My enthusiasm suddenly deflated.
“All they do is perpetuate ruling-class domination. They trick people into thinking they can work within the system. But the system must be smashed, and that means we need a real revolution.”
I picked at my broccoli.
“Participating in American elections is about reform rather than revolution,” she said.
I could tell by the way she said it that reform was a bad word. Anyway, if reform was opposed to revolution, it had to be terrible.
She reminded me of the U.S.-supported coup in Chile, after Allende had tried revolution through elections. And she explained how Democrats and Republicans are both parties for the rich, though the Democrats make more of an effort to pretend otherwise. I told my mother I didn’t know much about Carter or Ford, other than that one was a Democrat and the other was a Republican.
“Don’t worry about that,” my mother said. “There’s no real difference between them.”
“So you’re saying the elections are for dupes and sellouts?”
“Yes, exactly!” She leaned back in her chair. “Now you understand.”
My mother always said that there were three types of people in the world: dupes of the system, sellouts to the system, and those who fight the system by converting the dupes and denouncing the sellouts.
At first, my mother wanted to keep me at home on Election Day as a sort of boycott or protest. I was all for playing hooky. But then she came up with another idea.
When the big day came, I was brimming with confidence, delighted that, unlike my teachers, my classmates, and their parents, I had escaped the dangers of “false consciousness.” Being “in the know” politically made me feel special, and also made me feel sorry for those who didn’t recognize the evils of the system and the need to bring it down.
The school hallways were decorated in red, white, and blue. After lunch, everyone gathered in the auditorium. Students brought banners and signs from home that their parents had helped them make, with large bold lettering: VOTE FOR CARTER!, VOTE FOR FORD!, CARTER-MONDALE ’76! None of us could actually vote, of course. But no matter: we were being groomed to be future voters.
I proudly unfurled my cardboard banner, which my mother and I had made the night before, and held it high above my head. The banner had only two words painted in bright red capital letters: DON’T VOTE!
Jaws dropped. Heads turned. My teachers looked either terribly disappointed or mildly amused. Some of my classmates simply looked puzzled.
Perhaps I should have expected that reaction, but I didn’t care. For one moment, after more than two months of doing my very best to fit in and be accepted as a normal American kid, I tossed that all aside. As my whole school stared, I simply grinned and held my head up high and wished my mother could have seen me. She would have been so proud of her radical little boy.
Playing Hooky
I LIKED SCHOOL, but I didn’t always feel like going. Whenever I told my mother I wanted to stay home, she never asked why; when the school called to inquire about my whereabouts, my mother gave me a wink as she explained to the receptionist, “Peter isn’t feeling well today.” Sometimes she simply said, “Peter has decided to sleep in, which is fine with me.” Occasionally, I would even walk right out of school during the mid-day recess if I felt like it, knowing that when the school called home my mother would vouch for me. To an eleven-year-old, this made her the best mom in the world.
She didn’t believe in strict rules at home, either, or even loose rules, for that matter. As had been true in South America, she had total faith in me, perhaps knowing that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was betray her trust. I never had a curfew or a bedtime. I never got into trouble anyway, which I suppose gave her extra confidence about her no-rules rule. My mother’s attitude was that she could count on me to be responsible, use good judgment, and do the right thing. Then again, she didn’t give me a lot of tips about what exactly that meant. She never said a word to me about sex education or staying away from drugs or alcohol.
My mother didn’t see herself as an authority figure in my life; she saw me as her accomplice and best friend. In fact, she seemed to get a little thrill from being complicit in my defiance of authority. Of course, she wanted me to learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but, as she always told me, she thought mainstream education socialized kids to be obedient conformists. She never looked at my report cards or even asked about my grades—she refused to grade her own students, after all. So I never tried to impress my mother with my schoolwork and never took it personally that she showed no interest in the fact that I was doing well in my classes.
My mother’s worst fears about students being turned into sellouts were realized when the Denver Public School System launched the Adopt-A-School program, in which giant corporations like Coors, Exxon, and Chevron provided services such as career counseling and tutoring. Desperate for new funds and resources, my teachers supported the program, but my mother was appalled that corporate America was invading the classroom. She condemned the involvement of special interests in an article in the Denver weekly, Westword, titled “Adopt-A-School, Co-opt A Student? Denver Public Schools Teach Children the ABC’s of Big Business.” She followed that piece up with another in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, titled “Big Business Feeding Propaganda to School Kids.”
Shortly after these articles were published, my English teacher, Ms. Johnson, stopped me as I was leaving class one day. She peered at me through her large round glasses. “Your mother just doesn’t appreciate a helping hand,” she said, reaching up to push her glasses closer to her face. “What’s her problem?”
I didn’t know how to reply and didn’t feel like arguing with my teacher anyway. So I just put on a smile and shrugged my shoulders.
* * *
My favorite time to skip classes was when it snowed. The more snow, the better. After asking my mother to call in sick for me on days with some snowfall, I would go door-to-door through the neighborhood, offering to shovel steps and walkways and driveways for a buck or two. At the end of the day, I’d blow all my money on pinball machines. Sometimes I would coax a friend or two to go shoveling with me, although it wasn’t as easy for them to skip school. But I knew I could always count on Robert Vega, who lived a few blocks away, to play hooky with me; he hated school, was barely passing, and missed classes all the time. He probably thought I was also getting in trouble by playing hooky when it snowed, not realizing my mother was in on it, and I never told him. A few years later, Robert Vega would be the one to almost get me in trouble.
My mother herself was sometimes the reason I skipped school. If we got home late from one of her evening political events we would both be tired the next morning. She would wake up, make breakfast, and call in sick for me. Then we would both go back to bed.
I usually made sure not to skip more than one day in a row, not wanting my teachers to be suspicious. But one time my mother took me out of class for an entire week. It was November 1977, right in the middle of the fall term. We spent that week in court.
* * *
My mother had been arrested the day before my twelfth birthday. She was picketing at the main gate of the Adolph Coors Brewery Company in Golden, Colorado. More than a thousand brewery workers had been on strike since April, protesting racial discrimination and forced polygraph testing of employees, among other things, and my mother was eager to organize it. The Coors strike brought together an eclectic coalition of labor, environmental, gay-lesbian, and social justice activists. Members of the Coors family were outspoken backers of right-wing causes, which made Coors the company that everyone on the left loved to hate, my mother most of all (secretly, years earlier, she and Raul had fantasized about kidnapping Joseph Coors and forcing him to “listen day and night to a recording of helicopter, police car noises, and other highly selective tortures”). My brother Joel even joined the cause long-distance by drawing an anti-Coors comic book, which was handed out at r
allies and other strike events.
In a speech at a brewery workers’ rally in front of the state capitol building, my mother told the cheering crowd:
Cover of my brother Joel’s comic book in support of the Coors strike
It’s not just our ANGER at Joe Coors and his lie detector tests and forced physicals and harassment of workers and of minority people in the community that’s keeping us together. It’s our HOPE that working people can take their lives in their own hands—that they can, in building up their own power as workers, take power away from those who only use it against the people. Anger is enough to make people go out on strike, but without hope, and the organization and discipline that hope inspires, we can’t win the strike, or the larger battles that we all face as working people. The coalition that community people have formed is dedicated to keeping alive that hope and helping build that organization and discipline. The courage of the strikers in voting to stay out on strike even when money has run out inspires us to a greater sense of unity. Many of us in the coalition are living with meager resources, too, and working on the faith that the sacrifices we make now will help create a better life in the future for ourselves, for our children, and for all our sisters and brothers who are living in fear of losing their jobs or who are tired of being made to work intolerably long hours and under intolerable conditions just to keep some rich man’s pockets lined with gold.
Que viva la lucha!
Hasta la victoria siempre!
For six months, my mother made the strike her full-time passion as a coordinator of the Coors Boycott and Strike Support Coalition. In early July, she and four members of the coalition were arrested and charged with “harassment, resistance, and trespassing.” The cops claimed they had crossed ten to fifteen feet inside the Coors property line and refused to leave, although my mother insisted that the whole thing was fabricated, that the local police were in cahoots with Coors to harass and disrupt the protesters. The trial date was set for November.
I couldn’t wait. Not only would I get to skip school for days but I would get to see my mother take on the evil empire of the Coors Brewing Company. It never occurred to me that if she was found guilty, my mother could end up going to jail; for her part, she didn’t seem worried, either. She was energized by the coming fight.
When we arrived that first morning of the trial, a picket line of protesters stood yelling slogans and waving BOYCOTT COORS! signs in front of the Jefferson County Courthouse. They cheered my mother on as she walked up the steps, with me proudly by her side. I felt like a celebrity; some local press was there. Inside, the courtroom was packed. I sat up front with my mother’s activist friends. There was a lot of camaraderie in that room. Unlike the last time I had been at a courthouse—during my parents’ custody battle—this felt more like a party. I thought to myself, What would my father say if he could see me now? He worked as a contract negotiator for a big union, so presumably he would have been supportive of the Coors strike, but he certainly wouldn’t have approved of my skipping school. And he would have distrusted, on principle, anything my mother was involved in.
Contrary to my expectations, though, the trial dragged on tediously, through the jury selection and cross-examination. I doodled in my notebook, daydreamed, and even nodded off, except when the proceedings focused on my mother. In addition to the trespassing charge, the prosecution accused her of screaming, “Stick it up your fucking ass!” to the police and the security guards. As soon as they made this allegation, everyone who knew my mother burst out laughing. My mother could yell in a picket line as loudly as anyone, but she never swore. No one, including me, had ever heard her use the F word. Maybe she said “bullshit” on occasion, but even that was pushing it. There was no way this was true.
With my mother at the Coors strike trial in Golden, Colorado, November 1977
To kill time during the courtroom breaks and intermissions, I strutted up to the front, stood behind the podium, and pretended I was a trial lawyer. “Your Honor, I would like to call Andrea Gabriel to the witness stand. Ms. Gabriel, is it true that you are an anti-capitalist, God-hating, homo-loving communist agitator?”
“Well, yes, I am, and proud of it,” I said, switching to a defiant falsetto. All those hanging out in the room during the break, including my mother, laughed and cheered me on.
I switched to the defense: “Your Honor, I would now like to call Mr. Joseph Coors, president of the Coors Brewing Company, to the witness stand. Mr. Coors, is it true that you are a fat capitalist pig who hates homosexuals, communists, and labor unions?”
“Well, yes, I am, and proud of it.”
Everyone laughed and cheered me on even louder, though the stuffy prosecuting attorneys returning from the break didn’t seem to find it all that amusing.
Impersonating a court lawyer during the recess at my mother’s Coors strike trial in Golden, Colorado, November 1977
In the end, none of the charges could stick. At the conclusion of the weeklong trial, all of the defendants were acquitted and the case was dismissed. The defendants held their fists up high for the celebration group photo.
My mother felt triumphant. As soon as she got home, she typed up her own statement to the media, with “PRESS RELEASE!!!” in bold caps at the top, declaring that the effort by Coors to intimidate strikers and their supporters had backfired, and that, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the strike, the workers were part of a “growing movement against the totalitarian practices in the industry, and they will be seasoned in the struggle for working class solidarity.” I never saw that any news outlets picked up on that press release, but I do know that the next day I finally, reluctantly, went back to school.
Gun Crazy
BOYCOTTING EVIL CORPORATIONS like Coors was one thing, but my mother firmly believed that it would ultimately take armed struggle to destroy capitalism. That’s why she not only tolerated but encouraged my brief love affair with guns. I first learned to handle a real gun with real bullets in the basement of Al’s Pool Hall on Broadway, a half mile or so from home. I was in the sixth grade. I often stopped at Al’s on the weekends or on my way home from school to shoot a few rounds of pool or play pinball until I ran out of money. I then replenished my supply by helping myself to the loose coins at the bottom of my mother’s purse.
Many of the teenagers from the neighborhood—kids a few years older than me—hung out at Al’s, killing time, quarter by quarter. Al, the sixty-something, chain-smoking owner, sat silently in the back and watched customers come and go. His friend Clyde was a regular. A short pudgy man with a potbelly and greasy, graying hair, he bore a notable resemblance to Manuel Noriega and treated kids to free games of pool.
As a friend of Al’s, Clyde had a special privilege: access to the makeshift shooting range set up in the basement. The kids who hung out with Clyde not only got free pool games but also shooting lessons. After we played pool and did target practice with his .22-caliber rifles, Clyde would sometimes give us rides home in his black Cadillac Fleetwood with shiny black leather seats and sharkfin taillights. It was bigger and fancier than any car I had ever been in, a classy Batmobile. Once in a while, Clyde also took us in his big black cruiser to go bowling, see a movie, or play miniature golf.
I liked Clyde’s attention and all the free fun things to do that came with it. He spoke at length about reincarnation, what our auras looked like, finding past lives through hypnosis, extrasensory perception, the writings of Edgar Cayce, and extraterrestrial visitors. “The aliens are everywhere around us, impersonating humans,” Clyde warned us during one ride to the movies, adding, “I was abducted by aliens once, but only briefly.” Clyde also claimed that he was a member of “The Clan,” a vast, secretive old extended-family network that ruthlessly protected its members and stretched across the western United States and into Mexico. He said he could see the future and knew that he was going to die in the year 2025. Part of me believed him, but part of me also thought he was nuts.
My mother kne
w about Clyde, but she never really asked anything about him, what he did for a living, where he was from, whether he had a family. I suppose she thought that I needed a father figure, which was certainly true. She saw that I liked to do things that cost money even though I didn’t have any of my own. The one time my mother met Clyde, she hit him up for a donation for one of her political causes. I was embarrassed by my mother’s forwardness, but Clyde didn’t seem to mind. He gave her twenty bucks. He wanted my mother to like him, and my mother wanted him to support her cause.
One day at the shooting range, Clyde brought out a .22-caliber Ruger, a carbon black pistol that resembled a WWII-era German Luger. He told me I could use it for target practice whenever I liked. It was sleek and shiny and beautiful. It had a nice heft to it, heavy but not too heavy. Nothing like the flimsy plastic toy pistols I had played with before. I could not wait to use it.
Clyde even let me take it home. Problem was, I hadn’t yet told my mother about my new love of guns. “There’s a shooting range for target practice in the basement of Al’s pool hall,” I said to her casually over breakfast. “Clyde has been teaching some of us how to shoot.” I held my breath, waiting for her reaction.
She was scanning that morning’s Rocky Mountain News, scissors in hand, ready to clip any article of political interest. “That’s nice,” she said. “Just be careful.”
I could barely hide my relief and excitement. I tried not to think about how my pacifist father would have reacted. He hated guns, and would have been horrified that I was anywhere near them.
Later, I showed my mother the Ruger pistol, displaying it for her on our kitchen table. It turned out that my mother was actually supportive of my gun obsession. “Ah, I see,” she said as I rattled off the key specs. “You know, learning to use a gun will prove handy for when the revolution comes.” This was the same person who less than a decade earlier had led a campaign to abolish war toys. In between, the pacifist Mennonite had become a Marxist revolutionary.
Rebel Mother Page 21
