Halloween 2011

One question I am often asked towards the end of October is: ‘Do you have Halloween in England?’

I’ve been asked this question and responded to it enough to realize that I am not being asked if the ancient pagan fall festivals like the Celtic Samhain that predate American culture and grew into what we now know as ‘Halloween’ exist over the pond but rather if groups of children dress up and go from door to door soliciting candy with the phrase ‘trick or treat’.

I do hear there is some trick or treating in the U.K. now but it is all still relatively small scale and has not really taken off so I answer ‘no’ and go on to explain:

‘We don’t do Halloween, we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night instead on 5^th of November and that fulfills our need for the pagan fall festival.”

This statement, if the enquirer is actually seeking a dialogue and not merely chattering along the soundtrack of their preselected thoughts, will provoke the further question: ‘What is Guy Fawkes night?’

I then explain that it is a night devoted to making an effigy of the Catholic Terrorist, Guy Fawkes, and burning him on a large bonfire as a warning against Papist imperialists.

At this point most people check out, sometimes voicing the thought that I might be making it up or stating that they, ‘never know when I’m joking’.

To give these people fair due, I do have a droll sense of humor that can bend towards the surreal. For example, I have been known to state with apparent sincerity that ‘Bjork’ is actually the Icelandic word for ‘shrill little troll’.  However, Guy Fawkes Night is real. I’ve just checked Wikipedia and it’s not a vivid delusion of my own concoction.  We called it Bonfire Night in my area as a child and many Guys were made and burned in my youth. Large public firework displays accompany the bonfires now. I also hear that things are changing and it’s becoming more like ‘Halloween’. The homemade bonfire toffee, the black chewy treacle drooly deliciousness of my youth, is being replaced by generic ghost and ghoul themed candies. Children are not building effigies as much as they once did and are not parading them around and asking strangers for ‘A penny for the Guy’ as is traditional.

The funny thing is, that while I know what people mean when they ask me about Halloween, namely the children and the masked promenading for candy I’ve never actually witnessed this myself in America even though I’ve lived here for many years. 

It is only now that I’ve had my first real experience of the great tradition. We’ve just never lived in a neighborhood with kids so it’s mostly been a time of adult costume parties with horror film themes. In Chicago we lived in the top floor of an enclosed apartment block. In San Francisco in ’96 it was a crazy street carnival but again, no children.

We’ve observed Dia de Los Muertos a couple of times in San Diego, once going over to Tijuana and last year touring the decorated graves in Old Town, but I’ve never really seen the full of convoy of kids going door to door with the old ‘trick or treat’ routine.

I’m am therefore very happy to report that it does in fact exist and it is as delightful, charming and hilarious as episodes of sitcoms and nostalgic Ron Howard movies would have you believe.

My friend JR lives in South Park and it’s a cute neighborhood with set back houses with lots of young families. He invited us over to sit on his porch and drink a beer and hand out candy with him. Last year he said it was so busy that he ran out of candy in an hour.

We arrived about seven and it was all in full flow. He’s a set designer and he’d covered the porch with fake cobwebs and the neighborhood was alive with people. Most of the costumes were home made. Mario Brothers were popular. There were a lot of Princesses. The young ones were the cutest, struggling up the steps in bumblebee stripes and having difficulty managing their stuck on wings. They often had to be coached in the one key line by grinning, doting parents.

‘And what are you tonight?’           

            ‘A cape.’

            ‘A CAPE!’

The things children say, it’s always funny. A confident fat kid arrived and declared he was Zoro but he looked more like a mariachi and was lacking a sword. One kid told us she was ‘A Chinese person’, which was odd and launched us into a big discussion about political correctness.

There was a toddler dressed as a shrimp who was just way too adorable.

JR wore a false beard and was trying to instill a new set of rules this year since he’d run out of candy last year because parents had helped themselves to the treat bowl. This did not seem right and in fact there was a definite awkwardness about some of the exchanges at times with people who were way too old to be collecting candy. So he and his roommate had got an adult basket together for those too old to get treats. The adult basket contained condoms. It was an interesting idea and it proved difficult to enforce since the parents really wanted candy and not condoms and many of the parents were middle-aged Latino women, with little English and were probably Catholic and had received instruction not to block their husband’s semen in any way, so it was kind of embarrassing to see the look on their faces when they discovered what they’d got.

‘I feel more comfortable giving condoms to the men’, said JR after a few dips in the adult box.

‘Yeah, you’ve got to be careful, you could get in trouble, some of the young women dressed as slutty vampires might actually be underage.’

The teenagers on the cusp of adult hood were my favorite group. They were all clearly struggling with the idea that trick or treating may not be ‘cool’ or age appropriate for them anymore and yet they obviously enjoyed being out at night with friends and getting free candy. You could see the cognitive dissonance at play on their faces, teens who normally put effort into trying to be accepted as older suddenly have to decide that they are in fact not older and it’s fine for them to dress up as a chipmunk and go and pick up mini chocolates from the neighbors.

JR put each of them through the whole ritual, making them deliver the trick or treat line and then forcing them to explain their costume. Each question was a challenge with the subtext, are you really old enough to be doing this?

One sulky teen told us she was ‘From the 80’s’. Another one said she had come as ‘Prom Night’.

But of course, it’s not really about the chocolate. Candy is cheap and plentiful, the teens were arriving with iphones, they could probably buy all the candy they could ever want. There is a lot more to Halloween, there’s something in the atmosphere of the night, the smiles, the costumes, the tradition. It’s social connectivity. It’s good, I get it

Surface Surface Truth Surface Joy

By Andrew Barclay Newsham

            Sam had a smile on his face as big as an upturned umbrella and it poked out into the bar and disturbed the locals. He was feeling good, damn good. So what if it was perhaps a little too good for the Lumber Mill Grill? There was no law against being happy. There was no law against smiling. To hell with them if they thought he was a nut.

            He raised his glass of beer and saluted the small group of men who perched like vultures upon saggy leather stools at the end of the bar. They pretended not to notice him and glared stiffly at a small television that was tuned to a baseball game.

They are the nuts, thought Sam, for not smiling. How could they not? It was all too ridiculous. It was delicious. Absurd. Everything was as vivid as a peach.

            As soon as he’d come in he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with the bartender. It was the smile but it was more than the smile. He’d ordered a German beer, the man had been friendly and pleasant. As he waited for his drink he’d read a framed piece of embroidery on the wall. The other wall decorations were antique black and white pictures of logging and lumber mills. The embroidered patch stood out, such frames normally referenced God or country wisdom but this did neither. ‘You can eat an elephant if you take small bites’, it said. He asked the bartender about it.

            “I guess it means you can do anything if you set your mind to it,” said the bartender.

            “Like eating elephants?”

            “Yes,” said the man.

            “Are you some kind of monster?” asked Sam. He was joking. It was clear it was a joke. How could anything accompanied by such a smile be considered otherwise?

            But the bartender had frowned. That had been the beginning of the sour note that crept into their relationship.

            “It’s just a saying,” he had said defensively.

            “I know, I know,” said Sam hastily. “I’m only joking. It’s strange though, when you think about it, like, if you really set your mind to it you can really fuck something up.”

            The bartender shrugged and retreated behind the shield of his profession. “Would you like any food?” he asked.

            “Do you have any elephant? Maybe a deep fried ear with onion rings?”

            “No, but I can recommend the ribs.” He gave Sam a menu and then walked away, down to the end of the bar and the little gathering of regulars staring at the television.

            The television was old and small. Sam guessed it couldn’t have been more than thirty-six inches wide. Such a screen would be laughed out of all the bars he knew. Most bars in New York City, if they had televisions and were not cultivating an air of refinement, now went for giant screens that could be seen from the moon. But this wasn’t the city. He was a long way upstate. This was different world almost, like the Land of Oz. This was Podunk, New York. Population 2037.

Seeing these old men gathered around such a small screen was like something from the past. And who watched baseball anymore? Other than the World Series? Eight million games a season of virtually no importance. Grown men throwing and catching. Two or three big teams winning everything by virtue of buying up all the best players. The whole sham was deader than a legless turtle.

            Sam imagined a legless turtle on the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium. The place was packed, people knocked back weak beer, hotdogs and peanuts like mindless cows, as if it was all perfectly normal. A team of umpires yelled out the innings without a pitch being thrown or base being stolen, the only movement being the senile bobbing of the turtle’s head as it strove to comprehend its missing legs. During the seventh inning stretch everybody stood up and sang ‘take me out to the turtle…’

Sam began to laugh. The bartender and a couple of the old men shot him suspicious glances. He waved at them, as if he was on a boat. They looked away quickly.

Ten minutes later one of the men left the group and walked towards him. Sam swiveled in his seat to talk to him but he’d only come to get something from the bartender who had followed him up. The bartender got level with Sam and then bent down to open a padlocked box.

Sam decided to talk to the new guy anyway.

“Good game?” he asked.

The man shook his head and stared at the bartender’s back.

“Who’s playing?” persisted Sam cheerfully.

 “Mets v Padres,” said the man. He spoke without looking at Sam. He wasn’t old. He was in his mid-thirties. He had a thick black moustache on his top lip like a coal brush.

“The Padres of San Diego?” asked Sam, continuing to probe for conversation.

The man looked at him. He had sad, clouded eyes. “Yeah,” he said.

“You know Padres are military chaplains who may carry weapons onto battlefields,” said Sam.

“No kidding,” said the man. He wasn’t interested, his eyes had already gone back to the bartender who had come up with a long cloth package in his hands.

            “But obviously,” joked Sam, “I don’t think the baseball players are actual Padres. Just as the Cleveland Indians are not actual Indians or The Florida Marlins actual fish.”

            “You never know,” said the man casually.

            “No,” said Sam enthusiastically. “You never do know.”

            The bartender handed the man the package. “Here you go Lloyd,” he said. The man took the package and laid it on the bar. It was tied at either end with two pieces of string. He undid the knots and rolled back the cloth to reveal a shotgun.

            “Hey,” said Sam, “You’re not a Padre are you?”

            “No,” said the man flatly.

            “I mean, carrying the gun…”

            The man had ignored him and studied the gun closely. What he was looking for Sam could not tell. After a few moments he seemed satisfied and tied it back up.

            “Will you be in later?” asked the bartender.

            “No…” said the man hesitantly, “um… I’ve got to polish my bowling trophies.”

The bartender nodded and the man walked outside.

            After he had gone, the bartender sighed and knelt to relock the box under the bar. When he stood back up Sam asked him for another beer. As he set about pouring the drink Sam asked him what it was all about.

            The bartender shrugged.

            “But what does it mean?” asked Sam.

            “What?” asked the bartender.

            “Bowling Trophies. It’s a metaphor right?”

            The bar tender shook his head. The man made him uncomfortable. He was glad for the business but he couldn’t work him out. They didn’t see too many tourists out this way and he didn’t fit easily into any box or category. His happiness was too loud. The smile was unsettling and his conversation veered towards the perverse. He wasn’t drunk, so that left other drugs or love or lunacy. There were other reasons of course but he knew those three things were the main suspects. People just didn’t get that happy. The bartender thought about religion and then realized he would count that under ‘lunacy’.

            “OK,” said Sam. “That man takes a shotgun off you, studies it like a hawk and then walks off saying he’s going to go polish some bowling trophies…”

            “He’s a good bowler,” said the bartender.

            “So, you’re telling me everything was right there on the surface?”

            “I don’t know what you mean.” The bartender grabbed a cloth and began to wipe the bar.

            Sam knew he was making the man uncomfortable. His mood was veering towards the euphoric. He looked at the bar. It was perfectly clean and didn’t need wiping. It was a displacement activity, unless he was wiping away the stain of the shotgun. It had left no physical stain but maybe there was a psychic one.

            “You gave him a shotgun,” he continued.

“It was his,” said the bartender.

“OK, but then you asked him if he was coming back. He said no, that he was going to polish his bowling trophies. Now you’re saying there was nothing hidden in that. That it was all there, right at the surface for me to see. That he is really going to go and polish some bowling trophies...”

            The bartender shrugged. “He likes to keep them clean.”

            “More than clean by the sounds of it. Shiny. Clean and shiny. Sparkling like Gabriel’s Trumpet. Like ornamental brass.”

            “No harm in it.”

            “You’re damn right there,” said Sam. “But who does that? And what about the gun?”

            “Are you a cop?” asked the bartender.

            “No,” Sam chuckled and shook his head. “I know it’s none of my business. I understand that. I’m just a harmless stranger passing time in your fine saloon.”

            “OK then,” said the bartender and he walked away, back down to the locals.

            Sam took a deep breath and laughed to himself. It was an odd town that was for sure and yet he also knew it was just like any place really. Any place in America where a man could drive home to spend a pleasant evening polishing up a collection of bowling trophies. It seemed ridiculous but then everything seemed ridiculous. And to question it, to point it out, to reach for your fellow man to try and weigh and sample the magic and mystery of the moment, why that could only bring forth fear and suspicion. No, he wasn’t a cop. But would that make it any more valid if he was? Did he need to be a cop to question the undeniable oddity of that moment? There was a gun. That was something. An ominous implement. One could dwell on the gun. But this was a rural place. It was possibly not so strange. What would signify crime in the city was nothing more than a farming or sporting tool out here. But there was also mention of bowling trophies. That was something else. This was no play. This was no staged moment. This was life in rural New York, way upstate. Podunk. Some kind of run down old logging town. Or maybe it wasn’t? The Lumber Mill Grill might never have been an actual lumber mill. It could be a fallacy, a construction. The old pictures on the walls of felled trees and grim squared jawed men in checked shirts merely reproductions. Or not even reproductions but complete fictions, photo-shopped images carefully selected by Chinese businessmen to create an atmosphere and inspire a warm nostalgic comfort. This kind of thing happening everywhere. The authentic was replaced by the fake. It had gone on so long now that the authentic had begun to imitate the fake. It made your head spin, or rather it would do, if you ever thought about it, if you ever scratched beneath the surface. What good were axe handles and mining helmets anyway, in this modern robotic age, other to adorn the walls of bars?

The bowling trophies existed. The bartender had said as much. Sam imagined them. Shiny. Golden. Kitsch. A source of pride for a lonely man with a shotgun. Had the man really been lonely? Yes, thought Sam. He’d been sitting with the locals down the far end of the bar but loneliness was more than simply being with people. Sam had known loneliness. He’d felt it vibrating off the man like black smoke.

He knew it was nothing but conjecture but he couldn’t help his mind spinning through the permutations like a ball bouncing round a roulette wheel. The man had entered competitions and he had knocked down a lot of pins and they’d given him big shiny metal objects which he displayed and polished. Symbols. Medals. Trophies. He had propelled his ball better than anyone else on the day. As he polished he remembered the wonderful moment in which he won them, the roar of the crowd, the deadly curve of the ball rolling on the shiny polished surface of the lane to smash down the pins. Maybe it was all there? Maybe it was all right at the surface? Maybe it only seemed strange to him, a man from the Big Bad City? He’d fallen into a dark pool of cynicism, a place where nobody would willingly spend time treasuring bowling trophies. Maybe they were right to look at him with suspicion. He had been flying on autopilot for too long and now he was taking notice of the world, really taking notice, he was behaving like an alien.

            ‘To hell with them,’ thought Sam. He raised his glass to his lips. It didn’t matter. Bowling trophies, that’s all it was. No big deal. He wasn’t the one going home to clean them. He was happy. That was all that mattered. The world was a wonderful place full of interest and intrigue. It was as vivid as a peach. And ridiculous. However way you looked at it. That was the truth. However way you cut it. Whatever your belief system, scientific or myth based. Or myth based and scientific. There was the beer you had. The beer you were yet to have. The sunny day. The cool bar. The comfortable chair. The old embroidered frames about eating elephants. The suspicion over a smiling stranger. The passing moment full of endless potential. The baseball game, two teams of men focusing intently on hitting and chasing a ball around like dogs. And all the pairs of eyes watching them, in the stadium and on television in rooms and offices and bars like this one. Sublime and ridiculous. And what was it all about? Could people really believe there was a God? With everything in his plan? For his pleasure or as a test? No no no. the sheer weight of everything was just plain ridiculous. Of course mankind had to come up with the idea of a God, with a human face, some kind of higher power and off-stage presence to make our every action seem worthwhile. It’s comforting, otherwise what have you got? Mindless pointless pain and hatred and animalistic drives and pig headed incompetence. The best thing mankind could do would be to waste time peacefully, harmlessly, without killing or hurting each other or the environment. Pray, polish the bowling trophies, drink a cool beer, watch baseball, play baseball, chase the ball as happily and as harmlessly as a dog. Keep it all on the surface. Least you could do is smile, laugh at the absurdity of life.

            Sam took a deep breath and shook his head.

            So what if he was feeling a little nutty? Was it so bad? He was generally a happy person but this was something else. It was unusual to feel so damn good. He told himself not to stress and analyze it. What good could come of that? No, better to keep it all at the surface. Take it all at face value. The smile was at the surface and yet didn’t it also reflect his mood? Yes it did, he was smiling all the way to his core. Maybe that was what people were finding do disturbing?

            He’d driven up out of the city with his friend James. James had come to deliver a bunch of crap to his aunt who lived in this here Podunk, New York. For reasons Sam could not explain James had decided to deposit him in this bar and would pick him up later. He was out of the city for a day trip. It was nothing too big, nothing too grand. But he was feeling damn good. The feeling had grown within him as he’d left the city, following the Hudson River upstate into gorgeous greenery. Was it just a change of scenery? No, it was more than that. And possibly not even that.

            At the end of the bar the bartender quietly told the regulars about his last interaction with the smiling stranger. The regulars now consisted of three men. Tom, John and Abe.

            “He says he’s not a cop,” said the bartender.

            “I can tell he’s not a cop,” said Abe knowingly.

            The men agreed that Abe could probably tell if he was a cop because Abe had a brother who was a cop. In this silent and unspoken way he was considered worldly in terms of the law by the other men.

            “Why’s he smiling like that?” asked John. It was the third time they’d asked the question amongst themselves.

            “I think he might be religious,” said the bartender.

            “He don’t seem religious,” said Tom. “He’s not trying tried to sell it to us yet.”

            “Give him time,” said John.

            “He’s just a fool.”

            “He said Lloyd was polishing his trophies up to shine like Gabriel’s trumpet or some such,” said the bartender. “And he knows a lot about Padres, the clergy not the baseball team.”

            Sam couldn’t hear what they were saying but he knew they were talking about him. It just made him smile all the more. The fact that they were wondering what he was smiling about when he didn’t really know what he was smiling about only added to his joy. He didn’t know why he was smiling. Other than he was happy, inexplicably happy. And that everything was ridiculous, silly to the very core if you thought about it.

            He rolled off his seat and went to the jukebox in the corner. It was an old machine from the fifties, a beautiful dome and chrome relic, with yellow glass and mechanical flippers that flicked through albums of available songs.

            There was Tony Bennett. There was Dolly Parton. There was Willy Nelson and Johnny Cash. There was a Woodstock album. There was Little Anthony and the Imperials. There was a lot of Frank Sinatra. There was Otis Reading and Marvin Gaye. The white crooners sang mostly from a position of reflection, from a lofty ivory tower of mastery over their feelings, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again, too few to mention’. The black soul singers sang mostly from the heat of battle, in the molten midst of emotion, ‘Please Please Please, Try a little tenderness’.

            Sam put in a quarter and selected a song called Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop by Little Anthony and the Imperials. The music began tumble out of the speakers. The Imperials sang the title over and over while Little Anthony provided a rhyming narrative about a woman dancing. A man was in a ‘native hut,’ when a woman arrived with a dance that put him in a ‘trance’. The lure of the female. The joy of sex. The simple surface pleasure of skin on skin. Sam laughed.

It was ludicrous. That this should be recorded. Practiced. Performed. Scratched into vinyl. Encased in an old rock and roll jukebox in Podunk New York. Released by a silver coin with a picture of an eagle on one side. ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop’ sang the Imperials. Sam began to dance. The old men stopped talking. Sam danced towards them.

            “Little Anthony and the Imperials,” said Sam as he danced closer.

            The old men stared at him, mouths agape. Sam danced now like a hula girl, he shimmied to the left and then shimmied to the right.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m smiling?” he asked, speaking loudly over the music.

The men looked at each other but did not speak.

            As Sam turned in his dance he saw that his friend James had pulled up outside the bar in his station wagon. It was probably just as well. He didn’t know if he’d be able to sit back down after dancing. He didn’t know what he’d do. The men were scared of him, they really had no reason to be so but such feelings could easily congeal into open hostility. He bent low on his knees, rocking from side to side and danced around to face the men once more.

“I am only at liberty to tell you this,” he said. “Either there is a reason for it or there isn’t.”

He twisted away from them and danced out of the bar, timing his exit perfectly with the end of the song, a one man conga line lost in his own carnival.

            The old men watched him go in stunned amazement. On the television the Mets turned a triple play and none of them saw it.

Later that night, the man called Lloyd finished polishing his bowling trophies and then put the shotgun into his mouth and blew his brains out. He was very careful not to get any blood on the bowling trophies.

            The smiling stranger and the suicide of their friend became linked very strongly in the minds of the locals of the Lumber Mill Grill in Podunk New York although they really weren’t connected at all. Whenever they talked about it the conversation would always end with one of them intoning that Lloyd had always been likely to do it since his father had gone out exactly the same way.

            On several occasions, over the next few years one of the old men would put the song on the jukebox and dance on his own, imitating Sam. They would all laugh and the bartender would give them free drinks. Then they would talk about Lloyd.

            “If only he’d have stayed and seen the nut dance…” one of would say wistfully, as if that would have changed everything somehow.

            On a shelf above the jukebox now sat a collection of bowling trophies. The bartender had put them there after they’d been brought over by Lloyd’s cousin a few days after the funeral. The bartender liked the look of them although he never polished them and they attracted a lot of dust.

He was the only one who knew that the trophies all had different names written on the plaques and Lloyd’s wasn’t on any of them.

Lessons from the Life of Leon

     Lev Bronstein took the name Trotsky from a fake passport he used to escape from Irkutsk in Siberia in 1902. It was the name of one of his former jailors. Exile in Siberia was not like normal prison. It was entombment in a vast and murderous wilderness. Doors on exile settlements were often not locked because there was nowhere to go and no avenues for escape that did not risk certain death. Starvation kept people where the Czar put them, at the meanest end of a frozen three thousand mile government breadline.

Petulant youth. Picture taken by the Secret Police shortly after he cut the arms off his glasses, freeing his ears from 'the tyranny of ocular support'. 

On the night of his escape he made a dummy of himself out of pillows and sacking cloth filled with straw. The dummy was successful and it passed the nightly inspection of the guards. People often became listless and bed bound in Siberia and it was not unusual for a guard to be slack when taking roll call. Being a guard in Irkutsk was a form of punishment in itself. [i]

His baby daughter, Zina, rumbled Trotsky’s escape the next day. She jumped up on her father’s bed in her morning excitement and received the shock of her life. Trotsky and his first wife had decided to keep his escape attempt from their child because they feared she would become upset and tip off the authorities with a tantrum. She was a sensitive child and ill suited to shoulder her part of the sacrifices her parents had chosen to make for the global proletariat revolution.

Although Trotsky abandoned his first family he would eventually become, if not exactly the father of the Russian Revolution, a very important uncle. This has led many historians, including Winston Churchill, to conclude that it may not be possible to lead a revolution while changing nappies and reading bedtime stories to young children although Mohammed and the great Bolivar are said to have managed all three by their most zealous followers.

Trotsky never fully reconciled with his daughter. She never forgave him for the stunt with the dummy and he often grumbled to friends in letters that it was much ‘easier to diagnose the turmoil in the collective mind of the German petty bourgeoisie than to penetrate into the pain-laden recesses of Zina’s personality’. [ii]

Zina eventually committed suicide in Berlin in 1933. She was suffering from depression. Not only was her relationship with her father psychologically scarring but when Stalin seized control of Russia she was punished for being Trotsky’s daughter. Her first husband was sent to Siberia, her second husband died in a gulag in Siberia (Stalin, ever the over-achiever had to outdo the Czars by adding the Gulag work camps to Siberian exile). She was only allowed to leave the country under the punishing condition that she could only take one of her two children. She chose the boy. The girl was held by Stalin and in a show trial she was forced to admitting to being a Menshevik and once calling Uncle Joe a ‘poopy-pants’. She was shot out of a canon into a pit of dancing bears behind the Kremlin.

        

When Trotsky escaped Siberia he made his way to London and hid out with the Lenin's who were living in small rooming house in Kings Cross disguised as a German couple called ‘Richter’. [iii] Lenin made a big show of parading up and down the street in lederhosen on a daily basis to maintain the disguise. Trotsky felt this was unnecessary and this led to their first breach.

        

Writing under the pen-name ‘The Pen’ in the revolutionary newspaper The Spark he began to gather a following with a blunt but populist style that excited both agricultural peasants and young army conscripts alike. He spent the next five years traveling around Europe arguing with Marxists about Marxism and agitating people to revolution. On several occasions the agitating consisted of sneaking up on working men and women and poking them in the ribs while they brushed their teeth.

        

Working with such luminaries as Plekhanov, Akselrod, Zasulich, Martov, Potresov, Parvus, Lenin, Dr. Mandelberg and Viktor Adler he rose to prominence in the Soviet party calling for the overthrow of the Czar.

        

On January 22, 1905, great masses of workers in St. Petersburg, led by the priest Gapon, marched to the Winter Palace to submit a petition in which they set forth their grievances and appealed to the Czar to help improve their lot. The men, their wives and children were met by government troops who shot and sabred them. Thousands were killed and wounded. The day has become known in Russia as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Further strikes and protests followed with the Russian peasantry leading the charge with the cry ‘Give Us Land’.

        

Lenin was hard at work trying to organize the opposition against the Czar and his ministers. Trotsky was living in Finland since the military police was mobilized against him and he didn’t want to end up back in Irkutsk. He spent his time writing articles in support of the workers and itching to get into the action. He describes this time in his autobiography:   

        

   ‘At the end of September I moved still farther into the Finnish interior and took up my quarters in the woods on the shore of a lake, in an isolated pension, Rauha. This name in Finnish means “peace.” The huge pension was almost empty in the autumn. 

   A Swedish writer was staying there during these last days with an English actress, and they left without paying their bill. The proprietor rushed after them to Helsingfors. His wife was very ill; they could only keep her heart beating by means of champagne. I never saw her. She died while the proprietor was still away. Her body was in a room above me. The headwaiter went to Helsingfors to look for her husband. There was only a young boy left for service. A heavy snow fell. The pine-trees were wrapped in a white shroud. The pension was like death.

   The young boy was away down in the kitchen, somewhere below the ground. Above me the dead woman was lying. I was alone. All in all, it was “rauha” peace. Not a soul, not even a sound. I wrote and walked. In the evening, the postman brought a bunch of St. Petersburg papers. I opened them, one after another. It was like a raging storm coming in through an open window. The strike was growing, and spreading from town to town. In the silence of the hotel, the rustling of the papers echoed in one’s ears like the rumble of an avalanche. The revolution was in full swing…

   I demanded my bill from the boy, ordered horses, and left my “peace” to meet the avalanche. That same evening I was making a speech in the great hall of the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg.’[iv]

        

Trotsky got back to Russia just in time to see everything fall to pieces. The Czar made some concessions to the people and the workers lost their stomach for strike and revolution in the face of a cold winter.

The Czar arrested Trotsky and sent him to jail in the Peter and Paul Fortress to await a trial. Due to a bureaucratic error, for the first two weeks he was put in the Peter and Paul Cake Shop where he gained five pounds licking the frosting off the giant Peter and Paul spoon. 

        

When he was eventually transferred to jail in the Fortress, he was much more of a celebrity than in his previous incarceration and his supporters managed to smuggle books and writing materials into his prison cell. He relished the time in jail and over his life he often remarked that his time in jail were key in allowing him to develop his ideas in a way that he doubted he ever would have been able to do in the busy world where he had argue about Marxism with obstreperous Marxists and avoid Lenin and his lederhosen.

“Trotsky’s prison cell,” wrote fellow prisoner D. Sverchkov in At the Dawn of the Revolution, “soon became transformed into a sort of library. He was supplied with all the new books that deserved attention; he read them all, and the entire day, from morning until late at night, he was occupied with his literary work. ‘I feel splendid,’ he would say to us. ‘I sit and work and feel perfectly sure that I can’t be arrested. You will agree that under the conditions in Czarist Russia, that is rather an unusual sensation.’”

It was during this second spell in jail that he developed his concept of ‘Permanent Revolution’ which pictured a way for socialist utopias to occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism, a key stage Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles had identified in their best selling murder mystery, The Communist Manifesto.[v]

Trotsky urged the proletariat to join forces with the peasantry to bypass the rule of the bourgeoisie. On the scales of an election the vote of one peasant weighed as much as the vote of one worker. In revolutionary situations this equality is illusory. A thousand railway men on strike are politically more effective than a million scattered villagers. Therefore, the role of modern social classes is determined not by numbers, but by social function. Democracy is but an illusion drawn in the minds of the illiterate by the political class. Only by engaging directly in revolutionary activity can the power relationship between the classes be redrawn.

After a month long court case the Czar had him sent once more into exile in Siberia.

        

This time he escaped with the help of a drunken Zyrianin who drove him on a Reindeer slay over the impossibly vast snowy desert from Beriozov to the Ural Mountains:

‘Early in the journey the drunken driver had a way of falling asleep frequently, and then the deer would stop. This promised trouble for both of us. In the end he did not even answer when I poked him. Then I took off his cap, his hair quickly froze, and he began to sober up.’[vi]

He had no idea how the man determined the direction of travel and found help in the remote villages of the exiled Skoptsy, the Christian sect who practiced self castration and mastectomy in an effort to get closer to God by being less distracted by sex than other penis and breast carriers.

Trotsky brought back a number of jokes from the Skoptsy that are still in circulation today, such as:

         "What do you call the bit of skin at the end of a penis?"

                                                                            - "A Man."

When he made it back to St Petersburg every one was so surprised they didn’t know how to react. Lenin had already escaped to Finland and had donned the lederhosen once more and was plotting the next stage of the revolution with his large and clinical brain.

In October of 1908 Trotsky began to publish another newspaper called Pravda (the truth) with A.A. Joffe. It was written to appeal to the mass of workers and was smuggled into Russia either across the Galician frontier or by way of the Black Sea.

For the next nine years the uncle of the revolution floated in various degrees of poverty around the edges of Europe meeting with Marxists and fighting for and then against the Bolshevist bloc who were prone to acts of terrorism to push on the revolutionary cause. Many letters and postcards were sent and received. Books bought in better times were pawned to feed his growing second family with his second wife Natalya.

Trotsky was in New York and writing for another newspaper, Novy Mir (New World) when the first world war broke out and the full force of the long built communist revolution was unleashed in Petrograd and swept through the country. Trotsky headed home and arrived just in time to be made General of the Red Army by Lenin. His first task was to chase down the Czar and defeat the White Army of loyalists still protecting him.

The White Army published cartoons depicting him as giant red Jewish devil relaxing over a pile of skulls on the battlements of the Kremlin in an effort to inspire a counter-revolution based on the latent anti-Semitism of the peasantry. It didn’t work.

Trotsky as seen by the White Army, a double strut of battlement is conveniently positioned to hide his demonic penis, the showing of which would have made the whole thing ridiculous - much like the hiding of the Jesus penis in ecstatic crucifixion iconography. 

Trotsky wanted the Czar caught alive but when the red army finally captured him it was with a too small force to successfully transport the royal family Bolshevik territory. As The White Army rallied they took the decision to kill the whole family rather than let them escape.

The victory of the revolution brought on a tsunami of mass public drunkenness, which was frightening to behold. The orgy lasted many weeks and threatened to paralyze the country completely. Antonov Ovseenko, commander of the Petrograd garrison, wrote one of most well known accounts of the time in his memoirs:  

‘Here and there crowds of ruffians, soldiers mostly, broke into wine cellars and pillaged wine shops. The few soldiers who preserved discipline were worn out by extra guard duty. Exhortations were of no avail. The cellars of the Winter Palace presented the most awkward problem… The Preobrazhensky regiment got completely drunk while on Palace guard duty. A relief regiment was dispatched in haste but they could not withstand the temptation either. They were followed by mixed guards hand picked from all the remaining regiments for their morality. They got drunk too. Members of senior Soviet committees were sent. These too, succumbed. Men of the armored brigades were ordered to disperse the crowds. Everyone swayed backwards and forwards on drunk, jelly legs. At dusk the mad bacchanals spread. The gay slogan: ‘Let us finish off these Czarist remnants!’ took hold of the crowd. We tried to stop them by walling up the entrances. They climbed through the windows. Someone had an idea to flood the cellars with water. The fire brigades sent to do this got themselves drunk before they could complete the task. The whole city was infected by drinking madness. Only after an intense effort was this alcoholic lunacy overcome…’ [vii]

        

The month long looting of the Winter Palaces wine cellars has been said to have led to the ‘longest hang over in history’.

        

Lenin and Trotsky and the other leaders of U.S.S.R. moved into the Kremlin. They had succeeded in their revolution but could not agree on how to build a socialist utopia. The country was too large and backward and uncooperative. Europe looked warily on, worrying about their own working class and fearing the contagion of socialism might spread. Trotsky argued the bourgeoisie needed to be rehabilitated since they were the only ones with the intellectual skills needed to run the nation effectively. Hardliners like Stalin held this against him as a weakness and treason against the workers’ victory.

Modernization and collectivization led to endless bloody sacrifices and internecine fighting. Lenin once gave Trotsky a wedgie during a sixteen hour meeting to discuss the  proposed and forced collectivization of the Kulaks. 

'I'll collectivize your Kulaks!' screamed Lenin, much to the delight of the rest of the assembly.

This led to another breach.

Stalin slowly gained power, coiling himself around the apparatus of the Soviet like a boa constrictor. He became the chief secretary and began rigging elections and building his power base.

Trotsky was too busy writing books and articles and arguing with Lenin to see what was happening and by the time Lenin had died and his will calling for Stalin to be removed from office was discovered, it was already too late. The will was hushed up by Stalin’s enforcers, Trotsky was doomed to follow a series ever more tightening wedgies both real and metaphorical. Towards the end he became so disenfranchised he appeared clownish. Boris Bajanov, Stalin’s secretary, witnessed it first hand:

‘The meeting ended with Trotsky being ordered to make a public statement admitting and apologizing for crimes against the workers’ state. Trotsky jumped from his seat and tried to slam the door of the throne room at the Kremlin. The hall door is massive, Trotsky pulled it with all his strength, but it was dead slow to open. In his fury he did not notice and made repeated attempts to bang it shut. Thus instead of witnessing a dramatic gesture indicating a historic breach, we watched a sorry figure struggling with a door.’[viii]

        

Moscow Pride, 1936.

It was a strange time in Russia. Gay Pride marches swept through the streets carrying large portraits of Stalin’s friends. This is one of Dzerzhinsky who delivered a long a violent speech in a high pitch scream against Trotsky in the Kremlin and then died of a heart attack in the lobby before the eyes of the Central Committee. [ix]

Stalin had Trotsky sent into exile and then expelled from Russia completely. No country other than Turkey would take Trotsky in, so fearful they were of the great revolutionary and former leader of the Red Army. For the first four years of exile he was housed on the island of Prinkipo, the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul. His living conditions were adequate but frustrating.

‘The floor of our old and dilapidated villa was painted with such queer paint in the spring that even now, four months later, tables, chairs, and our feet keep sticking to it…’[x] – the Archives 15July 1933.

        

Trotsky stayed here for four years, fearful of the day when he knew the KGB under direct orders from Stalin would come to take his life.

In letters he complained constantly of the need for better secretaries and ones that were bilingual and could plumb the insane, obscure depths The Third International had taken Marxist theory.

Being Trotsky’s secretary was a thankless task. Glazman, Butov, Blumkin, Sermuks, Posnansky, Klement and Wolf all died in his service, killed by Stalin as they went out to buy paperclips and dispatch Trotsky’s articles to the dwindling anti-Stalin communist press.

Trotsky applied to get travel visas to safer countries, far from Stalin’s reach but was turned down everywhere. British socialists petitioned the government on his behalf but were turned down by the fearful Labor government of Ramsey MacDonald.

Churchill, obviously still smarting over the defeat of his anti-Bolshevik ‘crusade of fourteen nations’ invasion of Russia (1918–1920), wrote a triumphantly mocking essay calling him: ‘The Ogre of Europe’. ‘Trotsky whose frown once meted death to thousands, sits consulate, a bundle of old rags stranded on the shores of the Black Sea.' After a while Churchill had second thoughts and when he included the essay in his book Great Contemporaries, he replaced ‘bundle of old rags’ with ‘Trotsky- a skin of malice.’[xi]

        

Stalin and the rest of the world’s leaders were so successful into turning Marxism and the Russian communism into the insane project of a murderous dictator that young people who in the 1930’s faced executioners with the cry ‘Long Live Trotsky!’ often had no more inkling of his real life and ideas than sand crabs. [xi]

Trotsky eventually made it to Mexico by the outbreak of the Second World War. Stalin was growing more murderous and unhinged by the year. In an almost endless series of show trials everyone who had ever met Trotsky was forced into making outrageous confessions against him.

                 

When he arrived in Mexico he had been expelled from Russia, Turkey, France and Norway. He wasn’t expecting a warm welcome but he was met at the port by the artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frieda Kahlo who were active communists. They had not been contaminated by Stalin’s propaganda and knew only of Trotsky’s glories and so they rolled out the red carpet red carpet.

Frieda Kahlo (centre).

Kahlo, a tortured enigmatic and hirsute cripple, enchanted Trotsky and they embarked on an affair right under the nose of Diego and Trotsky’s long suffering second wife, Natalya.

Trotsky’s time in Mexico wasn’t all sleeping around with artists however. He worked hard to clear himself of the continuous slander of Stalin’s propaganda. He suffered as friends and family were killed across Europe. He became a collector of cacti. [xiii] He tried to defend the American Communist Party from the inquiry of the Dies Committee which was the forerunner of McCarthyism. He negotiated the sale of his archives to Harvard for a ridiculously small sum. He waited for the assassination attempt he knew was coming. If the assassins didn’t come he expected to die from his high and ever rising blood pressure.

In 1940 Mexican painter David Siqeiros led a commando attack on Trotsky’s house. Siqeiros was a Stalinist who had led a garrison in the Spanish Civil War. Trotsky hid under the bed with his wife as they fired over two hundred rounds into the room and then left, dropping a bomb. Amazingly, nobody was hurt in the attack. [xiv]

Trotsky was so calm after the attack that the Chief of the Mexican police, Colonel Salazar, instead of tracking down the culprits instead launched an investigation trying to prove that Trotsky had planned the whole thing himself:

“He was in pajamas, over which he had slipped a dressing gown. He greeted me with friendliness and a surprising calm and I asked him if he suspected anybody,

‘I most certainly do!’ he replied in very decided tone of voice. ‘Come…’

He put his right arm about me and led me towards the rabbit hutches. With sparkling eyes and sly smile he stopped and glanced around him (as if) to make sure that we were alone. Placing his right hand near his mouth to make the confidence more secret he said in a low voice and with deep conviction:

‘The author of the attack is Joseph Stalin the leader of the U.S.S.R.’”[xv]

Colonel Salazar eventually realized Trotsky was telling the truth, but only after he had been killed by an assassin sent by Stalin.

On 20th August of 1940 a young man who had been introduced as a potential supporter managed to get a private meeting with Trotsky to discuss an article he had written on French Marxism. As Trotsky read the article he pulled out an ice-pick from his raincoat and hacked it down hard into his skull. It did not kill him immediately and they fell together onto the floor in a struggle. Bodyguards burst into the room and Trotsky was rushed to hospital where he died the next day. At the funeral many people remarked that a man carrying a raincoat in the hot Mexican summer should not perhaps have been granted a private interview.

Trotsky’s final words, said to his wife Natalya on his deathbed were:

“I do not want them to undress me… I want you to undress me.”[xvi]

 His final written statement, Trotsky’s Testament, written just a few months before his death now adorns the inside of pizza boxes from The Worker Pizza Co:  

Trotsky's Testament

By Leon Trotsky

My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those near me about my actual condition.  I am active and able to work but the outcome is evidently near.  These lines will be made public after my death.

I have no need to refute here once again the stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single spot on my revolutionary honour.  I have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin's opponents have fallen victims of similar false accusations.  The new revolutionary generations will rehabilitate their political honour and deal with the Kremlin executioners according to their deserts.

I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life.  I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all.

However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova.  In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband.  During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness.  She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism.  If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged.  I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

L. Trotsky 
February 27, 1940 
Coiyoacan.

  All the possessions remaining after my death, all my literary rights (income from my books, articles, etc.) are to be placed at the disposal of my wife, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova.  February 27, 1940, L. Trotsky.

In case we both die [The rest of the page is blank.]

March 3, 1940

The nature of my illness (high and rising blood pressure) is such - as I understand it - that the end must come suddenly, most likely - again, this is my personal hypothesis - through a brain haemorrhage.  This is the best possible end I can wish for.  It is possible, however, that I am mistaken (I have no desire to read special books on this subject and the physicians naturally will not tell the truth).  If the sclerosis should assume a protracted character and I should be threatened with a long-drawn-out invalidism (at present I feel, on the contrary, rather a surge of spiritual energy because of the high blood pressure, but this will not last long), then I reserve the right to determine for myself the time of my death.  The 'suicide' (if such a term is appropriate in this connection) will not in any respect be an expression of an outburst of despair or hopelessness. Natasha and I said more than once that one may arrive at such a physical condition that it would be better to cut short one's own life or, more correctly, the too slow process of dying ... But whatever may be the circumstances of my death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future.  This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.

---

[i] As Solzhenitsyn wrote in a letter to the Irkutsk tourist board in 2006, ‘I would rather be a spore of mold in the dankest corner of the foulest kitchen in Kiev than be a bejeweled king in Irkutsk’. The Complete Letters of Alesksandr Solzhenitsyn, Volume 5, Minsk University Press, 2010, p1873.

[ii] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Outcast, London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p150.

[iii] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Armed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, p57.

[iv] Trotsky, Leon, My Life, Chapter 13: ‘The Return to Russia’.

[v] The Communist Manifesto sat at the top of the Times bestseller list from its publication in 1848 right up to the Crimea War. It still remains popular beach reading today due to its thumping plot and many cunning twists. For who killed the workingman? Why the owners and controllers of the means of production of course.

[vi] Trotsky, Leon, My Life, Chapter 15: ‘Trial, Exile, Escape’.

[vii] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Armed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, p322.

[viii] Bajanov, Boris, Avec Staline dans le Kremlin, Paris, 1930. p76-77.

[ix] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Unarmed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1959, p279.

[x] Trotsky, Leon, The Trotsky Archives, Harvard, Letter dated 15July 1933.

[xi] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Outcast, London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p19.

[xii] Ibid p124.

[xiii] ibid p448.

[xiv] Ibid p487.

[xv] Salazar, Leandro, Murder in Mexico, Secker and Warburg, 1942.

[xvi] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Outcast, London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p508.