“Well, I’ve been wanting to. I was going to talk to you first to see how you felt.”
“Well now you’ve talked to me.” I slung my arm around her shoulder and walked her toward the kitchen front door. “See you around buddy.”
Returning to the living room, I fell into the green beanbag, waiting for Rachel, and hoping I wouldn’t regret giving Pody the green light. She was always hovering around me and Rachel, or me and BeJo. She already felt like a brother…ah…sister-in-law. Better Pody than if BeJo started dating someone I didn’t like.
Rachel leaned against the doorjamb, looking at me from across the room. “Hi,” she said tentatively, greeting me personally for the first time tonight. “That was some meeting.” She sounded spent.
“How do you feel about the vote?”
“I don’t know. Shocked, I suppose. Frightened. What does calling a strike actually mean?”
I tried to sit up in the green bag-chair. “It means we’ve crossed a line. That the struggle with the Center has reached the point of no return. And it means we voted to define this as a labor issue. The battle line has been drawn.” I slammed a closed fist against the vinyl been-bag chair. It gave off a loud smack.
Rachel sat down in the small chair next to the stereo, still across the room from me. “I’ve never been in a strike before,” she whispered.
“Neither have I.” I slouched deeper into the beans. “At least not on the workers’ side. My dad used to come home at dinnertime cursing something he called ‘the unions’ for not loading marble on ships for his next job. That’s the first time I heard the word union. They were the bad guys.”
“Me too. My father sometimes came home saying he couldn’t get paid until the unions had okayed his jobsite.” Rachel’s voice wavered. Her face was pale, her lips a flat line. I wanted to comfort her, but she was holding herself, both arms wrapped around her body as if she didn’t want me to approach.
“And another thing, this means I can no longer go over to McCadden Place and talk to Morris. When he gets this strike news, negotiating a settlement will be his last priority. I know him, he’s going to fight. ”
“Meaning he’s going to fight with you?” Rachel asked.
Her question took me aback. I almost knocked over my Coke. “Of course not. This isn’t personal. I’m talking about the movement. Either way this goes, the movement is the big loser. This will tear our community apart.”
Rachel started to cry. She looked so frail. Was it best to keep things between us strictly political?
“What’s going to happen to us?” she said, wiping tears from her eyes.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. In the five-year, mostly turbulent history of our infant gay movement no one has ever called a strike against a gay organization. People will be shocked.”
Rachel began to rock herself in the chair. “I don’t want anymore breakups in my life. I left John two years ago and I was so happy to find the movement, and the GCSC. I never thought there could be an us versus them. This is my new gay family. Aren’t we supposed to be united-we-stand, divided-we-fall?” Her voice had grown plaintive, the question like a suppressed wail.
I began to wonder what I really knew about Rachel. Was I getting in deeper than I wanted to be?
“This doesn’t mean the end of the world, sweetheart,” I said. Damn! There was that word again. It came out so naturally when I was with her. “In New York City the lesbians don’t work with the gay men anymore. The entire dyke contingent walked out of the Gay Activists Alliance and formed their own organization. None of the dykes in San Francisco work with the men.”
“But that’s never happened in L.A., right?” Rachel’s eyebrows begged.
“No. Not on a community-wide scale.”
Rachel covered herself with a blanket slung over the back of her chair, the same pink one we’d slept beneath. “It frightened me when June started calling you names, like scab. The two of you almost came to blows.”
I climbed out of the beanbag, crossed the room, and knelt in front of her chair. “We didn’t almost come to blows.” I rested my hand on her legs. “We were just yelling out our differences. I’m not gonna punch June. Especially since she’s so much bigger; she would’ve decked me!” I laughed, trying to pry a chuckle out of Rachel.
She folded herself even more and lowered her head. “John used to hit me,” she whispered.
“John?”
“My husband.”
I fell into a sitting position on the floor. So it was the volatility of the meeting that had spooked Rachel. “Is that why you divorced him?”
“Yes. Fighting takes me back to my father’s house.” She spoke quietly. “Growing up in my family, volatility meant violence.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “In my family it only meant someone was stealing the meat off your plate or ‘borrowing’ your favorite toy. Unless, of course, it was my father’s anger.” I emitted a hollow laugh.
Rachel stared through me vacantly. “It was always my father,” she said. “Screaming at my mother, or sister, or brother. Sometimes he’d hit my mother. One time he stood there holding my baby brother, dangling him with one hand, screaming at her, ‘I’ll throw this kid into a wall if you don’t…do…whatever!’ I was so terrified I ran to the nearest wall so I could catch David.”
No wonder Rachel was so frightened; she thought there had almost been a fight in her home tonight. It was becoming clear that this woman was not cut out for political hardball. I didn’t know whether to wrap her in my arms or move further away.
“And then he left us,” Rachel went on. “That’s when they divorced and our family broke apart.”
“That’s not going to happen here,” I soothed. “We are strong enough to weather this.”
She tried to smile, but her eyes were distant. “Tell me more about why the New York dykes walked out on their gay men?”
I leaned against a windowsill. “It’s an ideology now, a philosophy called lesbian, or dyke, separatism. On one hand, lesbians separating from gay men could be a healthy, even necessary, phase. Like the straight women who birthed feminism and felt they had to leave the world of men in order to clearly grapple with the new world order of women. Maybe we lesbians have to divorce our gay brothers and go organize on our own for a few years. Maybe that’s the only way women can be free enough to explore who we are and what our politics and issues might be. Some lesbians feel we need to remake a world that’s not male-dependent. They say as long as we work together, we’ll never know what our own issues might be. For instance, is sexual liberation really a lesbian issue? Most lesbians see our freedom to make family and keep our children in court decisions as more critical than sexual freedom. Maybe by our withdrawing, the gay men will learn to value women. I have mixed feelings about lesbian separatism. As a political movement, we need to move forward with our gay brothers. Personally, I have no close gay male friends, and my world feels complete without them. But regardless of how lesbians choose to live, my politics are about building gay or lesbian organizations, not destroying them.”
I leaned down to re-tie my shoelace, hiding my face from Rachel. I didn’t want her to see the defeat in my eyes. Yes, tonight’s vote pitted me against my political godfather, and that hurt. Worse yet, now I had to stay the course and pretend to fight for that miserable GCSC job I never wanted in the first place.
“Calling a strike was not the right tactical move,” I continued. “It shuts the door behind us and locks Morris and the Board—and us—into a pre-defined tunnel of response.” My tone hardened as bitterness crept in. “I hate what happened tonight!”
Rachel stood up suddenly. “PLEASE, don’t get angry again!” she snapped. A different voice had emerged, this one filled with a tough, clipped ring. Abruptly, she walked toward the kitchen.
I followed a few steps behind. “So why did you ask me if this was about Morris and me?”
“I’m finished with talking about fathers tonight,” Rachel said in the same di
sconnected voice. “Let’s skip it.”
“Does skipping it mean you want me to leave?” I asked brusquely.
Rachel stood at the sink with her back towards me. “I’m still mad at you,” she said, now washing the dishes.
“Mad about what?” I asked.
She turned around. “You walked out on me at the Saloon. Has that slipped your mind in less than a week?”
“I’m here with you now, aren’t I?” I countered, softening my voice.
“You could have called after your midnight interview to ask me if I got home safely. Did I even cross your mind?”
Rachel was right; she hadn’t crossed my mind that night. “I got out of there at three in the morning,” I offered. “I assumed you were—”
“We’ve only been dating a few weeks and already you take me for granted. So I’m just saying—not tonight.”
“Fine,” I snapped back, walking to the kitchen table. I started slamming my notebooks and papers into my briefcase. Just as well—tonight wasn’t a space night from BeJo anyway. Grabbing my jacket, I walked out, leaving the kitchen door wide open.
A week later, I was back at Effie Street, watching the moonlight fall onto Rachel’s back porch. The front door to her duplex sat level with the street but the hill dropped away sharply at her backdoor creating a long, steep staircase up to the rear. The back stairs were steep so everyone avoided them, preferring the kitchen access in front, but I liked the back door, imagining it was my own private entrance. I climbed the staircase and sat on the cement porch landing overlooking the city. They say lesbians bring a U-Haul on their second date, but I was already U-Hauled with BeJo, so I’d just brought an apology.
Rachel had called me today, leaving two messages at The Freep. But I’d been too busy, maybe still too angry at being all but thrown out, to return her calls. Nonetheless, as I’d left a late night meeting in Silverlake, Lionheart had driven me to Effie. Seeing the place dark, I figured Rachel was either asleep inside or out on a date. It was Friday night and I was actually free from politics and work, yet alone.
Sitting on the stoop of the staircase, leaning against her bedroom’s wall I felt close to Rachel. Pulling out a smoke, I watched the almost-full moon make its journey across the sky. The muted light from the street lamps cast shadows on the Spanish stucco houses below, many with their original roof tiles from the ‘20’s. Dad had taught me how to tell the difference between new tile and old. The old ones were handmade and wider at one end. Mexican craftsmen shaped them by putting the wet clay on their bent thighs and rounding them. The wide end of the clay narrowed as the thigh approached the knee. The new tiles were of identical widths on both ends, no doubt shaped by a machine.
Old things were better than new things, Dad always said. And the best are the old things that last, he’d tell me with a smile and a twinkle in his eye; that way you’d never need anything that was new. He was talking about cars and buildings, but he’d also been married to the same woman for a quarter century. So far, not much of the old had lasted with me. My stint in the convent had been short. So had relationships. The only part of my life that had weathered was my political life. Perhaps it wasn’t the smoothest of moves to have arrived on Rachel’s back step in the middle of the night. I should have returned her call, at least left a message that I might come. Yet, I hadn’t wanted to commit. Using a sidewalk phone booth in Silverlake was not a safe late night bet.
Now that I’d arrived, I was content to sit on Rachel’s steps, deciding how to make my presence known in case she was inside. I leaned against the wall wishing I could thought-control the beanbag chair to leap through the open window above me and bring me comfort on the damp cement steps. Buttoning my jacket against the encroaching marine layer rolling in off the Pacific, I thought about my first night with Rachel when we wore the grooves off Diamonds And Rust. Was Rachel the diamond and I the rust, I wondered? Was I rusted shut emotionally? Perhaps she was right. I wasn’t taking her for granted, but dumping her at The Women’s Saloon and not calling to check in with her was inconsiderate.
I lit another cig and stared into the night. So far, a personal love had not worked out in my life. The first love of my life had been God. I was seven years old the day I knelt in front of the jewel bedecked statute of the Infant of Prague and took the first vow of my life. At the side altar with Mary’s little infant son Jesus, I’d made the sign of the cross over straight-cut bangs that fell over my eyebrows. At age seven I had reached the “age of reason” and according to the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church I was old enough to make a statement of faith, old enough to receive Holy Communion, and old enough to be a martyr. Since dying for my faith and taking that short cut to heaven didn’t seem to be an option in America, I could still take the long route and promise Mary that I’d enter a convent and devote my life to knowing and loving her son.
“I give you my life,” I whispered to my tiny Infant King with the crown on his head. “From this moment forward, I belong to you.”
I knew it would be another ten years, the day after I graduated from high school, before I could literally enter a convent, but my promise felt natural and solid, clear and compelling. I knew that a vow was a promise that you keep forever. “Once a priest, always a priest…according to the law of Melchizedek,” the Bible said. I had no doubt that my vow would fill me up for a lifetime.
Ten years later, I’d read the life and times of every Catholic saint ever thrown to the lions. I’d spent most of high school on the softball diamond, or in the small on-campus chapel at Bishop Amat. On September 6, 1966, I entered the IHM novitiate. The Montecito estate south of Santa Barbara was everything that Sister Veronica Mary IHM, my high school mentor, had promised it would be in her poem. It was indeed “a place apart where the saint might forgive and the sinner might praise. Where I was myself, not conscious of paltry pettiness.”
But it was also the mid 1960s. By the time I got to my “place apart,” the novitiate had become part of the chaos of American political life. Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, and other anti-war radicals, were using the novitiate as a safe house to run from the FBI. The endless stream of strange visitors made for great classes but little solitude. My order was at war with L.A.’s hyper-conservative Cardinal McIntyre because they were agitating for feminist reform within religious life. My ecstatically wonderful life among women who were committed to celibacy and covert lesbianism was a contradiction I could have enjoyed. But witnessing up close how regressive the Church was and that it was never going to even try to change poverty, war, or the second class status of women, threw me—a naïve teenager—for a grown-up loop. My faith in the Holy, Roman, and Apostolic Catholic Church had simply imploded.
The silence of the night outside Rachel’s duplex was like a “grand silence” at the novitiate, reminding me of the hundreds of lonely nights at Montecito begging the Almighty Universe to show me a new path. A year after I’d finally left the convent, I became distracted by the twenty-year-old joy and angst of being a college student, testing my new found gay identity, and a new decision to become a professional social worker. But it was not until October 3, 1970, the night I walked into the Daughters of Bilitis, that I was to fall in love again. This time with the cause that would indeed reveal my life’s promise.
I looked down at the steep bank of ivy that fell away from Rachel’s duplex. The sweep of the city lay in front of me. Perhaps, I reflected, I was too much in love with the sweep of the movement, my new cause, to have room in my heart for a single individual human being. It felt so much larger, so much more filling, to love a cause. People—women—would leave you, but a cause was with you forever.
Being married, even to a woman, didn’t suit who I thought I was. Marriage was a counter-revolutionary lifestyle. Was Rachel a white picket fence kind of lesbian? I wondered as I studied the abrupt landscape of her backyard ivy that seemed to fall down the hill out of control.
Love was too complicated and time-consuming in my life, but sex was necessary.
Sex with Rachel felt particularly necessary. Embedded in her jade bushes, I questioned whether the blissed-out feeling I’d had with her could develop into something deeper. Pulling the leaves off the jade branch next to me, I counted, she loves me, she loves me not, as I denuded a branch. At the Saloon and again the other night, I’d called her “sweetheart.” Sweetheart was what my father called my mother. Sweetheart could mean staying for breakfast.
I shivered inside my jacket. The pre-dawn cold would come soon. I’d be frozen by breakfast time if I couldn’t think of a way to get Rachel to open the door and take us to bed. How would my father have awakened my mother if she were angry at him?
I jumped up and leaned over the porch rail facing her bedroom window. I took a deep breath.
“Jesse, come home, there’s a hole in the bed
Where we slept; now it’s growing cold.
Jesse your face, in the place where we lay
By the hearth, all apart, it hangs on my heart.
And I’m leaving the light on the stairs
No I’m not scared; I wait for you”
A light flicked on in the bedroom. The porch door opened a crack, and Rachel’s face peered out.
“Jeanne?” she called, drawing out my name like a prayer.
“Yes, it’s me.”
The door opened wider, revealing her body. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.” Barefoot in the dim porch light, Rachel was dressed in a sheer blue nightgown gathered in pleats under her breasts. Her hair was curled every which way from sleep. In the dim light, she looked dazed and vulnerable.
“Grab a blanket and come out and watch the stars with me.”
Her figure disappeared for a moment, and then re-emerged from the darkness with the Nepalese quilt draped around her shoulders. Squinting, she reached for my hand. I sat her down on a stair, and sat myself on the stair behind her, wrapping the quilt around my shoulders and folding her inside it with me.
She leaned back into my arms. “I won’t ask what you are doing here,” she said, shaking her head.
When We Were Outlaws Page 19
