As mentioned last entry, a few things have come up in memory because of external news or discoveries.
One of them is something that has been coming to mind here and there for months, as I realized the 20th anniversary was going to happen, which it did, just yesterday. Well, today, really. This is long, sorry, but I'm not putting it behind a cut.
There was a riot in Tompkins Square Park, August 6-7, 1988. You can read about it HERE, in what seems to me a mostly accurate recounting of the event, and the reasons behind it, which I no longer have enough interest in to deal with below (the bastards won). If you were in the middle of it for any length of time, you probably have a bias towards one side or the other, so an "accurate recounting" may really be impossible. I was there and was beaten by crazed riot police with nightsticks for no good reason, so you'd think I have a pretty serious bias, but that's actually not true. I was (and am still) pissed off at both sides for various reasons, but whatever, it was 20 years ago and no one cares anymore, really. But I might as well set down my story of what happened to me that night, for the record.
I had been sitting around my NYU dorm room on 10th Street near Broadway - I was 20 and attending Summer session - when my friend Vanessa Veselka called me up and told me there was going to be a peaceful protest against the curfew in the park and that I should come and bring my camera to document in case things went bad.
Vanessa was (and is) and activist, organizer, and musician who I was close to for many years, and am happy to still be in occasional touch with. I got to see her last year (with her adorable daughter) when she was visiting NYC after only the occasional email between us for years. We've known each other since she was 14 and I was 15 in school in Massachusetts, and have been through a lot together (though no, we were never involved, which that might imply, though it turns out we were very interested in each other at different times in our friendship, but always when the other was seeing someone - when we realized this years after there was any chance of anything happening we pleasantly cursed our stupidity), so she'll always be very special to me. She's been in Seattle and Portland for years making good music of one kind or another, first three fine albums with her rock band, Bell, then one (which I have mixed feelings about) with a power-acoustic-punk duo, The Pinkos, and most recently a terrific CD of traditional folk in a Carter Family-style with two other women as The Red Rose Girls.
At that point in the late 80s she was my connection to a world outside of NYU Film School, to music and performance and people over at The Pyramid and ABC No Rio and so on - and the fast folk scene then around the whole Village, a scene still carried on by Lach with his Antifolk hoots at Sidewalk Cafe, which I think started at The Speakeasy on MacDougal (long gone and a restaurant now) - I spent plenty of time in the audience there and wound up on stage a few times myself.
So when Vanessa called, it would be worth it and I would go. So I grabbed my 35mm camera and walked eastward, stopping briefly on the stairs of St. Marks Comics (which was upstairs then) to load the camera and check it.
So somewhere, yes, there is a roll of film with shots from that night on it, or more precisely a clear plastic sleeve with the negatives in it and a contact sheet of that sleeve. Some of the photos look really good. I never printed any of them. Make of that what you will. I was hoping to drag them out of storage and finally get them digitized and put them up with this post (which I've been thinking about for months) but it didn't happen. So no visual aids here.
I got to the park and found Vanessa (how? no cel phones then . . . did we agree on a place?), and we went into the park and walked and hung and so forth. It was pretty boring until it wasn't, suddenly. I was a little unnerved hearing some of the talk around me - and here's a reason I'm not so happy with the protesters in the long run . . . I heard more than one conversation that specifically stated (not phrased this way of course), "We're going to provoke the police into violence so that we get beat up and it looks bad for them in the news." More than once, yes. This cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face way of thinking went exactly as planned of course, and after quite some time of having rocks, bricks, and fireworks thrown at them (I was near a mounted cop when a thrown cherry bomb went off next to the horse's head - being close to a suddenly terrified rearing and whinnying horse is not pleasant) - the cops went apeshit.
Now yes, as intended by some, they were provoked, however on the other hand, they went COMPLETELY over-the-top crazy-ass batshit loco. This was in no way about "stopping the protesters who are escalating to violence" but "hit anything living that moves and isn't a cop as hard as you fucking can with big pieces of wood."
I had been separated from Vanessa (why?) and wound up near a white van on Avenue A, near 7th Street, I think. I see that van in all the footage from that night. I saw someone with a video camera on top of it, and for years I've thought that was Clayton Patterson, but in seeing recent recaps of the night it appears it was a different videographer, and Clayton, who I got to know a bit, years later, was elsewhere. I wound up on Avenue A just below 9th Street when the line of cops that stood across from 9th in front of the park suddenly started screaming and rushing at protesters. swinging. I ducked back and forth behind a bus shelter and in doorways as cops and beatees rushed past me. Somewhere in there, Vanessa found me (we had been separated) grabbed me by the shoulder (obviously deciding I was out of my depth, perhaps correctly) and rushed me down 9th Street to a bar that had barricaded itself in. She said something to the doorman who peeked out a little slit in the door (what, I don't know, Vanessa could do these kinds of things) and whatever it was made him open up and pull me in while she ran back to join the melee.
So there I stood in the bar. I don't know for how long. I had a pint of beer - did I pay for it or was it given to me for having been out there and getting in? It was amber, not a stout, which would be unusual for me, but maybe that's all they had. Music played - it must have been someone's Rolling Stones mix tape. I swear to god the two songs I remember playing, which have always since been colored by the violence of that night for me, were "Gimme Shelter" and "Memo from Turner" (okay, "Honky Tonk Woman" also played, but that doesn't exactly conjure up dark, violent memories).
I have no idea how long I was there. Long enough to finish my beer, not be able to get another, and be very very bored, except when hearing sudden bits of horror come through the door or boarded up windows.
I have no idea where exactly this bar was, or what it was. Whenever I've walked down this block in the years since, I've tried to find it, but have come up blank. What WAS that place?
Vanessa came back, took me outside to 9th Street and started walking me west, telling me about some of what she'd been through - she hadn't been hit, but chased a lot, including through an apartment building where an old Russian lady hid her and several others from the cops that chased them. She checked to make sure I was okay, sent me off on my way, and went back toward the park, where you could still hear the riot going on. I walked west, where it seemed everything was calm and okay. The fighting was confined to Avenue A and east. It seemed.
At the corner of 9th and 1st Avenue I stopped to take a picture of a helicopter that hovered over the intersection, its skids as low as the building tops. Click. Somewhere I have that, a perfect shot of the copter and the street sign at the southeast corner. I crossed to the southwest corner and looked around. Lots of confused people, wondering what was going on, maybe just in the area for a drink. I turned and looked up the Avenue - a marching group of cops in riot gear was coming south. They stopped in the street near the northeast corner. I snapped a picture of them. Click. Somewhere I have that, a perfect shot of a big group of riot cops standing in front of what I now know to be PS122.
I turned back around. I was standing next to what looked like a yuppie couple from uptown, who were trying to figure out what was going on. Someone who looked more like one of the East Village protesters walked by, shouting over and over again, "This is NOT Germany 1933! This is NOT Germany 1933!"
(the "NYC 1988=Germany 1933" statement had been yelled often that night, and was a common statement in the graffitos you'd see everywhere then by anarchist Peter Missing, who had a band called Missing Foundation, and who wrote this slogan - along with an upside-down martini-glass symbol and the words "The Party's Over" - all over the Village)
The man's tone of voice, and seeming unlikely yelling of a contradiction to the protest yells, struck me funny and I had to laugh, as did the yuppie couple, who then went into a routine that was obviously a private joke with them, but which I got, as it referenced a Monty Python sketch: "This is NOT Germany 1933. The fish is in YOUR trousers, it's YOUR laugh! This is NOT Germany 1933! The pie is in YOUR face, it's YOUR laugh!"
They did that a couple of times, and laughed, and I laughed with them. Then there was a sound - I don't remember what, except it was BAD and my stomach dropped, and we all turned around to see the cops that had been lined up in front of PS122 rushing at us, screaming, with nightsticks raised.
I started to run down 9th Street, but then thought that running would seem some kind of admission of guilt or something and why would they hit me if I just stood there, right? So I stopped and tried to look "innocent."
Three cops smashed into me, knocking me back into the pulled-down gate over the fabric store on the corner (it's a pizza place now, I've had a slice there, and reminisced). I raised my right arm to protect myself, and the clubs began hitting me on that arm and my right thigh, and occasionally my head when my arm wasn't in the right place. I cupped my camera in my left hand, protecting it.
I have no idea how long it lasted, except that they kept hitting the same places over and over, and I was knocked back into the gate several times. It can't have lasted ANYWHERE near as long as it felt it did (or I'd be dead), but it lasted long enough for me to consciously think "okay, they've been doing this a while, they're going to get tired of this any minute now and move on" several times, and then realize they weren't going to stop. There was the slightest moment of feeling that, in fact, this was never going to end and I was stuck in some kind of loop of torture, where sticks were just going to keep raining mechanically down on me for all eternity.
What came to mind then, and what I did, was to yell in the best English accent I could muster (which was not good), "I'm a TOURIST! I'm a FUCKING TOURIST, you BASTARDS!" I did this, and there was a slight backing off, like it had confused them enough to ease up long enough for me to start running west again, still yelling that I was a tourist. One of the cops who had been beating me called after me, "You picked the wrong night to come to town, buddy!"
As I ran up the sidewalk on 9th, I was briefly paced by a cop with raised stick running on the other side of the parked cars, trying to find an opening to get to me, but I did the tourist yell again, and he slowed up and started back eastward.
For twenty years I have wondered about that poor sweet couple doing their Monty Python-based routine next to me. The cops went for them, too, I know. They had to have been beaten. At least I knew there was a riot happening - I don't think they had any idea. What happened to those two? Are they okay? Are they together, still? Who were they?
And I went on, west, back to my dorm. I have a weird memory of running into someone along the way, neither a cop nor protester, who wanted to know what was happening, and filling him in. Oddly, I think I did it in my "English" accent and persona, continuing to complain that I was just a fucking tourist pulled into this by accident. I have no idea why.
Got back to the dorm, set up my video8 camera on a tripod, put a tape in, started recording, and delivered a monologue to it about what had happened that night (with the sounds of sirens and helicopters in the background). I have that tape in a box somewhere, but no ability to play video8 tapes anymore. So no visual aids there. My roommate, a sweet, great guy I knew for just that one term whose name I've completely forgot, came in while I was recording and sat down off camera, posing questions to me, and both trying to help me personally and (smartly, as he knew I'd want) trying to make it interesting for the camera.
Eventually, somehow, sleep happened, and when I woke up everything seemed clearer. The air, I mean. Lines were sharp and my vision was better. My roommate - who I want to call "Mike" for some reason - Mike put on Bowie's Hunky Dory album (still a vinyl LP then), which we'd already decided was the best weekend-morning wakeup album ever created (so it must have been a weekend), and suggested I get cleaned up and we go have brunch somewhere nice. So I did, examining my growing bruises for the first time (and both of us sharing a look and chuckle as Bowie sang about the "lawman, beating up the wrong guy").
The underside of my right forearm and a giant oval on the top of my right thigh were an deep purple. Over the next few weeks, they would go through an amazing series of colors of the spectrum on their way back to fleshtone.
And that was 20 years ago now. So I put it down. Someday, I'll get those pictures and video out and look at them again. Maybe for the 25th anniversary.
I don't know what it did for me in the long run. Make me less trustful of cops? Well, I wasn't exactly a believer in them to begin with, and I've known good cops, too, personally (a couple of years later, I got to know and hang with a Homicide detective out of the 6th Precinct, who was actually surprised that I could trust a cop again after that night, and had stronger negative feelings than I about how the cops acted that night).
Also, I wonder about my leg. For a few years, I've had a strange nerve problem in my leg - the skin itself is numb most of the time in a very specific area, and sometimes it gets strange cold sensations or pins and needles (sometimes very painful). I just thought it was some kind of pinched nerve thing or whatever - probably related to my poor posture and back problems, which I get sometimes (I haven't had any feeling down part of my right arm and into my pinky for weeks now after sitting badly at the computer one day) for a time, but which usually goes away. The leg has had this full-time for many years now.
It was Berit who noticed that the numb area corresponds almost exactly to where my bruise was from the beating (I always demonstrate the oval shape of both the same way, but hadn't caught it myself). I wouldn't have thought that a beating would have caused this, especially years later, but soon after noticing this I read, by chance, of an instance where percussive injury had caused the same kind of numbness. So this might be a little permanent reminder of that night. I dunno.
In any case, that's what happened to me 20 years ago.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
