I was hungry: by this time that sort of thing didn’t even make me sweat. I went behind the counter, found packaged bread and cheese, and I made myself a couple of sandwiches. I ignored a bloody knife lying near the bread-board. Then I sat down at a table near the window and opened a couple of my cans of soda.
There were things to see—the tempo was picking up all the time. A schoolteacher trotting by with a wooden classroom pointer in her hand, waving it and singing “Little Red Wing.” Behind her about twenty or thirty pudgy eight-year-olds carrying bus stop signs, one bus stop sign to every two or three kids. An old woman trundling half a dozen dead-looking cats in a brand-new, bright green wheelbarrow. A big crowd marching along and singing Christmas carols. Then another, smaller crowd singing something else, I don’t know, a foreign national anthem, I guess. But, you know, a lot of singing, a lot of people suddenly doing things together.
When I was ready to leave, another light drizzle started, so I had to sit tight for an hour or so more. The rain didn’t stop the five secretary-types, though. They snake-danced out into it, yelling, “Everybody—let’s go to Fifth Avenue!” They left the crying countermen behind.
Finally, it was clear and I started off again. All over the street there were clumps of people, arms locked, yelling and singing and dancing. I didn’t like it one bit: it felt like the beginnings of a riot. At the Automat near Duffy Square, there was a bunch of them spread out on the sidewalk, looking as if they were having an orgy. But when I got closer, I saw they were only lying there caressing each other’s faces.
That’s where I met those newlyweds who’ll be testifying after me—Dr. and Mrs. Patrick Scannell from Kosackie, Indiana. They were standing outside the Automat whispering to each other. When they saw I didn’t have the pop-eyed, zombie look, they fell all over me.
They’d come into New York late the night before and registered at a hotel. Being, you know, honeymooners, they hadn’t climbed out of the sack until almost two in the afternoon. That’s what saved them. Months before, when they’d been planning their honeymoon, they’d bought tickets to a Broadway show, a matinee, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and they’d charged out of the hotel room fast not to miss it. They’d run out without breakfast or anything, just a candy bar Mrs. Scannell was carrying in her purse.
And from the way they described it, that production of Macbeth was like nothing else anybody ever saw on land or sea. Four actors on the stage, only one of them in costume, all of them jabbering away in speeches from Macbeth, Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Oedipus Rex and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “It was like an anthology of the theater,” Mrs. Scannell said. “And not at all badly done. It hung together in a fascinating way, really.”
That reminds me. I understand a publishing house is bringing out a book of the poetry and prose written in New York City on this one crazy LSD day. It’s a book I sure as hell intend to buy.
But interesting or fascinating or what, that oddball show in a professional Broadway theater scared the pants off them. And the audience, what there was of it, scared them even more. They’d walked out and gone looking around, wondering who dropped the bomb.
I shared my soda with them, using up the last of the six-pack. And I told them how I’d figured out it was in the water. Right away. Dr. Scannell—he was a dentist, I found out, not a medical doctor—right away, he snapped his fingers and said, “Damn it—LSD!” I bet that makes him the first man in the country to guess it, right?
“LSD, LSD,” he repeated. “It’s colorless, odorless, tasteless. One ounce contains 300,000 full doses. A pound or so in the water supply and—Oh, my God! Those magazine articles gave someone the idea!”
The three of us stood there drinking our soda and looking at the people screaming, the people chuckling, the people doing all kinds of crazy things. There were mobs now heading east and yelling, “Everybody to Fifth Avenue. Everybody to Fifth Avenue for the big parade!” It was like a kind of magic had spread the word, as if the whole population of Manhattan had gotten the same idea at the same time.
I didn’t want to argue with a professional man, you know, but I’d also read a lot of those magazine articles on LSD. I said I hadn’t read about people doing some of the things I’d seen that day. I mean, I said, take those crowds chanting like that?
Dr. Scannell said that was because of the cumulative feedback effect. The what? I said. So he explained how people had this stuff inside them, making them wide open psychologically to begin with, and all around them the air was full of other LSD reactions, going back and forth, building up and up. That was the cumulative feedback effect
Then he talked about drug purity and drug dosage—how in this situation there was no control over how much anyone got. “Worst of all,” he said, “there’s been no psychological preparation. Under the circumstances, anything could happen.” He stared up and down the street at the crowds going chant-chant-chant, and he shivered.
They decided to get some packaged food and drink, then go back to their hotel room and hole up until it was all over. They invited me along, but, I don’t know, by this time I was too interested to go into hiding; I wanted to see the thing through to the end. And I was too scared of fires to go and sit in a fourteenth-floor hotel room.
When I left them, I followed the crowds that were going east as if they all had an appointment together. There were thick mobs on both sides of Fifth; across the avenue, I could see mobs of people coming west toward it. Everyone was yelling about the big parade.
And there really was a parade, that’s the funny part. I don’t know how it got organized, or by whom, but it was the high point, the last word, the ultimate touch, to that damn day. What a parade!
It was coming up Fifth Avenue against the one-way traffic arrows—although by this time there was no traffic anywhere—it was coming up in bursts of fifty or a hundred people, and in between each burst there’d be a thin line of stragglers that sometimes wandered off and got mixed in with the people on the sidewalk. Some of the signs they carried were smeary and wet from being recently painted; some of them looked very old as if they’d been pulled out of a trunk or a storage bin. Most of the paraders were chanting slogans or singing songs.
Who the hell can remember all the organizations in that parade? I mean, you know, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the CCNY Alumni Association, the Untouchables of Avenue B, Alcoholics Anonymous, the NAACP, the Anti-Vivisection League, the Washington Heights Democratic Club, the B’nai B’rith, the West 49th Street Pimps and Prostitutes Mutual Legal Fund, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, the Save-the-Village Committee, the Police Holy Name Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Our Lady of Pompeii Championship Basketball Team. All of them.
And they were mixed in together. Pro-Castro Cubans and anti-Castro Cubans marching along side by side, singing the same mournful Spanish song. Three cops, one of them without shoes, with the group of college students carrying placards, “Draft Beer, Not People.” A young girl wearing a sandwich sign on which was scribbled in black crayon, “Legalize Rape—Now!” right in the middle of a bunch of old men and old women who were singing “Jay Lovestone is our leader, We shall not be moved…” The County Kerry band playing “Deutschland uber Alles” followed by the big crowd of men in business suits, convention badges in their lapels, who were teaching two tiny Italian nuns to sing, “Happy birthday, Marcia Tannenbaum, happy birthday to you.” The nuns were giggling and hiding their faces in their hands. And behind them, carrying a huge white banner that stretched right across Fifth Avenue, two grizzled-looking, grim-faced Negro men about seventy or eighty years old. The banner read: “Re-elect Woodrow Wilson. He kept us out of war!”