Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright

  I don’t know how Putnam got into news, or cold war politics, but he was obviously a frustrated movie star. A great silent star born at the wrong time. You could turn down the volume on his singsong cadence, yet easily understand the entire monologue from his melodramatic performance. He had the grief of Lillian Gish, the grim sorrow of William S. Hart, the eye-popping intensity of Rudy Valentino. He had everything but the humor of Chaplin — the man did not have one funny bone in his body.

  We heard through the grapevine of Tracey’s dad, whose sister worked at the KTLA television station, that Putnam had gotten ahold of a copy of The Red Tide and was eager to expose us on the air, Friday night.

  We scrutinized our latest issue to see what topic he would target. The lead story was about Nixon invading Cambodia, and all his lies and cover-ups.

  But we didn’t think the Tricky Dick story would be Putnam’s favorite — he considered Nixon a liberal. Maybe he would go for our story about undercover narcs on high school campuses. Our intrepid photographer Joel had taken surreptitious photos of the fake “high school seniors” — from the LAPD — who posed as perfectly groomed beach boys, trying to score.

  Another suspect in our latest issue was our history of the FBI’s infiltration of the Black Panthers — but we thought that might strain Putnam’s reading level. He would face the same challenge with our exposé on sexism in Driver’s Ed class. I loved our Driver’s Ed story, because we’d found an illustration from the student driving manual that showed a blonde who couldn’t figure out how to get the key into the ignition.

  Which story would Georgie pick to illustrate our depravity? At six o’clock, we gathered at our clubhouse — the Letwin brothers’ garage — and Darryl twisted the TV antenna to make Putnam’s show appear without floating horizontal lines.

  Tracey and my other favorite Red Tide girl, Tammy, argued whether we should be down in front of KTLA’s offices protesting this very evening or should wait till the next morning. Michael, whose parents were hosting our vigil, told them if they didn’t shut up he would stuff them in the trunk and George would never hear from either of them again. Darryl popped a Bud and turned the volume up. Showtime!

  George Putnam held a copy of the latest Red Tide in front of his cameras so the viewers could see the cover and back page on half the screen.

  “I have here, before me,” he said, his eyebrows and hair moving with great feeling, “a picture of the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.”

  We looked at one another, bewildered.

  “I cannot,” he warned, “show this obscenity on television.” He paused. The suspense was unbearable.

  “It is an illustration” — his voice dropped to a baritone — “of a woman’s … private parts.”

  I grabbed the issue out of Tammy’s hands and ripped it open to the last pages. “Oh my god, it’s the IUD birth control story!” The picture he was referring to was a Gray’s Anatomy-style cross-section of a woman’s vagina and uterus.

  “Why?” Putnam raised his eyes to the heavens for an answer. “Why are our children subjected to this kind of filth, this kind of promiscuity, in the schoolroom?”

  “Oh man, Principal Dornacker is going to have a fit,” Tammy predicted — and it was true, because Georgie was making it look like Uni itself was funding our birth control campaign.

  “This rag, if you can call it that,” George said, lowering the paper, “claims to be the work of high school students — yet we know this pornography is the work of a cynical group of so-called adults who fund and exploit their communistic, atheist ideologies on our precious children.”

  “Why isn’t he saying feminist?” Tammy demanded.

  “Because he doesn’t know that word,” Tracey said.

  “Where’s our fucking cynics to fund us, that’s what I want to know,” Darryl said, and opened another Budweiser.

  “Our daughters,” George continued, “our daughters cannot defend their virtue when godless putridity is flaunted in their faces!”

  “Okay, I’ve got the headline,” Tammy interrupted: “‘George Putnam Claims Women’s Vagina Is Most Disgusting Thing He’s Ever Seen.’”

  “It’s the only one he’s ever seen!” Michael said. I looked at a couple other faces in the room, and I wondered if that described a few of our members as well. I knew George Putnam wasn’t a virgin, but some Red Tiders were.

  “I think,” Tammy said, “it was the fallopian tubes that did him in.”

  “I know George is shocked,” I said, “but this story didn’t even do its job. If we want birth control access for high school students, these stories can’t be so boring and technical, like sex is a valve job. No one we know even reads these.”

  I reminded everyone of a short piece I’d written about the essentials of lubrication, the benefits of coconut oil, and how even saliva was better than nothing.

  Michael gave me a look. Last time he saw my lube story, he told me he was going to throw up. People were dying in Vietnam, and I wanted to talk about vaginas — how could I?

  School went like a slow drip the next day. The same ten people who always watched the news had seen our big “exposé,” but it was like we were in a bomb shelter while everyone else was whistling Dixie.

  I was annoyed. I’d rather be on my picket line in the rain, arguing with company goons. After lunch I went to the gym office, where for some reason I was allowed to use the phone with impunity. Ms. Larsen, the only teacher using “Ms.” on campus so far, was lifting boxes of something onto a rolling cart.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” I said, taking one of the loads out of her arms.

  “I am not giving you a note for PE today, Susannah.”

  “Ms. Larsen, you don’t need to. I’m doing independent study PE now, remember? I’ll never need a note again.”

  She took two boxes to my one and kept stacking. “Hmpf!” And then, “What do you want, then?”

  “Did you see you see the George Putnam show last night?”

  “I don’t watch that fat bastard.”

  I tried again. “Well, I still want to know if you’re going to sign our petition for the self-defense workshops we want to do during girls’ gym. I put the paper on your desk last week, and you said you’d think about it.”

  The petition had been written up by Red Tide women, but we’d given ourselves a liberal name, High School Women Against Violence Against Women. Tracey said that name made her dizzy, but I argued it would work. “That’s the shit they like. We can’t say, ‘Pinko Dykes Who Want to Get Their Hands on Your Daughters.’”

  “Susannah, how many rapes exactly do you think are happening on this campus?”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me that!” I dropped a box at her feet. “You, of all people, know that those girls crying in the locker room are not telling anyone what goes on, and that’s the whole problem. No one around here reports rape; it would ‘ruin’ their reputation.”

  “What do you mean, me, ‘of all people’?” Ms. Larsen’s face turned beety.

  “You’re a feminist —”

  “I’m a what?”

  “You’re NOT a feminist? Oh, c’mon!”

  “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Everyone else acted like Ms. Larsen was some gray-haired stoic, but I felt like I’d been in a bar brawl with her every time we were alone for five minutes.

  “Do you know what people think you’re saying when you say ‘feminist’?” she whispered. Her blue eyes darted at mine.

  “I don’t know — what do you mean? Who are you talking about?”

  She stared at me, and we both stopped picking up boxes. I felt tears coming up. Why did she always have to break my balls?

  I tried again: “Are you trying to get me to say something like, they think I’m a lesbian?” I was hot now, too.

  Ms. Larsen’s head trembled back and forth.

  “I don’t care what they think!” I said. “They’re in the dustbin of history; they’re not wha
t’s going on! What does their prejudice have to do with anything?”

  “It has to do with how you are perceived by this administration, the faculty, and the rest of the community. “ She barely moved her lips.

  “Well, if they ‘perceive’ me as a dyke, I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care! I mean, I am bisexual.”

  Larsen took a step back and held up her hand in front of her eyes. “You can’t talk to me like this, Susannah,” she said, and moved closer to her desk.

  “Ms. Larsen, you know things are changing. You don’t have to be ashamed anymore.” I leaned against her desk, then hoisted myself up to sit on it.

  It was too much. She grabbed my wrist and pinched me until it hurt.

  “Jesus!”

  “You have no bloody idea what shame is.” She didn’t let go. I could count every dark line on her face.

  “Ms. Larsen!” I yanked, but she had me in a vise. “Shame is a fifteen-year-old girl in the locker room next to me who’s bleeding from her vagina and won’t tell anyone but me that a varsity player just raped her and told her he’d kill her if she ever told anyone.”

  She let go of my arm. “Where’s your fucking piece of paper?”

  “You’re standing on it.” It had fallen off her desk, but I could recognize my handwriting on the floor. I picked it up and handed it to her, half-torn. Her eyes were watery. My heart was ready to burst out of my chest.

  “You can fix it with some Scotch tape,” she said, and pulled a red pen from behind her ear, signing the bottom of it. Her phone rang, like a stage cue, and she turned to answer it, steely as ever: “Coach Larson, what do you want?”

  I tried to read her first name on my self-defense petition. Her signature was unreadable, like a little scarlet scar.

  Sex Education

  My first partnered sex was a group of three. My best friend, Danielle, and I seduced and conquered an older man of twenty-seven from down the street. Gary was an unemployed soap opera actor, hustling for commercials, going to auditions every day. I was almost sixteen, Danielle a year younger. She’d only been in the States six months, from Belgium, coming to stay with her father, just like me.

  I found out that Gary’s soap career consisted of playing “teenagers” — no wonder he cried about his aging process. We thought he was ridiculous — but pretty. He envied our lack of concern about growing up.

  Kissing Danielle is what I remember the most. We were all on the futon, watching the World Series after we’d finished doing Gary’s laundry. Danielle and I had a housecleaning/-sitting service, and every other Thursday we went to Gary’s apartment to hose down his man cave. We pestered him with nosy questions about sex; we found his driver’s license and taunted him about his real age; we skinny-dipped in the pool. Danielle delighted in being rude, and I was one of her few calming influences.

  The Orioles got the lead. Danielle and I were lying down, telling Gary how boring baseball was and how he should get a life. Dani started to pass me a joint she’d rolled, and our cheeks brushed each other. How could a tough girl be so soft?

  My lips touched hers. It was a shock; it almost hurt. I thought, Am I trembling because it’s Danielle, or because it’s a girl, or because it’s my first time?

  I had never kissed anyone before. Never held hands, never played “Post Office” or “Doctor”. I had read every page of The Hite Report and the Kinsey research, but I had never kissed anything but my pillow.

  We kissed Gary next. We triumphed over baseball. I don’t know what made him surrender that day — we had told him so many times before that we wanted to lose our virginity and that he should oblige us by being the guinea pig.

  “It’s so weird,” he said afterward. “Sue, you have a better figure, but Danielle, she has something that I just can’t put my finger on. It just compels you.”

  “Jesus, Gary,” I said, “it’s not an audition.”

  “You just insulted both of us,” Danielle added. It’s true — it should have hurt to hear his crude appraisals. But when I was with Dani, his words bounced off like rubber arrows.

  I felt safe and bold with Danielle — I’d do things with her I’d never do by myself. We could seduce anyone; we could get out of — or into — any situation we wished. When we were alone, she told me that my kissing was terrible, that Americans didn’t know how to kiss. She ran a bath for us, and when we got into the tub to practice, we turned on the shower, too, the water pouring down our heads.”

  Men were intimidated by us, which we thought was funny. Funny, but great leverage. For the first couple months of my sex life, I was too intimidated to do anything alone with a guy — Danielle was my big dog, my fearless leader, the one I could temper and reason with. I loved her. Sex with her, alone, made me shiver. We never talked about it.

  At the same time, Danielle had no interest in the women’s consciousness raising (CR) groups that were sprouting all over Los Angeles. She was her own Amazon. She didn’t join groups. Maybe it wasn’t a Belgian thing to do.

  I was in two or three CR groups simultaneously. The first one, a formal session, was all older women, except me. I think I gave them the first taste of teenage impulsivity they’d had since they’d been in high school themselves. A couple of them were ready to turn me in to the police, because they imagined I was the type to steal their boyfriends without a second thought.

  I argued with them, in my fawn-like attempts at sexual liberation. “First of all, I don’t even know your boyfriend,” I said to one mad hen named Marcie. “And second of all, why does it bother you that, if I fucked him, theoretically, it wouldn’t ‘mean’ anything to me? What is it supposed to mean? Why can’t I be your friend, have sex with your old man, and then have dinner with both of you the next night. Why is that so hard to imagine?” I saw this as a direct line from Engels’s Origins of the Family.

  Marcie hissed at me and used the parental language that I didn’t experience at home with Bill. “You are an infant who has no idea what you’re dealing with,” she spat.

  I never knew how to reply to that. Marcie, and the other over-thirties, didn’t get that I was so much closer to my girlfriends than I was to any man. I barely understood men at all. The older women’s approval and affection were critical to me. I could, and sometimes did, have one-night stands with their men, but I never felt with these men the intimacy I had with the women in the CR group. And I didn’t understand the women’s investment in these relationships.

  The second women’s group I was in, which was the most influential in the long run, was “The Speculum Club,” as I called it. We were a self-help group modeled on the famous Feminist Women’s Health Centers. The aim was not to talk about feelings, but rather to take down our pants every session and look at our cervixes.

  We monitored our cycles, detailed our sexual response, learned our fertility symptoms inside and out, performed vacuum aspirations on our uteruses, and seized control of the birth control process when necessary. My written diary from that group was extraordinary in its detail and observation. It was the first science class I’d ever paid attention to.

  I went from a teenage girl who took the Pill without giving a hoot about its hormonal consequences to a rabble-rouser who would preach, “When you’re not afraid to touch your vagina, you can use birth control that doesn’t screw up your body every day.”

  The Pill was ideal for marketing to women who had never taken a mirror and looked at their genitals. They never had to deal with their cunt; they just popped a colored tablet in their mouths — “Barbie Birth Control.”

  When you use diaphragms, cervical caps, condoms, it’s a hands-on experience — and hands are so good for everything sexual. The girls in my locker room at high school, who were always trying to “borrow” a Pill for a special occasion, didn’t take to my exhortations. Well, maybe some who were eavesdropping did.

  I remember Julie, the girl with the locker next to mine, who, aside from thinking that the Pill only had to be popped within a couple days of “d
oing it,” was particularly disdainful of my approach to letting boys know what was going on.

  “I’d rather die than have my boyfriend see me sticking my hand down there!” she said. “What a turnoff! — how do you expect to get a date?”

  We were talking different languages. “Dates” were for morons and squares.

  “Why, are you trying to convince him that you’re infertile?” I asked. “That you have a magic pussy that can’t get knocked up?”

  “STOP SAYING ‘PUSSY’!” Julie screamed, loud enough for the guys in the boys’ locker room to hear her.

  As much as I lectured Julie on her backwardness, I wasn’t so liberated myself beyond the birth control basics. I was so timid about bringing my orgasm out of my secret masturbation life and into bed with someone else. I knew, technically, that vaginal poking was unlikely to make me come without more direct clitoral stimulation, but I was too shy to “lead the way.” I wished someone would just look into my eyes and know. I couldn’t believe that so many older guys I met with Danielle seemed neither to know nor to notice whether a girl came or not.

  The third women’s group I belonged to was the broader group of women at high school my own age. We were all devoted to the women’s movement, especially the music. It was a happy lesbian-bi launching pad — everyone was so game, so open to “what could happen if you just tried it,” unlike my older CR comrades or the nerds of my Speculum Club. My high school girlfriends were the ones who schooled me about what it looked like to get turned on enough to just follow your clit to its natural conclusion.

  Sure, they were shy sometimes; we were all shy. But when your arousal level exceeds your timidity, you don’t need an instruction manual. Like Danielle — she just went for it.

  My girlfriends’ bedroom conversations were deeper than anything I ever said in a circle with chairs and tortilla chips. We talked about our sex with other people — with boys and men of all types, and with other women, those inexperienced like ourselves and committed dykes.