Once the canisters of gas began flopping down between our feet, the crowd, without registering hardly any emotional response, began moving slowly but obediently up 12th Street. Up 12th, between the massive, dark blocks that were the buildings of Internal Revenue and Interstate Commerce. I kept getting these flashes of old war movies I had seen where a bomb would plop down right next to your buddy, and you'd see the thing coming at him, and, balm, your buddy would be gone. But none of these bombs were really exploding. I found myself laughing, and shouting happily to someone beside me. "Wow, they're using all the goddamn stuff up on us." It seemed hardly worth their effort, but it was mildly flattering.

And the mass of people continued to file slowly through the dark corridor that passed itself off as 12th Street. A crowd that didn't look so much like a bunch of millennial radicals as it looked like a crowd out of a fifties horror movie, Exactly. That was it. We were exactly like one of those mindless crowds that takes to the street during the final reel of every fifties horror movie. Except that there were supposed to be a monster at our rear, but we had no monster. All we had was a bunch of methodical cops, crop-dusting away like mad. It all seemed vaguely ridiculous to be staggering up 12th Street, coughing into your handkerchief, looking for all the would like a proliferation of defeated Camfiles.

I'm sure that if there is ever a public outcry against the use of gas, it will not be because gas can be used for the purposes of general ground control. Instead, it will be because gas upsets the ecological balance of things.

For, by the time we reached Pennsylvania Avenue, all the birds had taken refuge in one particular tree where they were setting off a tremendous racket. Suddenly, the crowd, which until then had been chanting walk, walk, now began to yell to each other not to go under that tree. And one girl sighed winsomely, "Even the birds are crying." Even? No, only.

Not quite sure what was now demanded of me, I just wandered around for some time. By six o'clock, troops had surrounded the White House, most bank windows had been broken, MPs were stationed at the major hotels to help satirized matrons into limousines, and a pall of gas was spreading haphazardly about the city. The whole affair came off as very South American. So this is what they've been warning us the universities might become, I thought. And then, coming across a book store that had also had its plate glass busted in, I knew I wanted no part of it any longer.

Hitching up Connecticut Avenue proved next to impossible. One old man stopped his car and asked if I wanted a ride out of town. When I told him I just wanted to get towards the neighborhood of the Washington Cathedral, he shot off down the street.

Finally, a bus came along. Joyously, I forked over the thirty-two cents that I had carefully reserved for just such a contingency earlier in the day. I was pleased with my foresightedness, because in D.C. you have to have exact change and even a streetfighter has to face reality every now and again.

The lights inside the bus made my eyes water, but I no longer wanted to cry. Conscious that the half of the people on the bus that weren't demonstrators were staring at the other half of us who were, a little of the old exhilaration began to return.

A year and a half ago, I spent a few weeks tramping about the country for McCarthy. It had been a strange experience, because, deep down, we knew that people weren't voting for McCarthy as much as they were voting for us. That was the only rationale for wasting an hour talking with a suburban housewife or trying to cajole a guy that you knew was an implacable racist into voting for Gene. All the time we had been nothing but walking advertisements, not always even aware of the dishonesty at the very soul of our campaign. Why else did we try to dress hassled but neat, and always make an effort to appear ever so friendly?

And now, on this D.C. bus, here I was, wearing a pair of jeans whose zipper was broken, as well as a jacket that didn't quite fit, and looking just as objectionable as I possibly could. Perhaps, after all, streetfighting was a pretty good deal-at least, it allowed for an indulgence that even the new politics couldn't accommodate.

We spent most of Saturday evening at Frank's house, abut soon discovered that after comparing how seriously we all had been gassed there really wasn't much else to say.

But, dear, dumb, gentle reader, if you're still with me after days and days of CRIMSON elegies on Washington marches, as well as rafts of my own ruptured prose, you're about to hear of the great odyssey that gave meaning to the whole weekend.

Late Saturday night, Joel and David and myself, all newly reunited, set out to seek sanctuary in the apartment of a friend of a friend where we had spent the previous night. I still hadn't figured out the geography of Washington Northwest, and had developed a corresponding hatred for the area.

A ride dropped us off at the apartment sometime after one; we soon learned that the friend of a friend had returned to reclaim the bedroom, and the original friend had taken over the living room floor, and, sorry, but there really wasn't any room left. By that time our ride had also left, so off we set, on foot, to try to reach the house of yet another, friend that lived nearby.

Gradually, I began to wish that the three of us did not look quite so disreputable. Even though I was carrying a typewriter and suitcase, there was little, reason to believe that any law-and-ordered citizen would give us a lift. We walked for about an hour. It wasn't until two in the morning, that we'd realized that we had made a wrong turn somewhere. (Not a meta -physical statement, that.) Instead of being already half asleep on the floor of somebody's house, here we were half asleep on Canal Road, an almost-highway, surrounded by woods and leading into Maryland.