Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  “You look great, Judy. You know, of all the women I’ve been with in my life, you were the most special to me.”

  “Thanks, Roger,” I said, surprised and maybe a little suspicious. “But you know I was just a kid then.”

  “No, you were no kid. You were smart, savvy, sexy, tough. You were not a kid.”

  Just then, Ken walked into the kitchen and I introduced them. Ken made it clear that I was with him. Roger could see there was love between us.

  He stayed about half an hour and then said goodbye. That was painless, I thought.

  Then the notes started to arrive. There was one a day for about a week. I couldn’t really understand his scrawling handwriting, but what I could make out was very disturbing. At the end of the week, he called. He was drunk, very drunk.

  “Seeing you with someone else was too painful for me, Judy,” Roger said. “I want you back.”

  “I’m with someone else now, Roger.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Please stop sending me notes. They’re kind of upsetting.”

  I don’t remember what else he said but he didn’t call again and stopped sending the notes. The next time I saw Roger was on the street, almost twenty years later. He was walking like a zombie. I was in the middle of therapy and had just become president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC). He told me that he was studying pottery at George Brown College, permanently off the booze, and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The zombie walk was a side effect of the drugs he was taking. I took his number but when I finally called him, about a year later, it was out of order. I never saw or heard from him again.

  * * *

  As part of my political practice with the RMG, I became involved in other organizations. I joined the Committee Against Racism and Political Repression, founded by Black radicals, including Akua Benjamin, who remains a friend to this day. Its objective was to stop the deportation of Rosie Douglas, who had just gotten out of jail for participating in the most important Canadian anti-racist action to date, a 1969 sit-in at Concordia University that resulted in the destruction of the computer centre. Rosie always claimed that an agent provocateur trashed the computers, but he was convicted of mischief and got an eighteen-month sentence. After he got out of jail, he continued to organize against racism, often in coalition with Indigenous activists. The government wanted to get rid of this charismatic Black leader. We organized across the country but failed to stop the deportation, which finally happened in 1976. Later, Rosie became the prime minister of Dominica.

  I also joined the Committee to Defend the Self-Determination of Quebec. This committee was formed sometime after the Parti Québécois victory in 1976 and continued until after the 1980 referendum. The committee was an alliance between the Trotskyists who had always defended Quebec’s right to self-determination and whose Quebec wing supported independence and other independent leftists. Given the massive polarization around the 1980 referendum, we got very little attention in English Canada, but it was good experience to stand up for a very unpopular political position in the middle of what sometimes seemed like a war.

  Because the RMG believed it was training the leadership of a not-too-distant future revolution, I learned a lot of skills. I learned not to be discouraged if things didn’t immediately work out. “The long view,” we called it. I was also trained as a public speaker. In 1975, when Philip Agee, the former CIA agent who left the agency over the United States’ secret wars in Latin America, came to Canada to promote his book Inside the Company, the RMG asked me to chair the large public meeting that we sponsored. I was nervous and one of the male leaders told me, “Don’t worry, Judy. If you say it with confidence, everyone will believe you.” A secret of the patriarchy that I learned well.

  By then faction fights were erupting within the organization. It was a sign of the times that political debates were very polarized. You took a position and held on to it for dear life. My need to play a leadership role brought intense pressure, leading me to bury my feelings more and more. There was also pressure on RMG from Fourth International, the international Trotskyist organization to which we belonged, to fuse with the League for Socialist Action (LSA), an older and more male-dominated left-wing political group. Many of them had been through 1950s McCarthyism, when Senator Joseph McCarthy led a series of investigations against Communists and Communist sympathizers in the United States, and didn’t like our sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll free and easy ways, or our combination of New Left and Trotskyist politics. We thought the LSA were squares and didn’t like their politics either. I think they agreed to the fusion with RMG because they figured they could defeat our politics, pick off some of the leadership, and get rid of the rest. And that is exactly what happened.

  After a big debate, which I helped to lead with Steve Penner, we pulled off a fusion of the two political groups in the autumn of 1977 and formed the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL).

  * * *

  It was after the fusion that things really started deteriorating for me. I was spending more and more time and energy on the new organization and less on my relationship with Ken. We were fighting more, not just about politics but about everything. What began as a loving, close relationship soon became distant and argumentative. I began feeling more anger and less compassion for those I disagreed with, both inside and outside the RWL.

  About a year after the fusion, I agreed to go on staff for the organization and move to Montreal. Ken didn’t want to go to Montreal, but at this point he was not a priority and neither was my job at CHS. I was so immersed in political activism I didn’t think about anything else. I became extremely isolated in Montreal, working mostly in French, living in a city where I no longer related to my old McGill Daily friends, most of whom thought I was crazy for being a Trotskyist. My good friend Steve Penner was there, though, and he was as obsessed with “the movement,” as we called it, as I was.

  On top of that, the fusion wasn’t working and a major part of the old RMG wanted a split after a difference emerged, mostly around RWL’s decision to “make a turn to industry,” meaning that we would all get industrial jobs to be closer to the workers who we thought would be the driving force of a socialist revolution. Moving middle-class university graduates into factory jobs seemed foolish to many RMG members.

  Steve and I couldn’t understand why people wanted a split. We had worked so hard to unite the two organizations. I remember a tense leadership meeting in Montreal after members of the former RMG within the group had left. It became clear that I was now in an organization where I didn’t like anyone. Almost everyone I cared about had left the Revolutionary Workers League that I had worked so hard to help form. It wasn’t so much that I questioned the new organization’s ability to bring about change without my RMG comrades; it was that I felt too isolated and abandoned to fight alone.

  I left one meeting with Steve and Léon, a Quebec comrade, and started to cry. Steve put his arm around me and said, “It’s okay, Judy. Don’t worry about it. If you can’t handle it, that’s okay. Léon and I can do it.”

  Something in me hardened. Suddenly, the tears were gone and so was any feeling of grief. There was no fucking way I was going to let two men take over because I couldn’t handle it. I would never give up my leadership that way. Failure to do what was necessary was not an option. Once again I completely detached from my emotions, but this was a turning point.

  I believe that in this moment I created a new adult personality. She was tough and cold, and she was the last of the alters to emerge in therapy. From that point on I buried all my feelings except anger. But that didn’t last long either.

  Ten

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Soon after the split of the RWL, I decided to go off staff, return to Toronto, and make the turn to industry.

  The first sign of my deterioration was physical. Problems with my digestion turned int
o serious pain in my abdomen. A specialist admitted me to hospital because of my history with amoebic dysentery following my trip to India. He believed my liver might have been compromised. I went through a series of tests that felt like torture. Every test made the pain worse. I was admitted the day before John Lennon died in December 1980. I remember crying when I heard the news. I had always loved John Lennon.

  “What are you crying about?” the nurse said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  They also gave me painkillers that made me hallucinate. When I told them that I was hallucinating, they just put up the bars on the sides of the bed, which panicked me even more. I called Kristi, my massage therapist, and she talked me down. Then the young woman in the bed next to me started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked

  “I don’t know,” she whimpered. “I started feeling pain in my stomach and it’s getting worse.”

  I buzzed the nurse.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked when she came in.

  “The woman in the next bed is in pain.”

  The nurse checked her and then told me not to worry.

  I tried to sleep but woke up when the woman started screaming.

  The nurses came in and talked to her like she was a child.

  “Stop screaming. It’s nothing to worry about.” But she wouldn’t stop. They gave her some medication but it didn’t help.

  I looked at the woman and saw she was in terrible distress. Even under the influence of painkillers, I was able to react to the crisis. I got out of my bed and went to the nursing station.

  “She’s in trouble, call a doctor,” I insisted.

  “Don’t worry,” said the nurse. “She’s taken Valium, that will help. She’s just a hysteric.” Later, I found out that she was anorexic.

  I knew something was very wrong. I started roaming the halls, calling out for a doctor. A doctor came with me to the room and after a brief examination rushed the woman into surgery. They had left a hole in her esophagus, so the Valium had gone into her body cavity. She could have died of septicemia. I, on the other hand, only had irritable bowel syndrome, but it was a sign of things to come.

  * * *

  Soon after I recovered, in January 1981, I got a job at McDonnell Douglas, an aircraft factory just outside of Toronto. Ken had moved to Montreal to be with me a couple of months before we both decided to move back to Toronto. Now we were living in a flat above a store on College near Bathurst. I was still a part of the Revolutionary Workers League, and many of our comrades were getting jobs in industry.

  Finally, I was living my political beliefs. There was a sense of class-consciousness and even solidarity on the plant floor. The entry-level job at McDonnell Douglas was deburring using a drill with tough sandpaper to clean up the airplane wings. The work wasn’t bad until I woke up one morning and found my right hand was paralyzed.

  I ran hot water on my hand and the feeling came back.

  “I woke up this morning and my hand was paralyzed, completely paralyzed,” I told my workmate. In those days, we didn’t know about repetitive stress injury.

  “Oh yeah, happens to all of us.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “We all have it. It never goes away.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. It doesn’t go away. No big deal. Just run hot water on it.”

  “Why don’t you complain about it?” I said. He laughed.

  A few weeks later, the manager asked if I wanted to transfer to the wing department to do chemical milling.

  “A girl was transferred over there a few months ago and she’s doing pretty good,” he said. “So we thought we’d try you.”

  Fuck, I can’t believe the chauvinism in this place, I thought.

  It was a reclassification, a semi-skilled job. I think it paid $2 an hour more, $13 an hour if memory serves, and that was a lot of money in those days. I was happy. The work was more interesting. Standing at a drafting table, we would trace a stencil onto the metal wing. A crane would dip the wing into acid, leaving the necessary indentations from the stencil. There were two problems: the bath consisted mostly of sulphuric acid and nobody wore the protective suits because they complained they were too hot. Now and then, when the crane would go off balance, the guys would put a wooden block on the end of the crane. Sometimes the block would drop into the acid and if you didn’t move fast enough, you’d get acid splashed in your face.

  “No problem,” my workmates would tell me when I objected. “The sink is right there, just wash it off.”

  “What if it gets in my eyes?”

  “You wear glasses. No problem.”

  Damn, I thought. I’m the girl and if I complain they’re going to be even more pissed off that I’m here.

  The other problem was the shift work. This job had three shifts and the midnight shift was killing me. I had trouble sleeping during the day; my digestion was affected, and I felt tired all the time. And the danger of acid burns increased when everyone was so exhausted. Driving home from work at 7 a.m., I had to put my head out the window so I wouldn’t fall asleep. My workmates taught me that trick, too.

  Finally my six-month probation was over and I could get involved in the union. Soon after I got off probation, I went to a union meeting where there would be a vote to strike. I’ve always been a powerful speaker so when I spoke from the floor in favour of a strike, my intervention got noticed not only by my fellow workers but by the boss. Guys started to drop by my workstation to talk to me about workplace issues. Then management started harassing every person who came to talk to me. Soon no one was coming and I became quite isolated. Then one day at lunch break, I found a threatening note in my lunch box. It was made out of letters clipped from a tabloid newspaper and said, “Fuck Off and Die, Commie Bitch.” It had to be from one of my workmates.

  I started to feel quite ill. My doctor said she thought I was allergic to the acid bath and instructed me in no uncertain terms to quit my job. Today I think my illness might have been due to the stress, the isolation, the threat, and the repression of the emotions that came with them. I listened to the doctor and quit. Going home that day, I felt such liberation, like I was driving a convertible with the top down, my hair flowing in the wind.

  The next morning I woke up and couldn’t move. When Ken got home from work, I was still in bed. I hadn’t eaten or slept. It was like I had fallen into a deep dark hole and I just didn’t have the energy to climb out of it or even ask for help. I felt a weight inside my chest, pressing down on my feelings, my energy, my desire, myself. I had lost interest in everything. I didn’t care about anything or anyone. For an activist that was worse than death.

  Then there was the anxiety. Everything made me anxious. I couldn’t eat either. In my last month in Montreal, my sister-in-law Glenna told me that she had lost twenty pounds in a couple of months on the Atkins diet, a high-protein diet popular at the time. She said it was easy so I tried it. I lost thirty pounds in a couple of months. The move from Montreal, starting work in a factory, a failing relationship, the loss of most of my friends at the RWL, and losing thirty pounds led to unbearable stress, but I didn’t give it much currency. I could handle anything. I always had.

  This time, however, it was too much. This time I couldn’t work, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t do much of anything.

  It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be clinically depressed because in essence, it is an absence of feeling. The most famous metaphor is Sylvia Plath’s bell jar. By this time, I had totally buried my feelings. Ken and I were still together, but I was distant. I started seeing my massage therapist, Kristi Magraw, again. She believed that a lot of emotional pain was held in the body and that massage could release it. This is common knowledge now, but back then she was a pioneer. She recently told me that when I first came to see her my body was very numb as if it were totall
y covered in armour.

  When I went to my doctor, she diagnosed me with clinical depression and wrote a prescription for pre-Prozac antidepressant pills. The first day I took them, I had a hallucination that ice water was racing through my veins. I immediately stopped taking the drugs. I knew I couldn’t just lie in bed all day, so after a couple of weeks I called my old boss at the Canadian Hearing Society, Denis Morrice, telling him that I was ill and couldn’t keep working in the factory. He offered me a contract to set up a sign language interpreter service. I took it.

  To give you an idea of how changed I was, most of my co-workers described me as shy and quiet. Most days, I was incapable of working; I’d just stare out the window. Our office was in a beautiful Victorian mansion in the Annex, the downtown residential neighbourhood near the University of Toronto. My desk was at the front window on the ground floor looking out onto a peaceful tree-lined residential street. One day a week, I’d feel able to work and got enough done to satisfy the job requirements.

  In February 1982, I went on leave from the RWL. One day, Joan Campana, a comrade who had recently won a million dollars in the lottery, asked me to have lunch with her. She was so shocked by the change in me that she offered to pay for a trip to Cuba that the Socialist Workers Party, our U.S. counterpart, was organizing. I accepted her generous offer, figuring a week in the sun would fix me up, not to mention a visit to the only society that was close to our vision of what socialism might look like. Despite the limits on democratic expression, I appreciated how they prioritized children, education, and equality for women and Black people. But even though I loved Cuba, its wonderful people, and the beach, the trip didn’t help. When I got back, I decided maybe I did need a therapist. My doctor had suggested I go into therapy when she diagnosed me with depression, but at the time I refused. I didn’t believe in therapy.