by Susie Bright
Nothing. Goddammit.
“Mom, if you don’t open this door, I’m going to call the police again and they won’t be looking for Patty Hearst — they’ll make you and me go to the hospital!”
Another one of her faces, the “Snow Queen,” opened the door an inch. I was relieved to see her standing up, intact. “I am fine,” she said. “Your things are packed; you may go.”
“I’m really sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry I made you upset, I —”
She closed the door in my face. But she didn’t lock it this time. She really didn’t like the police.
I was relieved to catch the train back early. My face had a funny blush on one side, but I didn’t think anyone would notice. I had to pee, but I could wait till I got back to L.A..
I left Elizabeth’s apartment and walked across the landing to ring the bell at Apartment 2G. All the older ladies at this apartment complex knew each other.
“Hi, there, Mrs. Koperski.” She recognized who I was — I look exactly like my mother. “Yes, I’m fine; I have to go to the train now, but would you go check in with my mom in a little bit? She’s not feeling well, and I made her some tea. I’m worried she’ll forget to drink it.”
“Oh yes, sweetheart, of course I will. …”
My mom’s neighbors were good-natured busybodies. I didn’t want them to discover her body, but I had to do something. She’d probably pull it together to save face. She’d forget what had happened between the two of us. Presto. I wish I could pull that off. I wish I could just turn around, like Pussums, and show you what I looked like walking away from every last bit of it.
Dago Armour’s Apartment
I finally got permission from my dad to go to “Commie Camp” in Detroit the summer of 1975. I was seventeen, and you would have thought I’d been invited to a tour of Europe; I was so excited. As far as I could tell, Motor City was filled with charisma, a 100 percent working-class town with factories on every corner, like pastry shops in Vienna. I could not wait.
But I had no money for my destination, no ticket to ride. I was going to have to baby-sit and hamburger-fry my way to the revolution launch pad.
My father didn’t say anything directly about my plans. It was more like: “You earn it, you plan it, go ahead.”
But his newest girlfriend, Judy, didn’t hold back, and I heard her dramatizing it on the phone to one of her girlfriends. “She wants to go to Detroit for the summer …
“Ha! Yeah, I know, why not throw in Newark and Carbondale and make it like a cruise! I told Bill, I told him, you’re her father, you …
“No, no, I don’t think Susie has any idea; she’s never really been out of California. She says to me [using a prissy schoolgirl voice], ‘I’m sure there are nice places in Detroit, just like anywhere else!’ Yes, I know, we’re all waiting for the film to be developed!”
More laughing. I didn’t think Judy had ever been to Detroit, either, so what did she know? I’d develop the pictures all right, and I wouldn’t show them to her.
Judy was so ignorant — she didn’t understand that Commie summer camp was not going to be in the city itself. It was a real camp, the kind of place out in Michigan’s forests that gets leased to Girl Scouts and Rotarians. I guess the owner didn’t have a problem with Reds, either, at least for a week.
Or maybe the camp managers didn’t know who we were. One year we organized a high school anti-apartheid conference, for which I made up phony brochures for the kids’ parents that said that the whole thing was being sponsored by the YWCA. It was the only way we could get those permission slips!
I had a couple more months to make the money for my bus ticket. I had applied for a scholarship to the camp itself that would cover my bunk and meals. I asked Geri and Ambrose to plea on my behalf. Geri called me back with something I didn’t expect. “Some of the members of the Executive Committee think your family is loaded.”
“What?”
“I know, I know — they think everyone in California is a millionaire, unless they’re industrialized.”
“Well, did you set them straight?” I was so embarrassed. I thought the Executive Committee met in robes to solemnly discuss the future of Leninist cadre building, not Sue Bright’s dad’s financial statement.
“Of course I did. I told them that the average feeder driver at UPS makes more than your dad does teaching, and don’t you worry, they’re going to do it. I told them they were full of shit. But it’s just like rubbing salt on a wound to tell the Executive Committee your dad is a professor … that’s what they were supposed to be if they hadn’t dropped out and become Teamsters.”
“Those guys went to college?” I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the receiver like it was alive.
“You didn’t know that? That’s their secret shame — they’re all Cal and Columbia dropouts.” She told me that Mac Lofton was one quarter away from his PhD in English literature.
“Is it really a secret?” When I saw Mac in public, he wore a blue satin Teamsters’ jacket with the American flag embroidered on the chest above Local 5. He married a comrade named Arlene, even though she was a lesbian, and listened to George Jones because “that’s what workers do.” Every time he saw me, or one of the other kids from The Red Tide, he’d make a face, like someone had put a hippie hair in his Danish. And every time I saw his wrinkled face, I thought, My god, you don’t know a single “worker” under sixty-five. I loved the Teamsters Union rank and file, but Mac acted like no one mattered who wasn’t over fifty and driving “over the road” — while most Teamsters I knew were young and loading trucks, like at United Parcel Service. We weren’t listening to George Jones.
“Everyone knows,” Geri said. “It’s the story of half this organization — don’t let them fool you. They don’t want any of you kids to go to college, ’cause they would have to see you graduate when they didn’t.”
I’d never heard her talk like that. “Geri, didn’t you drop out of school, too?”
“Yes, I hated it, but it had nothing to do with communism — I just got pregnant, and I wanted to live on an organic farm and bake bread with my baby on my back.” Geri cracked up at herself. “It’s no secret and no shame; I have no regrets. If I ever go back to school, I’ll be doing it for me.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. Mac and the rest of the IS leadership acted like going to college was the same as turning your back on the whole class struggle; it was like saying you were going to a fiesta while people were starving. I agreed a thousand percent. I was not going to waste the revolution’s time by sitting in a classroom with a bunch of dilettantes who thought they were going to get a degree and be somebody. Whenever someone said that shit to me, I’d come back with, “Instead of being somebody, why don’t you do something for a change.”
Yet here was Geri, acting like it was no big deal one way or the other.
She had one more question for me. “Sue, I didn’t know what to say about this, but can your mom help you out? I don’t even know if you talk to her.”
“My mom?” I acted like it was something you might or might not have, like an extra limb. “Look, I’m baby-sitting and housecleaning my ass off for the bus ticket, and I can work at camp, too — isn’t there something I can do for my room and board?”
Geri called me back the next day and told me that Murray, the International Socialists head pressman, was going to be running the kitchen, and that I would do supper duty with him each night. Excellent. Murray even sent me a postcard, telling me he’d learned to cook in the Navy Brig, and now he was going to share all his special recipes with me.
The Greyhound ticket from L.A. to Detroit, roundtrip, was $172. The problem was that I was making $1 an hour babysitting, and $2 for housecleaning. I had a couple weeks left, and aside from bus fare, I still needed cash for everything else before I left: burritos, books, ice cream.
Danielle, who’d turned me onto my first cleaning jobs, advised me: “Raise your prices.”
“Oh yea
h, right.”
“Whaddya mean? I did.” She slammed her cigar box shut and started tamping down a hand-rolled cigarette. “These assholes can afford it,” she said, licking the paper. “Stop cleaning their dope for free. Stop taking record albums instead of money. Start charging them for blow jobs.”
“Jesus Christ, Dani, I’m not going to charge money for sex!”
“Jesus, Sue,” she mimicked me with an American drawl, “what will you charge money for? Qu’est-ce que tu fais maintenant?”
This was why we couldn’t keep cleaning together — she knew how to clean, but she also knew how to get on my nerves. I knew she didn’t want me to leave, either.
I went to the Dennis’s that night to take care of their twins. I wasn’t having sex with Mr. Dennis or Mrs. Dennis — hah! They were a middle-class Ebony magazine-type family, probably the only people I worked for in the canyon who didn’t have giant spider plants in a macramé baskets, or a shoe box full of Colombian. I couldn’t imagine asking them for more money — they were so nice; and I imagined they moved to this neighborhood so their kids could go to West L.A. schools without being bused for two hours.
My lover Reggie Johnson came over to pick me up from their house at ten thirty. Mr. Dennis took one look at Reggie at the door — Reg’s twelve-inch Afro and black leather coat, versus Mr. Dennis in his suit and tie — and made a terrible face.
I could read his mind: What are you two trying to prove?
“Don’t say anything!” I mouthed to Reggie behind Mr. Dennis’s back.
Mrs. Dennis came to the door, too, with some homemade macaroons. “Do you want some for you and your friend, honey?” she asked, just like a mommy in a TV show.
“Thank you, Mrs. Dennis,” Reggie and I said in a one-two chorus. I was glad Reggie’s mom was kind of like Mrs. Dennis, because at least he had good manners with her.
The next day after school, it was time to clean Dago Armour’s apartment. He was a self-professed filmmaker whom I had never seen leave his apartment except to go to Odie’s Stop ‘N’ Go for more beer. But Dago was very smart and had stories about every single person in Beverly Glen, from the kids working on The Partridge Family to Beatle George Harrison’s secret masseuse.
Dago was always bitching about money, so I wouldn’t sound out-of-place talking about my problems. Maybe he would have a scheme, not for getting money, but rather for how to get out of needing it — he was good at that.
I hadn’t seen Dago make a normal financial transaction in the five months I’d been cleaning for him. He paid me in windowpane acid, or hash, or peyote buttons, which I could always sell to Danielle, who split whatever she got with me.
Danielle had cleaned for him first, but she dumped him because of his no-cash policy. “Besides, he’s fucking nasty,” she told me. “Bastard. He is responsible for Misty’s death, and everyone in this canyon knows it except her fucked-up parents.”
Misty — was she the kid who fell off the cliffs of Schweitzer Canyon last year and everyone said it wasn’t an accident? No one saw it happen. Even my dad, who knew nothing of neighborhood gossip, had read in the paper that a fourteen-year-old girl named Misty Dawson had fallen right off the ridge, and that her dog’s howling in the middle of the night had woken up everyone in Beverly Glen Canyon. Her parents weren’t around; they were in Vegas or something. The ridge she rode up that night was now being carved up and leveled for a monster development project, with a whopping five different floor plans that buyers could choose from. But when Misty was alive, it was like the rest of the canyon: coyotes and sage and desert poppies.
I asked Dago about Misty, and he started crying. “Get me a couple Tuinals, darling, or I’ll never stop,” he said.
“I’m sorry to just be so blunt,” I said. “I didn’t know —”
“No, no, she was the best, the best,” he said. “I want to talk about her all the time, and no one does, goddamn them all!” He sounded like her guardian, not her murderer.
Dago got out some pictures of Misty and him together, standing in front of the corral, where her gelding Sallyboy used to be stabled. Misty was in cutoffs and a handkerchief gingham halter top. A little blond stick figure, with a huge smile and oversize baseball cap. A tomboy. She hugged Dago like he was Santa Claus. He looked about twenty years younger than he did now, but I knew Misty had died when she was only fourteen, before I’d moved in with my dad. Fourteen! I was sixteen, but fourteen years old seemed too young to die and too young to be Dago Armour’s girlfriend. Maybe it was unfair just to draw the line there, but it made me feel weird. When I was fourteen, I was pressing grilled-cheese sandwiches on an ironing board in Edmonton.
Misty did have a grown-up face in the pictures, with all the black eyeliner — her trademark. Her tiny legs disappeared into turquoise moccasins.
“Dago, don’t cry; it’s okay,” I said, getting him a glass of wine for his pills. “I didn’t mean to make you upset. I just don’t understand what happened to her; everyone seemed to love her so much.”
“They did — she was their fucking ringleader,” he shouted. “She and her Sallyboy!”
This was the part I’d heard before, Misty and her pony. Everyone would get together at the corral, get stoned, and play wasted versions of “Mother May I” and “Red Light Green Light.” They would drop acid and change all the colors and steps. Misty was the only one who could get the child actors to laugh. She got some girl from All My Children to show everyone her third nipple, and then she wouldn’t let anyone make fun of it, because she said it was a “gift from God.” Everyone had to play Ouija with the young actress because Misty said her third nipple made her psychic and she could see the future.
Apparently, when Misty was around, everything was different. The uglies became goddesses. Misty was so charismatic that she didn’t have to make herself a deity; she could afford to be generous and give other people a taste of her power.
“You know what happened to her? They fucking killed her! Mum and Dad!” Dago sobbed, with the same accusing tone Danielle had used in talking about him. He starting banging his head on the edge of the coffee table, and it made all his drugs fly into the air.
“Stop it!” If Dago thought I was going to get on my hands and knees to pick up granules of Thai stick and cocaine, he was out of his mind. I’d fucking vacuum it all up and throw it in the trash can.
“I still don’t get it,” I said, “because her parents weren’t even there when she fell, right?”
“Yeah, well, there you go, babe,” Dago said. “They weren’t there; they weren’t ever fucking there, every fucking time, in’nt that the way?” When Dago got mad, his English accent got even thicker.
Enough already. I knew that Misty’s parents were alcoholics and that after she died they sold Sallyboy (“to the glue factory,” Danielle had sobbed). We still played at the old corral, but it wasn’t the same. The Ouija board had been launched into a bonfire.
Dago said he had dropped out of the film he was producing and moved into his current basement apartment where he paid rent in cocaine and charm. The landlady was another former child actress — so pretty — but the kind of woman who needed to hear the compliment ten times a day or she just fell apart.
Dago’s barbiturates were taking effect. He sprawled on his “divan,” as he called it — an orange-and-brown-plaid sofa. It was covered with his tantrum-flinging remains now, but he let his head drop back like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Don’t clean that up, luv. I know it’s all my fault; you don’t mean any harm. You’re such a luv — the most innocent child in this world, such a beauty. Misty would have made you into one of her goddesses.”
I knew what was coming, and I’d rather have vacuumed. It wasn’t like he was a bad lay or anything; in fact, he was like the most experienced man I’d been with — he was at least thirty-something. But I never would have even done it with him in the first place, if I’d known he was such a crybaby. I always felt stupid that I hadn’t noticed
that in the beginning. How were you supposed to tell? Guys seemed so tough on the outside, and then when they came, they would cry and cry.
The first day I showed up to take over Danielle’s usual shift, Dago made me the most incredible Spanish omelet, with potatoes in it, and talked to me about Ingmar Bergman. He said that I must go see Persona that very night at the Nuart with him, and I told him that my dad had taken me to see it the previous week, which impressed him no end. I really didn’t get Persona, but after Dago finished explaining it all to me, I may not have been sure if Bergman was a genius, but I was certain Dago was.
He ate my pussy till I screamed; he made me come like he was just skipping stones. That didn’t make him cry. I’d never seen anything like it. I wondered if it was this fancy with everyone over thirty.
“I am God’s gift to unusual,” he said to me, pinching my cheeks, “and I love you already.”
“I wish high school guys weren’t so uptight, because there are three I know who I wish you could give lessons to,” I told him in earnest, and he roared.
“You are a delight — bring them on, bring them all on!” he said.
Dago offered me a line of cocaine, which did nothing for me but was exquisitely served up in the bowl of a miniature silver spoon. I didn’t wash one dish that afternoon, and he told me to come again in a week, or even sooner if I wanted.
I came over every two weeks out of sheer concern that he was drowning in his own garbage. You never knew if he’d be brilliant, lucid, or unspooling like a frayed cord.
“C’mere luv, let me lick your … cunt.” Dago motioned me over. I hated it when he was too high to handle the longer-syllable words. He was not a pretty picture on his plaid divan. I knew from experience that he could perform sexually no matter what he had ingested, but there was only so much I could stand, even with my eyes closed.
Danielle had once used an expression in front of me: “mercy fuck.” I didn’t ask her what it meant because I knew I was guilty. But now, looking at Dago in his dirty clothes, unshaven, splayed out on his sofa bed and beckoning to me like Bacchus on a hospital gurney, I thought, Well, this is it. A mercy fucking nightmare.
