Last Tuesday, Spring finally broke through the winter gloom. I was with my kindred lover, friend, collaborator Kate, locking our bikes beside a small playground to get ice cream. I pulled Kate towards me and kissed them and they kissed me back.
Three honks from a nearby car shred our intimacy. Our mouths pulled away and we glanced through the tinted windows at the vague globulous outline of the driver within.
“Is that about us?” Kate asked me. “Are we being hate-crimed?”
Maybe he was just waiting for a friend and was irritable, I wondered. Maybe it had nothing to do with us.
Our defiant mouths closed in on one another. The driver honked again. And again. This time we ignored him, though, now I felt myself as achingly visible to the world and I made inventory of what we were wearing.
I was wearing a long, bright blue butterfly dress, its little antennas poked out from the space between my breasts. Kate was wearing fishnets over marine blue stockings and red leather shorts, suspenders and a t-shirt. This always happens in times of danger. I suppose it’s an evolutionary safety mechanism, something little mammals evolved in cruel and indifferent jungles to blend into their surroundings and disappear..
We moved to to the line of people snaking from the ice cream parlour and took up space behind a young girl, around eight years old, standing alone. After a few moments, a woman introduced herself as the girl’s mother and apologetically cut in front of us. To her apology I said:
“That’s why we have kids, isn’t it? So they can hold places for us in the line.”
“I was born in the Soviet Union, so I’m a professional when it comes to lining up.”
I laughed a little too loudly, revealing the taut vigilance that tightened my body. I noticed a man emerging from the car, a large man, swollen to an extent that I suppose is only possible through the use of steroids. His hair was clipped, and he wore a muscle t-shirt. He walked towards us with slow menace; it was clear he wasn’t after a cone.
“You should be ashamed to do that in front of children.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t feel ashamed.” I said.
“I have kids,” Kate added, “there is nothing wrong with expressing love.”
“You should be ashamed.” He repeated. Again and again. He spoke a lot about children but I suspected his focus on their supposed innocence was just a screen to hide his disgust at the very fact of our existence–that we would flaunt it so. That we, freaks in his eyes, should have the gall to feel safe to show affection in a public space.
“That’s enough. You can go now,” said the mother. He edged closer to her.
“What has this got to do with you?”
“You’re threatening people.”
“I’m not threatening anyone. You’re threatening me.”
I noticed his hands were curled into fists and I told him so.
The eight-year-old, very courageously, joined the chorus of people pleading with him to go away.
He looked down at her, “Is that what you do? Is that how you act when adults are talking? You think its okay to talk to adults like that?”
The child looked at the ground.
The push-pull continued for some more minutes. Two of his friends joined him. Another man tried to intervene on our behalf. I did my best to ignore him for his own safety.
“I’m not doing anything,” said the muscleman. “I am just standing here on the street and you are yelling at me.” He said. “All I want is peace.”
“So do we.” I said, trying to speak with sincerity. “You want peace, we want peace, so let’s just end this conversation.”
A friend of the muscleman, shorter, pudgy, with a slightly queer edge, began to plead ironically for the three of them to leave. “Can we go now? Please! I’m afraid of these people,” he said, waving his hand at us.
The muscleman paused, muttered something, before hulking back to his car.
***
The police wore body armour and looked ready for combat. They carried pepper spray and batons and moved in long lines on our periphery. They were waiting for a pretence to strike, for instance: a forbidden chant like “From the River To The Sea – Palestine Will Be Free”, which to my mind, is akin to hauling someone away from a Greensboro lunch counter.
As we crossed an intersection, the police struck. Three or four demonstrators got churned up in this man-machine of gruesomely hard bodies acting in violent concert. They were pushed to the ground and trampled beneath toe-capped boots. A sucker punch was thrown, the target reeled, and was then gripped from every limb and hauled from the crowd, hands covering his mouth and nose so that he could not breathe.
It was Wednesday the first of May. We were demonstrating for Palestine and our path almost crossed the ice cream parlour. I thought of the muscleman. If he had thrown a punch at me, would I have called for the police? Would I have begged the state to ride in with its monopoly on violence to save me from his malice?
Both the muscleman and the bureaucrats with truncheons and toe-capped boots worship power over others, despite the justifications they spit your way, whether that be “save the children” or “regulation transgressed”. Relying on these forces for protection is self-defeating, like using a bullet to heal a wound.
It’s never the right time for this conversation as there are always more important battles to be fought. So now as good a time as any to ask: how can we avoid planting the seeds of the old power in the earth of the new?
