proles
A novel by BARRY BERGMAN
Simon Bussbaum’s a film junkie without a cause, a spiritual drifter looking for light in the days of Watergate—days of social tensions, cultural turmoil, and criminal conspiracies in high places. His burning bush appears in the form of City of Emeralds, a McCarthy-era, feminist-tinged reenactment of a triumphant New Mexico miners’ strike.
Inspired, he flees Queens for the sulfur haze of a copper smelter, eager to join Naldo Galvan, the real-life strike leader and star of the film, on American workers’ march to the promised land of liberty and justice for all.
But not every burning bush, it turns out, is a message from God.
copper goes co-ed,
world goes tilt
No females forever, Simon finds, is a matter of doctrine in the church of the red metal, like the casting out of menstruating women under Jewish law. And his blue-collar brothers prove way less open to cultural change in the flesh than they are on the silver screen.
“The smelter... was a cavernous, ramshackle Big Top featuring spark-spewing furnaces, splashing cauldrons dangled from cranes like murderous marionettes, rapids of liquid fire tumbling down in harrowing dayglo ribbons. Danger was everywhere, lurking beneath the dull roar and the rotten-eggs stench. Everything black and orange, darkness and firelight, a waking nightmare Halloween.”
“Was the party just mimicking rigor mortis, possum-like, till conditions improved? Could it be that decades after Stalin was denounced, by Khrushchev no less—after the Beats, the FSM, Abbie Hoffman, Tim Leary, Martin, Malcolm, Bobby and Huey, the Beatles and Dylan and Janis Joplin and Gracie Slick—people here in America still pledged secret allegiance to Gulag Joe and his joyless proletarian wet dream?”
who am i? how did i get here?
My word-slinging career includes stints as a newspaper reporter in small California towns—"Council OKs Stop Sign at Court and Main," that sort of thing—magazine writer and editor (Sierra, California, Mother Jones, et al.), and communications jack-of-all-trades at various nonprofits, from a small animal-advocacy group—not to be confused with a small-animal advocacy group—to the mighty UC Berkeley.
Before I found I could get paid for tapping on keyboards I served a stretch of hard time in an Arizona copper smelter, the ghosts of which would resurface, in new and surprising shapes, in Proles, my first completed novel. I now live and write in Berkeley, California, in a house I share with my journalist wife, Liza, and two feline assistants, Cosmo (shown here) and Mookie. I'm currently working on what threatens to be my second novel, tentatively titled Mr. Pitiful.