Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  We sang labour songs and gospel and folk and when we sang “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the cops applauded. At the beginning of the winter there were eighty-four of us. Now there were sixty-three. I caught a glimpse of someone’s grey shirt, as he pushed his way to the edge of the crowd and down the street.

  Sixty-two.

  We were down to the true believers. Nothing had happened that was supposed to happen. And yet still we stood in the cold and waited for the Old Man to tell us what to do.

  ——

  When they finally let us back inside we kept finding new things missing. The CB radios from the Control desk and the other stations, pictures of Lenin taken off the walls. My book of radio codes was gone. The small closet room, the Cave, which the Old Man sometimes used as a sleeping room, had been searched from top to bottom. The FBI found only a few weapons, old and not very useful. I was not surprised, since some things had been moved the week before. Where, how? I only knew the sounds of heavy lifting I’d heard from the office, the absence of the guns in the room. It seemed strange to me that there was a plan for the guns, but not for the dumbwaiter escape. This mystery was its own distraction. But still there were basic things to be done. Coffee to be made. Dinner to be cooked. Cigarettes to be smoked, and the street to watch in case they came back.

  A week after the raid I was on night watch again. The cops were more obvious now: vans parked across the street, men with binoculars at the window. What was I watching them for? The watch couldn’t keep them out. It could barely keep us in.

  In my journal I wrote,

  The silence of early morning watch shifts and the emergence of spring outside the window is almost painful to me. A dangerous melancholy. Everything changed but nothing changed. Just like he told me it would.

  Since his fall down the dumbwaiter, the Old Man lived in the haze of new drugs that the ex-medical student got for him by forging the AWOL doctors’ names.

  But even with eyes like pinpricks, the Old Man was still in charge. He shouted out new orders, about newsletters and calls to action and lawsuits. With his freshly busted-up leg, he needed more help than he ever did before, so I was called upon to do things like carry a fresh needle or new bandages from the doctor’s office one apartment over.

  Hurrying through the basement hallways and courtyards I found myself rhyming my thoughts into lyrics of something that was almost a song:

  Running through a burning corridor

  I am just a wooden soldier for

  a war of fire

  tender wood

  would tender words

  bring a flood

  to fight the flame and

  ashen blood

  to cure the lame

  (break a leg again)

  And once the song is in my head I can’t get it out, even as I’m handing Polly his bandages, even as I’m asking him how he’s feeling.

  ——

  I brought the bandages, I brought the needles, I brought the protein shakes and the cigarettes and the coffee that he needed. And with these things I brought those big eyes he’d teased me about, full of panic, not all of it for him.

  He must have seen that, seen it and not liked it, because one night when I was back at the Control desk he took over my housing logistics, re-arranging all of the people and all of the cars, confusing me so much I started to shout, “That won’t work, it just won’t work!”

  Even as I said it, I felt the dangerous pleasure Pat must have known when she shouted at the Old Man to shut the fuck up. Tanya’s grandmother slapped me across the face, telling me to stop being so hysterical, and just as her hand struck my skin I understood that I’d been set up, that this had been what he wanted all along. All night I kept touching the warmth of my cheek even after it was gone. This was what it felt like. This was the line I’d crossed over. And once you were over you couldn’t go back.

  The countdown numbers, like the pictures of Lenin, were gone from the wall, taken by the FBI. Nicotine stains on the wall framed everything that was missing. Our new radio didn’t have very strong reception so the voices I’d gotten to know on the CB were gone and I missed the truckers and cabbies whose conversations I’d listened to when I slept by the radio at night. Ten days after the revolution was supposed to begin, John came to the Control desk and handed me a notebook, a hardcover composition books with “School Days” on the cover. “Maybe you’ll get better use out of this than I have.”

  Inside he’d written one entry, at the beginning of February.

  Started the last days—if this thing is as historic as everybody says it is supposed to be theoretically then we might as well record history … I will write what I can and what I have patience to at the end of each day which is getting to be more like closer to the start …

  The last days. Where were we now? At the start? At the end? Since the raid I couldn’t tell.

  In my new journal I wrote about the strangers from the radio.

  Today would have been a good day to listen. Clear skies. Strange that I should miss them.

  I watched the back window, my eyes shifting from the sun on the courtyard to my own reflection. I was going to be nineteen soon. I felt a small flutter of panic, like I did when I’d taken too many pills.

  Maureen put in her resignation to the Central Committee. She was doing it by the books, the first time I’d ever seen someone try that. In the meantime she said she’d do only non-political work. Dishes. Cooking. She cleaned toilets, she swept floors, and so for the Control Officer, she was a kind of blessing, a set of free hands for every occasion, although it had been days since I’d heard her speak. Maybe she was a cop after all. Maureen was putting something to the test. Was it that she could leave the right way, by fighting it out, by making her point? Or was it that even this was a lie, this elaborate bureaucracy, the constitution in its leather binder? As I watched her silently working I wondered if Maureen was brave, or stupid, or protected. I could not risk believing I was any of those things.

  A month after the raid I gave John a note with his nightly logistics.

  I had a friend once who left without saying goodbye and I never quite forgave her.

  In the five minutes it took me to walk there, I would know whether I was going to try to get to the train or the tracks of the Carroll Street subway station around the corner. All I needed was five minutes. Or an hour. A day to think things through. I wrote down my father’s number in the note.

  John called NOC an hour later, and said he had a question about his logistics. When I got on the phone he asked me if I was going to Long Island, and I said no.

  “Well, what is this number then? It’s a Long Island area code.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s a mistake.” And it was, because I’d written the area code wrong.

  But he didn’t tell anyone. Was his silence indifference or a gift? He’d given me candy and a nickname and the most delicate of kisses on the stairway at midnight. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Something else I’d have to leave behind.

  In the basement, my dog emerged from the furnace room, just as I came out of the communal cubbyspace. I’d taken all the change I could find out of everyone’s pockets, and it added up to less than five dollars. She stood in the hallway, wagging her tail. I squatted down and put my arms around her. My sweet Gemini who stood and wagged her tail while a bully broke my nose when I was thirteen. And yet still I’d insisted on taking her wherever I moved, from Redding to Montreal to New York. I’d insisted on pretending that we were capable of protecting each other. Little girls and dogs, with our helpless, endless love.

  If I didn’t go now, I didn’t know when I’d have another chance. Just after Tanya had woken me up for morning watch she was called down to the Old Man’s office. Was he fucking her right now? Most likely he was talking about fucking her someday, somewhere. Not here, and not now. Today he was impotent and strung-out. The Old Man had even less to offer Tanya than he did to me. But he could still promise. Promise he was going to fuck her
brains out, or love her forever.

  Polly, Mary T, Beth, Jayne, Susan, Linda. Others I never even noticed. Now Tanya. Who the Old Man had on the couch today was a question I tried not to ask anymore, an answer I didn’t need to know.

  Except today.

  Today I needed to figure how long she was going to be in there, how long it was likely to take. Today his attraction to her was an unexpected opportunity, a gift I couldn’t afford to refuse.

  The day before I’d written in my journal,

  So here it is Monday. I am nineteen today and that is nothing, nothing at all.

  Later on that evening he called me down to his office. He said, “Is something on your mind, little girl?” Something had been reported to him. An expression on my face, or maybe reports of crying in the bathroom.

  “It’s my birthday,” I said.

  He said, “I know. I know that, you think I don’t know that? Happy Birthday,” he said, gesturing towards the bourbon bottle. Within a few minutes he’d drifted off to sleep.

  But here was my real present: calling little Tanya down to his office, choosing her instead of me. Even as I was telling Gemini that I loved her, as I was telling her I was sorry, whispering into her velvety ears, I was listening for footsteps on the stairs. I hadn’t thought at all about leaving my dog, because if I thought about it, if I’d pictured this moment once in my mind, I’d have to stay forever. If I thought about what the Old Man might do, or threaten to do, just to keep me or punish me or both, I’d have to stay forever. I could only save one of us, and only if I hurried.

  Later is when I’d cry. Later I could have anything I wanted, I told myself. I could have the third rail or I could have a thousand more days to forgive this moment and decide what to do with my life. But at that moment all I had was the unwatched street.

  PART FOUR

  The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.

  KARL MARX, “THESES ON FEUERBACH,” THESIS 2 (1845)

  TWENTY-THREE

  After the revolution, my mother said, things would be different. And they were.

  After the revolution, right after, all I had were nightmares and daydreams and one canvas bag that contained everything that was left of the girl I’d been before. Dialectics said that everything contained the potential for its opposite. Like the tears to laughter and back again when days after I left, Susan called me at my father’s house and asked, “Is it because he missed your birthday? Is that why you left?” The fact that he had gotten Susan of the red pubic hair in the Vaseline, to call me, showed how little he knew me. Polly was my measure of things, the one I looked to see the girl I was, the woman I might become.

  “We didn’t win,” I said. “Nothing happened.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because. Because I was there.”

  I was there, I saw. I had to keep reminding myself of this. Even if I didn’t know everything, I knew enough. Even if I was wrong and the Old Man hadn’t called for the raid, he’d beaten Polly with a crop, he’d beaten Mary T and Struggler, and the day after the revolution, nothing was different. I wanted to hear how Susan would justify it but I could tell that Susan, answering everything I said with a question, didn’t really know yet. It had been over a month and not even the Old Man had been able to come up with a way to explain exactly what really had gone down.

  Sometimes I wondered what the Old Man thought would happen when he went for the dumbwaiter, what part of the plan went wrong? And then I thought back to the day he told me the chicken soup story and wondered if there had ever been any plan at all. Working all the angles was not the same thing as a plan.

  ——

  Dialectics said history worked in spirals not circles—we could never have the same day over again, we could never go back to the place we started—but we could come deceptively close. And so I found myself walking down familiar streets with the same wonder I’d had when I first moved to Montreal as a little girl, the same amazement at how many separate worlds could live side by side, how many words there could be for any one thing. And how many things couldn’t be translated at all.

  On the phone my mother tried to comfort me with Lenin’s words that not everyone was cut out to be cadre, but that didn’t mean we had to stand in the way of the others who carried on. In my father’s house I stayed in the mustard yellow guest room, because my old bedroom was now the nursery. At mealtimes we talked about the weather and the crossword and all the things his new baby son was learning. My sister called and said it was about time I came to my senses. “That guy was so crazy,” she said.

  The first job I got on the outside was as a telephone solicitor. Every morning the phone crew did the PMA chant. Positive Mental Attitude spelled out like the YMCA dance. Our job was to get people to come see a presentation on summer timeshares. Later, it turned out the whole thing was a scam.

  A month into that job I got fired because my sales numbers were too low and I spent too long talking to old people. The next day I got a job as a waitress at a sports bar. I told them I had experience serving in New York and this did not seem like a lie.

  I got my own apartment and enrolled as a mature student at the local college, paying for my tuition with money I got from my dad for holding his drug stash. I took a course called Knowledge and Human Nature. The textbook was heavier than the bag I’d taken with me from New York.

  The first day of class I sat in the only left-handed desk in the room ready to take careful notes. Despite everything, I still wanted someone to tell me what was true, what was real. Our teacher wore a lavender dress made of shiny synthetic material and wobbled on her heels. Grey roots showed through her mink brown dyed hair, and there was a slight tremble to her hands. When she spoke her voice had a high singing quality to it. She stared out the window at the back of the classroom and said, “When we define truth, what exactly are we defining?”

  How is truth defined? I wrote this down. I put a star beside this. I underlined this. I traced the ink lines of my words on the page. When I first went to Brooklyn, I wanted the red star tattoo that some of the old timers like Rena had. Sitting in the classroom I wanted it more than ever. I wanted some proof of where I’d been, proof it all happened. If not the truth, then at least this. Evidence. A testament to my faith, a scar to remember it by.

  For the first few months after I got out I’d been amazed by how different the outside world was. But it didn’t take long to start to see the similarities; the tiny ways people fell apart every day, trapped in lives they didn’t believe in anymore. The tremble of the teacher’s hand. The bored looks on the other students’ faces.

  The girl who smelled like baby powder, the last person to ask me not to go to New York, was also one of the few people I saw when I came back. “I’m here to steal your girlfriend,” I told the man she’d been dating the first time we all went out together for a drive in his BMW. He might have been relieved—he was nineteen and they’d recently gotten engaged. But did she want to be stolen? That wasn’t entirely clear. She wanted to bring me food when I ran out. She wanted to pat my back when I cried and she didn’t want to ask questions. She wanted to kiss me when she was drunk. Those things were good enough for me.

  And worth paying for, which is what it felt like I was doing the night the boyfriend woke me up to have sex. When I tell her she cries but doesn’t call it off with either of us. We even try with the three of us together, but it was a failure of geometry and coordination. And none of us really wanted to share.

  Sex was what I did instead of apologizing, instead of small talk. I had little patience for listening to people talk about their meaningless lives and talking about myself was worse. Explaining why I didn’t know who Boy George was or that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. I interrupt a nice young man mid conversation to tell him that I’m actually a bit bored but we could fuck if he wants to, I live just around the corner. I even had sex with the little dealer agai
n for some cocaine and a chance to get in on his next deal. In bed I tried to imagine myself as a drug dealer—the clothes I’d wear, leather and heels, the things I’d say. Later, cutting lines, I realized I wasn’t strong enough to carve off a piece of myself like that. But I wasn’t weak enough to let just anyone else do it either. Even if I did need someone to take the Old Man’s place I’d have to look a little harder. There were days when I couldn’t believe I was never going to talk to him again and nights when I couldn’t get his voice out of my head, pretty, pretty girl. He had transformed me in ways I was still discovering.

  Everywhere, melodies, lyrics and drum lines shouted at me from the dance floor, the radio, leaking from the headphones of fellow passengers on the bus. Pop songs by Eurythmics and Elton John reminding me how human, how normal, it was to be sad. What were other people sad about? I couldn’t imagine.

  In my apartment, with my own lock and key and my father’s big navy steamer trunk full of drugs in my living room, I was sometimes the centre of too much attention but often alone. No one cared when I walked out my front door, where I was going, when I’d be back. Sometimes this was exhilarating but other days it was terrifying to think that I could just let myself disappear. I got a cat just to make sure I had a reason to go home.

  Some days I could count the many pleasures of my new life: the cat purring on my bed, this window that opened and closed, the view of the park, these books, this drink, this stranger, this body that I lived in with no one to tell me how or when to use it. This self that didn’t want to die, that didn’t stay in Brooklyn, that didn’t throw herself on the tracks, that didn’t want to waste any more time.

  And other days I made this same list, all the things I would give away, just to believe in something again. Just for that radiant certainty. The revolution I’d counted down to had been like the sun, so bright it lit every corner of my life, and yet I could not look directly at it. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. It ended up the same in the end. The doubts I didn’t let myself feel, the words I didn’t write.