one life and his right to its fulfillment. My attempt to form a fuller life had led me to these squandered ones. I felt each thwarted life before me was a tragedy that could bring suffering to us all. We would miss what it might contribute. We would expend our energies, if not oppressing theirs, repressing the recognition of what in us allowed these lives to exist. It was not that I felt a brotherhood with the Raiders. We were too different even to be friends. I was trying to function as a lawyer and limit my attention to facts and statutes like Woody wanted, but a greater gestalt was working on me.
My work followed me everywhere. I walked out of cocktail parties because the juxtaposed experiences were too jarring. How could I debate the effect of violence on the civil right movement with a professor of urban affairs, while Bill Tobago was being slung against walls? How could I try to pick-up a blonde electrologist from Mississippi College for Women, who had punctuated her charming tale about “frog-gigging” with “nigger” references, while police were threatening to blow off Arthur Best’s feet? For the first time, it made sense to have people walk me to my car. For the first time, I wondered who I talked with was reporting my words to the police. And still my phone rang. And still I asked myself if anyone had been killed. And throughout, I could not escape suspecting that, despite my late hours and frantic scurrying, all I was doing was writing words on paper, and all I would accomplish would be that.
There were three of them in Rev. Boyle’s office. Each wore a red beret, paratrooper boots, the black leather jacket with the blazing sun. The one on the right was small, his process shiny as new paint. The one on the left was huge, a keloid scar circling his thick neck. Simba Stokes sat between: medium build; smooth, placid face; long, dark lashes hiding large, almond, almost Asian eyes. His hair, jutting beyond his brow, seemed capable of pulling him forward by its own weight and compelling this otherwise composed man’s charge.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Rev. Boyle said. “Simba can tell you about it.”
“Fine,” I said. It was not fine. I was comfortable with Rev. Boyle beside me. He provided me with worth-by-association. I did not know what this three knew about me. I did not know what I truly knew about them. Did I judge Simba Stokes by his dozen arrests or his zero convictions? How did I account for this high school drop-out, with a reported mid-double-digit IQ, rising to lead thousands? What did it signify that a man with no job sat like a prince and was celebrated as a king?[2] There were deeper questions too. How did society expect to tempt men with this power and prestige with minimum wage jobs and forty hour weeks? What did it do with the thousands who aspired to become them? Shoot them? Let them shoot each other? Give them enough and beat them enough so they did not shoot you? As far as I saw, that was about it.
The bookcases in Rev. Boyle’s office held Hanna Arendt, Paul Tillich and Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills and W.E.B. DuBois. Some combination of them had induced his faith in Simba Stokes, but I had read only one or two.
“Listen here, man…” Simba Stokes said.
..
The three of them, Stokes, his younger brother Cubby, and Erroll “Black Velvet” Coates, had left Lord’s Church at noon. They had driven a few blocks in Stokes’s purple Mustang when a green Cutlass, lights flashing, siren wailing, pulled alongside and forced them to stop. Inside the Cutlass were two GIU detectives. One was new. The other was Orestes Newcombe.
Newcombe ordered the Raiders to line up against the side of their car. He told Black Velvet Coates he had half a mind to match the skin necklace he was already wearing. He asked Cubby Stokes when he’d next be down the station to suck his cock. He looked through their pockets and wallets, card by card, paper scrap by paper scrap. He took two one-dollar bills from Coates, a pack of Camels from Cubby, and an address book from Simba Stokes. Then he pushed Stokes into the green car.
The new detective drove east, into the park that borders Lake Michigan. As they rode, Orpheus Newcombe asked Simba Stokes if he could swim. “What I got to swim for?” Stokes said.
When they reached the lake, they drove across a black top parking lot, onto a narrow pier. Newcombe ordered Stokes out of the car. “I gonna ask you one time,” Newcombe said. “Rifles.”
“What kind rifles you got on your mind, Officer Newcombe, sir?”
“Forty-some R.O.T.C. training rifles some boys lifted out of Blake High last night. Them rifles.”
“That a white school, Officer Newcombe. I bet you some white boys ripped them off.”
The pier rested on telephone pole-like logs sunk into the lake’s bottom. The logs were caked with ooze and slime and a colorless gunk spiraled into the water. At water level, a narrow ledge ran between the logs. Orpheus Newcombe smacked his left fist into his right palm. “Set yo’ skinny ass down there.”
“You crazy, man?” The dark, foul smelling water slapped at the ledge. Newcombe smacked his palm again.
“Okay, man. Whatever you say.” Stokes braced himself with his arms, tested the ledge with his feet, and dropped onto it. He stood inches above the lake’s surface, clutching the pier at Newcombe’s feet. The lake rose, licked the soles of Stokes’s half-boots, fell, rose again, and swallowed them up to his ankles. “Done foolin’, man? Can I come up now? You ruin my Stacey-Adams, you know?”
“Rifles, goddamnit! Where them rifles hid?” Newcombe slid his right foot toward Stokes’s fingers. He balanced his foot on its heel, then brought his weight forward, playing with his foot against Stokes’s fingers, shifting it up and down, fractions of an inch in either direction.
“I don’t have no guns, motherfucker!”
Newcombe dropped onto a knee, grabbed Stokes under each arm, and hoisted him onto the pier. “I through playing, boy. If you could swim, you shouda swum. Now on yo’ hands and knees.”
“Cock sucking, nigger motherfucker!”
Newcombe punched Stokes in the head. After Stokes fell, Newcombe rubbed his pistol’s barrel against Stokes’s ear. “I want them fucking rifles. I want your fucking bazooka. I want your fucking grenades.”
Shoot me, motherfucker. Pig motherfucker.”
Newcombe took a switchblade from his pocket, flicked it open, and dropped it beside Stokes. “Shouldn’t ought’n a-pulled that. Ten,” he said. “Nine, eight…”
When Newcombe reached “One,” the gun fired.
Newcombe laughed. “Musta missed you, honey. Damn, but I bet I did. Wet yo’ pants, honey? Wet yo’ damn pants? See, I wants them guns more ‘n I wants yo’ sweet ass. So now I just funning. Like cats with damn mice. And today be ice cream compared to next. You not gone believe next time. See, I wants them guns. And I gonna be on you and at you and in you, till I has me every one. So think ’bout the fun we havin’. Think it, feel it, dream it, breath it, honey. An’ tomorrow, lessen you want round two, you meet me at the science museum parking lot, at four, holdin’ them guns or some sweet words where they be.
When they returned to the car, the new detective spoke for the first time. “One word about this, nigger, they gone find you floatin’ in this damn lake, your damn nigger balls cut off, stuff in your damn nigger mouth.”
..
“You the lawyer, man, Simba Stokes said. “What I do?”
I drew on my cigar. That was quite a story. It was the best story I had heard. “You got any witnesses?”
“Cub and Velvet seen the man take me. Seen when I come back.”
“That leaves your word against two officers for what happened on the pier, and two friends of yours saying you were taken against your will. A technical kidnap, if it’s believed. With your valuable time lost, the damages be… ”
“Don’t seem right,” Cubby Stokes said. “The man getting away with this.”
“Witnesses ain’t no thing,” Black Velvet Coats said. “What heights, weights you want?”
I smiled. “That you don’t have any’s the most convincing thing about your story.”
“But what’s I really want to know, man, is do I meet the dude tomorrow?”
I had not been thinking of anything as simple as tomorrow. I had grown comfortable with questions I could not be expected to answer. Now I had to pick “Yes” or “No.” “He won’t show up. He must figure you’ve told someone.”
Man, he will come,” Stokes said.
“The dude be there already,” Coates confirmed.
“The freak’s a-impressionist, you dig,” Cubby explained. “He out to make the impression we all a-scared of him.”
If he does come, he can’t do much worse than he’s done already,” I said.
“Shit, kill me is all.”
I stared at my cigar’s glow turning to ash.
Stokes brushed a spot from his jacket. He was neither nervous nor excited. He was discussing a problem with his lawyer.
“C’ mon, “I said, “he won’t kill you.”
They looked at me as if l had announced the promotion to firm partnership of Little Lulu. It would be difficult to build confidence in the legal processes’s ability to achieve social change in the face of looks like those.
“Fuck he won’t,” Stokes said. ”Ain’t he a man? Ain’t I one? I’d kill him. He be the law, but the law be crooked as me.”
I had nothing to say.
“S’pose they find me in that lake. Or down some alley. You’d know who done it, right?”
I nodded.
He nodded back.
We might have been discussing dinner next week. I wondered if Simba Stokes was auditioning as a sacrificial hero to impress me. I had thought it only in fiction that Robert Jordans took solace from dying for right reasons. Life was for living, as far as I knew. And even if Newcombe killed him, what difference would it make? I could prove nothing, convict no one. Another death was nothing.
“Don’t see I got a choice,” Stokes said. “S’pose I don’t show. He find me some time. I can’t hide from that devil. Shit, man, I don’t want to.”
“Everything all right?” Rev. Boyle had entered the room.
“Just fine,” I said, thinking about Clarence Darrow fighting for his clients and his principles and never losing, because he had justice riding with him. It must have been a bore, never losing like that. How did Clarence spend his nights if it wasn’t not sleeping because he were too worried or too scared. “The problem is,” I said, “nothing corroborates his story. Now, if that cop is at that lot tomorrow, that’d indicate what Simba says is true.”
“Man, he will show. What you think we be trying to tell you.”
“Even if he does, it’s still only you saying he did. So … ” My words had brought me to the edge. One second I was a lawyer. The next I was about to step out the suite window. The flight might be a thrill, but the landing sure could sting. “I could be there. Then you’ve got a witness, and my being there could keep him off your back.”
***
At 3:30, the next afternoon, I sat in my car in the parking lot of the Museum of Science and Industry, musing that you could probably run through its high-ceilinged, wide-aisled rooms, swinging a tire chain in either hand, without chipping a single exhibit. If you ran through screaming someone was being stomped in the parking lot, a guard would probably gentle you with a hand on the arm, apologize to the serious guests, and lead you politely but firmly away.
I was tired. I was tense. With [roommate] Woody at his girl friend’s, I had spent the rest of the night alone with my anxieties and the woman next door fighting her child. “Bitch!” the woman had screamed. “Bitch, bitch, bitch.” There had been a sharp slap, the crash of glass breaking, a brief silence, and the child’s wail. I had lain in bed, unsure if I should pound the wall, call the police, or lodge a complaint with management. I eventually slept, though neither long nor well.
I took a legal pad from my briefcase and set it next to me. I took a ballpoint pen from my inside jacket pocket and wrote the date, time, place, and “In Re Simba Stokes” on the top line. I removed from its case the motion picture camera Chip Gilberti had authorized me to rent and placed it on the floor near the accelerator. Chip had not thought my being in the parking lot a good idea, let alone while dangling an expensive instrument COLA would be on the hook for. He had suggested we ask a friend of his at the US Attorney’s office if the FBI would take over the investigation. The friend, a red-faced, prematurely grey fellow, had listened attentively, clucked sympathetically, and confided he should handle our request alone since, winking at me, “Beards make the Bureau nervous.” After lunch, he had reported to Chip that the FBI did not wish to seem to be casting aspersions on a fellow law enforcement body; and I had gone off, reminding myself to take the cap off the lens and keep my finger out of the way.
At 3:52, seven minutes behind schedule, Simba Stokes wheeled his Mustang next to me. He wore strawberry slacks, cranberry shirt, and a derby as red as a maraschino cherry. I had borrowed a cassette recorder from the office, which I told him to keep under his front seat. I told him to keep his door locked, his window a few inches open, and to try to make Newcombe talk about the day before. Then I sent him to park where I could see what happened without being directly in the policeman’s line of sight.
I lit a cigar. I felt noble and heroic and tragically alone. I had left Ruth and California for Chicago, a parking lot, and a meeting with The Man. Robert Jordan had sent Maria off on horseback. Now I was as admirable as him. Here I sat, driven by my beliefs to my present state. I sat back in my warming, noble, heroic bath while cold tragedy crept in from the faucet, drip-drip.
All day I had calmed myself by thinking Newcombe would not come, but now I felt the grip of the horror movies when the strings play high, the cymbals crash, the theremin hums, and you await the monster’s first appearance through the fog. I was scared. I foresaw my own beating, arrest on false charges, conviction on perjured testimony, sentence, disbarment, certain and total destruction. I did not want to be at this place. I did not have to be here. But I had brought myself, which was confusing, even frightening. Why was I doing what I did not want to do, unless I wanted to, and why would I? I felt like leaping from the car and escaping across the parking lot with loud, free cries of joy. But that was a quick thought, which vanished almost before I touched the door handle. I ran a hand through my hair, down my neck, beneath my collar; and, as I did, a nail knocked a scab from a pimple and drew my own blood.
..
The green Cutlass slid by the entrance, hooked a U-turn, and came in.
I wrote “Arrival: 4:08.” The Cutlass looped around the parking lot, then braked to a rocking stop beside the Mustang. A man in a soiled raincoat got out of the Cutlass on the passenger side, slammed the door, walked to the Mustang, and leaned against it, driving it toward the ground. He had big shoulders, a chest like a wine keg, big arms that swung in a way that broke things.
I bent over, feeling every inch of my descent in every cell of my body, gripped the camera with both hands, and arose. I aimed through the windshield at the big man and pulled the trigger. The camera whirred. I wondered if that was all: would the camera whirr, the man move on, and there be nothing more?
The big man lunged, his right arm snapping like a snake for a rabbit at Simba Stokes. The Mustang’s window was up enough to bar his entry, so, midway, he changed course and beat upon its roof. “Open up, you fucking little prick!” He beat the car like a kit of drums.
Then the Cutlass’s driver was pointing at me. The big man whirled and glanced and trotted back to the Cutlass, double time. The tires shrieked as the Cutlass pulled past the Mustang and headed for me. I kept my finger on the trigger. As a child, I would run directly at the camera, making faces, while my father shot. Now the twisted faces came at me.
Orestes Newcombe–the big man–leaped from the car with a fury that would shake the earth. His arms would tear, his eyes sear, his breath scald like boiling pitch dumped upon stormers of the castle. “What’re you doin’ here, motherfucker. What the fuck you doin’?”
“Taking movies,” I said.
“What kinda shit you trying to pull? What the fuck is goin’ on?”
“I’m taking movies.” I had feared the beginning the most, the dive into the cold pool, the game before the whistle. Now that it had begun, I was not afraid. The man would ask questions and I would give answers. I could do that. A lifetime of teachers and professors had trained me. They had asked me tougher questions than Orpheus Newcombe could. He seemed nervous now. His eyes flicked around; sweat beaded his beefy face. He did not know what was happening, who else hid, how many cameras lurked.
“Okay, peckerhead, from the top. Who the fuck are you?”
I caught myself before I answered. If l was as innocent as I was playing, I would not know who he was either. “Who the hell are you?” I said.
He flashed his star. “I’m investigating a case it looks like you’re interfering with.”
“My name’s Levy,” I said, remembering lawyers’ admonitions to witnesses. Answer the question asked and say no more. “That man’s a client of my law office, and I’m investigating a complaint of his.”
“What kinda complaint?”
“I don’t think I have to tell you.”
Newcombe’s eyes measured the width of my window’s opening. His huge hands, balled into fists, swung at his sides.
“It’s privileged information.” I was calm. I would be polite and not offend. I had my corroboration and could leave.
Newcombe’s fingers hooked over the window’s edge, his nails close to my face. “This your car?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Move your ass from behind that wheel and prove it.”
I had not expected that request. Having to surrender the security of the car shook me. I recalled the law as best I could. I would do what it required and be safe. The police could investigate suspicious persons. I was a suspicious person. Therefore, the request was reasonable, motivated by a proper sense of duty, and not to be feared. Newcombe was acting reasonably; I would too and not cause worse. We would be reasonable professionals together, acting with mutual respect. Besides, it seemed too nice a day for danger. The sky was blue, the air warm, the breeze gentle. They don’t kill lawyers, I thought. Even in Mississippi, they never killed a lawyer.
I got out of the car. I pushed down the button and closed the door, realizing too late my shrewdly locking the camera in had unshrewdly locked me out. I handed my registration card to Newcombe. It was colder than I had expected.
“See what downtown got, Roland,” Newcombe said, handing the card to the driver. “Lemme see your license and ID.”
“All right, officer.” I gave him my driver’s license, draft card, a COLA business card with my name on it.
“Lawyers, shit. I know about the law. I took courses at Loyola. You ain’t interested in law. You just want to get these cocksuckers off.”
I felt all right. I would hand him what he wanted and answer what he asked. I was coming through fine.
“You still ain’t told me what you investigating.”
“It’s an attorney-client privilege. I’ll listen to your reasons why you think it’s not.”
Ain’t my telling you enough?”
I shook my head.
“How ’bout I say ‘Please.”‘
“Sorry.”
The wind blew harder now. Tree tops snapped about. Mist crawled bout the museum’s columns.
“Nothing,” Roland said. “He checks out like he say.” He handed the registration to Newcombe, who handed all the cards to me. He put his big hands on his big hips, spreading his coat, revealing the revolver holstered on his belt. “Maybe we should go,” Roland said.
“When I say so,” Newcombe said. “This horseshit peepy-creepy don’t sit right with me.”
I watched Newcombe’s heaving, sweating face. I stood so close to the monster I could smell its breath; and, having come this close, like Newcombe, I wanted something more to happen. If I had been Simba Stokes or Fu Manchu Otis, I would have been beaten, shot at, abused; if l had been them, Newcombe would have felt compelled to be the man who performed those acts. But between him and me passed only words and pauses, which seemed to signify a lack of substance to my being. I did not want to be killed or maimed. I did not crave a beating. But I had come so far, one punch I could have taken.
A plump, furry, white caterpillar had fallen from a tree onto my car’s hood. Newcombe ground it into green ooze with a thumb. “Now, what’d you and that camera see?”
I could not answer. I had made it all up: the drama; the safety; and the bug. The caterpillar was not there any more. There was only another stain on the hood.
“What’d you say?” Newcombe grabbed my jacket lapel and wiped the ooze from his thumb onto it. He wiped his thumb along my cheek.
I gagged. I felt the ooze stain me.
A dirt-streaked Corvair had pulled beside us. Its driver leaned out the window. “What’s going on, fellows?”
“Easy, pal,” Newcombe said. “Police business.”
“You another lawyer?” Roland said. “You all having a convention here?” “Did you say ‘police’?” He was middle-aged, baggy-eyed. His gray suit needed an iron and his white shirt a collar button. He had a wart on hs nose and dandruff on his neck. He smiled with the good-hearted, unconscious buffoonery of a TV sitcom next door neighbor.
Newcombe flashed his badge a second time.
“Fuck me.” Good old Ed Norton showed his own gold shield. “Internal Investigations. My day off. Waiting on the kids. They like the culture.”
Newcombe and Roland looked at each other. I looked at the three of them. “How long you been here, Captain?” Roland said.
“Not too long.”
“You didn’t see much of this, I guess.”
“Was there anything to see?”
“No, sir. C’mon, 0, let’s us take care of some real business.”
Newcombe stood, arms slack at his sides, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He could handle a lot. One thing at a time he could. Two, maybe. He could knock them over and bust them apart. But too much was happening at too many levels. I knew that, if not what it meant. “Cut the shit,” he said. “Let’s make it.”
..
I headed for the Loop at dusk. I still did not know what had happened. I did not know if Ed Norton had been in the parking lot by coincidence, because the FBI had tipped him, or because somebody else had. I doubted it was coincidence, but the implications of policemen spying on policemen were beyond me. “Next time get yourself better cover,” he had told me. “For surveillance, this place sucks.” I would not let it bother me. If he was there on business, it was to protect Newcombe, I told myself. I would not accept Ed Norton’s dismissal of my efforts. I had come to this place and done what I had wanted. I had made Newcombe’s eyes hunt for an out and provoked the sweat which wilted his mustache. When Simba Stokes told me Newcombe had not mentioned rifles, I had not cared. We did fine, I told him. We had what we had, and I would take it to the office and put it in the safe or bottom drawer or tiger cage to protect it from whomever would take it from us. I slammed down the accelerator and charged around the Dan Ryan’s high-banked curves. Traffic was fleeing the city and, riding against its flow, my achievement felt greater and greater. I have done something you have not, I thought. I have felt something you can not. I have ventured far to win the treasure I am toting.
“You looked cool,” Simba Stokes had said, “sitting there, smoking that cigar
I wondered if I could print that on my card.
..
It came to nothing.
The cassette was inaudible. The film showed a man outside a Mustang talking to a man inside it. A group of Strawberry Hill ministers lodged a complaint with a deputy chief of police. The Defender warned the GIU was “laying the foundation for violent confrontations later.” The Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupicinet invited me onto his TV talk show.
Then he cancelled the invitation.
***
The Youth International Party (YIP) had been born in December 1967. It hoped to infuse the coldly organized, issue-oriented realpolitik of the New Left with the drug-laced, loony hedonism of hippiedom. It planned a Festival of Life for Chicago to coincide with the convention. It would be “an alternative tribal gathering,” a confrontation between the new and the old, the free and the chained, beautyand the beast. Wrote Abbie Hoffman, its most prominent spokesman:
A Constitutional Convention is being planned. A convention of visionary mind-benders who will…address themselves to the task of formulating the goals and means of the New Society.
It will be a blend of technologists and poets, of artists and community organizers, of anyone who has a vision. We try to develop a Community of Consciousness.
..
Earlier that· spring, YIP had drawn 5000 people to a Yip-In at Grand Central Station in Manhattan that had resulted in a melee with police which had ended in fifty-seven arrests and more than twenty injuries. The “gross incompetency and irresponsibility” of YIP, combined with the “astonishing brutality” of the police, a Village Voice reporter warned, “seemed to be a prophecy of Chicago.”
..
The idea of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands possessing a New Consciousness pouring into Chicago did not appeal to Mayor Daley. He fit comfortably into the Old Society and was not about to contract with bent-minded poets for its renovation. His vision for the Democratic Convention was that it be a tribute to how well his Chicago worked. It was to run smoothly and function perfectly, like a well-crafted Swiss clock, producing at the proper hour Hubert Humphrey in leiderhozen. To achieve this smoothness, the mayor and his minions had spent months pounding loose pegs back into holes, by billy clubs upon noggins if necessary. Now, when all appeoared in place for an event proper in magnitude to honor his achievement, these auslanders loomed. He could tolerate a few spoilsport votes for Eugene McCarthy; democracy required that. But nothing he had learned in civics class or public life had prepared Richard Daley for the hordes that the media reported drawing nearer. Each rumor outraged him more than the prior. He could not distinguish put-on from promise…
***
Lincoln Park occupied 11,000 acres of Near North Side, between Lake Shore Drive and Old Town. The Yippies had settled in the south end. It was chilly and cloudy.
The park looked like a park. No one incited anyone. No one shrieked at hallucinated monsters in the trees or groped someone else upon the ground. A teenage girl, dark hair held by an Indian band, handed a six-page pamphlet to us. It contained a list of hotels, with floors and room numbers of where delegates were staying, accompanied by the words “BREAK-IN BREAK-IN…FREAK FREAK FREAK…” the “Top Secret Yippie Plans for Lincoln Park,” a day-by-day schedule that included folk singing and poetry, workshops in drugs and draft resistance, a Yippie Olympics, a Miss Yippie contest, a game of Pin-the-Rubber-on-the-Pope, and the nomination of Pigasus, a full-grown hog, for president and a seventeen point political program, which ran from ending the war and eliminating pollution, through abandoning money and disarming everyone, including the police, to legalizing psychedelics and the “freedom to fuck all the time, anytime, whomever you wish.” “It is for these reasons,” the pamphlet said, “we have come to Chicago. It is for these reasons we will fight and die here.” The girl’s smile made it all seem equally a joke. Then a boy with a Zapata mustache handed me a wall poster. “Yippies,” I read, “are going to put on a display of political brutality at 11:00 tonight.”
According to a map someone else had given us, we walked between the “Free Store” and the “Free Theater,” not far from “Future City.” But all we saw were mostly well-scrubbed, middle class boys and girls. Some played bongos, strummed guitars, and sang of not-being-moved. Allen Ginsberg led a small circle in a chant of “Ommmm.” A dozen on so—boys and girls—practiced karate and washoi, a Japanese form of crowd control, under the direction of—of all people—Hersch Sylk, our training leader.
There were working class kids from the neighborhood, some bikers, a few blacks, one nude (male), and families who had strolled over from the zoo, equally curious about this display. There were a number of riot-helmeted, nightstick-clutching policemen and a couple crew-cut, beefy, middle-aged men in white short sleeve shirts, with handcuffs dangling from the back pockets of their slacks. But the most fire crackled from a Puerto Rican softball game.
“Lame,” Woody said.
I agreed.
“I move, counselor, we adjourn for coffee and a Danish.”
I felt disdain. These tenderfeet did not measure up to we grizzled veterans of the social justice frontier. They had not dared ghetto living. They would soon quit their fun and games and return to the suburbs. I was pleased to have confirmed my life as the courageous, substantive one.
***
The next day, I was settling down with an after dinner cigar, and the Cubs on TV. “It’s for you,” Woody said.
“The ACLU is putting a team of observers together,” Rev. Boyle said. “The mayor has ordered the police to clear Lincoln Park. It would give you a chance to view gang violence first hand.”
“I thought the Raiders were cool,” I said.
“I was speaking of the Chicago PD,” he said.
Rev. Boyle arrived in clerical blacks, a stiff white color, a white armband on each sleeve. I changed into a suit and tie and pinned a COLA business card to my lapel. Do not, I thought, fold, spindle or mutilate.
Rev. Boyle drove us from the South Side in his ’56 Ford. “The bloodbath,” he said, “will not be in the ghettos like people think. The. Yippies and the police want it more. The Yippies must prove themselves by being bloodied, and the police will be less inhibited busting a Yippie head than a black one. These longhairs are asking for it, insulting values the police believe in. Plus, they aren’t gonna shoot back.”
He parked several blocks from the park to lessen chance of his car being trashed. He wet two handkerchiefs from a canteen and passed me one. “For tear gas,” he said. “Pat; don’t rub.” I followed him with this cold, damp lump pressing through my pocket onto my thigh.
..
Lincoln Park was laid out like this. Hundreds of policemen had formed skirmish lines, three deep. Fifty yards away, in a valley south of the pond, 2000 insurrectionists waited behind a barricade. The barricade was thirty-five yards long, five-feet high, and made from wood picnic tables, wire trash baskets, and rusted oil drums. It ran west-to-east, from Garibaldi’s statue to the snow fence. Along the barricade flew the black flag of anarchy, the red flag of communism, the multi-colored flag of the Viet Cong. In the middle of the barricade, a phalanx of clergymen stood at the foot of a twelve-foot cross. Along the barricade, bonfires, built from trash and tree branches, flared. The police stared toward the flames, caressing their steel-tipped batons, fingering their pistols. Canisters of tear gas hung from their Sam Browne belts.
It was about 10:30 and fifty degrees. Rev. Boyle and I stood on an embankment, looking down on the field where the event would be played. We were in a large group of people, mostly young, mostly white. There were a few longhairs and a few Near North teenagers of the expelledfrom-parochial-school variety. Occasionally someone plunged into the valley to join those behind the barricade. Occasionally someone from the barricade defected to us. A khaki suited man argued with a longhair in a football helmet. “Organize,” the man said, “Let it happen,” the kid said. “Passive resistance.” “Arm like the pigs.” He went down the hill.
More police arrived, marching across the field, singing “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go” and whistling “Colonel Bogey’s March.” The barricade sang too. “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war.” Chords from the barricade’s guitars floated in the air. The beat of its bongos kicked in. “America, America,” the barricade sang, “God shed his grace on thee.” “From the halls of Montezuma,” the police answered, “to the shores of Tripoli.” When the singing stopped, a vacuum, mostly silent, mostly dark, grew. At the bottom of the vacuum lay a fear of the evening yet to come. The only sounds were slaps upon the bongos and, from one corner of the barricade, a mindlessly chanted “Ommmm.” Along the barricade, the bonfires flickered, spat and soared.
The first shift was a patrol car’s slow, steady traverse of the gap between the barricade and the skirmish lines. “The park is now closed,” its loudspeaker announced. “Anyone remaining in the park is in violation of the law.”
“Hell, no, we won’t go. Hell, no, we won’t go.”
“Please leave the park. The park is now closed.”
“Stay in the park. Parks belong to the people.”
Someone threw a rock at the patrol car. Someone else did. Someone threw a bottle. The police car turned, its line-not-to-cross drawn.
I felt I had arrived at a moment my life and world history were about to alter. Boxcars full of cultural trends and social forces appeared ready to empty into Lincoln Park. I patted my notebook to be sure I was ready.
A rock or bottle or screamed insult to a mother would draw a police feint toward the barricade. The insurrectionists would fall back. The police would withdraw and the insurrectionists reclaim their position. Then someone would throw or scream and the dance would resume. A lot of blood was not going home with the person who had brought it.
“We might see more below,” Rev. Boyle said.
“I thought we were supposed to observe.”
“We can observe down there.” He was fifty and small and he was ready to give the night sticks another crack at him.
I shook my head.
“Sure?”
The line of fires, the rows of police, the narrow zone between was another sight I had never expected to see. But I was as close as I wanted.
Rev. Boyle went down the embankment.
..
The End of the World was not announced in Lincoln Park by trumpet or bang or whimper. The End of the World was a grating, metallic, earth-pulverizing rumble, advancing unseen through the dark, its terror amplified by the dancing flames, the shifting shadows, he bongos’ beat. The rumble grew louder. The earth’s vibrations jellied legs.
“My God,” a girl yelled. “The bastards have tanks!”
In Prague that week, the Russians had turned tanks upon the Czechs. But this was not Prague. And these were not Russians. In Lincoln Park, Chicago unleashed fire and garbage trucks upon the technologists and poets. The fire trucks burned with orange floodlight eyes. The beast from the Department of Sanitation was humped with a tank from whose nozzle tear gas spewed.
Police rifles fired tear gas too: “Putt-putt-putt.” The gas from their canisters and the garbage truck’s tank billowed in rolling waves. Policemen, helmeted and gas-masked, advanced, some marching, some breaking into a run, swearing and howling “Kill, kill, kill.” Rocks and bricks and stakes ripped from the storm fence met their charge. With the orange light, the smoke, the screams of pain and anger, it was no bad duplication of Hell.
People fled. I ran without considering direction, distance, pace, or saving a finishing kick. I ran toward space and away from smoke. I turned right at fire and left at scream. My eyes burned from the gas. People choked and coughed and retched. A boy, not twenty-feet from me, slipped. Two policemen clubbed him with their rifle butts. He screamed and swore and called for God.
I was on the street now. Trash cans had been dumped and set afire. A bus sat, stalled across two lanes, windows smashed. Someone had thrown a brick through a patrol car’s windshield. Neighborhood kids and Yippies were stoning the other windows. Water from the radiator flowed down the gutter. Smoke chugged from beneath the hood. The red light on the roof continued to pulsate. The siren wailed. The closer I drew to the smoke, I thought, the closer to an explosion I came. If I stopped to throw my own rock, I would be trusting that no hunk of blasted metal would strike me. Here I was, trying to come together while America was flying apart. I had lost Rev. Boyle long ago. I thought Robert Jordan a fool for lying down to die when he could have ridden off with Maria.
I cut down an alley and through a back yard.
..
Over the next few days, at various locations within Chicago, with casts of varying sizes, these scenes were replayed. Police and National Guard on one side. The youth revolt on the other. Billy clubs, rifle butts and tear gas against rocks, bottles and flaming trash. The climactic scene occurred Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., when police trapped a crowd of demonstrators, who had been denied a permit to march from Grant Park to the Amphitheater, in front of the Hilton and, charging into that crowd, drove ten or twenty people through the plate glass window of the hotel’s ground floor Haymarket Restaurant. The official statistics for the week showed a hundred policemen injured, with forty- eight hospitalized. More than a hundred demonstrators were hospitalized and more than a thousand injured. Nearly 700 were arrested.
The major achievement of the demonstrations was the publicizing of the brutality of the Chicago police. Three networks televised it. Several Pulitzer Prize winners reported it. The New York Times summarized: “(T)hese were our children in the streets and the Chicago police beat them up.” It had not been noteworthy when it had been black people’s children–poor people’s–but now the blood was in everyone’s living room, on the tube, seemingly capable any minute of walking in the door. (The media may have been influenced by the fact that it wasn’t just children that were assaulted. Of 300 newsmen covering the convention, sixty-five were beaten, arrested, or had their equipment smashed by the police.)
The Times and the Pulitzer Prize winners were surprised. I was more surprised by how not-so-out-of-the-question life in a police state was. During these days, police patrolled everywhere. They occupied all street corners. National Guard jeeps, caged in barbed wire and mounted with machine guns, roamed neighborhoods. You could never be sure if your tennis match would be interrupted by tear gas wafting on the wind or if your trip to Baskin-Robbins would plant you in the path of a rampaging mob. But you adapted. You blinked, dabbed with a handkerchief, settled on a flavor elsewhere. My life, which I had flattered as being committed and defiant, ran its course from bed in the morning to bed at night. I was disappointed to have been revealed as so adoptive. Would I have to confess one day to having sat back while the trucks scooped up my day’s Jews? But I sought no clubs to bang my head against.
I watched the show on TV. Partly, I kept away out of fear. But partly because another event had made me doubt the worth of the endeavor. To have had one’s head busted in Chicago during Convention Week might someday prove one’s participation in a generational peak experience, but this event made it seem a game played for trivial stakes. No demonstrator was killed by those troops and guns. No one lost an eye or limb. But that week, Simba and Cubby Stokes had stepped out a doorway, after saying goodbye to their girlfriends, and been blasted by four shotguns. Cubby bled out on the sidewalk. Simba was severely wounded.
They held Simba in the hospital at Cook County Jail. Outstanding warrants, one newspaper said. Material witness and self-protection, said another. There were bars on the windows and roses in a vase. Plastic tubes connected him to machines. He breathed quietly beneath a green sheet. He looked peaceful, like a little boy. A little boy with one ankle handcuffed to the rail. The policeman in the corner chair stepped out of the room when I entered.
Hey,” Simba Stokes said.
“Hey,” I said.
“How you get in?”
“Said I was your lawyer. How you doing?”
“I so high you watch out I don’t loop the loop.”
“You look good.” Fluid dripped through the tubes, some in, some exiting. “I be out in a couple days.”
“Great. You take it easy.”
He waved me closer. “Write me a letter. Tell Daley we want a street named after Cub.”
..
That evening, I watched Gus Joost, the Movement’s leading theoretician, on TV. I’d had a couple beers; the cigar smoke was thick; so he flickered at me through a haze. Joost was sad-eyed and acne-scarred. He had a Levi shirt, wire-rimmed glasses, cotton candy sideburns. “These days have achieved a great deal,” he told his interviewer. “Young America, from the Crazies to the Clean for Genes, have been united against the Establishment. The corrupt nature of the Democratic Party has been revealed and the need for new political alliances recognized. The fascistic nature of the United States has been shown, humiliating it in the eyes of the world. Most important, the troops necessary for the conquest of the New Age have stood up to the armies of repression, overcome their fears, and proved they can prevail in the revolutionary streets.”
That was one view. But having worked a year with people who were abused because they wore the wrong color beret, I found it unsurprising that people who spat, threw rocks, yelled “Pig” would be beaten. Actually demonstrating that did not prove anything anyone with a certain life experience did not already know. Anything beyond that was an extrapolation which might or might not prove true. It had cost the demonstrators blood to make their point, but other Americans had lost more without storming any Bastilles behind other Gus Joosts. And even if the extent of institutionalized brutality was news to some people, it was not so shocking that many of them might not shrug it off, incorporate it, and go on a little wiser, a bit more cynical. Aware of one more pit in life’s cherry bowl to chomp carefully around.
Notes
1 Yup, nickels, not even quarters, were the customary request. Even this represented an inflation since junior high and “Two cents, Jim?”
2 Later that year, Norman Mailer would write, “One could be certain the gang had leaders as large in potential as Hannibal … how else account for strength and wit of a stud who would try to rise so high… ?”
NOTE: Lollipop is available through www.theboblevin.com or by sending $15 to Spruce Hill Press, P. O. Box 9492, Berkeley 94709