Farblondjet

An Interactive Memoir
Jerry Ross, the Painter

Love and Marriage to Pamela --      "the shikse"


For the most part, I have always been attracted to “shikses” (gentile girls).  For some reason Jewish girls always seemed like relatives, something incestuous. An exception was Patsy Melrod in High School, who I thought was truly hot. My first wife was Pamela Fore Tyree. In fact, I just recently learned of her death.  She is survived by Susan Tyree Victoria of Brooklyn, her sister , and by her brother Peter Burton Tyree of round Mountain, Nevada. 


Pamela was a very special person.  I first met her through Workers World Party (WWP) the communist group I was affiliated with in Buffalo and New York City. When I first joined, I was attracted by its adherence to Trotsky and his explanations of how the Soviet Union, under Stalin, had gone to terribly wrong. I met her at one of our annual conferences in New York and eventually convinced her to come and live with me in Buffalo.  I accomplished this by writing a lot of poetry and sending it to Pamela who had an apartment in New York.  During the summers I would borrow my brother’s car, at that time a Mustang,  and drive to Manhattan where I would try to run into Pamela at the party HQ.  Pamela was very attractive with long, full brown hair and a remarkable face. She was Scottish-American with big eyes and a big personality. Her smile could light up a room.  She loved to talk.  She was like Annie in the movie “Annie Hall.” Very neurotic and high strung.  Strangely, when I visited her family in Virginia it was like scene with Annie Hall’s crazy brother with the grandmother and all.  Her brother wasn’t crazy, at least I don’t think so, but he did have a strong love for the wilderness and living in nature.  Pamela thought the world of him.


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Wedding photo: My first wife Pamela Fore Tyree with Chris Meunier looking on.


If you ever have an occasion to read my long poem “Twenty Years of Yawning”, you will come across the passage where Pamela and I were put on “show trial” by our Buffalo comrades and accused of “Kautskism” which is forming factions in opposing to the party leadership. Well this actually happened in our second floor party headquarters that we were renting somewhere on Main Street in Buffalo.


  This "show trial" happened to us because we had balked at "party discipline" and joined with anti-war activists who were using "hit and run" tactics while demonstrating against the war in Vietnam downtown.  Even after the WWP Chairman, Sam Marcy and his wife Dottie, had flown to Buffalo for a special meeting with me (an attempt to get me into line), I still identified more with the young activists and their semi-anarchist tactics than the stodgy "demonstrate by walking a picket line" methods of WWP that were modeled after the labor movement.  It just seemed more dynamic and spontaneous to run away from the police and reappear in some other ocation before they could stop us.  The party leadershio were not pleased.

 

I have fond memories of that headquarters because I used to give Marxist-Leninist lectures to the comrades and new recruits up there.  One night especially sticks in my mind.  I had been lecturing on Lenin’s “State and Revolution” and had a large hardbound copy of the book in my hands when all of a sudden a bat flew right at me.  I instinctively swatted the bat with Lenin’s book and the poor creature landed quite dead right on the table in front of me.  After disposing of the bat I continued to expound on Lenin when, after five minutes or so, a second bat came flying right at me again!  Sorry to be repetitive but again I smashed the bat with the book and it landed on the table.  Well, “class over!” I announced and we called it a night.  Actually that was the best use that book was ever put to during my tenure as chairman of Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF).


Jerry and Pamela


Pamela and I had instinctively felt that the WWP had abandoned Trotsky since they stopped talking about him entirely in their newspaper.  The “Marcyites” as they were called (after their leader, Sam Marcy) had become defenders of “workers states” no matter what horrendous crimes were committed by their leaders.  They supported the Soviet invasion of  Czechoslovakia and recently they supported the lunatic Muammar Gaddafi regime, enough said!  Well Pamela and I were tending towards the new left at the time, not so much “the Weathermen” but some kind of anarchism. 


The old left started to seem stodgy and regimented.  As already mentioned, We enjoyed breaking loose in demonstrations and snaking out in different directions to confuse the police. So I guess at that stage in our political development, it was a kind of relief to be formally expelled.  I think it was Pamela who came up with the insight that we were being “mind fucked” by the WWP leadership.  The problem was, after getting expelled, we were thrown into a kind of political no man’s zone. We had lost our context and political anchor, WWP.  . 


Pamela was found dead in her bathtub July 7th, 2008. She had been living in Albuquerque trying to make it as a school teacher. Her brother said she had a drinking problem.  I remember once that while living together, after just a few drinks, she had become almost comatose.  I literally had to scrape her off the floor to get her to bed. But other than that, Pamela, at least when I lived with her, did not have a drinking problem. She was pretty much a straight shooter. She was very much, at that time, up in her game.  That is, if you could figure out what her game was.


When she lived in Manhattan and I was very much actively pursuing her, I wrote her poetry and since she herself was some sort of a poet and poetry lover (her favorite writer was probably Kilbran).  But here is a poem I wrote on the occasion of hearing about her unexpected death:


“A poem for Pamela: 


You could be a regular pain in the ass

and were stubborn as hell.

Yet you always lighted up a room

and expressed your Leo (fiery) personality to the "T"

You would flip off cops

and challenge me to a street fight.

You could always mix it up and launch us on wild adventures

Like when you got us on top of an Arizona mountain

During a lightning storm.

I'll never forget those big rattlesnakes

hunting together in parallel as I jumped

six feet in the air.

You loved the great outdoors

I was more of a city dweller but I learned

to love the West and shared some of your visions

Our thing together was not meant to last.

You were way to independent and too much a

grandissimo character.



"Let's chalk a lot of this up to your craziness.

You could get way out on the edge at times.

Be well, Pamela in your present realm of nothingness,

Ours is the same no-thing-ness, in the last analysis, but we

remain in the living state and we therefore

spend most of our time chasing daily responsibilities.

Thanks for warming us as your meteor streaked by.

You left a lot of heartache and destruction behind.

But since you were a force of nature, what did we expect?”


Sidney & Jeanette, Jerry & Pamela


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