Break-up 1

16.

My victim-cum-cause-célèbre status suited my desperate need to feel central to something, to matter. To be significant. To make a difference. While Sasha and the kids were in Palo Alto, I took the opportunity to attempt to initiate an affair with my comrade, Lena, a fellow substitute teacher, with dark hair and dark eyes. If my experience is typical, the statistics regarding extramarital affairs are exaggerated, probably by male wishful thinking. It’s not that easy. A married man on the make is one of the least attractive creatures on the planet. I wrote her a sappy note telling her that it was she, not Sasha, that I loved. She must have been curious, because she did meet me for a drink at a Persian themed bar in the Haight, where I whined about how hard it was to live with someone who doesn’t really share your politics. She reported me to our club leader Kathy, and we spent the better part of our next meeting excoriating me for “sexism.”

At the end of the meeting, Kathy drove me home. I was contrite about my bungled attempt at an affair. Finally, I asked her point blank: “Do you think my relationship with Sasha is holding me back politically?”

She hesitated. “Yes, Henry, I do.”

That settled it in my mind. I waited a few more weeks until the semester was over. I took the van camping by myself to Point Reyes, and commiserated with myself among the desolate sand dunes. I decided to leave.

My return was awkward. I got home just in time for dinner, for which I had invited a teacher friend, someone I was trying to win to the party, building a base. So we went through the motions of this dinner, me knowing my decision, Sasha clueless. When the friend finally left, I told her. “I’m leaving you,” I blurted.

“Okay then. Leave.” There was hysteria in her voice, but she was in control.

It was late at night. I had nowhere to go.

I was hoping for break-up sex, but she made me sleep on the couch in the living room.

In the morning as I packed up my stuff, my knot of coldness took hold of me and I played B. B. King on the phonograph: “The Thrill is Gone,” an act of gratuitous cruelty. I suppose it made me feel better to vent whatever residual anger I might have had at her for not being the party wife I needed.

I stayed on a friend’s floor for a few nights, feeling numb. Finally I got the bright idea to rent an apartment in Geneva Towers, an all black housing project near the school where I had been teaching. My contract was up at that school, but I reasoned that if I could organize parent support again, I might be able to keep the job.

Geneva Towers was originally built as a low- and middle- income, racially integrated complex by an idealistic developer named Eichler who'd made millions building relatively interesting tract houses in the Palo Alto area. But the unpleasant winds, the unusable balconies, the too small rooms, and the frequent elevator breakdowns -- along with some spectacular apartment fires -- drove the middle-income people out. The developer, or at least the corporate entity which fronted for him, went bankrupt, and the federal government took over the mortgage. Meanwhile, thousands of blacks were being displaced by ambitious redevelopment projects in other areas of the city, and it wasn't long before the Towers became virtually all black.

My party club leader Kathy wondered if I wasn’t being “missionary” by moving into such a place, but the party leader said it depended on my attitude. My attitude, being that the move would help me keep my job, was essentially self-serving, therefore not missionary.

I used experience moving to the Towers in a novel I wrote years later called White Night, or How I Came to Believe that I was the One who Caused the San Francisco City Hall Killings and the Jonestown Massacre. Rather than cannibalize it, I’ll quote from it. The novel is written in the first person from the point of view of my autobiographical character, Barney Blatz, but interspersed with sections in the second person that are more of a reflection of his subjective state.

"You are a man driven by an anxious compulsion to know what is real. You take Mao's dictate that reality can only be known by acting upon it to the extreme of a constant, restless, and sometimes reckless activity. The minute you stop acting, the anxiety catches up with you and threatens to overwhelm your ability to act forever. Therefore, when your first wife tries to slow you down and get you to at least consider your family responsibilities in your revolutionary deliberations, you act against the anxiety that gives your life it's unreal cast; you act against the feeling that you are not doing enough to keep the world from collapsing around you; you act against the sense that you will suffocate in your own fear if you don't keep moving; you act in line with your understanding that reality must be constantly tested. You leave. You leave your wife, you leave your children, you leave your home to pursue the struggle on the front lines. You move into this all black housing complex thinking you will organize 'these people' for the revolution. 'Divorce, revolution, suicide, it's all the same thing,' your father has written you regarding the break up of your marriage. You think of yourself as an expatriate living in the Black nation. You can't imagine what they think of you, a lone white man invading their turf. It is one o'clock in the morning, and the security guard at the desk by the door is asleep. You are returning from a marathon meeting that put together a newsletter for teachers. You wait for the elevator. When it comes, you notice that all the buttons have been pushed again, a favorite trick of the Towers' preadolescents who roam the hallways even at this hour. The walls of the elevator are covered with burgundy carpeting that must have once looked elegant in a kitschy sort of way, but now the carpet is ragged with knife slashes. You press the button for the 17th floor, even though it is already lit. You wonder as you have before at the fact that there's no 13th floor in such a modern building, at the tenacity of superstition. The elevator goes down. At the first subbasement, there is a garage filled with old cars whose owners no longer much care what happens to them. At the second subbasement, there's another garage, but this one's abandoned and littered with Twinkie wrappers and such deposited there by the swirling winds. Three dark young men with hardened faces and rags on their heads strut onto the elevator, glaring at you with glazed over eyes. Your whole body stiffens with terror, all the worse for you wanting with all your soul not to let it show, yet knowing they can see it in the tremor of your hands. With your fingers, you comb back your sandy hair, parted Jimmy Carter style, as if to reveal intentionally the two inch scar on your forehead above your left eye that you got from a policeman's billy club when you were arrested last year with a group of your comrades for trying to physically eject a pack of uniformed Nazi's from a school board meeting, a scar which makes you look tougher than you really are. You push your wire rimmed glasses up on your nose to enhance your attentiveness. The elevator starts, stops, starts, stops, agonizingly slow, lurching like a stick shift car driven by a student driver. But you are cool. You retreat to a corner of the elevator, pocket your hands, and with a gentle smirk, try to ignore the young men. They ignore you back and exchange high fives with each other as they discuss the basketball game from which they are returning in a lingo you are just beginning to understand. You hope they can't hear the thumping of your heart."

While the first few weeks were scary, in reality I didn’t encounter anywhere near the hostility I expected. In fact, what I got from many residents was an over-friendliness, a nervous obsequiousness which said that “I’m not one of those that doesn’t like whites.” I discovered fairly quickly that the internalized oppression of many Tower’s residents had them still liking whites better than blacks, at least on the surface.

As September rolled around, I found that I wasn’t going to be hired back at Visitacion Valley. I tried to fight it. I got most teachers to sign a petition to keep me. I called a parent meeting in the Tower’s Rec Room and circulated flyers among students as they were leaving school. I also sold Challenge to the parents, possibly not the smartest move. Only two parents showed up at the meeting. The principal attacked me for being a Communist, a charge I could hardly deny, and most of the teachers removed their names from the petition.

One day, I got on the elevator, and there was a black woman I recognized from the party, Earldean Marshall. She was moving into the Towers. I knew her as a sweet but militant woman, shy but fierce when she needed to be. She had warm chestnut skin and a round face like the moon. She wore her hair in a short natural. She had a captivating smile. I asked her for coffee. We sold papers together door-to-door in the Towers and sold a good 30 copies in the time it would have taken to sell 10 hollering in front of Safeway. I took her out to dinner at New Joe’s Restaurant in Daly City near where she worked as a housekeeper for a prominent doctor. We ended up in bed together that night, and a new chapter in my life began.

Old Fashioned Commie-Nazi Brawl

15.

Perhaps because WAM was “my” organization, I felt an extra twinge of excitement as I joined the picket line at the school board meeting that chill evening of early January, 1974. I found most such demonstrations exhilarating, but this time we were protesting the presence of Nazis – uniformed members of the American Nazi Party – at the meeting. It was nice to be attacking an enemy that was universally dispised for a change, and the party and its base were out in force, perhaps a hundred strong.

After five years, my teaching career had achieved a modicum of stability. I still didn’t have a permanent contract, but I had a year-long temporary assignment as a math resource teacher at Visitacion Valley Elementary School in the southeast corner of the city. I had full pay and full benefits. I spent much time developing a math resource center and working with manageably small groups of students. I didn’t have to take work home with me. My work life was as happy as it had ever been.

As the meeting was about to start, I marched with the WAM picket line into the large auditorium. Seated in a neat row at the center were 14 men dressed in full Nazi regalia.

Led by Yvonne Golden at the microphone, a black teacher whom we identified rightly or wrongly with our arch rival, the Communist Party USA, the crowd chanted “Throw the Nazis out! Throw the Nazis out!”

The Nazis were there to for the second week in a row – the previous week there had been only four – to protest an attempt use bussing to integrate the San Francisco schools.

The chanting went on for at least 20 minutes, without the board even trying to call itself to order. Then, quite suddenly, to my – and everyone else’s – surprise, a group of about a dozen people, men and women I recognized as PLP members rose up behind the Nazis and began physically to carry out the chant. I realized right away to my simultaneous delight and dismay, that my comrades were implementing a secret plan. Fists were flying, people were screaming, chaos reigned.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I join in the melee or just let my comrades do all the work? Then I saw right in front of me a man in a beige sport coat and tie clubbing people – my comrades -- with a short baton. I assumed he was some kind of plain clothes Nazi. On sheer impulse, I grabbed his arm.

His club came down hard on my face, and the salty taste blood filled my mouth. I hit the floor. Seconds later, I was in hand-cuffs, still bleeding from the lip. As I now looked around, I saw the room swarming with uniformed police in riot gear – this move was clearly planned as well. In another five minutes, I was hauled out of the building and thrown into the back of paddy wagon along with a number of my comrades, Ellen, Steve, Bill, and others whose names I no longer remember.

My mouth hurt. I was confused. I was a little scared, though reassured by the presence of my comrades. I guessed I had done the right thing. The fact that the plan had been secret bothered me some, yet I could see that it was done partly to protect me from this very situation, to keep me from being associated with the attack and thereby protect my position with the school district.

We were taken downtown. I was booked on felony assault on a police officer. What? He was a police? I didn’t know that. I thought he was a Nazi. Maybe he was both. Assault? I was trying to stop him from assaulting others. Gradually my doubts about my role were replaced by a sense of righteous victimization. I was a cause.

About 7 of us were arrested, 5 men and 2 women, including Yvonne Golden, who had nothing to do with the attack. The 5 men spent the night in the felony tank at the city jail among the dope dealers and armed robbers, all of whom simply ignored us, as if we were from an alternate universe.

Sasha met me the next morning. She had had to put up the house to pay my $2500 bail. She took me to the dentist, my regular dentist, who stitched up my lip and to his credit, hardly mentioned my notoriety: Our “old fashioned Commie-Nazi brawl” was all over the papers – it even made national news – complete with names of the arrested.

The principal of my school, a well-known racist head of the Teamster’s Union chapter for principals, tried to get me dismissed. Once again I had to meet with the district's Personnel Director, Bob Seymour, a guy who had tried to be fair to me over the years, who kept me around finding me temporary assignments. I had the sense of him trying to be living disproof of my ideology that characterized the school system as fascistically undemocratic. This time he told me that the state would be looking into revoking my credential. I told him that I innocently grabbed the guy’s club, not knowing he was a cop, that I had no connection to WAM, an assertion he clearly didn’t believe.

Sasha was sympathetic, but scared, especially after the Nazis started calling our house. “Tell your commie husband he better be careful,” they said.

“I’m taking the kids to my mother’s in Palo Alto, Henry,” she told me.

“These chickenshit clowns are not going to do anything,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I can’t take that chance.”

I hugged her and I hugged Benjie and Zena, now 8 months old. I watched her drive away with a sinking feeling. Wasn’t I the victim here? Didn’t I need her support? It never occurred to me that her reaction might have had something to do with the fact that she was Jewish. She didn’t deserve it, and on some level I knew that, but I did feel a sense of profound betrayal, an excuse I may have been looking for to give up on the marriage.

I briefly enjoyed a certain celebrity. There were fundraisers to support the “Anti-Nazi Seven” as we’d come to be called. I spoke about how the police had interrupted my freedom of speech, since I had a bandage on my mouth from where I’d been hit. Sasha came to one of these events and spoke thus: “I don’t support Henry’s politics, but I support him. He didn’t do anything wrong.” This was not the kind of thing the party leaders liked to hear from party spouses, and I wanted to crawl through the floor.

Led by Ellen, a feisty blond parent organizer, at the arraignment we all declared that we would defend ourselves in pro per, a tactic the party sometimes used, with mixed success, to attempt to embarrass the judicial system. This time though the party leadership didn’t want to waste resources on a major trial, so when we were offered a plea bargain that reduced the charges to misdemeanor “disrupting a public meeting” with a sentence of 3 weekends in jail, the party jumped at it.

With some support from the union, I was reinstated by the district to my job at Vis Valley. They transferred the principal instead. I doubt whether the principal transfer had anything to do with me, but it did make things easier.

That spring, we served our sentences in the city jail, 3 weekends, Friday night to Monday morning. Despite the fact that Steve, Bill, and I were in jail together, despite our attempts to amuse ourselves by playing hockey with crumpled balls of paper, despite our stimulating cellmates, an interesting crew of Iranian gas siphoners, despite being allowed to bring in all kinds of books including Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” – the experience was excruciatingly boring, perhaps enough so for me to avoid going to jail again for the rest of my life.

Uncle John's Legacy

14.

My Uncle John died that summer and left me almost $40,000, a fair amount of money in those days. I didn’t go to the funeral. He was an embarrassment to the family: it’s hard to know which of his characteristics was the worst. He was enormously fat. He was blatantly homosexual. He was a serious alcoholic, and in fact died of cirrhosis. He was an insurance salesman. And he was a flagrant anti-Semite and racist. Still, perhaps because he was such a mess, by the time I was in college, I managed to conjure some sympathy for him. He had a huge belly, a florid German face. His oily brown hair was swept back over his head. He looked a bit like J. Edgar Hoover, who happened to be my 3rd cousin, but on my father’s side.

I remember having lunch with him when I was in my early twenties, in his dark Eastside Milwaukee flat, in a neighborhood that was becoming increasingly black at the time. His apartment was full of clashing oriental rugs and smelled of some cloying floral aftershave mixed with mothballs. He introduced me to his downstairs tenant, who was clearly his sometime lover, an obsequious houseboy of a man. He showed me his .38 revolver, a male bonding ritual. “You can’t be too careful in this neighborhood,” he said. He avoided the “n” word, a gesture I appreciated, as by that post-FSM time, my politics were well known in the family.

He was drinking straight vodka out of a jar as he cooked. He was renowned in the family as a great cook, an attribute which went a fair distance in mitigating his other flaws. That afternoon, he cooked t-bone steaks and tuna stuffed tomatoes, the latter a delicacy that has become a part of my own limited culinary repertoire.

I don’t recall what we might have talked about. I imagine I told him of my interest in becoming a writer, with psychiatry as a fall-back. He probably told me how much his carpets were worth.

As I left the flat, he called down to me from the top of the stairs: “Be a man, Henry. Don’t be one of those Beatle types. Be a man!” I thought that was hilarious coming from him – so not a man himself. Yet, I felt something significant for him, a softening of that knot of coldness in my chest which enabled me to dismiss so many people.

Once I received the inheritance from him, I tried to do the right thing as an emerging Communist. I gave half the money to my wife. And I gave half of my share to the PLP.

The party was launching a new front group at the time and had scheduled a founding convention. Hari, the new city leader, a wiry man of East Indian heritage who came into prominence as a leader of the Third World Liberation Front during the San Francisco State Strike, met with me to see if he could get me to give even more money. “What do you need it for?” he asked. I carried around a hefty suitcase full of guilt, so I gave an extra $2500 to support the convention, which was held in the social hall of the Congregational Church at Geary and Franklin.

Hari had wanted an organization that would reach broadly to unite leftist forces in the unions with a name like Labor Action Alliance or something, but once someone suggested “Worker’s Action Movement,” a chant swept through the hall filled mostly with PLPers and friends: “WAM the bosses! WAM the bosses” – naming the group by consensus.

I noticed once again that there were two competing ideas of how to build the party: build broad united fronts (Hari’s view) with other leftists or come off as the most militant force and attract rank and file workers (the prevailing view). I didn’t have the political confidence yet to have an opinion of my own.

But I did have an ironic sense of WAM being “my” organization: thanks to my Uncle John, I had bought and paid for it.

The Life of the Party

13.

I loved being in the party at first. I loved the powerful sense of identity it gave me, something I never had before. I loved the sense of purpose, of being part of something larger than myself. I even loved what most people hated about the PLP, it’s dogged (and dogmatic) certainty that it, and no other entity, was right.
Our party club in the San Francisco schools had a dynamic leader in Kathy O’hara. Big boned, a little dumpy, stringy hair, she exuded a confidence that I could only marvel at. She had charisma. The club met weekly. We usually discussed some theory, out of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution,” or, increasingly, out of PL magazine. It had been about 2 years since “The “Road to Revolution III” had come out, a seminal screed that severed the party’s relationship with China and attacked the nationalism of every other “revisionist” so called “communist” party in the world. We (and our miniscule allied parties in Mexico, Canada, and Great Britain) alone were the keepers of the flame.

Yet we attracted some incredibly smart people, including I learned by the grapevine a guy I knew at Exeter who won all the smarts awards and got involved at Harvard (probably never joined the party). Despite the persistence of sectarianism and dogmatism, which most of us squirmed at from time to time, the party had two things going for it. One was it’s insistence on organizing the working class. The party chairman, Milt Rosen, had written a pamphlet called “Build a Base in the Working Class.” It wisely counseled comrades to make enduring friendships with working class people. The second thing was its commitment to “smashing” racism. The party understood that racism was the primary obstacle to the working class unity that would have to develop if a revolutionary movement were to succeed. While masses of blacks did not flock to the party – our teacher’s club was all white – the party as a whole was reasonably well integrated for that time when Black Nationalism – which the party both courageously and foolishly attacked – was on the rise.

As a new party member, my job was to organize a march to Sacramento with the Organization of Unemployed Teachers (OUT). I managed to destroy the group. I was the one proposing the march, under the auspices of the Committee for Jobs in the Public Schools. We got the California Teachers Association to sponsor 3 busses, but were barely able to fill one. We had about 30 people. Wilson Riles, the black, progressive Superintendent of Public Instruction was going to speak. My friend Barbara, an ex-PLPer, was to answer him. I got to be the last speaker, a position I have always favored.

Riles made a good speech, decrying the lack of funding for public schools, ironic now, considering how far the support for public schools has fallen in California since 1971. Barbara attacked the speech, essentially arguing that it was Riles fault for not fighting hard enough for more funding. Riles returned to the mike as said “If you think Wilson Riles is the enemy, you are seriously deluded.”

Then I made my speech. I had “vetted” it to one of the “center forces” on the bus, a woman leader of OUT. She said it sounded like an ego trip to her. “Okay,” I said, “but do you object to my giving it?”

“No,” she said.

My speech went something like: “My name is Henry Hitz, and I’m a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist Party. We believe that there will be sufficient jobs for teachers and that schools will only start to improve once we have have a working class revolution!”

The speech was greeted by groans, and the founder of OUT, a nice enough middle class fellow, turned off the microphone on me.

I thought that’s what party members did, called for revolution at every opportunity. Indeed, there was a section of the party that believed this, but not the West Coast leadership. The OUT leadership attacked me, and the PLP leadership attacked me. This was the first time I noticed that here were simmering disagreements about how PLP worked in “united front” organizations, disagreements, which, years later, would erupt into a full-blown split in the party. As for OUT, even though I apologized profusely at the post-mortem meeting regarding the march, it never met again.

I had better luck organizing the Substitute Caucus, which along with the Teachers Action Caucus, worked in the local AFT chapter to overthrow the “sell-out” union leadership. This effort was fairly sophisticated: there was even a club of “underground” party members who because they weren’t publicly identified with the party, were able to reach out more effectively to the center. In the union elections, I was set to run for substitute representative when I got a call from a party muckymuck in New York asking me to instead make sure the vote count was honest. I was disappointed, but I carried out my assignment dutifully. My comrade Lena, a dark-haired beauty I had my eye on, ran instead. Astonishingly, the combined caucuses won 4 seats on the 12 member executive board of the union.

Meanwhile, life on the home front grew increasingly contentious. The word I coined at the time do describe my life was “hecticism.” I felt like I was trying to serve two masters, the party and my wife. The party required of me at least 3 meetings a week: a club meeting, a caucus meeting, a union meeting. And, I needed to spend at least one weekend morning standing in front of this or that supermarket hawking my quota of 20 Challenges, The Communist Paper. Ten cents. Written in this pseudo working class argot that I found alternately annoying and endearing: “The bosses quaked in their boots as 25 members of the PLP picketed U. S. Steel demanding 30 hours work for 40 hours pay…”

For every meeting I went to, Sasha required that I serve an evening of child care. Plus I had to do half the cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping. All this so Sasha could write. She had quit her job to write full time, a decision I both respected and resented. I wished I had the same luxury, as I had never given up my desire to write, and yet I secretly regarded this ambition in both her and me as “bourgeois.” Wasn’t there a revolution to fight?

Our new daughter Zena, born in May 1973, enabled us to paper over our differences. She came into our unwieldy alliance, and seemed to realize right away that if she was going to keep the family together, she had to be perfect. She was a perfect baby, sleeping through the night after the first month, infinitely cute as she took her first baby steps and babbled her first words. I didn’t understand then as I do now how much of “cuteness” is a survival strategy. With her dark Frida Kahlo eyebrows, she looked more like Sasha than Sasha herself, one of Sasha’s friends used to joke. Zena did a yeoman’s job of keeping the family together in the tumultuous first year of her life. More than that, no one could have done.

Winter in the Desert

12.

After my experience at Raphael Weill, I was delighted to substitute day-to-day. I let go my dream of ever having my own classroom, and enjoyed the stresslessness of going to a different school every day. I also was able to spend time being a father to my new son, Benjamin Cisco.

I had a brief bout of post-partem depression just after he was born – yes, men get it too – in the midst of the stress of Raphael Weill as well, and the feeling was of being trapped. Benjy, as we called him, had a touch of colic, and was sometimes inconsolable at bedtime. Many was the time I snatched him up nervously in his crying fit, took him out to the car, strapped him in his car seat, and drove him around the block until he fell asleep. I had yet to learn the crying was a baby’s job.

I borrowed a little money from my father, and we bought a three bedroom Victorian house in Noe Valley for $29, 500. Sasha and I reached a certain equilibrium, a sweet peace together that I remember exemplified by a scene when we were visiting my parents in Wisconsin. We brought peace to that family as well with the first grandchild. My father stopped getting into edgy arguments with Sasha over the role of women, arguments unsubtly laced with hints of anti-Semitism. One evening, we walked down the hill toward the lake, each of us holding one of Benjy’s hands, chanting as he bounced along proto-walking, “Bookie-na-na…bookie-na-na…” Benjy’s idiosyncratic word for his bottle.

I spent my free time working on a short story originally titled “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” later changed because of the PLP’s shift away from Maoism to “Fighting Back is Winning.” The story was based on the true story of a striking oil worker who was run over and killed by a scab truck. The story was replete with sectarian references to the PLP and SDS, but I felt like I had created a real working class woman character in the guy’s wife, and that I was onto something in my description of how he was feeling as he died, a recurrent theme in my stories and novels.

In the fall of 1971, I stumbled upon an organization called the Organization of Unemployed Teachers (OUT) that had managed to attract the press. I began working in the organization as a Communist. We, a former PLP member and I, formed a committee of the organization called the committee for Jobs in the Public Schools. We called a meeting, got the press to announce it, much to my surprise, and 70 people showed up.
Sasha and I renewed our conflicts around the amount of time I was spending at meetings. We would negotiate legalistic contracts involving hours of meetings traded for hours of child care, and I felt myself running out of hours. By the Thanksgiving, I was ready to call it quits with her. My political work too convinced me that I needed to be all the way in the party. I decided to join the party, and in making that decision, I fully understood that it would cost me my marriage. I didn’t tell either Sasha or the party my decision. I waited until we went on vacation over the Christmas holidays.

The car trip to Baja was unreal. It was as if we were traveling in jello, my secret congealing the air between us. Unable to separate my long-term and short-term goals, I imagined that we would get to the Mexican beach, I would tell her of my plans to join the party, and we would have poignant, good-bye sex as we made our separation plans.

The Baja desert with its prickly pears and mesquite reflected the desolation that had come between us. The beach at Ensenada was cold, dirty, not much a beach at all. The motel was painted a garish yellow even inside, and smelled of urine.
“I want to join the party, Sasha,” I finally blurted on first night in the motel as soon as Benjy had fallen asleep, and we were cuddling together, me filled with these misguided fantasies of break-up sex.

Surprisingly – though only to me – Sasha went off. “You brought me all the way here to tell me you were breaking up with me? With me and our one-year-old child? And you were expecting to have SEX with me after that? Get away from me!”

I sheepishly crawled over the other bed, thinking coldly that I should have waited until after we had sex to tell her. I could feel that hard black knot of coldness in my belly again, that strange voracious singularity like a tiny black hole that sucked up my every human emotion and left me numb.

Cutting our vacation short, we left for home the next day, deep in a cloud of gloomy silence, silent gloom, racing through the desert which had come between us like poison gas, killing every sign of life.

By the time we approached the border, Sasha surprised me again. She started crying. “Henry, I’m not that strong. I know you think I’m strong, but I’m not. Go ahead. Join the fucking party if you want to, if that’s the only thing that makes you feel alive. I can’t stop you. I know I’ve always said it would be a deal breaker, but I guess it isn’t. I’ll live with it some way.”

She was right that I did see her as strong – stubborn even – and that it never occurred to me that she would acquiesce in my decision, that I would have my chance to realize my dreams as a real party member, maybe even a leader some day, and I could keep her and keep our family intact.

I was flummoxed. How could she change the rules like this? I was supposed to be free once I told her I was joining the party. I was overcome with disappointment. And yet, a large part of me was relieved as well. I loved my son, and I didn’t want him to have to suffer from a separation and divorce.

Then she surprised me again. She explained to me that it was okay if I had feelings about needing to leave the marriage – that just having the feelings didn’t mean I actually needed to leave. As we rolled down the highway in her red Plymouth Valiant convertible back into our life, this insight hit me like a revelation: there was a serious difference between having feelings and acting on them. I think from the years of the impulsive sixties, I regarded my impulses as sacred. Here was the first time I really got it that maybe my feelings weren’t all that reliable.

On the one hand this insight started me on the way to a long-term healing process, one that suffered many ups and downs over the next decades. On the other hand, I felt trapped. Here I had come all the way to Mexico to end my marriage and reclaim my freedom, and I couldn’t do it.

Still, I was able to find my love for Sasha again in her very acquiescence to the cause, and I was delighted to be able to finally get inside the party. I called the local leader, Freddy Jerome, when we got back to San Francisco. I asked him if I could join and he said it would be good if I joined. He asked me to make a list of all the people I knew who might have money to give the party, a list I never made. I gave him a manifesto I had written concerning the role of sexism. Sasha had convinced me that the party had a serious problem with women, rarely elevating them to leadership, mostly relegating them to typing and making coffee and sandwiches. My manifesto argued that we would hasten the revolution if we were able to tap the revolutionary fervor of the women’s movement. Freddy took the document in stride. I don’t know if he ever read it.

Another Fall

11.

Even though I seemed to have mastered teaching as a substitute, if I had to stay in a classroom for more than a week, I generally lost control, or at least felt like I did. In the fall of 1970, I was given a long-term assignment in one of the more challenging all black schools, Raphael Weill, in the Western Addition, otherwise known as the Fillmore. The good thing about this school was that every classroom had a teacher’s aide in addition to a teacher. Some of these aides were excellent teachers themselves without the credentials. Also, there were two of them, very powerful black women, Joyce and Edna, who were friendly with the Progressive Labor Party. The school was in the neighborhood of a co-op housing development built by the Longshoreman’s Union, where a number of PLP leaders lived. The school was an informal focus of party work.

The school was also the “victim” of some wrong-headed liberal reforms, such as the use of Sullivan Readers mentioned above, and the regrouping of classes for reading, so that I had one reading period consisting of 18 boys and no girls, and after I’d exhausted my bag of tricks, they were too much for me. One of the boys was named Michael Marshall, and liked to climb out the window of the 3rd floor classroom and hang out on the ledge outside. His mother was sympathetic, but didn’t know what to do with him either. Through a series of circumstances unrelated to this teaching assignment, I ended up marrying his aunt, Earlean Marshall, some five years later, but Michael was my first exposure to the Marshall family. He straightened out some over the next few years, but sadly, as an adolescent, he fell into the black hole of adolescent schizophrenia, from which he has yet to recover.

So, I was stuck again in my pattern being so overwhelmed by fear that I couldn’t think. At one point, I took one of the boys up on his offer of a fist fight. That afternoon, his father came up to the school while I was on yard duty and confronted me while the whole school looked on. The principal, a black man without much control over the children himself, came to my rescue.

At the same time (this was mid-November), my friend Jeremiah from McKinley hadn’t been given a Teacher Corps assignment yet. So, on another self-destructive impulse, I invited him to join me in my class.

The next day, the principal called me in the office and told me that I couldn’t control the classroom well enough to keep my job.

Our friends Joyce and Edna called a parent meeting on my behalf. To add a bit of drama, Sasha started having contractions that afternoon, so we rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be labor, so we arrived at the meeting late, with my friends once again standing up for me, this time persuading the principal to let me stay.

So, I slogged it out until the end of January, secretly wishing I hadn’t won the battle. It was hard. I felt bad every day because even after the parents had stuck up for me, I still had very tenuous control of the classroom. And I still couldn’t think. I got confused about giving children freedom, and one time, much to Jeremiah’s amazed dismay, I just let the students do whatever, giving them no instructions. To their credit, they didn’t act up all that much, but they didn’t spontaneously pick up books and start reading either. I did manage to pull off some fairly creative activities with the mixed group, including reading circles reading “Where the Wild Things Are,” and another activity where I had transcribed the lyrics to the Jackson 5 songs currently popular (“ABC” and “I’ll Be There”) and had the students read along while listening to the songs on headphones. Then I managed to pull off some really stupid stunts like bringing in a refrigerator carton for students to… what did I expect? They went looping, jumping all over it, sliding on it, doing those exuberant kid things I wanted to encourage but which hardly lent itself to maintaining the disciplined atmosphere I needed in order to keep my job, to say nothing of my sanity.

I had an aide, Rodney, in the class who couldn’t stand me, who strongly believed that the students needed a black teacher. Black nationalism was all the rage, so to speak, in 1970. The man was angry, and perhaps justifiably, his anger was directed at me. When I brought in the refrigerator carton, he was filled with exasperation and simply removed it. I tried to reach out to him. I let him do some teaching, so he gave the students a spelling test, using random words.

After my son Benjamin was born, I asked my home room class to write to him and tell him what he needed to know. Rodney attacked me: “What makes you think these black kids give a damn about your white baby?”

I tried to get him removed from the class, but the administration refused and instead told me to look inside myself to see why I was having such a hard time with the students – essentially agreeing with Rodney that my racism was interfering with my teaching. And, of course they were right. I was afraid of the students even as I cared about them. Most of all, of course, I was afraid of my own racism. When the semester ended and the regular teacher returned, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

My Summer Vacation

10.

That June, Derrick recruited Sasha and I to go to the infamous 1969 Students for a Democratic Society – SDS – convention, held at the Chicago Coliseum. We hadn’t been active in SDS, but that didn’t seem to matter. The PLP was organizing everyone they could to go to the convention to be ready for a confrontation between its own Worker Student Alliance (WSA) Caucus and the rival Revolutionary Youth Movement, a loose coalition of rivals themselves. Thanks largely to the influence of the PLP, both groups considered themselves Marxist-Leninist.

It might be hard from today’s perspective to understand why so many young people were attracted to such a rigid and in some ways moribund ideology. At the time, it didn’t seem moribund at all: the Marxist-Leninist movements around the word seemed to be winning. Consider the year 1968:

• Tet Offensive, Vietnam, pushed US and South Vietnamese forces into defeat after defeat.

• The Cultural Revolution in China seemed to be challenging bureaucracy and establishing genuine equality (we didn’t hear of the excesses until later)

• A student-worker General Strike in France

• Student strikes at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and many other schools

• Kent State, Jackson State, in the US, students protesting the war were being killed.

• Several hundred students killed in protests in Mexico City (leading up to the Olympics)

• Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, and the cities erupt in rebellion, with many black people killed.

These were heady times indeed, and we might be forgiven if we really thought revolution was just around the corner.

The PLP was the more experienced of the groupings in SDS. The party was formed when a group of people split from the Communist Party USA to side with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The PLP practiced orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which means that it operated on the basis of democratic centralism. In theory, democratic centralism meant that there would be a thorough discussion of all policies throughout all levels of the party. Then a decision would be made by the National Committee, which would be binding on all members, whether they agreed or not. While the democracy aspect of this process was largely ignored (as it was in most such organizations), the process was effective in organizing people. So, by the time the convention opened with 2000 delegates, it was clear that the WSA caucus had the majority of votes.

As the first vote on direction of the organization came closer, a proposal from the WSA to make fighting racism a key strategy in SDS, the RYM faction, led by Berandi ne Dorhn and others, led a walkout. The RYM faction convened in a neighboring conference room. Because we were unknown in SDS, Sasha and I were asked by Derrick and other PLP leaders to go next door and spy on our rivals. We were aggressively frisked as we entered the room. Given that our politics weren’t ostensibly all that different from the others in the room, it seemed odd that we felt that we were in enemy territory, and the situation was frightening. The RYM faction placed a high value on security, and the room was surrounded by dour looking cadre with armbands identifying them as part of the security force.

From the stage, speaker after speaker attacked PLP. The most effective attack came from a Black Panther leader who called the PLP racist for criticizing the Panther’s for “nationalism.”

The PLP had recently and somewhat simplistically concluded that Lenin’s two-stage revolution strategy, where the party first fights for national liberation and democracy and then for socialism, was the reason that the Soviet Union and now even China were abandoning the international struggle in favor of their own national interests. The PLP was even critical of the North Vietnamese for negotiating with the US. Some of us questioned this party line, but were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Given that no other communists in the world held this view other than some tiny PLP offshoots in Canada, Great Britain, and Mexico, it was an arrogant and sectarian position. At the same time, taking such a position took a certain courage and gave PLP a certain purity and independence which, arguably, strengthened it for a time, especially as its rivals spun off into the even more sectarian Weathermen and other grouplets.

As the RYM announced that they were about to take a vote on the expulsion of the PLP and WSA from SDS, someone from the podium announced that the room was being sealed. Sasha and I rushed for the exit, and managed to talk one of the security types to let us out to rejoin our friends in the infinitely calmer WSA caucus. A group of friends of ours from Berkeley were acting out a hilarious skit about how some people could wrap themselves in red flags, brandish Mao’s Little Red Book, and do nothing to actually build the movement among ordinary U. S. workers.

Soon, the RYM faction returned to the main hall, surrounding the WSA caucus. Bernardine Dohrn in combat boots and flak jacket commandeered the stage and announced that the PLP had been expelled from SDS. The reaction of the group was a spontaneous outbreak of derisive laughter, hardly the desired effect. Dohrn then led the RYM out of the door, leaving the “expelled majority” to continue the work of SDS.

There were other ramifications from this split. RYM produced not only the Weathermen, but the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) as well, but our – Sasha and my – work was done and as we returned to San Francisco, I was proud to have played a role in this “victory” for PLP and became more committed to the struggle.

It’s surprising to me that as I write about these arcane struggles in SDS, I find myself continuing the polemics as if one faction was “right” and the other was “wrong.” There are things in the PLP position that continue to motivate me today, namely the fight against racism and the role of the working class. Yet all of these groupings were hopelessly ultraleft in terms of ever winning over a large section of the U. S. population.

The people with a genuine strategy for change worked in the Eugene McCarthy campaign and the McGovern campaign trying to express the electoral consensus against the war. The PLP did work “secretly” in the McGovern campaign and managed to call a demonstration against him at his own headquarters during the convention, which probably didn’t help.

But, hindsight is 20/20, bla bla, and it makes no sense to fault ourselves for what we didn’t understand.

I met some of the main leaders of the RYM faction – Mike Klonsky, Bernardine Dohrn, and Bill Ayrers -- in Chicago some 35 years later, and was pleasantly surprised to find them working on developing the small school movement in the Chicago school system, precisely the reform I was working on at the time in Oakland. We had all evolved substantially in our politics, yet we were still committed to the same ideals of developing an egalitarian society. (No, I never served on a board with Bill Ayers or went to his house, or did anything other than shake his hand!).

As part of an effort by the Party to keep its teachers close to the working class, I got a job in the warehouse at Wilson-Jones envelope company for the rest of the summer. I had a good time getting the job, creating a persona of a hayseed fresh off the farm, deliberately misspelling words on the application. It was refreshing to have a job where the only stress came from the school boy games the workers played with each other, throwing staples (Swingline Staplers was part of Wilson-Jones) at each other when the boss wasn’t looking. I made a good connection with one of the workers there, and even got the nerve to talk socialist politics to him before I quit to return to teaching.

Substituting

9.

My first assignment as a substitute teacher was to an all black 5th grade class which met on the auditorium stage of a school in the Bayview district. Right away, I noticed something was different. My voice came from a place of confidence deep in my viscera, not nervously from my upper chest. At the first sign of trouble, I wrote down the names of the defiant children, brought them to the office at the first recess, and called their parents. I had no more trouble from the class.

The principal complimented me on how I handled the children. I still hadn’t developed good judgment with regards to authority and still had a self-destructive streak, so I told her all about the racist principal that had fired me from McKinley. I never heard from her or got assigned to that school again.

I developed a bag of tricks that were infallible for the first day or so of an assignment. I would stand in front of the class without saying a word and write on the board : “He Hitz small children.”

Then I would in my mind divide the class into teams. Ideally, there would be two teams, but three or four by rows also worked. Still without saying a word, I would make a grid using roman numerals and give out points to the teams that were sitting with their hands folded waiting for instructions. At the end of the day I would give out packs of M&Ms to the winning teams. I would give points for right answers, as well as good behavior. I would also cheat as much as needed to keep the teams tied. The best days were those in which everyone won.

Usually I ignored the teacher’s lesson plan – if there was one (there often wasn’t). My favorite and most effective initial lesson would go like this: I’d take out a checkerboard and a few pennies. “Who here would like to make some money?” I would ask. Of course everyone’s hand shot up. “Okay. Suppose you put one penny on the first square of the checkerboard.” I’d demonstrate. “Then suppose you doubled that penny on the next square and kept doubling the number of pennies all the way to the 64th square. How much money would you have on the last square of the checkerboard? Take a guess. If you guess right, you can have all the money.” Then I would go around the classroom writing the students’ names on the board and their guess. This way, no one would try to fool me by giving a fake name, or mixing up the names the way classes loved to do when they had substitutes. Of course, most students would guess $1.28. Some of the smarter ones might get up to $256 or even $512 which is the highest guess I ever got. Once I’d recorded all their guesses, I passed out paper and had the class calculate the number. I reviewed how they could either add the numbers together or multiply by 2. “The student who gets the closest will get some of the money.” The students went to work, and my morning was covered. The correct answer is of course 2 to the 64th power, divided by 100. Or $184,467,440,737,095,516.16 or 184 quadrillion dollars. No student ever came close, either guessing or calculating. By lunch time, I would give them the answer and give the person with the highest guess and the highest calculation each a dime, “some of the money.”

I also carried with me some movies I had stolen from the district’s film library. One was a Disney educational moving called “It’s About Time,” an hour long feature that explained relativity and anything else you wanted to know about time, a subject of continuing fascination to me.

The other movie was also an hour long Disney feature called “The Sea” which I would show if I had a multiple day assignment and had a chance to present my unit on water. I would introduce this unit by asking the class to name everything they knew about water, giving a point to whichever team for each answer. I would write the answers on the board. When we finally got to the fact that water is used to put out fires, I showed them my experiment, one I remembered from my basement laboratory at Pine Lake. With great drama, I fetched a glass of water, drank a sip to prove it was water, and then poured it on a mound of sodium peroxide, an innocuous-looking cream colored crystalline powder that burst into flame. It also filled the room with some fairly noxious fumes, but I had made my exciting point about how preconceptions can be deceiving.

I had one more trick which served me well in most schools, and that was to play a Folkways record made by Langston Hughes in 1955 called “The Glory of Negro History.” The format was a dramatized history, a pageant, and black students in 1969 were especially riveted. When possible, I would scour the school for headsets and hook them together so that each student could listen on his/her own headphones.
One time I played this record for a 3rd grade at one of the rare assignments I received to a predominantly white school in the avenues, and had them write their thoughts about it. The principal observed the lesson and called me into the office afterward, questioning whether such an activity was appropriate for young children. As proof of her point, she pointed out one of the students’ written response: “I think I would like to be a slave,” the student had written.

“You can see, she didn’t understand the lesson,” the principal said.

I didn’t know what to say, but I understood the child perfectly, because I had at times felt the same way myself. There is a purity of innocence in the slave experience, a righteousness of victimhood that guilt-ridden whites can only dream about. It was being part of a cause which was incontrovertibly just. And, given that this was 1969, it was about having the power of the civil rights movement at your back.

Nowadays, you sometimes hear people, black people in particular, wax nostalgic for their schools before they were integrated. It is no doubt generally true in the south that the segregated black schools with their committed black teachers served black students better than the “integrated” schools that replaced them. Many whites left those schools and most of the black teachers were simply fired, at least in the early days. But the segregated schools in San Francisco in 1969 were something else.

Going to Hunter’s Point in those days was like entering a war zone, complete with the smell of burning flesh from the meat processing plants in the neighborhood. There were few black teachers. Some of these were both sympathetic to the students and able to control their classrooms sufficiently that real learning occurred. About two thirds of teachers were in control of their classes, but this was a task most of them accomplished by giving students busy work: easy dittos that required little more from the students than coloring skills. Meanwhile, students roamed the halls and left the school grounds regularly. Little effort was made to contact the parents.

Some of the “liberal” reforms that were gaining popularity at the time – open classrooms, individualized learning, learning stations – backfired disastrously when implemented in the “ghetto” schools, as they were known. A classic example was the Sullivan Readers, a self-paced phonics instruction program. Each student worked in their own book. Most of the exercises were fill-in-the-blanks. In order that students would get immediate feedback on their work, the answers were right on the page, concealed by a “slider” which the student controlled. Students became experts at manipulating that slider so that they could find the answer without actually reading the question or revealing to anyone watching that they were peeking at the answers.

At one school near Candlestick Park, my reputation preceded me. While a group of teachers were sitting around the lunchroom, the vice-principal, a shrill Filipina, pointed me out. “Watch out for that one,” she said. “He goes to the parents,” as if it were a crime equivalent to child molesting.

Meanwhile, that spring, Sasha got pregnant. I was excited about becoming a father, and built the baby a rather elegant cradle out of redwood, even though I am not the handiest carpenter on the planet. I enjoyed the LaMaze classes, and to this day use the relaxation chant we learned there to put myself to sleep: “Loose feet, loose ankles, loose calves, loose thighs…” etc. up each vertebrate of the spine, through the cerebrum and back down to the jaw.

Early Teaching

8.

It isn’t quite true what I said earlier, that I had never thought of becoming a teacher. There was a moment when William and I were hanging out in Colorado on a break in our undergraduate programs that he turned me on to Summerhill. The idea was that if you gave students enough freedom and enough choices, they would eventually figure out what they wanted to do and take charge of their own education. This concept resonated with my – and a lot of other peoples’ – sixties’ sensibility.

By the time I entered the credential program at Berkeley, these ideas had spread to the mainstream, with numerous elaborations from Jonathan Kozol, John Holt, Herb Kohl and others. The credential program assigned these texts, yet in our visitations to Berkeley schools, it was clear few teachers were implementing the ideas. The classrooms we observed were pretty traditional.

That winter, I started student teaching with a teacher who was trying to implement some choices in his classroom. But when I found myself in front of the class, a horrific anxiety overcame me, a foreshadowing of my future career as a teacher. How do you “control” a class when you don’t believe in controlling a class?
For one of my seminal evaluations, one of my professors came to the class to videotape a lesson. I had planned what I thought was an innovative approach to cooperative learning, using Cuisennaire rods, these color coded wooden sticks with different lengths representing different numbers, so if you put the blue “2” next to the red “4,” the length matched the green “6.” I grouped the class into 5 groups of 5 and gave them each multiple sets of rods. The idea was for them on their own to figure out the relationships between the rods and explain their findings. The students, however, were more interested in their relationships with each other, and began throwing the rods around the classroom. I froze, clueless as how to deal with the situation. Finally, the professor decided that was enough videotaping and the teacher bailed me out by taking over the class. I was steeped in shame.

A footnote: I got a C in the class that oversaw my student teaching, a bad grade in graduate school. I protested, but got nowhere. However, just then the School of Education decided to reduce competition by eliminating grades and utilizing a Pass/Fail system. The great irony was that on my transcript, the “C” was crossed out and replaced by a “P.” But you could still clearly see the “C.” This is a small example of the ambivalence with which the education establishment treated “progressive” reforms. The school system is expert at implementing changes which in reality change nothing at all.

Because of my weak performance in this more liberal class, in the spring, the dean of the ed school assigned me to a very traditional class with a strict black teacher not averse to using the occasional bop on the head to keep things under control. She was a good teacher though, and I thrived in this environment when discipline wasn’t a factor, even when I took over the class for 3 days. I began to find my sea-legs as a teacher, having the class make crystal sets, read Langston Hughes plays, and debate the merits of the contending positions in the Civil Rights movement between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. My proudest moment, was when white boy (Berkeley was fairly well integrated at the time) from the hills staunchly defended Malcolm’s commitment to self-defense by any means necessary.

I didn’t realize that this would be the only full realization of my potential as an elementary school teacher. Subsequent events prevented me from ever really having a successful experience in my own elementary class.

I got a teaching job in the San Francisco public schools, McKinley Elementary, across Market Street on Castro. 32 students, 5th grade. I was so nervous that first day, and the first month, and the first semester, I couldn’t think. In the first ten minutes of standing in front of the class, I tried to come on tough. A kid made a funny noise. I sent him to the principal’s office, a gross overreaction. Soon many kids were making funny noises. I couldn’t send them all to the office. Soon enough, I lost control. I was totally conflicted and confused about my role, wanting to offer them freedom in the Kohl-Holt-Kozol tradition, also wanting to please Mr. Susoyeff, a stern, bald-headed Russian, a former military officer in command of the school.

It was a mixed class, but it was the black kids that gave me the most grief. I kept them after school, but then in an effort to bond with them I took them to the Jr. Museum up the hill, rewarding their misbehavior, showing myself as a push-over. I tried to set up an individualized reading program as I’d been taught to do in my credential program but it took weeks for me to meet with students one-on-one, and most of them slipped through the cracks.

The children were out of control. Throwing crayons was the one activity the students were into. There were fights. When I tried to make Eddie Johnson sit down, he came at me with a broken bottle. I had to suspend him, violating my principles. I couldn’t do this job, and on a minute by minute basis, I faced my failure.
Yet Sasha was there for me, rubbing my head with sympathy, offering advice, soothing my frazzled nerves.

One day I was so nervous that I got to school and noticed that I had on two different shoes. Luckily I was early, so I raced home and changed, and returned to school before the bell.

I met an intern at the school, a black man who had been involved in the San Francisco State Strike, Jeremiah Jackson. We became friends; he became my first black friend. We had dinner with him and his wife Bliss, a quiet white woman, powerful in her own way.

“The racism at that school is tough to take,” he said. “You look around in the classrooms and all the black boys are isolated at the back of the class and given busy work. Even in the class I’m working in, the teacher professes to be liberal and all that, it’s the same story, black boys in the back.”

“The teacher across the hall from me?” I said. “In the lunchroom, she talks about shoving the black kid’s heads into the pencil sharpener.”“We got to do something, man.”

I wasn’t eager to take this on, I had enough problems. But I took one of his posters, a picture of Malcolm X, and put it on my bulletin board.

The principal hauled me into the office. “You of all people, Mr. Hitz, should know that we don’t need to encourage rebellion among these people. They get enough of that stuff at home. You need to calm them down, get them to work within the system.”

I took the poster down.

A few days later, I was working late in the classroom. At around 5 PM, after all the other teachers had gone, I started to leave myself. Jeremiah was in the hallway on a ladder, plastering posters all over the walls: Huey P. Newton in his classical chieftain’s chair, the Panthers with guns on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, Geronimo, Malcolm, Pancho Villa.

It was January by now, and my class was more or less functioning. The students and I had gotten used to each other. At the principal’s urging, I established three levels of reading groups, also against my principles, but it seemed to be working.

The principal called me in the office. “We won’t be renewing your contract for the spring, Mr. Hitz.”

“How come? I know it’s taken awhile, but my class in finally under control.”

“Really? I was observing the class the other day and Ollie had his feet up on the desk.”

I called Jeremiah. “The same thing happened to me, man! They’re transferring me to another school.”

I spoke with my Party study group leader, a teacher herself, Ann, an earnest woman, nervous herself. “It’s not because of the discipline. They don’t care about the discipline. All new teachers have those problems. It’s because you’re friends with Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah and I decided to fight. We called a meeting of all the parents we knew at one of the parents’ houses. About 10 parents showed up, along Ann and another Party member. We decided to have a picket line at the school on Monday morning and call a community meeting that evening.

Arriving at school that morning seeing the signs, “Rehire Jackson and Hitz,” brought tears to my eyes. No one had ever fought for me like this. Here were black people fighting for me. And Sasha was with me all the way, at my side, whispering little encouragements.

Over a hundred parents showed up at the meeting that night. The beleaguered principal attempted to field outraged comments from the parents. “You want a class where children throw paper airplanes?” he said, referring to my class.

“We don’t care about that,” one of the parents defended me, “We want teachers who can relate to the students, young teachers like Jackson and Blatz.”

Jeremiah and I were called downtown the next day. “I hear you had fun last night,” the Director of Personnel said.

“That wasn’t fun,” Jeremiah said. ”That was serious.”

The upshot was that Jeremiah got his job back at the school and I didn’t. But the Party had been there for me. I moved closer to their bosom. The experience at McKinley had changed me. I got a glimpse of your potential power, of the power of the working class. Just as important, the experience unleashed a power within myself that enabled me to treat students as an ally to their parents, so in many more cases – not all – I was able to stand up to their nonsense.

San Francisco

7.

I returned to Berkeley with Betty in the green Econoline van that I bought on the way out of New York. We visited some shrines along the way. We snuck into Walden Pond after hours and slept by its shores in sleeping bags. We drove through Hibbing, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan grew up. We drive up to Jasper National Park in Canada.

In Jasper, we went on a 7 mile hike deep into the wilderness and made love in a stream bed under the watchful eye of a moose. This is as far away from civilization as we had ever been, but on the way down, we ran into a group of people on horseback, one of whom Betty knew from New York. This incident plunged us into a prescient despair about the shrinking of the wilderness.

We finally reached the Bay Area and drove directly to a little town called Canyon behind the Berkeley hills, dropped acid, and crawled to the cabin nestled in the redwoods, where my childhood friend William squatted with his wife Katherine and wildchild Miklos. Betty and I stayed in the downstairs room, the closest to communal living I would get. I was constructing a novel about being on the bum with William in New Orleans, a cosmic egg of a book which couldn’t seem to lay itself, while William endlessly practiced the sitar and Katherine collected welfare, though William’s father was a millionaire.

A few weeks into our stay at Canyon, I double dated with my friend Mark in his old Renault, me with Betty, him with a revelation of a woman, Sasha, with Frida Khalo eyebrows and a mind like a waterfall, gushing with intellectual clarity. I’d met her briefly in New York when she was a junky, adding to her allure.

The next day I asked Mark’s permission to ask her out. He said “Sure.” The same shrill cynicism that turned me on, turned him off. We went out, who remembers where. We made love, sweet love, our bodies fitting together just so. Next day I inelegantly sent Betty packing, “She’s a real woman,” I told her, adding injury to insult.

I loved how her brown hair with peroxided tips hung way down her back, I loved the passion with which she invoked Chairman Mao, I loved her op-art miniskirt. I loved her even as she stood up to William, who bristled at her commitment to violence.
“Do you know how many people died in the Chinese revolution?”

“Fewer than would have without it,” she said, closing debate.

At one point in her Bernal Heights studio apartment, I mustered the courage to express my own doubts about the Communist thing. I’d been a committed pacifist myself, a conscientious objector, probably the only Zen Buddhist in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where my draft board resided. “Love me, love my dog,” she said. I didn’t know how to argue with her, she was smarter than me, and I did love her. So I loved her dogma, too. I read “On Contradiction” and noticed how similar the dialectic sounded to that of the “I Ching.”

I swapped my apathetic anarchism for revolutionary communism. I stood in awe of her as she developed the “Slumlord of the Month” campaign to present the Chatty Ratty award to such San Francisco liberal icons as Jeramy Ets-Hokins, street theater that the press adored. I took great pride in being known as Sasha’s boyfriend.

She trashed my writing: “What are you writing this FOR? You need to write for the movement.” The novel was foundering anyway, so I just stopped.

The daughter of a famous psychoanalyst, a breakaway disciple of Freud’s, she taught me about feelings, about how to express them. She pulled them out of me in a visceral tug-of-war, as if she were pulling my small intestine out of my mouth. It took me years to discover that she rarely expressed her own.

I loved the fact that she was Jewish, as had been most of my girl friends, six out of nine. It seemed to me perhaps stereotypically that Jewish girls were less puritanical about sex than the wasps and Catholic girls I’d grown up with. My father would reiterate certainly stereotypically how smart they were, the Jews, and Sasha did have all 800 college boards. There was the rebellious piece too, the need to reject my family’s Midwestern conservative values. More importantly, I was drawn to the tragedy of the Holocaust as someone who hated injustice of any kind, drawn irresistibly to look at this horror of skeletal bodies lying in heaps, this irreversible stain on my German heritage. Not that there needs to be a competition between the evilness of horrific crimes against humanity, but this genocide stands apart in its cold, calculated deliberateness.

It was Mark, small and curly-headed, also Jewish, who softened me up for Sasha’s Marxism. He was a red diaper baby like Sasha; his father had edited the West Coast Communist Party newspaper before he died. Mark had left the ideology behind, harshly critical of his parents for sticking with Stalin for so long, yet the sensibility remained.

I had plans to go to Mexico with him the summer that my friend William followed me to California and I was torn apart between my two best friends. I couldn’t tell Mark I didn’t want to go to Mexico because I wanted to hang with my friend William. So my unconscious did the dirty work. On an LSD trip with Mark in Golden Gate Park we strolled together through the Japanese Tea Garden in an uneasy silence, marveling at the veins on the leaves of the cherry trees or the musical swish of the carp between the lily pads in the ponds. Finally, just to break the silence, I said the first thing on my mind, which was: “I’m wondering if they will put that guy in the oven.”
Mark responded thoughtfully., “Hmmm. Could be the Ginger Bread Boy. Could be Hansel and Gretel.” Pause. “Could be a Jew…”

And then he looked at me with that ultimate victim look the hurt of this difference between us zapping off his being like a tiny full-body lightning storm and I crumpled at the abject shame that my consummately evil Hitler-nature had spewed out of me so blatantly and cruelly. An icy distance came between us. We headed back to our shared apartment in the Haight. I tried to apologize. “So much hatred. I don’t know where it came from.” But our friendship had been damaged. Soon Mark left for Europe and around the world. It wasn’t until he was on his way back years later that I wrote him apologizing again and explaining as I only then understood that it was the homoerotic jealousy that came between us, that I wanted to be with William rather than going with him to Mexico.

But, Sasha. She introduced me to Derrick, a party leader, a tall, muscular Jew with a defiant chin. He impressed me with his practical cynicism. “We need to organize the working class because we need an army,” he would say. “Can you imagine an army made up of college students?”

I couldn’t.

Nor did I know what to do with the rest of my life, now that my writing had run aground on Sasha’s criticism.

Derrick said, “You know, Henry, we need teachers. We want to build a parent-teacher alliance, kind a parallel to the worker-student alliance.”

“Really?” A teacher was about the last thing I had thought of as a career, because by and large I had hated school even when I was good at it, which was only part of the time. But building a revolutionary movement inside the schools, the belly of the beast? There was a challenging, potentially exciting thing to do.

So I did it, I signed up for the teacher training course at Berkeley.

Derrick became a leader of the student strike at San Francisco State where Sasha was enrolled as a student, studying the history of science and other arcane subjects.
I’d been in a lot of demonstrations, against the war, for civil rights. But I’d never seen anything like this: black students, Latino students, and white students all swarming over the campus dodging the clubs of policemen on horseback, day after day.

I flushed with pride when Derrick chose our house to hide out in from the cops and make stink bombs to plant in the classes that weren’t honoring the strike.

Fissures developed between Derrick and Sasha over the strike. Her class wanted to meet off campus, and she wanted to meet with them, but the Party leaders said that was tantamount to capitulation. If classes were meeting, there was not a strike.
“It’s not like the teachers would be paid,” she argued.

“Still, it’s business as usual, fewer people will come to the rallies.” Derrick countered.

By this time, I was all gung ho for the revolution. “The revolution is not a dinner party,” I said, “or an intellectual discussion in a nonstriking venue.”

She ended up not going to class, but in her pout I refused to see trouble ahead.

We were married on the Winter Solstice among the redwoods again – the redwoods drew I toward them as inexorably as gravity – in Hero’s Grove in Golden Gate Park. The day was cool but sunny, we’d lucked out. We had no contingency plans for rain. I dressed in a suede sport jacket, a purple mod shirt with a huge collar, a wide purple and yellow tie. Sasha wore a wool dress she made herself, orange with purple paisley swirls. In the car driving over to the park, terror washed over me, a typical groom at a nontypical wedding. But once we reached the park and saw my friends and family huddled in the woods, I allowed the happiness to embrace me. Some excerpts from our vows:

Friends: We are here this morning to marry this man and this woman. In the midst of defeatism, we affirm our willingness to contine; in the midst of despair, we affirm our determination; in the midst of fear, we affirm our courage. In the midst of the terror and corruption of the past and present, we have come together to plant the flag of the future.

Consider marriage as a continuous process of unity and contradiction – not static, but dynamic and organic -- an ever-changing, ever-growing relationship. Change and growth come about through struggle – a struggle between two persons and the unity that is their marriage; a struggle between the needs of their family and the needs of the people to which they belong.

The law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. Between opposities in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradiction is universal and absolute; it is present in the process of development and permeates every process from beginning to end. …

Within the family, the basis of unity between the opposites in a contradiction is love, or spontaneous affection. For the union of male and female is the origin of of the whole of nature….

Oh
I am thinking
Oh
I am thinking
I have found my lover
I think it is so

Thus were our vows an odd synthesis between the I Ching and Chairman Mao’s On Contradiction. The idea of contradiction did indeed set the tone.

Our wedding day was the best day of my life so far. The day after our wedding was the worst. My sister Nicki, three years older than me and not yet married, convinced me to postpone our honeymoon for a day and hang out with her and her boyfriend who would become her husband 6 months later. She fed us hashish brownies and I went to paranoid city, to some realm of terror that stopped my voice in my throat so I couldn’t speak. I lay on our waterbed, all atremble, with Sasha at my side, but she wasn’t. She was in her own universe. Forcing out the words, I tried to impart to her my vision of our family – me and her – at the center of concentric circles, the party, the movement, the working class, and something about what I said set Sasha off. She attacked me in the harshest terms, with a voice most shrill:

“First off, I want no party mucking up our family. If you equate loyalty to the family to loyalty to the party in any way, the party will eat you alive, eat us alive. You have to choose. It’s me or the party. And you already made your choice in marrying me. You can forget the party You need to promise me now that you’ll never join the party.”

I wanted to say: But you were the one who got me involved, love me love my dogma, and I did fall in love with both and now I’m way to deep into the party to back off now, I’ve pinned all my hopes on them, I’m convinced that only the strictest discipline and boundless commitment can keep the capitalists from destroying the world.

But the hash had destroyed the connection between my brain and my vocal chords and all I could hear was the sound of my dreams shattering on the bedroom floor, the dawn of our marriage holding within it its own doom. All I could do is cry.
We finally made it to the redwoods, those of Big Sur this time, for a short honeymoon, but the bruises still smarted and hope, that sputtering flame of hope that both Sasha and the party had ignited in me smoldered on its way to extinction.

Berkeley

6.

My sister Nicki, who was 22 by then, was living in San Francisco with a roommate in a Victorian carriage house of the type made famous in Armistad De Maupin’s Tales of the City, in North Beach at the top of Telegraph Hill.

On my first night in town, I borrowed my sister’s blue Volkswagen bug and attempted to drive over to the flat in the Fillmore where Mark was living with his mother. I was following a cable car on Powell Street just as it reached Market Street, the diagonal main drag. I watched astounded while the people jumped out of the rickety wooden cable car, and turned it around on the manual turnstile. I scratched my head as the cable car rolled forward and crumpled the fender of my sister’s car. Worldly as I was by then, I was naive as well. I gave the driver my name and contact information, but never heard from the bus company. I’ve been an enemy of the cutesy cable cars ever since.

Mark showed me the town. He showed me how to go down the crookedest street in the world Lombard Street in his Renault without touching the brakes. He took me to his family’s favorite haunts in Chinatown, to City Lights Books, Golden Gate Park, and Playland at the Beach. I started to feel human again after New Orleans.

Mark and I with his friend Allen Tobias got an apartment on Telegraph Avenue in North Oakland near the Berkeley line in a duplex with fake brick siding. Allen had gone to Columbia as well. He was tall, Jewish, with thinning hair at age 20. He was proudly neurotic, a trait I admired. He was brilliant, and funny, and whined a lot.

Once we had settled into the apartment, Allen took us over to his friend’s house above a Chinese restaurant further up on Telegraph toward the UC campus in Berkeley. His friend was a short bearded fellow named Lee Glickman, but who called himself Count Olaf Bolansky. He always had his clocks set 6 hours ahead. And, he knew where to get marijuana. The first night we smoked it sitting around Olaf’s living room, listening to Charlie Mingus, I didn’t feel a thing.

“You feel anything, Mark?” I asked.

“No, not really.”

Then I started to growl like a lion. Mark started barking like a dog. Allen made pig noises, Olaf hissed like a snake.

“I guess we are high,” I said, and we all laughed and laughed.

With a tip from Allen, who had worked there for awhile a few months back before he got fired, I got a job as a copyboy at the Oakland Tribune. My first duty was to bring coffee with two lumps to ex-Senator William R. Knowland, the paper’s owner. He was known as an extreme right-winger, the “ex-Senator from Formosa,” Allen called him, referring to his advocacy of invading China to protect Chain-Kai-Shek’s government now in exile on Formosa and Taiwan from Mao’s victorious Communists. Allen suggested I spit in Knowland’s coffee before serving him, but wasn’t sufficiently radicalized to do such a thing…yet.

Although I was little more than and errand boy, I liked the job. I liked being at the center of breaking news. I liked being paged by one of the columnists and rushing to his office to ferry his overdue copy to the city desk. The high point of the job was on Sunday, November 24, 1963, when I was manning the city room entirely by myself, monitoring the newswires as they clicked away. At about 11 AM, the following message clacked through on the AP wire

Lee Harvey Oswald has just been shot by Jack Ruby as he was being transferred from the Dallas City Jail to the federal authorities…

Suddenly self-important, I swung into action and called the City Editor at his home. “Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot! Will you be coming in to put together an extra?”

“We know already, Henry. It was on television. Everybody in the country watched. I don’t think we need an extra.”

“Oh.” For a minute there, I thought I was one of the first in the country to scoop this news.

By that time, I was bored enough with working that I realized that going to college was actually more fun. So, I applied to Berkeley as a California resident and got in for the Spring semester. I rolled my Tribune job back to part-time.

***

I loved the anonymity of Berkeley, the fact that going to class wasn’t really required, that you could buy notes for all the major classes at a reasonable cost. To satisfy my parents, I signed up for pre-med classes, thinking maybe I would be a psychiatrist. I already had a sense of myself as a little crazy, and the mind fascinated me. But the class I liked was Martin Halpern’s Creative Writing class. Mark audited the class with me.

Allen had gone back to New York, and Mark and I found our own place on Ashby above Telegraph. We smoked a lot of pot and enjoyed our first peyote trip with Olaf, who blended the buttons into a disgusting strawberry concoction.

I wrote a story about riding the bus back from New Orleans, “my own terrified image reflected back at me through the window from the night speeding by.” The Teaching Assistant, liked that image. She wrote sweet things on my paper. Her looks made my stomach flutter. She had black hair and helmet-like bangs. White, soft skin. Big, sad eyes. She had a Honda 50 motor scooter. There was a childlike quality to her that moved me. I was smitten right away. Roberta Feldman, aka Rivvy. She’d written a story that won a prize for the best college story about a girl like her who makes love to a cat.

I invited to her to the house for dinner and asked Mark to disappear for the night. I cooked her steak and artichoke, baked potato with sour cream. She called me Barney, after my autobiographical character in my story. After dinner, I was all over her, and she didn’t resist. Finally, I carried her back to the bedroom, and we made love oh so sweetly. She wrote on the back of my hand with her finger, “I love you.” Finally, I thought to myself. Finally. Finally. Finally.

The next morning, she told me that she was engaged to a Stanford student and they planned to get married next summer. But I was in love.

Two days later, Mark and I went over to Olaf’s, where he had six sugar cubes soaked with LSD. I knew a fair amount about LSD. My sister Lisi had given me a subscription the Psychedelic Review the previous summer. I knew I wanted it.

The first part ot the trip was beyond terrifying. I sat in a big overstuffed chair, watching my mind, the world dissolve before me. Colors, smells, all sensation became impossibly vivid as words lost their meaning and raw fear enveloped my body. Hours seemed to pass as I or something resembling I was buffeted about on a sea of chaotic sensation, a part of me continuously reminding another part of me, remember, you took a drug, this is the drug working, it will pass, let go, let go, but I’m dying, it’s supposed to feel like dying, looking over at Mark and Olaf no reassurance there they looked at least as scared as I was, you have to do this on your own because you aren’t connected to anyone anymore there are no words the music was all that kept it together, Miles Davis, Some Day My Prince Will Come, Kind of Blue, those sounds the only unity it’s like you could attach your mind to the music and let it play you from one extreme to the other a bone chattering chill a psychic roller coaster ride the experience is beyond metaphor like nothing you’d ever experienced before but there is something you know is real yet the fear just builds and builds you are totally lost and totally alone and you are going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it the fear builds to a crescendo a now the music is Mingus again the Black Saint and the Sinner Lady wowing from one end of a chaotic scale to the others and finally it’s all you can do to just die and you do.

And then it’s quiet. Something has died, but it isn’t you. As you look out now yes you see that clear blue light they talk about in the psychedelic books and it reflects back to you the you that Rivvy loved, that Barney, that sweet kind of hayseed boy you never imagined that you could love anyone like you loved Rivvy but also yourself it is the first time you have ever truly loved yourself and by extension everyone and everything in the fabulous universe and out of your minds as you were you had no trouble riding with Mark in the car winding up and up and up into the Berkeley hills finally coming to Grizzly Peak and you stop the car and get out and below you the entire bay area with its universe of dazzling twinkling scintillating lights with the luminescent bay connecting them all and above a silently wise full moon beaming upon you good will and all was right with the world and always would be you are so fully into that peace which passeth understanding.
The experience was unbelievably profound; no question it had changed you unutterably, that nothing would ever be the same, except, equally unbelievably, the next day things were the same. You had to get up in the morning, go to some boring class, not listen to the lecture, and lament how fleeting could be enlightenment, as fleeting as your love for Rivvy, which too was receding in her efforts to distance herself.

Mark, who was so happy for you about Rivvy, and saw that thanks to her you had mastered art of the LSD trip – “I can see this is your drug, Henry,” he said – he advised you, “Don’t let her go. Keep after her. Let her know how you feel.”
So I pursued the hell out of her, calling her, going to her apartment, harassing her. Remarkably, she let me love her. She kept her distance but she didn’t cut me off. Still, I knew I couldn’t have her, and on my next LSD trip I got so scared I scared Mark and Olaf and begged them to take me to Rivvy’s where I spent the night, she did take care of me, she talked me down from my fear, but when I tried to make love to her she said no.

I spent the next few months in tragic mode, and to make absolutely sure I had done everything I possibly could to claim this woman, I hitchhiked across the country to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she was staying with her family in preparation for the wedding. She walked with me on the beach, she was full of love for me and sympathy, but she was going to go through with the wedding. At least I had tried as hard as I possibly could, I could respect myself for that.

I kept in touch with her over the years. Sometime in the middle of my second marriage to Earldean – this would have been 14 years later – I wrote her a poem.

YEARNING FOR RIVVY

(for the Winter Solstice after 14 years)

She said her soul was in her bangs,
Squarely framing her dark eyes,
her purplish black velvet eyes
reflecting no light
Deep black eyes like black holes in the midnight sky
drawing everything into them
Black holes with all the sadness
of dying stars
of stars dying alone
collapsing in on themselves and
pulling everything toward them.

She kissed me where it hurt,

(and it hurt so bad!)
She kissed me on the black-and-blue
ulcerous festering sore
crawling with maggots
the minute poems of my nether being
(and how she hated maggots.

So did she wake me
So did she awaken in me
my sleeping beauty
So did she arouse in me the yearning
as only Miles blue:

Someday my prince will come

***

I’d also tried to continue working at the Tribune that summer, but one day I had come in without shaving and the City Editor said he had to let me go.

Late that summer, after I returned from my fruitless trek back east, the Civil Rights Movement held a picket line at the Tribune, accusing it of discrimination against Blacks in hiring. I joined that picket, and got a rush of joy when confronted by my old boss.

Mark moved back to San Francisco to drive a cab and attend San Francisco State. I found a small Victorian flat in South Berkeley on Adeline. The living room and bedroom were painted an awful coral reminiscent of the Burcon Hotel, and the kitchen a sickening green, it was old and grungy, but it was my home. I got an orange tiger kitten named Wow. It was my first time truly on my own.

The fall semester of 1964 started with an editorial in the Tribune, sharply reminding the University of California at Berkeley, that it’s campus was private property and it had no business allowing such organizations as SNCC and CORE to raise money for their dubiously legal activities in the South, or in the Bay Area, that in fact such activities violated school rules banning advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues.

The university’s response was to announce that the regulations restricting political activity would be strictly enforced.

I was much more into drugs than politics when this issue arose. I thought politics was boring. But I was on campus the day that Jack Wienberg set up his table on Bancroft and Telegraph and began soliciting donations. The campus police approached him and asked him for identification. He refused. He refused to dismantle the table. They brought a police car to the middle of the Sproul Plaza, and arrested him. The police car was immediately surrounded by students, including myself, and the roof of the car became a platform for student speakers. The sit-in lasted 32 hours before Mario Savio announced that an agreement to negotiate the rules had been reached and we could go home for now. But I was hooked. The injustice was just so obvious. The anti-Civil Rights Movement held the levers of power throughout the South, supported by the US Government, but student activists weren’t allowed to raise money on their own public campus. Not only was it egregiously unfair, to say so, to take a stand, was personally exhilarating. I was back on my mound of dirt, becoming the “robber” that I had wanted to be 15 years before.

The movement became a daily obsession. There were mass meetings every night, and I went to all of them. By myself. An odd contradiction: here I was front and center in the largest collective action in recent memory, isolated as hell. I followed all the arguments. It was significant that even the campus Republicans supported the movement.

My anti-ideological rebelliousness infected my school work. I was taking a Dramatic Arts class with a terrible teacher who gave an assignment like “Trace the development of Naturalism from Ibsen to O’neill.”

My response was to write a paper on “Ismism,” prefaced with a comment that I found the question repugnant and in the spirit of the FSM I refused to answer it. The teacher wrote “Tough!” in the margin, not long on humor or tolerance.

For two months, there was back and forth movement between the administration, the students, and the faculty. The Academic Senate came out in full support of the FSM demands, but the Regents held firm and upheld the campus ban on political activities and the suspensions of Savio and the other leaders of the struggle.

By December, as Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” and led 800 of us inside Sproul Hall, I was totally persuaded that:

There's a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.

as Mario described what we were doing.

The sit-in itself was festive, with groups singing Christmas carols with lyrics mangled to fit the struggle and students convening classes like “The nature of God and the Logarithmic Spiral.” I was still on my own, probably didn’t say a word all evening. At about two in the morning, the cops came, hundreds of them, Campus cops, Berkeley City cops, Highway Patrol, and went through the tortured process of dragging each of us who had gone limp into the waiting school buses. The buses took us to Santa Rita, the county jail south of Hayward. Santa Rita was an array of wooden barracks originally built, appropriately enough, as a concentration camp to house Japanese-Americans during World War II.

A self-appointed leader, dynamic and charismatic, called a meeting of our dormitory. “I think we should go on a hunger strike,” he said. “Call the press, let everyone know we weren’t yielding in our fight.”

It was 4 AM, and I was really hungry. I thought a hunger strike would be fruitless. I groaned. I spoke, something I rarely did: “I don’t think that would do any good.”

The leader turned to the others, “Who is this guy? Does anyone know him? Where did he come from?” I cowered in shame. He was implying I was some kind of police agent. His motion carried, though the point was moot because the authorities never even attempted to feed us. They let us go at about 11 the next morning. I was proud of my first arrest.

My family reacted with some dismay, but they respected my standing up for my principles.

A significant lesson for many of us in the FSM generation was that liberalism was bankrupt. While most everyone recognized that Knowland was a right-wing maniac, the ultimate decision-makers, the folks who called the cops, were University President Clark Kerr, and Governor Edmond G. Brown, both men with impeccable liberal credentials. The bankruptcy of liberalism would of course come to full fruition with Johnson and the Vietnam War, but for those of us who experienced the FSM, it was already clear that the “right” wasn’t the enemy: capitalism itself was revealing itself to be on the wrong side of history.

My next big discovery on the education front was speed. All my life, what I really wanted was to be a writer of fiction. I wrote my first story when I was eight. The story disappeared soon after I showed it to my parents, but here is a reconstruction:

FATE AND PEARL HARBOR

Once there was a boy who was playing with his mommy and daddy on the beach in Hawaii.

All of the sudden there were big explosions. BOOM! BANG! CRASH!

The boy ran down the beach all by himself.

THE END

Did my parents, with their zeitgeist understanding of Freud, recognize a death wish when they saw it? I don’t know why the story disappeared. But in my later attempts to write fiction or even non-fiction, something always seemed to be missing.

Not on speed. The first time I shot the methamphetamine that I got from Olaf into my vein with an eye dropper, I wrote up a storm. I figured out my whole novel, titled it: “Come Over the Mandalan Freeway,” and wrote the first chapter about a boy who escapes from his mother and sister at Disneyland and spends the night there, riding all the rides.

On speed, I wrote a short story as a paper for my Child Development class, my favorite class, about a black boy who ran with dogs. I modeled the boy on one of the neighbor kids who I’d gotten to know. The boy in the story was given a strong dose of behaviorist aversion therapy – a shot to make him throw up when he encountered dogs – but he kept on running with this pack of wild dogs, where he felt right at home.

For that same class, I wrote a rambling, convoluted paper on the nature of laughter (called “The Last Laugh”) that earned me an A+.

For my Asian Comp Lit class, I wrote a paper on the I Ching, which used the casting of the oracle to write the paper.

School hadn’t been so much fun since nursery school.

Two things happened to curtail my career as a speed freak. One was that I got really sick. I shivered in bed with fever for three whole days, and made a decision to cut way back on my speed use.

Then one day I went with Olaf to score some more speed. He took me over to his friend Alex,s house. Alex was a serious freak, over 6 feet tall weighing about 100 pounds, scraggly beard, eyes popping out of his head. While we were at his apartment, the police came. They tried to arrest Alex, but he resisted. They finally did subdue him, and my last view of him was standing on the front lawn of his house, his hands cuffed behind his back, bug-eyed, foaming at the mouth.

Meanwhile, I was so nervous I could barely speak, but Olaf was way cool. He told the cops that we had come over to view Alex’ art work – he made bad heavy metal sculptures using found objects. Since we hadn’t scored anything yet, fortunately, and were clean, the cops let us go. But it was too close a call. I knew I didn’t want to call my parents and tell them I’d been busted for drugs. Oddly, it never occurred to me not to tell them.

Having learned to write on speed, I spent years attempting to mimic the experience by swearing off coffee during the week and then on Saturday morning quaffing a large quantity of triple espresso. Only recently have I reclaimed enough confidence to write without being high.

***

The competition of men for sex, for women in particular is especially hurtful to both men and women. From the age of 15 onward, I never felt like a real man unless I was sleeping with someone. This attitude is mostly about what other men or boys would think of me, part of the need for status. So between bouts of being in love, I would find stop-gap girls who would sleep with me even if I didn’t love them.

Christina had been the first of these, the first woman who slept with me without me having to pay. Romy was the next, an accomplished cellist, a dark, sweet woman, shyer than me. But my friends made fun of me, implying she wasn’t good-looking enough.

Faye came after Romy, a summer romance in New York when I returned to Columbia for summer school. She was sprightly and fun, but had an odd odor, a floral scent of a carnation that had gone rotten.

Ann was a concert pianist with a penchant for horses, a virgin who came to me when I was camping one summer near Nevada City in the Sierra foothills. I met her through my friend William from Pine Lake who had dropped out of college again to move in with his wife Katherine across the street from me in North Berkeley. He was staying with Ron L. and working as a carpenter. Ann was Ron’s sister.
This one ended in the worst possible way. When I moved back to Berkeley at the end of the summer, I figured it was over. Of course I didn’t bother communicating this to Ann. I was hip. It was just a thing. Meanwhile, her father died. But a friend of William and Katherine, a blonde named Cynthia, was visiting them. So, I made a date with her and went to pick her up on my motorcycle. As we were leaving, there was Ann, sitting on the front steps, crying about her father. She gave me a look like I was killing her. I was so embarrassed I just pretended it didn’t happen, took Cynthia back to my new place in West Berkeley, and made love to her. It took me six months to get another girlfriend after that, I felt so guilty.

And that next one would have been Nora, Mark’s sister, who got me briefly in the restaurant business in New York in my year after college. The Phoenix Restaurant, on East 10th Street, across from Thompkin’s Square Park. We had a working beatnik clientele, as the Lower East Side sputtered toward becoming the East Village. Nora was smart, but extremely difficult.

We did everything, from cooking to cleaning to waiting tables, seven ten hour days per week. I’d never worked so hard in my life. The hardest thing about the business was the clientele. The regular customers were our bread and butter, but the reason they were our regular customers was that they had no friends – we were their best friends. This could be draining.

As capitalists in New York City, we competed okay. But to make real money, we needed a beer and wine license. We contacted our local mafia guy, the one who lent us the money to install the jukebox. He wanted $5000 to bribe the appropriate officials. We balked. When our partner Jerry hired a gay Jamaican cook in the country illegally at below minimum wage, I drew the line. I told them I wanted out.

We sold the restaurant the Purple Intergalactic somethingorother. I broke
even after six months. But it was clear, capitalism was not for me. I split up with Nora and went over to Betty, a girl I had known as a friend in Berkeley.

Betty helped create my hippy van and rode with me in it back to California.

I want to honor them, these stop-gap girls, because they made life bearable to me. For some of them, I was doubtlessly a stop-gap guy, but I don’t think women have the same competitive need to be sleeping with someone even if they know they have no future with this person, that the chemistry just isn’t there.

I have a sense of what this “chemistry” is. “Love is how people naturally feel about each other if no distress gets in the way,” says Harvey Jackins, the founder of co-counseling, about whom, more later. So that person we “fall in love with” somehow gives us a glimpse of what it might be like to get beyond distress, beyond our perpetual feeling bad about ourselves. It’s also an intuitive thing, our being matching us up with another being that we think will make a good co-parent – this is an evolutionary drive that kicks in regardless of our intent or lack thereof to have children.

There was one other love like this between Rivvy and my first wife: Nina. Nina’s finest attribute was her ability to listen with apparent interest to my long, speed-driven rants about Wilhelm Reich, who was my hero for a number of years. Reich believed that the orgasm put us in touch with the creative life force (orgone) of the universe. As a recovering sex-starved refugee from boarding school, the concept of sex/orgasm as the Answer resonated. Reich was brought to the Soviet Union to design sexuality policy for Lenin in the early days, but he went too far in encouraging sex among prepubescent children and got kicked out. In the US, he was hounded by the FDA for making claims that his “orgone box” could cure cancer, and went insane. My kind of guy.

Nina broke up with me after about 3 months without explanation. I was devastated. I went into a funk that lasted about as long as the relationship. It was like that for me in those days, either ecstasy or abject misery, with nothing in between. Bipolar is what they call that now, but even though I’d been seeing a shrink since I arrived in California, I didn’t have the luxury of a diagnosis.
However, 20 years later, Nina and I met up again when I was between marriages. She wanted me back! How sweet that was. Even sweeter: I told her no. It was thrilling to so get even with her.