Mob

The night Trump won, I joined the mob.

2016, Chicago — Dora, my Uber driver, called me at 5:45 just as I saw the police close down the turn into the street in front of my hotel. A blue sign made of what looked like an old wood picket fence stenciled with “Police Line Do Not Cross” and underneath “Chicago Police Dept.” Dora couldn’t get to me, she said. They had just closed her turn, three or four blocks away from my hotel. I told her I’d meet her there. I hung up and canceled my Uber trip. “Movie’s in eighteen minutes. I’ll just walk.”

After Dr. Strange, things were about to get stranger. I left the theatre after sleeping through the last 20 minutes of the movie and rode the long escalators down to Michigan Avenue. The air was cold, but it felt good. I was running on less than three hours of sleep and over five hours of airplanes. Advil and toothpaste were next, at the Walgreens on the way to my hotel. I walked past what’s now become the familiar homeless man — Daniel — with his dog and noticed that Michigan Avenue was empty. I saw a Starbucks and a $2.19 later I felt the familiar burn of caffeine and half-and-half warm me up. Cold outside but nothing different on the sidewalks — same sidelong glances, same blonde women with sleek dark coats holding on to stubble-faced thirty-somethings, same cutthroat rhythm crosswalks—when I saw something that had caught my eye on the way to the theatre, over two hours earlier. A single helicopter hovering above the old Chicago News building, pinned static onto the blue sky. It was high, much higher than the building’s spire, but it just buzzed unmoving like an enormous metallic hummingbird.

Now, walking back to the hotel, I saw its eye — a glaring streak surveying Michigan Avenue beamed from the same helicopter, buzzing above the same building. 

A large, pudgy kid running, finger pointed at something behind me. “They’re coming toward us,” he said to his friend in an excited voice with a stereotypical lisp and a distinct Latino plume in his vowels.

A block away I saw a group of hoodied skaters walking on the concrete median separating the two sides of Michigan Avenue. Boards in hand, yelling with spent, hoarse voices, jumping around and onto the median, and scurrying back into the street. Just past them came the rest of the students. Piercings, signs, and iPhones all over the place. “We want a President, not a fucking racist,” started somewhere in the sea of people, but a few seconds later was replaced by “Fuck Donald Trump.”

At this point you had two rather large groups of people: those marching in the middle of Michigan Avenue and those on the sidewalks, who, like me, watched the procession unfold, some rather stoically, others horrified, most bothered by yet another obstacle on their way home from work.

I joined the mob. I blend in well. Jeans, brown shoes, black winter jacket. College-age millennial seals the deal. I weave in between three lesbians yelling “Pussy fight back!” and try to record some video on my phone. Storage full. I join the cursing but I curse my phone and fire up Facebook and hit “Live”.

The street might as well be electrified, there’s so much bustling. Like insects that run into a lightning trap but instead of getting cooked they harness the volts and grow stronger. To my left, someone yells “Why the fuck is Lincoln standing next to L.L. Bean?” There’s a new effigy of Abraham Lincoln and a young millennial looming above the passing crowd. Lincoln is holding a piece of paper and looks like he’s giving directions to the man. I hear drums behind me. There are mobs within the mob — a group of men with Guy Fawkes masks, couples draped in rainbow flags, skater boys. Mexicans and Latinos everywhere. Mexican flags pass me left and right. “Immigrants are welcome!” is the new hymn for the next twenty seconds. Then “You Want Democracy, This is Democracy!” We keep walking. My phone dies just as bigger and more colorful signs are brought out. A large drawing of Hitler with Trump’s face. A naked, orange baby Trump. As we near the end of Michigan Avenue we cross the drawbridge over the river, the beams rattling under the stomps of a thousand worn Vans and Chucks above. On the right, a tall, fortress-like tower emerges between the other buildings. TRUMP emblazoned around the 30th floor. The crowd roars mad as if challenged to a duel. People spit, presumably at the tower, their foamy speckles falling into the river below. We make it to a monument of George Washington flanked by two of his captains. People clamber on his arms and legs. The traffic lights on the street corners are podiums from where other students lead the liturgy of the chants and insults.

It’s easy to watch the crowd, but I want to look at people. So I focus. There are other impostors like me in the crowd. You can spot them easily. They’re older and they don’t yell. Hands in their coat pockets. I instinctively pull my own out of my pockets. No need to give myself away, but in reality no one’s looking at me. A girl stumbles aimlessly in front of me. She’s about my height, plaid shirt, nose-ring, white vest, large glasses. With eyes half closed she looks around drunkedly and after a while cocks back her head and lets out a fluid streak of feathery smoke from her mouth. Just as I turn to look at her right hand the sweet vapour wraps around my face. The little white blunt between her fingers hot. She puts it to her lips but I can’t see her because her back is turned against me, but I know she inhaled because soon she flings her head back again and the same sweet cloud appears and floats to my right. I sidestep and manage only to catch the lingering smell before it’s gone. She walks away.

Two Colombian men take her spot almost instantly. I still haven’t moved. I try my phone again but nothing so I shove it into my pocket. I’m jealous of the Colombians — both of them are taking pictures and videos of the spectacle around us. A Mexican girl perched on a traffic light burst into a familiar tune “¡Sí Se Puede!” I know this one well. “Yes We Can!” is what it literally translates into but it really means “Go Mexico!” The Latinos who know it immediately pick it up and soon even the guy with the Black Sabbath t-shirt, ponytail, and neckbeard next to me has joined the foreign chant, jumbling the pronunciation like someone who’s got too much bubble gum in their mouth but is trying to command a legion into battle. I wonder if they even know what they’re saying. To my right, almost as if reading my mind, a thin girl with a black crop top stops yelling, turns to her Hispanic friend, and asks what it is they’re saying. I can’t help but smile.

The loudest chant comes last. It’s begun by a guy to my left holding a sign that says “Love Trumps Hate.” In another life he could have been a German SS Captain — short blonde hair, features that look as if hastily carved into stark geometric edges. He clutches his sign and screams. “Black Lives Matter!” Usually the crowd picks the communal songs sporadically but this time it sets the whole square aflame almost immediately. A group of young black women to my right bow their heads and raise clenched fists to the sky, all the while furiously yelling. More fists go up. It’s easier to spot impostors now. Just beyond the crowd, standing around the square, I notice the dozens of police officers who have been standing silently. No one minds them.

Twenty minutes ago the chanting was loud and clear but now every word comes out hoarse. The blonde guy leading the Black Lives Matter chant lets out another sentence but the last word deflates as it’s coming out of his mouth, his throat ripped to shreds by all the yelling. He tries again. “Black Lives Matter!” he lets out but every word flakes like chipped paint and you can see him grimace in frustration as he realizes his time as priest over the mob is over. He points at his friend who nods in return. She’s been appointed to lead the crowd and as soon as it’s her turn she jumps in and the blonde guy hangs his head in relief. 

Everyone is here, a legion of self-proclaimed outcasts in the heart of the country, a cacophony of bitterness—across the mobs within the mobs and the chants within the chants there is but one motif and it is hate. Come to me, all you who are bitter and resentful, and I will give you power.

As I walk away, one last sign catches my eye. “Truth stands on the side of the oppressed.” I maneuver around the congregants and make my way to the sidewalk, away from this metropolitan sanctuary to victimhood and democracy. I glance back one last time. Above the crowd, the helicopter remains still, the sounds of its engines indistinguishable from the fever below.