Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 2

  Inside the chancellor, Charles Young of “Fuck Chuck” fame, surrounded by and sheltered with a beefed-up security, peeped out a second-level window to watch the carnage he’d ordered up unfold. The front line of the cops was another fifty yards beyond these student “leaders.” Stretching to my right—looking like lambs looking for Jesus—sat the rest of the crowd of demonstrators, perhaps two hundred weak. It was gonna be the usual pig-fest with a few more busted hippy heads, a few more notches carved into nightsticks well worn. And that bothered me. But that wasn’t what was bothering me. Not at all.

  And it wasn’t from any sense of outrage at the outrageous continuously recurring nightmares such as the mining of Haiphong Harbor, the by-now daily “incidental” or “accidental” incursions into Laos, the carpet bombings in Cambodia, the multiple My Lai-type massacres in Vietnam. Or even at the war in Southeast Asia as a whole. Or even at war itself in general. And what was eating me alive from inside out wasn’t twenty-four years of being black in America, fifteen years of which having grown up a Nigger in the South, sired up out of the loins of Nigger ancestors who with their present-day Nigger descendents had totaled up some 246 years of human bondage in chattel slavery followed by 107 years of third-class/third-rate citizenship all the way to this very fucking day. Eight years ago, Bob Dylan had electrified our movement and set it to verse singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” but all about me, all around me, as far as I could see and all that I could see was nothing but the “same ole, same ole”: Niggahs takin’ a foot up they ass. Yeah, that pissed me off. That pissed me off big time and had been pissing me off for a long long time. But today, and for a while now it seems, that wasn’t what had me pissed.

  And, as an aside, naw … it wasn’t from burning the candle at both ends and putting the platinum-white hot jet of a blowtorch to its middle. Wasn’t from the women I was using who used me. Fair exchange ain’t no robbery. And, naw, it wasn’t from doing dope, lots of dope, as I was selling more. With a positive cash flow being de riguer, as real Niggahs don’t get to deficit spend, a steady flow of five- and ten-dollar bags, “nickels” and “dimes,” flew out of my hands more than compensating—economically that is—for the masses of the dopes that I imbibed, that I smoked, that I snorted, that I shot … I was teetering … teetering on the very verge of slip-sliding onto the rain-slicked highway lanes of an ever-tightening spiral that pointed only one way. Down.

  But before a dope fiend can reach the bottom-level of his fiendishness he has first to run out of dough; but the hippies and the hipsters, the flower-children and the militants, I sold my dope to keep my coffers topped. They visited so often that it got around that it was my crib was what was meant when someone made mention of going to cop at the five-and-dime store. A dime was three fingers-full of a wax paper sandwich bag of unspectacular Mexican weed. A nickel less than half that. Rule of thumb: rule of thumb. Occasionally, the spectaculars did come in: Acapulco gold, Panamanian red, the lush green leaves of Oaxacan or the smoky deeply satisfying buds of Michoacán and the ante went up or the fingers went down. Either way the monies came and continued to come. But now even the dough provided no salve. How much healing can be bought and lumped-smeared across a gaping festering gash? How much good could it do?

  That knot in my stomach—doubling me over as if in the midst of a thousand story elevator free-fall—wasn’t from anything. Or anybody. Or any reason at all. It was from nothing. Nothing. Nothingness. Nihilism. Negativity. A wide open wound had acid-burned its way into and through the lining of my guts. I was burnt out, spent out, used up, about to give up. So … “Fuck it. I ain’t been arrested lately.”

  Twenty-five yards from the students the slowly advancing cops presented their arms, raising their truncheons and grasping them in both haunches of their pig-feet hands in a “ready-to-chuck” position across their chests. Just behind them a big black pigsty of a bus with windows barred and blackened. I looked at the star athlete and saw his minions leaned in and milling about him. Saw them looking nervously to him. Saw him looking nervously at the oncoming slow dark-blue tide. Saw two minutes into the future and saw the same damn thing I had seen two days past: they were gonna run.

  The words of the great Rahid rang out their echoes in the caverns of my mind: “Resistance must be given whenever the state attacks us. Resist! ‘Resist!’ as Bunchy Carter said, ‘Even if all you can do is spit.’ Comrades, listen up … If the state intimidates the revolution with just the threat of its violence then the revolution is dead; if, however, the state does not intimidate us even with its use of its unmatched violence then the revolution, dear Comrades, emerges stronger than it was before the battle it has just lost.”

  I looked at them … and they were gonna run. They were gonna get up and give up, slinking back like a pack of Pomeranians, whose high-pitched snappy yaps immediately morph themselves into a stirred and mixed-up mélange of whined whimpers and hapless yelps with but the first throaty growl of the irritated Big Dog. “They gon’ run. Yeah … them m’f’ers gon’ run like dogs. Jis’ liken two days ago they ran scatterin’, whoopin’ and yelpin’ they way down Wilshire Bl from in front of tha Federal Building…

  Them m’f’ers gon’ run.”

  Yeah, I wanted them to get hit. I wanted them to get hit. I wanted them to really get a taste of what it was like. A taste. A taste of what it was like to run up against the cops, these same cops, who Niggahs in South Central—and ghettoes around the world—faced off with every day. “Fake playin’-at-revolution-wannabes.” Hippies. Hippies with leather headbands around their noodles protecting such enlightened thoughts as the idea that not taking regular baths was one of the forks along the garden road leading to a purification of one’s soul. “Or some silly-assed shit like that.” Hippies. Raising Cain on campus until summer break came and they cut their hair, jumped on planes and became white again. Hippies. The son of Doctor such and such or Attorney so and so. One of them pretend-to-be hippies, who bought plenty of dope from me, was the son of a Washington big-wig privy to one of the President’s ears.

  Another’s father, I knew, did physics at Lawrence Livermore where plutonium triggers for thermonuclear weapons were designed, tested and refined. Many of them knew—much better than I can tell you, pal—the obvious and the subtle, the prima facie and the idiosyncratic, the degrees of separation and interconnections … the webs by which their parents and their fore-parents—and themselves in their later years—were wedded to the very system, making them part of its fabric, that they purported to attack. And better than ninety percent of them, to this day, not knowing that less than half a mile and three years away, through a series of—on the surface, only vaguely linked—yet underneath tightly interwoven and interconnected events—Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins had been killed for their and their fathers’ and their father’s fathers’ sins. It was a web woven of so many degrees of closely connected separations that when it unraveled it would have to unravel in a rage and a vengeance. And now, this vengeance was to be mine.

  The pigs were close now. And I saw some students starting to edge their weight back on the hinds of their legs and their butts. The next thing would be for them to turn tail. “Naw …fuck, naw …” Amidst and through the tie-dies, fades and pastels of the rag-tag oleo of hippies, flower children and revolutionary-wannabes I strode towards the line of cops. I saw a pig point his paw at me as I sat down at the front of the line, arms folded rested as if a strange sensation of long-missing satisfaction was washing over me. From ten yards away the cops suddenly broke from their slow advance into an out-and-out charge.

  As I was hustled roughly onto the bus, I turned against the cops who were holding me against my will and saw and heard the clash and smash of blows, the crush and crunch of dirty-blonde longhaired skulls now matting themselves into clumps of strands with the red red flow of the streamings of blood. Curious. I thought I caught a glimpse of one figure standing erect amongst the huddled and hunkering-down mass as the maze of swine—as
if a plague of man-sized locusts—swept in on them.

  M’f’ers, thank god, had been so anxious to get my high-yellow “Black-assed-coming-to-the-front-and-sitting-down-smart-assed-Nigger-m’f’ing”-self that two of them, one on each arm, had bodily lifted me as they snatched my 135 lb. (soaking wet) wanna-be-soldier-in-the-people’s-army-dope-dealing-and-dope-using-ass from off the pavement of Ackerman Way that they forgot something. My legs touched down with my feet hitting the ground in a scrape. I don’t know if at the pig-sty academy they had practiced “Two-man Body Carrying” or what but I swear I could feel a breeze rushing past my face as they hustled me towards and onto the bus. In a last heave they landed me face first into and onto the bus’s steps. That was to be the last brush of fresh air that I had for three days. Literally. Meanwhile the pigs were laying into and laying it onto the ones who were either inspired to stand their ground by my walking to the front or were too late to run away as the riot squad’s saunter had hastened into a stampede with their blows meshing blood with blonde. I almost felt sorry for the m’f’ers.

  The star athlete was second or third on the bus with his captors prizing and showing him off to the others pigs who paused just for the moment, but only for a moment to savor their companions’ capture. Then they went back to cracking heads. They had cuffed the star athlete and then shoved him onto the bus. Again, they made a mistake. Fifty others were soon on the bus handcuffed from behind—some so tightly that their wrists began to change color and swell—then they were shoved onto the bus-cum-paddy wagon. Each of the prisoners, almost to a (wo)man when she or he alight from the vehicle’s stairs and found a seat gave a bit of bravado in a yelled curse at the cops that failed to penetrate plate glass windows.

  After that, it got quieter than a m’f’er on that bus.

  SNAP! went something and I turned and saw the star athlete had broken the strap that linked the hard plastic wrist-cuffs. An awed HUSH … that for a moment accompanied then quickly transformed itself into a CHEER! He must have thought he was back in Pauley Pavilion for he gave a fist pump in response to their dotes. The cops had been so busy “shining and showing off for the white folks” (themselves) that they had cuffed him in front and with the wrists and strength of a seven footer he had, with a GRUNT!, snapped the cuffs in two. “Cuffs! Cuffs!” I had no cuffs!

  I hadn’t even noticed so great was the forbearing of bail, court, time and fine-money dollar signs that had been bouncing around and bouncing off of the gray matter in my head inflicting their own meta-level hematoma. “No cuffs! I ain’t got no cuffs.” I had no cuffs … and a pair of nail clippers! I snipped at the cuffs of the imprisoned next to me. Snipped at it at its weakest thinnest point. Snipped at it until with a final SNAP! it gave way and my seatmate’s hands came free from behind his back. I handed him the clippers and he went to work on the wristlocks that were turning his hands blue. The star athlete also had a tool. Other implements were soon forthcoming from the pockets of those who had been arrested but, critically, not searched. By the time the bus had made the climb up and over into the Valley and had arrived at the Van Nuys jail on board there were fifty-two people with fifty-one pairs of plastic handcuffs littering it’s aisles. A CHEER! had gone up with the rending of the last pair.

  Then the silence of imprisonment reigned.

  “Well, what are you gonna do?”

  Leaning back against the dank of the cell wall, my eyes rose up from the feet that had materialized in front of me and kept climbing. Outlined against the steel gray backdrop drab of concrete, bar and cell she leapt out from its background as if life—up until that second—had been a scratchy black and white silent movie with not even a tin-pan score that had just jump-cut itself Technicolor 3D with a hi-fi stereo soundtrack. Dark auburn hair crested a forehead framing fire-green eyes and then cascaded down and across her shoulders. She looked just like Lauren Bacall. Sculpted in bronze. She was built like Bacall, all 5’10 of her looming directly over me, complete with Bacall’s high cheekbones and wide-for-a-woman’s shoulders. No wonder Bogie fell for that dame. This one … like her. She was a touch elongated but elegantly so almost like her figure had leapt from an Ernie Barnes painting. She was what down South they call “A long drink of water.” Just as easily she could have been gangly as she ended up graceful. But the bones thrown in the dice game of life had rolled out of her palm, banged themselves on the table of life, and chanced up a natural seven.

  “Well, what are you gonna do?” she repeated herself.

  “Everything!” I wanted to yell. I had been hit by the same thunderbolt that had transfixed Michael Corleone when he first saw Appolonia. “Everything,” my mind Bogied to her, “Everything… Schreetart, I wanna do everything ta ya’, wit’ya’, because of ya’.” I fell for her like an apple on Newton … I caught myself. I must have been tripping cause I was taking so much time with these thoughts in my mind that she repeated herself. Again.

  “Well, what are you gonna do?”

  I sat up straight.

  “Do about what?”

  “About. What. Do. You. Think?”

  She spoke down literally and figuratively to me. The cadence was fifth grade teacher to soon-to-be-repeating-fifth-grade student. I drew myself up from the wall reaching up to a full two inches below meeting her eye-to-eye. “Naw … she’s 5’11 “ And growing.

  “Huh,” I managed.

  “About continuing to take a stand and not copping a plea to the trumped up charges that they’re going to file. You led folks into this. I saw you go to the front.”

  “So what? I saw you standin’ up ta tha cops liken you was playin’ tha lead role in Joan of Arc or somethin’.” Yeah, it was her that I had caught glimpse of. “You wanna lead somebody go ‘head. I ain’ tryin’ ta lead nobody nowhere. I’ve had enough of leadin’.”

  And in truth I had. Had had my fill. Had had it up to here. Had had it. Time spent before UCLA at LACC organizing and then guiding City College’s Black Student Union through a series of encounters with the administration, the police and right-wing students had drained every bit of desire to quote unquote “lead.” Anybody. Anywhere. For any reason. Even for Rahid.

  “You know that if someone doesn’t take a stand,” she gestured at the sad sacks cringing around the holding tank, “then all of these ‘mopes,’”—”mopes,” she called them—”will end up copping pleas. As if we did something wrong and not the cops.”

  “Lady, you don’t … “

  “Louisa. My name is Louisa.”

  Louisa. “Yeah, yeah, Louisa.” The au francais of the handle fit her like an all dolled up Orange County trophy wife wrapped and ready to be ravaged in a plunged-neck thousand-dollar Gucci gown—commando underneath.

  “Well then, Louisa, what I was gonna say was that you don’t need to convince me that it was the cops who was wrong … “

  “But you’re going to cop-out and cop a plea.”

  “Hey, I ain’t got no money for an attorney. And what do you think a public defender will do but plead me out? And you?”

  “I will defend myself.”

  “You know the one about the lawyer who has himself for his client, I take it?”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Never mind.”

  “How could they convict us when we just sitting in the street?”

  I could have said “You weren’t,” but I let it pass.

  “‘Sitting in the street’ in violation of a direct order to move.”

  “And you’re the prosecutor now?”

  “No, ma’am. Just the facts.”

  “Well, Joe Friday,” she disdained, “haven’t you got any backbone?”

  “Last time I checked I did. It’s sitting right above my black ass. You know, the black ass that has had a number of foots stuck up in it.”

  “Don’t cry the racial blues.”

  “Don’t hide behind the baby blues.”

  “My eyes are green … “

  BOI-ING! “Don’t I know it
?”

  “… and I’m not hiding behind anything. I want to fight their bullshit charges.”

  “Then go ahead.”

  “And you won’t?”

  “Why should I?”

  She gestured at the “mopes,” “Because of them.”

  “Huh?”

  “Them.”

  “Them who, the ‘mopes’?”

  “Yes. The ‘mopes’ who right now are being bailed out by Mommy and Daddy who will get them a lawyer, pay their fines and get their records expunged.”

  “Right on,” I admitted, “Now what could we do and why should I do anything to help them?”

  She answered both questions at once.

  “We could shame them.”

  “Damn!” She had a point. I didn’t notice it then. Frankly, now that I look back upon it, I couldn’t tell you just when it had happened but the torque in that knot in my craw, that proto-bleeding-ulcer, that open sore bottomless-pit of nothingness had loosened, disgorging a bit of its bile.

  To make a long story short, we both went to court and we both went to jail. It’s just that I took the long way around to it. Initially, along with all the other “mopes,” I had taken the plea. “No contest” was effectually the same as “Guilty.” ‘Sides they were talking six months if you went to court. That’s the way justice, rather Just-us, is effectuated in the People’s (that’s a laugh) Court: plead guilty to something you didn’t do and you can get “Probation.” Fight the frame-up, lose and do six months. It’s like confessing to witchcraft while they burn you at the stake. I guess the notion is that at least your eternal soul won’t have to keep on sizzling while your mortal body’s being seared.