by Susie Bright
“Dago, I have to talk to you about something; it’s not Misty, it’s a real emergency,” I said, determined to get my problem aired before he passed out or got so crabby he started breaking his last few wineglasses.
“Yes, luv, my beautiful dolly, tell me anything, but sit on top of me, will you?”
I couldn’t come while sitting on top, but I could talk that way — I could talk for hours astride anyone; it made me feel very important. I pulled my cutoffs down.
Dago’s cock was clean — why was everything about him so dirty except for his cock? It was the one thing I never felt like laundering.
“Sweet Henry,” he swore, pushing into me. I put some spit on my finger and traced the top of my clit, like he’d shown me — that felt good. I was starting to get the hang of not being so self-conscious.
“Your fucking cunt is fucking tight; you’re fucking killing me, luv,” he moaned. I knew that if I closed my eyes now, and he kept talking to me like that, maybe I could come; if I let myself fall on top of his chest, and pressed my head into the pillow so I couldn’t see his tobacco-stained teeth and his pinprick black pupils, and just listened to that voice and kept thinking how much he wanted me — all my empathy would reach a pitch where I was lost in sensation, not running commentary anymore. That would make me come, as Dago put it, “like a star-spangled fucking rocket.”
My fingers drew the magic diagram on my clit. It was like releasing a valve; everything else got pushed out. If he would only just fuck me — “Just like that,” I breathed — “Yes, luv, just like that,” he repeated back, and his cock pushed me open again. This wasn’t romance, it wasn’t revolution, but it wasn’t playing games, either.
“You’re an angel, my cunt, my tight, sweet angel cunt,” he whispered, never stopping with his cock or his mouth. I followed his cue and pressed down on him with my clit and my sticky fingers and came, just like he said.
I pulled myself off him, the tender ungluing. I was fond of him — but he had to listen.
“I haven’t told you about my Detroit thing.” So much for afterglow.
“You can tell me anything, darling, anything,” Dago said, pulling me back into his lap, sans penetration, and pushing up my top so that he could hold my breasts with his hands.
“My eyes,” he moaned again. “You’re still on the Pill, aren’t you, darling, aren’t you?”
I narrowed my eyes. “No, I’m going to have your love child and sing about it like Diana Ross and have a big hit.”
“That’s what I was hoping, darling, you’re right, you’re always right — I must never, never condescend to you. … Is there any coke left that I haven’t spilled on the floor?”
I got off him and found his little spoon nestled behind one of the bolsters. He smiled at me: Mr. Lucky Strikes. Yuck. He could be so nice, but his teeth, how did he stand it?
“Tell me about Detroit, luv, when are you going?”
I forgot about his teeth and just loved him then, because he said when are you going, not if, or why — and I could have just as soon said “the moon,” and he would have acted the same.
“You have to see a film before you go, you have to, maybe it’s at the library,” he said, getting excited as if he wasn’t persona non grata at the UCLA film department. “It’s called Detroit: I Do Mind Dying.”
For once, I knew what he was talking about.
“How do you know that?!” I asked. “Geri and Ambrose and Michael and Temma, they all say I have to see it, too. It’s a documentary — how do you know about anything like that?”
“There are a few Marxist filmmakers who aren’t idiots, luv.” Dago smirked.
I looked at him harder. He was so stoned, but he could still say things like this. I never heard anyone say words like Marxist unless I was in an eponymous meeting of them. It was like a secret language, a code ring — no one said Marxist unless they were one, but Dago wasn’t anything. He just liked movies and young girls and his coffee table holdings.
“Well, anyway,” I explained, “I have to get there. I’m going to Commie summer camp, and they’re going to let me work in the kitchen for my room and board, but I have to buy my own bus ticket, which I’m still eighty-eighty dollars short on, and I have to eat on the bus, too, and I cannot baby-sit the Dennis’s into bankruptcy in the next month.” Saying it out loud made realize how completely hopeless it was.
“You are such a beautiful doll,” Dago said, and he reached deep into another sofa cushion hidey spot. The divan was like Mother Goose’s skirt. “I’m going to give you a whole book and film list before you go, and you have to come and shag me and tell me all about it when you come back, my little Commie camp cunt angel.”
I reached out for the reading list he’d dug up, but it wasn’t a list in his hand, it was a fistful of twenties. It looked like plenty more than $88. He could have more than paid off his cigarette tab down at Odie’s that he’d been running for the past ten years.
I couldn’t believe it. I burst into tears. “I don’t want you to give me money for fucking you; I never said that!” I felt like Danielle was right next to me, boring her eyes into me. I might tell her everything, but I wasn’t going to tell her this.
Dago dropped the money on the floor and tried to grab me with his skinny arms. He wasn’t weak, but I was already standing, and I could shake him off. Where was the Kleenex? Where were my cutoffs? I ignored whatever he was calling out to me and headed to the bathroom. I was so stupid; I never should have told him.
The bathroom door consisted of a bamboo bead curtain, and half of the beads had fallen off so you could look anyone in the eye while they were taking a dump. I ignored Dago’s gaze when he came to peer in at me.
“Miss Fucking Bolshevik Cunt, I would never dream of paying you to fuck me — it’s my assumption that you do it out of pure fucking joy. Isn’t that right, darling?”
I looked down into my naked lap and sighed.
“Really?” I said, still not looking at him.
“I don’t even pay you to clean this apartment; you are fucking unpayable and a lousy housecleaner and a tight cunt, and if you don’t pick the money up off the floor, I’m going to make you vacuum it up with your pussy lips.”
“You’re disgusting!”
“I’m so glad you noticed. And hurry up, too, because my boyfriend’s coming over, and I don’t want him looking at you and having a heart attack on my divan.”
“Boyfriend” was Dago’s drinking, Truffaut-watching buddy who was some kind of dirty old man by proxy. He wanted to do everything Dago did, but I don’t think he’d been laid in a million years.
“He doesn’t have my looks, angel; that’s what the young girls demand,” Dago said, cackling and lifting his glass. “Here’s to all the angels, and to all the communists!”
“I’ll never forget this, Dago,” I said, grabbing my granny pack and the money and shaking the cocaine dust off of everything. “When I get back, I’ll wash your walls and beat your rugs, I promise.”
“If you do that, the whole neighborhood will be plastered for a week,” he said, and swiped at my thigh as I leaned against the front door to leave.
“You’ve still got my come dripping down your leg,” he said.
“I do not!” I yelped, jumping over his broken porch stair into the garden. “You’re such a sick fuck.” That’s what he would say. I’d never said it before. I hoped he knew I was joking — because after I went to Detroit, I never saw Dago again.
The New Branch Organizer
Michael, Joe, and I were leaving for Detroit, maybe for summer camp, maybe forever, each of us scrambling for money and rides. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles IS branch was being “reorganized” by the Detroit Executive Committee. They figured our youthful Red Tide energy — a.k.a. 24/7 devotion — would be missed. Our newspaper was moving with us; there would be no more Los Angeles Red Tide — instead, the Detroit Unified School District was about to have its collective student body mind blown. Yahoo! I had only two months l
eft till school got out, and I counted the days.
In April, Stan Holmstrom was assigned to Los Angeles from Seattle, to become our new branch organizer. He drove straight from the airport by himself and showed up at one of our Teamster organizer meetings with a six-pack.
Stan wasn’t the family type. There was steely resolve by the IS Executive Committee to send us someone who wouldn’t sing folk songs or make brownies or wipe your nose when it ran.
We got to have someone fresh from Seattle — someone mysterious, single, childless. He told the Teamster comrades that he not only drank beer, he knew how to brew it.
He needed a home, so everyone pitched in to set him up in less than twenty-four hours. Stan’s first gift was The Red Tide’s old white sofa, from Michael’s parents’ garage. Stan took one look at our monster, all eight feet of it, and it was as if every semen, weed, and Top Ramen stain were visible to him, illuminated on its ratty gray-white nap.
Joe said someone should’ve cried. Tracey said someone should’ve cleaned it.
Ambrose said Stan drove out his first day in Lynwood to play pickup basketball games a couple blocks away in Compton. “He picked his location because it’s right off the freeway and a couple blocks from some courts.”
Stan didn’t come on like a ton of bricks. He had a loping gait; he moved like he was always on the court. His hair was shaggy, if not exactly long, and it hung in his eyes. He was tall, taller than anyone else in our group. Michael said he was almost thirty. He dressed in work shirt, blue jeans, leather belt, and sneakers every day. Dressed like a kid, played ball like a kid, but with those sad downward-turning eyes like someone older.
I didn’t know someone so quiet could be a branch organizer. Geri was charismatic, and Ambrose was always chatty. Michael was an orator, Joe would not stop arguing, and the other half of the branch were loquacious UCLA professors. Even young members like me would argue and make speeches at the drop of a card.
Some of the other women, the “girlfriend” members — women who never said a word but were someone’s girlfriend — they were quiet. We’d have these private talks afterward where they’d promise to say something “next time,” but then they never did.
Stan sounded sure of himself when he spoke, but he didn’t offer a lot of explanation or rah-rah. It was just, “This is what we’re going to do.”
The idea was that by having a laser focus, we would reform a moribund and corrupt union. Just saying, “I’m going into Teamsters,” to anybody else on the Left was outrageous. Everyone thought we were joining an organized crime syndicate.
“There is no other left sect in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, because no other group would have them,” Joe said.
“Isn’t Fitzsimmons like Nixon’s lapdog?” I asked. The Teamster’s current president appeared in press photographs with the president all the time.
“Yeah,” said Joe. “Drinking buddies, for sure.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do in Teamsters?” I asked.
Joe pinched my tummy. “You can head up the ladies’ auxiliary, Sue.” He’d made me come with his mouth the night before, and it had just made my head spin. His teeth were white, and he was young like me. Was that love? But I loved everybody in our branch — sleeping with them just made it a little deeper.
Stan gave everyone an assignment at the next branch meeting, except me. I raised my hand: “What can I do?”
“Yeah, right,” he said, not looking up. “You can report here, tomorrow, oh six hundred. You can flyer the Gateway yard with me.”
Gateway: that meant trespassing and chatting up total strangers. I was good at that.
“I don’t get out of school until after three; I could come then —”
Stan scowled. I saw it like a comic bubble over his head: Haven’t we gotten rid of all the bourgie college coeds yet? What a jerk; he didn’t even know who I was.
Geri touched his arm.
“Sue’s still in high school, Stan.”
He shook his hair out of his eyes for a minute and snorted.
Fuck him. My god, he’d been here only a week, and he was sitting on what had been my bed with Joe and Reggie.
“I’ll be here by three,” I said. I wasn’t going to use military time, either.
Temma, another Red Tider who’d dropped out of Uni, passed me in the hall when I got up to use the bathroom. “Oh, he likes you,” she laughed.
“Don’t bullshit me!” I whispered.
“I fucked him last night —”
“What?”
“Yeah, yesterday — he’s okay. You should check him out … his partner, Shari, you know? She’s in Fresno all the time.”
I hooked my arm around belt loops and dragged her into the bathroom with me.
“What partner? Are you kidding? Are you going to do it again?” It was like hearing she’d made a statue come alive.
“He’s practically married to Shari Z. — that’s why he’s down here, because she got an offer to teach women’s studies at Fresno, and she’s going to come visit him when she can on weekends. We don’t have any comrades in Fresno, so —”
I cracked up. “Oh yeah, well, she can build a branch out of the Women’s Studies Department, and they can come make cookies for the Teamster meetings!”
I couldn’t believe Stan was acting like the Original Mr. Worker, and his old lady was a professor. One of the unrepentant ones who wasn’t going to industrialize, apparently.
“His first wife, Marie, she’s famous; she’s the queen of the Wolf Socialist Party, and she’s like the biggest dyke in Seattle. Even the local pigs are afraid of touching her … she’s some kind of wild woman.”
“He was married to her?” God, he was old.
“Yeah, that’s what Geri told me, but I guess she ‘expelled’ him for being a man at some point.” Temma laughed and pushed me off the toilet seat. “It’s my turn.”
Somebody knocked on the door. “Hey, High School, get off the can.”
Temma reached over and pushed in the lock. “Go run the water,” she told me. I turned on both spouts.
“Shari’s going to be at Ambrose and Geri’s tonight, for the potluck,” Temma said. “Come early, ’cause she’s not a night owl. She’s this perfectly nice white academic; she comes up to about Stan’s elbow. Dresses just like him, but in tighter jeans.”
The knocking started up again, warpath-style. I knew Temma would no sooner open the door than surrender at Pearl Harbor, but I had to get out. She’d already lit up a cigarette and opened the window; I opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through.
One of the older women, Xena — a professor’s wife — blocked me, looking outraged. She’d been outraged ever since I fucked someone she’d fucked a hundred years ago. Jesus.
“There’s still someone in there,” I said, like I’d come out of a train station lavatory.
“Someone!” she spat. I shrugged.
Stan appeared behind her. “Hey, take it easy,” he said, and he touched her lower back. She shuddered, then moved up against him, like a kitten that couldn’t help it. He didn’t take his eyes off me.
I walked into the meeting space again with my arms open wide. “I’ll show you a Teamster ladies’ auxiliary, gentlemen,” I said, bowing to everyone huddled on the floor. “Give me some flyers.”
Temma was right about the tight jeans. Shari was petite and curvy. I found myself scrutinizing her body more than I did Stan’s. She was one of those women who make a sacrifice by not wearing a bra, because she was narrow-shouldered, and her tits were full and … pendulous. Every time I said that word, I felt like I was sneaking a peek in Penthouse magazine. I wished my breasts were on the pendulous side. It was sexy. When I told Geri that, she said, “Oh, you’ll get your wish eventually.”
But when? I could be really, really old by then.
Shari had a tiny waist. Her hips flared out, like a Mexican guitar. Short legs, and, due to her strict feminist costume, flat sandals. It was funny, because
sure enough, the UPS women who came to the potluck, including Geri, all wore at least three-inch platforms. So did Temma, who’d permed her hair into an Afro, and had burned herself a dark red-brown at the beach.
I patted the top of her perm to see what it felt like. “You went to the Boardwalk after the meeting.”
“You could have gone, too; the Hare Krishnas fed everybody,” she said, slapping my hand away. “But I guess the ‘ladies auxiliary’ was calling — are any of you holding?”
I tilted my head behind me. “Go ask Joe, or go through his pockets, if you can stand it. He’s the new dope dealer of the 208 Teamster hiring hall.”
Joe was rarely working a shift, but he wore his blue Teamster jacket all the time. He said he was making more money selling weed and speed to drivers than he’d ever made on campus.
I heard someone take Linda Ronstadt — Ambrose’s heartthrob — off the turntable, and Kool and the Gang started up.
I joined some of the girls in the living room, swaying and chanting:
Watermelons, fresh ripe tomatoes, apples and oranges, Idaho potatoes, yeah … Fruitman!
Geri was ladling out chili, and it smelled so good, but I just wanted to dance.
Stan may not have liked high school, but he was lucky The Red Tide was there. He was lucky to see Temma in her high heels, plus all the local girls and all the non-Teamsters, the ex-Panthers and “crazy motherfuckers,” as Joe called them. We knew how to have a good time. It was the only way new people, our “contacts,” would ever give our politics a chance; those awful meetings would kill them first.
Stan wasn’t dancing; I didn’t know where he was. I kept picturing the way Xena shuddered against him. Shari was dancing without him, her arms around Xena’s husband’s shoulders.
Soon, I wanted to lie down, crash in one of the other rooms where there wasn’t any dancing. Ambrose and Geri had a room in the back where they kept a plush leather coffee table. I found it, curled up, and dozed off, until Geri came in and put a blanket over me and tucked a little pillow under my head. It must have been a pillow for the baby. I dozed off again.
