Diversity of tactics: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, December 2022

It was November 8, 1960.

My parents and their friends were arrayed around our black-and-white RCA Victor TV in our tiny San Bernardino living room. It was election evening, with John F. Kennedy duking it out against Richard Nixon. My parents were lifelong Democrats but some of the friends present had voted Republican. In a testament to the times, everybody was drinking, smoking, eating European deli foods, joking, laughing, and playfully arguing. It was quite congenial, with no mention of a “second civil war.”

My parents allowed me to stay up way past my bedtime so I wandered around in the background. I carried a glass jar filled with dry soup beans and every time Walter Cronkite announced a victory for Kennedy I shook the jar and said: “Kennedy wins!”

That was my first memory of an American election. I would become a “don’t vote, it only encourages them” anarchist in 1968 and burned my draft card in 1970. When the voting age was lowered to 18 in March of 1971, I ran with a group of New American Movement-inspired youngsters for city council and school board in Ventura, California. That same year I registered with the Peace and Freedom Party. I’ve had a complicated, some might say contradictory relationship with American politics ever since.

Revolution, war, chess: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2022

“Shachmat,” Uri said in Hebrew, then English, “checkmate.”

I was stunned. I’d dominated the chess board as white, with eleven of my sixteen pieces intact and pushing aggressively into black’s territory. I’d mercilessly attacked him throughout the game until he had only a half dozen pieces left on the board. I was just about to deliver the coup de grâce when he put me in check with his remaining knight, then checkmated me with his remaining bishop.

“Another game?” Uri asked, the right side of his face and his right arm marked by a stroke.

Class power: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2021

Two blasts of the two-tone metal whistle sounded most early afternoons in the 1960s, announcing the Helms Bakery man’s arrival in our San Bernardino neighborhood. He drove a bright yellow and blue Chevy panel truck emblazoned with the company logo and slogan “Daily to your Door.” The kids and housewives swarmed the truck on hearing the whistle and the driver stopped to open the double back doors to reveal long wooden and glass-fronted drawers redolent with the smells of yeast, flour, and sugar. Those drawers were stocked with freshly baked cookies, glazed and jelly donuts, cream puffs and pastries, while the center section carried dozens of loaves of bread and assorted cakes. Many were still warm from the oven.

New Socialist Movement: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?” April 2021

 

Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy
—Polish proverb

It wasn’t my scene.

I attended Stuart Shuffman’s book release party for Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco sometime in November, 2007. Stuart initially xeroxed his zine at Kinko’s and personally distributed it to stores and shops around the city. His handmade publication was about to become a conventional paperback travel guide produced by a now-defunct independent publishing company that would offer a New York City edition the next year. His Guide to Living Cheaply combined two of my favorite things—zines and cheap eats—under the imprimatur “you are young, broke and beautiful” but the raucous release event wasn’t for me.