When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  “What kind of proof?”

  “The exact chemical mix of the teargas. An accurate description of how you went about it.”

  “No problem.”

  “As for the Socialist Workers Party bombing, I’ll need the bomb components. Right down to the type of detonator. Where exactly it was placed. And why your group chose the SWP in the first place.”

  “We met the Socialist Workers’ Party on the streets in Boston and Pasadena when they were pushing the busing of them niggers into our neighborhoods,” he explained. “That integration crap is being shoved down our throats. Besides, we needed bombing experience so we can work up to hitting the Jew-infected Fairfax area.” He spat out the last words like he wanted to kill.

  “Sounds like you’ve got a lot to say, Joe,” I said, wanting desperately to get the guy on tape. “When can we do the interview?”

  “Thursday at three p.m.,” he shot back.

  “Where?”

  “You drive that red Cougar of yours east on the 10, all the way to El Monte.”

  My heart stopped. Joe knew Lionheart; he was watching me. My throat closed up as I swallowed a fuck you that threatened to erupt.

  “On the corner of Valley and Garfield there’s a Sears and Roebuck store,” he continued. “You know where that is?”

  “I know the location.” It wasn’t far from the Plush Pony, a Chicana lesbian bar in Alhambra, a town Latinos were steadily moving into.

  “At exactly three p.m. you drive around the parking lot to the back of the building. At the far east end of the lot there are never any cars. There’s a tree. You park underneath it. You turn off the car and wait.”

  I was amazed at the public nature of his choice, hiding in plain sight. “How will I recognize you?”

  “You won’t,” he said. “I won’t be there.” He laughed. “You think I’m a fool? How do I know you won’t tip off the LAPD? They’re already out to kill me.”

  “I’m a reporter. I don’t blow my sources.”

  “My people will see your car and meet you. If they see anyone in the car with you, they won’t approach. I mean anyone. There won’t be any interview. You got that?”

  I didn’t like Joe’s tone of voice. “I’m bringing my tape recorder,” I replied. “You got that?”

  “Good. I’ll give you pictures. But no camera.”

  “Don’t push me,” I snapped. “I’m the one who’s doing you a favor, remember?” My bully-in-chief father had taught me, punks had to be confronted early on or they’d mop the floor with you later. It had come in useful in my early twenties, when I’d been a social worker and probation officer and worked the ghettos. I stayed silent.

  “Three o’clock, Thursday,” Joe said.

  The line went dead. I held onto the receiver, my mind reeling from the fact that I’d been talking to someone who might have already killed people. What if I pissed him off during the interview? With the name Córdova maybe he was expecting me to be Italian. What would he do when he saw that my skin was brown? Light brown, true enough, but not white.

  Penny opened my office door. “Jeanne? Did you get an interview?”

  “Yeah sure.” My voice rang hollow. “He’s one hell of a flipped out white boy.”

  Me editor sat down in front of my desk. “When is the interview?”

  “Next Thursday.”

  She pursed a pencil on her lower lip. “While you were on the phone, Jeanne, I gave this interview a lot of thought. I won’t have my reporters going to secret interviews with right wing murderers. Jack Margolis has to go with you. Tomassi will recognize Jack’s name and photo from his column next to yours.”

  “You sent me to Donald Freed’s source alone.”

  “That was different. Freed and his friends are on our side.”

  I studied the tightness of Penny’s jaw line. I respected Penny’s opinion, but my gut said this time I had to disobey her. Sometimes she was simply too white and too straight. She didn’t understand that most gay people risked their lives on a daily basis coming out of the closet. She’d never been in the front row of a demonstration with LAPD mounted troops trampling us. She hadn’t been with me in my beat up yellow Vega the night a drunken bigot had attacked my car when I was on my way to a lesbian bar, shattering the windshield with a crowbar and threatening to do the same to me. Penny didn’t know about street courage.

  “I’ve written fifty-four stories for you, Penny. Many of them turned out to be more hazardous than they first appeared. I’d think you know by now that I can handle myself. You have to trust that, Penny. The man was adamant. I need to go alone.”

  Behind her wide specs, Penny‘s eyes grew small. Her thin lips formed a very straight line. “And I say, adamantly—this Nazi can’t dictate the perimeters of safety for my writers. This guy is a fanatic at best, and a mental case at worst. If you show up with Margolis, he’d have to let Jack be present.”

  No, he wouldn’t have to, I thought. “Joe isn’t going to meet me himself. His people will find me and take me to him. He knows my car. His people won’t approach if they see someone with me.”

  Penny jumped up. “He knows your car? Come on, Córdova, I can’t say yes to this!”

  Suddenly a thought crossed my mind and my face relaxed. “OK. So you’re officially on the record as telling me not to go. What I do with my time is my business. Now you’re off the hook if something happens.”

  Penny threw up her hands as she walked to the door. “It’s not my neck I’m worried about.”

  “Don’t worry Penny,” I called after her. “The guy likes me.”

  As I headed east on the 10 toward El Monte, my mind was focused on the story I’d be writing about my Nazi. I hadn’t gone to The Freep this morning so I wouldn’t have to lie to Penny’s face or block Jack from getting into my car. No one, not even BeJo knew where I was going. As a back-up precaution I’d left a note with the details stuffed in Robin’s mailbox. In the note I’d left Penny’s phone number and told Robin to use it if I didn’t call in by nine tonight. I passed the Cal State LA campus and kept reminding myself that Joe Tomassi and I had developed a good rapport. Breathe slowly, I told myself, as Lionheart raced with my heartbeat. Get a grip. Butch out.

  That Joe’s National Socialist Liberation Front had bombed the Socialist Workers Party when both groups had the word “Socialist” in their names was one of those ironic leftovers from Hitler’s brilliant propaganda ploy, when he’d changed the name of his German Workers Party to the National Socialist German Workers Party. Playing on the popularity of the word and concept of socialism in Germany in the 1920s, Hitler had created a confusion of his group’s identity with the identity of the largest political party in his country, the German Social Democrat Party. By putting the word “National” in front of the word “Socialist,” he could claim he championed equality for everyone who had German blood.

  Sure enough, Joe’s henchman had found me parked in a tree-covered empty corner of the Sears and Roebuck lot in El Monte. The teen-aged blond had blindfolded me, stuffed me into the back seat of his car, and handcuffed me!

  I’d asked the burly youngster, “Are the cuffs really necessary?”

  He’d answered with a thick, dumb sneer, under which I detected an eastern European accent. “How does it feel to be someone’s prisoner, Miss Press?”

  “That’s Ms. Press to you!” I’d retorted.

  The steel handcuffs cut into my wrists, and I worried that soon I wouldn’t feel my fingertips. The cheap vinyl car seat was sticking to my jeans. No way to begin a new friendship, I thought, as I tried to keep from falling over as we rounded corners. Nauseous with car-sickness, I wondered where the bravado was I’d shown Penny last week.

  The air was scented with diesel fuel and deep-fried tortillas, the smell of El Monte, a semi-industrial, Chicano barrio ten miles east of downtown L.A. I tried to distract myself with thoughts about my personal life: the half-life I led with Rachel, and the lack of definition I maintained with BeJo. I was still in
shock over having whispered “love” to Rachel and still in dread about reading her letter. I’d buried it in the last drawer of my desk and quickly gone into a state of denial. I hadn’t been able to pick up the phone or answer her calls for days. Yet we’d run into each other at the last protesters’ meeting and the minute the last striker had walked out of Effie Street we were underneath her bed quilt of many colors. Neither of us wanted to even mention the strike against GCSC, the tension of which had increased as our side had doubled the length and strength of the picket line outside. As I’d feared, renaming our boycott and calling it an official “strike” had given June’s camp more leverage to be tougher. They’d begun actually turning people away, not letting even clients in need cross the picket line. But so far, no one had crossed the line into violence. That was the line I was watching.

  My Marxist training had taught me that violence was one of the characteristics that defined the border between how one treated “the misguided opposition” and how one treated “the enemy.” The former were people in the struggle on your own side who were simply misguided. The enemy was people who were truly on the opposite side—whose politics was in principle unacceptable. Captain Joe Tomassi and I would never be on the same side. People like Tomassi were the enemy, fundamentally opposed to our beliefs. The misguided opposition was GCSC, or any of the constantly squabbling gay, lesbian, and feminist groups who sliced and diced ideological purity with each other. All of us were still members of the same tribe. Someday, I knew, gay men would realize that feminists were their sisters, that gay men suffered “homophobia” because it was also rooted, like hatred of women, in a sexist society. And on that day the Center would include the word “lesbian” and finally become the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. That day would come, I felt sure, as long as none of us crossed the line into violence.

  The vehicle came to a stop and the front passenger door opened. The car rocked as though someone had gotten in. But nothing was said between the two people in the front seat. As we started up, I sniffed the air again, smelling cologne. I suspected the new passenger was Tomassi himself, but I stayed cool and said nothing. We had already begun to play cat and mouse. It was a game I could play well.

  I clamped my teeth together, hoping I wouldn’t throw up before the game started face-to-face. Besides, I reflected, bouncing helplessly, Joe could kill me. If he could throw a pipe bomb into an occupied building, disposing of me would not ruin his day. But right now, I comforted myself, I was worth more to him alive than dead, since I was writing about his ego-driven deeds. Nevertheless, I couldn’t wimp out; the ante in this game was nerve. I’d already decided to save my bottom line question—“So Joe, what have you got against Jews?” for last.

  The car halted and the driver killed the engine. “Don’t get out,” he snarled.

  The passenger door opened and the cologne left the car. I could smell that we were still in the San Gabriel Valley, since the atmosphere had a similar ratio of smog to oxygen as when I’d gotten in the car. I waited patiently, assuming that my driver had a plan for how he was going to get me out of the car without calling attention to the fact that I was a blindfolded, handcuffed woman. Be alert, I told myself. My chance to memorize his license plate was coming soon.

  The front door opened, then the back door. The driver slid in next to me, shutting the door quickly. He skillfully unlocked my cuffs and removed them, then my blindfold.

  “We’re going to get out now,” he said, trying to sound commanding. I could hear the teenage tenor in his voice. “I’m going to take your arm and we’re going walk calmly into a nearby diner like we was boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “Whatever you want, honey,” I said.

  As we got out he turned to retrieve my tape recorder and notebook. I calmly memorized his license plate: TP573, California.

  We sauntered across a nearly deserted parking lot and through the back door of an anonymous looking, rundown structure. I couldn’t read any signage on the front of the building. Once inside I surmised we were in a dingy diner whose popular day had come and gone with the Third Reich. The place was empty except for a couple of old men at a table near the front.

  The driver stuffed me into a tacky green Naugahyde booth immediately inside the back door. He stood awkwardly beside the booth, guarding me as if I weren’t here of my own free will.

  A waitress with tired blond streaks came to the booth. “Whadya have?” She stared at my driver asking, “Are ya comin’ or goin’?”

  “We’ll have two Cokes,” a deep voice answered from behind me. The waitress left and a solid figure with a linebacker-size chest swung into my booth. “I’m Joseph Tomassi,” he boomed and stuck out his hand, “Capitan of the National Socialist Liberation Front.”

  “I’m Córdova,” I replied hurriedly, forgetting to lower my voice to mimic the authority in his.

  “I could see that,” Tomassi said, as he pulled a piece of newsprint out of his fatigue jacket pocket. He laid my Freep column with its photo on the table between us. “You’re cuter than your picture,” he decided. “But too young.”

  “I’m older than I look,” I retorted, flustered. Meeting Joe had made me lose the offense. “Older than you are!”

  Despite a heavy black mustache, Tomassi had a baby-smooth face set in a warm brown complexion. He looked Latino with a fairly recent Native American ancestor to whom he could credit high, wide cheekbones. With his shoulder-length hair, black with almost feminine curly locks, and rough unkempt side-burns that came almost to his chin, he looked more like a Samurai than a Nazi. A most improbable Aryan.

  “I’m twenty-five,” Joe almost shouted.

  “You don’t look anything like I thought you might,” I said, keeping the tone of my voice high and friendly like a chatty-Cathy feature reporter.

  “Yeah?” Joe grunted, warily. “Whadya ‘xpect?”

  “Older,” I said. “More...” I paused, cautiously noting his set of coarse, dark eyebrows knitted tightly together over cold, glassy eyes. Bomber eyes, I thought. Keep this boy smiling.

  “You mean I don’t look like him?” Joe pouted like a boy.

  “Oh no. I mean, yes. You do! With the mustache and black hair and all. But…you must be some kind of prodigy to be so young and a captain and all.”

  My compliment soothed Joe. “You’re right. I joined the American Nazi Party when I was fourteen.”

  I waited, hoping he would continue on his own. I prodded. “Tell me about your family, Joe. Where did you grow up?”

  “We’re here to talk about my politics,” Joe exploded, banging his fist on the table. “I’m not gonna talk to you about my mom or dad so that can write up some kind of psychoanalyze that I’m a Nazi because my father and I hate each other.”

  “Do you?” I persisted.

  Tomassi hunched forward. “Don’t mess with me, Córdova.” His cold eyes narrowed.

  I wondered if Joe glared to hide his vulnerability, like I did sometimes.

  He snarled, “My dad was in the Army and I was proud of him and that’s all I’m going to tell you. So get off it!”

  Hmmm, I pondered. Going parental wasn’t a good idea. Most criminals didn’t care for Mom or Dad.

  “We have to talk about some kind of background, Joe. People will want to know where you came from, what you wanted to be when you grew up, that sort of thing.”

  Joe had withdrawn. His stiff shoulders saluted the back of the booth bench, as though he was deciding if our interview was over before it began. Finally he exhaled, “I wanted to be a cop.”

  “Are some of your members cops?”

  “Most are from the Klan or the Minutemen. But yeah, some are LAPD.”

  “Did you enter the police academy?”

  “No,” Joe said. “By the time I matured into high school, I knew I wanted to bring down the government. And I saw that the cops are the political soldiers of the government. So I knew I couldn’t become a cop. Instead I joined The National Socialist Party.” />
  “The American Nazi Party?”

  “I was the head of the El Monte Chapter by the time I was twenty.”

  “So you’ve had this ideology since you were a teenager?”

  “Had what?”

  “A Nazi point of view…about the world?”

  “Damn right,” Joe answered. He snapped his fingers for the waitress who appeared quickly and refilled his soda glass.

  “Just so I’m sure to get the record perfectly clear, Joe, exactly who do you see as your enemy?”

  “The Jew capitalist U.S. government!” Joe banged the table again. “Assimilation of the darkies into the white race will lead to nothing less than global cultural regression, the Dark Ages revisited.” His jaw muscles rippled.

  “So why aren’t you still with the Nazi Party? Why did you break away from them and form your own splinter group, this National Socialist Liberation Front?”

  “The party ousted me. They were paranoid that I had too much control,” Tomassi recounted. “I found out the Party was playing ball with the U.S. government. They were collaborators. Taking money from Nixon’s people to disrupt the Independent Party’s presidential campaign. That just ain’t right. They think their job is to hand out literature and educate white people to take their power back. They don’t realize that the masses of whites won’t rally around a wimp-assed educational program. White people can no longer even recognize our enemy. They’ve been blinded into apathy. They no longer have the guts. So groups like mine have to wake our brothers up by force, and train them how to use violence against our enemies. People are going to be hearing about my army.”

  Good. I’d obviously gotten Joe on his favorite topic—violence. “Is that why you tear-gassed the support rally to reopen the Rosenberg trial?”

  “Where’s my Fifth Amendment?” Tomassi toyed with me.

  “You blew it off when you asked me to interview you,” I snapped.

  “Okay, I won’t deny it.” Joe laughed, his massive chest heaving.