Bill Styron and John Marquand Jr. were also in the bar and there was a certain undeniable decadence in the way we sat there, drinks in hand, watching the kids in the street getting wiped out. Tear-gas fumes began to permeate even the locked doors, and at the height of the slaughter five or six kids were pushed through a plate-glass window on one side of the bar. The cops rushed in after them. “Get the hell outta here!” a cop was yelling, which they were trying to do as fast as possible. But something was wrong with one of them, a thin blond boy about seventeen. “I can’t walk,” he said. “You’ll walk outta here, you little son of a bitch!” said the cop and clubbed him across the side of the head with his stick. Two of the others seized him by the shirt and started dragging him across the floor of the bar and through the lobby. Next to me a middle-aged man, wearing a straw hat with a Hubert Humphrey band, watched the incident with distaste. “Those damn kids,” he muttered, “I haven’t seen a clean one yet.” Then he looked back out into the street where, at that moment, a flying squad of blue helmets and gas masks, clubs swinging, charged straight into a crowd obviously of bystanders. “Hell,” he grunted, “I’d just as soon live in one of those damn police states as put up with that kind of thing.”