Friday: We sleep now to the thrum of choppers, squall of sirens — not mournful ambulance wails or low firetruck moans but stentorian police shrieks, often in staccato bursts. Many demonstrators gather in north Brooklyn: Barclays Plaza, three-quarters of a mile southwest; Grand Army Plaza, a mile south; Cadman Plaza, a mile-and-a-half northwest; from our windows we see choppers hover over all three. Their persistent roar scatters birds we heard for weeks, jangles nerves: the sound of militancy.
Our days center on demonstration schedules: Will we go to Fort Greene Park at 1 p.m.? Steps of the Brooklyn Library at 2? Barclays at 3? We still haven’t checked out the nightly 7 p.m. vigil at McCarren Park — I wonder about the vibe in hip, oh-so-white Williamsburg. We check on a site volunteers update each morning. “This website is not associated with any organization,” it reads — a distillation of the atomized leadership structure #BLM protests are using, borrowing from the #Occupy movement of 2011 and, it occurs to me, 12-step organizations. (Second of 12 Alcoholics Anonymous traditions: “Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.”)
Brooklyn demonstrators skirting 8 p.m. curfew Thursday tried to evade being “kettled,” the NYPD practice of trapping people in enclosed outdoor spaces, then wading in, often violently, to arrest. Marchers left Barclays Plaza, headed to Clinton Hill, sending bicyclists ahead to check for police blockades, zig-zagging east and south on side streets. I heard them marching east on Greene, glimpsed them as they turned south on Vanderbilt: the roar went on for long minutes, from more than 1,000 people, blending with the chuff of a chopper flying low, spotlight cinematically sweeping.
Police finally trapped them on Washington Avenue; organizers and local politicians (city advocate Jumaane Williams, city councilman Brad Lander) convinced police to let folks go home. Organizers, as they had all day, urged marchers to remain peaceful.
The Girlfriend and I spent the night in our separate apartments — the first time we’d done that in Brooklyn since quarantine. We were exhausted, having spent the day in New Jersey moving contents of her just-sold Southern California house into a storage unit. We and The Son left Brooklyn at 7:30 a.m. to meet the moving truck in Hoboken, but the driver couldn’t bring his 13’6” trailer into its lot — low power lines. The Girlfriend scrambled to find another space, not far, off one of the state’s ubiquitous parkways.
The driver arrived there by 11 a.m., gave us an hour to unload the truck (one-bedroom unit’s worth of space) without incurring further fees. The three of us managed, sweating in the sticky heat, using dollies to lift the washer and dryer, dropping each only once, only a little. Packers had crushed some of the “fragile” boxes — dishes, The Girlfriend guessed. It’s been years since she’s lived with these things; the few art pieces she cares about seemed undamaged. We emptied the truck, took another hour to Jenga the items into a storage unit, locked up, drove back to the city.
New York City’s environs are crammed with storage units, as nine in 10 residents have no garages, basements, attics, or crawl spaces in which to cram their crap. The units are a window onto American poverty, falling into three categories of destitution: 1). Those keeping household goods, not just furniture and bicycles but boxes of diapers and food, bespeaking hasty moves from apartments no longer affordable; 2). Those keeping illicit goods, like huge barrels out of “Breaking Bad,” or boxes of perfume or clothes or umbrellas sold on street corners, from car trunks; 3). Those keeping collectibles — box upon box of what may be one person’s treasure, looking an awful lot like my definition of trash.
We return through the Holland Tunnel and lower Manhattan, drive west on Canal Street along block after block of boarded up or smashed windows. No neighborhoods we’ve seen in Brooklyn have been looted like this.
The Girlfriend is getting her house cleaned, so she and The Son stay at my house until evening. We shower, get deli sandwiches at my market, eat a late lunch. They’d stay for dinner but need to drive home by curfew. The need to leave my house by 7:30 p.m. adds stress to our “Ticket To Ride” game (the first time I’ve played the adult version, first time they’ve used the German city version — I get my ass kicked, they finish tied).
Every chance she gets, The Girlfriend excoriates Mayor de Blasio’s curfew.
“I hate it perhaps more than it deserves to be hated — though that might not be possible,” she says. “It’s like the cherry on top of a cake of crisis. The cake is indignity, disruption, violence, greed, illness, malfeasance; then you put this god-awful cherry on top. Have we not suffered enough trying to engage with these — ‘insults’ isn’t strong enough — these violations to our way of being? In New York City we’re confined to small apartments. That’s not true of a lot of places in the United States. We need to go outside, to move our limbs, to have another place to be; a lot of us have no air conditioning, our apartments are hot. The city is built for activity at night. We leave New York and are surprised when we can’t shop or get something to eat in the middle of the night. In the summer, 8 o’clock feels like the middle of the day — it’s still light out. Our mobility is already limited because we can’t use the subway; now we’re shut in after 8, losing another three or four hours when we use the city to walk, to breathe, to socialize. You and I often walk late — it’s cooler, there’s less traffic.
“That’s the selfish part. Then there’s the political part: it’s only in place as a draconian tactic to disarm protest. The entire city is held hostage to a policy in support of policing that is itself illicit. We have almost uniformly non-violent protests — the curfew not only forces 99 percent of the non-violent protesters to succumb, it also forces the 99 percent of people not protesting to succumb. Our movements are checked at a time when we’re already self-policing in response to Covid. So the police are policing on top of our self-policing. It’s way more stressful and exhausting here, because we’re in such tight quarters and the percentage of Covid-19 cases is higher than almost anywhere in the world.”
Early afternoon Friday I join the Girlfriend on the steps of the Brooklyn Library’s main branch in time for the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday” to Breonna Taylor. An orator, a college student, urges the largely white crowd to begin to dismantle white supremacy by educating themselves on topics such as police violence, to see people of color not just as cultural exotica but as potential friends with whom to empathize: “Take them home. Have a meal with them. Speak with them. Learn from them. I mean, educate yourselves first — but ask us, too. Just understand: we are not here solely for your education and your entertainment.”
Speeches end, a march begins. I see thunderclouds heading from New Jersey, decide to head home.
A couple of hours later, at the tail end of the thunderstorms, I use The Girlfriend’s car to drive to The Co-Parent’s house to pick up The Kid. A trip that took 15 minutes in CoronaWorld’s height now takes 45 — more drivers, bad weather, people using side streets to avoid demonstrations. Coming home, I risk driving on Flatbush toward Grand Army Plaza, hoping crowds have disbursed — they have, saving me a good quarter-hour.
In CoronaWorld, in the era of #BLM protests, a day like this — writing in the morning; 90 minutes in a demonstration; 75 minutes in the car — wipes me out.
The intermittent rain keeps nighttime crowds down; police still surround and arrest on Nostrand Avenue peaceful demonstrators who left Grand Army Plaza an hour before. Good news: prosecutors in The Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn say they’ll not pursue charges against demonstrators whose only offense is curfew violation.
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