by Susie Bright
Big Sex
Little Death
A Memoir
by Susie Bright
Big Sex Little Death
A Memoir
Copyright © 2011 by Susie Bright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bright, Susie, 1958-
Big sex, little death : a memoir / Susie Bright.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-9708815-6-4
1. Bright, Susie, 1958- 2. Bright, Susie, 1958---Sexual behavior. 3. Feminists--United States--Biography. 4. Women radicals--United States--Biography. 5. Women socialists--United States--Biography. 6. Women adventurers--United States--Biography. 7. Lesbians--United States--Biography. 8. Sex--Political aspects--United States--History--20th century. 9. On our backs. 10. Socialist International (1951- )--Biography. I. Title.
CT275.B6824A3 2011
305.42092--dc22
[B]
2010030224
Design by Susie Bright, Title Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell. E-book creation by 52 Novels.
Ebook edition published by
Bright Stuff
POB 8377
Santa Cruz, CA 95061
Print edition published by:
Seal Press
A Member of The Perseus Book Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Audiobook edition produced by:
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An Amazon Company
Table of Contents
Preface
First Bites
Baby Teeth
India
The Irish Side
Way Out West
D – I – V – O – R – C – E
Runs Through It
Bleeding
The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said
The Red Tide
The Bunny Trip
The Churning Mist
Swim Banquet
George Putnam’s Show
Sex Education
You Are Now a Cadre
Patty Hearst
Dago Armour’s Apartment
The New Branch Organizer
The Master Freight Agreement
Greyhound to Detroit via Amarillo
The Aorta
Commie Camp
Relocation
The Perfume Counter
Expulsion
All Along the GirlTower
School Days
How I Got Introduced to On Our Backs
The Feminist Vibrator Store
The Baby Showers
Models Crying
Les Belles Dames Sans Merci
The Daddies
Motherhood
Rotation
Aging Badly
When I Came Back from My Honeymoon
Santa Cruz
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
This book is dedicated to:
Elizabeth Joanne Halloran Bright
1925-2004
&
William Oliver Bright
1927-2006
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— W. B. Yeats
Preface
At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the whiffs I get from the ink of [women writers] are fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin's whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.
— Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
How does a woman, an American woman born in midcentury, write a memoir? The chutzpah and the femmechismo needed to undertake the project go against the apron. I was raised with, “Don’t think you’re so big.” Yet to be a writer at all, you have to inflict your ego on a page and stake your reputation. To be a poet, the effect should be transcendent, and disarming.
I already knew the best result of my memoir, before I finished it. The days of my writing — a couple years in earnest — inspired many of the family and friends around me to write their story, to put a bit of their legacy in ink. Reading what they had to say was a revelation. If more of us knew the story of our tribe — and carried it from one generation to the next — it seems like the interest would pay off.
I know so little of my own family history that, when I was young, I often read memoirs in search of blood relation. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.
At the onset of my memoir, I thought I would bring myself up-to-date on the autobiography racket. I researched the current bestsellers among women authors who had contemplated their life’s journey. The results were so dispiriting: diet books. The weighty before’s and after’s. You look up men’s memoirs and find some guy climbing a mountain with his bare teeth — the parallel view for women are the mountains of cookies they rejected or succumbed to.
The next tier of bestselling female memoirs, often overlapping with the diet tales, is the tell-all by a movie star, athlete, or political figure. The first two subjects are designed to exploit gossip — the last are so boring and circumspect you wonder if they’re funded by government cheese.
The last group of popular memoirs — and this goes across the gender divide — are the ones in which the author unloads a great deal of weight in the form of psychic burdens from childhood. The subject is nearly driven mad by lunatic or intoxicated parenting, sidetracked by years of self-destruction bred into their family line, only to be redeemed at the end by a clean break from addiction and pathology.
I’m as vulnerable as anyone to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn’t call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn’t need a drink? Who isn’t going to crack and lash out at the people they love? I have a lot of sympathy for the dark places in my family history, while at the same time repeating my mantra, “This can’t go on.”
I came of age and became a sexual adult at the moment that women — in jeans and no bras, of course — were taking to the streets. Sexual liberation and feminism were inseparable topics to my best friends in high school. As I entered my twenties and feminists began to disown one another over sexual expression, it reminded me all too well of what I went though in the labor movement, civil rights, the Left — “let the weak fight among themselves.” Radical feminists didn’t need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.
When I was first involved in politics, it was part of our group ethos not to proclaim our names and so-called talent all over the map — it went against our sense of the collective. When people ask me how I became a professional writer, I couldn’t give them a “climb-the-ladder” scenario, because I went out my way to be part of a group. Everyone was supposed to know how to write, talk, run a web press, unclog a toilet, stage a demonstration.
I saw a news article today by a corporate headhunter who said he liked to get under his applicants’ ski
n by asking them how, exactly, they were most misunderstood. What an endearing literary question!
It was a good interrogation to ask myself, mid-memoir. What do people think about me that is off base? And how do I gauge this misperception?
Most people unfamiliar with my work imagine that anyone with the youthful nickname of “Susie Sexpert” must be an adolescent airhead, a happy but too-dim nympho, someone who set out to shock her strict parents — or, alternatively, was raised in a den of hedonists.
They also think, along the “dumb blond” trajectory, that I just haven’t thought things through, about where sexual liberation might lead — how a female Narcissus could drown in a pool of clitoral self-absorption and drag unfortunate others with her.
I would say, for one, I was motivated, always, from the sting of social injustice. The cry of “That isn’t fair!” gets a more impulsive behavior from me than, “I want to get off.”
My parents were far more radical than I am, because of basic changes in their generation: My mother didn’t die in childbirth. She went to college. My parents married even though they weren’t of the same religion. They divorced — before that became the American way of life. My father’s ashes can be found in a Native burial ground instead of a WASP family plot. They strayed so much further than I did from their immediate ancestors. They were better educated than I, but I have had a bigger mouth. I don’t know who to blame for that.
The other side of my character, the one that isn’t the “Sí, se puede” version of Auntie Mame, is exemplified by loss, constant and too-early. I’m more preoccupied with people dying than people coming.
In the world of sexual risk and revolutionary politics, a lot of voyagers die before their time. Evangelist Jerry Falwell famously preached at feminists, queers, and integrationists that all their fatal problems — their assassinations and plagues — were retribution from an angry God, who wanted people to keep their legs crossed and drink at the “colored fountain.”
I don’t believe in God or retribution, but I accept that there are consequences from pushing, hard. Pioneers don’t look good on an actuarial table. Sex radicals tend to be excellent at hospice care, at the rites of the dying, at memories that leave legacies. Perhaps because we are blunt about sex, we’re not so afraid of death’s taboo, either.
Every loss uncovers an edge about why we persevere in spite of the empty space. Sex — its quixotic vitality, not its banal marketability — is one of those things that makes you feel like, “I’m not done yet.”
This memoir is a progress, not a final deliverance. You’ll see some of the flowers that pressed themselves into my scrapbook. Using Mr. Mailer’s criteria, I'm going for “dykily psychotic,” definitely “bright,” and, hopefully, crowning.
First Bites
Baby Teeth
I couldn’t sleep last night. Every drunk yelling under the window finally slipped away by four am and left the street silent. My lover was deep in slumber. I curled up against his back and woke him up.
“Jon, tell me a story,” I said. “You know, a really personal story.”
It’s a little joke between us that if he talks to me in intimate, sonorous tones, I will fall into a dead sleep. The more secret the story, the sooner I’ll drift off.
I thought of a question to get him started. “When you were a little boy, what was the first time you can remember getting hurt?”
Jon remembered a spill. He took a fall in the public commons of a housing project in State College, Pennsylvania. He was running — tripped and scraped his knee on the edge of a slate staircase. He remembered the blood pouring out of his knee, the shock of all that red ink. His mother came running out, bundled him up, wiped his tears. I’ve always wanted to be bundled like that.
I fell asleep dreaming of a mommy’s blanket.
I remember the first time I got hurt. I was bit by a little girl, hard enough to bleed.
I was in a daycare, the first daycare I can remember. My mother was working as a secretary, and we were living in Berkeley after her divorce from my father.
I hated this daycare. The rooms were large, cold — even in my memories it looks like a set from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When the teachers got impatient with you, they rolled out dark, narrow, wooden panels, seven feet high, that they could wheel into position and use to effectively trap you in a box, anywhere on the floor.
You could see light at the top — the panels did not reach the ceiling — but otherwise it was like being stuck in a refrigerator. You lay on the floor inside your “box,” and they told you not to make a sound or it would get worse.
Outside the classroom area, there was an asphalt yard. One afternoon a little girl with raven curls and blue eyes — I remember being struck by how pretty she was, even at two — came right up to me, grabbed my forearm, and sank her teeth in.
I have no idea why. I yelled bloody murder; I saw the marks and red holes welt up on my skin. Someone — not our mothers — rushed over and punished both of us. We were walled up in separate boxes.
I had complained about the box to my mother with no effect before. But this time, there was no hiding the injury. I remember her outrage — and her impulse. Elizabeth jumped into the car and I sat at home watching the kitchen clock, imagining the tongue-thrashing she was going to give them. I never had to go back there again. When she came home, she was grim, but I could tell it was over.
There’s never any misunderstanding about broken skin. No “What if?” or “Should I care?” We yell or cry out, hit or block; there’s no wondering how we feel.
When I first started teaching about sex, in my thirties, I tried to whittle down what it was that people viscerally react to when sex horrifies them. I kept coming back to our openings, the expected and unexpected openings to the body. We don’t like invasions we didn’t ask for.
I did an exercise with a classroom of mine, students analyzing sexual representation. I said, “Let’s try to get to the nitty-gritty of what is called ‘offensive.’ Let’s stop talking about it.” I gave them all crayons and butcher paper, reminiscent of a daycare.
I set the mood. “I want you to quickly sketch the most disgusting, abhorrent thing you can think of, the thing you are utterly repelled by, the thing that you cannot endure for one second.”
I told them I didn’t care if it was phobic, or irrational, or if everyone would probably agree with their choice. Just to go for it.
I asked them to draw two pictures. One that depicted an “offensive” situation that was not about sex. Another one that was pointedly sexual.
We pinned the drawings to the wall. It was a parade of horrors and sillies. It was hard to stop laughing or gasping. Of course, most of the students were not adept renderers, and their pictures were crude. I had given them only a few minutes.
The nonsexual themes of offense evoked brutal violence, the monster vs. the mouse. Images of people hurting children, or animals, or each other in a vast war. The red crayon was used to draw the cuts, the explosions, the cruelty. The world split open. Faces with blue tears pouring out of the eyes. Anyone can draw that.
The sexual offenses were sometimes fetishistic, other times universal. Many students went to shit. One student drew an ice cube tray of “shit-sicles” — god, how did he ever think of that? There were the bugaboos of the sexually inexperienced: anal sex, ew. Oral sex, ugh. One young man drew a dripping snatch, the horror. But others drew a penis that wouldn’t stop ejaculating, choking its recipient. Gang rape was represented. One young woman drew the aftermath line of a violent abortion. Her belly and vagina cut open. Someone drew a penis forced in another’s ear.
The themes of bullying and powerlessness unified us. But sexual confessions were more surreal. They were unusual … or symbolic. The students knew that their fears were unlikely to come true, or were exaggerated — but the horror persisted nevertheless.
I kept saying, “Look at the openings.” The place where we say, “I can push out, but you can’t push in.”
We take tremendous pleasure in those same places, but there’s no ignoring their perilous entry. We don’t want to be caught off guard; we don’t want to be preempted and struck.
Our nose, ears. Eyes, mouths, vaginas. Anuses. Our tender flesh. We arrive bundled up, and we don’t want any poking. We work up the courage to invite another’s hands, tongue, a soft or persistent pleasure.
It’s the opposite of automatic. When you’re born, you don’t know you’re separate from your mother. As your baby-self grows, it starts to dawn on you: The umbilical cord is gone. You become conscious of where you begin and where your mother ends. You realize you have to protect your own tender openings.
I didn’t want to get bit by that pretty little girl at the evil daycare. She reminded me of Rose Red. I was Snow White. I was smitten with her perfect face and piercing eyes. I thought she was coming to me with a wreath of flowers instead of incisors.
So my early desire was nipped. I wanted to smell, to listen, to taste, to be felt and achingly fondled … with discrimination. I wanted to speak my mind and be understood. That bite proved something I wasn’t able to get across any other way.
Would I have learned anything without being hurt? I was hurt too much, like most of us … and not by incoherent, dazzling two-year-olds. More by the wall-boxers. There was way too many of them.
I was bullied as a kid because I was intellectually precocious but socially inappropriate. I read constantly, but I had my thumb in my mouth half the time. My moral universe was populated with fairy tales my mother read me, opera librettos and folk songs she’d sing to me — I had no idea what kids were talking about down the street. I wore thick glasses at a time when you didn’t see many children with prescription lenses. My shoes were funny and the hems of my hand-sewn dresses fell below my knees. I attended ten schools before I was seventeen and had a vocabulary that didn’t sound as if it had come from anywhere nearby, because we never had.
My mother and I moved every year or two, all our belongings stuffed into a 1963 VW Bug. When Elizabeth got fed up with something, she cleared out. There was no doubting the injustice that propelled her.
