by Sonja Larsen
He said, “Sixteen, huh? You know, Polly was only fifteen when she became a revolutionary.” Polly was in her late twenties now and the political commissar, responsible for education and recruitment. Mary T, another powerful woman in the organization, had been recruited when she was seventeen. He said that young people had fought in revolutionary struggles throughout the world—Spain, Cuba, China. Russia and Vietnam.
I stayed. I listened to him talk, his voice and everything about him both familiar and strange.
“I know you,” I said to him.
The Old Man surprised me when he laughed and said, “Of course you do. You’re sixteen, you think you know everything. But I know you, too.”
My drug-dealer dad, my commie mommy. Karl. My cousin. The scary thoughts in my head when I got too sad.
All the things he knew. He went through them like a list. I didn’t have to tell him anything, not even lies.
NINE
“I think I want to stay a year,” I said when I returned home to Montreal after my first visit to NOC. I’d already joined and although my dad didn’t know it yet, I’d only come back for his wedding and to pack up my things. We both knew asking was just a formality. If he said no, I’d go live with my mother and end up in Brooklyn anyhow. At the wedding I wore a white linen dress my stepmother sewed for me, and in a pair of borrowed pink three-inch heels, I felt almost elegant. The ceremony and the reception were both at the house, and by midnight I was doing lines of coke in my bedroom with a dealer friend of my dad’s. While he cut the lines on my vanity I was looking around the room with its hot-pink walls and speakers collaged with photos of rock stars. None of it even felt like mine anymore.
The dealer put his hand on my ass and said, “I want to fuck your brains out.”
I liked the sound of that, even if I was already bored with him and the fussy way he lined up the coke on the glass. I liked the thought of someone fucking my brains out. Because that’s what I wanted to be, even if for only a moment, if only for this one time in my life: thoughtless and experienced. He was small, only a little taller than me, and slender, and he had soft dark skin but an ugly face. Maybe it was only ugly because I knew I didn’t like him. But I liked how he looked at me and I thought it probably wouldn’t hurt much for my first time. Still I laughed and said, “Don’t be stupid, we’d get caught.”
I stayed in the house alone while the newlyweds went on their two-week honeymoon and the day after they left he called me to say he was on his way over. For a minute, I thought about leaving before he got there, but I didn’t want to go back to New York a virgin. I stayed and we got high and then we got naked in my father’s bed. But he didn’t fuck my brains out. He just fucked me, and I was thinking the whole time.
Thinking about Dana and sex, how they said she wasn’t sleeping with that guy, but she was, she must have been.
And thinking about the revolution. How it wasn’t just an idea. It was a day not even three years away. I’d be almost nineteen then.
I’d been right about the pain, my first time hardly hurt at all. I could see how it might be pleasurable, this friction between two people. Interesting even. But the closeness of the dealer’s face, the startling noises he made, like a man wounded, somehow those things caught me shamefully by surprise. I felt better when I saw his look of confusion and fear after he saw the stain on the sheet and got what that little red rose of blood signified. That flicker of panic. He wanted to talk about it, wanted to know why I’d done it but I told him I had a friend coming over and he was quick to leave. I had a bath and took myself out for lunch. And everything about that lunch, the twinge between my legs, the memory of his fear, the quiet moment at the restaurant alone with a book, felt grown up, like it was both the start and the end of something.
That night I turned on the television and listened to the stereos, playing the one in my room and the one in the living room at the same time so that all the rooms in the house were flooded with music. I began going through my records, listening to each one. I stayed up until I could hear the morning birds, and the trucks and cars and the dull roar of daytime from down the block. And for the next week and a half I stayed up all night and slept in the heat of the sun while the phone kept ringing. The little dealer—sometimes to apologize, sometimes to try and fuck me again. Some of my friends called trying to understand why I was leaving. The story I told people was about life experience and living in New York City. The more they tried to hold me to this life, this life where we were just dancing until something terrible happened, the more I needed to leave. But still I went out dancing alone, because after this I knew there wouldn’t be any dancing at all.
No dancing, no rock shows. On a whim I went to a Stranglers concert at Club Montreal. I ran into a friend of a friend, and it was as though he could see the change in me. I couldn’t stop thinking when I was in bed with him either, but at least I didn’t find the proximity of his face so alarming. I slept over at his apartment for two nights. The second night I said I’m moving to New York and he said I know. And the next morning I woke up to Marianne Faithfull singing, Why’d you let her suck your cock, and his angry girlfriend sitting in the living room, turning up the volume.
The last person I had sex with was one of my best friends from school. She reminded me of Marlene Dietrich. The high cheekbones and the wave of her hair. Her deep voice with just a trace of a German accent. Sometimes in my fantasies I dressed her up in men’s suits or tight skirts. Drunk on the contents of my father’s liquor cabinet and the knowledge that I was never coming back, I told her this. We were sad and trembling and clumsy. It was so different with girls. I’d told her all about the dealer and the boy from the bar. She kept whispering in my ear, Did he hurt you? I didn’t know who she meant but I loved the tenderness, the concern in her voice as she said it.
But even in that moment, against her skin that smelled like baby powder, her body against me like a shield, I was far, far away from all of it. I was watching myself at a distance since I knew none of that mattered anymore.
“What will you miss?” the Old Man asked me when I came back from Montreal with my dog and my trunk of belongings.
What would I miss? Gone is gone as gone can be, this is so plain but it’s hard to see. That was one of the first poems I’d ever written, when I was nine or ten years old. The things I was aware of missing most tended to be right in front of me. I missed my mother the year she found the revolution, and my best friend when she stopped talking to me in the seventh grade. Still I wouldn’t miss that hard-to-breathe kind of feeling I’d woken up with for months, the kind of sad you couldn’t dance or fuck away, although I’d tried. And my room in Montreal was just a place where a little girl had once lived. But maybe music, the way a song could be anything: an omen a memory a prayer, the way it could make you feel special, like it was written just for you, just for that moment in your life. I couldn’t trust music to keep me safe, to keep me away from Metro tracks or drugs or any of the other places that had been calling to me since Dana’s death. But I could still miss it.
“Music,” I said.
And he told me to turn the radio on.
TEN
Once a week, the morning after class night, a group of us went to pick up donations around the city. By 6:30 a.m., after a shower and another cigarette, I’d be watching the city roll by from the window of a green cube van. We were on the road eight hours on a bad day and ten to twelve on a good one. The air hummed with the millions of tiny dots that lack of sleep brought and the city changed colours, from the blue to the pink of sunrise to the pale yellow of mid-morning. It was like the all-night acid trip I’d done in the months before joining. My father had made me promise not to buy drugs from strangers, but I did anyway. Acid and mushrooms and THC. They made me throw up but I didn’t mind. I liked the empty feeling when I had nothing left inside me and the way I could feel so happy and so sad at the same moment.
We drove throughout the boroughs visiting warehouses, stores, delis, ba
keries and butchers who had agreed to give donations. The donations were what fed us at NOC although they were made to the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals. We told people that their cheese and milk and bruised fruit was going to malnourished migrant kids on Long Island. I wondered about that lie at first, but didn’t those kids need revolution more than charity? Besides, there really was help for them at the field office on Long Island, although what they received was usually not much more than beans and pasta.
On the road anything could happen. Cars loaded with food broke down in inopportune places—Hell’s Kitchen, Spanish Harlem. In the space of a year I nearly got caught in a police shootout down an alley and another time I witnessed two men punching a man in the parking lot of a butcher store. The beaten man didn’t make a sound except a soft wheeze when he was hit, and for years to come the memory of this scene—how he didn’t struggle, his small resigned sound of pain—will come to me at unexpected moments.
My partners on this run were John and Lilia, who were both in their early twenties. John had a little gold earring and reminded me of the gay boys I’d fallen in love with at the bars in Montreal, so I was surprised to discover it was his girlfriend who’d recruited him. They were part of the New Jersey field office, where I’d spent a weekend and attended my first cell meeting. All those years when my mother went to cell meetings I’d imagined her shooting guns, or making bombs. Instead I discovered she’d been sitting around a table in a church basement calling everyone comrade and discussing a list of agenda items sent from National Office Central.
Not long after that weekend John got kidnapped from the New Jersey office by a so-called de-programmer that his parents had hired. They were convinced John was brainwashed. But a few months later he came back, this time to National Office Central. This felt like a connection between us, that we’d been away from the revolution, but returned. We discovered another connection in our old bittersweet memories of rock and roll and recreational street drugs.
Lilia said she’d never taken drugs of any kind. The newest cadre in the office, Lilia was Hispanic, with long dark hair and a round face. She told us that before she joined the revolution, she had thought about becoming a nun. She said she believed all human experience was an attempt to create meaning. You could call it the original sin, or a trick of biology, but in our hearts we wanted order and purpose. She said it in such a resigned tone of voice that I almost felt sorry for her, for the way it seemed like she’d never experienced even the small pleasures of being lost.
I told them about growing up “in the field,” and I made them laugh when I told them about coming to NOC for the first time, a little punk wearing red lipstick and a wool beret I’d hoped was suitably revolutionary-looking.
“I was recruited almost before I walked in the door,” I said.
My next favourite job after picking up donations was typing directives to the offices. I liked the shape and feel of the different typewriters, the Olivetti and Remington. The whole mood of a day could depend on the machine I got, if the keys felt solid or wobbly, moved smoothly or were stiff beneath my fingers. The difference between a day feeling lucky to have found the revolution and a day when it didn’t seem fair that I had to give up my life to fix this fucked-up world.
The Old Man said recruiting people was a numbers game. One out of three people you asked to help out would. Out of three people that had contributed once, one would again. The one-out-of-three ratio went all the way up to cadre status. How many people, how many canvasses and phone calls had it taken to bring us all here? If I hadn’t been so bad at math, skipping it that year at New Morning, failing or nearly failing it ever since, I could’ve probably figured out the answer.
I couldn’t do the math but I could remember what it was like looking for that one out of three. What it was like to be a volunteer in a field office. I’d been on bucket drives and membership canvasses and food drives, not just in Redding, but in Sacramento, Medford, Oakland. I knew what it was like to go door to door or stand out in a parking lot, handing out flyers and soliciting donations. When people stopped and took a leaflet, or threw in a quarter, they were surprised to find out I wasn’t raising money for Girl Guides or the school band. Scanning the people’s faces to see who looked the friendliest, the most likely to give, even though I knew we weren’t supposed to do it that way.
I never wanted to go back to Redding, not to any field office. Even though I had committed myself to the revolution the thought of small-town parking lots and bake sales, smiling to try and get a dollar donation made me more frightened than the guns in the Old Man’s office.
I still had to do telephone soliciting sometimes, for the donations we picked up each week and I still dreaded it. Just a list of names and phone numbers, and no logical place to start but at the top. I almost welcomed the familiar sound of a dial tone halfway through my pitch because it meant I could stop trying. Even though it was my duty, my obligation, to approach as many people as possible, even though it was arrogance to try and decide who got to hear about the work of the organization and who didn’t, there were times I skipped a number because it just didn’t feel right. I marked “No Answer” on the sheet.
Typing was easier. I spent a lot of time typing. Most of what we typed went to the field offices. Fundraising pitches, recruitment pitches, drafts of new leaflets. Everything we typed was in triplicate, so after failing two typing classes in high school, I was finally learning to be careful, making sure that my fingers were positioned correctly and that all the edges of the carbon paper were straight. This was my favourite moment: when the paper was lined up and in place, before I’d even started to type, before I hit a wrong key.
We worked all day, taking a break only for dinner. During dinner we put away the typewriters and ate at the same tables, watching the MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS. Afterwards we cleaned up and put the typewriters back and worked until eleven or twelve at night. When we were done, and if there was no class, we’d go to our assigned sleeping spots for the night.
And that was how it went, most of the first year. Days I went out lifting boxes and thanking strangers. Days I stayed in and typed. Nights the Old Man lectured and nights he didn’t. Nights I slept on the Lower East Side, nights I slept in Park Slope.
My mother knew enough to never ask me questions about what I did, but my father thought that I worked at the Park Slope design studio, one of the organization’s actual businesses, helping to make advertisements and flyers. From the two or three days I’d spent working there, I knew enough to be able to tell him what it was I was supposed to be learning. Paste-up. Layout. Blueline.
But the reality was that mostly I just slept there, three or four days a week, on a mat underneath a drafting table.
Three women lived and worked there full-time and only women stayed at this apartment. One morning as we were getting dressed, I could see everyone else was wearing the same kind of underwear, pink and green nylon, which had been bought in bulk. The sizes were marked in Magic Marker on the back, to make it easier to find a pair that fit. You could tell I was new because I still had most of the panties I’d brought with me, although now they had my initials marked on them.
That morning the hot water ran out after the third person on the shower list, and on the subway back to NOC Nicole was cranky, twirling her fingers around her unwashed hair in disgust. Nicole had been with the Party eight years—seven in the field and one at National Office Central. I had recently noticed how careful Nicole was about the way she looked. That she applied eyeliner each morning, and often styled her hair. Maybe I noticed these things because, after six months at National Office Central, I had only recently stopped doing them myself. My brief teenage infatuation with girly-ness was over and I no longer wore earrings, or mascara or lipstick; I had not cut my hair since I’d arrived. I didn’t need gloss or colour to show the world who I was. I was dedicated, I was cadre, and the face I saw in the mirror—young and a little tired looking—reflected that. It felt like N
icole was trying to pretend she had another life, her curls a kind of defiance.
On the subway back to NOC, each of us was carrying the same style of vinyl overnight bag from a bankrupted travel agency, and I could see that some of the commuters around us were trying to understand our connection. Six white women, plainly dressed, no evidence of religion or politics on our second-hand clothes. But our bags, even the way we stood close together, not talking, gave us away. The rule was we didn’t discuss anything related to the organization in public places, and since we didn’t watch television or movies, or listen to music or read non-political books, all we had to share were memories from lives we didn’t want anymore—or this sleepy silence.
Even if we had talked about the organization, our conversation might have sounded like a code. Everything in the organization had a name, a special name. All of these special names were in a manual called The Essential Organizer. The FIN committee raised money. The PRO (short for Procurement) department got stuff: food, clothes, anything and everything. BENE or Benefits, distributed it out to people who needed it. Transportation was the TRX department. There was a name for everything in the organization, a way to do things. A way to ask for donations, or rides, a way to sort the clothes in the free-clothing closet.
As we walked, the six of us, from the subway to the brownstone, we were carrying out the very last fifteen minutes of an eight-hour assignment marked HUS, for housing, on all our schedules. At NOC, every hour in the day was mapped out and colour-coded on a large board. We were nearing the end of a dark grey block on the board that stretched from two a.m. to ten a.m. And when we walked through the door there would be new colours on the board, new tasks beside our names, and the sign on the wall would tell us we were one day closer to the revolution.