My First Marxist Experience

  The week my roommate dropped out of film school to work box office full-time she Netflixed La Chinoise, which, she claimed, led directly to the student revolution in Paris 1968. The film is about a group of Maoist undergrads & we watched it in the dark-red living room of my slanted first apartment. I couldn’t pay attention except for the scene where a quiet blond boy paints a rainbow around the entire mid-section of the living room in one single stroke, holding all seven brushes in his hand, & later walks off screen & shoots himself in the skull. I hated that red room, where my second love dosed me & taught me the word proletariat exactly as I peaked. I spent the next twenty-seven hours feeling every ounce of blood tingling through my capillaries until I convinced myself I was God just to cope with it all.