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73. Charged with
disorderly. . . .
Charged
with disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, we were held overnight and
released with the drunks on Tuesday morning. As we left the police station
together—I, Moriarty, Krupp and Kerrigan, Ted Kemp, and two men I didn’t
recognize—we met the women coming from the other side: Mattie, the girl poet
from Wesleyan University, and a couple of denim-skirted look-alikes from the
Mary Moody Emerson Center who’d pitched in on Mattie’s side when the cops got
rough. We greeted one another boisterously—nothing makes a person happier than
getting out of jail—and went to breakfast at the Trailways station down the
street. We bought a Lincoln Star to
see if our names were mentioned, but there was nothing about us personally,
just “twelve demonstrators arrested.” We were surprised there was only one poor
photograph showing a snowburst above a crowded melee. Kemp had a suffered a
crease on top of his head, and Ray Moriarty had his broken nose to show; they
bore their injuries with weary dignity. Mattie and Ted Kemp sat together at the
cafe, but when we left the terminal they parted in silence and went opposite
directions.
I’d
slept better in jail than I usually did at home. Rather than face my stifling
apartment, I walked to campus to find out whether the Daily Nebraskan had come out with a better photo. I was anxious to
see if I was famous, and for what. In the back room at the Student Union, I
found L. D. Langdon reading her Wordsworth. “Hey, Ace,” she said when she saw
me. “Nice throw.”
“I
don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t
worry,” L. D. said with a wink. “I won’t tell Selva Andersen who beaned her boy
friend. I’m sure they’d rather think it was some Nazi.”
“It’s
too bad Ted didn’t get to give your speech.” I gestured toward her book. “How
come you’re still reading that? Tooks’s class is over.”
“There’s
this thing called a dissertation, Jonas,” L. D. said. “Maybe you’ve heard of
it.”
“I
heard,” I said. “I’m doing mine on the Mort D’Arthur. I figure I’ll
start writing in two or three years, after I get all my course work taken care
of.”
“Good
thinking, Ace,” L. D. said. “Why waste time on your diss when you’re going to
flunk out anyway?”
“It’s
always reassuring to talk to you,” I said. “Is the Rag out yet?”
“The
D.N. comes out around ten-thirty,
if I’m not mistaken. How’s my lover-boy Teddy? Does he have a concussion or
anything?”
“Nothing
that would incapacitate him in bed,” I said. “He might want to part his hair
differently for a few days. Shouldn’t you be at home, waiting to greet your
hero with open legs?”
“Nah,”
she said. “When Ted needs sympathy and admiration, he never has to look any
farther than the mirror. Did you sleep?”
“I
slept good,” I said. “The mattress smelled like barf, but at least I had a mattress. I guess they must’ve put me in a juvenile
cell.”
“And
the others?”
“They
put them somewhere else, thank God. If I had to hear Kerrigan blabber all
night, I’d hang myself with my shorts.”
“So
they gave you a juvenile cell and threw your students in the tank? You must
know someone down there.”
“Yeah,
they’re old pals of mine,” I said. “When I was an undergraduate here, the
L.P.D. changed a tire for me one morning when I was too drunk to do it myself.”
“They’re
thoughtful people, those Lincoln police.”
“Did
you happen to see any TV footage?”
“There
wasn’t much,” she said. “Everyone who didn’t get arrested came down to Casey’s
to watch it on the tube, but the whole thing caught the cameramen off guard,
apparently. They covered Spiro all right, but not the demonstration.”
“I
saw cameras and strobe-lights flashing all over the place,” I said.
“So
did I,” L. D. said, “but nobody seems to know whose cameras they were.”
The
Daily Nebraskan had better
coverage than the Lincoln Star,
but it was almost as if the snowfight had not occurred. After a few of us were
hauled away, the demonstration had gone forward as planned, and it was that
peaceable part that got the most attention. Adrian Fisher made a speech with
one hand over his eye, and Selva was there with her poster: Stop The Killing. Spiro had sneaked in the back way, after the
picketers back there had come around front to see what the noise was about.
L.
D. Langdon glanced up from her book. “Disappointed, Ace?”
“You
know that character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape?” I replied. “He takes a swing at his boss and
nothing happens?”
“Nothing
happens a lot, Ace,” L. D. said. She closed her Wordsworth, looked at me, and
grinned. “I’d keep swinging, though,” she said. “You might be doing better than
you think.”
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