Miami and the Siege of Chicago Read Online Free Page B

recovered, sunglasses offered up in tribute, he made the speaker’s stand—the flat bed of a truck—and the meeting began. The New York Times was to report 3,000 people there, perhaps it was half; they cheered everything he said, those who could hear him. The acoustics varied from punko to atrocious, and the reporter circling the crowd heard one plain buxom girl with long brown hair—hippie hints of trinket and dungarees, girl formed out of the very mold of Rockefeller supporters— turn nonetheless sadly to her friend and say, “I can’t hear a thing—bye bye.” Next step, a sixty-year-old blonde in a bikini with half of a good figure left (breast and buttocks) the flesh around her navel unhappily equal to the flesh around her neck, wearing orange plastic bracelets, gold charm necklace, rings, rhinestone sunglasses, wedgies, painted toes, red hot momma kisser lips, a transistor radio giving rock, and she—whatever she was hearing—out to yell, “Rocky, we want Rocky,” beating out the rhythm on one of her two consorts, the one younger than herself; the older, a husband? had a cigar, a paunch, and that benign cool which speaks of holding property in Flatbush in Brooklyn, and putting up with a live-wire wife.
    But indeed it must have been reminiscent to Rocky of campaigning on beaches in Brooklyn and Queens, not Coney Island so much as Brighton or Manhattan Beach or Jacob Riis Park: the crowd had the same propinquity, same raucous cheery wise hard middle-class New York smarts— take the measure of everything and still give your cheer because you are there, Murray. Even the smells were the same—orgiastic onions in red hot dog and knish grease, dirty yellow sand—Rocky had to recognize it all, for when he introduced Claude Kirk, “the young alive Governor of Florida” (sole vote for him in the Florida delegation) a smattering of applause came up, a spattering of comment, and one or two spit-spraying lip blats—it was obvious the crowd didn’t know Kirk from a Mafia dance-contest winner. So Rocky shifted gears. “It’s a thrill for us from New York to be here, in Florida,” he said, “and half of you must be here from New York.” The laugh told him he was right. A delicate gloom began to come in equal to the first tendrils of mist over a full moon; God would know what his advisers had been telling him about the possible power of this open street rally on the 72nd Street beach—with luck and a mass turnout massive enough to break all records in category, he could be on his way—a people’s candidate must ride a tidal wave. This was not even a bona fide breaker. Half of his audience was from New York. Well, he was no weak campaigner. He kept it going, hitting the hard spots, “The Republican Party must become again a national party, the voice of the poor and the oppressed.” Great cheers for the size of the crowd. “The Republican Party cannot afford parochialism any longer.” Smaller cheer, slight confusion in his audience. “Parochialism” had vague connotations of Roman Catholic schools. Rocky had a good voice, man-to-man voice, Tracy, Bogart, hints of Gable. When the very rich desert their patrician holdings on the larynx (invariably because they have gone into politics) and would come over as regular grips, mill-hands and populists, they lean dependably into the imitation of movie stars they have loved. One could psych a big bet that Spencer Tracy was Rocky’s own Number One and would be on the ticket as Vice President if the election were held in heaven. It was an honest voice, sincere, masculine, vibrant, reedy, slightly hoarse, full of honest range-rider muscle, with injections from the honest throatiness of New York. It was a near-perfect voice for a campaigner; it was just a question of whether it was entirely his own or had gravitated to its function, much as the center of his mouth