Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  I remembered how we tried to cut open a Mexican jumping bean we’d bought when we found out there was a worm trapped inside. How we wanted to rescue it. How we wanted to see it. I remembered walking the miles between my house, the office and the motel on the edge of town. All the time we’d spent in an air-conditioned knick-knack shop on the motel mile, inspecting the seashells and coin purses and spun-glass birds and key chains with tiny thermometers that broke when the temperature went above 102. And those memories, fragile and meaningless, were all that was left.

  I didn’t go to the funeral. Maybe no one invited me, since me with my told-you-so rage was the last thing anyone needed. Or maybe I said no. I didn’t want to see the white casket Suzie had asked for, the sugarcake of a burial, the whitewash of a life. Maybe we all pretended it was just as well I didn’t go, since money was tight, and I had school exams.

  At school, where I was in the last month of Grade 10, I learned new words. Murder, or was it suicide? Un meurtre ou un pacte de suicide? Ma cousine. Un fusil. I took final exams about subjects that had no relevance to me anymore in a language that sexed every object; it was all meaningless.

  And at home, that two-storey house with its leaded-glass windows and garbage bags of weed in the basement, it was only two months away from my father’s wedding to his girlfriend of five years and the party had already begun. Life goes on. Enjoy it if you can. That was the message I interpreted in their attempts to console me with food, with music. One morning my dad offered to drive me to school. We took a detour to the McDonald’s drive-thru for breakfast, my dad’s one fast-food weakness, and on the way there he rolled a joint, one handed, and lit it up. As he passed it to me I wondered if my dad was always stoned or if this was something he was doing for me because I was sad.

  It touched everything, this sadness that was sometimes a weight and sometimes an emptiness. It ruined everything. My dog circled me in drop-eared submission to my misery while my friends acted surprised that I was so affected. How well did you know her? someone asked. Everything was changing, everything was already different, and all I wanted to do was let Bowie’s Diamond Dogs play over and over again on my record player, in the prettiest room I ever had, in the house I knew I couldn’t stay in anymore, holding my breath while I waited for the needle to drop again.

  My mother sent me a copy of Invest Yourself, a catalogue that the organization published of volunteer opportunities around the country. There were dozens of the organization’s offices listed, in Long Island and New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

  Invest yourself. Those words called out to me. I could be like Dana, a wasted life. Or I could choose to be someone else, someone invested, a force in history.

  PART TWO

  Revolution is the only solution—there ain’t nothing else. You will obey orders. You have two privileges. One is to obey the order. The other is to fire the son-of-a-bitch that gives the wrong order. You’ve got a clear choice. Out!

  Leaders are leaders because they lead. They overcome what stands in front of them—whether they have to kick it in the balls, or kiss its ass.

  GINO PERENTE’S “ANALYSIS”

  EIGHT

  He was wearing dark aviator glasses, and a Hells Angels biker vest, with a black T-shirt underneath. The T-shirt read: Yea though I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no evil for I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley. He was sitting behind a table at the front of the room with a full ashtray and a stack of notes he never looked at in front of him. It was 2:15 in the morning, and our teacher, the one I’d heard called half a dozen different names—but mostly “the Old Man”—was not showing any signs of letting up soon.

  Living in this row of Brooklyn brownstones were nearly a hundred people, breathing in each others’ cigarette smoke, building the revolution a day at a time. In this room, what would have been a dining room, we ate and worked and held these weekly classes. We sat on folding chairs, on a couch, on the floor. Still more sat against the walls in the hallway. Occasionally someone’s head bobbed up and down as they nodded off then jerked awake. Most people had clipboards in front of them, and some took meticulous notes while others only wrote down the occasional word.

  This was National Office Central, or NOC, where for twelve to fourteen hours a day this apartment, and two others in the building, were filled with the uneven tic-tac of manual typewriters, some of us typing fast, others slowly, our task to communicate to the field offices what to do. How to hold more profitable bake sales, how to recruit doctors, how to run food banks and winter-clothing drives, how to recruit members, both to the National Labor Federation and to the secret branch whose name I had only recently learned: Communist Party USA, Provisional Wing. In the memos we quoted Lenin and we quoted Marx. But mostly we quoted the Old Man.

  Outside was Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In 1981 Crown Heights was a mostly Black and Hispanic neighbourhood of Haitian and Caribbean immigrants In the blocks around us were a dozen storefront churches, holy roller and Santeria, and sometimes in the early evening the sound of singing and crying, in Creole and Spanish, carried from the street. Up on the roof of our apartment, chicken bones, burnt and placed into a circle, had been found, and walking down the street my first day I heard the bleat of a goat coming from an apartment.

  Voodoo, someone told me.

  The Hasidic Jews patrolled the nearby streets in station wagons, and waited for the Messiah to come. On the floor above lived the last Irishman on the block, an old bagman for the IRA. On the subway, the young Muslims in their long white tunics and with their beautiful serious faces, moved from car to car, cans outstretched for money to feed children, build schools, change the world. And every morning the Catholic church across the street played a recording of bells—bells with just a hint of static. Everywhere there was evidence of our common hunger for a better world, a better life. Here in this city, with its broken windows and needles in the stairways, the sound of gunshots in the distance—everywhere there was evidence that this life would not do.

  On class nights the Old Man sat at the table with the notes he never looked at, an ashtray, a coffee cup and three cassette recorders that made a small steady whine as they turned around and around. On one side of the Old Man sat Mary T, a petite woman with the pale skin of her mother but the Chinese features of her father. On the other side sat Polly, a taller woman with a thin face and a head of wild curly brown hair. They changed the tapes, lit the Old Man’s cigarettes, refilled his coffee. The rest of us sat with our clipboards and notebooks in our laps, trying to write it all down, which wasn’t always easy. The Old Man’s lessons took twists and turns through all kinds of history, including his own. In one class he might cover events of the Russian Revolution and then move into his own days as an organizer with the United Farm Workers union. Throughout each story were lessons about philosophy and human nature.

  The Old Man took a haul off his Lucky Strike cigarette and said, “Truth is the collision of an objective and a subjective reality inside your own mind. For a revolutionary, the truth of the revolution is impossible to deny, since it corresponds to the objective reality of the oppression of the working class, and our subjective concept of justice.

  “In other words, kids, there ain’t no justice, there’s just us,” he said, and it seemed like he was looking right at me.

  With his dark glasses, and black, slicked hair it was hard to tell how old the Old Man really was. I guessed somewhere between forty and sixty, but I didn’t really know. He walked with a limp and had kicked-in-looking teeth, from the Days of Rage riots in the sixties, he said.

  In the Genesis document, the organization’s official history, we learned that in 1958 “some of our people who joined the Communist Party USA in California … became part of a dissident element in CPUSA.” I assumed that one of those people was the Old Man, just like I assumed he was in the group that later went to Cuba, and Latin America and then came back to the States. The Old Man seemed to be at the heart of all those stories
, although he was never named.

  In the short time I’d been at National Office Central I’d heard him referred to as the Old Man, Oldie, Field Commander, Vincent Ramos, Vic Elder, Eugenio Perente, or Gino, but never Jeri, the name that I could see tattooed in faded slanting script on his arm.

  I didn’t know which of those was his real name. But I knew his voice. I’d been listening to it for years.

  Leaning against my mother, my head on her knee, falling asleep as we listened to the tapes from back East in apartments and the back room of the office in Redding, listening and dreaming about what the revolution might look like. My imagination focused on transformed communities: vegetable gardens in abandoned parking lots, sturdy houses with clean windows. But I couldn’t picture me or my mother, how old we’d be or even if we’d be alive, after the revolution. And as I drifted from dreaming to daydreaming to waking, the Old Man’s words and the sound of my mother’s pen and the rustle of paper as she wrote it all down, followed me.

  After the revolution, my mother told me, things were going to get better. She meant that the workers would own the factories, that the wealth would be evenly distributed, but she meant something else too. That we’d understand that it wasn’t only our fault; that the powerlessness that had dogged us, generation upon working-class generation, wasn’t only because of our failures, but the result of having the weight of a whole system upon us. Someday that weight would be gone.

  On those tapes, the Old Man talked about revolutions around the world, about labour history, about Freud and the Catholic church. He talked about Darwin and Marx and Lenin and the rising up of the working class. His voice was rough and disembodied, subject to sudden dips and rises in tone. It was only after I arrived in Brooklyn that I realized that part of the strangeness of his voice was because the tapes we’d received were tapes of tapes, sometimes third- and fourth-generation recordings. In the background I’d been able to hear the coughing and chair rattling of the others in the room, and I knew I was listening to another life, secret and underground.

  No one mentioned his name then, and there were many people, like my mother, who did not even know it. A friend back East, they said. My mother sat, stiff, on the floor, taking notes in her tidy hand, as the scratchy fuzzy voice talked on.

  I was in that life now, the rustle of paper and breath on the audio, the creak of a chair in the distance.

  The first person to greet me when I arrived at NOC was Pat. “Hey there, kiddo,” she said when she first greeted me at the door. In the three years since she’d seen me I’d changed from a lonely tomboy to an angry and lipsticked sixteen-year-old, but in her jeans and button-down shirt, Pat hadn’t changed a bit. When I left Montreal I’d thought I would be going to Long Island, where the organization was founded in 1971. I had an image of myself on a picket line, shouting until my voice ran out. Instead I was taken to the brownstone in Brooklyn where I was happy to see a familiar face.

  A few days after I arrived, Pat walked me to the corner drugstore to call my mom. Inside the drugstore it smelled like musk and coconut oil, and boxes of beauty products, waxes and straighteners and lighteners and gels, written in English, Spanish and even Creole, lined the shelves. At the back of the store were two phone booths with old-fashioned wooden sliding doors. Inside each booth, dozens of names and telephone numbers were carved into the walls.

  I dialled the operator and called my mother at the office, collect.

  “Are you there?” my mother asked me.

  I wondered if my mother was trying to picture me: where I was, what I was doing, the way I had each week when she and the other cadre went out for secret meetings. I’d since learned they’d been at their weekly cell meeting, which they held in a church basement. The cell meetings were for the Communist Party USA, Provisional Wing, the secret organization that most of the full-time cadre also belonged to. We weren’t affiliated at all with CP-USA, a group the Old Man considered to be sellouts. The provisional was like the IRA’s provisional wing, the ones that weren’t all talk.

  The Party’s constitution said you had to be eighteen to join, but the Central Committee had made an exception for me because, in a way, I’d already been FOP, or a Friend of the Party, for years.

  Since coming to Brooklyn, I’d learned not only about the inner organization but that “when the revolution comes” was not just an expression, but a day on the calendar: February 18, 1984. This was the real thing that made us different than other so-called leftists. There was a plan. There was a deadline. I needed that.

  “I’m here,” I told my mother.

  “And are you in?” she asked me.

  Are you in? That was a question my father could never ask me, since he didn’t even know there was an “in.” He didn’t know about the Party, about the revolution. He thought the organization his ex-wife was involved in was a cross between Amnesty International and the Salvation Army. And he thought I was staying in Brooklyn only for the summer.

  But my mother and I both knew the truth, that I was leaving Montreal for good. The revolution wasn’t like a summer camp you visited. You had to pick a side, eventually. I’d always known that.

  “I’m in.”

  On the way back to the safe house, Pat bought me a slice of pizza. She taught me how to fold it over and tip it in into my mouth, New York style. “Congratulations, kiddo,” she said.

  National Office Central was really three apartments. The apartment where the Old Man was teaching was the main one. It was where we checked in and checked out every day, ate our dinner, held classes. It was just an ordinary apartment but it was hard for me to imagine any other configuration for it. The meeting room was previously a dining room, and the sleeping room, where we had a double bed and stacked all of our mattresses, had once been a bedroom. There were two large front rooms that now held the desks of the operations manager and political commissar, tables for working, a desk overlooking the street where the watch person sat. Beside that was the Cave, a small room that might have once been a nursery or a closet, which was the Old Man’s room.

  The organization owned three four-storey brownstones on Carroll Street, twenty-four units altogether. We rented out most of the units but kept apartments in two separate buildings for ourselves, and we had the entire basement that joined them all together. On the ground floor was the organization’s law office, which had a reception desk and office in the front room. This area and the Cave were where the Old Man spent most of his time. The rest of the space was used by the organization’s three lawyers and any overflow workers from upstairs. One building over was the doctors’ office, where the organization’s two doctors ran their practice but that we also used for workspace, meetings and sleeping when needed.

  In addition to the Carroll Street apartment, the organization had other places throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. There was a small walk-up apartment in the Lower East Side, an apartment in Park Slope and the homes of supporters who we stayed with overnight. Like most people in the organization, I moved from place to place, sleeping on spare beds, couches and gym mats on the floor.

  When class was over we folded up the dozens of chairs, gathered our coats and bags to head off for the night. Down in the basement I said hello and goodbye to my dog, Gemini. She’d been with me from Redding to Montreal and now New York. It had not occurred to me she would end up in the basement when I brought her here. I only knew I wasn’t going back to Montreal and I couldn’t leave her behind. Down in the boiler room she’d begun sharing her food with a litter of feral kittens. Back in Redding she’d sometimes take my stuffed animals and surround herself with them—my mother speculated she’d had puppies that had been taken away too soon. When I thought about her down in the basement alone at night I tried to think about the kittens and how we were each doing our work.

  I piled into a station wagon with seven other people and we headed to Manhattan. From the car window, I could see a crowd hanging around outside CBGB, the mecca of punk. It was hard to believe I could be so
close and yet so far away from it now. Part of me envied the people standing outside in the cold, how they wore their anger in their hair, their boots, their jewellery, the work they put into expressing themselves, right down to the tips of their black-polished fingernails. And part of me could see they looked ridiculous, like actors instead of warriors. Like people with nothing better to do. At the red light, the winos rubbed our windshield with old rags, and even as I looked away from their broken skin and matted hair, I was filled with love for them, my beaten American brothers.

  And the only way to show that love was to fight for the revolution.

  The roaches scattered as we entered the fourth floor of the Bowery walk-up that was one of the apartments we used. The nights I slept here I pulled the sheet over my head to keep them from crawling on my skin, and still I could wake up with one crushed on my pillow. As the others got ready for bed, I sat down on the sleeping pad and lit a cigarette. Soon everyone else was asleep, their snores another city sound, like traffic.

  I sat watching the shadows lose their sharp edge, the light coming through the window a mixture of street lamps and the blue of pre-dawn, that early aching moment that I remembered so well from my last days in Montreal. I coasted from minute to minute on memory and cigarette smoke. My father’s car driving up. The moment when I stepped in and everything changed.

  I knew when I got to Brooklyn that I was probably going back to the organization for good, that I wasn’t looking for reasons to join so much as reasons not to. And I almost found one the day I met the Old Man for the first time. I’d been in at NOC a few days already. Pat said there was someone who wanted to meet me, and she led me downstairs to his office.

  It wasn’t the rifle leaning against the wall that made me wonder if I was making a mistake. It was the strong smell of Paco Rabanne in the air and the sight of the Old Man in his white suit and a black tie. He looked like a gangster, not a revolutionary. He was sitting behind a big oak desk. I got a feeling that he was waiting for me, waiting to see the look on my face as I walked in. I had an image of myself turning around and leaving, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.