The Cops Don’t Need You
Stephen Policoff
It’s 1969, and everyone Simon knows is against the war—especially Izzy, who he hopes will be his girlfriend, even if she thinks love has to be unchained or it’s not love.
Ride along for their fateful trip to a D.C. protest, tear gas and all.
-The Editors
1.
I was not an idiot.
Of course, I was against the war.
In 1969, at Wesleyan, everyone you knew was against the war, except for a few football players and wrestlers, holdovers from the earlier fraternity era; and Gil, a budding politician, my only right-wing acquaintance, whose dad was a whiskey magnate, and a member of the John Birch Society.
Sure, I was against the war. But in truth I was more interested in playing my guitar, reading poetry, getting high, and trying to find a girlfriend amongst the cadre of women recently admitted to Wesleyan as an experiment in coeducation.
Yes, yes, I was against the war; I despised Nixon, I fretted over napalm and the endless bombing of villages. But the war was also a little more abstract for me than for some of my friends, because I knew I was never going to be drafted. I had fairly bad childhood asthma, and my father, an insurance executive, knew important people in Albany, a famously corrupt city government. And it was well-known that educated white boys did not get drafted in Albany.
I should have felt worse about this than I did, but mostly I felt relieved. Some of my friends went to amazing extremes to get out of the draft—feigning madness, or getting profoundly drunk and vomiting all over a desk at the draft board; and then there was Rick, who was from a small town in Iowa where every 18-year-old male was likely to be whisked off to Saigon. He fled to Canada, and I never heard from him again.
So, yes, I was in favor of liberating Vietnam from arrogant American intervention. But I was equally in favor of my own personal liberation from the largely gray and sexless three years I had spent in Middletown, Connecticut. And this wistful dream was tied up with Izzy, an amazing actress and campus activist, who I was hoping might become my first real girlfriend.
Except that she wasn’t interested in being anyone’s girlfriend.
“Read Norman O. Brown,” she told me, after our first, tentative fondling, gazing up at the autumn sky above Foss Hill. “Love has to be unchained or it’s not love.”
This seemed irrelevant to me, but I nodded enthusiastically. She was always quoting Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown or One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, or dizzying monologues from the play known as the Marat/Sade, a famous British political/sexual extravaganza which Izzy desperately wanted to put on at Wesleyan’s ’92 Theater.
She was tall—almost as tall as me, and I was a gangly 6 feet; she had long auburn hair, often tied up in a messy bun or unruly ponytail. She was from Palo Alto, and was always going on about the San Francisco Mime Troupe, told me it was almost a religious experience, and how she wanted Wesleyan to have its own agitprop/improv theater company, and was I interested in helping out?
I was. I was so interested. I would have been interested in helping her with even the most colossally unlikely project. Which is how I ended up going to the Moratorium.
It was Jed’s idea, really, and he was often engaged in colossally unlikely projects.
Izzy was friends with Jed and Rachel, the only married undergraduate couple any of us knew in college. Jed was a theater major, and very politically active; he often proclaimed his allegiance to SDS and could quote whole paragraphs from the Port Huron Statement. He was trying to create a contemporary Julius Caesar, with Caesar portrayed as Nixon.
“The assassination is going to be fun,” Jed declared to Izzy, though this was as far as they had gotten in conceiving the production.
When news of the Moratorium reached Wesleyan—November, in D.C., a huge march to show the strength of the burgeoning student movement against the war—Jed immediately declared that he and Rachel and Izzy must go. Rachel, who did not say much, and was always smiling, as if high, suddenly grew very serious, told Izzy, “This could change everything,” which totally sold Izzy on the long drive to Washington.
I was not totally sold. I was not so eager to be part of any vast assemblage of protestors. I felt claustrophobic in crowds and did not really picture myself marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, shouting demands.
But Izzy wanted me to go. “We need you along, Simon,” she said, stroking my hand. “We need somebody quiet and thoughtful to balance out the crazies.”
The phrase we need you was pretty much all I had to hear.
Jed and Rachel owned an almost cliched VW van decorated with flower decals and 2 Stop the Bombing bumper stickers. We left that Friday morning, lurching down I-95, munching on baloney sandwiches which Rachel had mass produced for the ride. We guzzled Pepsi and cheap red wine and smoked some hashish procured from our classmate Chip, a State Department attache’s son, who traveled back and forth to Morocco on his diplomat’s passport.
I brought my guitar, and played mostly the Dylan songs from Highway 61 I was trying to learn. I was not bad, and getting better, and we all bellowed along to “From a Buick 6” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
It was a long trip in the rattling van but everywhere we stopped—the Howard Johnson’s, Esso stations, minimarts—we saw the smiling stoned faces of other students, hippies, radicals, heading to the Moratorium. Even I was swept up in the optimistic breeze blowing through that day. There was much whispering of plans in the bathrooms, and many flashings of the peace sign and the raised-fist power sign on the highway, and in parking lots all the way down.
The four of us took turns driving, though Rachel commandeered the wheel about halfway there and drove like a maddened trucker through the increasingly heavy traffic approaching D.C., while Izzy dozed with her head in my lap, an almost indescribable thrill.
Because Jed grew up in Indianapolis, he knew Paul Moore, the Episcopal bishop of that city, who was now the bishop of Washington. Bishop Moore was famously anti-war; he owned a huge house near the National Cathedral, and had opened it up for “well-behaved” peace protestors, which included us, though we were only semi-well-behaved.
The house had many rooms, all of them full of teak tables, deep red chairs, ornate rugs, and on all of the furniture in all of the rooms sat or sprawled out dozens of student protestors, most wearing torn jeans, work shirts, billowing peasant dresses, hats and scarves of various kinds, all talking loudly, laughing, lounging. No one was smoking or drinking in the house, that was going on outside on the manicured lawn. A few blond children were running about, gaping at the visitors, and an older woman in a somewhat severe mauve dress was handing out apples from a large bag, saying, “Eat this apple, then talk to me, dear, tell me about yourself,” and some did, while others looked away.
“Why the apples, I wonder,” Izzy said. “Maybe she thinks we all have bad breath?”
We threw our sleeping bags into a pile in the corner. We wandered around the house, like tourists. Izzy wanted to get high, and I was—shocking, I know—willing to go along with her desires. We went out to the yard, which was abuzz with jabbering and singing, where Izzy produced two yellow capsules.
“I think it’s mescaline,” she said, as we gulped them down.
Things got a little hazy after that, as they do, and we giggled and chattered and lay on the grass among dozens of others, where there was much talk about the evening pro-peace prayer service at the National Cathedral. I was not especially interested in this event, since my head felt like it was separating from my body and Izzy was obsessively drawing an imaginary circle on the palm of my hand.
But Jed found us, said we needed to go to this service, that he promised Bishop Moore we would go to support him. And soon there was a parade of scruffy youths heading down the street to the gleaming cathedral.
Which was impressive, filled with candlelight, shadows, organ music, a choir singing “Blowing in the Wind.” We sat way up in the far balcony, so that in our foggy state the bishop and all the figures by the altar looked like dolls or puppets. I could barely hear any of the homilies, sermons, prayers, but when we all rose, held hands and sang “We Shall Overcome,” and Izzy’s arm was winding tightly around my waist, the whole place shimmered with possibility.
2.
We slept sprawled out on the floor of the large living room, but when I opened my eyes, it did not feel like time had passed. We gulped coffee from silver vats, and grabbed more apples, and nibbled on doughnuts, and were a little giddy with the idea of marching in some huge pick-up army of peace-loving freaks.
Everyone around us began drifting down toward Pennsylvania Avenue, jabbering and smiling, some holding thermoses, as if off on a 5th grade school trip. Rachel insisted that the four of us have a group hug, in case we got separated, though we vowed we would not.
It was warm for November, but Jed was always cold and wore his buckskin jacket, which, with his long blond hair, made him look a little like Kit Carson. The rest of us wore sweaters and sweatshirts, and Rachel was all in red.
“I want to stand out in the crowd,” she said. But there were too many people for anyone to really stand out.
I had never seen so many people. I have no idea how many; later they said it was more than half a million, but it was so vast a crowd it was hard to see anything but a dense forest of faces. Eventually, we did start marching, and there was chanting and yelling. Izzy joined a group chanting, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh the NLF is gonna win, which I found hard to make myself say. I liked Stop the Bombing better, and then there were loud cries of The people united will never be defeated, which sounded hopeful, though I was not convinced it was true.
The march went on for hours in the dim autumn sunlight. When we finally came to a halt, near some fountain, there were so many people milling about, I felt dizzy. I wanted to splash some water on my face, so I tried to make it over to the fountain, but I couldn’t get past the still-chanting crowd, and when I looked back I did not see Izzy or Rachel or Jed, and I was so turned around, that I pushed my way in an altogether different direction, thinking I saw Rachel’s red skirt, but it wasn’t her.
As the sky started to turn purplish, a man with a walrus-like moustache and megaphone made announcements at the far end of the sidewalk.
“We are not done here!” he exclaimed. “We will march to the FBI Building! We will stop the infiltration by those pigs of our anti-war movement! If you don’t want trouble, don’t come. Otherwise, follow!”
I did not want trouble, though trouble hung in the air like an acrid smell. I pushed myself to the opposite side of the street and up on a mound above the sidewalk I saw a familiar looking man, in a buckskin jacket, handing out leaflets. Was it Jed?
It was not Jed.
But it was someone I once knew, and as he thrust a leaflet in my hand, a leaflet which declared Fools! War only ends when your minds are free! I blurted out “Nate Balin? What the fuck are you doing here?”
He glowered at me. I was too stunned to glower back.
Nate Balin lived across the street from me in Albany when I was growing up. Older, troubled, scary, he threatened to beat me up many times. Eventually, he ran away from home. He was rumored to be doing LSD experiments in Millbrook with Timothy Leary, or immersing himself in the world of shamans in northern Mexico, or somewhere else weird where no one in Albany wanted their children to be living.
“I used to be Nate Balin,” he snarled. “And who are you?”
But just as he said it, he had some memory flash. He grinned a sort of lopsided grin. “Young Simon Gold?” he said. “We meet again. Are you as much of a fool as ever? And why should I not be here? I am called to be wherever I am needed. And I have a message for all who seek peace. Only I can help find it. Listen. I am now called Father of Dreams….”
I could tell he was about to expound on why he was the only one who could help achieve peace, but he had the same menacing gaze I remembered all too well from running into him on our shared Albany street, the same look I had often turned away from.
I turned away again.
“You don’t look like the father of anything,” I said. “I’ve lost my friends, and I have to try and catch up with them.”
He shrugged as if this were utterly uninteresting. “Lost,” he sneered. Then he pointed across the fountain, said, “Some heading that way,” and I walked away from him quickly. I did not look back to see if he was still glowering at me. I was pushed along by the crowd, as I pointlessly tried to find Izzy or Jed or Rachel, or any idea of where I was or where I was going.
3.
The crowd seemed to screech to a halt, like we’d hit a wall en masse. The daylight was fading. We were at Dupont Circle, someone said, and there were angry cries and a whole brigade of police and National Guard and raw rage. There were so many men in uniforms, some with clubs and guns, and one man in riot gear with what looked like a bazooka, a giant brown tube, aimed right at us.
“Tear gas!” someone shouted, and then smoke was everywhere, accompanied by groans.
“Get out, hippie scum! Go home!” the police were shouting and just as I turned to run from the tumult, a gray canister landed at my feet, and I was sprayed almost directly in the eyes with some kind of scary toxic stuff, which caused me to weep and cough, and bend over, and almost fall down.
It was dark and I found myself leaning against a lamp post wondering if I was going to die or throw up or just stagger around in utter confusion for the next few hours like a character in a clamorous bad dream.
Which is what happened.
I had no idea where I was, where my friends were, where Bishop Moore’s house might be. I was stumbling along a wide, dark avenue. Was this the same lamp post? Was that the same coughing and crying clutch of protestors I passed a few minutes or hours before?
Then, looming above me was someone familiar, but not someone I wished to see. Nate Balin again, laughing, laughing at me.
“Poor Simon,” he said. He had a low, deep voice but it always sounded to me like fingernails on a blackboard. It made me shudder. “False consciousness led you here. What you believe? False! What you seek? False! When, when will you see?’ he demanded.
“I don’t think I want to see whatever it is you see,” I managed.
And I ran in the opposite direction. My eyes were a little less teary now, my brain possibly recovering from the tear gas trauma, and I saw a small band of exhausted protestors with wan smiles, drifting up a hilly street off the avenue. I made my way to them somehow, and as I trudged in this subdued throng, the neighborhood started to feel familiar, big houses, sculpted hedges, impressive trees. The group paused silently in front of a white house, then, someone burst out of the door, and it was Jed.
“Hey! Simon! We were wondering what the hell happened! Izzy thought maybe you got arrested. Glad you made it back.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I have no idea how,” I pointed out.
Then Izzy came out, her hair wild. She hugged me like I was her long, lost love, which did not feel like a terrible thought. “Oh, Simon, are you OK? I was really worried.”
I tried to look stalwart, something I was never good at. “Got gassed,” I said.
“Wow! Wow! That is so cool,” Izzy exclaimed. “God, I wish I had gotten gassed.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “It was stupid and ugly and I’ve been wandering around for hours, and I saw this guy, this guy I used to know, and he said it was false consciousness, false consciousness is why all this happened to me. Do you think that’s true?”
Then, Izzy kissed me, my first real, passionate kiss.
“You don’t believe that, right?” she asked.
I thought about the hopefulness of the drive to D.C., how it faded a bit in the crazy crowd of the march. I thought about cheers and chants then Nate Balin’s glower, and the cops’ angry rant and glinting weapons.
“What we’re doing, it means something, right?” Izzy kept asking.
I was going to blurt out, Does it?
But when I looked at Izzy’s hopeful face, her eyes were lit up like all the stars in the sky. And even though I was not sure in that moment about anything but her luminous eyes, I managed to smile.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure. It means something.”
-30-
Stephen Policoff’s first novel, Beautiful Somewhere Else, won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. His third novel, Dangerous Blues, was published by Flexible Press in 2022. His stories and essays have appeared in Provincetown Arts, The Rumpus, New Guard Literary Review, and many other publications. His memoir, A Ribbon for Your Hair, will be published by Heliotrope Books in 2026. He is Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU.