For The Alma Mater

You know I'm way pressed when I drop back to posting once or twice a week. How busy is too busy? This is too busy. So, here's something I wrote today for the University of Massachusetts Amherst program in Social Thought and Political Economy newsletter, because the program director, who I adore, asked me to. I'm sure they won't mind being scooped.

How does one meet the immediate survival needs of those who are have nothing while building institutional power to fight the root causes of homelessness and poverty? This is the question that fifteen years ago led Tim Harris to found what would become North America’s premiere street newspaper.

Seattle’s Real Change now employs more than 350 homeless and very low-income people each month in street sales of their weekly publication. Last year, street vendors sold 722,571 copies of the progressive community newspaper that offers “opportunity and a voice to low-income people while taking action to end homelessness and poverty. “ Vendors buy their papers for thirty-five cents to resell for a dollar plus tips. In the process, homeless people find that they are not without friends.

“Over the years I’ve come to understand Real Change as an enormous web of human relationships,” said Harris. “People stop being afraid and find that they care for each other. That’s where the personal and social transformation really begins.

Soon after Harris graduated from the STPEC program in 1987, he became involved in alternative newspapers and direct-action style empowerment organizing with homeless people in Boston.

“I discovered that the formulas for community organizing just didn’t translate. Leaders came and went very fast, and were up against too many demons to be real effective. Meanwhile homelessness just kept increasing. The Boston years were about getting my butt kicked and organizing without a roadmap.” By the time Harris left for Seattle in 1994, he understood that homeless people couldn’t win without allies, and that street newspapers could bring people together.

Real Change is presently leading a multi-racial, cross-class coalition in a ballot initiative organizing drive to create alternatives to a new Seattle municipal jail. “People get that cutting school budgets while building new jails doesn’t make sense, and ever-increasing incarceration rates just deepen poverty and wastes limited public resources,” said Harris. The initiative has lured activists out of their single-issue ghettos to find a new, more unified, way forward.

“Taking risks only strengthens our support,” said Harris. “Our funding comes mostly from reader donations and paper sales, and this gives us huge freedom to tell the uncompromised truth. It’s a powerful position from which to organize.”

For more information, visit realchangenews.org, and nonewjail.org.

The Street Years: Part Three

The Davis Square Street Magazine house was a second story apartment in a house where the landlord, Larry, lived downstairs with his wife. She was nice enough, but Larry was a boozer. He soon decided, given the traffic through our apartment, that we must be dealing drugs. It was a tense relationship.

Every few months or so we'd get an issue together. Between Jon's manic-depression and perfectionism, our poverty, and my own chronic distraction, it's a wonder we published at all. Every once in a while though, a truck would come, and we'd get ink all over our fingers as we carried the precious bundles upstairs.

The times of no money continued. I remember standing near a Burger King in the Northeastern University student union. A volunteer was driving me around to drop papers at the distribution points. I was starving. Literally. I smelled the greasy food and longed for a dollar to buy french fries. I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger that year, and knew just how he must have felt.

I would later come to think of this as my boiled potatoes and shoplifted cheese period. Jon was the thief. I'd lost my nerve for that sort of thing by thirteen. He specialized in string cheese and cigarettes, reserving most of his actual money for 12-packs of Rolling Rock. At least we kept the rent paid.

I lived upstairs in a roughly finished attic room across the stairwell from our photographer David, who converted a closet into a darkroom. Jon was downstairs with two of my friends that I knew from college. Doug and Claudia were Central America activists and ran a teeny non-profit called the Student Central America Network. I was hired to run their phone bank.

This was, without question, the most pathetic fund raising operation in the history of half-assed non-profits. We'd cold call from the phonebook, and anyone unfortunate enough to pick up would be treated to an "update." This would begin with the latest atrocity of that blood-soaked time and end with an earnest plea to support student organizing to change U.S. foreign policy.

It's amazing that anyone ever gave us anything. A strong night would bring in around $100. Doug weaved and dodged every time I asked to get paid. The three of us would sometimes visit Al Sais, a friend of Doug's in Cambridge, who would cook a nice dinner and get us high. By this point, eating a real meal was a rare treat.

During one especially desperate week, where I had no money even for bus tokens, Al wrote each of us a check for $100. Mine bounced.

Al Sais would later be fired from his long time job as book keeper for the Central America Solidarity Association in Cambridge. It turned out that at least some of the much discussed string of "FBI break ins" that plagued Old Cambridge Baptist Church during the sanctuary movement were really just Al covering his tracks.

Doug eventually skipped out on his rent and we confiscated his guitar and amp in retaliation. Jon got good at surfer licks, and could slay me every time with his cover of Sargent Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Berets. The irony thing was very in.

By then, my focus was turning more and more toward homelessness. It was 1988, and Bennett and Harrison's The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America offered a framework for understanding the incredible growth in visible poverty that occurred over that decade. Homelessness in American cities had tripled or quadrupled, and a politicized grassroots movement had arisen along with a still nascent sheltering industry.

Boston's Kip Tiernan was running around quoting Walter Bruggeman, talking liberation theology, and asking qui bono? "Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency," she would say. A bag lady doll went on the market and Kip went ballistic. I found this irresistible.

A few years before, a chapter of the Union of the Homeless was founded in Boston. While there were a few radicals running around acting like this was a real organization, it was clear that there wasn't much there. The happening place was First Church Cambridge, where Jim Stewart and Stuart Guernsey were leading the direct action revolution.

Jim was a cynical divinity school grad who dressed in black, wore James Joyce glasses, and read Adorno and Horkheimer. He was a CD junkie, and ran a small shelter in the church basement. Guernsey was a soft-spoken southern minister who'd somehow come north to run another small shelter in Dorchester. They acted as Northeast lieutenants for Mitch Snyder, and would regularly go on some sort of extreme fast in solidarity with their hero.

Around them were a mixture of politicized homeless people, church folk, and shelter line staff who were down for the revolution. I found myself in the First Church function room more and more often, drawn in by the drama and the people. At the conclusion of every meeting, Guernsey would offer a little benediction. After awhile, Jim took pity and gave me a job doing overnights.

The summer of 1988 brought the CCNV's "Take off the Boards" demonstrations. Mitch Snyder had a genius for mobilizing coordinated direct-action events that kept homelessness in the papers and turned up the heat for action. Take off the Boards was a week of housing takeovers in cities throughout the east coast. There was a boarded up house in Boston's South End that Jim and Stuart chose as a target. A group of around 60 met up at Boston's City Hall for a brief rally, and marched toward our destination.

"What do we want?"
"Housing"
"When do we want it!"
"NOW!!"

This chant would be good for at least another 20 years. My favorite variation would come at the 1989 Housing Now! march more than a year later. My Boston affinity group came up with "Hey you's guys! How's about a house!"

Much better.

Only a few leaders actually knew where the house was. We came to a stop at a boarded-up Victorian, and a half dozen guys raced up the steps with crowbars to pry at the plywood. An advance contingent was to have taken care of this. They were there and inside, but hadn't managed to loosen the nails.

Within a minute there were about ten cop cars on the street and a couple of horses. These were Boston cops. They don't fuck around.

The plywood came off just as the police swarmed the house. The crowd lost it as cops started throwing bodies down the stairs. No one was prepared for a police riot, and things escalated within seconds to full-on pandemonium, which only made the police more aggressive. They pushed us back to the street, and then to the sidewalk on the other side.

I was stalking back and forth on the street and sidewalk, alternately screaming chants and yelling at cops. I saw one near by catch another's eye, point to me, and say, "him." They closed in.

For me, nothing brings on hyper-focus and a sense of calm like the prospect of getting my ass kicked. I locked eyes with the lead cop, raised my hands loosely over my shoulders, and slowly backed away.

Suddenly, they turned and ran. My scrawny hippy ass was saved by dumb luck and distraction.

The media had arrived, and several cameras were trained on a police horse as it trotted straight down a crowded sidewalk to bowl over a septuagenarian former nun. The cops seemed to know this was the end. The de-escalation was immediate. An ambulance arrived, and she was taken away for treatment of minor injuries. A few arrests were made, but most of us just huddled for awhile in small groups and walked away.

The story played the same way in nearly all of the media. Peaceful protest turns violent. The violence was blamed on the cops, and the TV stations found their footage of the horse running over the old lady irresistible.

This, I decided, was the revolution I was looking for. I'd found my people.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two
The Street Years: Part Three

The Street Years: Part Two

Street Magazine was the place where my new life began to come together. Al Nidle coaxed us into his world with visions of building Street into the next Rolling Stone, and we were happy to suspend judgment and come along for the ride. We lived on no money on the first floor of an Alston-Brighton rental house. Every one of us, in our own way, was crazy, although I was probably the sanest of the lot. A lonely old lady lived upstairs, and light brown patches spread across our ceiling from the urine of a hundred cats. Most nights, you could hear her moan and cry.

As publisher, Al was the guy who held the vision, opened the mail, and sold the ads. He was a grandiose narcissist with charisma to spare, and colored in each of the first 2,000 copies with crayon to complete the cover design. Al refused to work, and reserved the right to make his living off of our irregularly published magazine. He had a wife and an infant daughter who would visit occasionally, but was too self-absorbed to be of much use to them.

His forty-something friend David lived in a closet off of Al's living room-office-bedroom. David had a photographic memory, and could quote many of the books he'd read verbatim, but had trouble organizing his thoughts. I came to think of our conversations as intellectual pinball. While David had no formal role in the publication, he more or less functioned as Al's aide-de-camp. With his night-time dish washing job, he was the only one of us with regular work.

Jon was someone I quickly came to regard as an authentic genius. His bedroom was our production center and he'd painted a completely accurate nude self-portrait on his door. At twenty-two or so, he was a wildly prolific cartoonist, an amateur musician, and a talented graphic artist whose idea was to completely redesign each issue of the magazine so that it would never get stale. Jon drank too much and would disappear behind his door for days at a time. His creative jags, too, would go on for largely sleepless days on end. Jon temped a bit, but mostly spent his time working as an artist. A starving artist.

His bi-polar and anorexic mother Collete lived in a small bedroom just off of the tiny kitchen. She had yellowish hair, sunken eyes, and a quick wit, and would go in and out of psychotic episodes. My wife and I spent a lot of time encouraging Collette to eat, and making sure there were food bank groceries in the cupboard so that she might starve a bit less quickly.

Mine was the other room in the front of the house, which might have once been the master bedroom. I had a mattress on the floor and a chair, and kept the few clothes and other things that I had in a couple of boxes. I also still had the guitar that I'd bought in the Air Force, and we all played it. While none of us were any good, Jon had the most talent, and could do a dead on knock off of Devo's Mongoloid. I worked nights as a proof-reader at Stone & Webster, a huge engineering firm located near South Station. This paid better than other temp jobs I'd had, but I only got about twenty hours a week.

The second month we were there, Al took everybody's rent money and spent the $600 on a used Mac Plus without asking. This, with its two megs of RAM and 20 MB hard drive, was our only computer. Up til then, we'd been producing Street by sneaking into the Harvard computer lab. They rarely checked IDs and didn't seem to care if we were students or not. Since we still didn't own a printer, this was where we'd run the pages when we went to press.

After that, I don't think we ever paid rent again.

There was serious discussion of staging a break in of a downtown office that we knew of to steal their state of the art Mac IIci computers and laser printers. The plan involved explosions and flares to distract the police while the rest of us stealthily made off with the goods. Fortunately, we all got cold feet when it came time to actually make the heist.

We were working on our second issue together when, on October 19, 1987, the Dow lost $500 billion in a single day to add up to the biggest stock market crash in history. Our cover became a soup line with Jon's caricatures of various Boston personalities dressed in rags. "We're having a Great Depression" the tag line read.

There was a tent city in Cambridge in a big empty lot near the Necco candy factory on Mass Ave. I'd go there to hang out and got to know a few of the homeless leaders. There was always some sort of a high drama crisis unfolding. I tried to be helpful, but they didn't have much use for me. I was there as press, and did what I could to tell their story.

We saw ourselves as the gonzo documentarians of the impoverished urban lunatic fringe, and were well-positioned personally to understand the subject. Al had this vision of Cambridge as the Haight-Ashbury of the East Coast, but two decades later, and with homeless people instead of flower children.

Jon went to work developing an ad kit for Al, and various other bits of marketing paraphernalia. We had tons of heart, and Al and Jon fed each other's mania, but we didn't have the first idea, really, of what we were doing. Our Ché stickers, for example, invoked the signature likeness and read "Ché led a revolution and never sent a piece of junk mail. We're running a Magazine the same way."

The name of our publication was nowhere in there to be found. As far as we were concerned, branding was something that happened to cows and horses in Montana.

Eventually, an eviction notice was posted on the front door. We studied it carefully. The language was makeshift and it seemed to have been run off on someone's personal printer. If it didn't come from the Sheriff, we decided, we weren't all that worried. By now, it was January. The gas heat was shut off, but the electricity and water, which regularly froze in our bathroom sink, remained. I started spending the colder nights at Carolyn's place out in Jamaica Plain.

By then, we at Street Magazine central were beginning to hate each other. It became clear to Jon and I that what little money the paper raised was going directly to Al, who treated the paper's bank account as if it were his own. We'd spend hours working out decisions between ourselves, and then Al would just do whatever he liked. Slowly, Jon and I moved toward a coup.

The name, we found, wasn't trademarked. There was nothing to prevent us, the editor and art director, from ousting the publisher altogether. I was the primary architect. We plotted in bars and coffee shops, kept our plans to ourselves, and saved the money from our jobs to make first and last month's rent in a new place. Once we located a second floor walk-up near Somerville's Davis Square, we swung into action.

One sparkling blue day in February, while Jon and I were both at work and Al was out of the house, Carolyn and Collette put the Mac Plus in its little carrying case, stuck it in the car trunk, and drove away from the Alston-Brighton apartment for good. Jon and I broke the news to Al. He was off the masthead. His warlock friend Daemon put a curse on us. For all I know, it worked.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Year of Living Dangerously

On my eighteenth birthday, my sister brought my mother over to the house to try and normalize relations. My present was a blue jeans get-up that had elephant bells, a tight fit around the ass, and a vest to match. They brought a cake. We had a family moment amid the empty beer cans.

After that, I wore the new outfit constantly. My hair grew out. I was finally cool.

Meanwhile, life at the party house was becoming untenable. Mike was a nasty drunk, and it was taking less and less to get him there. By the time I left, he was down to an hour from first beer to belligerent dick. The parties were getting larger and more out of control, and police were showing up regularly to close us down.

I moved in with a friend I didn't like all that much to share an attic room in a house that had been partitioned all to shit. The landlord was a morbidly obese middle-aged Pepsi addict who worked at a tire shop. His name was Bob and he was a friend of Mike's. Saturday mornings we'd get high and watch cartoons. As landlords of shit housing go, he was a pretty decent guy. He got cheap rent to deal with the rest of us.

On the first floor, next to Bob's place, lived Cliff and Daisy. They were 40 going on 60 and usually drunk by three in the afternoon. Cliff and Daisy were talkers, and while I'd try to avoid them as I came and went, it wasn't always easy. Evenings at home basically meant hanging out in my attic cubby hole or getting loose with the neighbors. One night, Daisy sat close to me on the stairwell and asked if I believed in free love.

I said no.

Later, I would sell my dilapidated Country Squire station wagon to Cliff for $75. When we went to the DMV to transfer the registration his hands were shaking so badly he could barely sign his name. We stopped at a drive thru on the way home for a pint of White Port.

For a while, I drove this car with the gas line unhooked from its rear wheel well grommets and run up the side and through the back window into a two gallon can perched on the seat. I smoked. I knew this was dangerous, but, like all eighteen year olds, assumed immortality.

My mom saw it and wailed that this was "a time bomb." I told her not to worry.

The house with Mike was only three blocks away and I still hung out with them. Pat took over my room when I left, and Mike's underage girlfriend had gotten sick of his shit and moved her cute little ass into Pat's room. Now Mike was wasted pretty much all the time and stumbled around in a wounded fog. The large nightly parties continued.

A friend and I had left one of these to get cigarettes, and when we returned, there were eight police cars parked in a broad semi-circle, shining their floods on the house. Several of the cops had taken firing stances behind their open car doors. Pat came out with a rifle cracked open at the bolt held high above his head. The police rushed to take his weapon and took him down in cuffs.

Pat had told some kid to leave who didn't feel like it, and pulled out a rifle to make his point. The kid was a jerk and called the cops. In the end, no charges were filed, but it was a wake-up call for Mike. He moved back home with his mom, joined AA, and became a huge fan of the PTL club. This, for him, was all a step in the right direction. He'd always been a wiz with small electronics, and soon found happiness fixing toasters and stuff at the downtown Goodwill.

Meanwhile I moved several more times and worked as I could. The summer job at Augustana was soon over. I lied about my ability to drive a standard to get a landscaping job and managed to fake my way through. This was back breaking work and I quit in less than a month. It was a frigid morning, and I was on my hands and knees in front of a Burger King planting what seemed like hundreds of evenly spaced three inch seedlings. I decided it wasn't worth it and wandered off without a word.

They tried to stiff me on the final paycheck, but I went to some hole in the wall legal aid outfit and they heard me out and wrote a letter. The check was ready within days.

I spent a few weeks digging ditches in hard red clay with a jack hammer, did a bit of farm labor, and worked for several months in a potato chip factory. This involved driving an elevated tractor — called a Spudnik — that was outfitted with a conveyor belt shovel blade into semis filled with potatoes. The spuds would run down the belt and up a chute to drop onto a 10-foot brown mountain. We'd walk around on top and spread them about with big push brooms.

For a few months I lived in a nice rooming house, but it was more than I could afford. There were a couple of different roadside motels that charged weekly rent. When coming up with a month's rent no longer worked, these were a good fall back. I was always on the lookout for a cheaper place. The last four or five months I lived in Sioux Falls I was in a room above the Arrow Bar and across from the Nashville Club. Out my window, I'd see the regulars wait on the sidewalk for the doors to re-open at seven.

By then I'd found full-time work at Component Manufacturing, a light assembly operation that made mobile home rafters. In Sioux Falls, there was plenty of work if you were eighteen and willing to accept minimum wage and no benefits. The good union jobs were all in meatpacking, and although these were dangerous and had dismal work conditions, everyone wanted in.

I was hanging with some pretty rough people, and they didn't always like me. There were a few different girlfriends at that time, and there were hard feelings around one named Lisa whose last boyfriend was less than resigned. I pulled her out of a fight one night when she got jumped at a party, and that pissed some people off. Her nose had been bitten up, but not badly enough to need stitches.

A few weeks later, I was hitching my way downtown and hopped into the back of a pick-up. My body tensed, but I didn't pay attention. The truck sped out of town. I didn't have the guts to jump. It took dirt roads off the highway to a wooded area. When the truck stopped, I was alone with three enemies. One was the girl who had jumped Lisa, and there were two big guys as well. She held the knife.

"Take off your clothes," she ordered. I looked at the knife. "Why?" "I'm not going to cut it off," she laughed. "Just do it." There was a kick from behind. "Now." I did it.

I was forced to roll in the mud. They kicked me a few more times, took my clothes, and left. I made my way through the woods to a small lake, and there were people and cars. I called out from the bushes. Some guy brought me a blanket and gave me a ride to my place above the Arrow.

I wrapped a steel chin-up bar with friction tape to offer a better grip and tracked them down. A party was happening. They were expected. I went there.

A friend's step mom who was maybe thirty-five and had known me since I was fifteen caught wind of my plan and showed up to intervene. She pulled me out of the house to talk underneath a fire escape. I'd go to prison, she said. It wasn't worth it. Our faces were close. She kissed me on the lips.

We got high and the adrenaline slowly drained away. I took my taped bar and left. She dropped me off downtown and we never spoke again of what had happened.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Life Begins At Seventeen

After the disastrous sophomore year of high school, my life took an unexpected turn for the better. The sessions with a counselor seemed to have had some effect upon my parents. Suddenly, I was allowed to have friends and to come and go like a normal teenager.

I'd quit my job at the Canton Cafe when, after three years, the Wong family still refused to bring my pay up to minimum wage. My small cut of the waitress' tips made this legal. I now worked at the Country Kitchen, a Denny's-like chain. I made new friends. Getting high was part of the job. The lower rungs of food service are like that.

When a popular manager was fired after an ownership change, me and the lead fry cook decided to fuck them. It was a Sunday and crazy busy. I let the dishes back up almost to the door. Mark slowed down on the orders. When the point of maximum chaos met with the height of noon rush, we walked out. A waitress quit along with us.

This was my first overt act of labor rebellion. I don't know that it accomplished anything, but it was glorious. I soon found a similar crap job at a pancake house on Minnesota Avenue.

My junior year proceeded uneventfully. The deal with my parents was that if I went to school, they'd leave me alone. This worked surprisingly well. While I can't say I'd come to like school, I read a lot, and my grades were acceptable. This was a start.

It started to look like I'd finish high school.

Something else happened as well. I grew. The pre-adolescent pudginess went away and I got long and skinny. I had a date or two.

I was actually liking my life. I had friends. I had freedom. While this was the year I discovered the joys of purple haze and microdot, the drug use was still much more moderate. It was more about having fun than shutting down.

But the détente with my parents was about to end. I arrived home from a post-school year party at 1 a.m. and was met by my father at the door. "Even Cinderella was home by midnight," he said. "Whatever," I replied. I was grounded for the rest of the summer.

The next day, they went to work. I packed a box and left.

By the end of the week my stuff was tossed and my bedroom converted to an ironing room. They canceled my life insurance. This was a passive-aggressive insurance agent's way of saying, "You're disowned."

I soon felt as though my previous life had ceased to exist. It was like being hatched anew at seventeen. I felt that way for a very long time. Years later, when I was married, my wife put a photo of her family on our mantle. I placed an egg atop a candle holder.

For the next month or so I revolved between the living room of a girl I barely knew, a couch in apartment of another casual friend, and a sleeping bag on an air mattress in the garage of yet someone else. I didn't want to wear out my welcome anywhere, so I did what I could to tread lightly.

I had a small savings, and quit my pancake house job the day I left home. It was a kid's job and wasn't enough money to really help anyway. I also didn't want to be that easily found.

Hunger was something that, in the coming years, I'd come to understand. I showed up one afternoon at the Canton Cafe and asked the waitresses I'd once worked with for a hamburger and french fries. Barbara bought the meal out of tips and it sat before me on the counter. I was overwhelmed by the moment.

"Hasn't anyone ever given you anything before," she asked?

No. Not like this.

The friend with the garage, a guy named Mike who was a few years older than I and already had a serious drinking problem, planned to move out soon and get a place with me. We found a small two bedroom house to rent. It was cheap. This was, after all, Sioux Falls in 1978.

Returning to school in the fall ceased to be an option. The counselor at Washington High said they just weren't set up to handle emancipated students, and that If I wanted to graduate, I'd have to move back home. I took the GED without studying and passed with flying colors.

Most work required either a driver's liscense or that I be 18, so the job search wasn't going so well. Feeling some desperation, I told someone at the employment center that I needed work soon or I'd be literally on the street. He sent me to a storefront that did CETA job placement. This was a remnant of the War on Poverty. I was soon employed as a maintenance trainee at Augustana College.

The other CETA placement in the Augustana maintenance pool was a stoner named Pat whose parents had died. He had a small house and a social security check. We became good friends.

I did everything from shingling roofs to digging ditches. Most of the time, I followed around a straitlaced coffee-swilling septuagenarian Swede named Buell. After he went home, Pat and I would park the maintenance truck somewhere off campus, have a beer, get high, and then drive back to punch out at five.

I started taking whitecross that summer and loved how speed made me feel. The crash after a three or four day run, however, was brutal. I decided I liked it too much and left it alone. This was one of my better decisions of that period.

Nearly thirty years later, a mid-life ADHD diagnosis got me a prescription to Adderall, a much cleaner version of the same stuff.

Every high school kid who is half-way hip knows of a house where — pretty much any night of the week — odds are a party is going on. I lived in that house. There was a liquor store across the street that didn't seem too concerned about ID. We kept them in business.

I lost my virginity near the end of the summer. A couple of Indian chicks stopped to talk while we were on the front porch drinking beers. The fair was in town. We all went. I came home and went to sleep. Shortly after, my bedroom door opened and there was my new friend. She did all the work. I barely knew where to put the thing. Like most first times, this was not the stuff of fantasy. As she rode up and down, I felt completely outside the moment. It ended and she asked what was wrong.

The next day she brought flowers. Classy. I never saw her again.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Everybody Must Get Stoned

By thirteen, I was well on my way to my new identity as a pothead. In 1973, I was all about Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Yes, Pink Floyd, and getting high as often as possible. My best friend and I worked as dishwasher/busboys at the Canton Cafe. School nights we were home by ten, but Fridays and Saturdays the place closed at 2 a.m. We'd finish mopping the floor and leave at around 3. We got high before work, on our breaks, and after we got off when we'd go out for breakfast.

At Saint Mary's, my chronic truancy began in the seventh grade. I hated everything about school. I was physically clumsy, emotionally immature, and near the bottom of the social food chain. My homework was never done, since most evenings were spent huffing Pam or finding other forms of trouble. I was behind in most things and couldn't really focus very well on course work anyway. Life at home was a nightmare. I got good at being checked out in almost any situation where adults were involved.

One fall, there was a tragedy at nearby McKennan Park where a kid chased a kite into a tree and came in contact with a power line. He died instantly. I would often fantasize about following his example. Obviously, I never did.

As shut down as I was, I was still precocious, but mostly in ways that didn't help. In social studies we did a segment on systems of government. I said that Communism and Christianity had a good deal in common on paper, but neither really lived up to their promo. This merited a trip to Monsignor Sullivan's office, where I listened to a sanctimonious, late-model Mercedes driving old fart ramble about lost sheep. My mom said, "You never had these ideas before you started hanging around with Jeff Thompson."

Jeff was three years older, lived two houses down, and was the embodiment of cool. He had Robert Plant hair, knew karate, and played guitar in a rock band. While I was a late-bloomer, Jeff could have passed for twenty at sixteen, and often did. His band, named for a vinyl faux-masonry sold by the yard in hardware stores, was called Z-Brick. They rocked. Jeff had an older brother named Bob who was an honest-to-god hippy, and all the other neighborhood hippies congregated at his house.

Bob had done jail time for what was quite possibly the dumbest robbery ever committed in Sioux Falls. He pretended to beat up the manager of the Pizza Hut where he worked and locked him in the walk-in cooler just before the alarm was tripped. There was a light dusting of snow that night. It was early morning. The cops followed the tire tracks right to his house. Everyone got fired and the whole town had a good laugh.

Jeff and my other friends from the neighborhood were into rock & roll, cars, getting high, and girls, pretty much in that order. I was never cool, but at least they let me hang around. Our house was a place for them to party.

My sister and I learned we were adopted when we found paperwork in a desk at the end of the hall. I was already sufficiently alienated to not much care. My sister, on the other hand, kind of lost it. Within a year she was stealing large amounts of money from my parents by forging checks for cash to the local grocery store. The money went to junk food, pot, and buying the attention of one of the neighborhood boys who pretended to like her. She was morbidly obese. It was sad.

As much as I hated my parents, I knew they didn't have any money. The check writing went on for months and escalated over time. She wouldn't stop. I finally told my mother. She was in the basement doing laundry. I was as clear as I could be. Checks. Forged signatures. Several times a week. A few days later she told me that she'd looked into it, and that I must have been mistaken. I let it drop.

About a month later, my sister and I were smoking with a friend at the rock fireplace behind our garage when we heard brakes screech and a car door slam. It was my dad. "How could you do this ," he bellowed as he struck at her with his fists. "You've ruined me!" His rage had reduced him to tears. Terry was bawling. My stomach turned to ice.

It was arranged for me to leave and spend the night at a friend's.

I never understood how the forgery could have gone on as long as it did without being noticed. Once I'd said something, I figured it was out of my hands. I decided my sister had something on them. Something terrible. Something I didn't want to know about. And that my mother, for her own reasons, had covered.

In 1974, I started ninth grade at O'Gorman High, the Catholic school across town. My sister was already there. She never went to classes either. Neither of us were doing very well. In the middle of my first year she dropped out, never to return. My parents tried various things. Weight Watchers, counseling, Junior Achievement. Nothing took. The idea of her returning to school was soon dropped.

My mother asked our parish priest whether Terry might be possessed by Satan, and he said the problem could be found much closer to home. That was the end of that relationship.

They moved their business to a few blocks from our house and tried to resume their role as parents, but their efforts were ham handed and authoritarian and did more harm than good. They were the enemy, and we resisted.

My truancy became a full-time commitment. I was stoned most of the time. Weekends were spent in detention under the kid-hating glare of Father Wagner, the closeted gay Principal who was fooling nobody.

All the kids called him Father Fagner, or Father Fag for short. But we wanted it both ways. The second most hated teacher at O'Gorman was the woman who ran detention study hall. Apparently, her and Father Fag were an item.

In high school, there were the jocks, the nerds, and the heads. My choice was clear. I loved everything about stoner culture. Nothing was as cool as a forty dollar lid of Columbian.

My friends all had little pipes designed for smokeless hits between classes in the boys room. We passed joints in the grassy quadrangle over lunch. The essential high school car accessories were an eight-track and a bong. School was little more than a series of occasions to get high. I was too bored to even know how bored I was.

The truancies led to a series of suspensions, and finally, a few months into tenth grade, expulsion. As my mother walked me out of the administrative office where we had received the news she turned to me and said, "How does it feel to be a failure?"

I treated it as a rhetorical question.

I was enrolled immediately in the downtown public high school. My days were spent a few blocks away at Uncle Earnie's Pinball Arcade, a smoky little store front with about ten machines and a couple of pool tables. When the school truant officer was spotted, an alarm was sounded and we disappeared out the back door or into the basement until the threat had passed. There were a few suspensions, and by the end of the year I was expelled from there as well.

Next, I went to summer school at Lincoln, the high school in the wealthier part of town. A gym teacher caught me smoking a joint on the sidewalk before class, which got me expelled for the third time that year. I made up information for the police about my source, fingering some nobody losers that I didn't need to worry about.

The charges were dropped but I was required to see a counselor. He met with my mother and I together and then with her alone. The next week, I walked to his Augustana College office to see him on my own. Whatever she'd said to him, it must have been a thing to behold. She was bat shit crazy and couldn't feign normalcy to save her life.

He told me I wasn't the problem. My family, he said, just wasn't a good place to be. I needed to get out as soon as I possibly could. I had to hang on for another year or two.

I'd been waiting all my life for that. I could leave. The thought kept me going.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Young, Gifted, and Miserable

I wasn't exactly a socially gifted kid. Prior to starting school, there was one playmate other than my sister, and she was more Terry's friend than mine. I don't recall making any friends in kindergarten. I was overweight and crew cuts were out of style, even for six year olds. There might as well have been a big "L" branded on my forehead. I did, however, always get to be the grocer in our pretend store. I could make change.

In the summer of 1967. I remember finding a button on the ground that sparkled with 3-D reflective circles and said "Have a Ball." This I thought, was the coolest thing ever. My mother took it away. I asked what was wrong and she said, "Haven't you ever heard of a double-entendre?"

School for me was all about social embarrassment and standing out as a sort of a super nerd. I have two defining memories of first grade that capture the period nicely. The first is sitting in Sister Bernice's classroom at night awaiting our turn to go on for the Christmas play. I was stripped down to underwear, keenly aware of being fat. I had been cast as a plum pudding. I would wear a brown sack that resembled a bean bag chair and do a little plum pudding dance. But my mother had forgotten the tights that would complete the costume, and I was to wear the little girl's who sat next to me. She complained that I would stretch them out. My crying only added to the humiliation.

The other was the night that Sister Bernice called my parents to tell them I had attained a near perfect score on the Iowa Basic standardized test. My parents were thrilled. I was a genius, they said. Then my mother tickled me and wouldn't stop until I cried.

This evidence of high intelligence worked against me throughout grade school. My refusal to color within the lines was a major issue, as was my tendency to drift off in class.

Second grade was where it pretty much all went to shit. Mrs. Fahrendorf was on a mission, and there were numerous conferences with my mom. I didn't pay attention. My desk was messy. My penmanship was poor. Penmanship, in Catholic schools, is a very big deal. I was a voracious reader and skipped over all the little kid lit to stuff like encyclopedias and the Hardy Boys. I read the entire box of Agatha Christie paperbacks my mom kept in the basement.

I started to dread school, but home wasn't much better. My dad was gone most of the time to his new job that he hated with New York Life. I defeated him at chess when I was nine and it sent him into one of his red-faced tantrums. My mother was deeply unhappy, but beating my sister and I over small things always seemed to cheer her up. I was a bed wetter. This humiliation added morning beatings to the routine.

Ominously, I have no recollection of third grade at all. Not where the classroom was. Not the teachers name. Not her face. Nothing. By fourth grade, I was labeled as bright but lazy. Myself and a girl named Margaret were always the last ones standing for spelling bees, but my grades were low average and I was the last kid to memorize the multiplication tables.

That year, my parents borrowed money from my grandfather and bought an insurance agency in Madison, South Dakota, a small town about sixty miles out of Sioux Falls. My mother went to work along with my dad. She hadn't worked since she'd been a Conoco girl, pumping gas in shorts during the War. It seemed to agree with her. She was the secretary, but her real job was to try and get my OCD dad to his appointments on time. This was maybe a 50/50 proposition.

Summers and weekends, we'd make the trip to Madison with them. We'd hang out in the lobby and read and play, walk around the teeny downtown, or go to the park a few blocks away. There was a lot of sitting in the car waiting for our parents to complete sales visits. When school was in, we'd make our own dinners, watch TV, and go to bed. The freezer was stocked with Morton pot pies, Swanson TV dinners, and fish sticks. Mom and dad would arrive home anywhere between nine p.m. and two in the morning.

Money was desperate and family life was tense. My sister and I both had bank accounts in which we deposited part of our allowances and learned of the miracle of compound interest. Our parents zeroed these out and took the coins from our piggy banks as well. There were no apologies, and that was the end of our savings accounts.

By fifth and sixth grade, we started to go wild. We'd never had any real freedom before, so our newly unsupervised lives felt like a gift from heaven. We started inviting local teens in to drink, and would call Madison to hang up. If they answered, we'd know we had another hour.

My sister and I would take my mom's car on joyrides with our friends. I started to shoplift for fun several times a day. I eventually got caught, and they called my parents at work. No charges were filed. After that, I mostly stopped

By then it was the early seventies, and the counterculture was in full swing in Sioux Falls. My mother was a member of the Catholic Daughters of America, which blacklisted Jesus Christ Superstar over the Mary Magdalene heresy. I listened to it obsessively in my friends basement across the street and to this day can hear it clearly in my head from beginning to end.

We'd ride our bikes to the New World Rising head shop over by the K-Mart and I'd lay on the slanted floor of the black light room and look at the velvety colors of the posters. This was a time when even the K-Mart had a hippy shit section where you could get your incense and beaded curtains and lava lamps and such. But New World Rising had cooler art, bongs behind the counter, and smelled like sandalwood.

One poster of two elephants fucking read, "Don't switch Dicks in the middle of a screw. Vote Nixon in '72."

Smoking and drugs began in fifth grade or so. I learned that if you sprayed Pam cooking spray into a bread sack and inhaled, you would get an intense body-buzz and slip into a hallucinatory dream state. Glue and gasoline did the same thing, but Pam was our favorite.

One afternoon, my sister and I came home from school for lunch and started huffing Pam with some friends. I was laying on the kitchen table when she grabbed me by the hair, which made me want to kill her. She grabbed a knife, and I tried to knock it out of her hand. I laid open the side of my wrist down to the tendon. We called an ambulance, and I got ten stitches to close it up at the local clinic. I still have a horseshoe shaped scar.

I told the nurse I'd been washing dishes and a glass broke while my hand was inside of it. They sent in the social worker. Her huge and glacially blue eyes were magnified by her glasses. Those eyes became the whole room. She asked me to say what really happened.

"I was washing a glass when it broke. I told you."

I knew how to lie. You just stared right back and stuck to the story. Nothing to it.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Beginnings

I was born on September 30, 1960, in Fargo, ND. A mother was involved. At some point, so was a father. Or so I surmise. That's as much as I know.

The transfer was swift. Healthy white American babies rarely linger in orphanages. My sister Terry arrived first. For three months of the year we were the same age. We learned of our adoptions while rummaging through a forbidden desk. We were twelve.

Our parents said it had never been a secret. We must have forgotten.

My first memory is of the Jolly Green Giant. I'm in a small cluttered living room, sitting in a high chair. Dinner is in front of me, and the family is in front of a black and white TV. The Green Giant has a nice smile and a square jaw. Peas are everywhere. Not just any peas. Green Giant peas. His voice is deep but friendly. I don't know how I know that he's green, but I just do. Ho, ho, ho. Green Giant.

My second memory, I've always thought, was later that night, although it may not have been. I'm face down with my pajamas around my knees. My mother has inserted a suppository with a pencil. She's delighted with herself because she's hit upon the right tool for the job. The eraser has a soft tip. My sister is in the crib across the room, and a lamp is on the white bureau between us. It has red felt ship's wheels glued to a white shade. The base is a night light that, with its copper and red glass, looks like a lantern.

She describes how it went in to my father, who has somehow wandered into the room. "Ploop!" Later, when I learn the word onomatopoeia, I think of this moment.

My only other memory of our time in Fargo has to do with leaving. Just as I turned two, we moved to Sioux Falls, SD. There is a two car caravan, and my mother has the lead with my sister and I sleeping in the back and our father behind us pulling the trailer. It is night. I remember a roadside conference with his headlights shining into our car.

We moved to a small two bedroom rental house with a yard and a red wooden fence. When we dug in the backyard sand pit we'd find charcoal. I drew big Xs on each of the boards. There was a girl next door named Tammy. Her older brother died in a gun accident in their living room, but we were too young to understand. The adults were sad.

A big family lived across the street with a boy around our age, but our parents didn't approve of them, so we rarely saw him.

My dad sold insurance for Universal Underwriters, and was often gone for long stretches. He was pretty good at it. One day a truck arrived with prizes he'd received as premiums. There was a multi-band radio, a Weber grill, and a three speed english racer. He had a Master's degree in romance languages and could read Don Quixote in the original classical Spanish, but opted against an academic life for a bread and butter career in sales.

He would later say this was his life's biggest mistake.

My mother was of that generation of women who, when asked to describe their occupation, would write "housewife." She ran a pathologically orderly home. Our toys, some wood blocks, a plastic bowling pin set, and some crayons and paper, were stored in a closet at the end of the hall, and would come out when she said so. She was what was then described as "strict."

We mostly played outside. We had red trikes and a wagon. I was terrified of dragonflies, but loved fireworks and the Fourth of July. My dad would sit in a lawn chair, drink beer, and smoke while he ignited snakes and sparklers for our benefit.

The world was an animated place, full of things I didn't understand. I remember squinting my eyes at streetlights in the backseat of the car at night, and asking my mother whether the sharp spikes of light that would grow long and short as I moved my eyelids were real. She didn't understand the question.

My mother slammed on her car brakes once to avoid going through a red right and I pitched into the seat in front of me. From that moment on I thought red lights threw up some sort of an invisible wall that made cars stop. I also thought ear aches were caused by tiny rakes embedded in one's ear.

The days started and ended with TV. My sister and I would get up before our parents and look at the test pattern, which had a drawing of an indian in a war bonnet. Davey and Goliath was always the first thing on. There was also Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo. Early evenings, the local weatherman did double duty as Captain 11, and showed cartoons while managing a live audience of kids. During commercial breaks he yelled at us. It was common knowledge that he was an alcoholic.

He was the original Krusty the Clown, but Nordic, and in a pilot's outfit.

Dinner was usually in the living room. We'd watch the Honeymooners, Gunsmoke, Ed Sullivan, Gomer Pyle, and Petticoat Junction. On hot summer nights we'd get into our pajamas and go for a drive in the family's 1956 Chevy Bel Air.

Christ the King Church was a few blocks down the street. When my mother drove past she would always gently strike her heart three times with the inside of her closed fist. A Saint Christopher statue with a magnetic base perched on the metal dashboard.

My most momentous memories from that time were all from television. On Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In our Catholic home, the TV was on constantly. On Sunday, February 9, 1964, we had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and canned string beans for dinner and watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show along with 76 million other Americans. "Mopheads" my parents called them.

Life was uneventful, and we were mostly happy. My sister went to kindergarten and I was jealous. I was on the cusp of being old enough, but everyone thought it best that I wait so Terry and I wouldn't be in the same grade.

That summer, my parents bought a modest three bedroom one bathroom stucco house about ten blocks from Saint Mary's School, and my sister and I got our own rooms. There was a big crab apple tree in the back yard next to a cement and rock fireplace that had stone benches attached on each side. I went into kindergarten at a nearby public school while my sister started first grade at Saint Mary's.

Shortly after we moved, my dad was fired from his job. The way we heard it was that daddy stood up for something he thought was right, and he lost his job because the people in charge had no ethics. Our lives changed. We kept the house, but things got very tight for a long time.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Street Years: Part One

Before college, I was a working class vet with no money. After college, I was a working class vet with no money and a degree in social theory. In terms of my overall employability, not much had changed.

As my time at UMass-Amherst drew to a close, I prepared for my move to Boston by unloading whatever I could. I tried selling the diamond ring I'd bought when I almost got married in the Air Force, but no one wanted it. My stereo and the record collection I'd built over the military and college years went instead. I also sold my books.

I scraped together three or four hundred dollars. In Amherst, many of the frats had summer sublet signs in their windows. I started calling around in Boston and soon found a room in a Brookline frat house near BU. Two hundred fifty dollars paid my rent through the summer. I had a roommate. He was an asshole.

I'd hoped, on the strength of having started critical times and my experience at the Student Communications Office, to land a job as a typesetter. That plan didn't work out. During one interview at a mom and pop print shop in Brookline, I proudly showed off what I had done. The owner held the copy of critical times aloft with thumb and forefinger as if I'd just wiped my ass with it and noted that the text wasn't properly aligned across the columns. My pride and joy was "a rag," and wasn't impressing anyone. Worse, it seemed to scare them off.

The one offer I did get, I rejected. A small shop that did specialty printing for the stock market needed a night typesetter. This presented a dilemma. The stock market, as far as I was concerned, was a dark satanic force that dripped with the blood of children. College had ruined me. And yet, I needed work. I hedged that the night hours would be too inconvenient. They countered with a compromise. I said I wasn't really a typist, and they said "no problem, it's really only formatting anyway." I said the pay was too low, and they boosted it up a bit. Finally, I just said no. I wasn't going to "sell out" less than two weeks out of college.

The agency that tried to place me called to follow-up. "Does this have something to do with your major in college," they asked. I said yeah. They stopped calling.

Instead, I worked as a temp at University Hospital, stocking shelves and carts in the warehouse. It was a lot like my pre-college job at Action Crash Parts in Cambridge, except the pay was a little better and the warehouse was cleaner. The difference was that hospitals are all about status, and it was clear that mine was somewhere near rock bottom.

As a cart-pushing, shelf-stocking, order-filling menial laborer, I was beneath the notice of other hospital employees. The only people who talked to me were other cart pushers and janitorial staff. A few of these tried to enlist me in a plan to steal syringes and needles for street sales. This, when I wouldn't do it, placed me on the outs with some of these as well.

I mentioned this to a co-worker — a guy my age from Southy — and he started railing against the "niggers." It was my first brush with the famed Boston racism. I told him that kind of talk made me want to puke. Later, as we smoked some of his pot in a nearby park over lunch, he said all his friends talked like that, and that he didn't mean it. He thanked me for saying something. He wasn't a bad guy. He just wanted to fit in, like everybody else.

I'd listen to the Iran-contra hearings while I pushed pallets around with a hand truck and stacked up bedpans. I stocked carts with bandages and antiseptics and IV tubes and whatever else was on the list and then pushed them around the hospital, utterly invisible in my low-status anonymity. Every hour or two I'd take the elevator to smoke outside. I'd picked that up again at the frat house.

I was living in a rogue house. This is what happens when frats are unable to meet whatever official credentialing is required. I didn't really understand it or much care. All I knew was that while these guys lived in a house that was identified by three greek letters, it wasn't really even a frat.

As the summer boarder, I was an outsider to the life of the house, and didn't really want to know them any more than they wanted to know me. All of my worst preconceptions were confirmed. No one washed dishes. Ever. There was mold in the sink and in the fridge and the kitchen was more or less unusable. If I had to spend time in the house other than to sleep, it was usually on the porch, away from the rotten garbage smell that permeated the first floor.

The guys spent a lot of time watching sports and porn and all seemed to have money. Some more than others. There was one kid who drove a late model jeep and had a cel phone the size of a shoe that decided he was going to be a fish hobbyist as well. He set up a saltwater tank in his bedroom. The baby lobster kept eating his expensive tropical fish, and each time it happened he would come tearing down the stairs in a rage. I thought this was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

Having money, however, didn't stop them from stealing. During my time there the ring that I couldn't sell in college disappeared from my room, and my bike, the only real thing of value I owned, disappeared from the front foyer. No one, of course, knew a thing.

While I was still in college, I'd found a Cambridge-based tabloid called Street Magazine at Food for Thought, Amherst's radical bookstore. The paper had a sort of a grass-roots hip up-from-the-streets feel to it, and had progressive politics without feeling sectarian or cultish. It was exactly what I wanted to be doing.

I called the publisher, a little guy with tiny oval glasses named Al Nidle, and arranged a meeting. As it turned out, his editor and art director, Tom Bell and Seth Feinberg, has just quit and he was looking for someone new. Unbelievably, I was enough of an idiot to not see that as a problem.

I had company. Seth's friend, Jon Fountain, wanted the art director job. Jon was a recent BU grad who lived in a Cambridge basement near Julia Child's house, caring for the owner's retarded son. Jon's charge, who was a full grown man, had a penchant for shouting "put the Vaseline on your penis" in public, and running off with no clothes until Jon could wrestle him back inside.

Jon's situation made mine look almost desirable. We both met with Al, and started making plans for where we were going to take Street. Al's closest friends were an addled genius dishwasher named David and a hugely fat warlock named Daemon. Al would be the publisher. I would be the editor, and Jon would do layout and art. Seth and Tom tried to warn us, but we did it anyway.

Toward the end of the summer of 1987, we all moved into the first floor of a house in Alston-Brighton to work full-time for free at the newspaper. The hospital temp job ended, and I got a new assignment as a nighttime proofreader at Stone & Webster.

Carolyn returned from Europe. The trip had been harrowing. Toward the end she was reduced to waiting for tourists to leave outdoor cafes so she could swoop on the leftovers. She stayed with me a few days at the frat house before I moved into the Street squat with Al, Jon, and David. We were soon joined by Jon's mother Collette, who was bi-polar with a good bit of psychosis around the edges. Carolyn quickly found a group home job and a shared apartment in Jamaica Plain. It was a new beginning for both of us.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Road to Street

By the mid-eighties, my transformation into a full-blown student radical was complete. In my junior year, I parleyed my new typesetting skills into starting a monthly leftist newspaper called critical times. Despite our objections to capitalism, an Urban Planning grad student who worked at Amherst's radical bookstore sold enough ads to pay the printer. About a half dozen of us from the Radical Student Union wrote and collectively edited the articles. Each issue, I'd write a little introductory statement that commented on the issues of the day. After six years of Reagan, we were all half-crazed.

I remember standing on the second floor balcony of the Student Union Building, just outside of the RSU, watching the stack of our first issue that sat on the floor below. Occasionally, someone would wander over and pick one up. Each time, I considered it a blow for freedom.

It was almost noon, on January 28, 1986. A crowd gathered in front of the television that was always on in the lobby. The space shuttle Challenger had blown out into a fat plume of white smoke and shrapnel etched across a brilliant blue sky. The image played again and again.

In my crowd, however, the Challenger disaster paled when compared to the multiple crises for which we all felt personally responsible. The contra war and the counter-insurgency in El Salvador led the list. Most of my friends had been to Central America on various language school junkets, and their sense of outrage at what they'd seen was deep and raw.

I was far too poor for lefty tourism. Tuition was paid by student loans and Pell Grants and whatever other assistance I could scrape together, and I lived on the 15-20 hours a week I worked at the communications office typesetting materials for student organizations. Summers, I worked writing summaries of evaluations for the student published course guide. This was a great job in that it paid full-time and didn't require me to actually show up. So long as the work got done, that was all that mattered. I was a fast writer.

To say I lived frugally was an understatement. I ate sparingly, rode a bike or walked for transportation, lived collectively, and spent most of my money on books. I'd go on long rides through the rolling hills of Belchertown almost daily. There was a series of girlfriends, but, needless to say, none of these expected me to have money. They were another window into the world of the middle-class. I learned to fit in.

Kathleen, in my sophomore year, took me to her parent's house in Newton for Christmas. They lived in a modern A-frame with a 30 foot living room ceiling. It was my first introduction to a world of relative affluence. Her father, a blustery but witty academic, was unlike anyone I had ever met. Her brother went to art school, and was every inch the type. I felt shy and inferior and said little.

Later on, there were others. I dated several girls from Smith who were attracted to the working-class bad boy from UMass. One took me to their dining hall, and I was astonished by the white linen and crystal and their quaint ritual of tapping a fork to the rim of a wine glass when announcements were made.

I somehow managed to maintain around a 3.0 or so while engaged in a whirlwind of student activism. The highpoint was the takeover of the Whitmore Administration Building. The student government types were protesting a proposed tuition hike, and the student radicals wanted divestment from South Africa. We formed a coalition, stormed the Presidents office, and refused to leave.

They left us there. For nearly a week. Chancellor Joe Duffy — a self-proclaimed Marxist with a perma-grin affixed to his face — even brought us hamburgers from McDonalds. We scoffed at this blatant attempt at cooptation as we greedily gobbled them down.

Within a day, due largely to the media attention we received, the South Africa issue became the driving force behind the protest. It was during this occupation — as I ran around with a bullhorn by day and xeroxed thousands of leaflets by night on the University's copy machines — that learned I was a leader. As mainstream liberals and student radicals sat in an enormous circle in the lobby at night and worked out strategy by consensus, I was often able to bring the sides together. I found people listened to me, and nodded agreement when I spoke. This was a new experience.

The Whitmore occupation ended in a compromise that allowed us to claim victory. As we marched out together, I was a different person from the kid who had entered several days before. I was an organizer, and knew what I wanted to do with my life.

The rest of my time at UMass sped by. In my junior year, I moved from the house on Main street to another group house in a more rural part of Amherst. Our collective had allowed a lip stick lesbian couple to move in, and their mainstream tastes in radio and television were more than I could handle. My new housemates were two deadheads and a biology grad student with a biking obsession. They were, in comparison to the leftists on Main Street, close to normal.

There were several more arrests over South Africa, nuclear disarmament, and Central America, but by the time the big CIA-off Campus campaign came around in 1986-87, with Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter drawing the world's media to UMass, I'd pulled back from the RSU to focus on just doing the newspaper. For the past several years, I'd neglected my coursework in favor of full-time student radicalism, and for my last year I thought I'd actually try and learn something.

This was a little like leaving a cult. My circle of RSU friends, even though I still led the critical times collective, felt betrayed by my withdrawal. It was a frenzied year of activism, with high-profile arrests and a media trial in Northampton, and they couldn't understand why I sat it out. I was still figuring out who I was, and in pulling back, I think, sought a bit more balance and maybe a little more authenticity.

It was during this time that I met Carolyn, who in time would become my wife. We had known each other to say hello for several years. She was involved in Peacemakers, an anti-nuclear group who's main program seemed to consist of driving to Groton, CT, to get arrested at each new Trident submarine launch, and moved in different but overlapping circles from my own. We were both in a class on the Spanish Civil War that was taught at Smith and Hampshire, and she had a car. She drove, and we began talking.

In the fall of my senior year, I moved again from the rural group house to an even more normal student apartment near campus and across the street from several sororities. By the time Carolyn graduated in December of '86, we were spending a lot of time together. I had one semester left, and with Carolyn out of school, my own attendance became extremely spotty.

When I was less than a month from graduation, it dawned that flunking one course might mean not getting my degree. I crammed for three weeks, passed everything, and graduated. For years after, I would have a recurring dream about flunking out of college because I was unable to find my classes.

South African poet and revolutionary Dennis Brutus spoke at the commencement. We leafleted attendees with pro-divestment fliers designed to look like programs. I sat in the bleachers for the ceremony.

I lived in a cheap room at a Boston University frat house that summer while Carolyn toured Europe on no money with a friend. Everything I owned fit easily into her car. We drove to Boston during a thunderstorm, and spent a few days together at her Dad's house in Westford before we said goodbye until the end of August. By the time she returned, I had found my way to Street Magazine, and a new chapter was beginning.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two