The Brooklyn Rail

i wake up at 5:15 a.m. still grinding my teeth. The coffee is ground, too, from the night previous, i turn on the kettle. i pour the water over the grounds and it becomes coffee and i drink it and i carry the cup outside and smoke a cigarette next to blue dumpsters. Sally whom i do not know picks me up in her gray sedan. She is a painter, she is married, she is funny. She tells me it took her four years to learn to make LA her own. i have two years to go, in that case, in this city that owns me. i don’t think we listen to music at all. We arrive at Elysian Park at 6:30 in the morning. i deposit my phone, my wallet, my keys, my lighter, my cigarettes, and my two pens to a plastic bag already sharpied with my name. The mist reminds me of San Francisco. The trees are tall, evergreen, the tops obscured. i hear birds, but i don’t know birds’ names. Our unit, or spoke, is run by an enormous man with no charisma named David. Later i will watch as two cops lift and push him into a white van with great effort and, as i watch his soft fleshy back ripple with the jabbing gloves and grunts of the heaving cops, and as i watch his visible ass-crack, i will find him heroic. Talia says, “Are there going to be horses? I think we should have horses.” Jamie is affable, shakes my hand hard. “I’m Jamie,” they say. “I’m Jared,” i say. i ask the name of the woman next to me in the circle in which our spoke stands, and she says “I’m cold.” It is a cold response. i’m afraid and i want warmth. That’s why i don’t keep my name to myself. Some people are afraid and do not want warmth. That’s why they keep their names to themselves. The organizers teach us Hebrew songs to sing during the action, but there is no time to learn them. Talia and Jamie and i get in the back seat of Sylvie’s car, and her husband Casey rides passenger seat. Talia and Jamie ask one another about their hometowns, where they live, what they studied in school. i am never asked any questions, but i’m too tired to take offense. But i also intuit that i am taking offense. There is a small part of me taking offense and mutinying against the rest of me, threatening to sweep my personality into a morass of insecurity and despair. But the black hole cannot marshal; both parts of me are too tired. i look out the window at the red and yellow curvaceous architecture of Chinatown. We pull into the ticket entry station of the parking lot meeting point, which is a few blocks from the highway we will close down. The fee is ten dollars, which we had not been warned about. Sylvie has a twenty; since as a driver she is not a “body” like we are, she did not surrender her wallet. We are all wearing masks, as the organizers told us to do before leaving Elysian Park, so as not to be recognizable. But when you are not recognizable you become conspicuous. Many of us are wearing Ceasefire Now! black t-shirts, too. “How are you?” says Sylvie to the ticket guard. “It’s almost Friday!” says the ticket guard. We wait in the parking lot. i see three more cars of my comrades, or whatever, parked in spaces, but we’re still waiting on fifteen more cars. We all go different speeds, all of us, in life, there are not solely two speeds in life, the Fast and Furious franchise is wrong. It is 8:30 a.m. Sylvie receives a Zoom call; Casey holds the phone. An organizer has made the call and is asking every driver for status updates. Sylvie says, “We’re in, this is car B4.” Others update with the same news, or with different news, and with their assigned letter and number; others don’t respond at all. Then others say they cannot get in the parking lot because they don’t have ten dollars, or their wallets, or their pens or cigarettes, etc. Then others say the attendant says the lot is full. But the lot is not full. But it is full of masked faces in Ceasefire shirts walking around. “The guard is suspicious,” Sylvie says into the phone. “The guard is onto us,” she says. The guard is on guard, i think. The guard is on guard, i think, the guard is on guard. i notice i’m humming it. When people say time is circular and everything recurs, i think they’re not paying time attention. But i understand attention has a price. The Zoom call begins to resemble a desperate game of Battleship; C3, are you there? B1, are you there? We leave the lot and park with our hazards on, on an adjoining street in a turning lane. “We’re going to miss rush hour,” Casey says, after another half hour of idling through the phone pandemonium. Talia says it’s like a skit for SNL, a sort of Who’s on First joke, but was scrapped because it lasts forever, a joke that goes on our whole lives. We all laugh. It feels good to laugh. It feels like a kind of resistance to laugh. i wonder if i just tell myself that. We wonder when the plan will go into action. The plan is for each car to follow close behind the car next in numerical and alphabetical line, so we B4 will be following B3, and ultimately we make it to the highway point and stop and close it down. B3, the truck we will follow, has in its trunk a giant PVC menorah which we will construct once we establish our line of bodies, which is us, across the highway, and because it is day five of Chanukah, we will stuff six candle holes with fabric sewn into the shape and color of flames. Zoom establishes equilibrium and all are accounted for. Or we hope all are accounted for. Not everything is transparent. Not everything is opaque. Our organization and our situation are translucent. The organizers begin to call for cars to move, in their assigned pairs, to the highway. “Drive slow,” the organizer says, “and don’t let the car behind you get separated from you.” Almost all of the cars are called before we are. Then the organizer calls our car and the truck we are to follow, so we turn our hazards off, make an illegal U-turn, and end up miraculously behind the truck, which floors the accelerator so effectively we never see it again. “Okay,” Sylvie says. We enter the highway and Casey consults his phone for photos of the action location. Traffic slows to a standstill well before we reach our destination. “We can’t get to the shutdown spot because it’s already shut down,” Casey says. i don’t remember who says to get out of the car; we all just do. With his hand on the door handle Casey and Sylvie kiss passionately, but not graphically; it’s sanitized and sentimental enough that it could be a scene from Air Bud. But that movie was actually kind of affecting. As we’re walking between stopped cars on the highway we’re shedding our sweaters and revealing our Ceasefire shirts. “What’s going on?” drivers shout to us from their windows. i don’t respond. “We’re shutting it down for Gaza,” Jamie yells. The backs of our shirts say Not In Our Name; i don’t like it. Why is it about us? But of course it is about us, too; the genocide is being waged in the name of Jews, and the guilt of Europe prevents it from criticizing the genocide, which authorizes its continuation. i believe this to be true, but i also know it’s not in the Palestinians’ name, because they barely have a name, or a reality, that hasn’t been distorted or outright suppressed by Western media, since 1948. Still we have to counter this rhetoric, this narrative. Nothing in words is enough. I’m squinting in the cloudless mistless brightness. i see the seated line of bodies and i join it, become part of it, lengthen it. Jamie is to my left, we sit, i lock arms with a guy to my right, Jamie doesn’t want to lock arms. Jamie removes their mask, and takes a knee. It’s cinematic. It’s a reference to George Floyd. Jamie wants to be seen, wants to be individual, but still coalitional. i understand this in general, but it’s also a wish for charisma. i distrust charisma. Ceasefire now! we start shouting. Marshals in yellow vests stand at our backs to guard us from the crowd. We don’t have the full line of our own cars to buttress us from the crowd of drivers, and this will become important. This will become bad-important. An organizer with a megaphone leads the chants. An old white man starts screaming at us, he exits his car and screams at us, we keep chanting. More people leave their cars, scream at us. We’ve set up traffic cones behind us, they throw them at us. It strikes me that “rowdy” probably comes from “crowd,” or vice versa. Ceasefire now! we shout. A highway patrol car enters from an exit ramp ahead, driving the opposite direction to traffic flow, though of course traffic has ceased to flow. It parks fifty meters from us. Two cops in brown and cream uniforms step out of the car. Their hands are on their hips and they gawk at us. Ceasefire now! we shout. More highway patrol cars show up. As if there are speakers installed just beneath the highway, a very clear and amplified voice rises: “Get off the highway, this is the police.” There are maybe twelve highway patrolmen now. Ceasefire now! we shout. A motorcycle drives up to us, stops directly behind me, revs its engine threateningly. i know i feel fear, but i don’t feel that i have a body. Even though i and the rest of us on the line have signed up to be “bodies,” i am half brick half hologram. The crowd of drivers outside their cars is large now, angry. i’m on the right side of the line, but drivers at the left flank begin hitting us, grabbing us, shaking us, trying to force us out of the way. We all stand, arms locked. Some of us have to unlock our arms to push ourselves up; others don’t have to because they have good core strength. One driver picks a marshal up and holds her down on the roof of a car. The motorcycle noses its way into my right arm. The guy to my right tries to tighten the lock our elbows make. Let them pass, Jamie says. Let them pass, i say to the guy on my right, and gently nudge him out the motorcycle’s path. A marshal finally comes over, it’s the man leading chants on the megaphone. “We’re letting them pass,” Jamie says. “Okay, yeah,” says the marshal. We need chants. A thin, waifish person with long black hair and Ramones-esque black jeans picks the megaphone up off the ground and rasps Let Gaza live! So we all shout Let Gaza live! The LAPD has shown up: about twenty cars at once. There will be forty of them by the time we are under arrest. The crowd has stopped attacking us. There is a kind of relaxing, like the motorcycles expelled from the highway had represented a gastric build-up, a burp. It’s settled. Let Gaza live! we shout. We sit again. A thin man in his thirties wearing a scarf emerges from the crowd of drivers, whose now-pacified attitudes have reduced their activities to filming us on their phones. “My father is dying!” he screams. “My father is dying in a hospital and I can’t see him! I can’t see him because of you!” The “you” sounds spit out and throttled. “He’s in the hospital and I can’t see him! I support what you’re doing, but this is not the way! This is not how we protest! This is not how it’s done! You’re killing my father!” he screams. “You’re killing him with your selfishness!” he screams. He pulls his phone out from his pocket and runs to the right flank of our line. Then he walks across the line with his phone thrust in the face of each of us seated. “This is my father!” he screams. The phone is two inches from my face now. It shows a photo of an extremely emaciated old man in a hospital bed under sheets, his head torsioned painfully to his right, but i can still see his eyes which are as vacant as they are agonized. Or maybe i am agonized. He continues down the line. Jamie is no longer taking a knee. We all begin to slump, physically and emotionally. What have we done and what are we doing.? But of course i know and knew what we were doing and what would happen. i begin telling myself that this man has obviously been seeing his father daily already. But why would he take a photo like that? Who took this photo? Maybe it’s a stock Google photo for protest situations just like this. Maybe it’s the first Google image result you get when you search “demoralize Jared Harvey.” His grief is powerful. But what if i’ve stopped believing in others’ displays of grief? What kind of person am i then? An organizer jumps up and grabs the microphone. “We’re sorry,” he screams, addressing the whole crowd, “to be doing this. None of us want to do this, none of us want to hold you up from living your lives and going where you need to go,” he shouts, his eyes bulging, the hand trembling that holds the megaphone. “But as long as our government is actively funding a genocide,” he shouts, pushing the “gen” syllable so hard his voice cracks, “we will continue to shut” he shouts, pauses, “shit” he shouts, pauses, “down,” he screams. We are under arrest. The police begin lifting us up one by one, down the line from the left side, and zip-tying our wrists with our arms behind our backs. An organizer crab-walks across the line, pausing at every three people: “100% cooperation,” he says. “No resistance, no going limp.” A protester in a car is singing Jewish songs on a megaphone. The police break from the left-to-right pattern of arrests to arrest her. The songs stop. Two legal observers are arrested. This, i think, must not be legal. i am zip-tied with my hands behind my back, walked across the highway that has become a parking lot for cops. i nod and smile at other protesters in cop cars. It feels like a high school reunion. What’s up buddy, long time no see, we seem to say. i’ve never been to a high school reunion. The cop pats me down against a car. i tell him my license is in my left pocket, a mask in my back left pocket. “You’ve made it easy for us,” he says. i don’t say anything. “You guys were really peaceful,” he says, “you guys will be left off immediately,” he says. This does not turn out to be true; we will be detained another hour here, and then carted off to a warehouse where we will be detained two more hours. Later i will also learn that as the crowd was attacking us, and the motorcycles gently plowing through us, our police liaison pleaded with the cops that they do something, and one of them said “We don’t give a shit what they do to your people.” “Cool,” i say to the cop patting me down, who is wrong, or who is a liar. “So what was this protest about anyway?” he says, and i say i’d rather not talk about it. “Okay, okay,” he says, and smiles. “Watch your head,” he says, as he opens the back door to the cop car and i enter it. It is very difficult for me to sit with my wrists zip-tied behind my back. Every position is painful, so i choose the most tolerable position until it is intolerable, and then switch to a less-intolerable intolerable position. The tightness of the ties tweezes the bone, and i begin to value my wrists. i had always thought “it’s all in the wrist” was metaphorical, or only referred to sports, which are also metaphorical. For war, and for contest, things i am being cuffed for, which is also a metaphor, because i am zip-tied. An elderly protester is outside on his knees on the pavement vomiting. Eventually the police will relent, cuffing him instead, and with his hands in front of his torso. The cuffs they will lace on him are sleek, clean silver, and very elegant. He will from then on hold a beatific smile in the folding chair in the detention center. “Let me know if the zip-tie is uncomfortable, if you need it loosened,” the cop says. “It is uncomfortable,” i say. The cop doesn’t respond. Outside, a middle-aged woman on the highway being zip-tied is pressured to surrender her phone—once she relents, a cop gleefully drops it in a plastic bag, hands it off to another cop, and says “Evidence.” “What?” the woman says. “Evidence of your crimes,” he says. “What?” she says. Another protester is put in the back seat with me, a lawyer. He has the bushy eyebrows of a Marx brother, and he wears a KN95 mask. “Has anyone read you your Miranda Rights yet?” the arresting officer in the front seat asks. We say no. “You have the right to remain silent,” he says, “which means nothing you say will be used against you! So who were you working for anyway?” Through the KN95 mask i nonetheless see the jaw of the lawyer drop. “I’d rather not discuss that,” i say. “Have it your way,” the cop says, and exits the car. “Wild,” the lawyer says. “Yeah,” i say. The lawyer talks about how boring being a lawyer is. He practices tenant law, and he says he appreciates my hoodie, which features a design of a landlord depicted as an ogre holding in his claws a contract with a speech bubble that says “Sign it in blood.” The cop returns and says “We’re going to transfer you to booking now.” He opens the doors for us one by one, tells us to watch our heads. We walk to a white van. “These are my two bodies,” the cop says of me and the lawyer to another cop, who points to another zip-tied protester and says, “I just have this body.” i think about this; i just have this body, too. And as a protester i was designated to be a body. According to these two designators, organizers and cops—the spirits—a body is that which is on the line. i just have this one body. i watch the fulfillment of the moment of massive David, the bravest body i’ve ever seen, being pushed by two cops by his back into the van. The cops are bad at counting bodies; there’s no room for the lawyer and me. We’re transferred to another car and another cop. Just before the transfer, our first spirit cop asks for my phone number, he’s filling out a transfer form. Because my phone number isn’t on my driver’s license, i tell him i won’t be telling him that. “You want me to write that you don’t have a phone number?” He sneers at me for the first time; at least this time he sneers visibly. “Sure,” i say. “They’re your bodies now,” he says to the other cop. “Bye buddy,” i say. But it sounds like “body.” But it seems like “holy spirit.” We get in the back of the new cop car. i don’t hold allegiance to anyone. Cops hold allegiance to themselves. We speed down the downtown streets, we run red lights, and i feel a thrill; we’re running red lights! Maybe this is what so intoxicates cops; not their salaries and benefits, not their sense of brotherhood, not the brutality towards civilians they perform with total impunity, not their imperviousness to charges if not to reprimands, if not to slaps on their non-zip-tied wrists, but their license to run red lights. Stop means Go. They’re the worst people in the world! A gate to an enormous building opens horizontally, then a garage shutter opens vertically, and we drive into a huge hall, the size of half a football field, which resembles a vacant underground parking lot, vacant except for us. To the right are cops seated at desks placed against concrete walls, to the left is a wall with a sign that says BOOKING, with forty or fifty metal folding chairs set up in five rows, and hanging from the ceiling is a monumental Blue Lives Matter flag. “Aren’t those illegal?” says the lawyer, and i say “I would hope so.” We are taken out of the car and are moved to the folding chairs. i have shooting pains up and down my forearms. Casey is there, looking haggard, long greasy dirty blonde hair in his eyes. A cop walks up to a zip-tied protester, whispers in his ear “Have I arrested you before?” The man says “What?” and the cop says “Just wondering,” and ambles off, whistling. After a minute the cop comes back and drops a plastic bag holding a woman’s belongings at the woman’s feet. “Here you go,” he says. Her hands are ziptied, of course, and she struggles to clutch at the bag, shifts her weight on the chair to angle her tied hands to the floor, but can’t get to it. “I guess you don’t need them after all,” the cop says, and takes the bag back, but as he leans down to survey our faces, one by one, he smiles. He's burly, with a bushy black handlebar mustache. In school, was he the bully, or was he bullied? My student Manny wrote a paper about bullying. We need a more nuanced approach to and understanding of bullying, he wrote; as of now, it is not well understood that the bullied and the bully alternate, day by day, often within the same person. The lawyer and Casey talk about Lenin. “Lenin has these beautiful intricate sentences,” the lawyer says, “but will totally spoil them, even grammatically, at the end, just to get a jab in at Martynov, his enemy,” he says. “Lenin hated Martynov,” agrees Casey, “it’s impossible to understand Lenin without also understanding Martynov,” he says. i don’t think Lenin hated Martynov; it’s just bullying. My student is right. Casey it turns out is a tenured professor of philosophy at UCLA. It’s his second arrest. i talk to the woman on my left, who’s been arrested four times. She works at The Ruby Fruit, a lesbian bar my ex-girlfriend used to frequent, as a cook. “What’s the best food there?” i ask, and she says “The wings. And the burritos. I made myself a burrito at work last night, and can’t wait to eat it,” she says. “What else do you want to do today once we get out of here,” i say. “Get in the hot tub in my backyard,” she says. “Fuck,” i say. “Is it a claw-foot hot tub?” i say. “No,” she laughs, “unfortunately.” Because it’s her fourth time getting arrested for protesting, she falls asleep—it’s astounding. Some of us have stood up to lean against the back wall, some leaning diagonally with their upper backs making contact with the wall, some totally parallel to the wall with one foot raised and the sole flat and flush against the wall. It’s very Breakfast Club; i realize we are all the basket-cases in detention, or detainment, from Breakfast Club. “You remind me of an actor, the guy who plays Hemingway in Midnight in Paris, the way you look and talk,” the lawyer says to me. But he doesn’t remember his name, and i don’t remember his face. The woman who’d been singing Jewish songs from the car out her megaphone on the highway has been singing more Hebrew songs from her seat, and some people join her. It drives me insane. Then she’s singing the Not in Our Name song, and some people join her. It drives me insane. Then she’s singing “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift, which even titularly is out of place, aren’t we the heroes? Shouldn’t the cops be singing “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me”? But they don’t, and she does, and it drives me insane. For the second time, the cops mix up the order of their processing to extract her sooner, and i’m glad; i don’t have to get out of here first, i just need her to stop singing, and i guess they do, too, and i guess it’s proof of the power of song. Then they select me, i’m escorted to the desk by the wall, the cop hands me a carbon copy of my misdemeanor charge—unlawful assembly—and asks if my identification information is correct. It isn’t, my address is incorrect. The cop curses the original cop, my body buddy. The cop takes a scissors to the zip ties, to the area around my left wrist, but he can’t get it to cut through the plastic; he strains and strains with the scissors as hard as he can but cannot do it, and my skin gets trapped between the scissors. “Hey,” i say. “Oh,” he says. So he cuts instead from above, where my skin isn’t. i fantasize about what would have happened if he’d sliced into my wrist, blood spitting onto his shoes, and maybe we would all have our charges dropped. He escorts me to the garage door and when it opens, there are all the organizers clapping. i make a peace sign, but i don’t want to. The organizers hand me a donut, but i am not a cop. We eat donuts by the entrance to the facility, camp out there, and wait for more people to exit. At the next opening of the garage shutter, the lawyer steps out, and we hug. A woman from Telemundo NBC walks up and asks me for a cigarette in Spanish; i smoke with her and the lawyer and i and she all speak Spanish. She takes some photos. i look across the street at a comparably tall building, and the lawyer says that’s the actual prison. In front of the prison is a thirty-foot statue of two men squaring off against one another, their fists in the air, their faces up close, at each other’s throats, silver, gleaming, in profile. Sunlight seeps through holes that have been regularly punched through the entire bodies of the silver figures, holes the sizes of fists. “What is that?” i say to the lawyer, pointing at the sculpture. “They contracted an architect to design sculptures for the police stations and prisons, and I guess that’s one of the sculptures,” he says. But i realize i was asking about the holes. “Are they riddled with bullet holes?” i say. “Oh my god,” the lawyer says. “Is that a warning to us?” i say. “A warning to us that are still living?” i say. But i don’t remember the lawyer’s response. Maybe i was never asking a question after all at all.