“That’s right!” his voice boomed. “There is never anyone else to blame. You are a Córdova. That means you and you alone are responsible for everything that happens to you. I don’t want any cowards in my house.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stand down, soldier,” he barked.
I separated my heels, but my backbone refused to relax. The tone in his voice had downshifted. He hadn’t pulled off his belt. He wasn’t going to whip me this time.
“I’m not buying you a new baseball bat to reward your carelessness,” he continued. “You’re going to have to wait until you’ve saved enough allowance to buy another.”
“Understood, sir!”
“For your punishment, I am giving you eight demerits. Now, soldier, you are dismissed!”
I didn’t care about the demerits. They only meant walking up and down the hot, cemented backyard a few dozen times. No, my real punishment was these days of humiliation. Facing my troops tomorrow would be hard. I was the only kid on the block with a bat. Now we couldn’t play ball. It would be two months before I’d saved enough weekly dimes to buy another bat. It was all my fault. Good soldiers never let their platoon down.
I sat on BeJo’s toilet with the bathroom door closed, filled with the same shame I’d felt as a child. Today Morris Kight, my political godfather, had humiliated and dismissed me. Dad didn’t control who I was anymore; Morris Kight did. At least, he wanted to, if I let him get away with it. I grabbed some toilet paper to dry my tears. Pull yourself together, Córdova! I demanded as I stood up.
I jerked open the bathroom door and marched into the bedroom. I hadn’t minded being kicked off the Board. In some ways it had been a relief. But being fired, this was going too far. I lit a cig and exhaled a deep breath. What were Morris and GCSC up to? Something very strange was going down. I couldn’t help but wonder, why me? I wasn’t the ringleader of the “dissident” staff, or even the most vocal.
Oh shit! My cigarette fell to the floor as my mouth opened. This wasn’t about just me; Pody got a letter too! Oh no—were there others?
I dashed to the kitchen and dialed Pody back. “Good, you’re still home,” I said as she answered on the first ring.
“It’s not like I have a job to go to,” Pody quietly replied.
“I got the same letter,” I replied.
“Yeah, I was afraid they got you, too. I can’t believe they would fire you, Jeanne Córdova, publisher of The Tide, dyke leader...”
“The Board must have had secret sessions, and planned this out in detail.”
“Why fire me? I don’t make trouble. I make people laugh,” Pody protested.
“I don’t know why you,” I replied, truly stumped. “Why the two of us? It makes no sense.”
I stared at BeJo’s spick and span sink, so orderly. I needed to order my emotions to take a back seat so that I could see the parameters of Morris’s plan. Where was my political brain when I needed it? Turn on the faucet, turn off the faucet. On and off, something simple was right there in front of me. I took a deep breath; suddenly, everything snapped into place. “Pody,” I spoke gravely, “it’s not just about you and me. If you and I got these letters, June will have gotten one for sure. There could be others…”
Pody stopped sniffling. “You mean they fired three people at the same time? How can they get away with this?”
“They won’t get away with it,” I said, my voice turning dark. “Get in your car, Pody. Go to the Center. I’ll meet you there.”
“We can’t,” she said. “The last paragraph on the letter plainly says, ‘Call for an appointment to pick up your stuff.’ They don’t want us there.”
“That’s exactly why we have to be there, Pody! We have to confront this. Morris Kight can’t fire a bunch of employees with no warnings and just expect us to roll over and take it. Get in your car, Pody. Drive to GCSC. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”
I slid into my jeans and donned my war jacket.
By the time I hit the cement stairs in front of the Center, I was breathing rage. My shirt was sticking half in/half out and haphazardly buttoned. I’d forgotten to comb my hair. No matter. Today would not be about fashion. GCSC couldn’t dump multiple employees with no warning. IBM couldn’t even do that.
The place was a mess with every office packing for the move to Highland. Quickly, I ran to the small front reception room of Herself Health Clinic. I found my boss, April, sitting at the desk. She looked at me with tears in her eyes. She held up a single sheet of white paper.
“Christ, not you too?” I said. Other than sleeping with another director, my boss was a low-key, constrained and sensible woman.
“What’s going down?” she asked limply. Her voice was a hollow monotone.
A spasm of panic rippled though my chest. GCSC had fired a project director. That meant that the funding agencies would be involved. This was bigger than I had imagined. I laid a hand gently on April’s shoulder. “Quick,” I told her, “get on the phones. Call everyone. Tell them to come to the clinic’s office.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here. We have to occupy the building. The others have to come here.” I barked my orders. The small reception room was filling up. But luckily we could see who else approached the room because the door was open and faced a long hallway.
“What others?” asked my boss.
“Call June and Brenda. And then every woman on the GCSC staff. And the boys who have been with us. Tell Brenda to call all her top staff of the A.P.W. Call everyone! Tell them to come here. We all need to be together.”
“What a bummer,” April said, looking at me like a wounded bird. “What if some of them are fired, too? I don’t want to be the one to tell them.” She looked at Pody, who had just arrived, with pleading in her eyes.
“Whoa...not me,” Pody replied.
“April, I’ll make the calls with you.” I turned around. “Pody, start packing all of our protest stuff. Take all the political memos, the IAT material, the unpublished stories, our supporter’s list.”
I heard sniffles and turned to see Rachel standing in the doorway. “I received this in the mail!” she cried, handing me her termination letter.
She looked so helpless standing there with her shoulders heaving, tears streaking her pale face. I stepped toward her wanting to put my arms around her, but Pody stepped in between us and reached out to hug her.
I remained rooted at April’s elbow, phone in hand, too stunned to speak. Why fire the woman who was the Board’s own candidate for the management team? Then I remembered, Rachel had told me she’d threatened to resign last week.
Suddenly, June Suwara’s wild red bob appeared in the doorway. “What the fuck is going on here!” she demanded, brushing past Pody and Rachel to come to a halt in front of me. She waved her own termination letter.
“D-Day,” I replied. “The bodies are falling.”
“Today is May first,” she said. “It’s International Workers Day. They can’t do this!”
Two of the male employees who had been lesbian-friendly appeared in the doorway, crying on each other’s shoulders. “I’m a program director,” Enric said. “Look what I got in the mail.”
Then he took notice of the rest of us. By now the office was almost full. His eyes made the circle. “Not ALL of us?” he said.
Seeing the familiar letter in Enric’s hand, my shock deepened. Our guy friends, too? In recent weeks a handful of the gay male employees had begun to support us, calling themselves “effeminists,” a term used by the radical left wing of the gay men’s movement. Effeminists glorified in the name “gay faeries” and understood that the straight world mocked them because they as faggots identified with women. They championed feminist principles like lesbian equality in the gay movement. They were usually feminine, rather than butch gay men, and they’d become our natural allies.
A large frame filled the doorway. It was Colin McQueen, a big bear of a white guy with a great head of reddish-brown hair t
hat was teased out into an Afro. Colin was June’s assistant coordinator of the Peer Counseling Program. His socialist politics were similar to June’s but other than that he was new to L.A. and no one seemed to know a thing about him. “This means war!” he hollered waving his own termination letter.
“What about me?” a small, male voice called from behind Colin. It was Jesse Crawford, the program director of the Growth Groups.
“And me? Let me through,” a woman’s voice called out from behind the stack of men. Colin stepped aside and Alicia Maddox, GCSC’s treasurer, slipped into view.
Her presence among us was no surprise, I thought. Since Alicia had accused the Center of mismanaging funds, an accountant in a three-piece suit had arrived at Center. Bartley had told us he was an independent auditor. The day after I made my report to the Board, Bartley had told Maddox to take a mandatory “leave of absence.”
The next person who walked in was a surprise. Dick Nash had been one of the original founders of the Center with Don Kilhefner and Morris Kight. Older than the rest of us, Dick was tall and lean with stringy hair he’d grown out during his years in the Haight. Since his official position was only director of the Hotline and Switchboard, I’d always assumed he’d been demoted in some previous power struggle.
“Well this makes sense, doesn’t it,” Dick said in his droll, quiet way. “We all got paid yesterday. So we’re all fired today.”
No one answered Dick. Others were still drifting in, everyone waving his or her letter. The stuffed room felt low on oxygen. I breathed shallowly. The effeminist men had taken a stand based on principle. My respect for them was growing.
“We ought to do a head count,” I said quietly.
“I have,” June, answered. “It’s eleven.”
“Eleven?” I repeated, trying to absorb the shock.
“Six lesbians and five gay men,” June said.
April came forward with a hand-scrawled list. “It’s almost everyone on the Herself Health Clinic staff, the Peer Counseling staff, the Growth Group leadership and three from administration.”
“Who’s left?” felt like the universal unspoken that bounced off the clinic’s now unstaffed walls.
“What about Brenda and her APW program?” I asked.
“I’m out here,” a calm voice answered from the hallway. “We’re with you guys all the way!”
A loud cheer went up. I turned around to see that the entire hallway, all the way to the building’s front door, was packed with nearly two dozen staff. Behind Brenda I saw her top assistants and the whole staff of the APW program.
“Let Brenda in,” I yelled to those crowding the doorway.
Brenda Weathers was a tough looking dyke whose exterior belied a sophisticated, strategic mind. As she came forward, I remembered that in this past week she had managed to use the uproar over Bartley’s alleged playing with the books to finally persuade GCSC to put a deposit down on a new building for her program. The new location on Alvarado Street was a broken down mess of a large Craftsman house but Brenda and her staff were already working to renovate their prospective recovery home, planning on opening it for residential clients next month.
As Brenda approached I asked her, “Where’s your letter?”
“We didn’t get one,” she said, using the plural on behalf of the APW staff, I assumed.
“Why do you suppose that you weren’t fired?” I prodded.
“Because they can’t fire me,” Brenda said, with a sly smile. She spoke softly, as if she didn’t want our conversation to be overheard. “I’ve established a very close relationship with my funding agency.”
My eyebrows arched. “What does that mean, Brenda?” I asked, knowing that her funding agency, NIAAA, was headquartered in Washington D.C.
Brenda leaned in close to me and whispered, “Now’s not the time. I’ll tell you more later.” Her smile was as close to a Mona Lisa grin as a butch could pull off.
Suddenly I remembered a conversation Morris had tried to have with me at the end of last week’s Board meeting.
As I’d tried to slink out of the room without showing my anger and shock over being ousted, Morris had had the unmitigated gall to come up to me. Before I could open my mouth and tell him to go to hell, he asked me, “Has Brenda Weathers or April sent letters to our funding agencies?” I’d replied with hostility, “No one’s written any letters to any funding agencies. The workers agreed to wait until after tonight’s meeting when I presented my proposal.”
Morris had smiled that sardonic, crooked grin of his that told me he thought I was lying. Studying Brenda’s face now it dawned on me. Had Brenda been in touch with APW’s funding agency all along? Was that why she and her staff hadn’t been fired?
Spinning away from me, Brenda addressed the crowd, “APW is with you all the way. Let’s decide what we’re going to do next!”
“Burn the fucking place down!” a male voice shouted from the crowd.
“Yeah!” a woman hollered. “Everyone’s moved to Highland and the place is empty. Burn it now!”
“Right on!” June chorused with the others. The group was unleashing months of pent up hurt and rage.
I looked at Brenda and thought I saw the same fear on her face as I felt on mine. Burning things down was part of the revolutionary rhetoric of the day, but no such thing was going to happen here, I vowed. “Why don’t we get on the phone and lobby our friends?” I countered, my mind grasping for some way to turn the clock back and make the Board reconsider firing us. “Let’s spread the news. Let’s divide up the community organizations and businesses and call everyone to a meeting, tell the whole community that we’re not going to take this lying down!”
“We don’t need no fuckin’ meeting,” Eddie yelled out in disgust. “We are the meeting. Burn the place down!”
“That makes no political sense,” I told him. “What are we saying to our community with a bunch of charred embers? I say, go get more numbers, ask all of L.A.’s gay and lesbian organizations to join us. That’s what we’re all here for—community. Meet over the weekend.”
“Meet where?” June asked. “You think they’ll give us a room at the new building?”
“We can meet at APW,” Brenda said. “There’s a big living room.”
“When?” Enric demanded.
“Sunday night,” I offered quickly. “Right Brenda?”
“Yes. Sunday,” Brenda agreed. “Eight o’clock at APW. Bring everyone you can!”
We weren’t going down without a fight. Several people crumpled their termination letters into balls and threw them into the trashcan. One of the guys struck a match and tossed it in. Luckily, it didn’t catch.
Chapter 9
My Nazi
[Los Angeles]
May 1, 1975
Morning was passing as I left my angry comrades at GCSC to head for work at The Free Press. Unlocking my car, I slid softly into the rich, black leather of the ’67 cherry red Cougar that I’d named Lionheart, and let the sweet seclusion of my cave envelop me. Lionheart was my home on wheels, sometimes offering the only private place I had. The tightly sealed windows and purring roar of the engine blocked out the troubled day.
Parking in The Freep lot, I went inside and climbed the stairs to Editorial.
Penny stopped me. “You need to be here more often,” she said, following me into my office. “Especially now. A guy keeps calling for you. Says he’s a Nazi, and that he’s the one who tear-gassed the huge rally to reopen the Rosenberg trial. He won’t give me his name. Says he’ll only talk with you.”
“I can’t handle more people blowing things up. Not today!” I waved her off.
She followed me. “I said you’d be in any minute, so if he calls back today you need to be right here waiting for him. I forbid you to leave the building until he calls!”
“I am at your command!” I joked with a playful bow and arm flourish.
Gratified, Penny turned to leave my office.
Suddenly, the City Edit
or, Tom Thomson, appeared in my doorway. “Pick up the phone, Córdova,” he ordered. “It’s your Nazi!”
I pressed the blinking button on my desk phone and stood up to take my Nazi’s call. I always felt more powerful on my feet. “Córdova speaking,” I said, waving Penny and Tom out of my office.
“Who’m I talkin’ to?” The voice was hard and demanding.
“This is Jeanne Córdova, the Human Rights Editor of The Free Press. To whom am I talking?”
“You’re talkin’ to a member of the white race. So that means I got human rights too, don’t it?”
I pegged my caller’s education level at mid-high school. “Yeah, you got rights,” I said. “But first tell me who you are or quit wasting my time.”
“I’m Captain Joseph Tomassi,” he said. His voice was deliberate and full of ego. “Captain of the National Socialist Liberation Front.” {1}
“And that makes you a Nazi?” I mocked. What kind of Aryan name was Joseph Tomassi? I could just picture Mr. and Mrs. Giuseppe Tomassi Sr. getting off the boat from Sicily.
“Sieg Heil!” he said, laughing at me. “And proud of it!”
“That’s nice. And how are you today?”
“Don’t play with me,” Tomassi barked.
“You called me, Joe. What do you want to talk about?”
“Remember the tear-gassing at the rally for those dead Jew swine traitors last month?
I blinked at the hatred in his words. A coalition of west side Leftists were calling for the reopening of the infamous Rosenberg spy case. The rally had been broken up in midstream as someone released tear gas in the building. People had run for the auditorium exits. Several had been injured in the melee. The organizers speculated that the perpetrator had been an agent provocateur, someone from LAPD Chief Ed Davis’s anti-Leftist spy squad, the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) stirring up trouble. Davis denied the existence of such an unconstitutional unit, but like his Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS), activists knew PDID was real. It was used to hunt and gather political intelligence on us Lefties. {2}
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