Seven Deadly Sins

A number of years ago I visited London for a conference of the International Network of Street Papers. I was only there for a week, but made the most of it. Among the destinations were the British Museum, the Karl Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Road — where from 1902-1903 Lenin worked on the Socialist newspaper Iskra (Russian for Spark) — and Oxford, where I sat at the very table where C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien would drink warm beer and eruditely shoot the shit. While sitting at this table, I showed my friend Fiona, an anarchist friend I first met at UMass-Amherst, the gargoyle plaster casts I'd bought that day as my big splurge trip souvenirs. They replicated those I'd seen at Christ Church, and offered a medieval portrayal of The Seven Deadly Sins.

While the Bible has several listings of sins to avoid, these have surprisingly little correlation to the standard list of Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Anger, Envy, and Pride. The closest come from Proverbs and Galatians.

There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
¹⁷haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
¹⁸a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that hurry to run to evil,
¹⁹a lying witness who testifies falsely,
and one who sows discord in a family.

Proverbs 6:16-19

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, ²⁰idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, ²¹envy, murder, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Galatians 5:19-21

As a lapsed Catholic, I can still enumerate the seven deadly sins and their converse virtues with minimal prompting, and was blown away by the humor and aristry of their rendering as gargoyles. I was thinking about these today.

Lust (luxuria)

I love this little guy, who appears to be getting off on some sort of Rabelaisian medieval porn. My own sense is that lust isn't such an issue unless it's obsessive, at which point it becomes a bit soul-destroying. Otherwise, one runs around chanting "Think pure thoughts, think pure thoughts" to oneself, and that's a bit freakish as well and leads nowhere good. The associate virtue is chastity, which, in and of itself, offers little to recommend.

Gluttony (gula)

Another of those moderation things. Gluttony is is, I think, about avoiding oneself by sating the senses. I feel shitty about my life, so I'll sit in front the the TV every night watching DVDs of Six Feet Under while eating a bowl of mixed nuts and chocolate chips. The thing I've noticed about the Deadlies is that they're all, in one way or another, about avoiding oneself. Associate virtue: temperance. If that means moderation, I'm for it. If it means being an uptight parody of a prohibitionist, not so much.

Greed (avaritia)

One of the first things that struck me about these gargoyles is how close greed looks to anger. There's an insight there, in that wanting too much for oneself often has its flip side of hating those who don't have enough. Greed and hate go together. The opposed virtue is charity, which isn't really enough. This guy, by the way, has pound signs for eyeballs.

Sloth (acedia)

What I love about sloth guy is how totally fucking bored he looks. Were I God, boredom would probably piss me off more than anything. My boredom threshold is set fairly low, but I do my best to avoid this one. With so much to marvel at, get worked up over, and love and create, life is just too short. The partner virtue, says the Catholics, is diligence, This, to me, seems pale. If life is about avoiding boredom, it's also about much more that the pursuance of "diligence."

Anger (ira)

Here I'd have to distinguish between righteous anger and just getting all pissy about stuff that one should rise above. One is focused and leads to actions which are good, and the other is dissipating, and, again, takes us away from understanding much about ourselves. When someone really pisses us off, I think, we should pay attention to that and ask what it says about ourselves. Associate virtue: patience. I like that.

Envy (invidia)

Look at this scheming asshole and tell me if this is someone you want to be around. Sadly, our whole consumer culture is based on the idea of other people having crap we'd rather have ourselves. Our life energy is better invested in, oh, say, saving the planet so our children don't have to live in a shithole, than in acquiring a hot car or huge flat screen TV. Associate virtue: kindness. I prefer compassion, which the Dalai Lama has defined as empathy plus responsibility.

Pride (superbia)

I love this guy as well, with his supercilious expression and hands folded in prayer, awash in the spiritual pride of being better than everyone else. He's the very portrait of self-involved uselessness. This, like the others, is about focusing on oneself to the exclusion of others, or, conversely, the faults of others as opposed to oneself. The Catholics say we should instead practice humility. I'm with them on this one.

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

The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight

The owl drawing above was my submission for the STPEC program sweatshirt when I was in college at UMass-Amherst. It's a dadaist Hegel joke. Get it? Owl of Minerva? Duck? Quack? I still think it's pretty damn funny, even if no one else does.

Social Thought and Political Economy was an interdisciplinary major designed to teach critical thinking and offer a well-rounded progressive education. We got red stars pinned on us during our graduation picnic. Seriously.

We were obnoxious little lefty know it alls who were drunk on political theory that often verged on the incomprehensible. Ever try reading Habermas? Can't say I recommend it.

I understood just enough Hegel to be dangerous, although one of my better papers was on the usage of dialectic by Simone deBeauvoir and Franz Fanon. Then as now, I was a bit of a contrarian. I alienated one of my more doctrinaire Marxist professors my arguing that the seeds of Stalinism were there with Lenin, and that the Kronstadt Massacre signaled the end of the true revolution. I also outraged my anarchist professors by arguing that the ends of the revolution in Spain were corrupted by the means of violence.

I've since come to understand that this was a ridiculous argument, even though at some level it might be true. They were leftists up against fascists before fascism was even a dirty word, and most of the western world would have happily seen them annihilated without a fight.

Still, it wasn't like I really knew anything. I recall being halfway through a course on the Spanish Civil War before realizing that the Republicans were the good guys. Similarly, I was well into a critical theory survey course — struggling through Marcuse, Lukacs, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno — before I got the difference between "form" and "content." But I knew how to pronounce Loo-kotch and Ben-ya-meen, and that, apparently, was enough.

While I'm sure all of this shaped my thinking more than I know, the stuff that made me who I am happened mostly outside of class. As a student activist I learned all about pulling off "actions," and discovered I could be a leader. I found my voice as a writer through a weekly column in the Daily Collegian, which was one of the better student newspapers in the country. I got the publishing bug when, in my junior year, I used the access to equipment at my typesetting job to start critical times, a collectively edited leftist monthly newspaper.

Weirdly, I got A's in most of my theory courses. I credit grade inflation with getting me through college with undiagnosed ADHD. My final critical theory project was a Brechtian theater piece that I don't remember much about. Yet, I clearly recall another student's project. It was a piece on racism performed with potatoes. The hero was named Masha, and the central conflict came when her kid wanted to go to summer camp with his friend Jimmy, the peach.

Speaking of incomprehensible, the owl cartoon comes from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. "The owl of Minerva flies only at midnight" means something to the effect of "Wisdom is inspired by crisis." So ... Duck!

Maybe it loses something in the explanation.

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