by John Sladek
The Virginia state troopers arrive and wade into a suspicious-looking group of Negroes—city cops in plainclothes. These dectectives are Maced out of action for the rest of the riot.
Arsonists begin setting fires in timed pairs to frustrate firemen; two or three fires are started at the same time, just over a hose-length apart.
The steps of one police station are smeared with excrement; one cop slips and falls, fracturing a rib. Newstime magazine singles out this incident (‘a pointless and disgusting gesture’) and features it prominently in their story the following week, ‘WASHINGTON: THE RIOT CITY’. Newstime’s analysis is statistical (‘Hurled were 7,420 broken bottles, 847 bricks…’) and topographic (‘Map shows damage area’) as well as alliterative (‘Discotheques and Discontent’).
Delaware National Guardsmen arrive to protect the Lincoln Memorial (a quick informal survey has shown that the majority of rioters of all groups would like to mess it up). They are attacked first by HOMODRAFT, a ferocious band of homosexuals who want the draft laws changed to let them be soldiers. Federal marshals backing up the troops panic and let go with their riot guns, wounding more Guardsmen than queers. All Federal agencies are alerted to the possibility of ‘queer backlash’.
Students for Chairman Fat run through all districts, chanting and pasting hero pictures over everything. Brothers of the Black Claw have settled down to rooftop sniping. A few soldiers have deserted to join in looting. Five or six old-line Communists totter around, distributing leaflets and urging the workers to unite. The workers are hot-wiring trucks to carry away the stuff they’ve collected.
‘To each according to his need…’
‘GAT OUTA DA WAY YA OLD CREEP OR I’LL DRIVE TRU YA!’
Complications: Someone has looted a uniform shop catering to the police and armed forces. Before the riot is over dozens of pseudo-cops and fake Army officers swarm over the city, adding to the confusion.
A student anarchist group changes their name and prints a new manifesto once or twice an hour. With their mimeo machine in the back of a panel truck they tour the city, dropping white racist manifestos in the black areas, anti-Semitic handouts in Jewish neighborhoods, Nazi, Chairman Fat, black racist stuff where appropriate. Their little demos support all sides, with the object of panicking everyone else and thus preserving their own identity by contrast.
The ‘queer backlash’ news cheers up the cops, who knew down deep who the Enemy was all along.
At Union Station a group departing for New York to the Transvestites Anonymous convention are dragged (in drag) off the train by Federal marshals, gassed and clubbed. A White Shirts’ contingent sees only men in gas masks belaboring women with clubs. It makes their Southern Comfort boil. In the ensuing battle no one notices the arriva lof a Utopi Indian and his white prisoner…
On the Mall a few vice squad cops have put on women’s clothes to bait muggers and rapists. An army of Maryland state cops closes in…
After their first battle, Wes Davis and twenty trusted lieutenants disappear; they hole up with plenty of provisions in the top floor of an expensive hotel.
‘Aint as if we was running out,’ Wes explains. ‘Hell, we can watch it on television just as good.’
Six anti-memorialists who call themselves Burning World (motto: ‘Today Now!’) dress as Marine officers and pass through the lines guarding the Lincoln Memorial, where they plant a bomb. The blast kills them and a few of the Delaware Guard, and completely demolishes the tomb. Two blocks away, a Soviet official coming out of the State Department door is instantly lobotomized by a flying fragment of what proves to be Lincoln’s mole.
Students for Chairman Fat march among the stunned and bleeding soldiers in triumph, pausing only to paste pictures of Fat on helmets of the fallen, or to cop a grenade.
The Klan are out on the Mall, raping a Negro vice-squad cop in drag…forty have been in already without noticing anything odd.
‘Hey, the boas done blown up the Lincoln Memorial! EEEEEyahoooo!’ They set up a wooden cross by the Reflecting Pool and ignite it.
It explodes. One of the Fat-ists has slipped a grenade in the kindling. A Goblin is killed and a Cyclops loses an eye.
Angry tourists mill around the ruins of Lincoln’s tomb. They jump the prostrate Guardsmen, flailing away with thermos bottles, cameras and campstools. ‘You son of a bitch, you could have kept it up until I got a picture of it!’
‘Kick his nuts off, Gladys! Our whole trip’s ruined!’
The man from Babel Tours rushes among them, trying to make peace. ‘Girls, girls! Fellas, fellas! Let’s be sensible, now. No use losing our tempers. Now let’s all go over to the Washington Memorial…the big spire over there. And let’s try to keep together this time.’
The Pentagon’s MODULOG program is making things worse. Ideally the computer team would feed in data about concentrations of rioters (number, race, armament, deployment) and the computer would automatically dispatch the right number and kind of troops to deal with it. But in practice the machine doesn’t seem to be listening.
Troop, police and supply movements are getting snarled. Paratroops are dropped for no special reason in Chesapeake Bay. One Marine unit hits the beach in Baltimore; a CBW unit is reassigned over thirty times, each time to a different random location—they never even have time to unpack their assortment of sophisticated gases. Contradictory orders follow one another like machine-gun bullets; One tank command spends the whole riot ruining the lawn of the National Gallery as they roll around in circles…
There are jurisdictional disputes caused by MODULOG’S erratic assignments: The Army and the Virginia National Guard claim the same turf…the MPs have to move in on both of them with gas-firing tanks to prevent an intra-service war.
A lone sniper has barricaded himself in the top of the Washington monument. The police call up with a bull-horn asking him to give give give himself give himself himself up himself up up up. He is variously indentified as a Negro, a Chinese, Indian, Soviet ambassador, anarchist, etc.
The Klan catch six White Shirts still in blackface from the parade. As it happens, there are six lampposts right handy.
‘Please! No! Wait, you’ve got us wrong. We’re white as you are!’
‘Haw haw, this black son bitch gone try tell me he’s white, Rufe, you heah that? Haw haw—Arrrgh!’
The Grand Goblin falls forward, a fire arrow quivering in his back. War whoops. A band of Iroquois descend from their lair on the high steel of a nearby construction site. In a minute, it’s all over but the scalping. After the Indians leave, Negro children roll the living and the dead. The Iroquois have already taken the sheets, but there are a few credit cards…They pause to wave at a boy in uniform, riding in on a boxcar…
Bronze-chinned soldiers scour the city for pederasts. A boy scout is leading a blind man across the street, taking his hand. An armored car pauses to mow down the pair with heavy machine-gun fire, then moves on, broadcasting:
‘Keep in your homes! There is nothing to worry about, the situation is under control!’
Inside, the atmosphere is stifling. The corporal shuts off the amplifier and asks, ‘Lootenant, we got any more Pepsi?’
‘Naw, wait’ll we stop for gas. Not this station here, the next on the right. They give double green stamps.’
The incipient queer-fears of lawmen have by now been fully aroused. Twenty Klansmen are surrounded, Plunked and kicked to emasculinity. (Plunk: a new riot-control gas which paralyses the victim’s limbs but leaves him fully conscious and capable of feeling intense pain. ‘A cop’s dream’ says the American Law Enforcement Bulletin.) A carload of Daughters of the American Legion, out slumming, are arrested as drag queens and subjected to interesting humilitations.
‘My good man, do you realize who I am?’
Nasty laugh. ‘No I don’t, tooty-frooty, but I’m sure gonna find out.’ Tries to pull away her blue-rinsed hair, gives up when some of the scalp comes up. The cops take them back to the new detention center on th
e Mall, where they can ‘put on a little show, like you done at the Fadeout Club.’
‘There’s one of ‘em! Get the bastard!’ Virginia state troopers pile’ out of their cars and chase Cardinal Homer across the lawn of his residence. Ten Knights of Columbus try to fight a rearguard action with blunt sabers; a few cops stop to slap the cuffs on them and haul them off as pimps.
The main body are almost within grabbing distance of his streaming red cloak when a platoon of Mafia gorillas step out from the bushes and lay down a withering crossfire: Thompson submachine-guns, captured army automatic rifles, magnum-style Italian assassination guns…
‘You okay, fadda? Anybody else gets smaht wit ya, you just tell Big Fats, and I’ll lean on ‘em a little.’
Frustrated pilots slew around in the sky, now and then popping a Skybolt at some fishing boat off the coast.…Each pilot’s worried sick he might be queer and not know it.…
‘Now let’s see, what’s that unidentified craft down there? Looks like a Russian trawler to me…so what if they’ve disguised it as the Presidential yacht…well I’m a happippily mumarried man, two great kikids…DIE, RUSSIAN SPY SHIP!…so what if there was that time in flight school, nobody knows about that…’
Zionist students picket the Arab embassies, as usual blaming these poor oil billionaires for everything. The Arabs cower inside, stoned to inertia. Their flowing robes, the way they reek of kif, makes the Marine Guards sick.
‘For two cents I’d turn this machine-gun around the other way. I mean, here we are, guarding a buncha pansies…’
‘I know how ya feel, kid. But we’re pertecting our oil inneress—on the other hand, who’d know it was us?—Here’s a nickle, kid. Have an orgy.’
They pick up their weapons and stroll inside, through the elaborate mosaic hallway. ‘You take this end, I’ll take that one. But fer Chrissakes, kid, don’t shoot up the harem. Might come in handy later…’
The President’s evacuation plan is readied. He is to take the underground passage to Blair House, then helicopter from the roof to the submarine Scampi waiting in the mouth of Delaware Bay.
Everybody has a plan for getting the nut down from the Washington monument. The cops want to rush up the stairs and just take him. The Marines, traditionalists ever, want to use mortars with white phosphorus or mustard gas. The Navy put out feelers about shelling it from a battleship offshore, but nobody’s buying.
Up in the monument, the sniper picks off two more civil servants, raising his score to 48. He has his own loudhailer:
‘Listen to me, down there! You have all failed to make a distinction somewhere. Drop your weapons one and all, and come up here with your hands up! By the way, can anyone tell me why the Little Moron wore a condom when he went whaling?’
The Pentagon is defended by National Guardsmen from five states, Federal troops and Federal marshals equipped with the latest in chemical sprays, including Plunk, Mace and Mush (Mush sends the victim into an acute panic and at the same time causes behavior to become automatic and repetitive. He begins to run away and is usually found some ten or fifteen miles away, dead of heart failure).
Inside, specially-flown-in teams of experts are looking over the computer to find out what’s wrong with it. A dozen men in suits with IBM shoulders stand around the big round table in the War Room going over schematics.
Brigadier General Garner, acting chief of staff, sticks his head in. ‘About through with our table, gentlemen? The battle-board’s under all your papers there, and we can’t get a thing done without it.’
‘We’ve hit a snag, General. George here was just saying it might be the step-up of the differentiable multiplex write-in analyzer, but the rest of us opt for improved multi-scan facilities and a new software package.’
‘That so?’ The general closes the door, feeling old. He stops a white-coated technician coming out of the computer room. ‘You tell me, boy, in plain English. Can our brain be saved?’
‘Couldn’t tell you, sir. I just stopped by for coffee; I’m not in this department.’
‘Not a computer man, son?’
‘No sir. My job is feed birth pills to the pigeons, on the roof.’
The lobotomized Soviet official goes beserk in the supermarket, hauls out a huge Russian automatic and begins spraying the place with lead. The manager comes over to reason with him.
‘Look, you can’t act like that in here! You’ll drive all my customers away! What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway?. Who’s gonna pay for that display of canned peaches, 4¢ off this week?’
A dying shopper groans in delirium:
‘And gimme a package of stainless steel razor bl…’
‘He was afraid he might catch Moby Dick!’ screams the bull-horn from the top of the Washington obelisk.
‘We could do it easy,’ says the Navy man. ‘A couple shots to get the range, then POW!’
At that moment, Students for Chairman Fat solve all problems in dealing with him: they crash a stolen truckload of explosives into the base of the monument.
The Capitol is ringed with three cordons of battle-tested paratroopers and an outer wall of more expendable types. At first no one tries the bayonet wall. Then a large contingent of HOMODRAFT rush in, while American Nazis stand by ready to spit on either side. Anti-papists charge, waving contraceptive devices and screaming for the blood of Guy Fawkes. Down the Mall come a hundred Students for Chairman Fat, screaming Chinese syllables insanely and swinging their placards (‘WHY DIE, G.I.?’ ‘FAT IS OUR BROTHER’ and ‘FOLLOW THE CROWDS TO FOOK HING CHINESE LAUNDRY.’) From the rear of the Capitol come a horde of Black Nationalists in African costume, Black Claw of Islam brothers in leather jackets and shades, and the Iroquois. From the North come Klux, White Shirts, and the Organization for the Rights of Gentile, Anglo-Saxon Man, beefed up with a few hefty Daughters of the American Legion (in the front ranks for a spearhead attack). From the South come Zionists, anarchists, Knights of Columbus and Cosa Altra (the boys have been got together), young Communists of sixty and old of ninety, vigilantes, cops on strike, looting antique dealers after a bit of Americana, motorcycle hoods on bikes, the Peace Love Acid World Peace Society (who have no idea what they are here for) and a large auxiliary of aging pachucos in pink shirts and pegged pants (who are just waiting for some wise soldier to bump their shoulders or call their mother a name).
The Nazis’ eyes gleam; they work up their biggest gobs of spit. At the last possible second, when it looks as if everyone is going to impale themselves on bayonets, a team of lost helicopters comes over, spraying out a ton and a half of defoliants. The thick mist descends; everyone is too busy lying flat and fighting for breath to fight anyone else.
One brave soldier manages to stand his post, coughing and sputtering. As a final gesture he bayonets a figure charging toward him in the mist—it’s Senator Vuje, who’s been trying to get in (to use the Senate toilet) for hours.
The cherry blossoms are falling.
Looting and arson spread to all quarters of the city. Weary firemen have just put out a department store for the second time and are packing away their hoses and trophies when a flame-throwing tank comes by and gets it all going again.
‘Aw, fuck this,’ says one firefighter. ‘I been to so many fires today already my boots hurt—all full of transistor radios and watches and stuff.’
‘Our battle plan has several options,’ General Garner explains to his staff. ‘1. Contain the riot without attempting a showdown, erect barriers, then slash and burn out the corruption. 2. Divide the city into sectors, then go in and clean it out a sector at a time. 3. Level unimportant sectors of the city with artillery and/or bombing, defoliate, then napalm the corruption. 4. Evacuate the President and key congressmen (the Hawk list), evacuate our boys, then nuke the joint! I favor number 4, as the way to expend least effort and men for maximum results.’
At that moment a flash message comes in: IT’S OVER.
Garner slugs the messenger and dials the Operations Room himself.
‘What the hell do you mean, “it’s over”?’
‘That’s right, General. All units report their sectors are pretty well under control. Just mopping up, sir.’
‘And the rioters?’
‘Looks like they just tired of it and went home.’
Twenty-Three
Wes Davis sat up in bed.
‘A nigger plot!’
‘You all right, chief?’ One of his lieutenants came towards him.
‘Stayawaystayaway!’
‘Sure, Wes. Anything you say.’
Another man stood up in the shadowy end of the room. ‘It’s only us, Wes. Skeeter and Travis.’
Wes held up a trembling hand. ‘Don’t come no closer! Turn on a light so’s I can see you, boa.’
Skeeter turned on a light. It was dead quiet in the hotel room. The faint woodpecker sound of a machine-gun, twenty floors below, competed with Wes’s cautious breathing—his two friends held theirs.
‘Guess I had a bad dream. Is it—all over down there?’
‘No sir. Looks bad, Wes.’ Skeeter two-fingered his pack of Luckies up from his shirt pocket, flicked one into the air and caught it in his mouth. ‘Looks like the nigras is taking over.’
‘Just say that again, mister, and I’ll have your guts hanging on the Christmas tree.’ A chair scraped in the adjoining room. ‘Who’s in there?’
‘Nobody, Wes. Just some of the boas. Oh yeah, and a couple Secret Service agents. They said they got to pertect you cause you’re a presidential candidate. I guess they already evacuated the President.’
‘Get them OUT! And bring everybody else in HERE.’
Wes stood up and gripped the bottom edge of his denim jacket, to steady himself. His knees didn’t feel too good. When the group of White Shirts filed in, he looked hard at every face. ‘Line ‘em up over there.’