For a respectful, like-minded escort with no strings attached, I could always draw on the pool of decent young men in and around our Communist Club. But Joel was different. He was also the Youth Club’s most brilliant student and rising star. A gangly, dark and handsome high school senior from across town with a wide smile and rampaging intellect, Joel, like me and a group of young Philadelphians, had been recruited into the Communist Party in 1956. More intensely radical than anyone I knew, he began seeking me out, asking my opinions and inviting me for coffee. Naturally, I was charmed. Joel believed that the working class was being betrayed by bourgeois intellectuals, and accused the Party of ‘revisionism,’ which led to ideological conflicts and power struggles with Party leaders.
In addition to being a True Revolutionary, he was a true romantic, escorting me on a private Fairmount Park picnic for two, complete with French bread, wine, cheese, and the poetry of Rimbaud. He read aloud, his deep voice, clear and soulful, his bony shoulders shifting beneath the white shirt. Topping it off was a poem for me he had written and typed on a sheet of crisp white paper, convincing proof to everyone who had ever snubbed me that I could attract a smart, cute boy. ‘So there!’ my mind gloated from the hillside, soaking up Joel’s elusive yet complimentary verse like balm to the wounds of previous slights.
At the same time, the attention also made me nervous. Who did he think I was? At 16, I didn’t even know who I thought I was. Joel and I were spending more time together, searching each other out at Party functions, having meaningful late-night discussions at diners, holding hands at subtitled movies, and sometimes even kissing. Was I in love? I should be, wanted to be, but no commitment overruled the Party. ‘For life,’ we all told each other, determined to be the best Communists we could possibly be. Plus, the Party guaranteed emotional security better than a boyfriend, and was a lot less complicated.
Joel’s challenges escalated into a final confrontation to be resolved by a Club vote deciding whether or not to expel the young, super-leftist, upstart. The showdown took place in a West Philly livingroom. Most meetings were held in Powelton Village, an ethnically mixed, student and working-class neighborhood, in the kind of apartment we were expected to rent with paychecks from our factory jobs.
As the room filled to capacity, Joel took my arm and pressed me into the relative privacy of hanging jackets in the dim hall. ‘Alix, I need your support.’ We hadn’t talked about the meeting in advance. His dark eyes searched mine. ‘I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.’ But I would. He wanted me to turn my back on beloved comrades for a murky relationship and a bunch of theory I didn’t always follow with people I didn’t know. Whacking righteously away at the center beam of our small community, Joel would only find himself the latest splinter on a large pile. Maybe the Party did lack principles and was as revisionist as he claimed, but my girlfriends came first and always. That much was non-negotiable.
Joel made his case and Manny made the Party’s, gathering a tidal wave of monolithic unity as he went. The votes were cast and Joel’s challenge was crushed. Surrounded by sober comrades, my body sat on the floor while, relieved of the weight of ideal love, my spirit floated to higher ground. We would miss him. My girlfriends were comrades, insurance against the grinding isolation I had endured during two years in the midwest and the stinking life of a fish out of water. No boy was worth losing the social safety net I had longed for in Kansas City only months earlier.
The meeting began and the drama of passionate, irreconcilable polemic filled the room. Charges were laid and answered as the collective will gathered momentum, rose in a high, unstoppable wave of monolithic might to crush the apostate.
The cost of defiance varies from situation to situation, and person to person. In that year of 1956, I stood up to Mrs. Duffy with little repercussion, and a U.S. Court reversed Arthur Miller’s conviction for Contempt of Congress when he’d stood up to HUAC two years earlier. Joel didn’t stand a chance. The inevitable outcome was expulsion from both the Party and my life, which suddenly became much simpler.
Dobkin performs July 10 at Mountain Moving Coffeehouse for Womyn & Childrern.