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.