Except in its final moments engulfed in flame the night it burned to the ground, the Red House was never red. It was green-trimmed and clad with the sort of thick tar-paper-like composite siding meant to put one in mind of bricks. Although if the spirit of Ammuna the Hittite had ever spent a lazy Sunday morning reading the weekend edition of the Akashic Record and sipping a strong cup of Anatolian coffee with maybe a freshly baked emmer wheat croissant, he might have chanced on the fact that not a single person has ever looked at that sort of cladding and been put in mind of bricks except perhaps to the extent necessary to form the thought, “Those look nothing like bricks; I wonder if someone thought they did?”

The green-trimmed house was called the Red House because beginning in 1969 a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla theater collective called the Radical Education Detachment called it home. Their first carefully rehearsed spontaneous street theater event was held at Sewallcrest Park in that portion of Portland along SE Hawthorne that became known in the ‘60’s by the political activists who found affordable rents there as “Red Square”. The event was preceded by a massive postering of telephone poles throughout the area, the posters saying “A R.E.D. House Production” in small letters at the bottom.

But the more proximate reason for the green house being called the Red House was due to the name of the R.E.D. collective’s founder, a former Reed College student named Rudy Ghent. “Rudolph the Red” was as inevitable as the rain that would sooner or later visit an R.E.D. outdoor performance. When it started sprinkling, just as their second-ever performance was getting underway, Rudy addressed the small group of onlookers and promised that the weather would clear momentarily, which it did, but only after 5 minutes of nonstop gusting wind and a deluge unusual even for Portland had driven the audience out of the park. Word got out and in the next issue of the Scribe, on the page opposite the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, was a cartoon showing a soaking wet couple, barely visible through the darkness of the downpour, backed by an R.E.D. guerrilla theater sign, also barely visible. The woman was looking cheerfully at the man. The caption read, “Don’t worry – it’ll clear up. After all, Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.”

A group of Reed students formed the Che Guevara House in Southeast Portland not far from where the R.E.D. performed. It was dubbed “Chez Che” when it was discovered that not one, but two, of the residents were trust babies. In Northwest Portland, on Quimby St., an entire upstairs downstairs duplex was rented by all eight members of the Pacific Northwest Radical Feminist Brigade. They did not initially think to name their abode. When they traveled to Eugene for the U of O vs. SC game to protest the ill effects of the testosterone poisoning foisted on society by organized competitive sport and by football most especially, a sports writer for the Oregonian who was covering the game snapped a photo of their protest signs and, in the sidebar piece he wrote out during the second half, named the eight ladies “The Pac 8” in the spirit of gentle testosterone-laden revenge.

The PNRFB splintered along socialist vs. anarchist lines before the second month’s rent was due, but the fact of the residence’s being a duplex kept them in tight proximity. The upstairs became the Rosa Luxemberg Radical Socialist-Feminist Cooperative and there flew a blood red flag from one of the windows. Downstairs was the Emma Goldman Anarcho-Syndicalist Glee Club, which favored party balloons tied to the railing along the front veranda.

And there was the Wobbly House, the demographic outlier of radical and anti-war houses in that both its residents collected social security. They had come west together during the depression in a Wobbly-filled railroad train bound for a worker’s paradise. Whether an organization called the International Workers of the World still existed was a metaphysical question. What is certain is that Mel and Jerry held Wobbly meetings on a monthly basis and gave out IWW membership cards after a session of singing from the IWW book of revolutionary songs. And after receiving a one dollar membership fee. Many students bathed happily in the reflected glory of singing capitalism-smashing ditties with authentic depression era socialists. Because no other group except the SDS used membership cards, it is technically true that the Wobblies were the largest leftist group in the tri county area.

The Trotsky house, where Phil lived during his first two years at Portland State, was not a standout in radical socialist circles. Other than the fact that the house’s namesake would certainly have tried to disrupt the Vietnam war, none of the residents were able to determine what, as Trotskyites, they ought to be doing with their time. As nobody in the Trotsky House had ever read Trotsky, this remained an open question until the residents were introduced to the game of “tunnel tokes” at a party held at the tail end of one semester’s finals week. The game is played inside a train tunnel and the only equipment needed other than the tunnel is a joint big enough to allow everyone playing to have as much as they like.

Participants make their way to some part of the tunnel that’s wide enough to let everyone sit comfortably, and then toke away while awaiting the sound of the train.

That the game was actually played that night was only due to a tremendous perseverance on the part of the Trotskyites and the party guest who suggested the game. First there was a drawn out debate on its correct spelling. There seems nothing unusual about the sentence “We are going to walk into a train tunnel at midnight and toke up” until one considers that that sort of thing is rarely written down. Why anyone noticed or cared was lost to history moments later, but so long a time was spent on speculative etymology (is it “toke” or “toque”?) that some people lost interest and went to Mickey D’s instead.

Second was actually locating the tunnel entrance, which pretty much by definition wasn’t on a road you could drive a car on. The tunnel tokes expert had elected the Big Mac option so the players set out on their own with a set of memorized verbal instructions. By the time they found the tunnel it was past midnight. There were no street lights where they pulled off and parked on the side of a small road and if there was a moon, it was hidden along with the rest of the universe behind thick clouds. They pointed the headlights at the entrance, allowing them to see where to hop the chain link fence with the red No Trespassing sign and get inside. It was decided to leave the car running and the head lights on so that it wouldn’t be completely black. They had no flashlight, but they did have lighters and matches, which, once their eyes had adjusted, did a fine job of causing the tracks to shine just enough to show the way.

The wide spot in the tunnel was perhaps 75 yards in, and not quite as wide as originally described. But it did have, as promised, a few candle stubs left by previous players that lit up the place. It was cold. The tunnel wall was surprisingly damp and there was pooled water on the graveled floor. It wasn’t going to be the comfortable toke-and-wait they were expecting. But the luck of the stoned held and after the joint had made its way twice around, the sound of the train came. No whistle, just the sharp creaking of the cars up ahead. The players blew out the candles. A moment later the tracks lit up and then the engine with its blinding bright headlight was bearing down on them. They screamed. The train behind the engine was invisible; there was just the noise and the presence of unseen mass moving past them. Then the last car went by and, when it left the tunnel, went silent. Someone started singing as they walked out. “When the traaaaain left the stay-shun, there were two lights on behind. Well the blue light was my baby and the red light, was my mind.” Someone asked if trains ever travelled one right after the other. There was laughter and more screaming and they ran the rest of the way out. Their car was still there. Parked beside it was a Lake Oswego police car.

The night court magistrate was neither sympathetic nor mean. They were reminded that 30 days in county lockup was a real option for them should they be further tempted by misdemeanancy before their court date, and were then released without bail. Phil threw his temptation to the gentle wind that blew through the tunnel and was back in it the next night with a can of bright yellow spray paint, chosen to show up nicely against the soot-coated tunnel wall. He left behind a message in four foot tall letters: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS IN VIETNAM! BRING THEM HOME NOW! Something for the passengers aboard the train to ponder. Nothing at all like Pasha and his amored train in “Dr. Zhivago”, but he was confident that Trotsky would at least not disapprove, and that was enough. The next week, it was END THE WAR which in retrospect he judged unoriginal and a missed opportunity. So the week after he began at the far end of the tunnel and worked his way back with one of the year’s popular campaign slogans.

WHY CHANGE DICKS
IN THE MIDDLE OF A SCREW?
VOTE FOR NIXON
IN ‘72
BURMA SHAVE

Phil eventually ran out of wall space at about the same time he started desiring more personal living space. He gave up railroad tunnel agitprop and moved into a tiny studio apartment which he named the Natalya Sedova Salon, after Trotsky’s second wife.

The Eighth Route Marxist Leninist Mao Tse Tung Thought Anti U.S. Imperialism Revolutionary Socialist Workers Collective did not, at first, have a house. Its nine members were scattered around Southeast and North Portland. None lived anywhere that could accommodate all nine members, so meetings were held at one of the grand oak tables in the main reading room of the downtown branch of the Multnomah County Library. What the necessarily hushed meetings lacked in volubility was compensated for by the knowledge that the very building in which they were conspiring to rid the American proletariat of its capitalist yoke had itself been built by the Ur-Capitalist Andrew Carnegie. This irony became their little sustained private joke and while there is no way to know, it is possible that they were the happiest Maoist group in the country, if shared smirks can be said to be a sign of happiness.

With the recruitment of its ninth member, the Committee deemed itself to have reached a critical membership mass, and began thinking about a public presence. Given that Mao Tse Tung Thought had initially flourished among the progressive masses of Chinese people, Chinatown was chosen as the optimal choice for a committee location both in terms of its central location, and the sea of progressive Chinese-American people there in which the Committee could swim, just as the Chairman had encouraged revolutionaries everywhere to do. A space on the second floor of a three story office building on NW 4th St. was found and all nine members showed up with brooms, mops, buckets, a large book shelf to be stocked with the hundreds of copies of the Little Red Book in English and Chinese that they brought, and several huge framed posters of a beaming Chairman Mao. Chinese people from the neighboring offices dropped by throughout the morning, saw their new white neighbors, looked at the posters and the stacks of little red books, smiled politely, pretended to speak no English, and left.

Around lunch time, just as the Committee members were beginning to bring up the two dozen folding chairs they would be needing for the many public presentations to come, their new landlord walked in, handed them a check for their rent and deposit and lamented the very grave and unforgivable lapse of memory that had led him to forget that the space had not been for rent in the first place, since he was just about to renovate it. Expressing the greatest regret for the obvious inconvenience and in order to to spare the group additional labors, he explained that the dozen young men he had brought with him would now assist them by carrying everything back down to the street for them.

If there is such thing as revolutionary socialist good karma, the E.R.M.L.M.T.T.T.A.U.S.I.R.S.W.C. had it in peasant spades. Two days later a small store front complete with a glass display area facing the sidewalk and a three bedroom residence upstairs came available. It was in a suitably proletarian block off of SE Powell near the eastern end of the Ross Island Bridge. But better still, as the days went by, was the dawning realization that they, as politically conscious revolutionaries, had been oppressed by a reactionary and counterrevolutionary landlord. If the Committee had ever entertained the smallest doubt about its part in the worldwide struggle to smash U.S. imperialism, that doubt itself was smashed and they set about installing themselves in the store front with great purpose.

Phil by that time had migrated to the country and was living in a small but well-domesticated wooden shed in the back yard of some friends on Skyline Boulevard a mile or two north of the Red House, and each day drove an hour in to work at Mrs. Neusihin’s Pickles. During the off season, which was most of the year, the long commute was fine. But not during pickling season. Then, great bins full of cucumbers were delivered to the warehouse during the week, and herding them through all the steps from bin to barrel before they got a chance to spoil required 6-day work weeks at 12 hours and more each day.

Then one day a series of agricultural miscommunications left the warehouse stacked to the gunwales with freshly harvested dill, yet devoid of cucumbers. While Irving Neusihin tried to get it all straightened out Phil sent the crew – forklift drivers, coopers and cucumber cullers – home to enjoy an unheard of weekday summer afternoon off. Phil strolled out past the empty cucumber bins and along the bank where river boats had once put in to take on or unload whatever it was that the huge wooden warehouse had originally been built to hold. As he walked he smoked the emergency roach he kept in his pocket and after meandering gently upriver a few minutes more, discovered that he didn’t have an organic carrot cake muffin. Once, somewhere far away, on a firefly platform on sunny Goodge Street, a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine under very similar circumstances. But Phil remained calm. He drove up to the Food Front coop and got involved in a nice little eating scene of his own. It was as simple as that; no need for violence.

Quinn was at the checkout stand, covering for the regular guy who’d called in well that morning – one of a half dozen part time jobs Quinn held. “I have a secret,” he said under his breath as Phil laid down a dollar bill. “And it’s for your ears only.”

“Then I guess I’m all ears,” Phil said as he unwrapped the muffin and worked hard to not eat it in one giant bite.

“It will change your life.”

With his mouth less full than he wanted it to be, Phil shrugged and said, “My life changes every time I wake up in the morning.”

Quinn snorted. “Not nearly enough, my stolid bourgeois friend. But now, you see, destiny is getting involved. Old Elmo P. called the Red House this morning.”

“Your landlord.”

“Our landlord. And he told Emmy that he’s got a property that’s coming vacant day after tomorrow. He wanted to know if we knew anyone who’s looking before he goes to all the trouble of listing it in the Oregonian.”

“Wow. I can feel my whole life changing right under my very feet.”

“You know, sarcasm is for people with nothing to say.”

Phil looked vacantly at the pleated muffin paper in his hand, now denuded of muffin. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

“I drove by it on my way in. It’s cheap and it’s a 10 minute walk from Neusihin’s. Now what have you got to say?”

“Cazart!”

“Indeed.”

No one knew why, but the ancient Elmo P. Gersten had a real soft spot for hippies. He charged what was essentially loose change for the Red House and in return was never bothered by his tenants about things like maintenance. Phil could expect the same. But it was a whole house. Even with low rent he’d need at least one roommate to afford it.

Quinn walked Phil out the entrance. “From an hour’s drive, down to a 10 minute walk,” Phil mused. “How would I fill all the extra time?” They were standing in front of the community bulletin board.

Quinn pointed to a poster full of large type and loud colors. “Well, you could join these guys and smash U.S. imperialism,” he suggested.

“Oh, everybody’s always going around smashing U.S. imperialism. Bo-ring.”

The poster featured an illustration of two fantastically healthy looking Chinese youth, smiling fiercely and gazing with great determination up toward the sky, each holding aloft Mao’s little red book, the scene backed by a huge red furled banner with white lettering that read “Defeat U.S. Imperialism!” Below, a red lettered headline announced, “Mass Mobilization!”

Phil, along with the entire population of the tri county area minus nine people, had never heard of the E.R.M.L.M.T.T.T.A.U.S.I.R.S.W.C., though along with a lot of people in the anti war movement he owned a copy of the Little Red Book. Like Bartlett’s Quotations it had its pithy moments and like having a subscription to Playboy, it was, by conventional standards, somewhat naughty to own and therefore if not actually revolutionary, at least rebellious.

The reason for a Mass Mobilization wasn’t immediately clear. Maybe you didn’t need a reason to smash U.S. imperialism, Phil reasoned. His eyes had begun to slide off the poster toward whatever else might be pinned to the bulletin board, when he noticed the mobilization’s venue. The address was that of the Neusihin’s Pickles warehouse.

Phil drove back down toward Neusihin’s and found Elmo P. Gersten’s rental. It was a two story farm house. Probably once surrounded by orchard, perhaps pears, he thought, which do well along the river. The north parking lot of the old furniture factory across from the Neusihin’s warehouse was lined with the surviving pear trees of a former orchard. The house stood on a narrow tree-lined street that curved sharply around the north side of the property, cutting off a big chunk of what might otherwise have been sectioned off as a second lot, so the yard in back was bigger than normal. Something that must have been a detached garage could be seen still standing beneath an enormous biomass of morning glory. He saw a tall mound of morning glory and blackberry in the middle of the yard and knew a well was beneath it. The roof was almost intact and the front entrance was porticoed in a style that seemed surprisingly grand for a farm house.

Phil was the son and grandson of people who owned houses. He had himself grown up in a house. But since moving away it had been mainly dorm rooms, studio apartments and renovated rural sheds. The idea of walking into the office of Mr. Elmo P. Gersten one fine day, signing an agreement and walking out as the sole renter of his very own personal two story house with a big yard – an idea like that was simply the wrong shape for his brain. His brain didn’t know where to put such a shape and so stored it in the same place it kept his childhood memories of Christmas morning. He wanted that farm house, and to get it he needed a roommate.

Fifteen minutes later his truck was parked in front of the Portland Scribe’s office and he was inside filling out a classified ad form. The classified ad form was the blank side of a used piece of typewriter paper.

“Just write it out on the back there”, said the woman behind the counter. “Remember that ads are charged by the word, but not the length of the word.”

Phil looked up from the paper. “Beg pardon?”

“In case you prefer longer words. Some people do. I just mention that because we get a surprising number of English majors in here placing ads and they’ve all been indoctrinated by Strunk and White to always prefer short Anglo-Saxon words.”

“Sounds tempting. But I’d probably need a thesaurus.”

“Your wish, etc. etc.” The woman jumped up and reached for a fat book on the shelf behind her.”

“Hey! Look at that!” Phil pointed to a framed drawing which was hanging above the same shelf. It was the original artwork for the “Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear” cartoon. “I remember that one! I loved it!”

“Aw, shucks.”

“Oh?  You drew that.”

She handed him the thesaurus and gestured around her at the workspace. “One wears many hats here at the Scribe. Yes, I drew it but I confess to having stolen the punch line. It’s an old Bennet Cerf joke.”

“Who’s Bennet Cerf?”

The woman sat down, sighed and shook her head sadly. “So, then, it finally comes out. You aren’t an English major after all. But, hey! we’ll make the best of it. We can be great friends. But you must know that we can never marry.”

Phil paged through the thesaurus for a few moments, then wrote out the ad and handed it to the woman.

“Alright, let’s have a look. ‘Guy seeks roommate. Old farmhouse in southwest near the river. Cheap.’ No Latin lover you. Is it very nice, this cheap place near the river?”

“Yup.”

“Quiet little street? Maybe a yard?”

“Two more yups.”

“And trees. Are there trees?”

“A big spreading horse chestnut in the front, rhoddies and Hawthorns in back and all the morning glory you could ever want.”

“How about a front porch?”

“A long veranda that a can of Oly and I have got big plans for.”

“Ohhhh…” The woman tore the ad in two, and dropped the pieces in a waste basket. She stood up, stuck out her hand and said, “My name’s Bekka, I sleep on a mat on some friends’ living room floor and I’m your new room mate.”

 

Phil started by patching the roof with tar paper and black plastic. The rebellious curl of the corners of the kitchen linoleum had been quashed, the windows long ago painted shut had at last been liberated with hammer and chisel, the living room carpet ripped up and trucked away along with the pile of loose cement chunks that were already on the side of the house along with the broken screen door in the front that had been hanging from one hinge. The toilet got new innards and Bekka hung up, behind the toilet, a beautiful trompe l’oeil No Dumping sign that she stayed up half the night painting. The yard was just going to have to get by on its own until the basics like furniture and dishes were taken care of, so Bekka walked out back and issued a stern verbal warning to the morning glory and they let it go at that. But neither of them owned any furniture so they compensated by painting everywhere instead. “If it’s going to be empty it’s going to be empty and off white,” said Bekka. “Let it be a celebration of bare volume,” said Phil. “Besides, one of the stove burners works, we have a refrigerator, and there’re two metal folding chairs in the kitchen. So it’s not as if the place isn’t ready to live in.”

By the day of the E.R.M.L.M.T.T.T.A.U.S.I.S.W.C. Mass  Mobilization, Phil and Bekka decided that they had been oppressing themselves for long enough with endless demands for uncompensated labor and were ready to rally for the working class. In the morning, Bekka came upstairs with a cup of coffee and the Sunday Oregonian folded up beneath her arm and stood in the bathroom doorway while Phil shaved.

“What are you gonna wear tonight?”

“Wear?”

“Tonight’s a big deal. You don’t just go all casual to something like a mass mobilization.”

Phil tried rinsing the soap out of his razor in the slow trickle that came out of the hot water faucet when it was turned all the way on. “Does that mean you’re dressing up?”

“Oh, baby! I’ve borrowed a Mao hat with a red star in front from a guy at work. Sandy’s got a little short coat that’s perfect for the Mao jacket look. Jeans and work boots I already have. All my commie friends have pins, of course, so it’s just a matter of how many I’ll end up wearing. And one of them has a copy of the little Red Book in Russian! Plus …”

“Jesus.”

“…Plus, I’m going to make a placard today. Something simplistic and badly drawn, but I haven’t decided on a theme yet.”

Phil dried his face and threw the towel in the direction of the bath tub. “Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.”

Bekka picked up the towel and hung it around his neck. “I live in a house where I’m forced to share a bathroom with a boy. I thought that already was the bad news.”

“See how I’m dressed now? Same way I’m dressed each and every day?”

“You refer to the denim, plaid and flannel. It’s that very particular fashion style we People of the Book refer to as ‘Northwest Christian.’”

“Call it what you want, but dress up, dress down, this is all I got. Man of the people.”

“Despair not. We may yet amend your sartorial deficiencies by the judicious application of knowledgeably selected accessories.”

“Strunk and White are moaning in their graves.”

“I ain’t no kinda English major, daddy-o.”

The Mass Mobilization was not held exactly at Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles. It was held in the rear section of the same warehouse that hadn’t been used for decades and could accommodate large numbers of mobilized workers and their progressive allies. In the middle of it, a 10 foot wide red banner with gold lettering sewn onto it declared “Long Live the Glorious and Correct Thought of the Great Helmsman”.

Bekka entered carrying a cardboard placard on a stick that showed the fat little Monopoly game capitalist in top hat and tails being given the boot by a black woman, a man in a hard hat and a generically asian person wearing a Vietnamese-style conical straw hat. Bekka had accessorized Phil as best she could; he wore his one solid blue shirt, with a bright red kerchief knotted around his neck, and held his little Red Book in one hand. They had both accessorized with a brownie, since smoking during mass mobilizations is just plain revisionist.

Later, whenever they related the event to their friends, it wasn’t the fact that they were the only members of the progressive masses of people that showed up that evening that they talked about. It was instead how little the E.R.M.L.M.T.T.T.A.U.S.I.R.S.W.C cadres seemed to notice. The speeches went on for a solid 45 minutes. They learned from the keynote speaker that the greatest contradiction in the world at the moment was that between the revolutionary peoples of the world and U.S. imperialism, a point greatly amplified by the next two speakers using quotes from The Chairman. The fourth speaker gave a loud and passionate denunciation of Confucianism and how it undermines revolutionary programs wherever it crops up. Ten minutes into it she began to sob and after that could only manage to say, “This is serious!” again and again until one voice, then two, then the entire Committee took up the cry “El pueblo unido jamas será vencido!” And as they chanted they started marching  the banner was lifted high on its poles, Red Books were brandished and the first of perhaps a dozen circuits around the warehouse began.

Afterward Bekka was philosophical. “The whole thing was just as as poignant and looney as I’d thought it might be. It was definitely worth the trouble of dressing. And underneath it all,

they seemed really nice. It always gives me hope when people as untethered as that turn out to be nice.” They sat in the kitchen at the new folding card table and eating peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches and drinking milk from the set of depression ware glass dishes that Bekka had brought home from a junk store in Sellwood. She swallowed a gulp of milk. “Do you suppose they all live together in a movement house like Chez Che?”

“I picture a Stalinist apartment block.”

“Don’t be snide. I told you I like them.”

“Anyway, maybe we should think of a name for this place.”

“Cool-o! Anything in mind?”

“I’ve been wracking my brain for the better part of three minutes
now, and zippo.”

“Hmmm. Well, who’s your political hero? No, no, no, no. Cultural hero. What cultural person do you admire the most?”

“Oh, that’s easy. Maynard G. Krebs.” Bekka shrieked with laughter. Phil closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “I shan’t apologize.”

“Apologize? He’s perfect for you. He’s sweet tempered, optimistic and off-beat but never ever mean. And he’s a good friend. Of course you like him!”

“So what about you? Who’s your cultural hero?”

“Well now.” She took a bite of her sandwich and washed it down with the last of her milk. “The thing is, my tastes are definitely a bit more twisted than yours.”

“Remains to be seen.”

“I’ll prove it to you. Wait here. Don’t go anywhere.” She got up and in a few minutes returned with a cardboard box fastened shut with masking tape. “I’m a sketch artist. Cartoonist. Right? That’s my thing. But once upon a time I did a sculpture – a bust. The only sculpture I’ve ever done. It’s difficult to get it right and I’m not really comfortable with the whole process. But that one sculpture – it turned out alright, if I do say so myself.”

And with this, she pulled out of the box a lifesize clay bust of Eddie Haskell.