Chapter 11: Disruption

WE ALL COMPARED NOTES at dinner that evening. I absolutely loved having my family together each evening. Then I thought about how things were changing. My family was all together, but Elizabeth was in Las Vegas. I wasn’t sure I counted her anymore. But the four of us plus Toni made a nice family at the dinner table.

“I volunteered to help clean up the Institute,” Ronda said. “I know the people who trashed it thought they were striking out against the war, but I’m not studying how to make war. I’m studying how to make peace. Then there was a ruckus over by the National Guard Armory building. National Guard are staging there, ‘just in case.’ After a brief confrontation, though, the commander agreed to lower the flag to half staff in honor of the students at Kent State.”

“Flag lowering was all that happened in Rockford. No one stayed out of class. No signs were carried. They lowered the flag to half staff and told us all it was a terrible thing that happened and we should all be thankful to be in a sane and sensible environment,” Anna said. “It sort of makes me want to not go back.”

“There were a lot of students in the store today,” Patricia said. “I heard them say about half were boycotting classes and there would be a vote at the University tomorrow regarding whether to strike.”

“I think there is no need for a vote downtown. Students from all four Loop schools were on the streets. Not everyone, but I’d guess most will be out tomorrow. I won’t cross picket lines,” I said. “Carrie says there’s a national strike committee being coordinated out of Brandeis in Massachusetts. I think all they’re doing, though, is collecting information about who is going to shut down what schools.”

“Well, Kent State has already said it isn’t reopening this spring,” Ronda said. “It sounds like the University of Washington has already called a general strike and has shut down.”

“I ... um ... I don’t do this very often. I think that’s because of my own doubts. But when faced with situations like this, Reverend Mother Superior always suggested we pray. I ... uh ... don’t want to force the family into something, though.”

“Would you lead us in that prayer, Nate?” Patricia asked. “It doesn’t mean we’re all religious or anything, but sometimes things seem bigger than we are. It would be nice to at least ask for guidance.”

I looked from Patricia to Ronda to Anna. All three nodded. I held out my hands and took Anna’s on one side of me and Toni’s on the other. She’d been to church enough times that she knew what was happening when we bowed our heads.

“Lord, you don’t hear from us much and we try not to be a bother. We’re not ... or at least I’m not all that good a person, but I try to do right and not hurt anyone. There’s a lot of stuff going down around us and like it or not, we’re all going to be involved one way or another. We’d just like to ask two things that Mom always said. Help us make good decisions. We might not always know what’s right, so just give us a little nudge, please. And Lord, please protect our family and loved ones and keep them from harm. That’s really all we can ask. Amen.”

“Amen,” chorused my girlfriends.

“Sunny school?” Toni asked.

We all laughed and got things cleaned up and put away for the night. I sat with Toni in the beanbag chair and read Red Fish, Blue Fish one more time. My girlfriends all sat close to us, reaching out to hold hands or touch each other. We got Toni to bed and all sang to her together. That precious little girl was out like a light.

“Oh, Nate, there was mail today,” Patricia said. “You have a letter.”

“What’s this?” I said. I looked at the envelope to see it was from Photosensitive Productions. I tore it open.

“What do they want? Are we going back to Las Vegas?”

“Ah, no. They’ve started production and they’d like me to check out a few holes in the script for them.”

“Did they send it?”

“No. They just asked how soon I could come to LA and asked me to call Chrystal to make arrangements.”

“You can go,” Ronda said. “When your classes are out, I’ll still have three weeks of classes to go.”

“I’ll still have a week. You and Patricia could go.”

“I don’t think Toni would enjoy LA that much,” Patricia said. “Why don’t you just fly out, do the business, and fly back?”

“Oh, I know!” Ronda said. “I bet you could stay with Adrienne! That would be just what you need after these stressful times. She might even go to meetings with you and make the producer and writers lose track of what they are thinking.”

“Are you guys sure? I could just tell them I can’t come until June and we’ll all go,” I said. Somehow, the idea of seeing Adrienne was appealing. She was really very therapeutic.

“Call Chrystal and see what you can set up,” Anna agreed.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I can call after I get home and it will still be early Pacific Time. Even with the time difference, it would be too late tonight.”

Besides, if all hell broke loose tomorrow, I wasn’t going to be leaving my family any time soon.

It wasn’t quite hell downtown. The doors to the school were unlocked, but no one was going in. Students were on the sidewalk out front and across the street in Grant Park. Carrie caught up with me and shoved a leaflet into my hands that proclaimed: “Strike! Stop the Invasion of Cambodia. Stop the War in Vietnam. Boycott classes and businesses that are pro-War and pro-Nixon!”

There were details. A rally would be held in Grant Park on Saturday to protest the war and the killings at Kent State.

In some ways, the whole protest reminded me of Carrie’s unfocused activism when we were freshmen. And she was definitely still a believer in all these things, but she’d gotten focused on women’s rights through my introduction of Leva Harmon to her. The flyer also declared, “Free Bobby Seale” and “Free the Chicago Seven!” There was even a nod to the high school education strikes of a year plus ago, calling for the teaching of black studies and more classes in Spanish. There was a little something for everyone.

I pulled my camera out and went on a walk around the block to see how far the protest had gone. I also pulled out my peace symbol. Since the last time I was beaten for wearing it in July, I’d worn it under my shirt unless I knew I was in friendly company. Maybe the best picture in my set that Leslie took was the one that showed the symbol against my chest as I turned to look at her.

Well, if there was a time to declare what side of things I was on, it was now.

A block away from Columbia, Roosevelt College had a sign plastered across its huge double doors that just declared “Closed until further notice.”

I got another flyer that looked like it had been hand written on a stencil and mimeographed.

WE DEMAND

1. That the United States government end its systematic oppression of political dissidents and release all political prisoners such as Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panther Party.

2. That the United States government cease its escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos; That it unilaterally and immediately withdraw all forces from Southeast Asia.

3. That the universities end their complicity with the United States war machine by the immediate end to defense research, ROTC, counterinsurgency research, and all other such programs.

STRIKE!

It included a hand-drawn picture of a gagged Bobby Seale and a hand sketch of a picture I’d seen in the newspaper of a girl kneeling beside the body of one of the protesters at Kent State.

A block farther on, students had strung yellow tape across the entrances to the Art Institute. All along Wabash, the various buildings occupied by DePaul and the other three colleges were locked with signs that declared they were closed.

I stopped at the studio and processed the roll of film, printing pictures of the closed signs and noting on the back what each one was. I put them in an envelope and hustled up to the Trib to drop them off. Of course, a lot of photographers were out. I found out the ROTC building on the University of Chicago campus, where students had negotiated flying the flag at half staff the day before, was on fire. Northwestern, up in Evanston, was on strike and students had blocked streets and set barricades on fire.

By the time I got back to Columbia, a sign had been posted on the doors that simply said, “Classes canceled.” I saw Prof. Hyatt walking among students and stopped to talk to him.

“The faculty met this morning and voted to support the student strike and lock their classrooms,” he said. “This whole thing has gotten out of control with the killings in Ohio. The only safety we have is to outnumber the pigs.”

I was surprised to hear my professor talking like a teenage revolutionary. Just then Mr. Jonas stepped up to us. I hadn’t seen him much after my photojournalism class.

“Are you getting any good pictures?” Jonas asked.

“I took a few up to the Trib an hour ago,” I said. “There are fires up at Northwestern and down at UChicago, though, so I doubt they’ll be interested in anything as tame as what’s going on downtown.”

“It’ll get livelier. There will be ten thousand people gathering here on Saturday,” Jonas said. “It might be the biggest antiwar protest in history when you count all the schools going out on strike. You were in Washington for the Moratorium. This may be bigger. We’ll see if Nixon can watch a football game through this.”

I caught the train home at four. I needed to be in the arms of my family.

“Seventy-five percent of the student body voted to strike,” Ronda said as we sat at the dinner table and caught each other up on our day. “The Law School voted complete strike and protesters set fire to the armory. That’s the news.”

“Columbia faculty voted to join the strike, so the school is closed. I wonder if they’ll extend the school year to finish after the strike like they would in high school if we had too many snow days,” I said. “I also wonder what any of this will mean to student deferments. I’m not too worried unless Nixon decides to send another half million into Cambodia because he can’t keep sending them to Vietnam and still live up to his promise to withdraw troops.”

“And in Rockford news, nothing happened,” Anna said. “We’re an hour and a half outside of Chicago and you’d think we were in a different country. Mention Kent State and people shrug and say, ‘Well, what do you expect?’ We just went on Daylight Saving Time here and they just set their clocks back to 1944.”

“That’s one more good reason for Toni and I to have moved out of Tenbrook. As far as people there are concerned, the issues are settled. Clyde Warren is no longer on the draft board, so there’s really no problem anymore,” Patricia said.

“I think I’ll come down and take pictures at UChicago tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get pictures of some smoking rubble. I don’t think anything will be happening downtown until Saturday’s rally.”

Thursday was a tough day, through no fault of our own. Anna took off for Rockford. Ronda and I walked with Patricia and Toni to daycare and then Patricia’s job. Then Ronda and I walked over to her campus. There were still some students ducking into classroom buildings, a little furtively.

“I hate to see people acting afraid to go to class because everyone else is out. It’s dividing everyone.”

“That’s not all,” Ronda said, pointing across the commons area.

A group was marching onto the commons with signs that disagreed with the prevailing tide. “Kill all Commie Traitors!” read one sign. “Honorable Peace Through Victory in Vietnam,” read another. I saw a couple of army uniforms among them. I didn’t think they were supposed to do that, but what do I know.

“Open the school!” one person shouted.

“Open up! Open up! Open up!” the group chanted. It was hard to take them seriously as there were only twenty or thirty in the group. They stayed clustered close together and there were four or five police officers standing around them. It looked like they were expecting to be attacked.

I snapped a couple of pictures and changed to my 150mm lens so I didn’t need to get too close. There were ten times as many students off to our left holding protest signs and singing songs. They weren’t engaging with the counter protest.

Except one lone guy. He came right up to the front of the group and started handing them flyers. One of the policemen stepped between him and the group and tried to get him to leave. I took pictures of the confrontation, in which the leaflet guy was arguing with the policeman. He stepped away and reached inside his jacket. Somebody in the crowd yelled, “Gun!”

The police officer turned back to the leaflet guy and saw his hand in his jacket. He pulled his gun and shot the guy three times. The other police converged from the sides of the crowd as the mob cheered. The shooter was on his knees beside the body and opened the kid’s jacket. There was nothing there but a piece of paper.

I maneuvered in closer so I could get a straight shot of the officer over the body. Damn Chicago pigs. Now they come onto campus and shoot unarmed students.

Except this cop wasn’t one of the usual pigs. He was kneeling next to the body crying. I took the picture before I realized it was Officer Macalister. One of the good guys.

I don’t know how long I just stood there staring. The other police officers were standing between the body and the two converging crowds. Ronda grabbed my arm and dragged me back away from the commons. She pulled me behind a building and then turned and threw up. I emptied my stomach as well. We’d just seen a cop—one I thought of as a good guy—kill an unarmed protester. Just a bunch of bad circumstances. Tension. Tempers. A shouted word.

“We have to go,” Ronda sobbed. “We have to go.”

We stumbled back toward our apartment as we heard sirens approaching from a dozen different directions, it seemed. Ronda dragged me right on past the apartment and to the train station.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“We have to go to the studio and develop the film so you can get it to the newspaper. You have to show people what happens out here.”

“Yeah. I get it. It’s my job. I need to get pictures to the newspaper.”

We held each other on the train, crying until we reached the Loop and went into the studio.

I processed the film and printed a proof sheet. We chose four pictures that told the story. The crowd. The confrontation. The shooting. And finally, the officer kneeling over the body. I printed them and Ronda dried them. She neatly penned the description on the back of each. Circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back.

We headed down to the Trib and dropped things off. I didn’t want to stay and be interviewed. We took off and wandered among the various protesters in front of the buildings on Michigan Avenue. All the college buildings had big ‘Closed’ signs on their doors.

When we got to Columbia, I recognized several professors and some administrators passing forms out to students. I found Mr. Jonas, who handed me a letter.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“The administration is throwing its lot in with all the students,” Jonas said. “Closed for the duration of the term.”

“What do we do? Get incompletes in everything?” I asked. I started scanning through the letter.

“No. All students who have made satisfactory progress to this point will receive a P for Pass. You’ll get full credit for your classes, but no grade point.”

“Wow! That’s pretty radical.”

“Yes. I believe Roosevelt, DePaul, and The Art Institute are doing the same thing. The presidents all had a meeting last night that lasted most of the night. I understand Northwestern is doing the same thing. I don’t know about the other colleges in town.”

“Nate! Nate, I’m glad I saw you down here. We’d have covered this when I saw you in class if there was one. Your fall work-study has been approved,” Professor Hyatt called to me. “The new camera setup will be installed this summer and we’ll be taking photos for ID badges starting the last of August. Are you in?”

“Wow! I’d almost forgotten about it. Yes. I thought maybe it had been junked as an idea.”

“We’ll be doing freshman IDs starting August thirty-first. Classes start September eighth. It will be chaotic that first week or two. You might have more than the ten hours a week we anticipated,” Hyatt said.

“I can be clear for that. I think we planned to come home from Canada the week before that,” I answered. Wow! Only a month until we were leaving for Canada.

We continued to chat for a while. Occasionally, a group would get together and start a chant or sing songs. Eventually, Ronda and I headed for the train and went home to hold our loved ones.

Ronda and I needed a little extra attention from our lovers Thursday night. First of all, I had to dance with Toni. We put a stack of records on the player and just danced around the room for an hour. Sometimes I held her in my arms and sometimes I just set her on the floor and watched her dance as I danced. She was getting to be pretty good.

I loved that little girl so much! All I wanted was a safe and sane world for her to grow up in. Is that asking too much?

Our passports came in the mail that day and we all sat with them lying in front of us, thinking about where we’d like to go.

We had a nice kettle of beans and bacon on the stove for dinner. I made up a batch of cornbread from Dad’s recipe and when it was done—and not too burned on the bottom—we sat down to a dinner of comfort food.

Comfort was what it was all about. Every once in a while, I’d catch Ronda’s eye and we’d both start to cry silently until our lovers took control and comforted us. It wasn’t every day that you saw someone killed in front of you. He was just there talking one second and the next second he was lying dead on the ground.

After we got Toni settled for the night, the four of us went to bed and just held each other all night long. We didn’t make love. We just needed to hold onto each other.

I didn’t go downtown Friday. There was no reason to. No one had organized anything like pickets or specific protests until Saturday. What was to picket? The colleges had all closed for the rest of the semester. Ronda and I stayed in bed together all morning. Anna walked Patricia and Toni to work and found the two of us deep in making love. It was such an intense moment that we didn’t even hear her in the apartment until we’d both come and held each other while my cock shriveled out of her.

Only one of my pictures was printed in the paper. It was the one of the guy actually getting shot. I felt bad for Macalister. I just knew he didn’t want to kill someone. He’d responded to a perceived threat that turned out to be nothing. Still, the other guy was dead.

We all decided to join the walk into the city on Saturday. A couple thousand students, faculty, and families started the march from the UChicago campus to Grant Park at ten in the morning. We were strung out for several blocks with people carrying signs and singing protest songs. Toni started out walking, but we had the stroller for when she started to sag.

Anna and I probably covered twice the seven miles downtown from running up and down the line of marchers to take photos. When we got close to Grant Park, though, we found what crowds were really like. People had marched all the way from Northwestern in Evanston starting at six o’clock in the morning. Marchers came from the main DePaul campus five miles north. There were sections identified as University of Illinois Chicago, Loyola, Austin High School, and Bogan Jr. College.

We got situated where Ronda and Patricia felt they could hold a steady position, and Anna and I started moving around the perimeter in much the same way we’d been working at the moratorium in Washington DC. I was surprised when a woman detached herself from a group and rushed to hug me.

“Nate! I knew you’d be here. Come and take a picture of our group from Lake Forest College.”

It took me a second to recognize Amy Clark. Her hair was long and straight. She was wearing bellbottoms and a flower-print shirt with a headband. She did not look like the fashion plate I’d photographed two years before and won a State Championship with after I’d humiliated her until I got a genuine picture of her.

“Amy! It’s good to see you. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Good! That means I must look like a human being instead of the monster you photographed before.” She led me over to a group of about thirty students from Lake Forest. “We aren’t a very big group here today, but we shut down the college. At least for a couple of days.”

“I just hope we’re doing some good,” I said. “This is Anna. If you give her contact information, we’ll make sure you get copies of the photo.”

“Maybe I should come to have another photo session with you. It’s just so far out to Tenbrook,” Amy said.

“Oh, I don’t have a studio out there anymore. I have a studio just a couple of blocks from here on Wabash.”

“Cool! I’ll call for an appointment.”

“It might be in the fall before I have a chance. We’ll be headed to our studio in Canada in June.”

“Sounds exciting. Look, they’re setting up for the first speaker.”

Anna and I headed back to where Patricia, Toni, and Ronda were waiting. I was able to get some decent pictures of the music groups and the speakers, but as the Trib would say, “Nothing happened.” For a protest rally of around 20,000 people, it was peaceful and even kind of boring. It ended after about two hours and people just drifted away. I took my family home without bothering to go to the studio and process film from the day.

“Yes, there’s no reason I can’t come out this week,” I told Chrystal on the phone Sunday afternoon. “I’m out of school and don’t plan to leave for Canada until around the fifth or sixth of June.”

“That’s great. I’ll get your travel arrangements made and will meet you at LAX. I’ll give you a call back as soon as I have your ticket. I expect I’ll see you tomorrow evening and we’ll have meetings with the production crew on Tuesday,” Chrystal said. “Talk to you soon.”

“Yeah, ‘bye,” I said to a dead line. She was already gone.

“She says I’ll fly out to Los Angeles tomorrow. Something called LAX,” I told my girlfriends.

“That’s the Los Angeles airport,” Ronda supplied. “They all use three-letter abbreviations. I suppose Chrystal deals with that kind of thing all the time.”

“Now, you need to call Adrienne,” Anna said. “You simply can’t go to Los Angeles and ignore her.”

“I haven’t talked to her in a month,” I said. “I feel guilty because I’ve ignored her.”

“Well, you can make it up to her now,” Anna laughed. I looked at the card beside the phone with all our important phone numbers on it, and dialed Adrienne’s number.