Flying to America (24 page)
“All right,” he said, “now
move
on, you have to
move along, you can’t
picket us!” He said that the church had never been picketed, that it could not be picketed without its permission, that it owned the sidewalk, and that he was going to call the police. Henry Mackie, Edward Asher, and Howard Ettle had already obtained police permission for the demonstration through a fortunate bit of foresight; and we confirmed this by showing him our slip that we had obtained
at Police Headquarters. The beadle was intensely irritated at this and stormed back inside the church to report to someone higher up. Henry Mackie said, “Well, get ready for the lightning bolt,” and Edward Asher and Howard Ettle laughed.
Interest in the demonstration among walkers on 69th Street increased and a number of people accepted our leaflet and began to ask the pickets questions such as “What do you mean?” and “Were you young men raised in the church?” The pickets replied to these questions quietly but firmly and in as much detail as casual passers-by could be expected to be interested in. Some of the walkers made taunting remarks — “Cogito ergo your ass” is one I remember — but the demeanor of the pickets was exemplary at all times, even later when things began, as Henry Mackie put it, “to get a little rough.” (Marie, you would have been proud of us.) People who care about the rights of pickets should realize that these rights are threatened mostly not by the police, who generally do not molest you if you go through the appropriate bureaucratic procedures such as getting a permit, but by individuals who come up to you and try to pull your sign out of your hands or, in one case, spit at you. The man who did the latter was, surprisingly, very well dressed. What could be happening with an individual like that? He didn’t even ask questions as to the nature or purpose of the demonstration, just spat and walked away. He didn’t say a word. We wondered about him.
At about 2
P.M.
a very high-up official in a black clerical suit emerged from the church and asked us if we had ever heard of Kierkegaard. It was raining on him just as it was on the pickets but he didn’t seem to mind. “This demonstration displays a Kierkegaardian spirit which I understand,” he said, and then requested that we transfer our operations to some other place. Henry Mackie had a very interesting discussion of about ten minutes’ duration with this official during which photographs were taken by the New York
Post, Newsweek,
and CBS Television whom Henry Mackie had alerted prior to the demonstration. The photographers made the churchman a little nervous but you have to hand it to him, he maintained his phony attitude of polite interest almost to the last. He said several rather bromidic things like “The human condition
is the
given,
it’s what we do with it that counts” and “The body is simply the temple wherein the soul dwells” which Henry Mackie countered with his famous question
“Why does it have to be that way?”
which has dumbfounded so many orthodox religionists and thinkers and with which he first won us (the other pickets) to his banner in the first place.
“Why?”
the churchman exclaimed. It was clear that he was radically taken aback. “Because it
is
that way. You have to deal with what is. With reality.”
“But why does it
have
to be that way?” Henry Mackie repeated, which is the technique of the question, which used in this way is unanswerable. A blush of anger and frustration crossed the churchman’s features (it probably didn’t register on your TV screen, Marie, but I was there, I saw it — it was beautiful).
“The human condition is a fundamental datum,” the cleric stated. “It is immutable, fixed, and changeless. To say otherwise . . .”
“Precisely,” Henry Mackie said, “why it must be challenged.”
“But,” the cleric said, “it is God’s will.”
“Yes,” Henry Mackie said significantly.
The churchman then retired into his church, muttering and shaking his head. The rain had damaged our signs somewhat but the slogans were still legible and we had extra signs cached in Edward Asher’s car anyway. A number of innocents crossed the picket line to worship including several who looked as if they might be from the FBI. The pickets had realized in laying their plans the danger that they might be taken for Communists. This eventuality was provided for by the mimeographed leaflets which carefully explained that the pickets were not Communists and cited Edward Asher’s and Howard Ettle’s Army service including Asher’s Commendation Ribbon. “We, as you, are law-abiding American citizens who support the Constitution and pay taxes,” the leaflet says. “We are simply opposed to the ruthless way in which the human condition has been imposed on organisms which have done nothing to deserve it and are unable to escape it.
Why does it have to be that way?
” The leaflet goes on to discuss, in simple language, the various
unfortunate aspects of the human condition including death, unseemly and degrading bodily functions, limitations on human understanding, and the chimera of love. The leaflet concludes with the section headed “What Is To Be Done?” which Henry Mackie says is a famous revolutionary catchword and which outlines, in clear, simple language, Henry Mackie’s program for the reification of the human condition from the ground up.
A Negro lady came up, took one of the leaflets, read it carefully, and then said: “They look like Communists to
me!
” Edward Asher commented that no matter how clearly things were explained to the people, the people always wanted to believe you were a Communist. He said that when he demonstrated once in Miami against vivisection of helpless animals he was accused of being a Nazi Communist which was, he explained, a contradiction in terms. He said ladies were usually the worst.
By then the large crowd that had gathered when the television men came had drifted away. The pickets therefore shifted the site of the demonstration to Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center via Edward Asher’s car. Here were many people loafing, digesting lunch etc. and we used the spare signs which had new messages including
WHY ARE YOU STANDING
WHERE ARE YOU STANDING?
THE SOUL IS NOT!
NO MORE
ART
CULTURE
LOVE
REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST!
The rain had stopped and the flowers smelled marvelously fine. The pickets took up positions near a restaurant (I wish you’d been there, Marie, because it reminded me of something, something you said that night we went to Bloomingdale’s and bought your new
cerise-colored bathing suit: “The color a new baby has,” you said, and the flowers were like that, some of them). People with cameras hanging around their necks took pictures of us as if they had never seen a demonstration before. The pickets remarked among themselves that it was funny to think of the tourists with pictures of us demonstrating in their scrapbooks in California, Iowa, Michigan, people we didn’t know and who didn’t know us or care anything about the demonstration or, for that matter, the human condition itself, in which they were so steeped that they couldn’t stand off, and look at it, and know it for what it was. “It’s a paradigmatic situation,” Henry Mackie said, “exemplifying the distance between the potential knowers holding a commonsense view of the world and what is to be known, which escapes them as they pursue existences.”
At this time (2:45
P.M.)
the demonstrators were approached by a group of youths between the ages I would say of sixteen and twenty-one. They were dressed in hood jackets, T-shirts, tight pants etc., and were very obviously delinquents from bad environments and broken homes where they had received no love. They ringed the pickets in a threatening manner. There were about seven of them. The leader (and Marie, he wasn’t the oldest; he was younger than some of them, tall, with a peculiar face, blank and intelligent at the same time) walked around looking at our signs with exaggerated curiosity. “What are you guys,” he said finally, “some kind of creeps or something?”
Henry Mackie replied quietly that the pickets were American citizens pursuing their right to demonstrate peaceably under the Constitution.
The leader looked at Henry Mackie. “You’re flits, you guys, huh?” he said. He then snatched a handful of leaflets out of Edward Asher’s hands, and when Edward Asher attempted to recover them, danced away out of reach while two others stood in Asher’s way. “What do you flits think you’re doin’?” he said. “What
is
this shit?”
“You haven’t got any right . . .” Henry Mackie started to say, but the leader of the youths moved very close to him then.
“What do you mean, you don’t believe in God?” he said. The other ones moved in closer too.
“That is not the question,” Henry Mackie said. “Belief or non-belief is not at issue. The situation remains the same whether you believe or not. The human condition is . . .”
“Listen,” the leader said, “I thought all you guys went to church every day. Now you tell me that flits don’t believe in God. You putting me on?”
Henry Mackie repeated that belief was not involved, and said that it was, rather, a question of man helpless in the grip of a definition of himself that he had not drawn, that could not be altered by human action, and that was in fundamental conflict with every human notion of what should obtain. The pickets were simply subjecting this state of affairs to a radical questioning, he said.
“You’re putting me on,” the youth said, and attempted to kick Henry Mackie in the groin, but Mackie turned away in time. However the other youths then jumped the pickets, right in the middle of Rockefeller Center. Henry Mackie was thrown to the pavement and kicked repeatedly in the head, Edward Asher’s coat was ripped off his back and he sustained many blows in the kidneys and elsewhere, and Howard Ettle was given a broken rib by a youth called “Cutter” who shoved him against a wall and smashed him viciously even though bystanders tried to interfere (a few of them). All this happened in a very short space of time. The pickets’ signs were broken and smashed, and their leaflets scattered everywhere. A policeman summoned by bystanders tried to catch the youths but they got away through the lobby of the Associated Press building and he returned empty-handed. Medical aid was summoned for the pickets. Photos were taken.
“Senseless violence,” Edward Asher said later. “They didn’t understand that . . .”
“On the contrary,” Henry Mackie said, “they understand everything better than anybody.”
The next evening, at 8
P.M.
Henry Mackie delivered his lecture in the upstairs meeting room at the Playmor Lanes, as had been
announced in the leaflet. The crowd was very small but attentive and interested. Henry Mackie had his head bandaged in a white bandage. He delivered his lecture titled “What Is To Be Done?” with good diction and enunciation, and in a strong voice. He was very eloquent. And eloquence, Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us can hope for.
W
illiam Elderly Baskerville posed with the ink bottle in his hand. A lovely robust drop trembled on the lip; with a smooth slight movement of the wrist, he heaved it over the edge. It made a satisfying smash on the letterhead between his feet. Reaching, he picked the paper up and folded it in half. “Mislike me not for my complexion,” he murmured, and looked around the room. De Vinne was watching him. William Elderly Baskerville blinked twice. “Voyeur!” he spat. He ran his thumb up the edge of the paper. What terrors, monsters, troglodytes, and conflagrations lay inside? He threw the paper away; it lay curling in his wastebasket.
From their window one could see the dismal underside of an identical building, sometimes with faces pressed against the glass. William Elderly Baskerville spent a good deal of his time looking out the window, making faces for the people in the other building. De Vinne did not approve. He refused to look out the window at all. “Why?” William Elderly Baskerville asked suddenly. De Vinne pretended to start. “Why what?” Baskerville played with his paperknife; for a moment, he was a Borgia. “Why have they cast us here, and left us?”
De Vinne reached for his own paperknife, defensively. He was younger, heavy, and worried. He also refused to take off his coat in
the office. Executives wore their jackets at all times; his was a light green tweed. “Be damned if I know,” he said.
Baskerville dangled the knife like a jewel before his own bedazzled eyes. “I was pleased, once. I saw a horse burn to the ground.”
“A horse?”
“The eyes lit up with an interior light.”
“Did he scream?”
“It was a chocolate horse in my mother’s skillet. We had hot chocolate.”
“You aim to shock.”
“I only like things a little more exciting than they are.”
De Vinne was . . . tolerable. On occasion, he showed real promise. And after thirteen years, why not? Or had it been that long? Perhaps only since January. William Elderly Baskerville ran a hand through what he firmly believed was full white hair. The gray of the sky outside their window never changed; it was difficult to tell the time. Was he thirty-one or fifty? On the wall behind him a sign said
BLINK
.
The girl from the mimeograph room barged through the door backward trailing a supermarket basket filled with paper. She looked uneasily from one to the other, then smiled at Baskerville: he was the handsomer. De Vinne, enraged, stood up and hurled his knife across the room. It clattered to the floor a foot from the wire basket: the girl screamed with real terror. “Put it over there, Cynthia,” De Vinne said kindly. He helped her empty the basket onto a long table where stacks and stacks of identical paper already sat. She shrank from him as much as possible. One of the stacks began to teeter and slip off the edge; they piled the rest on the floor. Other piles drifted against the walls on three sides of the room, some of them four feet tall.
