By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here for a Chapter Index.
Chapter Twelve
June 16 Again (as reconstructed from later conversations)
Until there was too much tear gas to breathe, Nell had stood between the
rock throwers and the police lines, then, diving past horse hooves and
dodging the black-clad rock-throwers, she’d run to the back of the
swarm of protesters.
“I couldn’t stop the violence...you did see that all the rock throwers were men, right?...I was back there and I looked for Jean. I didn’t want to leave her, but, she was nowhere and I, you know, I thought they were going to kill us.”
Huddled on the other side of 19th Street were the protesters from her group--Democracy Partners--and a few more who’d stayed at our house. After telling them that there was nothing else that could be done, she’d led them down G street. They were coughing and heaving and/or couldn’t see or their eyes were so blood-red from the tear gas or pepper spray that they had to be led by the hand. Strangely, they weren’t followed or chased.
“It’s probably because we didn’t run,” she said. “Predators chase what runs from them.”
She’d once dated a guy who’d shown her--I’m sure for sex, though she didn’t say it--into and through a series of pipe-filled maintenance tunnels that ran under GW’s classroom buildings. So that’s where she led them...through a small maintenance door, through a smaller steel door, down a ladder and then, half-bent over so as not to hit their heads, through the tunnels themselves. They had no idea if the situation they were running from would be any better than the situation they were running to. Nell got lost a couple of times and the group had to double back, but finally, almost at random, they’d found a tunnel that ended at another steel door.
On the other side was a small steel staircase at the top of which they found themselves backstage at a production of Oklahoma. Most of the large cast was standing in the wings waiting for their cues and wore straw hats and checkered shirts so that between the wounded protesters and the big-smiling actors, there was some yin/yang theatrical time warp that threatened to turn Oklahoma into a whole other show. The cast looked shocked to see them and most were silent, but one of the cowboys, looked at Nell and said, “You guys doing a punk version of Hair?... Cool.”
Exiting, they were on H street, 3 blocks from the protest. They tried walking towards 23rd, then towards Constitution, but they found police lines in every direction. The zone had been quarantined.
Realizing that there weren’t many options and that the police would soon be combing the area, Nell’d canvassed her group for ideas. Mostly, there were none, though a woman she didn’t know suggested that they turn themselves in, in a “show of solidarity” with the protesters who’d been arrested.
“The police are really riled up right now,” she’d told them. “They might be kinda of violent.”
Nell didn’t know how right she was. At that same exact moment, somewhere near 23rd street, I must have been running with Tiny and her broken arm.
“Then I had this brainstorm,” Nell said, “I’d been in Tower records just the week before and I’d gone up to the Classical section. It was on the 2nd floor and down a long hallway and no one was in there. It was just so closed off from the rest of the store. So, I took them there.”
Outside, the police chased down and arrested anyone they thought looked like a protester. Inside, the group browsed, coughed, hacked, wheezed, and spluttered. All while listening to Brahms.
But, it couldn’t last. They had to try and escape at some point so after an hour they made a plan. They’d break into groups of twos and threes and, at five-minute intervals, leave by different exits.
“It was so harrowing,” she told me. “My coworker, Ray, went with the first group. He had a nasty welt on the side of his head and he could barely see and we had no way of communicating whether the plan was working. We just thought that we’d have more of a chance in smaller groups and if Ray and I were split up, at least one of us might be free to call a lawyer.”
Headed towards the far exit, Nell and the two teens she was grouped with passed a Gap.This gave her an idea: they went in and bought new sweaters and a sweatshirt, stopped at the ice cream parlor and got cones and walked out the Pennsylvania Ave. side looking like students.
“Like innocent bystanders?” I suggested.
“Are you saying we weren’t ‘innocent’?
“How about ‘non-participants’?” I countered.
She took a moment to think then said, “better.”
The police lines were breaking up. Down the block, closer to where the protests had been, many of the protesters were cuffed and put into paddy wagons. Nell could only watch them be carted away, then she and the two teens walked right by the police line, licking their cones and acting like they had no idea what was going on. The police never even looked at them twice.
“Where’d you go?” I asked.
“I’m
not supposed to tell,” she said.
Jean had made an end run around the police line in front of the World
Bank, found a gap at the far end of H street and managed to get on the
other side of it. “It was all instinct,” she said. “I
don’t remember doing any of it.” There
was no police line at 18th Street -- yet -- so she’d crossed it
and walked up it until H Street continued, then got back on H, passing
in front of the White House.
“There were two lines of riot police and soldiers with machine guns on the grounds. What did they think that that bunch of teenagers would do?” she said. “Scary, that they could feel so threatened so easily.”
“I always think that humans are making progress, evolving, but seeing the White House like that make me think that maybe we aren’t, that maybe everything that looks like progress just looks like that for a second before it turns the wrong way. We’re the original democracy, right? But, that wasn’t democracy out there on the White House lawn.”
“I walked up 16th,” she continued. “The helicopters whirled overhead and I kept thinking, ‘they’re looking for me, they’re looking for me,’ but I knew that was crazy, plus I was hungry, so I started thinking, ’I’m hungry...I’m hungry.’ I couldn’t wait to get home and have more granola and get some sleep. I walked all the way to that bend in Park near Klingle and there was a police car. I saw it and just knew...”
“I didn’t want to get any closer than that, but I had to make sure. So I walked round the bend and there was a line of cops carrying stuff out of our house...” She laughed and slapped her knee and said, “It was funny because we’d just moved that shit in... Anyway, I turned right around and walked back and down 16th to V and went to Teddy and Frank’s. I was dead on my feet at this point and didn’t at all expect what I found.”
“Which was?”
“Well, up and down the whole block, no one was on their stoops and a lot of the bigger junk...dead sofas, appliances... was piled up at the opening to the street like it was intentionally meant to be some sort of roadblock. I got to their door and I could see people moving around inside, but when I knocked? Dead silence.
“‘It’s me, Jean,’ I shouted and, for a second, no one did anything, but then the door opened and it was Frank. You know, he’s not affectionate, but he actually hugged me. And then I saw that Teddy and all the kids were packing shit up--computer equipment, printing equipment. Stuff that wasn’t there last time I was there. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. Teddy, you know how animated he normally is? He got quiet and started looking at his toes.”
“‘Um, Jean, we heard what happened,’ he said. ‘And, Frank, don’t you have something to tell her? Don’t you?”
“Frank looked annoyed,” Jean rolled her eyes just thinking about him,”He’s such a dimwit when he gets caught doing stuff he’s not supposed to do. He can’t admit he’s wrong at all. Everything has to have a good spin...EVERYTHING. So he looks at me and says, ‘Those anarchist kids that caused the riot? Umm...’then he chuckles, like I’m going to find it funny, ‘They’re friends of mine from Eugene and they said they were coming here for the protest and I told them they could stay here.'”
“'’But you couldn’t have known?' I said to him. ‘Right? Right?’ And then he looks at me and laughs again like it’s all just one big misunderstanding, 'They told me they were going to start something, but I didn’t believe them,’ he said. I started to say, ‘You could have called and warned us...’ but I was too stunned to say anything.
Click here of the next chapter.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
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2005 Me Three