Expulsion
The End of the I.S. & The Beginning of Something Else
The day that Danny, the Louisville I.S. branch daddy, took back his shotgun back from me was the day before everyone drove to Detroit for the special “expulsion” convention.
The I.S. was having another faction fight. I’d heard about faction fights in history books, among the Bolsheviks, and here I was, in the center of one myself. The last one in the I.S. had been when I was still in junior high school, innocent in Edmonton.1
A special convention was being called in Detroit, to throw the dissidents out. That would include me. There wasn’t any suspense; Glyn Carver and Joel Geier had the majority votes in their pockets.
So why were we even going?
I knew there were “principles” at stake, but it seemed to me another sort of worm had turned. Working class solidarity had become a fetish game, and wonderful people were being kicked out like dead wood. There wasn’t a vision, there were only snitches and bullies.
A decade later, I learned a bombshell, and heartbreaking news from Danny’s then-wife and former comrades. This very same Danny, “Mr. Louisville Auto Worker, Our Beloved Branch Leader,” was on the payroll of the FBI in Louisville, infiltrating the I.S. to plea bargain down his parole terms. He’d been busted selling coke.
This was the Feds standard M.O., J. Edgar Hoover’s specialty when he was wreaking havoc in the civil rights and labor movement.
No wonder Danny was so eager to lend me his shotgun. I guess he hoped I’d do something exciting with it to report to his G-men.
But in 1977, I only knew “Danny,” my comrade. He was on the majority team of our faction fight, and a minor captain in their Lord of the Flies pantomime.
The day I’d arrived in Louisville six months before, I had no reputation to speak of. By the end, it was mud. Every Ku Klux Klan member in town knew where I lived. When I was working at Byck’s one day, they broke in my apartment, left dead rats on the toilet and in my bedsheets, with a little white supremacy note tacked to the mirror above the headboards. The usual epithets. It was them, right? I hope it wasn’t Danny.
Dan came to my door on Tuesday, the day before the expulsion convention, to get his shotgun.
He knocked at the door, at the bottom of my stairs, and when I came down he could hear my thump, thump, thump, on the narrow steps.
I probably sounded a little heavier carrying the firearm. It was still winter cold, and he was standing behind that thin glass and wood door, a sheet of ice with glass underneath. When I opened it, his forehead was covered in flop sweat and his long biker hair looked matted.
Good lord, he was wondering whether I was going to blow him to kingdom come. I didn't know yet why he was so guilty-looking. He hadn’t done anything that bad to me personally— not that I knew of.
I had to suppress something, a nervous giggle fit. I handed him the shotgun before he said a word, and then I reached into my robe pocket and cupped the shells in my hand. I offered them to him like chocolates, five of them.
His face relaxed, when he realized I’d removed all the ammo. Such a little guy, really. And he didn’t ask for the sixth. I didn’t expect he could think that straight.
It’s odd what I remember about being expelled. I remember the white Indian elephant earrings I chose for the occasion, the denim skirt I wore, and a Western Union telegram that I got from Stan. Yes, Stan, my lover from L.A.2 He was back with his wife Shari; Glyn had relocated them to Cleveland. Stan couldn’t look me in the eye in Cincinnati, but I bet he watched my ass walk out the door.
Lots of people couldn’t look me in the eye. I had thought of them as friends for life, as family, but I realized I didn’t know anything about anyone, further back than two years ago. Who were these people, before the I.S.? I had no idea. But I’d taken bullets flying for them, willingly.
Expulsion was the end of all that.
We’d dodged gunfire and been put in handcuffs and jail cells. We’d stood up in court together and been sentenced as menaces to society. Now we would cross the street and not say hello.
I remember asking my mom once, if she would ever say hello to her own father if she saw him in a crowd, and she shook her head, no. She meant it. I didn’t know if I could be as hard as her.
I thought about the guy, Marc Traynor, who’d rung up my books at Papa Bach’s3 the day before I left California for Detroit on the Greyhound. He’d gotten thrown out of another sect, The Spartacus League, for something or other. Now he was a yoga guru. Was that how bad it could get? You got expelled and put on leotards?
I liked my elephant earrings because they reminded me of living with my dad. Home. Where was that, now?
“E is for Elephants, E is for Expulsion.” The I.S. faithful gathered in Cincinnati, at a Vet’s Hall— you always had to wonder who these patriots thought they were renting to. There were American flags hanging over a piano in the corner. Half the I.S. national leadership was wearing flags on their jackets, too, to better appeal to the “regular” Teamster kinda guy.
A couple hundred people were about to expel a couple hundred other people.
I was told ahead of time that I could expect to be formally expelled for “traitorism.” It sounded like Judas. Had I betrayed them all with a kiss? Probably. Everyone in the I.S. had fucked everyone, and now one half was jilting the other.
I had lied to Glyn, as he to me. I had organized secret meetings to bitch about our wretched decline. I had written letters to Canada to sympathetic comrades, which were intercepted by dear Danny.
I was accused of joining, or leading, a cult of personality. But which one? I didn’t know what my personality was anymore. The opposition’s list of complaints and deceits sounded tinny. I hadn’t changed at all except for the innocence bit, which had blown away like dandelion fluff.
Did Judas betray in despair, did he kiss in desperation?
I still felt the same way I did the day I begged Geri and Ambrose to join the I.S.4 — I noticed they weren’t at this monkey trial. They were too regular— they had children and a life.
I wore my tight jean skirt and vest I’d bought with my last check from Byck’s. I was sealed up, nothing flimsy showing. I sat on one side of the room, with “our” crowd, the bad kids. Michael was the only one from The Red Tide there with me. He was furious, hollowed out.
The Red Tide girls from Detroit were crying on the other side of the aisle, all the girls I remembered from Cass High, Western High, Cooley High. Alicia’s face was puffed up. Frank Runninghorse gave her a punishing look, but she couldn’t stop. Little Marika, who once stayed up at night with me to ask me what a lesbian was, snuck a peek at me. I was waiting for it. She was fourteen, too young for this crap. I mouthed, “I love you,” but Frank jerked her aside.
It was a horrible secret to whisper “I love you” in this room. Glyn, at the mike, was entertaining a motion on to get on with their day.
I counted heads. Under 300 people. Less than 300 people could afford to split in half? Here we go! We’d moved mountains; now we would divide a grain of sand. Ronald Reagan had won. It was 1976.
I don’t remember a single word at the mike. Nor did I save the tower of faction-fight documents that lay in my lap. I dropped them all in the “Help Our Vets!” waste-bin on the way out the door.
Stan’s telegram in my pocket was the one memento I saved.
He had sat across the aisle with the majority and voted to expel us like the rest of them. He hadn’t returned my calls or letters, when I wrote him six months earilir and asked him what he thought was going on. I’d asked him how he felt about the “workerism,” that was taking more surreal turn every minute. I reminded him how we used to make fun of socialist sectarians who pledged to only use “powdered garlic” in their kitchens, because the working class wouldn’t ever use the raw stuff. Upper middle class dropouts fantasizing about what “real workers” were.
But there were plenty of working class natives in the I.S. now. Why weren’t we seen?
Stan had become the Cleveland organizer; Shari had gotten a tenure track position at a local campus. He hadn’t written me a love letter since my first month in Detroit, and I didn’t expect one now. But I thought maybe a faction fight would persuade him to say a few words to me.
Pick me up, Stan, remember who I am. I didn’t hear anything back.
The night before the expulsion, packing my belongings in my army trunk in Louisville, I received a delivery from Western Union:
Dear Sue,
You’re a sweet kid. Have a nice life. Men are shit.
Stan
It was yellow, one of those old-fashioned telegrams you see in the movies that say, “Stop. I love you. Stop. I’m having your baby. Stop. Arriving tomorrow.”
I didn’t know Western Union would let you say “shit.”
Well, it was Stan’s last word. I didn’t recall characterizing men as shit. Was that his old wife Guerry talking in his memories? Was she whom I reminded him of? Maybe he got us confused.
Stan had taught me how to enjoy a good breakfast. He had read The Economist out loud to me while I lay in his lap, he’d nursed me when I was sick and brushed my hair. We watched “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” together, my first time. I made him a triple-layer cream cake for his 30th birthday, embroidered a Dylan lyric on his work shirt, and helped him blow out the candles. No one else was there on his birthday except for us. He cried when he took me to the airport. Did I get anything right?
Glyn banged a gavel on the table at the Vet’s Hall podium. How do you formally respond to expulsion? I found out, following Michael’s feet. We stood up in a group. We paraded out with sticks up our asses. I caught a cab to the airport, destination LAX.
My dad had arranged my ticket. Bill had called me my last day in Louisville, after Stan’s telegram. I told him I was about to get the boot from the I.S., and I didn’t know what to do next.
“You can come home, you know,” he said.
“Really?”
“You could apply to one of the state colleges,” he said.
He said it so quietly. I knew he remembered my vow to not go to school.
“What would I do there?”
“You don’t have to figure that out now; no one else knows what to do, either.”
He loved me so much. Why hadn’t we talked in so long? There was no way I was going to say, “I can’t go to college because all those people who just kicked me to the curb will say it just goes to prove that I’m a wanker after all.”
I couldn’t get over it, that my dad wanted to help me. My dad. I’d thought I was surrounded by comrades who wanted to be with me, help me, share everything we did together. Now we looked like we’d been run over by a six way split.
Bill— who hadn’t seen me in twenty months— was the one who offered a refuge. He was not “shit.”
I packed up all my stuff; it wasn’t much. I decided I could let go of about fifteen Lenin posters. I liked them, but it was like Vladimir was staring at me, doubting me. I didn’t have any other belongings besides my clothes and books.
When I arrived in Los Angeles, it was a beautiful day, a lovely day in paradise. Bill drove us back to the West Side along Lincoln Boulevard, so I could smell the ocean. I kept holding his arm; he could only drive with one hand. I remembered the same feeling I had when my mom had shipped me back to California from Canada: I could breathe again. You could always turn to the ocean; you always knew where the sea lay, where the mountains stood.
I had a summer to work in Santa Monica before I started Cal State Long Beach. I got a job in a print and copy shop, printing out parish bulletins, weird amputee pornography, whatever anyone walked in with. One time I xeroxed Exene Cervenka’s early poems for her: “The World’s a Mess It’s In My Kiss.”
The pressman asked me the first week how I learned how to run the machines, and I said, “I was a socialist.” He didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t miss his three-martini lunches either, so he wobbled away.
The only Teamsters I ran into were the UPS guys who delivered at three in the afternoon. I had a quickie with one of them, on a Friday night at the shop when everyone else had left.
Afterward he remarked, “You sure know a lot about my job.”
I sure did.
Tracey, my best friend from Uni high school, from the original Red Tide, came to collect me and we went to Venice beach. She was enrolled in the Feminist Studio Workshop downtown. She’d shaved her head and looked like a Dyke Priestess, with jade rings on her fingers. She asked me if I’d heard of the band, “Castration Squad,” and invited me to the Hollywood Pussycat Theater basement to see them play. Double bill with The Dils?
Sure, why not. She referred to it as punk rock. I liked that; I felt “punky”.
I put on my “Boycott Coors” t-shirt, the one with swastikas where the double-oo’s fell in the brand name.
“Pin razor blades to it,” Tracey said.
“Yeah, right on the nipples,” I said. I started dulling some safety razors from the medicine cabinet. I came out of the bathroom, with the blades swinging from the apex of my shirt.
“You look great,” she said.
I smiled for the first time that night.
“You know, I hate to say ‘I told you so’,” she said.
“Well, go ahead and say it, while I’m armed to the tits.”
She laughed. “Are you ever going to break down and admit the I.S. was all a big crock?”
“But it wasn’t... I’ll never say that!” I frowned. She sure knew how to wipe a grin off my face. “If that’s what you think, I don’t even know where to begin. I can hardly tell myself what went wrong. But it wasn’t all that way.”
“Well, I can tell you— your leadership were a bunch of male chauvinist pigs, art-hating, self-loathing, egocentric closet cases who could use a good ten years of radical therapy.”
“I wouldn’t waste a psychiatrist’s time.” I took out my pink lipstick and turned to the mirror again.
Tracey wasn’t getting my joke. She grabbed the lipstick out of my hand. “You condemned all of us before you left! You never wrote me! You abandoned all your friends and acted like were were all a bunch of nothing, because of what? Because we didn’t INDUSTRIALIZE? What the fuck industry are you in now, and what have you got to show for it?”
I pressed the tips of the blades hanging on my t-shirt toward my fingers. If I bled a little, I could feel something. But I didn’t. “Tracey, look how it all turned out. You all are thriving. Your art is beautiful. Meanwhile, I’ve got a rap sheet from Michigan. I’m at your mercy. Are you going to give me another chance?”
“I don’t know.” She looked angry now; her eyes were stinging. Was another expulsion coming?
I felt like I’d been saying “I’m sorry,” for a million years, a clothesline of apologies, round and round.
Flawed, yes, I was— you’d never come to the end of my regret. I was a traitor, a slut, a moving target; I was a wanker, a commie-dyke-nigger-lover— a mobius strip of condemnation from right and left. I still had Danny’s sixth shell left in my jean jacket pocket.
Did she want me to apologize for not joining her milieu? For not staying in high school? For not playing guitar in a punk rock band? What industry was that? I could line my coat with razors and there’d never be enough sorry’s to please everyone.
“Death by a thousand cuts—” that’s what Ken Paff said when I asked him: “What happened to us?”
And when the first 999 made their nick, we didn’t even notice.
I could stand in the shore break at Venice Beach, the tidewater pooling around my ankles, and tell you where I lived. That was real. I could breathe again. That part was good. And I was cursed by too little faith, and too many kisses, like Judas and the rest of his crowd.
I couldn’t begin to tell you what was going to happen next. Maybe a little bit more suffering. What’s one more cut?
I took Tracey’s hand and brought it up to my cheek. “Please don’t get pissed at me for awhile. I love you and I don’t know what else to say right now. I never stopped loving you.”
She grabbed me and we held each other, the razors pressed flat between our chests.
“Oh come on, then,” she said. “I like last chances.”
We got in her Chevy Vega, and headed down Sunset Boulevard.
If you would like to read previous chapters of my autobiography, they are all here on my blog, in chronological order, at this link: Memoir. That’s where you’ll find the chapter before this one, etc.
You may also listen to my reading of my first edition memoir, here.
Leaving LA for Detroit, last stop at Papa Bach’s
I have heard it said that "home" is that place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Bill was the best.