by Sonja Larsen
It was Day 779 until the revolution and it was also my first New Year’s Eve in the Party. On Christmas we ate turkey and took half the day off, but on New Year’s Eve we drank whiskey and beer and sang until early in the morning. We sang gospel songs will the circle be unbroken and folk songs this land is your land and labour songs there once was a union maid who never was afraid. But my favourite songs were the civil rights songs that combined the best of everything. Got my hand on the freedom plow Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Because I was still a probationary member I had a chaperone, a “shadow” to make sure I had a nice time, someone said—but I knew it was so I didn’t get too drunk. My shadow was a tall man named Daniel who was a lawyer and seemed as confused as I was as to why we had been teamed together. He was concerned when I asked for a drink but after I told him I’d been going to bars since I was fifteen and he’d checked that it was okay, he brought me a whiskey sour. I joked that this might be the closest thing I’d ever had to a date, but after that we mostly sang and hardly talked. It moved me to tears, the ninety voices in unison, the three or four guitars and a fiddle, all of us stamping our feet as we sang.
On St. Patrick’s Day it was much the same but with more Irish songs and a different chaperone. And again it made me cry. All of us celebrating and grieving at the same time, sad for the state of things, but hopeful for the way it would someday be.
ELEVEN
On my seventeenth birthday the Old Man called me down to his office. He was sitting on the couch. He had on a Western shirt and a bandana tied around his neck. He motioned to a small wrapped box on the coffee table.
“What is it?” I asked
“Open it and find out.”
It was a Pelikan fountain pen, black with a gold band around the centre, the kind that fills from an ink bottle. “Why?” I asked him.
“Because you’re turning fucking seventeen,” he said. “Have a drink. What do you drink?”
What did I drink? Beer from a straw. Southern Comfort. Brown cows. Whatever any stranger at any bar I could get into was willing to buy me.
The Old Man got tired of waiting for me to decide. “Grab the bourbon,” he said. The bar cart behind me had a dozen different bottles and glasses on it. “And a glass. Not that glass, a shot glass, you little idiot.”
“It burns,” I said, after the first shot.
“No shit,” the Old Man said, and poured me another one.
“What about you?”
“I don’t drink” the Old Man said.
It was the third time I’d met the Old Man privately. The first day when I arrived in Brooklyn, and then again when I officially asked to join.
The Old Man got up to put on a Roy Orbison record. It was old but I liked it. I could picture myself on a dance floor, doing a two-step to some of those songs, thrift store pumps on my feet. My mother and father met in a dance hall, so maybe that explained why it was so hard to let go of what I’d only recently discovered: that I could dance to almost anything.
“Seventeen,” the Old Man said. “You look like you’re about twelve.”
I tried not to let that irritate me, since I knew it was true.
“How old are you?” I asked him and the Old Man laughed.
“Old. Fucking ancient.”
I felt bad about being so flippant, after he’d given me the pen. I picked it up again. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
The Old Man said, “Tell me about Redding. Did you know I once had a plan to blow up the Shasta Dam? That’s right around there. Would’ve flooded the whole fucking valley.”
“Maybe you should have.”
The Old Man laughed.
“Why did you want to blow it up?” I asked.
“Just to prove we could, maybe.” The Old Man told me that was in 1971 when he was in a group called Largo. I would have been six then, two years before I’d moved to California.
“But blowing shit up is the easy part. Building the revolution, that’s what’s hard. Why do you think it should be blown up?”
I gave the Old Man my list of reasons. How I knew the first day we arrived there it was not the landscape for me. The heat. The KKK stickers, “Be a man, join the Klan,” on the lampposts. Bible freaks. Junior high pep rallies.
When I told the Old Man about my thirteenth birthday party he made me get my birthday card. The card was in a steamer trunk, full of everything I’d brought with me when I came to Brooklyn. I had to ask for the key since the trunk was in a locked storeroom in the basement.
When I opened the trunk, I saw my teddy bear. The teddy bear was the only thing I had left from my life before: before my parents were hippies, before we’d joined a commune or moved to California. Before everything, there was him. Growing up, he was at the heart of games of make-believe so intense I could still hear his voice, soft, woolly and reassuring. He was the only one who’d been everywhere I’d been: on the motorcycle and the bus, or later in my bed when my mother’s boyfriend crept in. I almost pulled him out, too, just to rescue him from the dark, but there was no room for him in the three-by-three cubby we were each assigned. So I pulled out the manila envelope of cards and letters, put the trunk back and returned the key.
Back in the Old Man’s office I showed him the card. The figure with the rifle, standing on the edge of the world. The signatures of everyone inside.
Twenty-six names. Not just my mother or the other cadre who lived in our house, but the West Coast leadership. Pat, who was now at NOC. A tall skinny man named Charlie who made me the birthday card. Margaret, who would one day take over the Party. The West Coast leaders were in Redding that week, to help give classes and recruit new cadre. Although sometimes the new cadre recruited themselves. The revolution, with its birthday cake and free coffee, clothes and donuts, attracted all kinds of people. People like Shelton, whose signature was the biggest, and looked like a child’s, although he was over fifty years old. He came around every day for nearly a year before anyone ever heard him speak, and had only recently started learning to write. Shelton, whose toothless face lit up as he sang “Happy Birthday” to me.
And Robin, recently out on probation, who wrote:
Robin the Hood
hopes you’ll be good
and help with chores
and all those bores
and do a good job or you will see
All the bad things that happened to me.
I went over each name on the card for the Old Man. Robin’s buddy Delbert, who later that summer told me he’d fuck anything from eight to eighty. Ali and her two kids. They were living in a car until they found the organization. Betty, who was in her fifties but raising the baby named Che, left behind by his teenage mother who’d been cadre just long enough to give birth and run. Fresh from jail, run away, or just rundown, people joined and left every month, sometimes with cash from the latest bake sale or canned goods from the cupboard.
“The lumpen proletariat,” the Old Man said. “The social scum. A passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“I didn’t say it, Marx did. How many times do I have to tell you people to stop wasting your time on these losers. We’re revolutionaries, not fucking missionaries.”
My aunt was one of those losers. The bent, the damaged, the scarred. She’d been sick all her life. Grand mal seizures since she was a baby, all day, every day. Gang-raped when she was a teenager. Crazy by the time she was in her late twenties. Now she was the kind of crazy you could see from a distance, the palsied look of someone who’s been on Thorazine too long. Her tidy signature Sue on my birthday card seemed like a forgery.
On the birthday card were names of people whose faces I could no longer remember, although I had once called them comrades. And then there were others I could never forget. Suzie. Pat. My mother, who calls me her comrade-in-arms. Karl.
“Karl,” the Old
Man said. “Tell me about that,” he said.
Three shots of bourbon and twenty-six names on an old birthday card.
“Hey there, little girl,” the Old Man said. “It’s your fucking birthday. You’re not supposed to be crying.”
By the time I recited the poem for the Old Man, it was not so much a poem anymore as a mantra, a way of seeing the world.
They see the smile
But I see the teeth
“Just tell me what you need us to do,” the Old Man said. “Just say the word.”
I sat in the Old Man’s office, drunk on bourbon and the enormity of the gifts he’d given me.
A Pelikan fountain pen with a gold band and a bottle of ink. The chance to tell a story I had only told myself in numbers, never in words.
I wondered if it might be bravado, the way the Old Man talked, that maybe even if I said yes, the Old Man wouldn’t do it. Karl had money and skills, he was useful to the revolution. But he had broken a rule. Leaning against the wall behind the window curtains of his office I’d seen a Thompson submachine gun, an M1-A1, and a shotgun. Karl could be summoned to New York, or more likely killed by someone on the West Coast. Would it be long and drawn out, a trial, an execution? Or would they take him someplace and shoot him in the head, like a mad dog?
I’d been waiting. I’d been holding my breath, waiting, for someone to be angry for me, for someone to name me a victim, and what happened to me, a crime. I just didn’t know it until that very moment.
“Just say the word,” the Old Man said, but even before I had a chance to think, I’d said no. No to that power, that power Karl had rubbed into my skin, to tell the secret, to destroy the happy lie.
That was the first time I ever said no to the Old Man, and although I didn’t know it then, the only time.
The light through the Old Man’s window blinds changed from inky blue to pale grey and I was still talking. And if the Old Man was bored, he didn’t show it, and if he got confused about the details, he didn’t betray that either. I’d discovered something about meeting a person who knows everything about you. What was secret becomes stories, stories I could not wait to tell.
When I got to Dana, when I told the Old Man that one of the ways they realized it wasn’t Dana who’d pulled the trigger, that she could not have shot anyone, not even herself because her arms were not long enough, he made me get out a rifle from behind the curtain.
“Pick it up.”
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” he said. And he was right.
He wanted me to aim it at the wall. That was the first time I’d touched a gun in the Old Man’s office.
“Is it loaded?”
“Just do it.”
“Up against your shoulder a little more,” the Old Man said. “At the picture on the wall. The horizon, aim for the horizon.” On the other side of the wall sat a woman at a desk who answered the phones and handled some of the Old Man’s paperwork. Would this gun fire through a wall?
“Why won’t you tell me if it’s loaded?” I asked the Old Man.
“Because this is not a lesson in gun safety.”
“Now,” he said, “Can you reach?”
And I could.
Bourbon. A fountain pen. The chance at justice. The knowledge that I was big enough, strong enough to hold the rifle; that I was not Dana, and never could be. A chance to redeem myself because I could not save her. Could not or would not, it all ended up the same in the end.
TWELVE
I was excited but nervous about my sister’s visit. She had been the only one to tell me not to go to Brooklyn. She’d moved to Seattle and was working as a hairdresser. “I don’t know what you’re thinking going there,” she said.
I wrote up a request asking for time off, my first since I had moved to Brooklyn. After a tour of NOC we took the subway to Manhattan for the afternoon.
She’d been to visit my father in Montreal and then me in New York. Everything about our new lives seemed to make her angry. The happy newlyweds. The way I talked about my work like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. “You sound just like her,” she said to me. She had always been skeptical about my mother’s cause. But the real evidence was my shabby clothes and untrimmed hair. Although she had sometimes rolled her eyes at my thrift-store style in the past, my new lack of interest in fashion concerned her more.
But what could she say? It was too late to talk me out of it, to pretend I was too young. I was the same age my mother had been when she’d had my sister. I was older than Dana when she’d signed the suicide note. The age of reason. I was older than my sister had been when she stayed behind in Montreal at fifteen. Choice was what our parents gave us when they had nothing else to give, not protection, not even sympathy. And that freedom was something they couldn’t take back, even if they’d tried.
We walked around until we ended up sitting in the biggest movie theatre I’d ever been in, watching a little creature called E.T. following a trail of candy. “Again?” my sister said, disgusted as I stood up to call in to NOC. Even though I had the day off I’d agreed to check in every hour or so. I’d been jumpy, thinking I’d better not get too interested in what was happening to a cute big-eyed freak, this plastic Hollywood creation, because I had this phone call to make soon. And still I could hardly tear myself away from watching him pick up candy in his long fingers.
I spoke with Rena, who answered the phones and typed the Old Man’s memos. She had a beautiful red star inked on her shoulder. She was the one I would have hit if I’d accidentally fired the gun through the wall. She put me on hold while she checked what I should do. Then she told me to call again in an hour.
I walked back down the movie theatre aisle, looking for my sister’s profile. Everyone could tell we were sisters, even though we didn’t have the same dad. But I’d never thought of her as my half-sister. When my mother and father married, my father adopted her, and then they had me. In a way, I was the baby they all had. After the first commune the definitions and the names for Mommy and Daddy may have changed, but she had stayed my sister Patti. And not even all the time we’d spent living apart, sometimes not seeing each other for a year or more, had changed that.
But the revolution, Dana’s death, the way she called it murder and I called it suicide, those things stood between us now. My sister was unhappy about my life in Brooklyn but we were good at forgiving each other for things we couldn’t change, things like blood and distance. Ideology was just one more thing. Still, maybe that’s why we’d chosen a matinee, for a chance to be together without talking. I could remember when I was six or seven, sitting in the dark beside her, waiting for my very first movie to start, eager for some new understanding of the world that only my sister with her platform shoes and rock star T-shirts, could give me.
On the screen E.T. was gesturing to the sky, his big eyes, pleading with the children to help him. And I think that’s what made me cry. Not little E.T., who is so far from home, but that the children are able to help him, that they can, that they do. He can be saved.
On the way back to the safe house we took the wrong subway. An elderly black woman on the train told us, “You girls don’t want to go this way.” We got off at the next station, and waited for the return train, the only white people on the platform. And my sister’s frustration at me for not knowing the right way, at the world for being scary, was like a force field around us, holding us together into a family, a flashback to the way it used to be before everything fell apart.
THIRTEEN
All quiet.
I made a note in the log every fifteen minutes, and I wrote down the description of each suspicious car that drove by. Black late model sedan. Brown van. In this part of Brooklyn they were not hard to spot. Anything new, anyone white. After months at NOC I had finally been approved to sit on watch duty. I worked several shifts a week, always during the day. I wondered if I would have been approved sooner had I been older. In this way NOC was no different
than so many of the other places I’d been before. In my mother’s office in California, at my father’s parties in Montreal, always being on alert for the subtle ways older people could assert their power. Each time I sat down for my three-hour shift at the front window I felt as though I had passed a test. I was trustworthy.
Outside it was hot and sunny and a car drove by with its window down, the radio playing a song I didn’t know. I watched the street, a woman sweeping her stoop, young men in muscle shirts strolling by and clutching beer bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
Behind me I could hear the rustling of papers and the clacking of the typewriters.
And every fifteen minutes I wrote: All quiet.
Aside from the vote of confidence it symbolized, watch duty itself was enjoyable. The view out the window onto the street, the sense I had of almost being alone, my back turned to the rest of the room. And then there was the time itself. On light watch, when the security threat to the building was considered low, we were allowed to read, to make notes. I wrote in my journal, I wrote letters, I stared out the window at nothing in particular, listening to songs replay in my head.
I wrote a letter to my father. I told him I was doing well. Learning new skills, meeting lots of interesting people. Like most things I’d told my father since coming to Brooklyn, none of these things were lies, but they weren’t quite the truth either.
All quiet.
After I finished writing to my father, I tried writing a letter to my mother.
Dear Jesse. I’d stopped calling her Mommy years before, when she’d asked me to, and after Live Oak commune, I’d called both my parents by their first names.