Drawing Blood

by Molly Crabapple

  One night, as I sat listening at Brazenhead, I thought back to when I was twenty-four, when a drunken art director told me, “Molly Crabapple stands for sexy sex.” In the circles in which I moved then, sex was never allowed to be clever, so I couldn’t be clever either. During Occupy, I made friends with writers who found ideas they respected in my art. That night at Brazenhead was one of many I spent in their company, reeling from a party at the Paris Review to an N+1 magazine launch to the rooftop of the Jane Hotel. The dawn often broke before the time I limped home, but I always came back to Shell Game.

  Spring faded into summer, summer into fall, but Occupy never returned to what it was.

  September 17, 2012, marked Occupy Wall Street’s first birthday. Mayor Bloomberg announced he would quarantine Lower Manhattan for the protests. To evade the blockade, protesters and sympathetic journalists gathered at my apartment hours before dawn. In our kitchen, Laurie Penny, Alexis Goldstein, Sarah Jaffe, and the livestreamer Tim Pool gulped down espresso. None of us had much faith that the anniversary would change things. We were there out of loyalty to what it once was.

  When the sun rose, Laurie and I walked downstairs together. Wall Street was a mess of barricades. Cops in riot gear packed downtown Manhattan, descending on the area on foot, scooter, and horseback. They vastly outnumbered the protesters. On the side streets, police buses waited to be filled. As usual, the NYPD had shut down Wall Street more effectively than any occupation.

  We walked south, through Liberty Plaza with its halal chicken carts and looming cube of corporate art. I grinned when I saw the head of pink hair that belonged to Nicole Aptekar, an artist I’d met during the Zuccotti occupation. I ran up to her and hugged her hard. If nothing else, today would be a family reunion.

  As I crossed the plaza to walk toward Zuccotti, I recognized someone else—the girl I’d seen marching down Broadway on that Saturday afternoon at the start of Occupy. Back then, she was holding a sign reading “One Day, the Poor Will Have Nothing to Eat But the Rich.”

  Now she had a new sign: “Hey Wall Street, I Got a Job. And I’m Still Here.”

  As the crowd started edging forward, Laurie tapped me on the shoulder. “This feels like it’s going to turn bad fast, and I don’t want to be here when it does,” she told me, then retreated north, toward the McDonald’s.

  I didn’t follow her. The day was so bright, and my friends from Occupy were marching.

  With Broadway cut off by barricades, a crowd of people turned east, down Pine Street, with the police shoving and barking. Some protesters walked in the street, but most, myself included, clung cautiously to the sidewalk. We shouted the old protest chants that feel so meaningful when they’re coming from your lungs.

  Now and then, a high-ranking officer in a white shirt would point into the crowd, and the lower-ranking blue-shirted officers would snatch someone. On the curb, I saw a cop grab the arm of a woman in front of me and pull her into the street. It was the same gesture you might use to escort an old lady.

  Silently, the next officer grabbed my arm and started to lead me. When we reached the center of the street, though, I realized he wasn’t letting go.

  I was a head shorter than the officer. I stared up at his ruddy face. He had small eyes the color of concrete, and his nose was turned up sharply. I looked at his chest and memorized his badge number.

  “Officer, am I free to go?” I asked.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” he answered.

  There was no warning. No Miranda rights like in the movies. I didn’t even know what I was accused of doing.

  “You know I was on the sidewalk. I’m two blocks from my home. Am I free to leave?” I asked him.

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. Because I was part of a protest, I was no longer a local resident, but rather a body to fill a quota.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” he repeated.

  I forced myself to comply. When the media reports that a suspect in custody was killed after resisting arrest, they never tell you how hard it is to assist passively with your own kidnapping. They never talk about the discipline it takes to submit.

  I copied what I’d always seen protesters do during an arrest. As he led me off in handcuffs, I screamed my name. Protesters screamed it back until it passed like a wave through the crowd. Maybe a lawyer would hear it, I thought. Maybe my friends would know where I was.

  The officer led me behind a barricade. I was wearing my grandmother’s purse, which had a chain for a strap. When he handcuffed me, he trapped the chain over my arm, keeping him from confiscating the purse. I stood with him, in a crowd of other officers, each guarding his captive. There were two young, scared-looking Latino guys, and a legal observer in his lime green cap.

  As we were led into the police van, a cop snapped our pictures with a Polaroid camera, hipster party style. Not wanting to let the police believe they’d cowed me, I gave them my best grin. A man in a suit passed by, looked us over, and told the police, “Nice work.” Then the door closed.

  In the van, I wriggled my purse to my side and managed to fish my phone out. I started emailing Laurie, Sarah Jaffe, and Fred, so they’d know where I was. Then I tweeted: “Arrested. Everyone in this police van is super smart and funny except for the driver.”

  A cop opened the door. “Put your phone away,” he snapped. As soon as he closed the door, I started tweeting again. I wished I’d actually done something illegal—jumped a barricade or sat in the street—instead of sitting there filling some cop’s quota. I certainly wasn’t going to act more obediently than I had to.

  In the van we shared our stories. The elderly nurse explained that he’d thought his gray hair would save him from arrest. The legal observer thought his uniform would save him from arrest. The well-dressed white teacher handcuffed next to me grew more and more furious, yelling, “This is America!” at the cops, as if that meant anything at all.

  John Knefel was also arrested on Occupy’s anniversary. The day had started poorly for him, with Capt. Ed Winski, the officer in charge of policing OWS, telling John that his podcast credentials didn’t qualify him for press access. A few hours later, photographers captured him in handcuffs, screaming, his glasses sliding down his nose. When cops hauled him off, he looked like an infuriated professor. At the station, one cop fingered his press pass. “This is bullshit, right?” the cop sneered.

  In the police yard, officers confiscated our possessions, giving us vouchers in return. We waited to have our pockets searched, our shoulders aching from an hour in zip-cuffs. Our arresting officers hauled us against the wall to take another set of Polaroids. Again I grinned.

  Inside 1 Police Plaza, cops separated us by gender. Female protesters waited in a large holding cage. Periodically, a cop would call some names. They dragged us out, then lined us up to present our IDs to a scowling female officer. The woman in front of me wore wrist braces, to protect wrists the cops had broken in a previous protest. To the policewoman here, though, those braces were weapons. “Take them off or I’ll send you to the Tombs!” she yelled—the Tombs being Manhattan’s municipal jail, where everything was twice as shit-encrusted, and took twice as long.

  “I have a right to medical devices,” the woman snapped. The policewoman sighed, then waved her past.

  From the cells, a long line of female prisoners applauded as the policewoman led us to our cage. It was a narrow, freezing rectangle, with a padded bench just long enough for three people to sit on. In the corner, there was a nonfunctioning sink and a barely functioning toilet. When one woman needed to use it, we formed a line to block her from the view of cops.

  We weren’t the first round of protesters this cell had seen. On the beige walls, former detainees had scratched “Shit is fucked up and bullshit,” “#OWS,” and “You’ll be the first when the reckoning comes.”

  I shared the small bench with a legal observer and a young Turkish photographer who sat silently rocking, terrified that her visa would be canceled. The woman with the
wrist braces lay on the floor. She was a welder in her late forties with a bony body and long curls sloppily pulled back. A veteran protester, she’d done time in Rikers. “This white shirt saw me from the back for the protest, and said ‘grab her,’” she told us. “They know exactly who I am,”

  I grinned, reassured to have her with me.

  Officially, the police were supposed to hold us for only twenty-four hours, but countless people stewed for far longer than that. How many hours we stayed inside was largely at the whim of our arresting officer, who was in no hurry. The women sang songs to pass the time: “Solidarity Forever”; “Tomorrow”; “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

  The policewoman screamed that she’d send us all to the Tombs if we didn’t shut up. We sang anyway.

  The policewoman walked from cell to cell, trying to hustle information from protesters. “Where do you work?” she barked. “What are the names of your roommates?” Sometimes she demanded that protesters submit to iris scans—something we were under no obligation to do. When women refused to give their biometric data to a police database, she threatened to send them to you-know-where.

  This was an empty threat, the legal observer in my cell reassured us. Tell them nothing, she warned us. Anything we said would be used to incriminate us or our friends. “How do you know a cop is lying? Because her mouth is moving,” she finished.

  One by one, police released my cellmates, until I sat there alone, scratching a self-portrait into my Styrofoam cup, every second expanding like a rack. Getting arrested for protest is like being put through aversion therapy. It’s a punishment in itself. In the time I was held, we got no phone calls. There was a single meal: four slices of soggy bread, a packet of mayo, and a mini carton of milk.

  I kicked the bars, just to watch them shake.

  Occupy Wall Street taught some middle-class white people what poor people and people of color already know: the law is a hostile and arbitrary thing. Speak too loudly, stand in the wrong place, and you can end up on the wrong side of it.

  While we were in the cell, after we banged too long and chanted too hard, an officer stared at us. “Look at you people,” she said. “What do you hope to accomplish? You brought this on yourselves.”

  After eleven hours, my arresting officer told me I was free to go.

  I collected my purse, then waited as cops filled out my forms. In line behind me was an elderly priest, a veteran of civil disobedience. Ahead of me was a reporter from Boston whom the cops had kicked in the ribs. An officer gave me a desk appearance ticket accusing me of blocking traffic. I’d have to show up in court in three months.

  I walked slowly through the back gates, out into 1 Police Plaza. I was all alone. I’d been arrested at eight o’clock in the morning. Now night was falling, and I shivered through my thin jacket. My phone was dead.

  I walked through the sets of gates without looking back.

  As soon as I reached Pearl Street, I ran.

  I came home to a dark apartment. No one missed me, I thought.

  Then I looked at the computer. #FreeMollyCrabapple was trending on Twitter in New York. A photo of my arrest ran on the CNN homepage. An Al Jazeera anchor described how I’d tweeted in handcuffs. As the cop had handcuffed me, the Agence France-Presse photographed me. The camera caught me while I looked up, the light hitting my face at its most noble angle, like I was some sort of Joan of Arc.

  Photos are such lies.

  I was elated to be out, this amount of attention felt ludicrous compared to that received by others arrested that day.

  Then I saw Laurie’s email: “Where are you?? We’re all waiting for you at 1 Police Plaza.”

  I tweeted: “I love you all. God, jail is boring.” Then I ran back to the station.

  I found Laurie, Sarah, and Fred at the deli near 1 Police Plaza, waiting for me to join them and for word of John Knefel’s release. I hugged Fred tight. “I’m so hungry,” I gasped, hiding my face in his shoulder, shoving a slice of pizza in my mouth. An older woman limped up to the counter, having just left the holding cell where she’d been detained for fourteen hours. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was matted to her skull with sweat.

  In the hours and days after my arrest, people kept asking how I was. They were curious, even congratulatory, in a way they’d never be to a black man who gets arrested for walking down the street. It’s impossible for a quick stint in jail for protesting to compare with the horrors of mass incarceration that black men and women endure. What we experienced was a millisecond’s faint taste of that.

  Still, once I was out, I couldn’t stop shaking. I hated myself for it, when I had had it so easy. But I shook, because even that tiny brush with incarceration had chilled me.

  I buried my head on Fred’s shoulder and whispered, “Drag me home.”

  For two months, Occupy had so much. Then, suddenly, we did not.

  I am an artist, not a political organizer. During Occupy, I drew pictures, marched, and helped however I could. Impassioned but peripheral, I was more loyal to my sketchbook than any movement.

  Cops never broke my ribs. I never picked up trash, cooked a meal, or organized a demonstration. After every march, I went back to my studio to draw. I never froze in a tent all night, hoping to use my body as a placeholder for the new world.

  If I seem to remember Zuccotti through the rosy light of an Instagram filter, maybe that’s why. As the months wore on, those who sacrificed the most for Occupy became some of its most bitter critics. Their disappointment is more real than my love.

  I conceived one Shell Game painting, Our Lady of Liberty Park, as an homage to Occupy. Its central figure was a beautiful black woman wearing a ruff of orange police netting. Her hair was braided around Joie de Vivre, the red sculpture that dominated Zuccotti. Her arms bore zip-cuff bracelets, and her dress was a tarp covered with protest signs featuring actual protest slogans, including “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.” Shrouded by Our Lady’s tarps, my American mice reenacted Zuccotti Park—the marches, the soup kitchen, the medics, even that vile drum circle. Doberman cops in riot helmets menaced the protestors, beating, macing, and arresting them.

  Banker cats watched from above, waiting for their servants to clear the park.

  On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York.

  The previous winter, a much-hyped hurricane had bypassed the city, leaving our shelves cluttered with candles and canned goods. As a result, Fred and I didn’t take the threat of Sandy seriously. We thought, at worst, that the power might be out for a day.

  In preparation for the new storm, Bloomberg had divided up the city into flood zones. Those in Zone A, closest to the water, would have to evacuate. We lived in Zone B, so we decided to stay. I was just starting Debt and Her Debtors, the sixth piece in Shell Game, and there were so many mice left to paint.

  The rain began to fall. It beat against our windows. Between the storm and the darkness, I could see little. But I could hear things: Branches snapping. Phone booths tipping. Glass shattering. Outside, the sea rose, and millions of gallons of water poured into the subterranean power stations.

  At six o’clock that evening, the lights flickered off.

  If hadn’t been raining, the night might have been dark enough to see the stars. In that stillness, the only electricity was the light from the windows of the Goldman Sachs building. Of course, they had their own generators.

  For light, but also for luck, I lit green candles for Santa Marta la Dominadora. Fred and I fell asleep in their flame’s frail glow. We were in New York, the center of the empire. The city would patch itself up by morning.

  When we woke up, our power was still off—as it was for millions of homes, from Far Rockaway to the Jersey Shore. We were on the seventh floor, high enough to avoid any flooding. But the power outage knocked out our water supply, and we had to flush our toilet with buckets of water we’d saved in our tub.

  In the uneasy daylight, we took a walk through the ruined neighborhood. The pay
phones were dead. The storefronts by the river had been bashed in—looted, I hoped, since toxic river water would have destroyed any inventory left inside. A few shopkeepers in wading boots picked through the remains.

  We walked east. Crushed cars lay strewn around the entrances of the underground parking garages down Pine Street; they’d been hoisted off the ground by the tide, then smashed down when it receded. Later, I heard that one of those garages contained the corpse of an attendant whose boss demanded he work through the storm.

  Our neighborhood’s sole open restaurant served instant coffee at an extreme markup. Crowds lined up for it, then sipped it in the dark.

  Back in the apartment, we charged our phones from an iPod dock. I called my friend Clayton Cubitt, a photographer who lived in Williamsburg. With neither power nor water, we needed a place to stay.

  Though he was already sheltering a collection of storm refugees, he graciously offered us a bed.

  Clayton came from New Orleans, so he had painful memories of Hurricane Katrina. It had been seven years since that storm broke the levees protecting his city, stranding thousands of residents. Nearly ten thousand were left at the Superdome, without water, food, or sanitation—even as President Bush glibly congratulated FEMA director Michael Brown on the “heckuva job” he’d done. Sandy was a shadow of Katrina, but storms highlighted the frailty of cities, as well as the need to take care of each other.

  Public transit was down, so Fred and I walked the four miles to Clayton’s apartment. The lights on the Williamsburg Bridge were dead near the Manhattan side, but toward the center they sprang on. Standing there, we looked back at a city divided into a checkerboard of dark and light zones. Williamsburg, too high for the floodwaters, remained untouched and bright.