by Marge Piercy
I had a woman,
I had a son.
They took them away,
they made them run.
Now I have everybody,
everybody, everybody
and no one.
One girl, thin in her nakedness as a garden rake, began to scream and fell to her knees. One of the regulars, a dark skinny guy with glossy black hair, came and squatted beside her, talking. He helped her up and moved with her for a while and then she returned to the larger circle and resumed the slower dance around and around.
The nakedness had a strange quality to it. Every so often when there was a crowd in the park milling around and something was happening and people were turned on, some guy would take his clothes off. But this was different. She felt that the dancers did not have a sense of being looked at. That was not primary. Yet people were watching each other, watching the dancing carefully. Often in crowds if some girl got stoned and took off her clothes, she would be mobbed. It would turn ugly, with men swarming to feel her up. But people were respectful here. There was a discipline underlying everything. She could feel a response in the outer circle when somebody danced well, inventively, passionately. When a dancer finished he would find his clothes, dress and step back into the circle. Or he might fall to the ground and lie there until one of the attendants could come to him. Then the kid would be raised up and helped to dress. When he was together, he would return to the outer circle and the slower dance.
It was an image of something in her blood. There were things that all the kids who were not nailed down yet wanted, even if they could not say. Certain things they groped for, though no one had seen them. Something beyond the tight consumption unit of the husband/wife/kiddies box of inducing neuroses. Some form of commune. Some form of social bond not based on buying or selling or being bought or sold. This grave dancing naked in the circle was one such image, something groped toward in a hundred other botched contexts.
She felt a sharp urge to throw off her clothes and dance in the center. She was a good dancer and proud of it. She loved to move well on the music, feeling herself borne in it and swimming with the beat. But something held her back. She had a feeling that this was all a ritual, and she did not want to appear a fool. How she would like to stand there naked burning like a torch with her wild hair flying and the beat surging up her torso into her flinging arms, while the circle slowly pivoted on her. It was a good ritual, if that’s what it was.
Then a heavy-set man pushed through the crowd into the circle but did not take off his clothes. He stood there flatfooted and slumping forward, with the circle spilling around him and reforming, and motioned the dark boy over, who came trotting. “Billy-O, what’s up? Something in the wind?”
Billy spoke into the dark boy’s ear, then turned and left, thrusting awkwardly through the dancers and into the crowd.
The dark boy came into the center. “Cool the circle! Cool the circle!” People stopped dancing in slowly subsiding motion. The attendants went about to the dancers in the center and talked them into stillness. Everyone got dressed. The attendants and most of the dancers did not dress cool or well but wore plain old clothes, jeans and work pants and work shirts, male and female alike.
“The pigs.” The murmur came around the circle. “Massed on the edge of the park. Going to raid us. Pass it on.”
A meeting was going on in low voices in the circle. Then everyone broke from it and began to circulate. They worked in twos with packets of papers in their arms. A pair looked at every person they came to carefully, checked the face against a sheet of photographs and passed out a flyer. As they worked toward her, two boys stopped beside another wearing beads and a serape. They whistled. He backed away, but the circle closed and held him. People on both sides held on to him, and he was stripped and tied with a rope and photographed again and left on the ground.
When they came to her, she felt briefly afraid. But they looked in her face and checked their photographs and handed her a map of the area. “We move out through B. Go south away from the precinct. We take the cops on that side of the park, break their barricades and move out. Escape routes through roofs and between buildings or through basements are marked on the map for emergency use” They passed on. In one corner of the map was a buffalo head, and on the top it said we are the people of the new nation of the young and the free.
The circle was dispersed. People were prying benches loose and breaking some of them up for the slats. People were digging rocks or bricks out of the earth, picking up whatever they could use as weapons. The pairs of Indians with their flyers and their photographs of plainclothesmen were moving through the larger crowd now, stopping to check people, warn them and move on. The crowd began to eddy in the park. There was a smell of fear and anger. She could see nothing, but people passed on that the cops had completely surrounded the park.
“Why is this happening?” she asked the guy next to her.
“They’re trying to force us out of the Lower East Side, to break up the community. They’ll go through and check IDs looking for runaways and evaders. A lot of guys come down here to escape the Nineteenth Year. If you’re under twenty, they just haul you off!’
Up on the shell, Shawn could see something funny was happening. He announced his next number and asked what was coming down. The dark guy who had been in the circle leaped onto the stage and, putting his hand over the mike, spoke to Shawn. Shawn shook his head and grimaced. They argued for a couple of minutes. Then the dark guy took the mike.
“The police have the park surrounded. Don’t speak to anyone except our warriors. Notice their armbands. Follow them. Do as they do. Follow the instructions on your flyers and we’ll lead you out. Join the tribes and survive! We’re the new nation of the young and the free. Come with us!”
He jumped down into the crowd, while Shawn stood there rubbing his blond hair on end. “Shit!” he said. “We can’t even play for you any more without them turning it into a trap. It feels like dirt.” He threw his guitar down and walked off the stage.
Immediately she heard screaming, and people began to run and push and push back. Stuck in a press of people she was carried along, and all she could do was try to move with the crowd and keep her footing. If she went down, she would be trampled. Shots or firecrackers? Cherry bombs or fire bombs? Everywhere people were screaming and shouting. Some cop had a bullhorn. The big heavy-set guy named Billy almost knocked her over passing through with a whole park bench for a battering ram, leading a charge of warriors.
She was moving in the right direction, east and south, but the crowd came to a halt. Behind her people kept shoving till she wanted to scream. She could smell the first nauseous whiffs of gas burning her eyes and swelling in her lungs. Her heart hurt and she was being crushed. Acid rose in her throat and subsided. “Gas! They’re using gas!” people were shouting. “Hold the line! Hold the line!” Then a shudder, a massive recoil passed through the crowd, and she almost went down underfoot.
They began to move forward again. Moving fast now. It was harder than ever to keep her feet as she was pushed and shoved and knocked from the sides and buffeted from behind. As she felt the curb under her and lurched forward and pushed herself upright on the man ahead, she felt something slippery underfoot. Wet and slippery. Bits of board and metal in the street.
She ran, she ran. The crowd was looser now. She was crying as she ran, but she remembered not to rub her eyes. She had lost the flyer she had been clutching and her pack had been torn from her shoulders. The small of her back ached from an incidental blow. She had torn her leg on something sharp. She ran and ran, the pavement pounding on her soles. Cars were honking ahead, people yelling. The wail of sirens from every side. She passed overturned cars. Some of the warriors were dragging wastebaskets into the street and setting them afire.
“Split up and move out!” the word came from ahead. “They’re waiting for us. Split up and move out!”
Turning, she ran down a side street. Others were running b
eside her. A police car pulled up on C with its light flashing, and two mounted cops came charging down. Someone seized her by the arm and pulled her stumbling down a half flight of steps into the areaway of a tenement.
She pulled her arm free but seized his hand. Cold, cold hand. He ran in big strides dragging her clattering after him. He boosted her up a fence and yanked her into a corridor and then up the stairs inside, up to the roof. Then pushing her down against the chimney, he lay on his belly and looked over the edge. He watched for a long time muttering to himself and cursing. Then he rolled over onto his back.
“I’m over here,” she said softly after a while. In the moonlight she poked at the gash on her leg. Her sandals were wet and dark with caked blood, as if she had stepped in a river of it. Her back ached and her eyes were raw and sore. She still felt as if she might throw up.
“Who?” He came slowly toward her, bent at the waist with his arms hanging forward like a chimpanzee. “Who?” He squatted before her and put out his hand to her face.
“Joanna.”
“I don’t know you. Do I?”
She laughed. “Guess not.”
“Shouldn’t have gone to take the mike. Should have been in front leading it. Got caught in the back. Mistake.”
She turned his face into the moonlight and saw it was the boy with black hair. He was mumbling and rolling his head back and forth on hunched shoulders. He looked spent.
“Are you hurt?”
“I never get hurt.”
“What’s wrong? Did they beat you on the head?”
“Mistake. But got the people out. Better clubbed than arrested. That’s our line.”
“Did you get clubbed?” She held his face in her hands carefully. Big head. Coarse black hair. Heavy bones. “I guess I was too worried to notice anybody. Are you going to join us?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have red hair.”
“You don’t even know what I look like.” She laughed, because she was miserable.
“Do you know what I look like?”
“Of course.” But then she saw what he meant. She came closer and hesitantly put her hands on either side of his face and lifted it into the gray dirty light. His hair was thick and straight and coarse and black. He had a high slightly hooked nose and heavy high cheekbones and large strong black eyes that stared into hers, stared and stared her dizzy. His face was sullen, morose and beautiful. He was swarthy and skinny with big tendons in the hands that lay on his knees. Then the hands moved out and took her shoulders.
“Joanna.” He gave her hair a tug and then he slipped one hand up under her shirt and gently touched her breast and then took it away. “I wish we could take our clothes off” Then he grinned, his face opened up in a dazzling smile at her, and he lifted her by his hands under her armpits and got himself up. “I’m tired. So tired. And I have a lot to do when we get there. I’ll have to go running around and talking my head off and I won’t be able to be with you. But you can get to know the people.”
“Will we be together later?”
“I think so.”
He walked on and she followed, and at every corner she wanted to run away. She was afraid, afraid. She had lost her sleepingbag and her identity all at once. She was Jill the prisoner on the base and Joanna the runaway outside who belonged to nobody. Here she was, following him like a stray cat hoping for milk.
Back to the Soil with Shawn
Shawn woke on a cot and lay still. He had been gassed and the aftereffects made him think of his childhood. Once he had been given ether, and it had made him sick for several days. Sign he had noticed on Avenue A near the park in a storefront dentists office: gas administered here. Come to me, ye wretched of the earth.
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.