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.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
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.
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.
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