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.