Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 09:14:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: When Trotskyism was hip


Louis:

"It's the spring of 1949 and I'm thirteen and a half. With my best 
friend Maria, I am sitting in the very front seat of the top deck of a 
double-decker bus as it makes its way down lower Fifth Avenue 
toward Greenwich Village, which I've been assured is the very last 
stop--thus impossible to miss. Suddenly we see it, the famous arch 
that's supposed to be the entrance to Washington Square and to lots of 
other things--perhaps a life of romance and adventure--that I've heard 
about from four older, very knowledgeable Trotskyite girls whom I've 
met in the basement of Hunter College High School. Juniors who 
disdain the bourgeois cafeteria upstairs, they lunch secretly on yogurt 
deep in the locker room. They carry bags of knitting under which there 
are copies of the Militant, which they hawk around Fourteenth Street 
nearly every day after school. They have Trotskyite boyfriends whom 
they make sweaters and argyle socks for and endlessly discuss. They 
never quite explain to me what Trotskyite is, but it seems that if you 
are one, you're headed for trouble not only with the fascists but with 
detestable teen-age Stalinists who've been known to harass sellers of 
the Militant and even beat them up. I admire the daring of these girls 
tremendously, their whole style, in fact--dark clothes and long 
earrings, the cigarettes they smoke illicitly, the many cups of coffee 
they say they require to keep them going. Friendly as they are, 
however, they never invite me on their rounds. With Olympian 
disinterest, they delineate a territory that it's up to me to explore for 
myself."

(From Joyce Johnson's memoir "Minor Characters", about her 
marriage to Jack Kerouac and life within the Beat Generation)


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