|
|
|
|
“Lick Bush? What’s that mean?” Homeboy’s walking behind me, Lenox and West 111th. “It means at the polls. It means defeat him, beat him.” “Who you voting for?” I hand him two stickers, one Kerry/Edwards from democracy.org and one Bush Must Be Defeated I got last night at a Dan Bern show, and head downtown, walking. I love walking the city, even though a five mile walk before the march may not be my finest plan. Along Central Park I find a cop with one shoe off, taking a rock out of his sock. He’s not happy when I snap the picture, but doesn’t try to give me a hassle. I’m walking pretty fast, after all, and he’s only wearing that one shoe… At 34th Street I merge with a group of chanters—troops out of the Philippines, amnesty for immigrants. I’m barely aware that we even have troops in the Philippines. One more thing to dread. We’re all traveling south toward Union Square. There are more police on the streets than I remember ever seeing before. None of them are smiling, but they don’t seem angry yet. The Emperor Has No Brains Miraculously, I find my friend; but oddly enough we can’t find our group, even as big and noisy a group as one would expect latino poets against war to be. We’re supposed to meet at the Gandhi statue. First I’ve heard that there’s a statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park. The things a person learns before a rally even starts, Philippine troops, Gandhi on 14th Street. A manic young guy with a www.nodraftnoway.org sign harangues us, intensely, lovingly. “Don’t draft me, don’t raise my tuition, don’t tell me to join the army to get an education. Not me, not just me. This is a we issue—I am not selfish. My voice is all I have. The best way to arm yourself is awareness. We’re the poorest rich country in the world. We can’t house, we can’t feed Americans, but we can feed the world!” Mark Garrison stops by, sees me scribbling, asks if I’m with the press, hands me a pack of Bushball cards. I lose track of my friend. Music starts up on the north end of the park. Why am I crying? The empty world. The futility of trying to defeat a ruthless power backed by unlimited funds. Our future, mine, looks so bleak right now. Shouldn’t I be full of hope, out here with thousands of others, using our voices and our feet? Why do I feel like an isolate soul in an utterly desolate land? Just waiting for the bombs, for the other shoes to drop. I pass a homeless boy, asleep, sitting up on a bench between two dyke protestors in finery and signage. He makes me even sadder. Noon. Friend irretrievably lost. I’m in the vanguard, in the middle of a band of green-festooned semi-organized activist musicians—paintpail percussion, tubas, spoons, voices. Funny to be walking westward in the middle of this, in the middle of East 17th Street, same route I walk to the office on workdays. Somehow, I’m more alone here than I ever am on the long weekday foot commute. Why don’t I feel any of this churning solidarity? Is it the year, more than a year, of war and deception and struggle and lies, on the national grandstand? Or just the sadness of my personal life, clawing out to swallow up everything good? There’s no way to tell, no way to know. All I can be sure of is that it wasn’t this way in DC, or out on Second Avenue last February. Protest signs skimming in front of the glitzy glass windows of The Gap. And the first chanting of the day:
Hey Hey, Ho Ho Now, clavé clapping and “No More Bush”. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra, marching in their greenery. We’re stalled half a block from Sixth (is it 6th?) Avenue. The RMO strikes up a livelier beat and all of a sudden thousands of us are doing the activist electric slide, two-stepping left, right, front, underneath the red brick condo window, signs pistoning in rhythm, chanting. I’m giving out Something for Junior CDs to anyone who expresses interest, and many do. The “lick Bush” logo on the back of my Axis of Eve tank top attracts a variety of attentions, and I don’t feel quite as alone as I did awhile ago. But I’m afraid if we’re kept penned here much longer trouble will come. A helicopter buzzes overhead. I can’t see what’s going on, nothing in front of me but the green mobiles of RMO, the “guilty” signs, the caricatures of GWB as Alfred E. Newman. Silence. Three sharps on a whistle. RMO launches a salsa beat, cowbells crashing and asses swinging. Thank God for the breeze. We’ve been stalled for almost 20 minutes now. What’s the holdup? Fucking NYPD no doubt. Nobody’s pushing or impatient. Yet.
Liars get impeachment,
How many lives per gallon? Get out of my White House I slide up, pass through the dancing RMOs and encounter another standstill band of percussionists. On the sidewalk, across the blue police sawhorses, people are still moving forward, slowly. I’m almost to the corner, still can’t quite tell what avenue we’re on. There are too many of us. I’m rocking with the Western Massachusetts Revolutionary Drumcore now. A man in a Global Goddess baseball cap. The light is green again. We still are not moving. The breeze is gone. Dissent is Treason Another signs spells out the complete Webster’s definition of tyranny. It applies. I see a surgeon’s mask painted with a blue peace sign, the manboy who wears it also holding a homemade sign: We Will Make A Difference Sudden squeeze. Backed to the curb, sirens. A citywide ambulance straight down the center of this packed street. It goes very slowly, passes safely. But the fact that it even came this way ha to mean that there’s no other, better street. Every crosstown sidestreet as full of bodies as this one, all the way south and east to Union Square, that makes hundreds of thousands of us out here. We make a little headway in the wake of the ambulance, then stall again. Is it possible that…there are just too many of us? No room to march because the streets, at 12:45, are already at capacity from here all the way to Central Park? God willing. I still feel very alone, but slightly less hopeless.
Surburban parents for
peace: Yes. I keep slithering slowly up the sidelines. It’s Seventh Avenue, not Sixth. I’m awfully thirsty. And there they are, latino poets for peace! Hilarious, to find them here, so far from the alleged Union Square Gandhi. I don’t recognize anyone, decide to keep on going it alone. Seventh Avenue is packed. Curb to curb, shoulder to shoulder, protestors walking at a crawl. Inching toward freedom under the brutal August sun. I forgot to bring any water with me. Someone hands me a wonderful laminated copy of the Not In Our Name pledge to resistance, subtitled “best read in the park” — meaning Central Park, the public park we have been forbidden to visit after marching. Somebody's passing out Oink stickers. And all of a sudden I’m on Seventh Avenue. All the businesses are closed. Hope they remember it’s because of the RNC, not the peacelovers, when they tot up their totals and see how much they lost during August. More helicopters. Lots of the ladies have slogans magic-markered onto their beautiful, muscular, sweaty arms, shoulders, chests.
Somewhere in Texas,
I ask a young woman to paste the Oink on my back, right underneath Lick Bush.
Get out of Iraq Drunken frat boy drives country into a ditch Osama Bin Forgotten
if men got pregnant That one must be left over from yesterday’s repro rights march over the Brooklyn Bridge. Ten thousand women on that one, at least.
Call and response, a megaphone:
A gorgeous blonde in front of me strips down to her bra. It must be ninety-five degrees out here today, maybe more. Her skin is smooth, tan, her abs tight, breasts small and high. I’m no longer in such a hurry to move north. On my left, a human beatbox with a megaphone. More people dancing. Another huge POW sign (Poets Opposing War) bobs up ahead.
Misunderestimated Now a whole platoon of flag-wrapped coffins. Coffin-bearers all silent. People on the roofs, the fire escapes. How many coffins are there? Too many to count, a tide of coffins sliding up the avenue. Cops on the roofs as well. Of course. When Clinton lied, nobody died
I didn’t march in the
60’s & 70’s I buy a “We Say No” banner and put it over my broiling head. 1:25pm, 20th Street & Seventh Avenue. Almost out of film, badly in need of water. Maybe a bodega will be open. In front of the coffin brigade, people walk with memorial signs:
Specialist
Thomas J. Sweet II
Hashim Kamel Radi
Vatche Arslanian
AZRA 12 years old Duaa Raheem age 6
PFC
Melissa Hobart Michael Kelly, Journalist A guy smiles by, offering free squeezes of sunscreen. He gets lots of takers. Bush is bad for our Karma I come out of the bodega watered and filmed and chocolated. And cranky, a little tired—of marching, writing, thinking. Walking from Harlem to Union Square this morning was so the wrong move. Four More Months Great sign! So am I going to Central Park? I mean to, thought I would. I don’t know. 2pm. 25th Street. My Bush Smells Like Shit hangs from a window above Whole Foods. From time to time we break into a hooting, whistling, hollering wave for no apparent reason, with great enthusiasm and as many leaping decibels as possible. Sometimes the spontaneous cheering seems related to the huge protest signs hung on the sides of some buildings, more often seem related to nothing at all. Which doesn’t dampen anybody’s enthusiasm. Outside the Southgate Hotel, which has a big sign welcoming the delegates, big chanting starts up: GO HOME! GO HOME! We’re right in front of Madison Square Garden now, and everybody is suddenly furious. The idea that those assholes will be congratulating one another inside the hall all week. Chanting: Fox News Sucks Bush, A Terrorist’s Dream Come True Wheelchairs. Tin drums. The coffins. A great boo going up in the street, a pause.
Chanting: You wanted
New York? Say it again. With fury. Keep going. Hoarse and sunburnt. Something’s burning up ahead, a huge fire, flames ten, twelve feet into the air, in the middle of Seventh Avenue between 33rd and 34th. It’s growing, pretty clearly out of control. We’re all still moving slowly toward it. Now the flames are down, but a thick, rowdy tunnel of black smoke is funneling up. A police whistle. The crowd pulling into itself, stopped ahead, no doubt. Naked arms against naked arms, the blended sweat of marchers. We’re being redirected, turned east on 33rd. The officer on the corner estimates us at half a million. And I wuss out. Don’t know where they’re turning us, too tired and hot to ask. I trudge down the staircase to the 1/9 which has miraculously appeared. Richard, 60-ish and good-looking in his overly warm suit and clerical collar, sits on the bench beside me and asks about he march. His wife and daughter are out there, but he has an obligation uptown. I give him a CD, and we talk for awhile about his son, a musician who played the Bottom Line four times, then left NYC for Austin to try and raise a family. Richard gets off at 86th Street, says goodbye, says maybe he’ll run into me at the polls. Says make sure you get your vote in good and early. I will. |
|
|
© 2004 by Jackie Sheeler |
