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several tests of my sincerity and effectiveness. They began with selling the Worker in Greenpoint, a brooding black and Puerto Rican project-housing slum in Brooklyn. I peddled the paper to old women who thought I was from Jehovah’s Witnesses, and housewives who were willing to pay fifteen cents just to get that white idiot away from the door, and once was met by a hulking dockworker who glowered at me from his doorjamb and said, “If you don’t get that fucking Commie paper out of this building, I’m gonna crush your head in.”
    When I returned and told my co-workers of that last encounter, I was practically awarded the Socialist Medal of Labor. But while my almost-comrades were exulting over the number of papers sold, I was being privately appalled by the incredible seediness of the entire affair. They sang of raising the political consciousness of the masses, and their only contact with the masses took place with a newspaper or pamphlet or slogan keeping a suspicious distance between the people and the Party.
    Still, “they” were pleased with my work, superiors whose names were whispered only among those who had already joined. I began to be invited to social gatherings, where I met the old-timers, the heroes of the struggles of the thirties. And then I received word that I was to be given a high-level assignment. I worried for a week, wondering whether I would prove worthy. And then the orders came. I was to infiltrate the Brooklyn Heights Methodist Discussion Club, and inject Marxist thinking into their talks. If possible, I was to be elected to some office in the organization, preferably that of secretary, and wield structural as well as informational influence.
    Visions of Stalin danced in my head. The secretary! I too had heard tales of how Uncle Joe never slept, of how a light always burned in his monklike cell in the Kremlin, as he pondered and wept over the fate of his people. While I went about my task, gaining influence through giving lectures and fucking the young Protestant ladies, it never occurred to me that my position was the most ludicrous posture a revolutionary might take. As continents went up in political flames, and massive economic war machines geared for the final battle in the history of man, I was bustling about, quite seriously, seizing control of the most inane, innocuous, and effete clique in a neighborhood composed of closet queens, déclassé executives, sex-starved secretaries, and Norman Mailer.
    It was a tribute to my diligence and narrow-mindedness that within four months, I had become president of the organization. Success beyond my wildest dreams! The very next day I was told the names of the other members of the club who were also Communists, and I realized why I had won the election so easily. More than half of the eleven members of that dessicated WASP company were members of the Communist Party! In a sense, I had to admire their feeling for camouflage; this was the very last place J. Edgar Hoover would think to look.
    Within a week, I received the word; I was to be accepted into the Party. I now had only to write a formal application, in which I denounced my parents’ petit-bourgeois ways, my former Catholicism, my days working for the Air Force, and in general every anti-Marxist thought I had ever had in my life. Not having ever been in the Boy Scouts, I missed the irony of the gesture.
    It was with moist eyes and heavily beating heart that I met the man who took my application, shook my hand, and uttered for the first time a word I had previously only aspired to. “Welcome, Comrade,” he said.
    Three months later he was found with excessive funds in his bank account, a wardrobe filled with custom-made clothing, and suspicious notebooks written in code. He was exposed, denounced, and expelled. And I watched with horror as the man who took that sheet of paper into his hands confessed that he was indeed on the payroll of the FBI.
    I fled Brooklyn. I stayed away from