Come hear a talkback to a PowerPoint of a cassette tape of an essay by Bob Avakian! Would you like to attend a screening of a Betamax of a Super 8 of a lecture by Bob Avakian?
Maybe you’ve seen the volunteers in their black T-shirts, handing out Revolution newspaper outside left conferences and protests. Or perhaps you’ve seen the posters, the sandwich boards, the flyers with their gummed-up tape. You can find them near wherever Revolution Books are sold, which happens to be exactly two places, three thousand miles apart, one where I grew up and one where I live now.
I pass Revolution Books in Berkeley almost every day on my way to work, and every time I do — skimming these advertisements for new presentations in obsolete media, their degraded quality a sign of purported integrity — I strain to forget that I used to sit at the other Revolution Books, in New York, many hours a week. I did so, you might say voluntarily, as part of the Youth Brigade of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), between 2003 and 2004, from age 12 to 14 — unless the Party is a cult, an open question, in which case I was in a cult as a preteen. And like most cult members, I was pretty devoted.
I ask my friend Jeff: Do you want to hear about when I was in RevCom as a kid? He replies honestly, flagging down the bartender, “I don’t know, not really, it scares me — I avoided that fate. Is Avakian even alive?” To induce him, I tell him it includes the story of my first orgasm, on a beach at the Jersey Shore. In what format? The microfiche of sex: dry humping.
I was the youngest of the Youth Brigade. They recruited me outside my middle school in 2003 — two attractive late teens, one woman, one man. My middle school building also housed a high school, and the recruiters looked just like the high school students, leaning up against the scaffolding.
The man was particularly handsome. I was, let’s just say, not. I’d been hit by a car in downtown Brooklyn the year before, reducing my life to absolute control by my parents, and I’d spent my time of less freedom building a chaotic identity. I began reading the New York School poets after my mother joked that I might feel an affinity with Frank O’Hara, who had also been hit by a car (I did, but it was a dune buggy, and he died). I wore a single knee-high combat boot on the good leg; the cast, on the other, was foot to groin and medical blue. Despite the indisputable fact that they sucked, I wore an Anti-Flag sweatshirt (their music was banned in many stores post–September 11: solidarity); Fugazi — good — graced the Walkman. My hair was magenta and I could recite Howl nose to tail, as I often did, trailing my sometimes boyfriend Max on crutches while he stole books from the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Returning now to the relative mobile freedom I once enjoyed, I started smoking. My first cigarette was, naturally, a clove. I would say I was a world-historically embarrassing preteen, except they all are. Their earnest desire to know the world and reconfigure themselves in relation to that new knowledge is what makes them powerful. Anyway, who I was becoming was the least of my concerns. We were at war.
