Off the Town After TDA

TDA, like many other things. seemed to lose itself as it passed from glorious anticipation into another mushy reality. Being in my room for two hours sweating and pacing back and forth was in every way more real then whatever it was that happened in Boston.

TDA started with martial intoxication. It seemed as if we were riding the subway to a war and needed only some General Patt?n to tell us that we were gonna meet destiny at Park Street station. Riding the escalator up through the dark who knew what was going to happen? Will the Revolution begin today: heart pounding, some part of me churning out anger and bile in amazing degree, and suddenly as I reach the street and see everybody else nervous o? flipped out I know that it's not about to happen, and have no idea whether it ever could. But there was that moment in the dark when I didn't how many people had brought bombs or guns, and whether this might be it.

In the Park there are so many pacers and kibbu?zers. Occasionally an affinity group floats past playing drums or swearing or chanting or doing whatever it is that they have an affinity for.

And you walk around and it seems that everyone I ever knew is in the crowd, doing the same weird things I am to pass time. A lovely day.

The process of disintegration and the loss of the mythic anticipation culminated with a group of skits put on by the caravan the?er. Which bombed. Policemen are standing in the usual little clumps, foundling their enormous nightsticks, as if (does it need saving?) they were the longest hardest pricks in the world. We have only what we have, and we are certainly not fondling anything as it grows colder and colder. And a whole segment of the march line on Tremont Street is jumping up and down with blood curdling pogo stick yells, but it is only to keep warm. (How many people here have seen Battle of Algiers? )

As I get colder I stop worrying whether this is really the revolution and become dominated by the elemental desire to keep warm and wonder if I am beginning to understand what Marx said about material determinacy. Cold is more real this time than revolution. The policemen are rubbing their hands now instead of their clubs. Are they... could they be... as cold or as scared as I am now?

There is the constant drone of some amplified speaker, and there is the drone of my little huddled affinity group, and the same beautiful girl keeps walking past trying to hawk the same stack of unbought Ailitant magazines, and she is adding her own drone.

At five o'clock the march finally pulls out down Tremont Street: a few drums are beating a war cadence, but it is lost in the carilon of Old South Church.

The Scots destroyed Rommell's army in North Africa during World War Two in a sneak attack at night. Bagpipers were lined up as far as one could see in either direction across the moonlit desert. And suddenly, on signal, they began playing, marching out across the sand in their kilts to the sound of ferocious black drums and wailing bagpipes, which, it is said terrified the Germans, who had never heard that sound before.

Maybe we needed kazoos, ten thousand blood curdling kazooers Marching down Tremont.

THERE WERE no kazoos, and the march was over almost in an instant. We walked past all sorts of stores and out into Government Center. where there were two speeches which seemed to be about absolutely nothing. It didn't make any difference. The people who had come to march to Government Center then split on the Government Center subway, and the people who had come to throw rocks headed up Tremont again to throw rocks. I saw about five thrown... mostly at bank windows along the way. The police very wisely did nothing at all. If they had, something might have happened-a cop killed, cut off from others, mauled by twenty or thirty people. And the something and something else; I had cast the scenario all afternoon. The rock-throwing affinity groups seemed to know what they were doing. They also seemed to be largely high-school age, perhaps organized in a Weatherman "jailbreak."

As we got to the top of Tremont Street, at the corner of Tremont and Park, all the people who didn't want to go home yet were massing. An occasional rock was tossed at the "Boston Five" and "Waldorfs." There were more police here, they occupied about half of Tremont Street, and were massed in diagonal lines. There was a lot of ?aunting and spitting, but I didn't see anyone at that point actually assault a cop. But people were getting really worked up, swearing pigs-eat-shit over and over at those fat somehow-unreacting faces. One cop near me kept muttering "Keep it up, you're gonna get it"-incredibly much like Sidney Greenstreet's thug sidekick Wilmer said to Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.

Clearly they were on strict orders not to charge. More rocks were thrown, and again the sound of breaking glass, and then, as a group of clergymen passed carrying a cross, several trucks of police pulled up and joined the lines across from us. The clergymen saw them, said "God let's get out of here." and f?ed enormous cross and all.

THE INEVITABLE. meaningless climax... a small kno? of people refused to leave, and long after the crowds had gone, were still there being revolutionaries. So the police charged, flailing their pricks, finally allowed to do their part of the theater, becoming in an instant superpigs. They chased the group of about 300 into the park. My girlfriend got beaten. She was in tears when I found her again. I threw a snowball somewhere in the direction of police. We went farther into the park to avoid the cops, but other groups are coming down from other ends.

And now we are lost. we are angry, it is nothing: we make it out of the park; it is over. It is meaningless and worse, it is every bit as unreal as going to a class or writing about something or doing just about anything except lucking.

The only reality I can find in TDA is that people are in jail somewhere in Chicago, and we are helpless to do anything about it except be angry.