A half hour later, sweaty and out of breath, huffing and puffing, we met by the elevator.
Philipe surveyed the damage, grinned hugely. “This will be noticed,” he said. “This will be reported. This will be investigated. We’re off to a good start.” He pressed the elevator button, the metal doors opened, and we stepped inside.
In the instant before the doors slid shut, he threw his key and security card out onto the second-floor carpet.
“There’s no turning back now.”
Three
I was like an adolescent who suddenly becomes enormously wealthy or an ordinary man who becomes dictator. I was drunk with possibilities, greedy to use my newfound power.
We all felt that way, I guess, but we didn’t really talk about it. The feeling was too new, too strong and pure, and I don’t think any of us wanted to dilute its potency by discussing it. For my part, I felt excited and absurdly happy, almost intoxicated. I felt invincible, as though I could do anything. As Philipe had predicted, our trashing of Orange’s city hall made not only the Orange city paper but the Times and the Register. Although our fingerprints were all over everything from the back door of the building to the vandalized workstations, although Philipe had tossed his key and security card on the floor in front of the elevator, although we had scattered our new business cards about the area, each of the articles clearly stated that the police had no suspects and no clues.
We had been ignored once again.
I should have felt remorse, I suppose. I had been brought up to have respect for other people’s property, and until now I had never even thought about destroying something that did not belong to me. But Philipe was right. Breaking the law was justified if it led to the eradication of an even greater wrong. Thoreau had known this. So had Martin Luther King. And Malcolm X. Civil disobedience was an American tradition, and we were just the latest soldiers in a long battle against hypocrisy and injustice.
I wanted to vandalize someplace else.
Anyplace. I didn’t care where.
I just wanted to smash and break things.
We met the next day at my apartment. Everyone was talking about what we’d done, each man rehashing his own personal contribution. No one seemed more hyped than Junior, our newest terrorist. He kept giggling, the laugh of a schoolboy, not an old man, and it was obvious that this was the most exciting thing to have happened to him in years.
Philipe stood by himself, next to the doorway to the kitchen, and I moved next to him. “What are we going to do next?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Who knows? You got any ideas?”
I shook my head slowly, surprised not only by his answer but his attitude. The rest of us were pumped up, high from our first outing and ready for more, but Philipe seemed… I don’t know. Bored? Disappointed? Disillusioned? All of those and none of them. I looked at him, and the thought crossed my mind that he was manic depressive. That didn’t fit, though. Manic depressives were either up or down; there was no middle ground. Philipe was more even-keeled than that.
Maybe, I thought, he was feeling remorse.
Maybe he was feeling what I was supposed to feel.
I still wanted to hit someplace else, to strike another blow against the empire, but I decided that maybe this wasn’t the time to bring it up. On the table to my left was the Show section of the Register, the entertainment section, and I picked it up, glancing at the top article on the front page. Fashion Island, in Newport Beach, was hosting its annual jazz concert series. I’d been there last spring, with Jane. Throughout March and April each year, jazz artists gave free Thursday evening concerts in an outdoor stage area set up near The Broadway.
“Let me see that,” Philipe said. He took the paper from me. He had been reading over my shoulder and had obviously found something that caught his interest. He looked over the front page, and a grin spread across his face. His eyes, dull a few moments before, were animated and excited. “Yes,” he said.
He strode into the middle of the room, held up the newspaper. “Tomorrow,” he announced, “we’re going to a jazz concert!”
We’d planned to arrive early, but by the time we battled the work traffic on the freeway and made it to Fashion Island, it was five-fifty. The concert was scheduled to start at six.
Bleachers and folding chairs had been set up for the audience, but both were filled and people were starting to stand around the periphery of the concert area. We stood in front of a men’s clothing store, watching the people pass by. It was an upscale crowd of beautiful people, the type of people I’d always hated. The women were all model-thin with short skintight dresses and designer sunglasses, the men blond and athletic and young and successful. Most of them were talking business.
Apparently Philipe felt the same way I did. “Obnoxious jerks,” he said, surveying the crowd.
An announcer introduced the band, and an eclectic group of longhaired men and short-haired women took the stage. The music started, a Latin-fusion hybrid. I looked toward Philipe. He obviously had something planned for tonight, but none of the rest of us knew what it was. I felt a rush of adrenaline as I saw him straighten, walk forward.
He moved beside a smug-looking woman wearing designer-label tennis clothes, a trendy chatterbox who had not stopped talking to the identically dressed woman next to her since the concert began. He turned to face her. “Would you please be quiet?” he said. “We’re trying to hear the concert.”
He slapped her hard across the face.
She was too stunned to react. By the time she realized what had happened, Philipe had again stepped back to where the rest of us were standing. The woman looked at us, through us, past us, searching for the person who had hit her. There was fear on her face, and her right cheek was bright red where it had been slapped.
She and her friend quickly moved away, toward a security guard standing near the bleachers.
Philipe grinned at me. I heard Bill and Junior giggling behind me.
“What should we do?” James asked.
“Follow my lead,” Philipe said. He moved forward, into the crowd, in the direction of the folding chairs. He stopped next to a young Turk in a power tie who was discussing stock options with a friend.
Philipe reached out, grabbed a handful of the man’s hair, and yanked. Hard.
The man screamed in pain and whirled around, fists clenched.
Steve punched him in the gut.
The man fell to his knees, gasping for air and clutching his stomach. His friend looked at us with frightened eyes and began backing away.
Bill and John advanced on him.
I felt strange. Following the rush of our city hall escapade, I’d wanted to do something else along those lines, I’d wanted to see some type of action, but this sort of random violence made me feel extremely uncomfortable. It shouldn’t have — I’d already killed a man, I’d already vandalized a public building, I didn’t like these yuppies here to begin with — but I still felt as though we were in the wrong. If there had been more provocation, if there was some way I could justify our actions, I might feel better about it, but as it was, I felt sorry for the woman Philipe had slapped, for the man he had attacked. I’d been the victim too often myself not to sympathize with other victims.
The first man was starting to get up, and Philipe pushed him back down onto the cement. He turned to me. “Go with Bill and John. Get his friend.”
I stood there.
“Get him!”
Bill and John had tackled the other man. Someone else had come to his rescue. This was turning into an honest-to-God brawl.