“We are the Women’s American Resistance,” and she wheels and faces the Palace bouncers, stretches her arm out and points at them and starts to yell, “Murderers, Murderers, Murderers,” in the chanting manner of a basketball cheer, but with a lifetime’s worth of hate and contempt behind every syllable. Her crew on the street joins in and goes to work unrolling a banner that comes to read Pornography Is Genocide.
The crowd seems to split into choruses of both cheers and boos and turns in on itself. Little donnybrooks erupt everywhere. One of the bouncers whispers into the ear of another, then unlocks a door behind him and runs inside. Sylvia hears police sirens in the distance as she watches Boetell trying to take the microphone back from his new partner and a fresh firestorm of eggs starts to rain down on everyone within splattering distance of the Cadillac. To the left, a gridlocked produce trucker is standing red-faced at the rear of his rig handing shallow wooden crates of tomatoes to brother truckers who look drunk with the prospects before them. A guy dressed in milkman’s overalls starts speedballing the tomatoes at the Caddy, but his first assault goes wide and hammers one of the bouncers. Palace security now goes into a crouch position and they all take some kind of black leather saps from the backs of their pants and hold them up chest-level, ready to break some bones.
The zebra-women continue flying their Genocide flag, but they’ve all pulled what looks like tubes of mace from somewhere in their costumes. A burly, bald-headed guy in an old-time baseball jacket makes the stupid mistake of choosing this moment to attempt a solo charge to rip down the women’s banner and takes a chemical blast to the face. He goes down like a rock, screaming, hands to his eyes.
And that’s when the police horses come in like a threeman cavalry, but almost immediately they’re engulfed and the surge of the crowd panics the animals and the horses start to rear up. Before Sylvia turns away, she sees a young kid knocked to the ground by a flying hoof and a panicking cop trying to maneuver his reins with one hand and yell into a walkie-talkie with the other.
Within minutes a riot squad arrives and breaks through to the meat of the upheaval. And it’s only when Sylvia sees the bobbing rows of their white helmets cutting through the plain of bodies, making a wedge and checking their way toward the Palace, that she thinks to bring her camera up to her eye.
She starts firing immeditely, the first shots reflexive and unfocused, and then she gets her bearings and the shock and fear turn into this adrenal blast and she jumps down from the mailbox and starts moving like this ghost, this bodiless form injected into the melee not just to record, not only to freeze and seal these horrible moments, but to do something else with them. To make them into something more.
She takes steps, locks in place, pivots side to side, scans the mob and instantly picks out her image. She shoots an enraged face, a cocked baseball bat, a body being pushed to the ground. She shoots Boetell with his mouth gaping and flat-palmed hand in the air, trying to trace the sign of the cross. She shoots four Teamsters holding a terrified Canal freak up above their heads, ready to launch him into the sky. She shoots an Intercourse Is Abuse placard, liberated from its owner and being used to smash in the windows of a discount appliance store. She shoots a wave of charging looters hauling stereos, televisions, microwave ovens from the store window. She shoots the arrival of the first of the Bangkok Park gangs — the Grey Roaches — jogging in to see what can be scored and picked out of this explosion of unexpected opportunity.
And then she’s knocked to the street. She doesn’t even see her attacker. She instinctively cradles the camera into her chest as she goes down full on the knees. Before she can get up, someone behind her starts screaming, “Cops,” and she pivots on her behind and brings the camera back to her eye in time to see a line of police racing the Roaches to the already ravaged appliance store. She shoots a bunch of frames of the charge. She freezes a gangboy swinging a fungo bat at a masked cop. She nails the cop knocking the bat from the kid’s hands with an arcing swing of his night-stick across the gangboy’s arms. She captures the breaking of the kid’s elbow, the free-fall to the street.
Suddenly, she’s making little movies, cinema reduced to its minimal essence, series of shots, four and five frames to a complete sequence. And all of it pure violence. Everyone is fighting everyone else and there’s very little sense of allegiances, of side against side. What appears to have started out as a classic protest event — amplified speeches setting cause against cause — has almost instantly degenerated into a fine definition of anarchy. Every man for himself and God against all. There’s blood everywhere and the Roaches have managed to set fire to the appliance mart.
Sylvia finds a pocket of clearing and runs across the street, gets her back against the wall of Herzog’s and starts focusing in on the flames. From the glass-shattered entryway of the mart, a cop and a Roach come rolling into the street, locked in a full-body clench, the cop trying to secure a hold around the Roach’s neck, the Roach squirming low, grabbing the cop waist-level and throwing short jabs to the groin. They spin out into the street, the cop rolling at the right moment to settle into an upright position on the Roach’s chest. And then he starts in with a cut-down billy club, first battering the kid’s head until the body goes prone and then grabbing the club with a hand at either end and coming down on the windpipe. Sylvia should be screaming and running into the street. But she’s just keeping her right index finger on the shutter release. Cementing the image. Exposing this suffocation to chemical-treated paper. Freezing the horrible instant.
Until the scene through the viewfinder goes black and the camera gets smashed back into her face and she’s back down on the sidewalk and now she’s screaming and looking up at another, younger cop, his face both terrified and furious. He’s hovering over her like he’s not sure what to do for a second, then he reaches down and grabs the camera, but Sylvia doesn’t let go, she’s got both hands on the shoulder strap and it’s five seconds of a pathetic and absurd tug of war and she doesn’t know why he hasn’t just let loose with his club again, but before the idea can occur, one of the Palace bouncers tackles the cop and before Sylvia can stand back up, someone has her under the arms and pulls her hard, backwards, her legs dragging across the sidewalk, back through a doorway and inside to the lobby of Herzog’s.
Then she’s released and she stays on the ground but rolls over onto her knees. She looks up to see a large man with an enormous bald head which he bows toward her as he extends a hand to help her to her feet. She gets up on her own, dazed and just starting to feel the pain in her right eye.
“I’m afraid,” the man says, “you are going to have what they once called a shiner.”
Sylvia brings a hand up to her eye, tries to touch it gingerly, then she brings the hand down to her chest and says, “My camera.”
The bald man nods and says, “My people will try to retrieve it. We’ll see what we can do. Are you from the Spy?”
She looks up at him, suddenly feeling shaky and nauseated.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asks.
She tries to say no, but all she can do is take halting breaths.
“Come,” he says. “It’s all right. You are safe now. Come to my office. You’ll be fine. We’ll wait out this incident upstairs.”