“What a fucking dickhead!” Emerson knew Jack Covert had
emotional issues but he always pinned him for being a real activist; maybe he
had reasons to be clandestine, Emerson always covered for him. But this was
serious; Jack Covert abandoned his colleague Emerson Davinsky on the
battlefield!
As soon as he
heard the frantic running chaos in the street, Jack Covert turned his bicycle
around, and walked with it the other way. He would have ridden it the other way
but there were too many human obstacles in the street for him to make a clean
getaway.
“I’m going,” Emerson heard him say; just like
that. There was no need for a cell phone or the text messages a newfangled
Blackberry could provide. Even the communications system in the immense
AT&T relay station behind them wasn’t necessary; Emerson heard it with his
two good ears; “I’m leaving,” said Jack with a slight look of fear in his
squinty eyes.
They had met there on
that corner near Bryant Park not even a half hour earlier, Emerson there by
subway, Jack on his bicycle he’d taken over the Brooklyn Bridge to arrive. To
Jack, it was a joy ride; it stopped when the danger started. Sure, Jack Covert
was there as he said he would be, even on time as a Pavlov dog is to a school
bell, but he was not there with Emerson as Emerson had thought, not really
there with him. In what became clear
to Emerson over the years of their knowing each other, working in the same
school, membership in the same organization, interest in the same topics, in
typical Jack Covert style, Covert was there but he wasn’t together with anyone,
anyone. Jack himself wouldn’t call it “being alone” because he knew that it was
the way of many post-anarchist dickheads to existentially be alone even when
acting together with others, never for the good of mankind, always alone. Nope.
Jack was out of there, through the path of least resistance, to the least
possible trouble he could encounter, and he walked away with the bicycle, just
walked away, from Emerson, his colleague, friend and comrade; just walked away
when the battle on the streets was getting heated. Emerson was disappointed to
find that out about him; Jack was the closest thing Emerson had to a friend in
the progressive movement. Emerson watched him weave his bike casually down
Avenue of the Americas and by 40th Street, he was out of sight.
Emerson had a
decision to make. He could stand there in disbelief. He could shouted out,
“Wait, I’m coming with you!” if his friendship to Jack was more important than
the demonstration they’d gone there to participate in. That was not what Emerson
Davinsky decided to do; he chose to continue on, to soldier on and do the legal
marshaling he had agreed to do at that meeting the week before near Thompson
Square Park. He felt so on his own, he felt so all alone, a character flaw Jack
might call it, a childish emotion not befitting a warrior.
Emerson took a deep
breath, turned the corner of Avenue of the Americas across from Bryant Park,
across from that newspaper stand with the socialist periodicals, the one he
learned about the Radical Guardian, Workers World, The Daily World, The
Socialist Worker; the one with no socialist periodicals for sale anymore. He
walked down 42nd Street to Times Square to the appointed time and
place of the happening he was to attend and marshal; his job, to write the name
of the cop that arrested any of his compatriots and find out which holding pen
in which precinct they were being taken to, to write down the hat number of any
cop that abused a demonstrator for legal action against him later on in court,
but to keep at least one foot on the sidewalk so he wouldn't get arrested
himself; those were the rules of the game “oly-oly oxen free.”
He found a way to get
there around the swelling crowd of protesters and onlookers and Times Square
gawkers. There, to where at 12:00 noon, before the days of ‘flash mobs,’ they
were all to meet and create diversion so the volunteers could assemble the
twenty foot tall wooden tripod, a tripod with a seat at the top, a seat where a
brave protester would dare police to remove him from and risk him bodily harm.
In the crowd, he saw The Carpenter, he saw Brad Will with his camera, he saw a
few people he remembered from ABC No Rio, and he saw Adonis. All were there;
Emerson was not alone.
The guerrilla theater
protest went on as scheduled. The police were surprised and not ready to stop
it before it happened. The plan worked. These brave souls were going to get the
media attention they craved, better than acting out dramas with expressive
signs for the microphone-less closed circuit TV’s on the subway platforms and
streets that they’d been acting out and sharing in the early days of social
media.
There the daredevil
was; twenty feet above the pavement, a protest, a dare to get him down in the
days when the police still had to worry about following the law and being
accountable. The police were advised by their white shirt captain not to let it
get any media attention; to keep it down. Then the chanting began as the police
jostled toward the erection guarded by activists sworn to protect the safety of
their perched comrade.
“Whose streets?”
“Our Street!”
“Whose street?!?”
“”Our Streets”
Critical mass was going to guard their right to ride their bikes in the streets
of Manhattan.
“Whose streets?”
“Our streets!” On
went the chanting, louder and louder, a hundred protesters strong among the
thousands that kept police busy all overt midtown, the confusion of police
jostling to get their vehicle close enough to arrest all the demonstrators
creating a disturbance, and the tourists gawking and pushing to see what in
blazes was going on, to abuse the one’s they could get away with abusing out of
the glare of the camera in the days when smart phone cameras would have made a
world of difference; now it doesn’t matter anymore.
The crowd cheered as
the surreptitious tripod was guarded below, and Adonis was arrested, damn it;
the police caught him off the sidewalk helping his comrade not fall down and he
was arrested. Emerson kept his foot on the sidewalk. He took out his pen and
wrote the cops service number onto his forearm in blue ink. He heard from
another marshal that they were being taken to the Chinatown precinct, for some
reason.
Other events went as
planned. There was a sit-in in front of the military recruitment center where
Broadway and Seventh Avenues crossed on 43rd Street; dozens of young
protesters were dragged away and put into police vans but not before the crowd
felt the liberty of fighting off the guilty party of oppression, in the days
when one could still fight off the guilty party of oppression without being
labeled terrorists. Taking over the streets was a distinct possibility in the
days before brutal force was constitutionally guaranteed and painful tactics
were illegal and frowned upon by society, in the days before the society was completely
under surveillance. Back before the back-door destruction of two World Trade
Center Buildings by almost friendly fire, there were still possibilities of
liberty. Emerson didn’t know then what he found out soon enough. The mementos and flyers he had burned in disgust after the
police of America were militarized, he would have had more details but then, in
hindsight, there was no reason to remember how liberty was lost, taken away,
stolen by the government in complicity. No one would believe it. The mementos
would have been the cruelest reminder.
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