Flash

by Jim Miller

  Some writers I’ve read say we disappeared. That’s not true, but it is fair to say we were never the same. And other folks talk about how the McCarthy hearings and such were the only red scare, as if the Palmer Raids and the war on the Wobs never happened. It’s my opinion that the second round was a picnic compared to what we faced, but that’s neither here nor there.

  So when a lot of the boys were getting rounded up, I took off and laid low. I got a job washing dishes on a ship out of San Francisco and there were a few other Wobs in my situation that did the same thing. A lot of the sailors were old Wobs and that was evident later in the city during the big general strike in the thirties. Lots of us old Wobs stayed around in labor circles and served as a resource or did organizing ourselves. When you think about the great sit-down strikes and the general strikes of the thirties, it wasn’t anything else but sabotage—the conscious withdrawal of efficiency. I ended up with the Longshoremen under Harry Bridges for a while, but I do admit I had a few periods where I fell into the bottle and disappeared into the Tenderloin for a patch or two. It turns out that it was an old Wob who remembered me that dragged my ass out of a flophouse for the last time. He was running a little bookstore and gave me this job here in this shop. I have to admit selling paperbacks after years of bustin’ my behind was quite a relief. So here I am.

  I looked at Pete who had fallen asleep over his book. His feet were up on the desk and his book was resting on his chest. I kept at it:

  Legacy

  What’s the legacy of the I.W.W.? I think that we had the idea that everybody was a human being. That was our radical idea—that there’s nobody who doesn’t deserve a piece of the pie. I know, in my case, the I.W.W. gave me a purpose, a channel for my anger, and a sense of pride that I mattered in the world. I know lots of other folks might have a more philosophical response, but for me, the basics are what matter most. We were the first to insist that there was no aristocracy in labor—that the unskilled and the skilled, black and white, immigrant and native, men and women all belonged in the One Big Union. There would have been no CIO without us and we were fighting for the rights of all workers before the Civil Rights movement. We believed in workplace democracy before anybody else, and something else—we had a hell of a time. We weren’t too serious to laugh or too high minded to enjoy ourselves. And we had ourselves one hell of a life, one hell of an adventure.

  I remember standing by the rail of a big steamer I was on, looking out at the moon over the Pacific and thinking that there wasn’t a place in the world where I wouldn’t be at home. Anywhere where there were workers with a fight, anywhere where folks were getting together. We had that sense, that we had no homes but the whole world was our home. Many of us had no family to speak of but every man was our brother, every woman our sister. It was a beautiful moment. Even if we took our lumps, it was worth trying. What the hell are you alive for if you don’t even try? We had nothing, but we had everything. Understand? It’s hard for me to put it into words really. Lots of folks today just can’t understand the feeling we had. I don’t know what else to say really. I lived the way I lived and I’ll die that way—with nothing and everything.

  And that was it, the end of his story. I looked over and Pete was still sleeping so I sat back and tried to grok the possibility that I may have actually discovered my great grandfather. Even if I hadn’t, it was an incredible story from start to finish. I could do a book with this much material. Neville would jump on this for sure, I thought. It was getting dark as I got up to give the materials back. I touched Pete gently on the shoulder to wake him and told him what I thought I was on to. When I asked him if he knew anything about the author of the manuscript, he smiled and told me to sit down by his desk while he got a cup of burnt smelling coffee from a pot that had been sitting there all day. He offered me some and I accepted, taking a white styrofoam cup from his hand. Pete took a sip and said, “I did the interview, son.”

  “You knew Bobby Flash?” I asked, amazed.

  “Not well, but yes. I was doing a project on local labor history for the Labor Council’s oral history project when I was just getting involved. When I started interviewing some of the old timers I found out that a lot of the guys who’d been on the waterfront and involved in the General Strike had started out as Wobblies. I finished collecting the interviews for the council and then I thought I’d do a book on the old Wobs as a separate project, to honor them mostly. I got about half done and then so many of them started dying that I lost the chance to record them all. I still thought the interviews that I did have were valuable but I could never get a publisher, so there you have it.”

  “How did you find Bobby?” I asked, fishing for anything else I could get from Pete.

  “I hooked up with him through one of the other fellows who met him at the bookstore in the Tenderloin. It was owned by an old Wobbly, the one who got Bobby off the streets and into a rehab program. Then he gave him a job in the shop. Bobby had that job until he died, sometime in the early sixties, I think it was. It’s gone now. Shut down after Montana Slim, the owner, died not long after Bobby. There was a whole network of old lefties up here, still is, for now. Once the waterfront industries dried up, it got more diffuse, but there are still a number of us around who knew the old guys.” Pete looked wistful about the good old days. I was desperate for some information that could confirm or deny my relation to Bobby, so I kept pressing.

  “Anybody who knew Bobby well?” I probed further.

  “Not anymore, I’m sorry to say. I wish I could send you to someone who had more for you, but the boys who were close to Bobby are all gone now.”

  “That’s frustrating,” I said, clearly disappointed. Pete looked at me sadly. Then, out of the blue, he lit up.

  “I just remembered something, don’t ask me how, but when Bobby died, I recall helping Montana go through his things in his room. It was a little place and he didn’t have much, but I’m pretty sure that Montana sent a package of his things to an address in Los Angeles. It was his grandson’s folks I think. Maybe your family would have it somewhere—if your theory is right, that is. For now, why don’t you keep the manuscript? If Bobby was your great grandfather, you should have it. Just let me know what you find out, OK?” I shook Pete’s hand, thanked him for everything, and promised I’d let him know the end of the story. As I was making my way downstairs he stopped me.

  “You know, I might have another thing or two now that I think of it. I’ll have to look through some things at home. I can’t guarantee it, but I might still have something else. Where are you staying?” I gave him the name of my motel in Chinatown, near North Beach, along with my room number and tossed in my home address for good measure, before I finally hit the street.

  Outside it was dark and the cold air was bracing. I had promised Shane I’d meet him for a beer before I flew down to San Diego the next day, so I looked for a payphone, but couldn’t find one on the street, even after walking for several blocks. Nobody used them anymore so it didn’t make sense to keep them on the street. Unfortunately, I was the last man in the world without a cell phone. I walked into a little bar with an old neon “Cocktails” sign, only to find that someone had ripped the world’s last payphone off the wall. The barkeep was nice enough to let me use the phone behind the bar. I left a message on Shane’s cell, ordered a beer and sat down alone in a booth in the corner.

  My mom had cut off all contact with Dad’s side of the family, so no one would have ever had the opportunity to tell me any stories about my great grandfather. I’d have to find my grandmother somehow. The last I’d heard she was still in LA somewhere, but that was years ago, when I was a kid getting birthday cards from a grandmother I never saw. Sandy had gotten into some fight with her about something soon after that and I stopped even getting cards. I looked at the row of gray and white heads drinking at the bar and wondered if they were somebody else’s lost father or grandfather. I wondered if I had any other family I’d never met in California, Mexico, or som
ewhere in a distant port where a bold Wobbly seaman had met a fine girl.

  9

  The next morning I woke up and saw that the light on the phone next to my bed was flashing. I hadn’t noticed it, but it had been late and I’d ended up getting pretty drunk with some crazy woman named Tanya, whom I met at the Saloon in North Beach after Shane blew me off to have a reunion with an old flame. I had thought I was getting lucky too until Tanya’s boyfriend, a psycho biker in Hell’s Angels colors, showed up and did shots with us, while eyeing me suspiciously every time Tanya gave me a sideways glance. It was an invitation for trouble, so I beat a hasty retreat and stumbled into bed without even thinking I might have a message.

  It turned out that it was Pete. He’d dug through his things and hit the mother lode it appeared. He sounded excited. I checked the clock. It was 10:00 AM and my plane left at 1:30, so I had time. After I took a leak and splashed some water on my face, I called Pete’s number. When I spoke to him he told me that the People’s Archive was closed on Sunday, but he’d be happy to have me over to his house in Bernal Heights. I got the address, hurriedly showered, jammed my backpack full of my things, checked out, and walked a couple of blocks to Café Trieste for large cup of coffee to go. As I stood in line, I closed my eyes and listened to the Charles Mingus album they were playing. A couple at the table by the front door were debating the merits of Obama’s foreign policy. Outside, I laughed as a chopper rolled by, fortunately not driven by the jealous biker from the bar the night before.

  Coffee in hand, I hailed a cab out on Columbus. The driver was a sullen Russian with no social graces. He raced across the city efficiently, however, and we were headed up a big hill to Pete’s house in Bernal Heights in no time. I checked the address, paid, and hopped out without even receiving a nod. The house was a large, shabby Victorian that had clearly missed the gentrification memo. The paint was worn down to the bare wood in places, and it looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned up in years. Still, it was a great old place. Pete met me at the door with a hearty handshake. The living room was a stunning mess with piles of newspapers, books, and mail occupying nearly every open space. The walls were covered with old posters ranging from reproductions of Wobbly stuff and ILWU strike flyers to some sixties concert posters from the Fillmore. I stopped to look at a Grateful Dead poster from 1967.

  “You see that show?” I asked.

  “Yup,” Pete replied nonchalantly. “You might be even more interested in some of these,” he said gesturing toward the hallway that led to the kitchen. It was lined with framed original I.W.W. newspapers and posters.

  “Take a look and I’ll make us some tea.” I nodded and glanced at the cover of the program for the Pageant of the Paterson Strikers. The central image was that of a worker climbing over a factory with arms outstretched. “Performed by the Strikers Themselves,” it announced of the grand event to be held at Madison Square Garden. There was a newspaper headline in Solidarity proclaiming “Industrial Freedom” accompanied by an image of a woman in a flowing gown walking out of her chains and into a glorious sunrise. As I continued on, I looked over into the bedroom, which was in a state of genteel squalor similar to the living room. Underneath the smell of the brewing tea, the odor of years of dust was thick and pervasive.

  “Fellow Workers: Remember! We are in Here For YOU; You are Out There FOR US.” was the caption that I remembered from Bobby’s interview. Here, it was accompanied by the image of a stern Wobbly pointing at the viewer from behind prison bars. Another poster displayed the skeletons of “justice” and the “judiciary” about to be buried by a mound of “capitalism.” These hung next to a series of funny cartoons featuring “Mr. Block,” with his big square head, being duped by his bosses and the media. The last one was an immaculately preserved cover for the sheet music for “Rebel Girl” by Joe Hill. On the wall across from the Wobbly stuff, Pete had hung a bunch of thirties labor posters and papers. The place was like a museum, where the order and cleanliness of everything else in the house had been sacrificed to the preservation of labor history. The frames alone must have put Pete out quite a bit. I wondered how he could have afforded to buy such rare pieces of the radical past.

  “Where’d you get all these?” I asked intrigued.

  “Dead Wobblies,” he shouted from the kitchen. “Lots of those old guys didn’t have any family to speak of. They knew I’d take care of them.” Pete walked out with two cups of tea in mugs that bore the stains of many years. Well used, but clean.

  “Let’s start in the backroom,” Pete said as he led me down the hallway to a small room occupied by another mountain of periodicals and a wall of cardboard boxes. I glanced outside the window and noted some rusty metal lawn chairs scattered in his unkempt yard, full of tall grass and weeds. The sun was breaking through the clouds, and a ray of light lit up the room for a moment before another cloud cut it off again. Pete picked up one of the shoeboxes and motioned for me to sit down with him in front of an ancient, pock-marked wooden desk where he laid out a series of old black-and-white photos. They were all group photos of I.W.W. members. One was a group at the Chicago headquarters standing behind Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman.

  “That’s Flash,” Pete said pointing to a face in the back row. I looked and nodded.

  “Sure looks like it,” I said before glancing at another shot of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn posing in front of a Wobbly storefront with Flash in the first row, the second man to her right.

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” Pete said. “Look at this.” Here was a shot of Mother Jones speaking to a group of workers in a tent camp. “Might be Ludlow, Colorado. Can’t be sure, but there’s Flash again.” It was astonishing. I stared hard at the photo and shook my head.

  “Christ, he was like a Wobbly Zelig. Did he ever talk about these people with you? I didn’t see anything in the interview, but there were pages missing.”

  “Yup, I know,” Pete said, looking a little sheepish. “As you can see, I bit off a little more than I could chew. The answer is yes, I think he did mention it in other interviews that I didn’t transcribe—a lot of the old fellows had been all over the place. I used to have the tapes but they got damaged. A lot of this stuff I gave up on once I couldn’t get a publisher. I just kept thinking I’d do something with it, but I never did. Now even my memory isn’t that great. But once you left the other day some things came back to me.” He put the photos in a manila envelope from the floor and handed it to me.

  “Now let’s head down to the basement. There’s more.” I stood up and followed Pete down some rickety stairs into the dark until he found the light switch. After I was done blinking, I was astounded to see the walls lined with shelves stuffed full of cardboard boxes. On the floor there was a row of steamer trunks. Pete made his way over to one and opened the lid to dig around.

  “What is all this?” I asked, feeling as if I had stumbled into some kind of Hardy Boys mystery.

  “Personal effects,” Pete said. “The old boys didn’t just leave me their posters.” He dug through a stack of tattered trousers and shirts until he found a wooden box with a small lock on it. Pete turned it upside down and grabbed the key that was taped on to the bottom. He put the key in the lock, opened the box, and grinned at me as he held up what appeared to be a small vial.

  “This is a tiny bit of Joe Hill’s ashes, at least that’s what Bobby used to say. Lots of the Wobs who were around back in the day claimed to have some.” I remembered reading how Joe Hill, the famous Wobbly bard, had been framed for murder and executed in Utah in 1914. His body was sent to Chicago where it was cremated, and his ashes were mailed to every I.W.W. Local. An envelope full of them had been seized by the US Postal Service back in 1917 and held at the National Archives. The I.W.W. finally got them back in the late eighties, and the last bits of Hill were scattered across the globe from Sweden to Nicaragua, to a cemetery serving as host to the remains of anonymous Wobbly coal miners killed in a strike.

  “It’s a
religious relic almost,” I said, “like a piece of their martyred saint.”

  “It was his most prized possession,” Pete replied. “Keep it.”

  “Thank you, Pete.” He nodded and reached back in the box and handed me a small stack of bound letters and a diary.

  “These were his, too. Now they’re yours.” Finally, he took another ancient, plastic-wrapped photo from the box and handed it to me. It was a shot of Blanco and Flash with their arms around each other’s shoulders in front of their horses. The picture was close to crumbling, so I gently turned it over and saw that Bobby had written “Brothers Forever” on the back.

  “That’s everything,” Pete said with finality.

  “It’s amazing. I can’t believe it’s all his. Thank you, so much.”

  “Do me a favor. Tell the story. Pick it up where I left off and give it to the world,” he said.

  “I’ll do my best,” I replied. As we headed back up the stairs I glanced at the other steamer trucks and wondered what other mysteries they held. Up top, Pete bent over and brushed the dust from downstairs off his pants. I looked at a clock on the wall and saw that I only had an hour until my plane took off.

  “Pete, I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said apologetically. “I wish I could stay here and look this over with you, but I can’t afford to book another flight.”

  “No problem, kid. The phone’s over there if you want to call a cab.”

  I thanked him and picked up the phone. While I was on hold, I noticed that Pete was smiling. I got the sense that he was pleased to have been able to pass the torch to me. It made me wonder if he had really forgotten or if he had had a change of heart. When the dispatcher got back on the horn, she told me the cab would be there in five minutes, so we walked out front through Pete’s shrine to lost history. Outside, the sun had struggled its way out. When the cab got there, I gave Pete a hug, which he returned heartily, and I was off to SFO.