Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  When we got back to the penthouse, I could hear my father throwing up in the bathroom. Was the Old Man right that I had daddy issues? I didn’t want to hurt my father but it seemed like I couldn’t help it. My mother’s face, the fact that I had lost my card-reading magic, those things would always make him a little sad. And that sometimes made me feel like I had nothing to lose. I put on my headphones and turned up the volume on my Walkman until all I could hear was music.

  EIGHTEEN

  On my second New Year’s Eve the construction paper countdown sign we’d put in the entranceway read “414 DAYS”—414 days until the revolution. This year no one shadowed me and I was distracted by the worry and the hope that the Old Man would call for me, that he would take me from the celebrations or that he would celebrate without me. Near midnight I talked to John, who I hadn’t seen much of now that I didn’t do PRO runs anymore and slept nearly every night at NOC. I missed the adventure of PRO run days. I think we talked about music, too, and at midnight, as everyone started singing “Auld Lang Syne,” John kissed me. I had never had a kiss like it, soft but dry, gentle and without expectation. “It’s tradition,” John said. Was it? No one had kissed me the year before.

  A few days later, the Old Man called me down to his office after class and when I got there he told me to get myself a drink. I poured a shot of Old Grand-Dad, 100 proof. The Old Man chose this as my drink months ago, and I gulped down a few, each in one shot, just like he taught me to do. The Old Man put on some Kris Kristofferson. He was horrified to find out I thought Janis Joplin wrote “Me and Bobby McGee.”

  “That druggie bitch?” he said and told me to turn up the volume.

  When the Old Man asked me about John I felt the bourbon rush through my body like a fever. What did the Old Man know? Had someone reported something to him? I told the Old Man the story that John had told me, how his brothers and his father and a de-programmer roughed him up after they snatched him. I said he reminded me of some boys I’d met in Montreal bars who’d left the farm after their dad beat them up for liking boys.

  “Does he like boys?” the Old Man asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I said I thought it was brave for him to come back. I didn’t say anything about the kiss.

  It was getting light out when the Old Man sent me back upstairs. John was sitting in the front window at the watch desk with his back to me, watching the street. Maybe the Old Man planned it that way. That John would sit in the room above us and listen to the low murmur of our voices and the same record playing over and over. Maybe he wanted John to see me, drunk, with the Old Man’s smell of hair oil and cologne, worn into my skin. All night, on the Old Man’s couch, I’d been wondering this.

  I stood in the doorway. “John,” I whispered. “John.”

  Maybe I was crying.

  Between us lay the sleeping bodies of four other cadre. In the early morning light coming in through the window, all the sleepers had a shadowy look to them, like bodies painted with watercolours. In the next room, Polly and Struggler slept, as they had for years, side by side on the same pullout couch. And yet this was as close to alone as John and I might ever get again.

  “You get yours,” he said, not turning around. And the way he said it didn’t sound like anything more than the statement of a simple fact.

  I sat still while the Old Man took out the shoebox of makeup he kept underneath his desk. It was a collection too large and too random to come from one woman—too many brands, lipsticks in too many shades. I sat on the couch, my eyes closed, as he painted my face. Glossy lips, sparkly silver eyeshadow. Pretty, he said, and I wondered if he meant the makeup or my upturned face, waiting for his touch.

  The Old Man began telling me new versions, his versions, of the stories I’d told him. The one where I stand by the side of the road, but this time I’m batting my eyelashes, willing bait for the perverts. Dale and the Englishman, the one I called the marshmallow major, what really happened with them?

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I’d remember.”

  “How can you be so sure?” he asks again. In my half-grown body with my nearly grown way of seeing the world it was no surprise to him that I confused men. In his version of the story there was a reason why it had happened to me, why it kept happening to me. I almost wanted to be that dangerous girl he was describing. And when I closed my eyes, I almost was.

  Keeping him company. Getting his clothes out. Dusting around the Thompson machine gun, and the rifle, and the .45 that sat on the coffee table. That’s how I had begun to fill most of each day. I learned how to fill the Montblanc pen just right, how to lay the crackers around the edge of the soup bowl, how to cut the crusts off the ham-and-Velveeta sandwiches, finish it with a toothpick and an olive. I had to make it pretty so the Old Man would eat something. Polly and Lisa taught me to think of him as a machine, a finicky machine we couldn’t fix if it broke. A machine we couldn’t replace.

  The Old Man rarely slept. He didn’t bathe often either. I thought of him as a man whose mind was so active he couldn’t be bothered with the meat on his bones, this fleshly life. Even sex seemed like a continuation of our conversations, ideas, concepts taken past words. Or sometimes sex was more like an inconvenient physical need, like sleep, like food. Either way I was useful, special, needed. Most people went their whole lives without meeting someone like him and there were so many ways the story could not have brought us together. Yet it did. We had both walked along the edge of the Shasta Dam. We had both ended up in Brooklyn. Somehow we ended up on this couch where nothing and everything was secret.

  One day the Old Man sent me down to the basement to look for a red smoking jacket he had in storage. Judging by the clothes, the Old Man’s fondness for costumes and disguises went back decades. A lime green silk suit, a white leather coat. I’d been through five boxes, and hadn’t found the jacket yet. I wasn’t sure how much of a hurry he was in to get it, so I was torn between re-folding everything and getting through it all as fast as I could.

  Joe Hassan was standing in the basement doorway, watching me jump up and down, trying to reach the edge of box number six. Hassan was brought in during a short-lived strategy to recruit college students directly to the Party instead of through NATLFED. He was the spoiled son of some millionaire or diplomat from Africa. The day the Old Man met him, he brought him back to Brooklyn and spent days with him in his office, feeding him ham-and-Velveeta sandwiches and vodka. I felt a little embarrassed for the Old Man, all the shouting, and calling for ice until all hours of the morning, it just seemed like showing off. For all the intense talk, what was it really? Just to show some rich runaway that his revolution was worth joining.

  “He won’t last,” I told the Old Man later.

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “Not much.”

  “He’s got soul,” he said.

  I laughed. It was still safe to do that. Laughing, crying, it was still safe.

  I said, “He’s got an accent, and a rich daddy.” I was disappointed, perhaps, that we weren’t going to ransom him. Hassan probably would have even gone along with it. Beyond just eating ham, I was under the impression he was looking for some thrills, some revenge perhaps.

  Instead the Old Man renamed him Joe and put him to work, mostly on maintenance and carpentry duty. Every so often the Old Man called him into the office, and he came out a few hours later, a little drunk and with new orders: more wood, a better saw. It was like a game to Joe Hassan, this sweeping and hammering.

  I was not sure if Joe Hassan was even a Party member, since sometimes he refused to do things. He wouldn’t wash dishes, for example, or cook food. Simply would not, and not like new people, who asked nicely not to do something and still ended up doing it in the end. Women’s work, he said. He wouldn’t do women’s work.

  I’d seen him often down in the basement, his long, thin body in coveralls, his hands white with plaster or sawdu
st, making shelves, re-organizing the tools. He played the radio, too, a not-quite forbidden thing. He’d let his hair grow long. Maybe he was drying out from drugs. We’d had people like that. He smoked filterless Camel cigarettes, the nicotine staining the smooth mocha ovals of his fingernails yellow. Like the rest of him, his hands were slender and delicate.

  As he watched me now, jumping for the boxes, his beautiful dark face was wearing the same smile I’d seen the first day I met him, slightly contemptuous.

  “Can you help me with these?” I asked him.

  “I see you look at me, you know.”

  “Sometimes I wonder what you’re doing here.”

  “Maybe I like it.” There was sawdust in his hair, and he had the beginnings of a beard. It was hard to tell if he’d gotten skinnier underneath the coveralls he wore.

  “The Old Man says you have soul.”

  Joe Hassan stepped into the doorway.

  “Do you want to know what he says about you?”

  He put his fingers on my mouth.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Don’t tell you? Or don’t touch you?”

  “You’ll get in trouble.”

  Joe Hassan laughed, almost a giggle.

  “No, I won’t,” he said. “It’s his idea.”

  I pushed past Joe and headed upstairs. Everything that remained of my old life was down in the basement. A locked-away trunk filled with my old journals and my teddy bear, a three-by-three cubbyhole for all my clothes. The quiet, dry order of the office supply room with its envelopes and blank paper. My dog who slept curled up with the cats in the boiler room. And now Joe Hassan, with his lie that might not be a lie, stood in the middle of all of it with that smile on his face.

  I knocked on the Old Man’s door. The Old Man lay on the couch with his eyes closed. I told him I couldn’t find the jacket. The Old Man opened his eyes and looked at me and I hoped he could see from my face what Joe had told me. My little Orphan Annie look, he’d called it once. I wanted to ask him why he’d done it, if there ever was a red jacket, if running into Joe was a coincidence or a set-up. But he just sighed and closed his eyes again, and I started to see that the time for asking questions was over.

  ——

  There was a way to do everything. That was one of the Old Man’s lessons. It was like the army: there was a right way, a wrong way and an organization way.

  There was a way to stack the crackers around the bowl of soup.

  There was a way to serve the tea.

  There was a way to make an egg.

  “Polly,” he yelled from the couch. “Look at this girl. This girl does not know shit. Why is that, Polly?” His mouth curled up into a tight sneer. He was pointing at me but he was looking at her. She kept looking from him to me. The look on her face changed as she moved her head. From a hard anger at me, to something soft and questioning when she turned to him. Hard to soft. Soft to hard.

  How did I not know shit? I did not even know what it was I didn’t know. But Polly’s hard look was almost as painful as all of the Old Man’s words. I liked Polly, I wanted Polly to like me. She was tough, but not mean, she yelled at people but she never laughed at them. She was smart even though she was a high school dropout and sexy but not very pretty. I liked her because she was exactly the kind of woman I could aspire to be.

  We had gone out to Long Island together once, to a dentist who donated his time for one of the organization’s field offices. Polly had been fifteen when she became involved with the Eastern Farm Workers Association, organizing farm labourers who worked the Long Island potato farms. Men, mostly, some of them picked up from skid row and bused out to Long Island to sort potatoes. Overcharged for shelter and transportation, sometimes they made virtually nothing. That was the first field office, and Polly had been with the organization, and the Old Man, ever since. Eleven years.

  We didn’t talk much on that drive. Polly looked out the window and occasionally pointed out landmarks. Where the organization’s first office was, where they put up their first picket. She didn’t point out the places she’d lived, or gone to school, or comment at all on the changed landscape, and for some reason that made me like her even more.

  I worked with Polly and Lisa almost every day. Helping them get the Old Man’s meals ready or wash his clothes. Sometimes three of us together could not get what he wanted done in time. A reference from Black’s Law Dictionary or a cream shirt with French cuffs he’d worn last year.

  The Old Man had never yelled at me, and he wasn’t yelling at me now. He was yelling at Polly.

  “I guess what I’m wondering, Polly, is how the fuck you think you can lead a revolution when you can’t even teach this one small thing.”

  “I want some education happening here, Polly. Some real fucking political education,” the Old Man shouted.

  Eggs, sunny side up. That’s what he wanted. That was the thing I was incapable of doing.

  Seven eggs it took me. Polly standing over me, my hands shaking. Broken yolks would not do. Cut the crusts off the toast and real butter only. Every time. Try it again. Do it again. This egg is no good. You thought it was but it’s not. It’s too runny. This one is too hard. Throw it away. Try again. The butter is burnt. Three eggs. You’ve broken it again. Four eggs.

  “All I am asking you for, little girl,” he said quietly through his clenched teeth, “is to make me an egg. A fried egg. An egg, not runny or crisped at the edges. Do you understand that?” He waited until I nodded my head. “Just an egg,” he said gently.

  I stood in front of him with the seventh cooked egg. I didn’t know if it was perfect or not. The yolk was whole. The edges were not burnt. But was it too runny? Was the texture right? I couldn’t tell without touching it. But if I touched it, it might not be perfect anymore.

  He wouldn’t look at it.

  “Pitch it, baby,” he said, his face to me not angry now, but drawn, old. “You’ve missed the point.”

  A perfect thing. Was it too much to ask, and if it was, why didn’t anyone else say so? No one in the office would look me in the eye as I walked through, again and again with the plate. But how could you hope to change the world if you couldn’t get this one thing, this tiny simple meaningless thing, exactly right?

  ——

  I was relieved when a few days later Lisa called me down to tell me I’d be spending the night outside the Old Man’s office. This was where she usually slept, in case he needed anything. She was not feeling well and the Old Man had told her to take a night off. Lisa had made me a list of what the Old Man might like to eat if he got hungry in the middle of the night. She showed me again where the important books were, Black’s Law Dictionary, Marx, Lenin, the Bible, and reminded me where his pens and extra legal pads were kept.

  Just before she left, Lisa said, “Sometimes it gets noisy. Do you understand? Sometimes the discussions get intense, and it gets … Everything you see and hear in these offices is confidential. You’re not to talk about what goes on here with anyone. That’s only for us.”

  Only for us.

  And only for me to watch Polly as she was called into his office. From outside, the Old Man’s angry voice was almost like an animal’s snarl, all tone and no words. At first I didn’t hear Polly at all.

  Only for me to watch as she came out of his office and reached for the riding crop we kept for him on the bookshelf. For months I had been watching Polly as she ironed his shirts or poured his coffee. I watched as she showed me how to rub his boots and his riding gear with mink oil. I had been watching the way that work in her hands looked like privilege. The starch in the cotton, the grease in the whip. When Lisa asked me to fill in for her, I was glad, because I thought after my failure with the eggs that my days of working for the Old Man, working with Polly, were over.

  As she walked back into the office with the Old Man’s riding crop I kept waiting for her to turn and look at me, for some gesture of acknowledgement. Instead she closed the door and I listened to the sof
t snap of the whip, and the wincing sound that followed. The small pleading whimpers she made when he began to hit her. There was no way of knowing what was going on inside the Old Man’s office, no way of telling what it really meant. Except she let him. Whatever was going on, she was letting him do it.

  And I was doing what I was supposed to do. I was waiting, I was listening. I was not saying a word.

  NINETEEN

  “Shut up,” Pat said. “Just shut the fuck up.”

  The surprise of seeing the Old Man at the morning briefing was swallowed up by the shock of Pat’s words, her thin arms and clenched fists and open mouth as she screamed at him. It felt almost surreal, seeing the Old Man in the meeting room in daylight, hearing words I’d never imagined from Pat of all people.

  “You never stop. You NEVER shut up,” she screamed.

  Two men put their arms around her and hauled her out of the room and down the stairs into the apartment below.

  After she was gone the Old Man stood up and looked around at all of us.

  “Welcome to reality, kids. Not everyone survives this thing. Not everyone one is tough enough to get through it.” Then he walked out of the room.

  Later that day I was allowed to visit with Pat in the sleeping room. All the lights were off. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but she didn’t say what for. I sat on the bed beside her and tried to remind her of that first day—Remember how surprised I was to see you here?—and how she took me out for a real New York slice, and showed me how to fold and tip the pizza back into my mouth, New York style. And all those early days in Redding, at the back of the office. How she’d helped me understand dialectics through the steam rising from the stove as we made dinner.

  “You said I was a good student. But you were a good teacher.”