Flash Read online

  Gary ended up moving to Las Vegas to get a job in a casino, and the SD Scene went bust. I floated around for a while, living off my feeble savings until I got a job as a doorman at Molly’s. Later I heard that Gary had found religion. Who knows? I, on the other hand, spent my time listening to stories of longing and despair, or reading the newspaper on my stool by the door. One old guy would come in every night and tell me the story of his son, a vet, who he claimed looked just like me. The son had come home from Nam, become a cop, and killed himself out of the blue one night, leaving a family behind. He’d tell me the story every evening, in the same way, as if I’d never heard it before. I’d sit patiently and watch as his eyes got teary and wait for him to pat me on the shoulder before he shouldered up to the bar for his first drink. Sometimes I’d carry him back on my shoulder to the Arlington, where he had a room, knock on the door, and hand him off to the woman at the front desk. Other than that, I just had to make sure that Dee Dee, the hooker who worked the bar, didn’t turn tricks in the bathroom. The rest was checking the occasional ID when the sailors came by for a snort before looking for love at one of the dance clubs down the street.

  The only real danger I encountered in my lost years at Molly’s happened when I had to tackle a deranged street person who came in and waved a knife at Sally, the bartender, when she refused to serve him. I had been back in the can when I heard Sally yell my name, and I ran out and went for him like a return man from my days at Our Lady of the Sorrows. I knocked him cold and the cops came to drag him off. The next night, the fellow’s friend came by, picked up the doorstop and threw it at my head. He missed and hit the jukebox. I got him in a bear hug and walked him out to the street. Later that night, I heard he got stabbed in a back alley off Market Street. His friend did a brief stint in jail and he was back out on the street. I’d see him wandering the abandoned parking lot off the corner weaving through the sea of pipeheads with his sleeping bag slung over his shoulder. It was like that, a steady stream of tragic tales from the SROs, occasionally interrupted by random violence. Mostly, I was bored. I drank too much and didn’t get enough sleep.

  Slowly, downtown started to change, with fancy restaurants and new shops replacing the old bars and porno theaters. Then, seemingly all at once, the dam burst and the last of the strip joints was shut down, followed by dive after dive, as if it was some kind of purge. Before the hipsters bought Molly’s, I spent a year shooing away tourists and gourmet diners who’d poke their heads into the bar to gawk at the old timers like they were a curiosity at a theme park. Then hipsters bought the bar and doubled the drink prices, which sent the SRO crowd out in the brave new world in search of a place to disappear. They fired Sally and me, after keeping us on for a symbolic month or two to prove to themselves that they weren’t predatory gentrifiers. Sam, the other bartender, saw the writing on the wall and managed to walk away with an entire day’s take before they could fire him. Good for him, I thought. After we were gone, they booked alternative bands and hired out the bar for private parties. When they failed, the hipsters were bought out by a chain restaurant, which also failed. Three or four more chains came in and out. Finally, a luxury hotel purchased the whole block, shut down two SROs and put in a five-star restaurant. The parking lot on the corner is now a fancy condominium that can’t sell any units with the economy in the dumps. Poetic justice.

  Anyway, my stint as a doorman reinvigorated my desire not to waste my life working for assholes, so I got my clippings together and sent them around town. That’s how I wound up at the SD Weekly, a job I managed to hang onto for a good chunk of the nineties. The rest, I’ve already told you about.

  When I got back from Oceanside, I wanted to get straight to my piece about Mark Sawyer, but I checked my email and there was something there from the archivist at Wayne State whom I’d contacted about Bobby Flash. He’d been nice enough to scan all the files and photos that were relevant to my inquiry, and I was pleased to see that there was quite a bit there. The first attachment was a narrative by Gus Blanco written in response to a call put out in both Solidarity and Industrial Worker for Wobblies to write up their experiences in the free speech fights for the United States Industrial Relation Commission. Apparently the I.W.W. thought the publicity would be useful, so Big Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John asked the membership to send in all reports to I.W.W. General Headquarters in Chicago so they could be sent to DC. Blanco’s report was as follows:San Diego Free Speech Fight

  By Gus Blanco

  Who went through the fight from start to finish

  December 30th 1911: Arrive in San Diego with Bobby Flash and several I.W.W. boys from Holtville. We get a place to flop in the Stingeree and search out I.W.W. Local 13 headquarters to get the lay of the land. The Wobs there tell us they’re in a fight with Spreckels on account of having organized the Mexicans on his streetcars. Some of the men look to help with that, others, myself included, look for day work to get money for food as we are low on funds and food after the trip from Holtville. Local 13 boys who don’t work on the streetcars as conductors or motormen are in mill, lumber, and laundry work. They send us the right way for day work.

  January 6th 1912: I speak at a street meeting at Heller’s Corner to organize some of the out of work I’ve met drifting in and about the Stingeree. Lots of drinking and gambling in the workingmen’s district to pull the last dollar out of them. AFL in town has no interest in ’em. I give my pitch, “Fellow Workers and Friends, look at Spreckels and his fat gang with all they could want and you with nothing to show for your labors! Why should you be made to feel shabby for looking like a man in search of work? Why should you have nothing while they have everything? Let me tell you fellow workers, you need to get smart and join the one big union,” etc. I finish and talk to a couple a fellas and the next one gets up and starts “Fellow Workers and Friends” when some upstanding citizen, an off duty policeman I heard, drives his car, horn blaring into the middle of the row. The Wob on the soapbox tried to warn the crowd not to respond and give the police an excuse but, men being men, a number of them took offense at nearly being hit and rocked the car while some other fellas slashed the tires. Then the police came in, roughed us up a bit, and broke up the meeting.

  A bunch of the boys and me took off and ran down into the Stingeree and ducked into a bar. We proceeded to drink a whiskey or two and the talk was angry talk. “Who do they think they are busting up the meeting ? I’d like to get my hands on that fella, etc.” Well, me and Bobby did our best to warn them about giving the cops an excuse to put ’em in the pen. What you need to do is organize a whole bunch a workers in town, we told ’em. It seemed like a good field to plough, though some lost their courage when there was no whiskey to buck them up. Me and Bobby headed up to Headquarters to report the day’s events and talk with some more boys.

  February 8th 1912: Spreckels’s gang on the council pass an ordinance banning street speaking. We met the ban with resistance. The Socialists, AFL and some preachers join in with us to protest the ban. Wobbly girl, Laura Paine Emerson, is arrested with two other ladies and thirty-eight men. I don’t get snagged that day. Most of the soapboxers don’t get further than, “Fellow Workers” before they’re pulled down roughly and arrested with a few smacks and kicks for good measure. The Wobs stay disciplined and keep with passive resistance. It’s just the start of the fight.

  February 13th 1912: Superintendent of Police John Sehon issued a roundup order for all “vagrants.” The police fill four jails with close to 300 Wobs, but more boys keep coming. Headquarters pledges to send 20,000 men if that is what it takes to win this fight. We hear reports that the men in the pen are driving the jailors to their wits’ end with constant singing and hollering. They feed them mush and stale bread or leave them hungry and it does not break their will. No water to drink. The guards recommend the toilet. They put up to thirty men in a cell with four hammocks. Men sleep on the steel floor. More news of police beatings in the jails as the struggle continues inside with men tak
en out and beaten with clubs and pistol butts. Some strangled close to death and thrown back in the cell. Men still not broken.

  February 20th 1912: I meet a boatload of Wobblies coming in from San Pedro to aid in the fight. A dozen men immediately proceed to assert their right to speak. The police wade into the meeting with batons flying but I manage to get free. They arrest the men but don’t take them to jail. This is the first time I hear of the vigilante terror. About twenty men were taken out to the countryside and badly beaten and told to walk North. Later I meet up with a few of these men in Los Angeles. Others were never heard from again.

  March 6th 1912: Man arrested for selling copies of The Labor Leader on the street. Meanwhile, the capitalist press is raving about the threat of anarchy and lawlessness to the good people of San Diego. The Union praises vigilante terror and the propertied men of the town line up behind them with few exceptions.

  March 15th 1912: A street meeting is broken up and a man arrested for singing “Out there in San Diego/Where the Western breakers beat/They’re jailin’ men and women/For speaking on the street.”

  March 20th 1912: Big March to protest police brutality, perhaps 4,000 people. Police have Fire Department turn hoses on the crowd, hitting one speaker directly in the face at full force. He is knocked from his feet and lost a few teeth. Others have clothes ripped from their backs by the force of the water. There are a good number of women and children in the crowd, but this does not arouse any decency in the police. A man is arrested for covering his face with an American Flag when the hose is turned on him. He is charged with defacing the national emblem.

  March 22nd 1912: Another man arrested for selling newspapers on the street. This time it is The Herald whose papers were in sympathy with free speech and at odds with the forces of “law and order.” There is no difference between the thugs, vigilantes, police, businessmen, lawyers, judges, the press and politicians. They are all part of the same mob. Some of them wear the badge brazenly while trampling the rights of their fellow citizens. They know only the law of the dollar and the baton. Sometime during this period, I forget when, Colonel Harris Weinstock is sent by the Governor to investigate human rights abuses. He compares San Diego to Russian tyranny. He is later threatened himself.

  March 28th 1912: Michael Hoey, a sixty-five-year-old Wob, dies after being beaten and kicked in the groin many times and left untreated on the floor of a cell. Police said he had been “laying about” when the doctor visited and recommended he be treated. Laura Paine Emerson gives a stirring speech at his funeral a few days later describing Michael’s death as a Martyrdom, “I have nothing to give but myself and life is not worth living when all liberty is gone.” She said that Michael was not dead but was with “the infinitude of nature” with “the hosts and martyrs to the cause of progress” he stood “transfigured in form and face.” It has been said that I am a hard man, but I wept at these words as did a good number of those rough customers about me.

  April 11th 1912: The San Diego Chamber of Commerce goes on record publicly praising the actions of the City Council, the police, and the vigilantes.

  April 15th 1912: Vigilantes meet a train of Wobblies coming into San Diego from Los Angeles and stop it, kidnapping dozens of men and forcing them to kiss the flag, sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and run the gauntlet. That evening, the editor of The Herald was kidnapped and threatened if he does not cease publication of his paper. He does not comply and the paper is later smuggled into the city from Los Angeles.

  April 20th 1912: Vigilante violence at a high point with dozens of Wobs disappearing. Bobby Flash is nabbed with a bunch of boys after speaking at Heller’s Corner. No word from Bobby after that point. I fear my friend and comrade has been murdered.

  April 30th 1912: I am finally nabbed by the police who promptly hand me over to the vigilantes. They blindfold me and put me in a car for a long drive. When one of them catches me trying to raise my head, I am knocked cold by a hard club or some other weapon. I awoke as the car stopped in some hills out of the town. The men remove my blindfold and I notice one is a policeman I had seen in town, out of his uniform. They strip me down and kick me in the groin. Once I dropped to my knees, the cop lights a cigar and burns I.W.W. into my behind as I am held down by two big thugs. I refuse to sing or kiss the flag. This results in a savage beating. I was bleeding about the head but the most pain came from the rifle butt they used to break two of my ribs. I am cracked one last time on the head from behind and left for dead, but miraculously, I survived. Something to be said for a hard head, I suppose. Am found by a woman on horseback and taken to a hospital in Oceanside where I spend weeks in recovery. One nurse is kind and the other will not touch me. It is better than being dead.

  May 7th 1912: A fellow Wobbly, Big Ben Jackson, comes to see me and passes on the news that Joe Mickolash was murdered by police, shot while trying to defend himself after taking a bullet in the leg in front of I.W.W. headquarters. We trade stories and agree that Michael and Joe are the ones to make the papers, but that many more poor bindlestiffs like us have been killed with no one to notice them gone or remember them with a fancy speech. So many of the Wobs were friendless and far from home, come to help their fellow workers, only to find the cruelty of strangers. Mickolash had a big funeral in Los Angeles that I was still too banged up to attend.

  May 14th 1912: Emma Goldman comes to San Diego while I am still in the hospital. She is kept from speaking and Reitman is tortured and tarred and feathered out in the sticks by the vigilantes.

  May 30th 1912: I am set loose from the hospital, still scarred and limping but alive. I hop a freight back down to San Diego. Police at the station recognize me and put me back on a train to Los Angeles with the warning, “The next time we send you back, it will be in a box.”

  June 10th 1912: In Los Angeles for little more than I week, wash a few dishes in the back of a tavern to gather some coin and rest up as my leg is still nagging me. At the I.W.W. hall I hear a funny story from a Wob just in from San Diego that the vigilantes stormed a “hobo camp” that turned out to be a group of boy scouts. They were panicky as a whole bunch of Wobs was let loose after a case of small pox hit the jail. I inquire with a bunch of fellas if they heard from Bobby Flash, my partner from Holtville, and one says he thinks he seen him a couple weeks ago heading North to San Francisco, another fella says he heard he got killed in San Diego, a third man told me he heard he headed back down to rejoin the fight. I never found out who was right as I took sick and was laid up for several weeks.

  July 15th 1912: Once I finally got better, I joined up with a group of fellas heading back down to San Diego where the fight was still on. We snuck in late on a freight and made our way into the Stingeree in the early morning. I met up with some boys I remembered who told me the fight was not going well. Things had quieted down a lot but the town was still locked down and the vigilantes and police had gone so far as to threaten the Governor’s special investigator, Weinstock, for telling the truth. Still they were still picking up Wobs every day even with all the big crowds gone. “One martyr a day,” was how we put it. I made my way to an I.W.W. house where a group of us was looking at ways to break the stranglehold of the vigilantes. The police still remembered me so I laid low for a while, waiting to see where events would take us.

  August 13th 1912: The lawyers for the Free Speech League left for Los Angeles after the Attorney General failed to get an indictment for the San Diego vigilantes. The money for their lawyers came from Spreckels and the Santa Fe Railroad.

  August 22nd 1912: Six men arrested in El Cajon on suspicion of being part of a plot to dynamite the new Spreckels Theatre and other buildings in downtown San Diego. The police claimed they were also plotting another “raid” across the border. I had not heard a word of any such plot amongst the I.W.W. men in San Diego or Los Angeles.

  August 23rd 1912: The I.W.W. house I had been staying at near 15th and G was raided by police. I escaped out the back having had enough of San Diego justice. The
news was that a prisoner had “confessed” to a plot for “the invasion of Mexico.” As with the first story, this was news to me who had been in the house and never heard tell of our plot to “capture lower California.” And it surely would seem unlikely that anyone would have given it a second try so soon after the first revolt got crushed. After my escape, I headed back up to Los Angeles putting an end to my dealings in San Diego. Some say that the fight was won when Emma Goldman finally spoke unmolested in San Diego in 1915, but many a dead Wob might beg to differ. As a result of my experiences there, I have come to question the effectiveness of nonviolence as the police will pin some outrage on you whether you are timid as a mouse or fierce as a tiger. This was confirmed yet again when I went with a group of Wobs, including Frank Little, to join the fight in Denver in 1913.