The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Heartbreak

as if it were plastique. Eventually the head librarian would

find it; we’d know by the dirty looks we got from her long

before we got to check on the book itself.

Catcher was a rallying point for our high school intelligentsia. I remember going to my parents for help: I asked if they would fight with the school board to get the book in the

library. They would not. I found this refusal confusing, an

abrogation of everything they had taught me. Actually it

outraged me. One of my friends had his editorial removed

from the school paper because it was about the wrongness of

banning Catcher from the high school library. So we fought

on, invisible guardians of one orphan book.

Then one day it happened: the school board took things

in hand themselves. They went through the library to get rid

of al socialistic, communistic, anti-God books. Surveying the

damage when they had finished, I saw no Eugene V Debs or

Norman Thomas, certainly no Darwin, Freud, or Marx; but

one slim volume cal ed Guerril a Warfare by a person named

Che Guevara had escaped the purge. I was bound for life to

the man. I studied that book the way the Chinese were forced

to study Chairman Mao. I planned revolutionary attacks on

the local shopping mall. We had a paucity of mountains in

the suburbs, so it was hard to apply many of Che’s strategic

points; the land was flat, flat, flat; the mall - the first in the

country - was boring, boring, boring, emphatical y not Havana.

I studied Che’s principles of revolution day in and day out,

30

The High School Library

and the school board was none the wiser. The shelves in the

library now were roomy, and the room itself seemed lower.

There weren’t books in piles to hold up the ceiling, nor were

there books that emanated heat and with the heat enough

light to be a candle in the darkness. It was as if anything the

school board recognized it did away with. I was almost out.

My term of imprisonment was almost up. My own hard time

was coming to an end. The pedophilic teacher had a lot of

anger and despair to fool around with, and he didn’t let any

of it go to waste. He’d tell you any story you wanted to hear,

give you the narrative of any book gone missing; Anna

Karenina went from being Tolstoy’s to being his.

31

The Bookstore

Sometime during high school the very best thing happened:

at the mal a bookstore opened. This was a spectacular bookstore, independent, few hardcover books but they were out of my socioeconomic league anyway; and there was a whole rack

of City Lights books, yes, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and

Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn and Gregory Corso and