When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

“Good little dyke.” Robin nudged me along into the kitchen.

  She placed what looked like a pan with holes in its sides on the stove and turned on the flame. Watching her maneuver her tools confidently, a sexist thought occurred to me. My pal would make some butch dyke a good wife. Robin was surely a gay man born into the body of a lesbian, the very definition of what I called a “faggot-butch.” She stopped clanging her instruments. “How are you and Rachel doing? She was so nice to give me her recipe for Cornish game hens last night. We’re getting together next week to make penne putanesca. For a femme, she’s a sensible woman,” Robin babbled on, snapping the green things off the carrots. “Not gorgeous though, like Anderson or some of your other lovers. Or brilliant, like me. What do you see in her? She must be a good cook…”

  “Don’t insult my predilections just because you’re not attracted to femmes,” I scolded. You’re the homo homosexual here.”

  Suddenly, I realized what Robin had said. “Wait—when did you see Rachel last night?”

  “After BeJo’s party. I went to the Saloon.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that when I walked through the door? You withholding little motherfucker! What did she say? Did she give you a message for me?”

  “No message! Nothing, I promise!” Robin responded quickly to my desperate, angry tone.

  I sat brooding on a barstool at the counter. No message meant Rachel was still angry with me. I sucked in my breath. Damn! I wanted so badly to reach out and touch her, tell her I’d talked to BeJo and everything was going to be all right.

  Robin came to my side and slung her arm around my shoulder. “That’s why I didn’t tell you right away. I knew you’d be depressed if there was no message. Then we wouldn’t have any fun.”

  “Robinnnn…” I wailed, “What if she’s not speaking to me?” My voice echoed in the Chrome Palace.

  “Why wouldn’t she be speaking to you?”

  I turned away and slumped on the barstool. “Yesterday, right before BeJo’s party, we made love in the front seat of my car…in The Freep’s parking lot.”

  “In the parking lot?”

  “No one saw us.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I…I sort of left.”

  “Does sort of mean that one part of you got out of the car and another part of you stayed with her?”

  My fingers were engaged in pulling one hair from my head at a time and laying them in a line on the tiled counter. “No that’s not what it meant. I mean…after we both climaxed, I saw what time it was, and I freaked…and just left.”

  “You mean you abused a woman in a car on the street and then left her to drive herself home?”

  “How can you say abuse? We both came!”

  Robin raised one eyebrow. I winced and dropped my head.

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “I had to leave.”

  Robin’s eyes bulged. “You left her?” She backed away. “Have I taught you nothing these last years?” she yelled, waving a brass spoon in my face. “I thought I had taught you how to dress. How to act. How to treat a woman. I never should have graduated you! You’re supposed to be a gentleman-butch. No wonder she’s not speaking to you. I wouldn’t either!”

  I looked up at Robin. She had bragged publicly that I was the first graduate of “The Robin Tyler Good-Grooming School for Young Butches.” Now she was yanking my degree. That demotion I could take, but her words “You left her?” resounded in my mind. I shut my eyes and pictured Rachel’s expression when she realized I was asking her to get out of my car. Again I saw her lower lip quiver; her eyes grow wide with shock. Christ! Maybe my body had just wanted a quickie; maybe in my lust I’d just compartmentalized away my emotions, denying them to both of us.

  Robin was still jabbering, “…and no! I’m not going to call her to apologize for you.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” I lamented. “I never thought she would take it so personally.”

  “You are such a heartbreaker, you little shit,” Robin grumped, throwing a clump of carrots at me. “Get over here and cut these up,” she ordered, returning to the stove. “But all is not lost. I’m sure she’ll forgive you. She’s obviously obsessed with you, too.” Robin shook spices into the pot. “Romance isn’t good for the movement. We shouldn’t let ourselves get distracted. We’re in the middle of a revolution.”

  “That’s right!” I agreed, straightening my shoulders. “But life isn’t just about the movement. Don’t we need to find balance between the personal and the political?”

  She stared at me. “Have you skipped meetings to be with her?”

  “I’ve been late here and there,” I equivocated.

  “That’s a bad sign; bad, bad, bad.” Robin looked at my uncut carrots.

  I waved the knife over them. “Do I cut them vertically or horizontally?”

  “Give me that!” Robin took her carrots and knife back. “Just sit on the stool. Don’t touch anything!”

  I lit a cigarette. Robin cut the carrots horizontally.

  “Hell hath no fury,” Robin continued. “That’s another reason why I don’t date femmes—since Patty. Punishment, major punishment! A butch just slams the door behind her and leaves.”

  “What can I do, Robin? I’m in love with her. I want to be with her. What am I supposed to do about BeJo? ”

  Robin looked up, an idea dancing in her green eyes. “Do what I did. Move them all in together! That way you could be with both of them.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Robin!” I belched. The thought of Rachel and BeJo under the same roof made my guts twist. “These are radical times, sure, but that didn’t work with you and Patty and me. Need I remind you?”

  “Maybe that was because of you!” Robin persisted. “It did work with Judy and Patty and me.”

  “Yeah, for three months!”

  “That’s because we didn’t like Judy that much…”

  I brought the conversation back to me. “Robin! I feel so confused, what am I going to do?”

  “You’re not confused, you’re scared! You’re afraid to let go of BeJo because she provides a rock for you to run aground on.

  She’s your sanity, your stability.”

  My lips parted to deny her, but instead I said, “That’s a crude way to put it.” BeJo and I were domestically compatible and we shared The Tide and loved newspaper work.

  “She chose you. You are not in love with her,” Robin charged.

  “So what? She lets me live my life the way I want to live it. Does it really matter why we choose to be with someone? It’s all so irrational.”

  “Maybe you needed a nurse when you met BeJo,” Robin continued. “And now, you don’t need a nurse anymore.”

  I said nothing. At times, I hated my big brother.

  “How close to the edge is Rachel with you?”

  “I never quite know where I’m at with her. Except that she’s in love with me, too. At least she was before last night.”

  “What would you do if you were in Rachel’s shoes?” Robin challenged. “In love with someone who lives with another woman and is more interested in the world of politics than the world of domestic bliss? What would you do if you were her?”

  “I guess if I were Rachel…I’d cut off my left hand to save my sanity.” I stared at the lit burner on the stove. “I would write her…I mean me, a long, definitive Dear Jeanne letter. An I love you, but…letter saying, ‘You’re a case of diminishing returns, a bad bet.’”

  Robin sliced the heads off a bunch of long green stalks. “So why isn’t she writing you that letter?”

  “Maybe she is.” I closed my mouth, dumbstruck by my own words. I stared at the noodles boiling on the stove. My flippant self withered. Good God…what if Rachel was doing just that? I rotated off the bar stool and began pacing the room.

  Perhaps all my dallying with Rachel was a subconscious playing for time to find out if we were emotionally compatible as well as having this kind of almost religious physical connection.
I’d wanted time to know what she was like in her domestic habits. Time to see what we had in common now that the strike might soon be over. Time to let my guard down. How come Rachel wouldn’t give me a year? It had only been three months. What if I tried to apologize tomorrow and she slammed the door in my face?

  I fell back onto the bar stool and looked at Robin, my face pale, my voice low. “I feel nauseous,” I said holding my stomach.

  “Córdova! Don’t you dare throw up all over my lunch!” Robin yelled and slammed a lid on her noodles.

  “What if she’s writing me a good-bye letter?!” I screamed at Robin.

  “Calm yourself,” Robin demanded. “Rachel’s a femme, isn’t she? Femmes never go all the way when they leave you. They do it slowly, one finger at a time. But it’s clear you’re coming down to her finish line. So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Cry?”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Shoot myself?”

  “Not helpful.”

  “I can’t leave BeJo totally. Not yet, anyway. ”

  “Does Rachel really need you to break up with BeJo totally?”

  “She didn’t say that. She wants weekends with me. She wants me to break off my non-monogamous time arrangement with BeJo.”

  “So she did give you an ultimatum.”

  “Do you think so? It sounded more like a request.”

  “Femmes always tuck their ultimatums in like tight sheets on a bed you can’t get out of.”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering, “that was her tone of voice.”

  “So go pack your Brylcreem and move in with Rachel over the weekends. See what happens.”

  “What about BeJo?”

  “It sounds like you’re not with BeJo anyway. Maybe she won’t notice you’re gone.”

  I stopped pacing. “That’s comforting.”

  “So let me ask you this,” she said, slamming some silverware in front of me. “Are you prepared to lose Rachel?”

  My cigarette fell out of my mouth. Panic began in my lower gut and traveled to my mouth: “Good God, no!”

  “There you have it,” Robin concluded. She shoved a bowl of soup toward me. “So do the deed and get back to your politics!”

  She sat down beside me and started eating, “Enough about women! Tell me what’s new with the strike? Now that’s something to be depressed about. I don’t know whether you should trust Morris…”

  Out of one fire and into another.

  With trepidation, I opened the door and let myself into BeJo’s and my apartment. Hearing the shower running, I tossed my briefcase on a chair and sat down in the breakfast room to wait for my live-in lover. Robin and I had spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the coming showdown negotiation with the Center. Instead of going to The Freep, I’d come home early, determined to catch BeJo before she went to work. And I was also determined to find Rachel tonight, and bring her the good news—that I’d broken the arrangement with BeJo and I was free to spend weekends with her.

  The coffee pot was brewing next to the sink and cookies were baking in the oven. This was a good sign. Cookies in the oven meant BeJo wasn’t baking the nails for my crucifixion. That she’d forgiven me for almost blowing her birthday. I’d created quite a mess. How to begin the discussion with BeJo?

  “Where were you all afternoon?” BeJo sailed into the kitchen, a towel wrapped around her. “I called The Freep and they said you hadn’t come in all day.” She sat in the chair next to me and folded her arms across her breasts. “It’s not like you to skip work to be with Rachel,” she quipped pointedly, her jaw tightly set.

  I squirmed in my chair. The cookies were a dodge. BeJo was still pissed. How like her to warm me up, get me off guard, and then drop the Sword of Damocles on my head.

  “I wasn’t at Rachel’s. I went to see Robin. We had some things to discuss.”

  “It seems I never know where you are!” BeJo retorted. “You could be in jail for some political thing for all I know. Are you and your gang really going to throw bricks into the Pussycat Theater that’s showing the snuff movies? {1}Have you already started that? Or, you could be with some new lover in San Francisco. You’re like a prairie fire that turns with the wind.”

  “I wasn’t in jail and I’m not seeing someone new,” I replied,

  seeing my opening. “I’m only seeing Rachel. I don’t intend to see any other women.”

  “What you intend to do and what you actually do are often two different things. Sometimes they’re three or four different things.”

  I cocked my head to one side, knowing this combative tone between us wasn’t a good way to start. I spoke to her gently, “Would you rather I was seeing others besides Rachel?”

  BeJo was silent for a few minutes as she stirred her coffee. “Of course,” she said, her eyebrows seeming to fold in on themselves. “That way you wouldn’t fall in love with her. I know you, remember, honey?”

  “Then you know that I said right from our beginning that I couldn’t be monogamous.” I spoke softly, and stopped myself from adding, because I was never in love with you. Truth be told, I probably couldn’t be monogamous with anyone even if I was in love. Except maybe Rachel.

  “And you know,” BeJo continued, “that I think this non-monogamous lifestyle is a bunch of horse manure. It’s just plain old unnatural. Besides, when we first met you were in no condition to date even me, let alone others.”

  I studied BeJo’s soft, deer-like eyes, warm and full of love, as they had always been.

  I fell down on one knee in front of her chair and took her hand, holding it in her lap. “You knew I’d get better eventually,” I said.

  BeJo studied my face as we exchanged memories of the dark times when we’d met, a few months before the National Lesbian Conference in ‘73 at a meeting of the organizing committee of the conference. Quickly, BeJo had joined the group. “Just to hang around you,” she’d later confessed. After nine months of exhaustive preparation, a devastating betrayal by my program co-chair and Trotskyist lover, and the highly charged arguments of national warring dyke tribes, I simply crashed into a full-blown nervous breakdown. Bringing together the largest dyke conference in history was politically explosive. Hundreds of lesbians favored a total separatist withdrawal from the world of men while other hundreds simply wanted to be open about being gay at their jobs without being fired. Amidst the politics, my personal pain was having a woman I loved deeply hang me out to dry publically as a Trotskyist in front of my own lesbian nation. Traumatized, I’d driven out of L.A., ending up in an isolated town up the Pacific coast. It would be seven months before I could face the world again. {2}

  I’d spent the first three months of those emotionally pain-racked days lying on a couch at my friend Margie’s house in Lompoc, listening to her write songs, convinced that I would be a dysfunctional vegetable for the rest of my life. Finally, I’d returned home to BeJo’s apartment where all I could do was mark the rising and setting of the sun as I crouched in random corners of her living room rocking myself to sleep. For the next few months, it was BeJo who crept around the edges of my secluded hell and tended to me. BeJo who hovered over me like a lover-mother hen, helping me glue together the pieces of my fragmented psyche. BeJo who held my hand every morning and every night as I stared vacantly at the television. BeJo who made me eat and eventually took me out for long drives in Ramona to get me used to the world once more. If she hadn’t been there for me I surely would have committed suicide or checked into a mental farm.

  I owed BeJo my life—that I knew. But how much of my life? The whole thing? Forever? As I knelt on the carpet in front of her we slowly wiped away each others’ tears.

  She took my head, bent it to her and kissed me on the forehead. “Jeanne I know you’ve been healthy for a long while now. I know you need more in your life than I have to give. I’ve stayed with you hoping to make it last as long as it could. I’ve grown to a new level with you learning how creativity and intelligence work in yo
ur life and now in mine,” she said, using her free hand to smooth my hair back. “That’s why I’ve never made demands I would have with another lover. I know I am not enough for you.”

  “Don’t say that.” I turned away from her. “I hate it when you talk that way.”

  “Then tell me you’re not in love with her.”

  “Why does that matter to you and me? I just want to spend more time with her on some weekends. You’re dating Pody. You’ll probably want to see more of her. ”

  “Don’t you even start to turn this thing around on me.” BeJo banged her coffee cup down on the table. “I asked you a question.”

  I grunted out a lie. “I forgot what the damn question even was.”

  “Are you in love with Rachel?”

  The sword dropped. I lowered my head, unable to lie to her face. A noise began to grow in my head. It was becoming a racket, a panic. Say it! I screamed at myself. Just say it. She knows it anyway. I reached out with both hands to hold up the wall.

  “Don’t bother lying. I can see your answer.” Her voice was so low I barely heard her.

  The grating noise inside my head disappeared and was replaced by another sound, the final, hollow sound of a rite of passage between BeJo and me.

  Chapter 25

  The Body Count

  [Los Angeles]

  August 15, 1975

  The phone rang continuously but she never picked up. “Rachel, where are you?” I asked, shaking the receiver in my hand as if I could pry lose an answer from it. My voice was hoarse. I felt strung out. In the gray light of a cloudy morning my Freep office with its posters and banners looked out of touch, like yesterday’s life.

  I hung up and looked through my open doorway at Penny, sitting at her desk across the hall, lost in editing. Her phone rang and she put her papers down to take the call.

  Closing my door for privacy, I dialed Rachel’s number again. “I’ve been looking for you since last night,” I said to her machine. “I’ve got great news! I spoke with BeJo….Everything is going to be okay.” I paused, hearing my words fall into the silence. “Call me as soon as you get this. I love you.”