from No Fortunes
by Peter Anastas
We walked over to Washington Square Park to find it teeming with people.
Musicians played fiddles and guitars, singing the blues and old labor songs.
Artists displayed paintings propped against benches and trees. Some were
drawing on the pavement with colored chalk. A group that called itself the
Student Peace Union was chanting, "Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb." Kids ran
among the legs of adults, their long-haired and sandal-clad mothers yelling
after them as they sat talking and knitting on the concrete and wooden
benches.
Roonie milled with the others, stopping to talk to Ted Joans, a brightly
dressed Negro with a black beret on his head, who was selling his poetry by
the sheet. Another guy was handing out leaflets that encouraged people not to
enter bomb shelters during the upcoming air raid drills.
"To run from the bomb is to embrace the concept of nuclear war," he was
saying. "Refuse to capitulate to Cold War terrorism."
"Don't you love it?" Mueller shouted, as he forged ahead of St. Pierre and
me, tossing his brown leather jacket over his shoulder.
I turned to St. Pierre, who was standing fascinated by a woman all in
green, who sang without accompaniment.
"Bill's in his element," I laughed, shaking my head, as I waited for Henri
to catch up to me.
He stood still for a moment, his black curly hair uncombed, dark face
mesmerized by the woman who was singing her heart out.
"This is the way I want to live. Don't you see, Jason?" He rushed ahead of
me now, stopping to watch a tall, skinny, gray-bearded and gray-haired man
chalking a nude on the blacktop. Beyond him a group of painters stood
critiquing a friend's monotypes that were hanging from a steel-mesh fence.
Roonie waved us under the arches and across the square to a coffee house
where we ordered espresso and brioche.
"Human beings are made to live out of doors," he said, gesturing out
beyond the big windows next to us. "We've lost the entire concept of the
agora in this country. Why do you think people flock to the few places where
it's still practiced?"
"I wouldn't want it all day long," Mueller said. "But just to know it was
there, to see people drawn to the streets."
"Someday you'll visit Hong Kong," Roonie said. "You'll see an Oriental
market that will make you speechless."
I sipped the rich, sweet coffee, inhaling its fumes. The prospect from the
coffee house window seemed miles away and centuries apart from the view out
of Clayton's Food Shop in Brunswick, Maine.
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