I found life’s first calling in the Socialist Worker’s Party in the most unlikely of places, a small town of 50,000 in upstate Wisconsin.
I arrived in the state in 1978 by way of the capital of Madison, where I did my last year of high school. My uncle had agreed to take me in (and presumably agreed with my parents to help straighten me out). He was single and living alone and let me sleep on a sofa-bed in what had been his office in a two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Madison. He was the only person in the family to graduate from university, and subsequently went on to seminary before serving in Madison as the assistant pastor and youth minister of a Baptist church. During my year with him, I visited church once or twice and to his credit he never insisted or even hinted I attend regularly. Nor did he make repeated reference to the causes of my situation or serve me a list of onerous rules. I understood things had gotten out of hand and I needed to dial back some of the wildness.
Though technically living in Madison, we were in fact living in the neighboring school district, the small rural community of Verona. In moving from Miami to Verona, I went from attending a high school with three grades and approximately 1500 students, to a school of four grades and 500 students. In Miami, I had African American and Latin American classmates, most of whom, like my white classmates, came from families that had recently migrated to Miami. In Verona, my classmates were white, many had Scandinavian, German, or Polish surnames, and came from families that had lived in Wisconsin for more than one generation. In Miami, I lived a 15 minute walk from school. In Madison I had to ride the school bus through cultivated fields, the farms some of my classmates called home. One of the more popular student clubs at Verona HS was the FFA – Future Farmers of America.
It was my first experience of culture shock – and within the borders of my own country. To a few of my classmates, I was the cool kid from Miami. To a few others, I was the long-haired, earring-wearing faggot from Miami who hung out with the freaks, the misfits who didn’t quite idealize the aspirations of middle-class, rural Verona. It was the first time in my life to be the object of open scorn. Fortunately, most classmates didn’t have strong opinions either way and I managed to get through that last year of high school without a beating or other serious problems and with grades far improved over the previous year’s performance in Miami.
There is never a good time to experience what I went through in those years, but there are certainly worse times. When I should have been planning for post-graduation life, I was getting high or trying not to get high. Consequently, the decision about what to do after high school was upon me before I had prepared. I saw my classmates applying for university, so I supposed that’s what I should do, too. I had no idea about other possibilities. In fact, I had no idea what I should do at university. But I applied to a couple of Wisconsin state universities and one year after arriving in Madison I was packing and heading to an even smaller community, a college town in the northwest quadrant of the state with a population of 50,000. My small circle of friends in Madison disappeared forever.
I didn’t know anyone in Eau Claire. I lived in the dormitory, first in a large room with five other freshmen, then in a double with a male cheerleader. None of us were friends; we were hardly acquaintances. Miraculously, I did manage to connect with one young man who later visited me in Atlanta and with whom I reconnected many years later via the internet. Following university, he went on to lead the life of an itinerant musician and after years without major success transitioned to a life of instrument and music engineering.
Unlike at high school where a student could get by with just doing enough not to be noticed, at university students were supposed to have a purpose, to be self-motivated and engaged in studies. Having worked on the school newspaper through both high schools and being an avid reader, I chose journalism as a major. But journalism at university was serious business. A single grammar or spelling error in an assignment resulted in the loss of one letter grade. My assignments were returning consistently poor grades and I was losing what little interest I might have had in pursuing journalism.
I might have done better if I had given more attention to my work and spent more time sleeping. I took part-time evening work at a bar and came home many nights after midnight in some state of inebriation, which I then sought to correct with amphetamines for early morning classes. Eventually I burned out and stopped working, which greatly improved my mood and my grades.
One university assignment I took to quite avidly sent my life in a direction I couldn’t have imagined. Journalism students were asked to clip, paste, and comment on newspaper articles to be submitted in the form of a journal at the end of the semester. I seem to have spent a good number of hours reading and writing notes, and as a result underwent a political awakening. I had until then never been a regular consumer of news in any format, but now I was reading daily about Thatcher’s election, cruise missiles being stationed in Western Europe, revolution in Iran and Nicaragua, the invasion of Afghanistan -- holy shit! How to make sense of all this?
1980 was a presidential election year and student versions of many of the country’s political parties sponsored rallies, discussions, and voter drives. Independent political candidate John Anderson spoke on campus, which was visited as well by members of the Minneapolis branch of the Socialist Workers Party, about which I knew absolutely nothing but from whom I received several topical pamphlets and copies of the party newspaper, The Militant.
Those materials opened a whole new world. I was hooked on the possibility of a systematic and predictive analysis of history, a framework for making sense of my current-events reading and about which none of the magazines or newspapers ever seemed to mention. I made frequent trips to the university library for books on Marx, Marxism, and Soviet history, and took a subscription to The Militant.
In the meantime, the semester was winding down and I needed to make some decision about the following school year. I had been advised to assume a student loan to finance university, the fees for which were quite high as an out-of-state student. In my absence, my family had relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, with my father making a lateral transfer to a new hub, and simply by moving to Georgia, I could take advantage of much cheaper in-state tuition. So, I applied to University of Georgia (in Athens, some 120km east of Atlanta) and made ready to move in with my family temporarily for the summer of 1980.
Looking back, this period of life seems to have been entirely reactive. There was never a plan or goal, or even any idea of making one. Everything was ad hoc, from deciding to go to university, to choosing a major, to financing, and finally to relocating.
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