Robby

by Nathaniel Berry

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

Justice for Breonna Taylor. Justice for George Floyd. Abolish the police.

Then the cop knocked me down to the ground, Robby told me, over the phone. We’ve spoken every day since quarantine, like we used to back in High School, and in the summers when I was home from college, when every night would end with us up on the second floor of Robby’s family’s carriage house listening to his dad’s old jazz records, walking the long way around Lake Adrian, singing Les Miserables from start to finish. Confident that at the first sign of revolution in our own country, we would run like Marius and Enjolras to the barricades. Since the protests started, our conversations have become urgent, and we actually say I love you, now, instead of just thinking it.

Robby had to walk from Logan Square to the Loop because they’d shut down the CTA to stop more demonstrators from getting downtown. He didn’t know anyone who was going out to protest, but he figured whoever was there would be in the Loop. He crossed the river a few minutes before they raised the bridges. He thought, for just a second, Oh, a boat must be coming. 

CITZENS: DISPERSE! THIS IS AN UNLAWFUL GATHERING. POLICE HAVE BEEN AUTHORIZED TO MAKE ARRESTS AND USE OTHER POLICE MEASURES

Robby had these cascading, intrusive thoughts: That the order to disperse is what the Redcoats said at Lexington and Concord; that the word Citizens is loaded and complicated, and that its invocation in an emergency almost always means somebody’s about to get fucked up; that other police measures was vague and ominous; that the bridges were raised in order to prevent people from escaping arrest or, even worse, being reinforced by other protestors in numbers sufficient to overwhelm the police; that he was scared, more of being a coward than of suffering physically.

Black smoke billowing from broken windows, broken glass like little shards of frozen flame, reflecting the setting sun; a bank was smashed and burning. Some teenagers had flipped a CPD SUV and set it on fire; they’d formed a selfie line and took beaming photos with the ruins of the state behind them. Robby had left his phone at home so he couldn’t be tracked. Robby wandered a little aimlessly around the empty Loop until the police started kettling. Black-clad Anarchist runners monitoring the police scanners warned protestors that the use of chemical weapons had been authorized. The loudspeaker kept calling everybody citizen, and the citizens formed close ranks, arm in arm, blocking the streets, opposite the ranks of club-swinging riot troops. Somebody shouted White people to the front! and Robby went to the front, locked arms with the citizen on each side. Somebody put their hands on Robby’s back to steady him. Robby told me he knows what Marathon and Thermopylae were like now—how an individual’s courage is dependent on the person beside and behind them, how a line of free people can hold together only as long as they have courage and trust in each other, and how when the person behind Robby fled, and the hands were off his back, it felt like a death.

Gassed and clubbed; the demonstrator rout was intense, immediate—people fled in any direction they could find, red-eyed and blue-bruised. A man in a wheelchair tried to escape the police line and one of the cops, maybe terrified by the full knowledge of what his brother officers would do if they caught up to him, shouted to Robby: Get him out of here!

Or what? Robby heard himself shout. Are you going to fucking shoot us?

I can picture it, and I know that it happened just that way because Robby (my genius friend, my Adrian High School Debate-Club and Improv Sketch partner, the only kid I knew who I would admit was smarter than me, the kid who failed out of college because he was too affronted by rote education and couldn’t imagine an undergrad degree in some humanities subject making him, or the world, any better; who read Marx and Bakunin and St. Victor Hugo, who dressed in Salvation-Army Suit-coats and theater-pilfered bowlers, who lived in his parents’ house on State Street until he was twenty-two and moved to Chicago to do stand-up and work at a library; who fell in love and had his heart so thoroughly broken that he despaired of ever finding even a moment of peace ever again) would throw himself like a Viking against the shield-wall of the CPD: for justice, sure—and also hungry for the annihilation of his troubled, unhappy spirit and the final resolution of all his contradictions.

And these cops kept saying, Robby told me, get out of here before anyone gets hurt—this mealy-mouthed passive-voice bullshit, because it’s not like we were going to get struck by an act of god: they were the ones who were going to decide to hurt us. 

Robby didn’t sleep for three days—hopped up on a toxic melange of adrenaline and embarrassment at not having been killed or arrested. That night, 1000 people were arrested in the Loop, and by good luck and privilege he made his way through downtown to the South Side, the only route not cut-off by police.

The Chicago Police are getting smarter, Robby said. Not doing the mass arrests after Saturday night, they’re kneeling with the protestors now because they know our biggest weapon is public sympathy. And when that doesn’t work, pretty soon it’s not going to be enough to just be hurt by them on TV and talk about it on Twitter. We’re going to have to do fight back for real—and I don’t know what that looks like. But I’m going out again tomorrow. I wish you were here. I love you.