My cell phone rings. It seems so absurd that I actually hear it, I decide to answer.

"Hi! Whoever this is, I can¹t talk to you right now because I¹m running from the police." Since I can¹t make anything out over the screams, chants, and intermittent concussion grenades, I look at the display on the phone. It's a jumble of numbers and symbols, so I know the call is foreign. I a frozen finger into my other ear. "Who is this?"

"Eli? Que esta pasando?" My brother¹s voice swims through thousands of fiber optic miles, shredded by the shoddiness of the Nicaraguan phone utility. I can barely make him out.

"I'm in the middle of the WTO protest, bro," I tell him and hold out the phone to the cacophony of violence around me. "I'll have to call you back."

I hang up as the crowd picks up speed, streaming around the commuter traffic like a river around boulders. I dare a glance back over my shoulder. Cops are behind us, some of them leaning on the roofs of the commuters' cars as they aim and fire gas and concussion grenades. They are pacing us a block uphill to the east, too, sprinting in small groups, trying to head us off. Kids around me are holding vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces with one hand, banging on drivers' windows with the other, warning them to close the air vents. The drivers, of course, are terrified by masked kids, bleeding and crying and chanting, and for the most part they stare straight ahead, white-knuckled on the wheel.

On a long block in the northwest corner of downtown, they cut us off. The winded contingent of cops behind ushers us into the arms of the smaller group, coming down from the east. We are about 150 strong as we back against the wall of a condominium. Someone asks if we can "please disperse" (as we¹ve tried to do for some time). After a pause full of hacking coughs, weeping and curses, an order comes through a bullhorn to move in an orderly fashion around the northwest corner toward the water. I am near the front of the group as we do so‹and confront yet another fractured squad. They launch their tear gas and shock grenades directly into us, at a distance of ten yards. They charge us with batons, yelling, corralling us right back up against the wall of the condominium where we are ordered to our knees under helicopter searchlights.

Within two hours, they haul us aboard commandeered city buses in cuffs.

I remember, above and beyond all the images, heroic and horrific, beautiful and atrocious in those ways that violence is, one image: an aged veteran. In the midst of the violence and chaos, I glimpse him, rolling aimlessly south in his wheelchair, head down and arms weakly trying to control his wheels, half-unconscious. CS gas, first used in the Vietnam War, shrouds his figure in pale yellow. A limp American flag hangs off the chair.

My family arrived in Seattle in 1980; I was three. At that time it was primarily a working and middle class town with an unfriendly climate but full of lakes, parks, and, most importantly for my parents, a progressive and tolerant mentality. My father conjured video stores on a couple of busy corners and my mother went to graduate school to get her Master's in social work. Like the fortunate offspring of many 60s types, I was shuttled to a Montessori school, then to a private elementary before making the severe transition into the public school district.

It was sometime in my early years when Seattle started winding its socio-economic cocoon. Coffee struck. By the time I entered high school, Microsoft had wrapped its tendrils around the technology industry and the very demographic of Seattle. "Grunge" was born. By the time I was 18, the vacant lots and shabby Thriftways that marked intersections around my high school had yielded to Walgreen's and Starbucks; residential blocks that used to be littered with children's toys and lined with American sedans were trimmed and repainted; Saabs sunned themselves in swept drives. The commercial complex that had housed a dingy drugstore and a dank old bowling alley was wrenched inside out with high-fashion boutiques, a four-star Italian cafe, gourmet grocery store, and an organic nursery. I struggled to understand if these were the same places I¹d known for so many years, only now exalted by the prosperity flowing from espresso, technology, and the construction industry. I slowly realized they were not. Working class people and small businesses weren¹t being transformed as much as they were vanishing.

In college in LA County, immigrants scurried through twelve-hour days in our dining halls and were threatened with document checks when talk of student-led unionization leaked out. As students, we worked our way through tomes about political strife in Central America, the increasing wage gap in the U.S., and, ultimately, theories of corporate globalization‹which I realized was at least connected to the changes that I had been troubled by. This was what, in my final year of study, led me back to the winter streets of my home to stand with tens of thousands of others in opposition to the World Trade Organization. I would find out just how much the city had changed since the days of antiwar and anti-nuke marches with my mother, when Seattle was a picture of civil protest and the Police, for the most part, a picture of restraint.

When the PA system rasped my last name on the morning of December 3, 1999, I shot upright. The air in the cell was acrid and hot. About half of the other men were on their feet or getting there, rubbing their eyes, trying to understand. In the first place, we¹d not offered our names. The City of Seattle was holding some 500 "John and Jane WTOs" prisoner. Unfortunately, the police identified many of us by pawing through backpacks. But we still hadn't seen a courtroom, still hadn't consulted with a lawyer, and still didn't have any idea of charges, so the command to step forward for release was unexpected to say the least. Bewildered, we allowed ourselves to be ushered to discharge; in a crammed elevator a prim guard held his nose and scowled at us.

As we waited in front of a steel mesh window, the officer who was shoving our belongings out to us paused and slammed the front page of the day's newspaper against the mesh.

"Congratulations," he grinned.

In the boldest font available to the Seattle Times the headline read: "Summit Ends in Failure." Cheers and tears exploded in the tiny room and we hugged one another with an electric joy, forgetting even the poisonous fumes of our tear-gassed clothes.

We exited the jail into a raucous celebration of nearly a thousand supporters. Tables wobbled under the weight of loaves of fresh bread, crocks of soups, and thermoses of cocoa and coffee. Wild-eyed teens rushed forward and offered cigarettes; nuns in rumpled habits hugged us; ACLU and National Lawyers Guild representatives hustled us in front of cameras and tape recorders.
Off to the edge of the crowd I caught a glimpse of a peculiar sight: two small boys, no more than six or seven years old, stood inside a cardboard box. I finished an interview with a feisty documentarist and walked over. One of the boys was black, one white, both their faces smeared with chocolate and smiles. The mother of one of them sat on a curb and watched me read the lip of the box, which read, "I was tear gassed while I was downtown with my mom. I was so scared. I couldn¹t breathe and thought I was going to die." Suddenly I couldn't breathe either. I snapped a photo of the boys goofing up at me. Then I stepped off, pushing through the bleary cold, weeping as I had not in months or even years, putting my feet and fists against those newspaper machines that hadn¹t been used as barricades against the onslaughts of violence.
I'd witnessed my supposedly forward-thinking hometown transformed by virtual fascism in a matter of hours. But, I soon realized, this transformation had in fact been brewing for a long time; Seattle had, like much of the world, cooked under the pressures of the "new economy" and those forces resistant to it for a long time. That week was simply, finally, the explosive result. The romantic notion of a city that resisted the blandishments of material success, that clung to its core and its culture at the expense of glamour and fortune, had eroded. The question was whether or not the veritable war of those days was the death knell of what used to be or a flash point of renewed resistance, not merely in terms of Seattle, but in terms of society and its relationship to the mind-blowing pace of "progress." Perhaps it was both.

But there was another, more personal lesson lurking in the gas and rain of that week: that youth and the carelessness of it were over. I'd only returned because of what other places had instructed me to stand against at home. And whereas all prior returns had been sweet - at least in larger part than they were bitter - this time it was violent and hard, not only because of what had happened to my home, but because of what had become of me by way of time and my movement through the world.

Perhaps it sounds melodramatic to claim that I mourned as I stomped down Fourth Avenue away from those two little boys, past the coffee shop where I¹d served countless cappuccinos to members of the "new economy," past the steakhouse where my father and I had spent long dinners sifting through the mess of my adolescence, past the grimy alleys where I put up my graffiti, frantic without knowing why. But I have since learned with awful precision what grief feels like: a heaving burn in the chest, a mounting rage at the gracelessness of farewell, the slam of a door.
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