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

Harvest of Shame

By the fall of 1984, I'd settled in at UMass-Amherst. Life as a student radical agreed with me. The collectively run house I'd moved into lived on vegetables, tofu, and whole grains, which were purchased at the Belchertown Coop and kept in large jars beneath the kitchen counter. We had a chore wheel and decided things in house meetings. I'd joined the puritanical left. Nobody smoked, drank to excess, or took drugs. Sex was OK, but we didn't much talk about it.

During my first year, I was placed on academic probation after flunking French and balancing my one A in Marxist American History with a few Cs. As someone who had skipped most of high school, I was poorly prepared for college. I didn't really know how to study, and the undiagnosed ADHD didn't help either. I wouldn't figure that one out for another twenty years. As long as my coursework mostly involved reading and writing, I was fine. I decided to major in Social Thought and Political Economy and minor in journalism.

My girlfriend Kathleen had a job as a typesetter, and taught me her trade on some funky little terminal that used cassette tapes for memory. I soon landed a job on a Varityper making posters and brochures for student organizations. This was a computer terminal that saved jobs to big floppy disks and printed text to photographic paper. I'd cut out the lines and columns with a metal ruler and exacto blade and use a waxer, light table, and border tape to make things all nice and balanced.

The Radical Student Union was homebase between classes, and the Student Communications Office, which housed my beloved Varityper, was just downstairs. I was happy. Overwrought, but happy.

The College Republicans had a strong- well-funded chapter and offered a convenient nemesis. The Contra War in Nicaragua was in full swing and there were US-funded horror shows in El Salvador and Guatemala as well. Nuclear proliferation and star wars threatened the planet, and apartheid was just beginning to surface as a campus issue.

The night Ronald Reagan was re-elected, a farmhouse party in Belchertown culminated in a solemn flag burning ceremony as we held hands in a circle and sang We Shall Overcome.

That was just the sort of thing we did back then.

Reaganomics, which was characterized by heightened military spending, tax cuts for the wealthy and the middle-class, and large cuts in government spending, especially that directed toward the poor, was bringing homelessness back on a scale that hadn't been seen since prior to World War II.

The call went out from Mitch Snyder's Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) that protesters were needed in Washington, DC for their month long Harvest of Shame action. We rented a van on the RSU's dime and drove the 400 miles to get ourselves good and arrested. Our English anarchist friend Fiona taught us a song from her homeland that we sang every chance we got:

Trash trash, trash all the nation
We are the anarchist generation,
We're gonna find a new direction
We're gonna have an insurrection.

BOLTCUTTERS! Devolution,
We're gonna have a, revolution
Something, something something,
Something something, something
TRASH TRASH!!

As our group of baby radicals broke into song at the slightest excuse, the older and clearly exhausted activists from DC would look at us in wonder, and then be happy that we were leaving after the weekend.

When we arrived, Mitch Snyder was in the 43rd or 44th day of a fast that had come to the point of being seriously life-threatening. At issue was $5 million dollars that the CCNV wanted from DC to renovate their famous shelter for 800. This was where we came for our CD training and orientation. This was my first real brush with homeless activism. Hundreds of people had arrived for the climactic end to the month of action and around 80 of us would be arrested in front of the Capitol the next day.

The CD itself was one of those highly choreographed things that involve groups of people going limp and being flexi-cuffed and carted — with various degrees of delicacy — off to jail. Our group went to DC Central Cell Block. Most of the arrestees posted $80 in bail and were free. We, on the other hand, were prepared to gum up the system with our bodies.

The system pretty much took it in stride. We were placed two to a cell in four by eight rooms that had steel plates suspended from the walls as beds and a toilet and small sink. Three times a day they would trundle a laundry cart down the aisle that was filled with paper bags. Each held a baloney, mayonnaise and white bread sandwich and a plain donut. The donuts tasted like baloney. There was also coffee, which was terrible.

Some of us took this as an opportunity to fast. We devised a game that used sandwiches in baggies as a sort of a hockey puck. The goal was to get it through the feeding slot of the opposite cell. Opponents were allowed to block the hole with their hands, but not from the inside. Periodically we'd fish the sandwiches from the hallway using a belt.

The lights were on constantly. It was a long, three day weekend. We lost sense of time. The highlight for all of us was when Todd, who had all of Alice's Restaurant memorized down to the slightest inflection, performed the whole thing at 3 am. The real prisoners down the hall yelled for him to "shut the fuck up."

Eventually, we were taken to court where a judge dismissed our charges and were reunited with the women radicals who had gone to a different jail. They complained of mushy broccoli and scratchy blankets. We, on the other hand, had done hard time, with nothing but baloney and donuts.

I broke my glasses by rolling over them as they laid on the steel plate of my bed. My cell mate was a gay friend named Matthew. We amused ourselves by telling people my glasses were smashed in an attempted jail rape.

Snyder ended his fast on the 49th day when the District of Columbia capitulated to the CCNV's demands. He had lost fifty-seven pounds. When asked if he was afraid to die, Snyder said, "No. It's painful, but I have a greater fear of allowing people to languish like animals, and sometimes I'm afraid I'm not doing enough."

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

Birth of a Student Radical

For awhile, it seemed like I was destined to reinvent myself every four years or so. After I left home at seventeen, I went from a fucked-up and abusive family to finding freedom as a semi-employed pothead. I starved much of the time and went through seven addresses in fourteen months, but none of that mattered. I was deliriously happy. It was as though my previous life had ceased to exist.

For a long time, I remembered nothing from before.

Then came the Air Force, and another reinvention as, midway through, I began to shed the doper persona I'd adopted up as a teenager. My drug years, I think, were a way to shut down and fit in. I became an awkward stoner because, in the mid-seventies, that was easier and more socially acceptable than being an awkward nerd.

When, during my Air Force Years, the pothead thing stopped working for me, I slowly started to reconnect with the curiosity I'd left behind somewhere in grade school. By my summer in Waltham, I was reading Thoreau, Emerson, and Camus for fun. I'd also quit smoking to save money.

Then came college, where I remade myself once again, this time as a student activist. My new more-radical-than-thou lifestyle gave me somewhere new to put the anger that had been simmering all along.

Within the first year, I began to remember things. It made me spacey. Sometimes there would be dreams. Other times, pieces of my former life would just pop in out of the blue, like a long lost relative looking for some couch space. Other than the occasional joint or beer, I was more sober than I'd been in seven or eight years. I turned twenty-three a month into my first semester at UMass-Amherst.

My two Travel Pay buddies from the Air Force and I shared an apartment in Sunderland, a rural community to the north of Amherst between Leverett and Deerfield. I bought my food at a farm stand that was two blocks from our building. Across the parking lot from my window was a corn field. I'd take the bus or hitch to campus. Sometimes, I'd just walk the four miles.

I had no idea, really, who I was. My apartment mates, on the other hand, were a couple of regular guys. Keith was a business major, and was losing weight by eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast and a big salad for dinner. John was going into law enforcement. They'd study, watch Letterman at night and sports on the weekend, and go to school. I didn't get Letterman at all, and kept a bit to myself. I was less than socially adept. I read compulsively and felt that I needed to make up for lost time. I thought I might become a journalist.

Before long, I found the Radical Student Union.

The RSU was on the second floor of the Student Union Building and had a desk, a phone, two chairs, a file cabinet, and a couch. There was also a lit rack filled with publications like The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, and Off Our Backs. Just behind the office was the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Alliance, and next door were the Radical Feminists. Down the hall one way were the Central America Solidarity people, and in the other direction, past the Student Government Association office, was my future wife, who spent much of her free time getting arrested with the anti-nuclear Peacemakers group.

The RSU began in 1969 as a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and several years before I arrived — after most of the old guard Leninist-Maoist leadership had moved on — had changed its name from the Revolutionary Student Brigade in an attempt to be more appealing to the masses. There was a tiny budget for attending conferences and printing and such, and a handful of people for whom the small organization offered a ready made community.

Two things happened that first semester that would change my life forever.

The first was that, on October 25th, 1983, Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. At the time I was reading Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching for a media studies class. I was also taking a Contemporary US History course that billed itself as having a Marxist perspective, and had been introduced to Howard Zinn's People's History. Zinn's book was a revelation, and with Grenada, I felt as if — for the first time — I was seeing the world for what it really is. It was my political awakening, and I was enraged.

The more I became involved in the RSU, the less I had in common with my Air Force friends. I had become an angry alien. Looking back, I'm sure I was insufferable. Radical politics was a new identity that was ripe for the adoption. I threw myself into it completely and ditched my big dorky plastic aviator style glasses for small rimless lenses. The transformation was underway.

A few weeks later, I rode in a van to a leftist student conference in Madison, Wisconsin, where I sat through various workshops and plenaries on gender identity, racism, Central America, consensus decision-making, and other staples of the early-eighties student left. There was a math major there named Kathleen who I thought was cool. We talked. On the way back, we spent most of the ride underneath a blanket.

Kathleen was bisexual and lived in a vegetarian coop house on Main Street, about a half mile past Emily Dickinson's place. Her household lived collectively and were all engaged in radical politics of one stripe or another. This was a world I had never seen. For seventy bucks a month I moved into a space behind the kitchen that had once been a laundry area. There was room enough for a bed and little else.

I was a quick study. By winter break, I was heading toward academic probation, but my new life as a student radical had begun.

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