MAY DAY

"EAT SHIT AND DIE, NO GOOD COMMIE PIG!"

The Revolutionary Communist Party was planning to march on downtown Cincinnati as part of their annual May Day Celebration. Only a month earlier they has managed to secure a storefront for the purposes of opening a bookstore. Traditionally they have done so here in the good old USA as a front for their nefarious deeds. But this time they made the mistake of settling into the ground floor of the very building wherein I had maintained three floors of living art ecstasy for the past several years. Ironically, the building also housed the Baskin and Robbins ice cream parlor. How American can we get here!

The morning of May 1st arrived, and with it the Party's Rose Bohmann came knocking at my door. Rosie wanted to borrow the phone. A doctor from Cleveland was footing the rent for the place, but the phones weren't yet connected.

“We want to find out if our parade permit came through,” she said. “The gall,” I said. Now remember, these are the very same people who advocate armed overthrow of the U.S. government, and its evil offspring capitalism. Revolution indeed! Needless to say, but I'd better say it anyway - I sent Rosie packing, and in search of a phone booth.

O, they marched all right, this rag-tag contingency of maybe thirty-five adults, mainly ageing blacks, displaced white mountain folk and a handful of snooty college majors. Add to that another thirty or so assorted children of the above and the total might have reached seventy-five communists in the entire state of Ohio that day.

I marched too, and was met with well wishes, “Glad you could make it, Comrade!” Of course it didn't occur to these comrades that I was marching to the tune of a different drummer. Nor did it occur to the hundreds of jeering protesters, undercover cops, flag waving patriots, assorted bikers, bakers and buffoons who thought it was them that I was marching with, “Glad you could join us to help thwart this menace, Brother!”

After a couple of hours the entire spectacle reached downtown Cincinnati and approached the central district's Fountain Square, the site upon which the Communists were want to plant their flag that day. Instead, they were met by one of their advance scouts who drew them up short of the goal. Wild eyed he warned them, “Turn back, before it's too late… the square is already occupied!”

And indeed it was! At least 50,000 of Cincy's finest had turned out to change the course of communism that day. Another few thousand manned the windows above. Even the buildings themselves carried the message with banners the size of buses. In the streets below there were veterans of all our wars, creating a great and impenetrable wall of humanity. Joining them arm in arm were secretaries from the offices and their bosses. Pipe fitters, hillbillies and queers to boot. The unemployed and their bosses as well. Young Koreans in cages who testified to the tortures their families suffered under the real communist reign of terror were also there. I could go on. Needless to say, the communists didn't. They'd finally met their Waterloo. They turned and dispersed themselves once more, back into the nothingness from which they came.

They also left my building soon after. The radical right wing group, the Nameless Ones, were about to lob a bomb through the open windows of the second floor above the Communist bookstore when it was brought to their attention that those very same windows looked out into the world from Burkhart Studios. Consequently, at the last moment, the bomb threat was aborted. Whew! Saved in the nick of time by some nameless patriot who will forever remain anonymous. However, I did send him a personal thank you note.

Years later I was living in Chicago and decided to pay a nostalgic visit to Cincinnati. Traveling by Amtrak, the good old American Way, and arriving at 4am, whom should I run into but Rosie! After I assured her that I wasn't moving back in town to haunt her beloved comrades, she told me that she was meeting the train to collect a shipment of party newspapers sent down from the Chicago office.

“How could you?” I asked. “Amtrak is the cheapest carrier,” she replied. The gall, you say.

BURKHART STUDIOS

2845 N. HALSTED STREET CHICAGO ILLINOIS 60657 773 348-8536