At that second, the woman in the veil let out a long scream and slid to the floor. Sister Mary Jane was there even before Marilyn. ‘Quickly!’ she said. ‘Boil some water!’
The riot began with an
incident
of a familiar type. A group of Negroes watching the White Shirt torchlight parade refused to ‘move on’ at a policeman’s order. The cop, a rookie named Joe Haarman, drew his gun and perhaps repeated the order. Among the group was a girl eleven years old…
If anyone expected an apology or promise of investigation by the police, they didn’t know Chief Wiggin. He went on TV that evening to say:
‘Haarman was just doing his job. We’re going to back him up all the way. You can’t go around asking every hoodlum his
age
before you shoot. A cop has to think fast in a situation like that. And don’t forget, men like Haarman are out there every night, risking their lives to protect you and yours.’
UP YOU AND YOURS, WIG
signs appeared instantly in many windows all over the Negro district. Negro citizens’ groups started the long, tedious process of making official protests and trying to get the chief to say maybe Haarman had after all been hasty. Others preferred direct methods.
To stave off trouble, riot cops began unwarranted slum-to-slum searches for hidden caches of weapons.
The Justice Department is worried. Five hundred Federal marshals are called on duty and issued with gas masks, Mace, riot guns, side-arms and clubs. The Attorney General addresses them:
‘I want to make this clear—your mission is not to aggravate violence, but to quell it. Should any disturbances break out, they are to be handled as peacefully and diplomatically as possible. I don’t want to see a lot of pictures in the papers tomorrow of kids with bleeding heads, pregnant women being dragged by the feet, and so on. Is that clear?’
‘Yeah, we got it, sir.
No pictures
.’ Winks. Smack of weighted club on palm. ‘You leave everything to us, sir.’
Cardinal James Homer, whom the papers describe as ‘flinty’, ‘an outspoken conservative’, is giving a sermon at the dedication of a new Knights of Columbus chapel, a slick new building in the midst of the ghetto.
‘Dangerous radicals and shiftless degenerates need to be taught a lesson. The trouble with
most
of our lawmen is they just don’t shoot to kill!’
The doors burst open and several hundred Black Nationalists, White Shirts, cops and snarling dogs all swarm in and chase each other around the sanctuary. Marshals close in outside, smash out the new stained-glass windows of SS. Christopher and Filomena and lob in teargas.
‘O Jesus!’ says one cop, seeing where he is. ‘O Jesus! The Mafia ain’t gonna like this…’
One story spreads that Haarman is a Catholic, another that he is a Jew. White Shirts at the convention hall hear that a black cop killed a little white girl who refused to submit to him. Catholics hear that Masons have murdered the cardinal.
A dozen night-rider Klansmen in full hooded regalia are packed into a hotted-up old Merc tearing down the Southwest Freeway on their way to the White Shirt rally.
‘How many notches you got on that old shotgun, Billy Bee?’
‘Well, I don’t rightly recolleck…lessee…this one don’t count, cause after we hanged and burned and shot the son bitch, he up and ran off…what’s that burnin’ yonder?’
‘Git off my eyehole so’s I can see. Hot damn! Looks like the convention hall itself!’
A clever White Shirt has set their own convention hall on fire to guarantee the sympathy of many potential voters (the convention, and choosing a candidate, are mere formalities anyway). The White Shirts come charging out, armed with guns, tire irons, homemade clubs prepared weeks in advance for this emergency. In the street their numbers are swelled by Klansmen and Nazis; they run, yelling and screaming for a hundred feet before they encounter a shoe shine boy.
But as they stop to attack him they realize they’ve been decoyed: black militants and street gangs close in from both ends of the street, armed with garbage-can lids, guns, zip-guns, broken bottles and chains.
The first police on the scene take one look and barricade both ends of the street to let them fight it out. But a quick head count shows more black than white; they put in a call for the riot squad.
The riot squad moves in with teargas, clubs and Alsatians, chopping their way for no particular reason to the center of the mob, which closes right in behind them. They’re rescued an hour later and withdraw with heavy casualties, including a gassed dog and a cop with canine throat slashes.
Enzio (‘The Head’) Gagliardi comes out of a Negro club where he’s just been collecting an insurance premium (twice the club’s rent) to find his Cadillac’s been worked over. His ice-blue eyes move from detail to detail: All tinted glass smashed, the radio gone, the hood spray-painted with slogans and plastered with posters of Chairman Fat Tsing:
‘LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN FAT
,’ he spells out.
‘Republicans, eh? So Fats Funicolo wants to play the Old Rules, does he? I guess I’m not too old to handle a heater. Get some of the boys together. Call Cleveland, Chi, L.A., Vegas…’
‘But, boss, we and Fats are all brothers in Cosa Altra.’
‘Fuck that. Anybody breaks the pretty dual aerials off my little honey here ain’t nobody’s brother! Call a war council.’
A vigilante mob called the Big Stick Men, all wearing tricorner hats and carrying muskets, set up an ambush for any un-American elements that might wander by. They manage to pick off a black postman and a paper boy who might be of foreign extraction.
Then the Islamic Brotherhood of the Black Claw outflanks and roars down on them, throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails, and assisted by the machete-swinging Bolivian Urban Guerilla Brigade.
‘Hold your fire!’ shouts the Big Stick commander, raising his saber. ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’
‘But Commander, they’re all wearing dark glasses!’
The muzzle-loaders won’t fire anyway, and in half an hour the street is empty but for broken glass, blood slicks, and a tricorner hat perched on a lamppost.
The Black Buddhists decide to sit down in protest on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Klan move in at once with blacksnake whips and hobnail boots. The cops sit by until they’ve had their fun, then tell them to keep back on the sidewalk.
‘I don’t like this,’ says one cop, spraying Mace liberally over some dying buddhists. ‘I mean, they didn’t leave a hell of a lot for us, did they?’
‘Wait till we get them back to the station house,’ his partner says. ‘Plenty of life in there yet. What I like to do is hamstring two of them and make them race on all fours down the hall, goosing them up with cattle prods. The winner gets maybe a drink of water, and the loser gets his prick cut off—you know, “accidently he stood too close to the paper guillotine”…I know cops that won’t use nothing else for a sap, just one of them filled with buckshot…’
The Klan are jealous. ‘We’re leaving now,’ their leader calls. ‘But we’ll be back—with a steamroller.’
The original ‘sides’ are blurring already. Among the city cops are Catholics, Jews, Negroes and sympathizers with the Klan; this is true also of the FBI, the Federal marshals and the militias of three states who are now getting into the act. Some Catholics are White Shirts; some Jews are anarchists; some Catholics and Jews own Negro tenements; the landlord of a poor white slum contributes heavily to the American Nazi Party. All of the organizations involved, from Big Stick and the Klan to Students for Chairman Fat, include spies from the FBI, CIA, city police and cops from three states, as well as spies from other groups. Splits and coalitions are common and frequent. It’s getting harder to decide who ‘they’ are.
No one is necessarily what he seems, and no one is ‘just’ an anarchist, Negro or cop.
Ad hoc
committees are formed almost spontaneously, often without names; everyone is able, finding himself performing any atrocity, to believe it is not the
real
him doing this—and there are enough secret sympathies to justify anything.
A strategist at the Pentagon tries to work it all out with the help of CIA reports.
He dictates a memo to the general staff: The main possible types of conflict are
Racial
Religious
Ethnic
Income level (relative prosperity)
Relative authoritarianism
Relative age
Sexual preference (relative heterosexuality)
or some combination of any of these. No classification of these seems complete: an anti-Semite usually hates a Black Muslim who hates a black Jew who hates a homosexual Jew and a white Jew about equally, who hate each other, and who also both may hate a white Jewish cop who hates his superior who hates an anti-authoritarian young man who hates an authoritarian young man who hates and envies anyone wealthier than he.
“The city is an equation of
x
unknowns…there may actually be more
sides
than
individuals
,’ he concludes, ‘and everyone is not just alone, but incomplete…’
The general staff decide he means ‘put the Marines in to guard the Arab embassies’, which they do. The Arabs call up the State Department every five minutes thereafter, reporting Zionists sneaking around in camouflaged uniforms.
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.