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join the Communist Party. Which was then, as it is now, the saddest single American organization outside of the DAR. I returned to Brooklyn College, there to pick my way through two and a half years of irrelevancies to earn a BA in psychology. Meanwhile, I discovered Greenwich Village, marijuana, and Marxism.
    I fell in with a brilliant professor of economics who had just returned from Cuba and was aglow with tales of socialism triumphant. The pictures and stories of Fidel and his band rivaled anything America had to offer during the revolution of 1776, and contrasted with our line of folk heroes, which includes alcoholic Presidents, despoilers of forests and wildlife, vicious generals, and the legendary list of gunfighters, bandits, and armies of men who committed genocide upon the Indian nation.
    After Japan, where culture is an art and not a wild hope, the United States could be clearly seen for the brutal, exploitive, shallow, vulgar, and bellicose nation that it was. In a flash I saw that our entire nation was solidly built on the twin pillars of greed and violence. And it seemed that nothing short of a mighty and total upheaval could cure it. This was, of course, before I came to understand that the problem is not with any given society, but in the nature of mankind.
    At the height of this fervor, I met Roger, whose love of truth blended imperceptibly into a grotesque personal neurosis, and who was finding his rhetoric in Marx, Lenin, Engels, Trotsky, Plekhanov, and Eisenstein. I moved in with him and his wife, Verna, into a Hassidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. And while the long-robed and bearded Jews, with their sweeping fur-lined hats stood like eighteenth-century Poles in the evening fog under the lamplights, the band of us declared our home to be the first Williamsburg Soviet, and we spent all our time in marathon discussions and study groups, producing pamphlets and slogans, and in general doing the classic leftist scenario. Concurrently, I was having a tender love affair with a zaftig solipsist from Bensonhurt, although I was consistently criticized for having truck with such a decadent female.
    It was a strange brew and reached a high spot during an all-night party which mixed impassioned denunciations of capitalism with nude dancing on the roof. The Hassidim passed by, refusing to even notice us since we were goyim and therefore hardly better than thinly cultured savages. Their attitude was freakily fixed in my mind one night when I went in to buy some bread at a local bakery. The man ahead of me was Jewish, but clearly of the Reformed, or Amorphous, wing. He was treated with contempt by the stone-faced Hassid behind the counter. But when the storekeeper turned his eyes toward me, I experienced that uncanny sensation of being completely seen through. In his eyes, I didn’t even exist.
    Fairly soon, because of our constant involvement in marches, demonstrations, and courses at the Institute for Marxist Studies, we began to meet real Communists. Now, I had first gone to college during the days of McCarthy, and I knew of the concentration camp provisions of the Smith Act. Also, that was a time before the students had become the vanguard of the revolution, and HUAC was still droning through its Neanderthal hearings, counting each day a success if all the participants managed to keep awake during the entire proceedings. Also, through osmosis, I had been imbued with the rhetoric of the cold war, and despite myself, the notion of a Communist inspired images of cloven-footed demons. In all, to my straight-thinking mentality, joining the Party was a fateful and decisive step. So I flirted with the idea a very long time. Ironically, since my father was a house painter, to the Party this gave him a “guild mentality” instead of a “proletarian outlook.” And because I had been a Catholic (this was pre-Pope John) and, sin of all sins, a spy on the Chinese, they were equally hesitant to take me in.
    I was to be given