Police cars and paddy wagons are now streaming back down North Avenue in the other direction. I tell the people around me that we better break up or else we'll all be busted. Then the first two people I saw in the movement center that afternoon show up. They are from Vermont, but I don't remember their names. One is a guy with lots of curly black hair and a red lumberjack jacket. And the other is a girl with strange glasses (round) and a brown leather jacket. They agree to help me find my glasses.

They say the area over by Lakeshore Drive has been cleared out by now, but we keep walking by aggregations of policemen on the sidewalk. Each time I see a blurred figure moving our way, I whisper, "Is that a cop?" They say no, and I am relieved.

We turn down the alley where I'd been trapped. A little ways down it, seven Chicago cops come walking out of the shadows at us. "Here're three of them," one says to the others. "OK you three, turn around and put your hands up against the wall."

"Oh no," says the chick with a very acidic voice, "you've got to be kidding. We aren't doing anything. Leave us alone." I can't figure out what she's trying to do except that she isn't going to take any shit from the Chicago cops.

They spin us around, throw us up against the wall, and start frisking us. The chick and the guy keep making these little acidic comments, "Yeah, that's my handbag: you want to look into it?" And, "You want me to take down my pants?"

The cops then make the kid take down his pants. While pretending to continue his search, one cop yanks the guy's testicles a couple of times. The kid screams out in pain, and then they let him put his pants back up.

Next they find this little leather sack he was carrying with his hash pipe in it. A cop brings it out saying. "Lookee here; he's got his little hashish pipe." They take it apart, fiddle with it, toot it, while he says things like, "Yeah, of course, that's my hash pipe; never travel without it." The cops stuff it back in his hand, and move over to me.

They grab an index card out of my pocket. It has the emergency medical and legal telephone numbers on it, which leads them to believe that I'm one of "them." I tell them that I'm just covering the demonstrations for a college newspaper. I can't see any of their faces. So it's very hard to keep in mind that they are there.

A cop leans into-my face and asks me what the notes on the back of the card are. He's a Puerto Rican, I can see at that range. I am surprised. I move the card closer so I can read it, but try not to let them know I've lost my glasses in the running. I explain it, and they tell us to get moving. We do. Up to North Avenue again, around the corner, where the other guy takes out his hash pipe, tells us it really is a hash pipe and has hash in it, and drops it into the nearest shrub.

We go down the next side street to the scene of the first ambush, and into the alley where I lost my glasses. We go a little ways down and then find them on the way back.

I can see. Blurs straighten into streets, buildings, trees, streetlights, and smashed cars.

We pass a lot of them.

A man who runs a small wooden newsstand next to several stores whose windows are broken is talking with shocked pedestrians. They ask him if he doesn't think the kids are crazy. He says, "They didn't touch me, they only got those capitalists up the street."

We walk back through the area to Clark Street, and down that to North, where there are now a million cops. We head west towards? Wells Street to get a train somewhere and leave this entire scene. The third large group of cops we pass tells us to stop and get up against the wall.

They search us. Ask us what we're doing. We say we're leaving. They ask us where we live. We say Boston. One cop is talking to each of us. I'm telling my cop that I've been observing the demonstrations for a college paper, when the one searching the other boy finds a penife that goes with his hash pipe. My cop tells me to get out of there right away as they arrest the other kid and the chick for carrying a concealed weapon.