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

Working Poor in Waltham: Part Two

As the summer in Waltham wore on, my car developed an alarming shake. The steering wheel vibrated so violently that its edges would blur. Apparently, Audi chassis of that era had a tendency to rot from within and the New England winter rock salt roads hadn't helped.

Worse, the thing was overheating, and a thermostat replacement had no effect. The temperature gauge would slowly climb into the red on the way to work, and just as the steam became threatening, I'd arrive. The car would cool, and eight hours later I'd drive home.

My Audi was literally falling apart. I had no money. I needed the car to last one more month.

After half a summer of working full-time and barely earning enough to survive, I asked my boss for a raise. He was a skinny guy with a new MBA who spoke enough Mandarin to broker parts deals with suppliers in China. The extra fifty cents an hour wasn't much, but it helped.

Meanwhile, the manager of the downstairs re-chroming operation — a lanky 6'5 African American whose deeply lined face, perpetually reddened eyes, and oil stained features gave him a vulcan aspect — took to harassing me for being gay.

Maybe it was the way I walked. Maybe it was how I talked. Maybe it was my long legs and the short shorts I often wore in the tropical heat of the warehouse. Whatever it was, this was a first, and my denials had little effect. Things became tense.

Eventually, I decided to respond in kind. My opportunity came when we were both in the air conditioned admin office and he started in. I pushed back hard. "I think you're gay," I shouted at him. "It's all you ever talk about. Just shut the fuck up and keep your faggoty bullshit to yourself. I don't want to hear it anymore."

The office went dead silent. His eyes narrowed murderously. Not another word was said. The harassment stopped.

Meanwhile, a new cold caller upstairs named Jeff had another sales gig on the side, and I was a prime prospect. Jeff was a Nichiren Daishonin Buddhist, and his belief system, which resembled an Amway pyramid, led him to pursue me relentlessly.

"Want to come to the Temple with me after work and chant for awhile," he'd say. Being basically polite, I never told him to fuck off directly, and being basically a sales guy, he never stopped asking. Eventually, I said yes.

My first exposure was at a private home in a walk-up near Fenway Park. Everyone was white, and appeared to be middle class and twenty-something. They knelt on a carpet before an alter with bowls of fruit, incense, and a beautiful scroll with Chinese calligraphy that they called a gohonzon. Chanting seemed to make them high.

This was prosperity Buddhism, and chanting, they said, brought them "benefit." A new car. A better job. That sort of thing.

I was lonely and my life kind of sucked. I bought a cheap gohonzon and a cardboard case with doors that could close when it was not in use. I chanted nam myoho renge kyo for an hour a day and more when I went to temple. I basically had no one to stop me.

My life continued to suck. I came close to finding a girlfriend, but it didn't work out.

Her name was Amy, and I met her at my gay Greek playboy friend's parents house, a beautiful beach front home in Northern Maine. We spent a weekend there. I remember little other than that we had the whole beach to ourselves.

I was long and tan and in great shape from a summer of running and work. She noticed. My beach reading was Camus' Stranger, which offered the illusion of being of her class. Amy was my age and worked at Shearson Lehman. I told her I was an aspiring journalist, which was a lie. We dated. Once.

She lived in a condo directly across from the Bunker Hill Monument, which provided the view from her living room window. The locals regularly vandalized her car. We got high and walked around Boston's North End and across the Charlestown Bridge back to her place, where we watched the sunset against the monument from her couch. The pot made me paranoid and quiet. I spent the night on her sofa. In the morning, she led me to her room.

I would only see her one more time. A week later, I came by after work. Since my car was only good for one way trips, I didn't go home to change. I arrived in my dusty work jeans and t-shirt. She wasn't impressed. I was no longer the sexy proto-journalist on the exclusive beach in Maine. I was now the working poor loser with the shit-box car.

After that, she stopped returning my calls.

Near the end of the summer, plans for college nearly went sour.

Before getting thrown out of the Air Force, I'd applied to UMass Amherst with two of my office buddies from Travel Pay. To my astonishment, we were all accepted. I was able to pull together a package of grants and loans to make it possible.

My parents agreed to help by co-signing a student loan. As fall approached, their signed paperwork failed to materialize. The deadline came and went and I called to see what had happened. They'd changed their minds. Were I to default, my mother explained, they might lose their house. They just couldn't risk it.

When I'd left home six years before, my parents made a big production of canceling my life insurance and "disowning" me. For me to ask for their help was a big reach. For them to renege was all the proof I needed that I'd made a mistake. It would be three years before I spoke to them again.

John Gallagher, the guy whose travel vouchers I'd pretended to audit as we worked nights in Travel Pay, rescued me from Action Crash Parts by loaning me the money I needed.

Near the end of August, as I was preparing to move on, I told the Buddhists I was leaving and that the whole chanting thing wasn't working for me. The last morning I was there, as I finished packing, two of them showed up at my door. They were a high pressure tag team and looked like they might be FBI. I finally relented so they'd leave.

"Let's chant on this," one said. We pulled my gohonzon out of a moving box and hung it on a nail. After an awkward moment, we all went to our knees for a quick ten minutes of nam myoho renge kyo.

They left, and John pulled up in his U-Haul. It took less than five minutes to load my stuff.

I drove my car to a supermarket parking lot, took off the plates, and walked away. We drove the U-Haul to Sunderland, where the three of us had found a cheap student apartment. Things were finally looking up.

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