Tales of the Out & the Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

Needs! Jobs, Not Imperialist Wars! Victory for the National Liberation Struggle Is a Victory for the Working Class! Support the Peoples of the World Struggle against the Super Powers! Young people got on their line of about 200. They talked about Ford and Rocky, about the Vietnam and Cambodian Wars, about unemployment, lay-offs, budget cuts. Police were heavy in and around the park. Disguised as vendors, drunks, passersby, along with the Secret Service. Unobtrusive, like an alligator in a dinner jacket. There was a new ring of people forming around the cordoned-off area to watch. A couple of smaller groups of demonstrators, some carrying signs saying Rollback the prices! Obviously suburbanites who wanted to buy more stuff with their loot.
    America in the 1970s, in the pit of depression called recession. One out of every four blacks unemployed, Finland Station the gut end of that. Thirteen percent of the whole nation unemployed, and in Finland Station it soared to thirty percent, fifty percent of the youth. And at nights there were more muggers on the streets than regulation folks. Sometimes the muggers mugged each other. Other times, they would mug police decoys, which they scattered all over the bleak slum, disguised as disguised cops.
    The cries about the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner hit home with a lot of the working people walking near the park, just coming from shopping, and even some of the people who were crowded around the outside perimeter hoping to see a glimpse of power. The line went from one chant to another, and circled back and forth on the perimeter where they were permitted to march. It was very late Saturday afternoon, turning to early evening. The shoppers were spreading after coming out of the bargain basements. They stopped to look at the signs and listen to the words being shouted at them.
    Who’s that? What’s that for? That’s Sloane and them. Uh-huh. What they talking about now? President—you know he’s supposed to come in to some kind of reception tonight. A thousand dollars a plate? Is that what it cost? My land, child … A thousand dollars! Sloane and them always on to something or another. Need to spend that on some of these vacant lots we got around here. Ain’t it the truth.
    There were policemen and undercover-types literally everywhere. A couple of the officers would nod at Sloane or say something. Some of the others that had actually grown up in Finland Station nodded at some of the people in the demonstration line. A couple of Sloane’s high school running partners grinned and nodded as they passed, now enrolled in the protection of the pretender. Some would beneath brown skin blush, and beneath the white skin, redder, they too would blush.
    “Hey, Ray! What’s happening?” said one dude who had become a militant cop for a minute, until Tim had him locked up for dumping garbage along with the Lloyd group. He was parked directly in front of the hotel. They’d placed him there to let the R.C. bunch see that there were defections from the revolutionary motive everywhere. Tim’s aides, for instance, and many of the City Hall functionaries, were some of the biggest mouths calling for the destruction of America a few years ago. Ten thousand and up cooled them out a.s.a.p., and now some of them began to flit into the hotel. And the guests began to arrive in their finery, some of which wasn’t fine at all. How come it could be that some sister making $57.50 a week, in blue jeans or cheap skirt, could be more elegant than the shadowy presences strutting their stuff with capes and jeweled bags and the rest of the garbage? A couple of these couples made the actual mistake of thinking they could walk through the park toward the set, not knowing that democracy called for it to be shut off. Some of the demonstrators lit them up at once, asking about the money and the doofus clothes that purported to be expensive.
    More and more people joined the line, and it was well over three hundred