Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

But the bouncers aren’t having any of it. They keep their rigid stances behind their bushy mustaches until one guy at the end gives in to the temptation and flashes Boetell a defiant middle finger.

The Reverend wheels to the crowd and barks, “Then we must pray for them, my friends. It is our mission on this rock. Let us now raise our voices so that the strength of the Archangel might descend upon us and we prove worthy to fight the final battle at the time of Millennium. Sing now with me, people. Sing loud and send your voices soaring to heaven that he might bring the rain of fire down upon this bastion of carnal hideousness. That he might smite this wicked temple as he did Sodom and Gomorrah.”

As if on cue the gang in the robes circling the Caddy breaks into “Nearer My God To Thee.” The first few yards of people beyond them join in the singing. But after that the street is clogged with packs of Canalites and furious motorists and they start in with catcalls and heckling. Boetell yells above the voices of his choir, “Your taunting will only make us stronger. You are advised, one and all, that the decent people of Quinsigamond are taking back their city. They will not tolerate abominations such as this one,” a wildly dramatic gesture toward the Skin Palace. “They are linking arms with brethren from the East Coast to the West. The day of the Lord is upon us, heathens. Get thee behind me. The family of God will trample you under its heel.”

It’s on this last line that the egg throwing starts. Boetell catches one right on the jaw. The splatter covers his whole face, but he looks more thrilled than shocked, as if this were the perfect turn of events, the next exact step in a scripted pageant. He makes a show of mopping his face with the sleeve of his white suitcoat, but it’s really just a brush to a single cheek and the bulk of the yolk still shows like a runny scar.

A kid with a mohawk haircut charges the Caddy with a full, open carton of fresh grade-As, hoping to give the Reverend a complete pelting, but one of the singing disciples suddenly drops into a defensive stance, takes his 2 Thessalonians 1:8, 9 placard from his shoulder and starts swinging it like a battle-ax. On his third swing he nails mohawk in the stomach and the kid crumbles to the pavement.

The crowd starts to go crazy, pushing and shoving and screaming. The bouncers look at each other, starting to get edgy, unsure of what to do next. Boetell closes his eyes and turns his head to the heavens. He brings the mike to his lips and yells, “Send us help in our hour of need, Sweet Jesus. Send us a phalanx of reinforcements to battle those who would blaspheme the flesh and defile the soul. On your command let an army of righteous warriors join our holy platoon and war on this lascivious enemy of unbridled lust and perversion.”

And the Reverend gets his wish. A column of marching women breaks out of an alley next to the Palace and, with an almost military precision, starts to move in the direction of the Chariot of Virtue. The crowd seems so stunned by their appearance that it parts like a biblical sea and the unit raises its clenched fists in an up-and-down power salute and comes to a stop at the hood of the Caddy.

Boetell falls to his knees, careful not to dent the roof, and says, “You have rewarded our faith. You have sent the enemies of our enemies to help us beat the writhing beast into submission. Let us say Amen.”

An amen chorus sweeps through the faithful, followed by a lot of Praising the Lord. The new arrivals, however, seem less than enthusiastic about the revival rhetoric. The women are all dressed in black-and-white striped, smock-like tunics and matching pants. They’ve got large blocklike numbers stenciled in black on their backs. It’s like a costume party where everyone decided to show up as old-time prisoners, like inmates in some ancient jailbreak movie. And they’ve all got silver tape over their mouths. One woman steps up onto the Caddy’s bumper, then up to the hood, holds her hands up over her head to get the crowd’s attention, waits a beat, then gives a signal to her people and in unison they all make an exaggerated display of ripping the tape from their faces and hurling it to the ground. The leader then jumps up next to Boetell and grabs the microphone from him.

“We are the Women’s American Resistance,” and she wheels and faces the Palace bouncers, stretches her arm out and points at them and starts to yell, “Murderers, Murderers, Murderers,” in the chanting manner of a basketball cheer, but with a lifetime’s worth of hate and contempt behind every syllable. Her crew on the street joins in and goes to work unrolling a banner that comes to read Pornography Is Genocide.

The crowd seems to split into choruses of both cheers and boos and turns in on itself. Little donnybrooks erupt everywhere. One of the bouncers whispers into the ear of another, then unlocks a door behind him and runs inside. Sylvia hears police sirens in the distance as she watches Boetell trying to take the microphone back from his new partner and a fresh firestorm of eggs starts to rain down on everyone within splattering distance of the Cadillac. To the left, a gridlocked produce trucker is standing red-faced at the rear of his rig handing shallow wooden crates of tomatoes to brother truckers who look drunk with the prospects before them. A guy dressed in milkman’s overalls starts speedballing the tomatoes at the Caddy, but his first assault goes wide and hammers one of the bouncers. Palace security now goes into a crouch position and they all take some kind of black leather saps from the backs of their pants and hold them up chest-level, ready to break some bones.

The zebra-women continue flying their Genocide flag, but they’ve all pulled what looks like tubes of mace from somewhere in their costumes. A burly, bald-headed guy in an old-time baseball jacket makes the stupid mistake of choosing this moment to attempt a solo charge to rip down the women’s banner and takes a chemical blast to the face. He goes down like a rock, screaming, hands to his eyes.

And that’s when the police horses come in like a threeman cavalry, but almost immediately they’re engulfed and the surge of the crowd panics the animals and the horses start to rear up. Before Sylvia turns away, she sees a young kid knocked to the ground by a flying hoof and a panicking cop trying to maneuver his reins with one hand and yell into a walkie-talkie with the other.

Within minutes a riot squad arrives and breaks through to the meat of the upheaval. And it’s only when Sylvia sees the bobbing rows of their white helmets cutting through the plain of bodies, making a wedge and checking their way toward the Palace, that she thinks to bring her camera up to her eye.

She starts firing immeditely, the first shots reflexive and unfocused, and then she gets her bearings and the shock and fear turn into this adrenal blast and she jumps down from the mailbox and starts moving like this ghost, this bodiless form injected into the melee not just to record, not only to freeze and seal these horrible moments, but to do something else with them. To make them into something more.

She takes steps, locks in place, pivots side to side, scans the mob and instantly picks out her image. She shoots an enraged face, a cocked baseball bat, a body being pushed to the ground. She shoots Boetell with his mouth gaping and flat-palmed hand in the air, trying to trace the sign of the cross. She shoots four Teamsters holding a terrified Canal freak up above their heads, ready to launch him into the sky. She shoots an Intercourse Is Abuse placard, liberated from its owner and being used to smash in the windows of a discount appliance store. She shoots a wave of charging looters hauling stereos, televisions, microwave ovens from the store window. She shoots the arrival of the first of the Bangkok Park gangs — the Grey Roaches — jogging in to see what can be scored and picked out of this explosion of unexpected opportunity.