Like People in History (16 page)

He was fitting hooks into eyes from one end of the roof, I the same from the other end. This provided me with a phenomenal view of the surrounding area, including most notably the demonstration we'd just left across the lawns and trees and through the fence. Thanks to the media, that scene was now so brightly lighted it took me a minute to register slight differentiations in the illumination as photographers' flashbulbs went off. As Paul and I neared each other in our task, James was already helping Junior toward the edge of the roof we'd ascended, saying, "Now I'll go down first and make sure you don't fall. Keep your eyes up. Don't look down, whatever you do. Okay?"

It is to Junior's credit that he merely said, "Okay," though the strangled way it came out of his fear-riven throat suggested how scared he really was.

I looked away from them to Paul and moaned, "Some Ninja Faggot!"

"I read somewhere," Paul said, "that the guy who threw the bomb at Sarajevo had a fear of loud noises!" We giggled as we struggled to fit the final recalcitrant eye into the final unbending hook. Once we could no longer see Junior's head past the eaves, we crawled up the roof's slant a bit, then lifted the unwieldy banner. We were trying to be as quiet as possible, but a sudden wind rose and buffeted the long sheet of material like a spinnaker on an oceangoing schooner. Paul was almost swept off the roof, but the wind calmed down for a few seconds, and we took advantage of the calm to manage the banner over the side.

We quietly slapped palms at our success. Then we threw down the two pull-cords on either side, waited a minute or so, and headed down. When we looked over the side, we couldn't see Junior or James on the scaffolding.

I couldn't believe they'd moved so quickly. "Where are they?"

"Back at the truck?" Paul suggested.

We climbed down the rope, and had to work to retain our balance once we arrived at the by now really shaky scaffolding. Where were those policemen? Had they been doing rounds? Or just passing by? We'd have to be careful, maybe hide in the bushes. Paul showed me the shortest path to the truck, then said, "Crawl there if you have to." He tossed the coiled rope we'd used to climb up onto the roof, saying, "Do I break balls or what?"

Now for the pull-cords. The two had to be pulled simultaneously. We might only have a minute or two after the banner was unfurled to get the hell out of there, although, because of the metal hook attachments, the cops would have to go up onto the roof to get the banner back down, which could take an hour, long enough for people at the demonstration to see the message—and for the media to film and comment upon it.

I held my breath as I slid along the brick lower wall of the building over to the pull-cord. There it dangled. All clear.
Wally,
I said to myself,
I hope you appreciate what I'm doing for you.
I took the cord, looked back for Paul, saw his hand grab his cord and—felt something very cold, very metallic, and very circular nudge at the carotid artery in my neck.

"Hold it!" I heard a nervous voice inches behind my left ear. "Or I’ll shoot."

I knew then where James and Junior were: caught. As I was. For some absurd reason, all I could think of at the moment was that sweet dancelike tune of those two interweaving oboes in the "Esurientes" section of Johann Sebastian Bach's
Magnificat.

"Don't shoot. I give up," I said.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. "Go on. Up against the wall." Louder he shouted, "I've got another one, Dak."

I thought, Oh, hell! After all this, I'm not going to let this fail
now
! So as I moved toward the wall, I pulled the cord with me. Hard.

Something up top snapped, and my side of the banner fell with a loud, shuddering thud like a ton of canvas.

"What the hell!" the cop shouted, falling against me. He almost poked a hole in my neck with his gun. "Get down! Down on the ground! What the hell's going on? Down! Face in the dirt."

As I was shoved down, I saw my half of the banner unfurled and prayed that Paul would do the same. Seconds passed slowly, then I saw the other half come slamming down. Paul had done it. Once again, I felt the cop half astride my body suddenly jerk at the sudden noise.

Meanwhile I thought of all the humiliating moments in my life— being eighty-sixed from Keller's for punching out a leather queen who'd been leaning on me all night, being knocked down by three crackheads between parked cars as they tore off my sneakers and literally ripped my pants in half getting at my wallet—but this,
this
was surely the absolute limit.

"It's a goddamn banner, Joe!" The other cop was coming over to us. "They were hanging a goddamn banner from the roof of Gracie Mansion!" His voice was filled with wonder and admiration. "Why not hang it on the mayor's dick? Come on, Joe, pat him down and back off."

I no longer felt the pistol barrel in my back, but I did feel myself being expertly frisked.

"He's clean," my cop, Joe, said in what I thought was a disappointed tone of voice.

"Like the other two. Just demonstrators. You can get up now."

I stood up and brushed myself off. Dak was the cop facing me. "Look, you're trespassing and all. So we've got to arrest you," he said. "You know the drill, right? You turn around for the bracelet. How the hell did you guys get up there?"

I shrugged.

"We'd better tell the captain," Joe, the nervous younger cop, said.

Dak laughed. "You think he can't see the damn thing from where he is? It's half the size of the building. It can be seen from a mile away! You guys are really something else!" He shook his head in reluctant admiration.

Ten minutes later, I was being shoved out of the parking lot entry and into the open doors of a police van. True to his word, Paul had managed to get to the truck without being caught, and he'd already driven it back out.

The banner we'd put up had exactly the effect we'd intended. The demonstration had become twice as loud and active as when we'd left. A bunch of senior-looking police officers were huddled together, obviously trying to figure out what to do about the new headache we'd just presented.

I should have known that the same blond newscaster who'd "interviewed" me before would be on the spot to videotape me being led, handcuffed in a plastic loop, into a police van and to ask, with perfect naiveté, "Professor Sansarc, why did you help hang that banner?"

"Don't point your camera at me," I yelled. "Point it there! That's the story tonight!" I nodded back at Gracie Mansion, its upper floor covered by a banner reading "RELEASE THE FUNDS!"

To my surprise, the newscaster actually turned away from me and had the camera point at the banner. He was saying some shit or other about it into the microphone when the nervous young cop who'd caught me saw his chance and rabbit-punched me into the van. Admittedly he did it without much conviction, but it was hard enough to send me sprawling on the floor.

"You okay, man?" Junior Obregon's voice asked from inside the van. "Pig fucker!" he yelled at the cop.

Even though they were also bound in plastic loops, Junior and James helped me to my feet.

"They got us climbing down." James confirmed what I had suspected.

"Paul got away," I told them.

"Well, that's one out of four," James said.

"It's all my fault, isn't it?" Junior asked.

"Come on, June, we all knew the risks involved," James said coolly, but he still managed to sound irritated with himself and with us.

I sat down on the van bench opposite them. "The banner's up, isn't it?" I asked, thinking how proud and surprised Wally would be. "Stop bitching."

We were silent for a minute. Then Junior said, "Man, is my daddy going to burn my ass for this!"

We all laughed and were silent again.

Then I began to sing, "Eh-Es-Sur-Eee-Eee-En-Tes!"

The van door opened up, and there was Ron Taskin, all four earrings glittering, and with him a cop and one of the ACT UP legal advisors, who kept saying, "No one told me there was going to be an action tonight other than the fence-victims. Why can't you people tell me in advance, so I can get the paperwork prepared and the facts straight? Is that so much to ask? Is it?"

Ron ignored him, looked at me, and whistled, "Far fucking out, Rog!"

I took a bow.

"I'm simply going to have to call this an Unauthorized Action," the legal advisor was going on, "and we'll have to deal with it on that basis."

"Honey, you can call it Jane Wyman, if you want," Ron said.

"It'll be easier if you've got a lawyer," the distraught legal advisor said, looking pointedly at me.

"Okay," I said. "Anatole Lamarr. He lives in K-Y Plaza. Kips Bay," I had to explain to the legal advisor who was either Bridge and Tunnel or truly dim. "I'm sure Anatole will be delighted to be roused from his aloe-and-oatmeal Jacuzzi soak while watching taped reruns of 'L.A. Law' to come see me in some piss-stained slammer."

The legal advisor continued to bitch and moan about how unauthorized it all was, as he took down Junior and James's names, addresses, and other seemingly relevant data. He told us we'd have a legal advisor waiting wherever we were booked who would counsel us on our plea.

"Not guilty!" we all shouted.

"He or she will discuss all that there!" the legal advisor said.

A few minutes later, he and Ron were pushed away from the door by a female cop and the van was slammed shut and locked.

"Where we going?" Junior called out at our legal advisor through the grating into the van's front seat.

"Don't know yet. But we'll find you," the nervous legal advisor shouted back at us. "Mind you," he told the two cops who got into the van's front seat—a youngish man and the woman who'd locked us in— "I've got your names and badge numbers."

"Don't mind him," I told the two cops through the grating. "AZT makes him just a little bit frazzled. Me, it doesn't bother a bit How about you guys?" I asked James and Junior, who caught the joke and replied, "I don't know, man, makes me horny all the time."

The two cops looked at each other a second, and she looked as though she were about to say something when James added, "Don't worry, Officers. We don't bite."

"We're just going a few blocks to the precinct house," the driver finally said out his window, to where I assumed the legal advisor was still waiting. "Okay? That okay with you?" he yelled back to us.

"Thank you, Officer Krupke!" I said.

Despite his announcement, we sat there longer. I continued humming the "Esurientes" and watched James and Junior settle down and begin nibbling at each other. I suppose they were finding their hands tied behind their back to be both a turn-on and a test to be gotten around, until finally James was leaning back on the bench and Junior was hovering over his lower torso, trying to open the front of James's button-fly jeans with his teeth.

Now, here, I thought, is a scene Alistair would appreciate in all its details and ironies. Alistair who... Ah, but there was the rub!

I thought about Alistair sending home all the party-goers and tucking the White Woman into his chenille-covered bed with its yacht-helm-motif backboard, feeding him a glass of milk and a few soda crackers, and remaining to read a page or two of Anne Beattie until Dorky began to snore; Alistair blowing a final kiss and tiptoeing out, going into his own bedroom and locking the door behind him, and spreading out those Tueys, perhaps calling each of them by the name of a trick or boy he'd possessed, as he downed them one by one, all sixty-four.

Anatole
had
to come to the precinct house.
Had
to get me out of jail tonight! So Alistair wouldn't die.

Maria and Debbie were lip-synching and dancing and gesticulating from their position atop the low wall surrounding the reflecting pool. Naturally, they had the full attention of the lunchtime dawdlers in front of the forty-story building. It was mid-August 1969, a lovely, hot Manhattan afternoon quickly coming on to 2
P.M
., and my two co-workers were acting out the words of the song that Mary, Flo, and Diana Ross sang, their sound pouring out of Carl DeHaven's speaker-equipped portable radio a few feet away, while I turned aside slightly to cup in my hands and inhale deeply from a roach of grass I'd cocktailed into the emptied top of a Salem Long. In a few minutes, we'd have to leave this small spot of Urban Fun 'n' Sun and return upstairs to the tiny, airless, thin-walled cubicles that were called our offices in the large impersonal publishing firm where all four of us had been hired as high school and college textbook editors. It was a grim prospect, one I wanted to avoid as long as possible, to alter as much as possible in advance by sense-modifying drugs.

"Mr. Sansarc!"

Recognizing the voice, I immediately moved out of the halo of the marijuana smoke. The voice belonged to Frank Kovacs, my immediate superior, a man whose very voice—never mind his presence—for no reason I could precisely fathom, managed to induce within me that instinctual, that completely primitive "fight or flight reflex" we all supposedly hide somewhere in the deepest recesses of our being.