My friend Alvaro helped me to move into Jane's place (not her real name). Jane lived in Los Angeles just north of Korea Town. She was about 15 to 20 years older than I was. She had another roommate Tom (not his real name). Tom was a professor at a local college. The apartment was long and narrow and each of us had our own room. My room was very small and close to the combination kitchen/living room. Jane, Alvaro, Tom, our two neighbors and I all were members of the same Trotskyite organization. Our organization would meet at Occidental College in Pasadena.
I knew very little about Jane and Tom. Tom, I believe, was Jewish and Jane was a former Catholic nun that left the church when she was young for a career as a radical feminist. We were all serious activists. In the time I knew them, we were involved in resisting the first Gulf War, the invasion of Panama and occasionally attending discussions with a Palestinian group concerning the situation in Palestine. It was an interesting time. As I was moving back and forth between coasts, I found myself protesting the Gulf War in Boston and in Los Angeles. Boston protests were always more militant, and I enjoyed that, but Los Angeles protests, though smaller in scale, were always more colorful and creative.
One of the protests I attended was at the Westwood Federal building. Ron Kovic came to speak to the crowd. I helped Ron on stage and held his wheelchair so it would not roll off the platform. To the shock of my parents, supporters of the war, back in Boston they saw their son on CNN unexpectedly. At that protest I remember a group of my comrades lighting an American flag and one of them using the burning flag to light his cigar. It was the first time I had ever seen a flag burned in real life.
Living with Jane started off easy but quickly became stranger and stranger. Each morning I would open up the cupboard to find my cereal or freeze dried coffee and discover that it had moved to another cupboard. At first I thought I was just forgetful - remembering incorrectly where I had put them, so I made a point each day of remembering exactly what cupboard I placed my items in. Each day they would still end up in another cupboard. Each day the cupboards would be well ordered, but differently ordered. I began to wonder if I was going out of my mind. One day while struggling to find my breakfast items, Jane was standing in the kitchen with me, quietly smirking. I said to her, "it seems my things keep changing location!" She laughed and said, "that's because I move them every day." I began to wonder if Jane was a little off balance.
Once every week, Jane would have a meeting exclusively open to female members of our group. To my surprise, she demanded that all males leave the house when they had their meeting. It wasn't good enough to simply be in another room unable to hear what they were discussing. Personally, I felt this was beyond merely intrusive, but outright annoying. Nevertheless, I tried to accommodate her by looking for someplace to go each time this happened. Sometimes Tom and I would go somewhere together. Sometimes I would get together with Alvaro.
Eventually, Tom moved away. He had found a new teaching job in Texas. In his absence, I returned to the house one day to find Jane shaking with fear. She was in a panic. She told me, "Hans is coming to visit. He'll be here in an hour." "Who is Hans," I asked? "I don't know," she replied.
She left the room, walked down the hall, disappeared for a while, came back and sat down again. I looked at her wondering if I should ask any more about Hans and decided not to. As I turned to go to my room, she said, "Don't go, you need to do something about Hans." I told her I didn't know who Hans was. She told me that they were having another feminist meeting and all males would have to leave the house and, since Hans was a male, I'd have to take him with me.
By now I was really getting confused. This time I asked, "tell me everything you know about Hans and why you believe Hans is coming here."
She told me that Hans telephoned. "He said he just flew in from Belgium and that he is a friend of Tom, but that Tom never met him, they just communicate by letter. Hans is an activist. Tom is not here. You take care of Hans, and by the way, I hope he's not an axe murderer, he'll be staying with us for a while."
And with that the door bell rang and Hans appeared. To my relief, Hans was smaller than I was. This made the "axe murderer" comment easier to manage. I brought his bags in, explained to him that Jane would be having a "woman's only" meeting for two hours and offered to take him out to dinner. Of course, it was of no concern to Jane that I had my own life and might have preferred doing something for myself.
Hans turned out to be very sane. I enjoyed talking with him. He was very interesting, well educated and a syndicalist. When we returned there were a few females left and they stared at us as if to say, "how dare you enter our domain!" After they left, Hans, Jane and I sat down and had a good conversation. When I turned in, I remembered the "axe murderer" comment and put a chair in front of the door to my room (there was no lock).
Hans never murdered any of us. If anything, it was Hans and I that may have had something to worry about.
During this time I got together once with Bridget. She had moved to Long Beach. The night before I hung out with an uncle, drank profusely in a restaurant and then got stoned. I slept the night on my uncle's couch and was not my best in the morning. I drove to Long Beach to see Bridget. We took a walk to the beach, strolled around and visited a museum. Though slightly hung over, I was happy to see her again. We had fun coming up with bizarre interpretations of abstract paintings, joked and laughed and then spent the last twenty minutes or so sitting side by side on a bench by the sand. I enjoyed her company greatly. I loved looking at her hair in the sun, listening to her voice and looking into her eyes. Of course, I refrained from doing anything about those feelings, as I was married. When we parted, I tried to forget about her once again.
At that time I was renting a car. I left my own car back in Massachusetts. I had planned on flying back at some point and then driving my car out in a mad dash across the country. That time was coming soon, so I decided to take advantage of the rental car and go on a long ride. One evening, sitting there bored, I decided to pack a bag and go out into the desert. As I left my room and walked down the hall, small tent, sleeping bag and duffel bag in hand, Jane looked at me and asked, "Where are you going?"
I told her I was going out into the desert.
"What," she asked! "Who are you going with?"
"No one," I replied.
"No one goes out into the desert alone," she shouted.
"I do," I said, "I do it all the time."
"What desert are you going to?"
"Death Valley," I said.
"Death Valley! You're going to Death Valley in August! You are going to die! I'll never see you again. Don't go," she screamed.
This was a little more than I could take. I told her I would be perfectly fine and that I hoped she would have a good weekend. I left, packed my car, and headed North Eastward.
I arrived in Death Valley as the sun was rising. I was a nice ride. I drove at night in order to avoid stressing the car in the heat. As I arrived, one of the Park's cafeterias was opening. I was shocked to see how expensive everything was. Listening to the other guests around me, I soon realized that nearly everyone else was either from Japan, Germany or Italy. Gouging foreign tourists seemed to be the primary objective of the park. Consequently, few Americans were to be seen.
After eating I found a campsite and put up by tent. This was a big mistake. During the course of the day, the temperature inside the tent would get unbelievably high, heating up everything inside and storing up some extra heat in the ground below. It would be all ready to radiate into my body throughout the night.
I set off in my car to many of the different starting points for short hikes. Death Valley is truly beautiful, but as it was August, it was very hot as well. On one of my hikes I was pleasantly surprised to come across an Italian woman hiking topless. It was nothing to her and it made me think about how twisted we Americans become by being such prudes about our bodies. Our denial of the expression of nudity causes us to be more stimulated by it. Thus, we are more obsessed with sex than we would be if we just got naked more often.
I visited all of the major attractions that day. Before returning to my tent I bought two gallons of water, as I figured I would be sweating a bit that night. As it turned out, two gallons were hardly enough.
I crawled into my tent, opened the window flaps, and attempted to ignore the heat, but it was unbearable. The entire night I lay there, soaked in a puddle of sweat, sipping from the two gallons of water. From time to time I would sleep, if only for a few minutes. During one of these sleeping spells, I awoke to the sound of something sniffing my head. In order to keep cool, I had retired with my head next to the front door of the tent. The flaps were opened but the screen window was shut. An animal was pushing the screen against my head and poking its nose at my head, sniffing and sniffing. I had no idea what it was. This had never happened before. Slowly I reached for my flashlight which was by the side of my leg. I turned it so that, once turned on, the beam would flash into the eyes of whatever was behind my head. The idea was to temporarily blind it and use that time to dash to the other end of my tent, see what it was and then figure out what to do from there.
I closed my eyes so that I would not be blinded by the light, turned it on, and dashed to the other end of the tent. I heard a yelp and by the time I reached the other side, turned around and looked, it was gone. I shut the light off and sat quietly. I heard dozens of little feet running around. They all began to yelp. I figured at that point that it had been a coyote.
When things quieted down, I looked outside. My tent was one of the only tents around. I had gone to bed earlier than most people and found that many had arrived after I entered my tent. However, unlike me, they did not put up tents. They were sleeping on top of the picnic tables. I got out of my tent and the air was much cooler outside than inside. They all looked so comfortable. Unfortunately, there were no empty picnic tables left. The ground was still warm from being baked all day. Basically, I had no good place to sleep and I was screwed.
Not able to sleep, I packed up my tent and returned to my car. I drove around in the dark, letting the AC cool down the car. I parked at a scenic view point, opened up the windows, and dozed for a while.
The next day I drove around the park some more and at sun set I began my trip back to Los Angeles, arriving early the next morning. A few days later I would return to Massachusetts to get my car. However, that was when the shit hit the fan with Jane.
Living with Jane was like walking on egg shells. I did my best not to annoy her as she seemed to be ready to explode at any moment. The night before I was to fly to Massachusetts, I placed my clothes in the washing machine and turned it on. The washing machine was in the hall and it was noisy but it was not very late. I set my alarm to get up at 4:00 AM, at which point I would dry my clothes for an hour, pack my bags, drive to the airport and catch a 7:00 AM flight to Boston.
At 4:00 AM my alarm went off. I transferred my clothes from the washer to the dryer. And returned to my room. Suddenly, I heard the most insane screaming I had ever heard in my life. Jane came flying down the hall and asked, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I told her, "I have a plane to catch and need to dry my clothes before leaving." She pulled my clothes out of the dryer, threw them at me and told me to get the fuck out and never come back.
This was not very convenient. I had a plane to catch at 7:00AM. My clothes were wet. I had not yet showered. And now she expected me to move out, at 4:00AM? I told her, "No fucking way. I need to catch a plane. I'll be happy to move out when I return in a week. In the meantime, I'm leaving my things here."
I gathered my wet clothes, put them in a trash bag, and returned to my room. I found Tom's telephone number in Texas and called him. I told him the story of what had just happened and asked for advice in dealing with Jane. Tom said, "That sounds just like Jane to me. I advise you to get out quickly, she may be dangerous."
I took the wet clothes with me in my car, drove over to my father-in-law's house (he was living in LA), put them in his dryer, took a shower and drove off to the airport without any clothes to bring back with me.
While back in Massachusetts, I called my friend Alvaro to explain what happened. He told me that in the days since I left, Jane was telling everyone that she threw me out because I was an FBI agent sent to spy on her. That was the last thing I ever expected to hear. She claimed that I really didn't go out to the desert and that I was traveling too much to be anything but a spy.
I asked Alvaro to tell everyone that it was not true and to find out why she thought I was a spy. On my way back to Los Angeles, while on the road, I called Alvaro again. He told me a few things I had not known about Jane and Tom. It turns out that Tom and Jane were once married. In all the time I lived with them, they never told me that they had been married. However, even more interesting was Tom's account of the cause Jane's paranoia.
As the story was told to me, during the 1970s, Jane had been a member of a radical feminist cell suspected by the FBI of engaging in acts of terrorism. Jane had found out that she was on the FBI's list of suspected terrorists. Upon finding out about this, she lost her sanity. In a panic, she gathered together all of her personal papers, notes from meetings, membership lists, propaganda and everything else, piled them up on the floor of her kitchen and set them on fire, causing some kind of significant event the extent of which I do not know. She had never been the same since.
As I write this, I too have spent the last two years of my life harassed by the government for my political views. Back then, I had nothing but anger for Jane. Now, I see things differently. I feel sorry for her.
I now suspect that this is the reason why she demanded that all males leave the house whenever she had her meetings, why she was so curious about my day to day activities and why she freaked out when some stranger from Europe came to visit. It makes me wonder about the staggering cost in human happiness caused by the abuses of our government against activists. Just how many people have had their lives ruined by FBI agents? Given this human toll, I can only assume that being a sociopath is a prerequisite for FBI employment.
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Copyright © 2004 - 2008, Stephen DeVoy. All rights reserved. No permission to reproduce is granted without explicit permission, in writing, of the author.
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