Flash Read online

  So it appeared that both Blanco and Flash were picked up by the police in San Diego, but neither one of them was sent back to Holtville. Apparently the powers that be were more interested in dishing out vigilante justice than checking their records or seeing if they were operating under aliases. I was also intrigued by the possibility that Bobby Flash had been killed by the vigilantes sometime after he gave his account of the gauntlet to The Sun. I entertained this possibility for a few seconds until I opened the next attachment, which contained a series of photos: Bobby Flash soapboxing in Minot, North Dakota in 1913; Bobby Flash at an anti-war rally in San Francisco in 1917; Bobby Flash standing in a crowd of Wobblies in front of the I.W.W. Headquarters in Chicago, two men to the right of Big Bill Haywood, no date on the picture ; Bobby Flash in a “Hobo College” sitting in a room of men and women listening to Ben Reitman, no date on the picture. It appeared that Flash had made his way out of San Diego alive and well and had continued in Wobbly circles for at least five more years, into his thirties. I thought again about my great grandfather who’d died up in San Francisco—it was another thread of possibility, however tenuous.

  When I got to the next attachment, I was surprised to see a letter from Flash himself in the Industrial Worker, June 10th, 1911. I read on:Letter from Lower California

  By Bobby Flash, I.W.W.

  Fellow workers and friends,

  I know that many of you have heard it said that the poor man has no right to travel. You have seen that a man with a pocket full of money can go wherever he wants while the bindlestiffs and poor working men can be driven out of a camp at the whim of any policeman or paid thug. Well, friends, I write to tell you that we have found paradise down here in Mexico. We are living high and flying the Red Flag in Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and San Quintin. Down here across the border we have a workers’ Utopia. It’s a new world being born inside the shell of the old. We do not work; we do not get pulled into the pen for vagrancy; we do not kneel down to any man. We are Mexicans, Indians, Americans, workers and outcasts from around the world, but we know no country.

  Why would you beg for a living on the other side of the border when the fight with Diaz is being won down here? Why be pushed around from town to town, hungry and alone, when our cooperative commonwealth has thrown capitalism in the ditch here in a place of our own? We have seen workers coming in from around the country to join the fight. All hands are welcome. Come and back us up or send funds. Which side are you on, fellow workers? You can live to see the day capitalism is overthrown and men can live in peace.

  Join our struggle,

  Bobby Flash, I.W.W.

  Under the Red Flag, Tijuana, Mexico

  The last attachment was an interview with Flash that appeared to be from some kind of unpublished study on the Magónista revolt that had been donated to the archives. It was a brief, but interesting, raw transcript that just jumped into the attack at Mexicali:I was with Leyva and Berthold when we took Mexicali in January of 1911, I think it was. Williams Stanley or Stanley Williams, was called Cohen by some of the boys but, actually, his real name was Robert Lober, was the I.W.W. man in charge of the planning at the Wob Headquarters in Holtville, just across the border. Later, Lober got shot and killed. He wasn’t with us in the first raid though, just Leyva and Berthold. Anyway, the Cocopah Indians did a great job scouting out the town and finding out they didn’t have any real way to defend it. So it was real easy pickings at dawn. We only killed a cop when he tried to stop us from letting loose the jailed Magónistas.

  Well, we took the town and it caused a real big stir. Jack London gave a speech and declared himself “a chicken thief and a revolutionist” in solidarity with us. Emma Goldman gave a speech too in San Diego. I don’t know if she called herself a chicken thief too [laughter].

  In the early days there were a good number of Mexicans with us. Then there was a lot of squabbling about who was in command. Hell of a lot of yelling and cussing. Some fellas got beat up, others shot. A damn shame too because we had just won a big victory. Well anyway Leyva and Berthold got into it with Stanley as they called him at the time. We split into separate groups and I was with Stanley. When the Mexican army attacked us in the second battle at Mexicali, Stanley was killed, but we held the town. Eventually, after a few more squabbles and changes in generalissimos, Pryce took command. You’ll have to pardon me but I just can’t remember all the changes and names, but Pryce was an important one. He was a mercenary, but he was in sympathy with us and against Diaz, and he knew how to fight, which helps when the bullets are flying.

  I never met or even saw Magón. He was in Los Angeles and never left. We got pamphlets instead of bullets from the chief revolutionary mostly. If the left could of overthrown capitalism by talking the bosses to death, we’d be living in a workers’ paradise [laughter].

  Anyway, eventually, Pryce, who was disobeying orders I later learned, led us West to take Tijuana. It was a fierce and bloody fight, but we took it. There were only about a thousand or so people in the town, so it wasn’t like attacking a big city. We scouted the positions and attacked at dawn. A lot of people died on both sides. I never took a bullet, but I lost a few comrades on both sides of me. I was with Pryce with the main group who went straight after the town’s central defenses. We may have argued a hell of a lot amongst ourselves, but we were good in a fight. We rushed the trenches and other barricades, running straight into the line of fire. Dynamite Dan had a bullet take off a chip of his ear, but he managed to get up front and take out one of their best gunners. I can’t be sure if I ever hit anyone but I rushed after him blasting away and hitting the ground when I caught sight of a man aiming my way. I never had any formal training so I kind of made it up as I went along, taking whatever advice Pryce or anyone with more experience had to offer.

  One thing that did bother me was the way some of the pictures of the dead ended up being sold as postcards. I saw one with one of the poor kids who’d come down from a migrant camp in the Imperial Valley to join the fight. It wasn’t right, folks making money off of a man’s death like that [Inaudible]. Some of the same sons of bitches that came down from San Diego to loot the town done that I’m sure. Folks like that parasite, Ferris, Spreckels’s snake oil salesman.

  Well, we were pretty excited at first having taken Tijuana and some of the other small border towns. It looked like we had really started something big. But slowly, we came to see that the money and re-enforcements weren’t coming. Pryce opened the town up for tourists from San Diego and it got to be more like a circus side show than a revolution. I did get to meet a nice Mexican gal during that time. Patricia was her name. Real nice woman. Of course, she couldn’t leave with me after the second battle, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Anyway, Pryce fell in with Ferris and tried to drum up support for us, but that all blew up and he deserted. Ended up in Hollywood I heard. Anyway, Ferris tried to bring in his own man and turn the whole thing into a capitalist land filibuster. Some of the boys, not the Wobs, fell for it because they’d been promised land by the some of the recruiters working for Magón in Los Angeles. In any event, we almost lynched the son of bitch Ferris brought in, but decided to expel him instead and elected Mosby, a real I.W.W. man, but not a great fighter. Poor bastard got shot after the second battle when he tried to escape from the US troops who pinched him as he crossed the line.

  What I remember from the second fight was how outnumbered we were, like two to one. We fought hard, but we didn’t stand a chance. When the call went out for a retreat, it was every man for himself. The Mexicans who were left (a lot of them had left to fight with Madero after Leyva was deposed) took off for parts unknown as did the Indians. The mercenaries figured they’d rather surrender to the US Army. Some of the Wobblies joined ’em, but Gus Blanco and me, along with a group of the Holtville Wobs, slipped the noose and snuck across the border and made it back to Holtville without getting captured.

  It didn’t work out the way we wanted, but I don’t regret get
ting caught up in the fight. Hell, it looked like we had a chance to write our own ticket for once, so what the hell? Gus and I were just beginning to get into scrapes, so this was just a warm up of sorts [laughter]. It would have been a beautiful thing, a worker’s Utopia in Baja. Who knows what we could have done. The one thing I regret is leaving the loveliest woman I ever met. But that’s a story for another day.

  Recorded and Transcribed for Border Revolution, 1960.

  The archivist had been nice enough to explain in his email that Border Revolution was a book that never came out. It was the project of a leftist historian who died before he could finish it. His son donated his father’s papers to the archive. This was the only material on Flash or Blanco in the manuscript. The pictures were from a larger collection of photos of I.W.W. members and events in the archive. This was another big clue to the fate of Bobby Flash. The research for Border Revolution was being done in 1960, which meant that Flash would have been seventy-three years old. Was the age on the Wanted poster correct? Where was the interview conducted? Was it San Francisco? I called the archivist in Detroit. He didn’t know. He did though, tell me to try both the Library for Progressive Research in Los Angeles and a private library and bookstore in San Francisco that specialized in the history of the American left and countercultures, the People’s Archive. I thanked him, hung up, and wrote down the contact information.

  It was late and I was too tired and distracted to start my piece on the dead Marine. I printed up the material from Wayne State, put it in a separate folder, and looked around the office. It was empty and dead silent. Neville had come and gone without saying a word to me. I sat at my desk for a moment and thought about the seventy-three-year-old Bobby Flash, recalling the story of his failed revolution and lost love. How long did Bobby Flash live after that interview? Did he die a lonely old man or in the bosom of his loving family? And what about Gus Blanco? Where did he end up after Denver? What a thrilling and horrifying ride those two had—revolutionaries, outlaws, political prisoners, martyrs, heroes, common men, lost to history. And I was on their trails, tracing the distant threads of their lives, chasing their ghosts across time.

  5

  The next day I stayed home and spent several hours writing the piece about Jake Sullivan, the dead Marine. It was a compelling story, but my head wasn’t in it, which made the work hard and unsatisfying. Finally, I hit on what I thought was a good angle and knocked it out. When I headed into the office to talk to Neville, he took a long time to read the piece and finally looked up, frowned and said, “It’s not your best work, but we’ll run it.”

  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically. He didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled out a letter he’d gotten from a reader about a colony of anarchist punks living out in the desert and flipped it across his desk at me.

  “Maybe this will be more up your alley,” he said with a smirk. I looked over the letter, which included directions and a little hand-drawn map. It seemed like a hoax to me, and the drive would take up an entire day there and back.

  “Do I get an expense account for this one? Gas, food, and lodging?” I asked without any hope of a positive response.

  “Fuck no,” he said and laughed.

  “See you in a couple days,” I replied ruefully and I grabbed my satchel and headed down the stairs toward my car. Out on 5th, the meter had expired and I had a parking ticket. I got in and tossed the ticket on the passenger’s seat and flopped my stuff on top of it. It was too late to go out to the desert that day so I hit the 5 and drove up to UCSD to look over the dissertations that the archivist at the historical society had told me about. The early afternoon traffic was light and I got to the campus quickly and parked in a student lot near the library, assuring myself of another ticket, a couple more of which would consume most of my meager paycheck. This was why Hank needed to stay in college, I thought. The students all looked joyless, inwardly focused and stressed out over midterms or loans or diminished expectations. It was a long way from Animal House. I thought of Hank and hoped he would endure his boredom and follow through where I had faltered.

  Inside the spaceship amidst the eucalyptus trees that was the library, a nice, petite blond woman wearing a Rosie the Riveter button helped me find the relevant dissertations and theses. “Great topic,” she said as she sent me on my way. I settled down in a private little nook to peruse them. Most offered up the same information I’d found in other books, and none of them had any specific references to Bobby Flash. I learned a tad more about the identities of the vigilantes and their connections to the town’s elite. I read a good summary of the character of the turn of the century Stingeree and the efforts to stamp out vice, which pushed the gambling and prostitution across the border where Spreckels’s interests also controlled the action. There was even a famous “hole in the fence” that celebrities from Hollywood used to go to drink and gamble during prohibition. Not much else about the Magónista revolt, but I did find some interesting stuff on Communist organizers in the Imperial Valley in the 1930s. Dorothy Healey had been out there organizing workers. The whole Valley turned into a Fascist police state of sorts, just as bad as the ugliness in the teens. But that was off topic.

  Finally, I checked an index in another study of the Wobblies and found a reference to Gus Blanco. It turns out he was killed in the free speech fight in Everett, Washington in 1916 after he wrote the account of the San Diego fight for the government commission. This time, however, he’d gone down fighting, as a footnote described him as a Wobbly who pulled a gun on an approaching gang of vigilantes. I guess he figured he’d rather die on his feet, than get lynched or tortured to death. Can’t say I blamed him. As with most of the murders of Wobblies, nobody was ever prosecuted. Instead, the government went after them a few years after Everett, passing criminal syndicalism laws at the state and federal levels that essentially made it illegal to be a member of the I.W.W. The Feds then got the go-ahead to round up Wobblies for being Wobblies. Scores of them served long hard sentences handed down during the first Red Scare. It all reminded me of McCarthyism in the fifties and the whole hysteria after 9/11 with the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness and people rushing to throw away their civil liberties in exchange for “safety.” A whole century of bullshit. Fear was a powerful thing, I thought, and frightened people can and will do anything. With that pleasant thought, I was done for the day. I left the lifeless stacks feeling strangely sad, mourning the death of a man I never knew who went down almost a century ago fighting a losing battle.

  The next morning, I packed up a bag with a toothbrush and a change of clothes, checked the oil and water in the old Mustang and hit the 5 North to the 8 and headed east against the flood of stop-and-go traffic. After a bit I was climbing up toward the Cuyamacas. I put on a Leonard Cohen mix that Hank had burned for me and lost myself in the “Tower of Song.” As I left the last of the exurbs, the lunar landscape of giant boulders mixed well with a Rufus Wainright cover of “Hallelujah” and I found myself so deep into the music that I forgot everything. It was a moment of pure joy, the kind I almost thought I wasn’t capable of anymore. Who would have guessed it would hit me on the I-8? During a second version of “Tower of Song,” U2’s backup music had me feeling positively messianic until the CD ended.

  I saw the sign for the Desert View Tower and realized I was getting hungry, so I pulled off the Interstate and drove down a brief stretch of side road until I arrived at the site of the funky landmark, a 70-foot lighthouse-like lookout that stood a good 3,000 feet above the desert floor. It was painstakingly crafted, between 1923 and 1928, out of local rock by a man named Bert Vaughn. He’d meant the tower to be a tribute to the pre-highway days of America when the trek from San Diego to Yuma was an arduous journey filled with peril. I parked the Mustang and got out, glancing over at the Boulder Garden, a menagerie of skulls, buffalos, Indian heads, frogs, and folk creatures carved out of the native stone by an unemployed engineer and folk artist in the thirties. Inside the tower, an eccentric man
in a coonskin cap greeted me. I paid the two-dollar entrance fee, bought a coke and a candy bar, and went upstairs to check out the view. It was still early so I was the only one climbing the spiral staircase and, once on top, I stood for a moment and gazed down across the desert at the Salton Sea shimmering in the distance.

  Back on the freeway, I popped in a Slab City CD that one of the music reporters had given me for the drive. Slab City was a Mexican hardcore punk band from the Imperial Valley. It was the kind of music that made your pulse rate rise—ugly, thrashing, torta rock. I listened to “Wolf Boy Down El Dorado,” “Caguama Rama,” and “Milwaukee’s Beast” as I hit the peak of the mountain. The temperature gauge was holding steady, which made me breathe a sigh of relief as I began the long descent toward Ocotillo, where I got off the Interstate, filled up the gas tank and gazed out at the big empty desert. From Ocotillo, I took a small highway through the desert outposts of Plaster City and Seeley before I reached El Centro in the heart of the Imperial Valley farm country. In El Centro, I turned north on 86 to Brawley where I stopped for lunch at an old diner downtown. The men in the booth next to me had cowboy hats on and the waitress called me “honey.” Outside by the park, a group of migrant workers were eating bag lunches and listening to a Mexican radio station. From Brawley, I took 111 North to Niland, just off the southern tip of the Salton Sea, and turned onto Main Street East on my way to Slab City. The whole of the Imperial Valley always struck me as a Mexican version of The Grapes of Wrath meeting Deliverance, but Slab City was another animal altogether, a world apart.