At the movement center in the afternoon someone describes hitting a cop in the face with a lead pipe Wednesday night just as the cop was getting out of his car. Most kids who hit cops don't escape. He was lucky.

I talk to two people from the Boston group. They say that tomorrow they are going to break through the police lines. I sympathize with their spirit, but I don't want to join them. I hope they all make it back.

At the apartment, we get drunk and zipped so we can sleep before tomorrow. I am crashed asleep at 3:20 when Joan comes in and wakes me up for a phone call. Parker has got a tip that the cops are massing for a bust outside one of the movement centers. He'll pick me up on his way to get John Kifner, who is covering it for the New York Times.

I call our movement center and no one answers. I figure it's all over and they're busting everyone.

We get to the scene of the bust, and it's finished. The glass door is broken. But there are kids inside still guarding the center. They won't talk to Kifner and tell him to leave. We drive to the police station where he finds out that they raided only one place. 43 were arrested, and over a hundred were left there.

Last night the Weathermen had beaten up an undercover cop they discovered trying to get by. Tonight the cops raided to arrest his attackers, and arrested the others when they started fighting. There were at least 5 cops in on the raid. I am glad most people didn't get busted.

On the way back downtown the newspapermen are all talking about the arrests as if it were a Parker Brothers demonstrator-cop game. I am thinking that they have lost their feeling for how serious the kids were about what they were doing. I tell Kifner that I regret the pan I wrote of Medium Cool because they were proving the movie was right about the heartless press. He seems a little upset that I should say that. I realize that I said it because it was the only thing simple enough to score a meaning at 6:00 in the morning I tell myself that I don't know. I begin to think that I don't exist again.

At noon in Chicago's Haymarket Square it is cold. The wind is blowing down through a corridor of dirty brick warehouses and right between the threads of my shirts. I am shivering, sitting in a doorway watching six Chicago cops circle their blue and white three-wheel motorcycles in front of me and park.

They leave their engines on. Exhaust runs out onto the sidewalk. They talk into the radios. They sit and grimace, tighten their gloves. A police captain walks past them telling men to take up positions on the corners.

Patrol cars are pulled over to the sides of the street. Palin cars full of plainclothes cops are sitting in parking slots in the square. As far as you can see up Randolph Street into the Loop there are cops stationed every 50 feet on both sides of the street.

Huddled in the shelter of a massive concrete pedestal in one corner of the square is one kid. Last Monday night the statue of a policeman, which was on that pedestal, was mysteriously blown up. By us.

A few hours carlier this morning bombs exploded at two Chicago in duction centers, but little damage was done. A little later four kids were caught in downtown Chicago carrying bombs. That makes the total arrested so far close to 150.

Quietly 5 Weathermen walk into the square from the west and gather around the base of the statue. The Red Squad. Chicago's plainclothes cops. starts walking toward the statue from the other end of the square. No one notices them. but I recognize a couple of them from two days ago. I wonder what they're doing.

They slip into the crowd of Weathermen, and I start hurrying over there. Two of their clubs are raised into the air above the crowd and come crashing down. They are dragging two kids toward the police cars. Everyone is completely surprised. The kids are bleeding. One of them is Mark Rudd. About 50 newsmen are taking pictures of Rudd's arrest and surround the cops all the way to the squad car.

At the same time two other people are arrested. One is a girl. She is led off in a different direction while everyone follows Rudd. Another boy is heaved into a paddy wagon in back of the statue.