by Susie Bright
Who was this man? Xena, Temma — none of them looked desperate when they said his name. Their bellies didn’t tremble like mine.
Susie. He called my name over and over.
I pulled all his weight onto me, and he shuddered. The tables turned.
“Are you okay?” I guess that was his big question.
Yeah, I was. Daylight was breaking. He got up to get me another whiskey and a ginger ale. I asked him if I could roll a joint, and he tossed me a baggie from under some Emma Goldman autobiographies on the floor.
“What are you reading her for?” I asked, licking the Zig-Zag.
“I’ve been reading Emma since I was a draft dodger.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. How’d you do it?”
“I wore a dress.”
“Like Phil Ochs?” I threw the sheets off. “Or like a Teamster girlfriend singing “The Draft Dodger Rag”?”
“How can you be old enough to know that song?” he asked.
“I’m not.”
I started it, and he caught up to me on the second line:
Yes, I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I reached out for him with my scabbed-up hand. “I’m not eighteen, but I know a lot of things,” I said. “You underestimated me — I guess I thought you were an asshole, too.”
“Yeah, you got that right,” Stan said, and took a drag. “How old are you?” He exhaled. “No, don’t tell me.”
I wouldn’t. I couldn’t stand to lie apart from him. I was an infant; I wanted him to cradle me and never let my toes touch the ground.
“How can I go off to Detroit and leave without you? Shit!” I said. I straddled his lap and blew a smoke ring. His blue eyes framed right in the center. His cock grew hard again underneath me.
Everyone — everyone but Stan and a couple other comrades — was heading to Michigan for the summer camp. This was the first moment I hadn’t craved going away. I never wanted another day to break.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You gotta go.” He took the joint from me. “There’s not a man alive who’s not an asshole — that’s all you need to know — but you’re gonna be okay.” His hard-on started to soften.
Why’d he have to go and say that? Fuck, Stan. Didn’t he get it? I would have told him I loved him right then, but I knew it wasn’t cool.
Instead, I moved his hand between my legs again, and the wetness shut him up. Feel how I feel. I leaned down to take his mouth in mine and make all the nonsense stop.
Greyhound to Detroit via Amarillo
This was Motown, this was New France
Where the Chippewa did the firedance
That was long ago
This is here and now
But the memory still remains somehow
— Sam Roberts
I prepared for Detroit two ways: like I might be back in two weeks, and like I might settle in for good. Tracey promised that if I didn’t come back, she would ship my neatly-packed boxes to me. I noticed she scrawled, “This is a bad idea” and “Come back baby come back” on my record crates.
I was only taking a rucksack on the Greyhound. It was like hiking with my dad — “take only the bare minimum.” I decided to bring three paperbacks, which Bill and I diligently picked out from my favorite bookstore in Los Angeles, Papa Bach’s.
Papa Bach’s was the heart of beatnik Venice, an ocean poet’s diaspora, even if it was on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. The never-scrubbed floors were laid out like a hoarder’s attic, rat-packed shelves ready to teeter over under their own weight. Stream-of-consciousness ruled the store’s organization, where sections like “Poetry” led to “Madmen,” which led to Charlie Manson’s song lyrics.
My dad made a beeline for some of his friend’s chapbooks on the poetry shelves. “This is a novel,” he said, “but they keep it here anyway,” offering me a copy of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office.
My eyes brightened. “I didn’t know he wrote a novel!” I said, and snatched it out of his hands. “About working in a postal office!”
My dad laughed at me. “Yeah, the big time.”
“I love stories about what it’s like to work somewhere!”
“I know, honey; this is one of the best.”
I asked Bill if there were any good Commie writers I hadn’t read yet in my IS study group.
“Yeah, lots.” He disappeared into the stacks and returned with John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.
“How about a thriller?” he asked. He had found a copy of Day of the Jackal for a dime.
I was set. I made seven peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches. I had granola with chocolate chip cookies. I wore my green Starry Plough T-shirt, weathered hiking boots, and my mother’s old denim sailor’s coat.
The L.A. Greyhound Station was in Skid Row, downtown. It smelled like urine and disinfectant. I left before six am and was so sleepy I fell into the front row behind the driver and didn’t wake up until Barstow, the last of California’s desert before you cross the state line. I was starving, and it was my first chance to look around to see who my traveling posse was for the next three days.
I was the only passenger under sixty. Every row was seniors, people who looked like Oxnard’s finest — no doubt avid George Putnam listeners. Well, no matter, that’s why I brought my books. I had a lot of diary writing I wanted to do, too — but I had to go to the bathroom first.
“Take care now, little lady,” the driver said, when I got up to head to the toilet. “The smoking section’s at the back of the bus.”
It seemed no matter how tough I tried to dress, everyone treated me like an innocent little lamb — I just had that kind of face. I smiled at him. “I can handle the Marlboros!” The real challenge would be inhaling the toilet stall air freshener.
The back row of every Greyhound bus has a bathroom on the left and three seats on the right. In those days, the passengers could open their own windows; hence, the smoking section had a vent.
To my great pleasure, I saw that the two smokers in the aisle so far were young, long-haired, and probably smoking something besides Camels. Hallelujah — I was going to move my seat.
It was a boy and a girl, but they weren’t related. Lizzie, the hippie girl, was as tiny as an elf, traveling with her skateboard, getting off in Albuquerque to face a felony charge of defacing a McDonald’s — she’d sprayed “Barf, Baby, Barf” on their cement walls one prom night and had been on the lam for six months in Los Angeles. Her parents had told her she had to come in before it got a lot worse.
“How bad could it get?” I asked.
“Oh god, don’t ask — but my mom’s a tiger,” she said. We talked so fast I didn’t see half the desert slip by.
The young man propped against the open window was beautiful — like a storybook Jesus with a faint scar on his cheek. “Jesus Meets Chuck Conners in The Rifleman.” But he hardly said a word. He asked to borrow my Day of the Jackal, and looked grateful when I broke out the PBJ sandwiches. I told him I could cut the crusts off for him like my grandma did in Oxnard.
Lizzie and I hugged goodbye in Albuquerque. No new girls got on board. “Jesus” asked me if I wanted to smoke a joint before the driver called us back inside. We walked to the alley behind the station and lit one up. It was quiet next to the trash bins.
“You sure are pretty,” he said.
“Me? You’re the one who’s pretty,” I said. The sun was going down, and when he turned to face the last light from the horizon, his eyes were golden.
We returned to the bus, just the two of us in the back, and I asked him if he wanted something else to eat. He reached up to take a cookie out of my hand, but put it back in my lap, his head hanging down.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s going on?” I tilted his head up with the tips of my fingers, and his lips parted like a child’s. Oh my god. I had to put something there, so I kissed him. A little voice in my head said, This is
not mercy; this will not help, but the bigger voice said, Feed him now, and that’s what won.
He sucked on me for the next ten miles. It felt good, and then it felt sweaty — bad sweat, like it was never going to end. I pushed him off. “I like kissing you, but you gotta tell me what’s wrong.”
He rolled his eyes — the first sign of a sense of humor. “Will you read to me from the Jackal?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. I know what it’s like to work yourself up to saying something difficult. I picked up the book from where he stopped on page four. Could he not read? I didn’t want to ask. I jumped in from where I’d left my bookmark:
Col. Rodin: We are not terrorists, you understand. We are patriots. Our duty is to the soldiers who’ve died fighting in Algeria, and to the three million French citizens who have always lived there.
The Jackal: And so you want to get rid of him.
Jesus put covered my hands with his on the book’s open page. “I’m AWOL,” he said.
“Oh, shit …” I said. “How long, where from?”
Jesus looked around the rest of the seats like he was just noticing that the Ozzie and Harriet brigade surrounded us. He shook his head gravely at me, in a way I recognized from the IS.
“Are you going to keep me on a need-to-know basis?” I asked, trying to get another smile out of him. “I don’t even have a name to call you.”
“My name’s Beau!” he said, like that was one thing he would never deny.
“Well, I thought you were Jesus ’cause you look so sad and beautiful.”
He took my hands in his again and raised them to his lips, kissing them. He slumped to the floor, to his knees, but didn’t let go of me — my god, was he having a heart attack?
“I want to ask you,” he said, haltingly, “I want to ask you … to marry me.”
“What?” I jumped up, snatched my hands out of his, and banged my head against the luggage racks. “You don’t need to marry me; you need a lawyer to keep you out of the brig! I can help you, but you don’t even know me!”
He scrambled back up onto his seat and opened his palms to me, as if to show me a stigmata. “When we get to Amarillo,” he said, “I will buy you a ring, and we can get married. I will get you any ring you want.”
Really? How? By robbing a bank? I hadn’t been planning to explain my trip to anyone on this bus. And maybe laying it out for a crazy AWOL G.I. was the worst way to start. But I thought if I could get him to see how different I was from what he imagined, I could help him out of this mess. God knows what had happened to him at Fort Fuckhead or wherever he’d run from. He needed reality and a warm therapist.
“Beau, you and I haven’t talked long, but you should know I’m not getting married to anyone,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m going to Detroit because I’m a socialist organizer, and we’re having a big summer camp to learn how plan our little revolution better — I’ve been planning on going to this since tenth grade.”
“You can go later, after we get married,” he said, reaching out and cupping my breast in his hand. Just cupping it, not squeezing or anything. The action was like a Valium for him — the furrows in his brow disappeared.
I had to admit, he didn’t flinch about “socialist summer camp.” It was like he hadn’t heard me at all.
I looked at my watch. An hour more until Amarillo. Maybe we could just sit there with him holding my breast and he’d fall asleep and I could ring the bell or whatever and get the hell off this bus.
“I’ll read some more, okay?” I asked. He rested his head on my shoulder and kept that one hand of his in the same spot. Some Blue-Haired Beehive lady came back to go the bathroom and shot us a look like she was going to puke.
Well, be my guest.
“Ama-rillah!” the driver called, gliding us over a bump.
I shook Beau-Jesus awake. “Sweetie,” I said to him, “I gotta go to the ladies’ room real bad, and then we’ll go shopping for my ring, okay; meet me right in front of the ticket counter in five minutes?”
I jumped up ahead of him, before he could even stand up, and barreled down the aisle in front of every aged and disabled passenger, barely catching Beau’s cry, “I love you, baby wife of mine!”
The driver waited for each rider at the bottom of the bus steps. I grabbed his arm and dragged him around to the front grille, where the passengers couldn’t see us. “You’ve got to help me — there’s a crazy man back there who won’t leave me alone. I’m going to hide behind the driver’s side back here and when he gets off you make sure he walks toward the ticket counter — and then I am getting right back on this bus and hiding under someone’s suitcase. Do you hear me?”
He pried my hand off his arm, but he didn’t look confused. “I told you to watch out for the smokers,” he said. He walked back to the front to help a few more old ladies with canes down from the bus.
I crouched down behind the giant front tire on the driver’s side. I could see everyone’s shoes walking away from the bus. Beau-Jesus was the very last pair of boots. I could see him pause as the driver pointed him toward the station’s ladies’ room and the ticket counter. He loped away. What a beautiful creature he was. The driver knocked three times on the steel of the outside door, and I scampered back on board, mouthing, “Thank you.” I collected all my shit from the back seat and hid in the Tropical Jasmine bathroom for twenty minutes. When I came out, we were well on our way to Oklahoma City. I looked like a squished sandwich, and I fell asleep for three hundred miles in aisle seat 2B.
The Aorta
When I met kids my own age in Detroit — and I met hundreds, selling The Red Tide in front of every public high school in the unified school district — I’d tell them, “I just dropped out of school and moved out here from California.”
Their mouths dropped. “You’ve got it all backward!” they’d say. “Are you crazy?” I had their attention.
“You have something here,” I said, “that you will never find in Los Angeles, even if you looked for a million years. Everything is illusion there.”
Detroit was the opposite of L.A. However bruised the city was in 1975, it was still based on making things that made America run. If Chicago had big shoulders, Detroit had steel quads. You pushed the pedal to the metal. You meant what you said, and you said what you meant.
When I walked into the IS national offices on Woodward Avenue, across the street from Henry Ford’s original shuttered factory, it was a classic case of butt-ugly on the outside and beautiful under the skin. The brick edifice of Ford’s plant was abandoned, weeds growing over barbwire fences. This was the place that built the first car my grandpa owned, the first time he didn’t drive a mule train.
I expected Commie Camp would be a great party in the woods, but it would have to compete socially with any weekend night on Livernois and Six Mile. I lived in a brick house in the neighborhood with five other comrades, presided over by a house dad and house mom named Sam and Sheila. They refused my rent money offerings; Sam set me up in a couch that looked like the same model I grew up sleeping on. Sheila made spaghetti carbonara every Thursday night.
Living in a mostly black city meant that, for the first time in my life, there was no racial tension. None. I’d walk down the street and everyone assumed I’d been adopted into an African American family. A biracial family. And I had, in the same fashion of everyone who’d stuck close to old Detroit. Everyone who lived in the town limits was a worker or unemployed; everyone in management had immigrated far out to the suburbs. The segregation took its toll, but the class consciousness was fierce. Of course, the labor unions were corrupt — but people remembered what their grandparents, black and white, had died for. I didn’t have to explain the same things I’d had to explain standing in front of a supermarket on Santa Monica Boulevard, trying to convince a real estate broker’s husband why people who work should have a stake in what they produce.
Detroit families didn’t split apart and move every season like Malibu sandpipers. When I m
et someone new, I’d meet all their cousins, too. The first barbeque we had in Sheila’s backyard, there must’ve been a hundred people there — but Steve P., who’d moved to Detroit from Tacoma, told me, “It’s really just three families.”
We danced every single night until we dropped. Until the pressure dropped. You didn’t go over to someone’s house in Detroit without dancing.
Legal drinking age was eighteen in 1975, which meant you could get a pass if you were seventeen. My first week in town, my comrades took me to the Aorta, a popular bar down on Six Mile Avenue. I danced with every man, woman, and dog. Who cared that summertime in Detroit was humid, gray, and smelly? Cold beer never tasted so good.
I remember this bar girl, Pepsi, who showed me her moves. She did a slow grind, never taking her eyes off mine. Her feet held fast to the floor as her hips pushed against the beat. Her hands and arms clasped together like she was holding a hammer — bringing it down, slicing it up. A Bunny with a weapon. I took my pen out of my shirt pocket to scribble on a bar napkin: “Dear Tracey Baby: Forget L.A.! Ship me my records and everything!” I drew hearts all around the border. I had to remember to mail this.
Pepsi grabbed me by my waist off the barstool: “What’re you writing, Susie Hollywood?” Those saber-wielding hands of hers were as soft as a puppy’s.
I slid off the chair and abandoned my wet postcard.
Commie Camp
Chili liked to say his Ford Econoline was “infallible.” I loved him, but Chili liked to say everything was the opposite of what it really was — that was his humor. He’d coaxed his “baby” all the way out to Detroit from Oakland, and he had the empty Pennzoil cans to prove it.
When Temma told me we were getting a ride back to town from Chili, in his “infallible Ford van,” she didn’t understand why I sunk my head in my camp pillow.
We were sixty miles outside of Detroit, and I was looking forward to heading home after a week of old-school Bolshevik history lessons, sing-alongs, and labor organizing tips. I’d been cooking for two-hundred-plus every night. It’d been a blast, but I wanted to fall onto my couch at Sheila’s and go to sleep for a week.
