8 OU Students Arrested at G-20 Protest

The following is a piece I wrote for the Athens News about some crazy shit I was a part of in Pittsburgh last weekend. It's not comprehensive by a long shot, and it's edited for length. In the future I'll post something that articulates my thoughts a little better.

Silence fell among the paddywagon occupants as a uniformed figure came into view through the metal grate at the rear.

"How does it feel to be a terrorist? Y'all have no rights now."

The "terrorists" had moments earlier been chanting slogans at a rally on the University of Pittsburgh campus. They were gassed, pepper-sprayed, choked and beaten as a result of their efforts.

I shifted uncomfortably in the plastic zip-ties wound around my wrists and thought of the comfort I had enjoyed only a few hours earlier. After a march to Pittsburgh's City County Building, myself and nine other OU students were eating dinner in the city's Oakland area. We decided to attend one last rally before we headed home.

We arrived 15 minutes before the rally was scheduled to begin, but from the law enforcement assembled you would have thought we missed the party. SWAT, National Guard, and K-9 units all served as window dressing to a small army of police clad in riot gear. There were hundreds of these already standing shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter of the area, and it was all I could do to watch in awe as busload upon busload arrived to thicken the ranks. As I surveyed the scattered clumps of protesters---many of them undoubtedly U of Pitt students out to witness the spectacle taking place on their front lawn---I found it impossible to understand what warranted a show of force that would have made bin Laden wet his pants. Authority outnumbered dissent 2-to-1.

We want you to know that this is a peaceful protest, said a fellow protester with a megaphone. I want you to know that I respect each and every one of you.

He got about as much response as if the wall he was talking to was made of bricks and not police.

Minutes later a much louder, amplified voice boomed across the crowd.

"By order of the city of Pittsburgh chief police, I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly."

A wave of panic rippled through the masses as the wall of police began to advance, seemingly from all sides at once.

"Move back!" they thundered, nightsticks in hand.

The crowd thinned as it was harried through a gap in the police line. The bold remainder found themselves in the middle of an adjacent street. Hemmed in on three sides by what looked like a force mobilized for war, our backs were pushed against a nearby park.

"We! The people! Have the right to assemble!" chanted the four dozen-strong unlawful gathering.

The stoic ranks began to close in, forcing us to jump over a row of hedges into the park. As we left the streetlights behind and found ourselves in darkness, the atmosphere quickly changed from one of caution to fear.

People scattered in all directions. The police had entered the park. They themselves marched with purpose, but in as many directions as the fleeing protesters. It was the kindergarten playground again; a big game of cops and robbers, but with higher stakes.

My friends and I, in an effort to stick together, eventually found ourselves trapped. A solid perimeter of stony-faced officers wordlessly encircled us. Fear melted into despair in some and impotent rage in others.

"We want to leave," said one OU student choking back tears. "Tell us where you want us to go!"

Another was on the phone with her father, breathlessly describing the situation.

From somewhere in the impenetrable night another squad of riot cops came charging into the clearing.

"Get on the ground! Hands out!"

We all quickly complied. As my arms were wrenched behind my back and fastened together, I craned my neck to check on my friends. The one on her phone was lying prone, but with the phone still clutched against her face, pleading for help. The armored men were shouting at her, and one began to choke her.

"Hey, get your hand off her neck! She's just on the phone with her dad!" I shouted.

My reward was a boot on the side of my face, forcing it into the earth.

"Keep your head down!"

It was this moment, the sensation of a hard leather boot sole against my face, and an imposing authority figure leaning onto it, that stuck in my head as we were hauled to our feet and whisked off to jail. The scene replayed as we sat out the night in handcuffs, as we emerged from the jail into a cold drizzly Saturday morning, and as we made the trip back to Athens. Five days later, and I'm continually drawn back to this episode. I find it impossible to focus; the other issues in my life pale in comparison.

How does it feel to be a terrorist? Apparently, like this.

A Memory from Summer

I remember the way the bricks seemed to dissolve under the pressure of the water cannon. Like ice cubes splashed with warm water. Cardboard blocks stacked four stories high without mortar.

Here come a bunch of no-good window-breakers, joked the fire chief in impenetrable deadpan.

I couldn't understand what was going on for a moment. Windows were indeed breaking, but for no apparent reason---spontaneously it seemed. Hundreds of foot-square panels of glass, arranged in a grid across the side of the warehouse, began to fling themselves from their lofty perches, the steady rhythm they made as they shattered on the concrete pier below reminiscent of the water gushing from a gutter just after a heavy rain.

It was only once the window population of this hapless, charred warehouse had been decimated that I could see the no-good window-breakers: firefighters with long wooden instruments. Like the poles used to open tall windows in an old building. They had heavy iron hooks at their ends, which emerged, probing, from the side of the building like antennae.

The burnt-out warehouse, still smoldering, continued to be doused with water pumped by a fire boat anchored in the adjacent Chicago river. A mustachioed, portly chief in taxicab yellow armor told me they hadn't had the chance to use the state-of-the-art vessel in a decade.

Looking down from a bridge onto the scene, I could sense the enthusiasm with which the crewmen performed their duties. They ravaged the long-abandoned, newly-destroyed structure with the vigor of highly-trained marksmen bereft of a target for too long.

Down the river a crane surreptitiously loaded, one metal clawful at a time, a mountain of garbage onto a barge. If cranes are equipped with rear-view mirrors, he must have been watching the battle being waged. Trash to trash, the waste keeps cycling through.

Pestilence

When I first arrived at this apartment last January I found piles---mounds---of dead flies around the windowsills and heaters. After I cleaned the flies up, I was inundated with Japanese beetles, which look deceptively like ladybugs and leave itchy bumps all over your body if they get into your bedspread. As I stayed in the apartment into the spring, ants became a ubiquitous enemy. My guard was ever-vigilant lest I give a millimeter to the marching armies.

In June I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom and removed all the furniture, handed the keys over to a sub-leaser. My return yesterday acquainted me with fresh entomological evil.

As I hoisted up the sliding door to my storage unit, I was flooded with a torrent of wasps, before I could even register their infernal death-buzz.

I didn't flinch. I just bolted, arms flailing. It was several moments before I edged back towards the unit, my forearm held out in front of me as a knight holds his shield as he enters the dragon's lair.

I hauled three car-loads of my belongings from the lair, venomous insects poised menacingly over each item. Silent, watching.

I wasn't stung once. Valor prevailed.

Hitching with Truckers

I find that most who make their living inside cramped cabins riding in straight lines begin to wax poetic as they describe home. Home for Tommy, a self-described half-Navajo ex-hippie, was a shack in the country he shared with his son and a half-wild dog, his closest neighbor two miles away.

He's always trying to get me to come over, explained Tommy. But I got 10 acres and I mostly keep to myself.

He gave the distinct impression his interest in companionship with his neighbor ended at the occasional hog roast.

Government once told Tommy and his friends to go and kill Vietnamese. Now it tells him maximum trailer weight and engine braking policy. The "hell no" philosophy of his youth seems to extend to his appropriation of a rural turf.

So he burns swine instead of flags, keeps junker cars on his front lawn and lets weeds lacking psychotropic qualities flourish.

My bus to Chicago stopped at a truck stop in Indiana on the way home. I saw a truck cab with a dreamcatcher hung over the mirror, just like Tommy's. I looked around but couldn't find the driver. I waited by the truck until my bus re-boarded.

Men In Blue

It's about cardinal past warbler on Cafe Luna's bird clock, which means I have canary and robin until I need to set down my coffee and head to school. Theft school; or as the courts call it, the Rush Theft Deterrent Program.

I doubt my education will have much practical value. Instead it will keep me from winding up like the poor transient trying to catch some sleep on the spare chairs adjacent to where I sit at the counter. I watch as three portly men ask the manager, "You want him out of here?"

I don't hear the response, but soon the diner is filled with the brusque jostling of said transient: a seemingly unnecessary conflagration. I'm reminded of yapping dogs behind a chain-link fence. One of them keeps saying, "Chicago police."

I stink-eye them as they leave. They're probably my teachers.

Context Matters

Talking to my friend Brenda. She says Jack Kerouac is a chauvinist. I don't necessarily disagree, though honestly it hadn't occurred to me. But I maintain that his art is still valuable.

I muse on that conversation the next day at the car wash, as I watch my coworker Travis suck on enormous pantomimed breasts while moaning, "Ma Ma. Ma Ma."

She's got a little gut on her, he says, but I don't mind. He points his cigarette at the woman entering the pool supplies store across the street. The smoke collides mid-air with jet streams of hot pink wax and soapy water, all three vanishing into the fury of an industrial fan.

More cushion for the pushin', chortles the man who is known to his friends as "SUV." I have a softness in my heart for SUV, but he is a terrible human being. I imagine a meeting between him and Brenda. And that's all I can do; imagine.

Still, today I cleaned rancid honey-mustard sauce and cigarette butts out of a loading dock behind the dining hall. I positioned myself as I swept so that I could see the blond sunbathing on an adjacent patch of grass. I maintain my art is still valuable.

The Lunch Ladies In My Life

There's Irene, the quiet woman with a worried mother's eyes. I help her unpack magical boxes filled with staggering volumes of Frank's Red Hot sauce, breaded chicken filet, Double Dutch Chocolate Frozen Yogurt Mix. Her son is named Tim, she told me today.

Erica made small talk with me and my attractive co-worker; I appreciated her breaking the ice.

Lorraine is above it all. She masters her Newsday crossword (at least I think it's Newsday, I was never able to get close enough to her to see), leaning over a table. She'll let you know when you need to yell louder.

We're supposed to yell out the name of whatever we take from the kitchen, so the cooks know when they're running out. Bellowing out "Tater Tots!" every 15 minutes or so, only to be graced with a "Thank You!" to which I respond, "Thank you."It is one of the great pleasures of my occupation.

There is another that bears mentioning, but I do not know her name. If I could name her, she would be Bonnie. She waddles in a rapid, skittish manner, making comments to herself constantly. Example: reaching for a jar on a high shelf. "Come here you." Breaking down a cardboard box: "You had to be taped up, didn't you?." Once I responded to one of her twitterings. Something inane like "One of those days?" She seemed surprised that I had talked to her. She mumbled something and walked past me.