Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  I remembered the unexpected smoothness of the metal and wood of the rifle in my arms, when the Old Man told me to pick it up. The feeling that I had when I held it up, that I had finally arrived at the very heart of things.

  Yes, I said to Mary T. Yes, I would be interested.

  Revolutionaries shed blood, not tears.

  I was twelve when I told my mother that. She was crying on her bed in our shared room. I don’t remember anymore why she was crying, or where I’d read that, if I really believed it or if I just thought it was something she wanted to hear. But I remembered how she wiped her tears away and said, “Thank you.”

  In a locked room on the first floor, Lisa showed me how to take apart and put together an M1-A1. We did this using only a dime, which I had to keep under my tongue when not in use. Lisa was in her early twenties, and said to be related to a member of the Weather Underground. She was tough as nails except when it came to the Yankees and stray cats. She was the Old Man and Polly’s aide in the military fraction, and for our training session she was dressed in her full khaki military uniform, with pulled-back hair and a beret. Lisa in uniform had a serenity about her that Lisa in jeans and a T-shirt did not. When she was taking apart a gun, her face had an almost blissful look.

  My military time was a new colour on the board. I loved this new way of thinking of myself—as a warrior, a fighter. Sitting on the floor with Lisa, I slid the eight clip into the M1-A1. The gun barrel resting on my thigh, the smooth thin dime in my mouth, the calm look of solemn concentration on Lisa’s face as we took the gun apart again and again.

  Blood not tears.

  That day under Lisa’s watchful eye, listening to her careful quiet voice, the pieces seemed to come together like a child’s puzzle. I knew the black gun was still only an idea, since I’d never even fired it. But it was an idea bigger and more immediate than forgiveness, more real than love and all its various definitions.

  PART THREE

  Human knowledge is not … a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire …

  VLADIMIR LENIN

  SIXTEEN

  I was sitting at the watch window, smelling the damp cool of early morning. Outside, nothing moved. In the silence of the apartment as everyone else slept I could hear the sounds of an all-news radio station coming from the Old Man’s office directly below me on the first floor. Overnight watch was something I did now that I joined the MF section. I could look on the schedule and know who the others were just by the hours they spent staring out at the street, listening for sirens. Me. Lisa, John. A dozen others. The countdown wall was in the low 500s. Less than two years to go.

  Aside from night watch most of my military time had been spent reading military manuals, studying diagrams of guns. But Lisa said all my time was military time now, that being an MF cadre meant bringing a soldier’s attitude to everyday tasks, leading the others by example. Like being the first to stand up when volunteers were needed to bring in the food or the laundry, or not complaining about cooking dinner two days in a row. It was not easy to do sometimes. To believe, as you folded sixty pairs of pants in a laundromat, that this was important revolutionary work. And yet at other times, it was easy to see this doubt as the remains of my capitalist way of thinking, my own ego getting in the way. What could be more revolutionary than feeding and clothing people, than respecting work that was simple, straightforward, essential? There were no shit jobs in the revolution.

  One thing that changed was that I saw the Old Man more often. At his request I brought him pens, his yellow legal pads. And then sometimes he called me for odd tasks. He had a theory that this new disease the Haitians and the gays were getting was a CIA experiment gone wrong. He wanted me to translate the local Haitian newspaper. He wanted to know the words to his Edith Piaf record. Neither of those were in the French I spoke, but I tried my best. We listened to the Piaf album over and over again.

  “That’s bullshit,” the Old Man said. “Nobody lives without regret. Even if it’s a useless emotion and we know it. But the worst thing is false regret. That’s the fucker. Pretending you’re sorry when you’re not. That’s the worst kind of lie you can tell.”

  He asked me to learn the words to “L’Internationale” in French:

  Debout! les damnés de la terre

  Debout! les forçats de la faim

  La raison tonne en son cratère

  C’est l’éruption de la fin

  Du passé faisons table rase

  Foule esclave, debout! debout!

  Le monde va changer de base

  Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

  There were words I have to look up like forçats, which meant prisoners, and other things I guessed at—the past is a cleared table, or slate, maybe. Mobs or crowds enslaved. But some lines were easy to understand and got stuck in my head for days.

  Stand up stand up damned of the earth

  The world is about to change its foundation

  We are nothing, let us be all.

  When I came out of the office Mary T or Polly asked me careful questions, to make sure there weren’t any orders I was supposed to relay. Did I need more hours in the office supply room? Would he be calling me back later or could I be sent to Outside Housing?

  There had only been the one training session with the gun, and then some other reading of military manuals, protocols. I sometimes wondered if it was because Lisa could see that I was not a good soldier, that even in daydreams, with only an imaginary weapon in my hand, I was an uneasy fighter. Although I often imagined firing the rifle, I never pictured a target. There was never someone I felt certain had to die. Sometimes Reagan, but I knew that he was just a symbol anyway. And if not him, then who? Someone whose only crime was to be paid, or tricked or seduced by the capitalists into defending their cause? And yet I often imagined being shot myself. I wasn’t sure if I could kill someone, but I did feel ready to die. Didn’t that make me a good soldier?

  As I watched the street and the rooflines of the buildings around us, counting down the minutes, I was satisfied with the unchanged landscape. Despite chain-smoking and drinking coffee all night, I sometimes fell asleep and was instantly plunged into a dream. Me and my best friend in California, skinny-dipping in a creek. Speaking French on a crowded bus. Drunken taxi rides. I woke from these small dreams terrified by everything that could happen in a moment. Everything you could miss, everything you could remember.

  The CB radio beside me came alive with the Old Man’s voice.

  “Who’s up there?” he asked.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Sonja.”

  Dialectical theory said that things happened little by little, and then all at once. In tiny increments, life was always changing, minute by minute, breath by breath. In a moment the present became the past, night became day, and who I am became who I was. Evolution said we could not stand still, even if we wanted to. No day was identical to the last; no story was repeated exactly the same way twice. That was one of the lessons of dialectics: that history repeated itself not in tight, identical circles, but in spirals. Everything that happened was brand new but familiar all at the same time.

  Hours later, half-asleep, I flickered between dreaming and remembering, trying to understand the exact order of things. The moment before, and the one after.

  Bringing the Old Man coffee and a fresh pack of smokes.

  His hand brushing my hair back. His hand on my thigh.

  No. First was coffee, cigarettes, stories. We sat together on his green velvet couch. He wanted to hear about the communes again, hitchhiking. How long had my parents known Dale, how had they travelled? What were they thinking? His keen memory for details and the questions he asked showed me all the things I didn’t know, that I would never know. I remembered the ro
ad, I remembered it took us ten days. I knew that much.

  I knew that I was a loved baby. Who was born into a turbulent time. That it had been the seventies and a lot of things were falling apart, or coming together, depending on who you were, where you stood. That was the story I’d been told, and the story I tried to tell the Old Man.

  But it only took a second for the Old Man to take that away from me.

  “Bullshit,” the Old Man said. “Pure fucking bullshit.”

  The hot shock of tears on my skin. The Old Man handing me a fresh cigarette, watching me breathe in the truth of his words, words that washed away every lie, every convenient comfort.

  “Just a little girl with big eyes trying to act tough,” he said, stroking my hair.

  The smell of his Paco Rabanne cologne, the slenderness of his hands, the strength of his arms as he pulled me to him. The voice inside my head that whispered danger. And how that voice went suddenly quiet because there wasn’t anything to be afraid of anymore when the thing I feared had already happened.

  That was the point, the Old Man said afterwards, as he re-buttoned my shirt. I was like Polly had been when he first met her. Two smart girls so anxious about sex we couldn’t think straight. He said, “I fucked her on a desk and made her go back to filing while her knees were still shaking.”

  When he said that, I was afraid he was going to send me out of his office, back out into the bright crowded world me and the other cadre lived in. My knees were not shaking, but my eyes had gotten used to the darkness of his office. So I was relieved when he told me to pour myself a bourbon, and we fell asleep on the couch listening to the country-and-western station on the radio.

  “I think it’s pretty, what you and the Old Man have,” Polly said a week later when she handed me the birth control pills. Did Polly and the Old Man still have sex? I assumed not since she was handing me the pills. It was two in the morning, and there was no one up but the two of us. I hadn’t left NOC since that night. “Pretty” was the Old Man’s word. Pretty, pretty girl, even though we both knew I wasn’t. The Old Man had been calling for me at all hours. Two in the morning, seven in the evening. Sometimes when he called for me he wanted to tell me how to file my office supply requisitions, and sometimes we discussed Quebec politics, hippies, mothers and daughters, life in the field offices, rock and roll and wildfires. Once when he called me he just held out his coffee cup and didn’t say a word to me. Often we ended up on the couch. He explored me like a map, naming all the places: my sweet ass, my perky tits, my cocksucker lips.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What gets you off?” If my body was a map the Old Man was looking for the hidden treasure.

  “It’s never happened with anyone” I said. “Maybe I can’t. Maybe I’m frigid.”

  “I don’t believe that,” the Old Man said. “Do you want to call me Daddy? Is that what you want? You can tell me. Tell me,” he said.

  But I just turned my head into his bony chest, into the sweet musky smell of Paco Rabanne and Tres Flores, and his pale unwashed skin.

  “I don’t know what I want.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said, his fingers stroking my hair. “I’ll help you find what you want.”

  He said it had been a long time since he’d felt the way he did about me, my intensity, my precocious understanding of the world. Pretty, he said, pretty little girl. No one had ever called me that before. If pretty was a lie, maybe it all was. I could hear the story that I’d been telling him. Karl, the bus driver, the dealer. I could see the kind of girl I was. There was something in me that called out the secrets in men.

  “Maybe you’re no different,” I said to him. “Just another dirty old man.”

  He said, “There’s the door, don’t let it hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  “How can I trust you?”

  “Who do you trust, little girl? Give me one name.” He laughed at my silence. “How am I any different? How can I be any different if you won’t let me?”

  I was curious about the pills he took. “What are those?” I asked. “Are they any fun?”

  The Old Man looked at me and said, “You think you’re some kind of tough, talking like that. Those pills keep me alive.”

  “What if you’re just a dirty old man. A pill popper?”

  The Old Man sighed. “When I’m dead you’re going to be sorry you said these things to me.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I’ll regret it. Probably.”

  The Old Man talked a lot about death. An assassination, he said, by a government agent, or maybe even one of us. He felt some days like his body might just give out under all the strain. He would often stay awake for four days and then sleep for one.

  There were days when he barely ate. Lisa and Polly said this was part of my job now, helping to take care of the Old Man. Polly showed me how to cut the crusts off the ham-and-Velveeta sandwiches, how to wipe the edge of the soup bowl clean with a paper towel. The food had to look nice, to coax the Old Man into eating it. Some days, meal supplement shakes were the most any of us could feed him.

  I watched as he drifted off to sleep on the couch. The Old Man told me he was afraid he’d stop breathing in his sleep. I watched the pale, exhausted face, the white roots of his hair shining at the base of his scalp. Lines on his face as sharp as folds of paper, watched his thin chest rising and falling and rising again. I sat and I struggled to stay awake, just to watch him breathe.

  I’d had a theory about the Old Man, about the kind of man he was, ever since I’d met him. I know you, I’d said to him that first day, and I didn’t just mean that I’d recognized his voice. But it seemed like the more I got right, the less it mattered. Maybe I didn’t want to be right. Maybe I was tired of being right.

  On his wall was an oil painting, a little landscape of woods on the edge of a lake. Pale beech and blue sky reflected in water. The colours of early fall just at the tip of the branches. It wasn’t very well done. When I looked at it, I could see the intention of the tree, but not the tree itself. How this line of umber should represent a shadow. The smudge of green standing in for moss. But just in the centre of the picture, the middle of the lake, there was a moment of grace. Perhaps a three-inch square of something lovely, the clouds perfectly mirrored in the surface of a pond on a late September day.

  I’d begun spending hours inside that picture, inside that landscape of contradictions. Days, weeks. Each time I lay down on this couch. While he had his hands inside me, trying to figure out the only secret I had left. When he’d fallen asleep before he’d told me whether to leave or stay.

  SEVENTEEN

  I knew the Walkman was a bad idea but I said yes the minute my father suggested it. He was visiting with my stepmother from Montreal. It was just before Christmas and we were in Times Square, going in and out of electronics boutiques. Finally we had seen them all, and bought a small silver one, and a spare set of batteries. Then to a music store where I bought two cassette tapes: Lou Reed and David Bowie.

  I ran through the arguments in my head.

  It was a gift.

  There were earphones so you couldn’t say it was disruptive.

  We bought the Walkman. We went to see Evita on Broadway. My father thought I would like the show because it had Che Guevara in it, and because one summer we both read The Return of Eva Perón by V.S. Naipaul. We didn’t talk to each other through books anymore. He didn’t know the organization disapproved of Che, who’d gone into the revolution export business, instead of staying in Cuba.

  After the show we ate at the Carnegie Deli, and actually sat in a booth behind Henny Youngman, a comedian from my father’s era who even I had heard of. We ate in hushed silence, trying to overhear his conversation and it paid off when he said his most famous line: “Take my wife, please!”

  The Old Man took us all out to dinner at a fancy restaurant along the river. We rode in a 1972 white stretch limousine. Most days we used the limo to transport people to outside housing, all of us crammed insid
e, sitting on each other’s laps, while we rode around the Bowery getting dirty looks, or having the wheels kicked when we were stopped at red lights. But that night, cleaned out and with only a few of us inside, driving through a better part of town, it felt very different. My father and stepmother liked the attention but weren’t quite sure what all the fuss was for.

  Then the Old Man asked my dad about buying bullets in Canada.

  The Old Man had always pressed me for details about my father’s drug business. How big? How much? The truth was, I had no idea. My father had been robbed by men wearing ski masks in a hotel in the Maritimes once, so it had to be a little dangerous. There had once been garbage bags of weed in our basement. How much was that worth? In the world of pot dealers was he big or small? I had no frame of reference. Mostly it seemed to me like people dropping by for a beer and some business.

  My dad didn’t ask what the bullets would be needed for, or why the Old Man would think he knew these things. Instead he said he didn’t think that made sense, since the States was where the guns were.

  “Why do you think they would be cheaper in Canada? I just don’t see why you’d think there’d be any benefit in doing it that way.” I felt guilty for the look on my father’s face, fear disguised as anger, as irritation. Even though I’d answered all the Old Man’s questions truthfully, it was clear that he hadn’t really understood that my dad was more hippy than thug.

  Perhaps the Old Man sensed that he’d gone too far because he changed the subject and went back to complimenting them both on what a fine job they’d done raising me. How smart I was, how helpful. But by then my dad was very drunk and he spent the rest of the dinner talking about the view out the restaurant window. Where did the river go? And the boats, where were they going? Why did they travel at night? Were there submarines? He was sure he saw submarines.