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I sold commie posters to a future Supreme Court justice | page 1, 2
She was not amused. After all, this was 30 years ago, long before
Gorbachev and Yeltsin came to Western attention. There was a Cold War
going on globally as well as a very hot one in Southeast Asia. And just
the previous August, Soviet forces fraternally seized control of
Czechoslovakia from the Czechs. The Evil Empire was still open for
business. So maybe if I waited until hell froze over, perhaps then
Stalin, Trotsky or even Khrushchev -- giants of Soviet history -- would
be sufficiently rehabilitated to be shrunk to poster size. The next morning I took the train to Helsinki along with my thick roll
of posters. From a post office there, I mailed the package via surface
mail to my college address in Worcester, Mass., where I'd pick
them up when I returned in early September. In all, my investment came
to $5.60. When I showed up for classes at Holy Cross just after Labor Day, the
posters were awaiting me, only slightly worse for the trip. After
retrieving the package from the post office on the first floor of the student union, I went upstairs to the cafe for a coffee and to
inspect my booty. Within 10 minutes of unraveling the roll of posters,
I had sold two at 10 bucks a crack and one for $8 plus a
jelly doughnut. (It was all the guy had, and I happily took it.) Not
only had I covered my initial investment, I was well on the way to
paying for the entire trip to Russia. That fall of 1969, in case anyone of a certain age recalls, I was the
fellow selling Soviet propaganda posters from Worcester to Boston. As
one would expect, sales were especially brisk in Cambridge, where I
turned Brigham's ice cream parlor just off Harvard Square into something
of a showroom. Also, as anticipated, the most popular poster by far was
the one of the fearsome, gun-toting black guerrilla. Sales of that item,
which made up nearly half my inventory, tended to divvy up about equally
between guilty white liberals and black revolutionary manqués. None of this story would amount to anything more than a mildly
entertaining yarn were it not for a certain customer who turned up on my
doorstep that October. Knocking on my dormitory door one night were a couple of black Holy Cross
students, one of whom I knew from a seminar on racism in
American culture. Along with him was a shorter, stockier man who was a
year behind us. Both were big in the college's small Black Student
Union. The one I did not then know wore what appeared to be combat
boots, a choice of footwear I did not take to be an artifact of a
previous life experience but rather a Statement. So shod, he didn't need
his skin color to stand out on a campus where nearly everyone else wore
Chuck Taylor rejects or ancient Bass Weejuns held together with white
surgical tape. His name was Clarence, but he was introduced as Cooz -- a nickname he
had appropriated from a decidedly white basketball player who years
earlier had starred at the college and then achieved some notoriety with
the Boston Celtics. Ironically, Cooz, I would soon discover, was also a
devotee of Malcolm X. They had come, they said, to check out The Poster. It was obvious which
one they had in mind, and, as luck would have it, there was just one
left in stock. I got it out of my closet and rolled it out across my
desk. They looked. They hemmed. They hawed. We negotiated. Or rather, I
told them I wanted 10 bucks for it, and they allowed as to how I was
ripping off the BSU. How about I donate it? I demurred, telling them at
great length of the great lengths -- not to mention the dangers -- to
which I had gone to bring this work of Soviet art into the United
States. "Hey, this is contraband. I've probably got an FBI file because of
this. What do the feds have on you?" In the battle of drawing room
subversives, I had just trumped them. In the end, we exchanged one poster for two $5 bills. Over the next several months, I ran into Clarence a few times, most
memorably that December when a campus protest against corporate
recruiters got out of hand and a number of students were arrested. Those
charged with failure to disperse were disproportionately black, leading
to charges of racism. Clarence was not among those arrested, but, along
with the rest of the BSU, he withdrew from the college in protest. For
its part, the school suspended all normal activities for three days and
went into the sort of collective soul searching that small, Jesuit
colleges do best. In the end, Clarence and his colleagues returned,
albeit hesitantly, to a chastened college. After graduation the following June, I moved to California and never
gave Clarence another thought. That is, until 20 years later when I
saw him on television. He'd put on a few pounds. He was standing next to
George Bush at the summer White House in Kennebunkport, Maine. The president
was telling the press and the nation that this man, Clarence Thomas, my
old customer, would be his nominee to replace Thurgood Marshall as an
associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. The rest is history. My part was prologue. But I can't help wondering
what he's done with that poster.
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