Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright

  “You can’t leave until you train Marguerite on the press, though,” he said, saving me from the impossibility of feigning gratitude. He pointed to some camera-ready copy on the corner of his desk.

  “We need six thousand of these by” — he checked his gold watch — “five o’clock, so let’s get going, eh?”

  He got up to open the door, keys in his hand, ready to lock it behind us. I realized he couldn’t wait for this to be over. Some other lucky cunt must be waiting outside.

  I left the office to go downstairs to the party store for a Baby Ruth, and called Sammy and Sheila’s house from the pay phone. I bet they’d be a little sad to see me go.

  “He believed me!” I shouted into the phone. “I just have to scrub a few more floors with my bare hands, and then I can go!”

  Sammy laughed like a pleased Santa. I could tell he had a drink his hand. “You did alright; I knew you would. See, this is going to work out.” I could hear Sheila yelling in the background that she was going to kiss me all over.

  “Yeah, I’ll come home as soon as I finish these flyers. Tell Michael when you see him that it went through.”

  I had to re-ink the mighty AB Dick printing press a half-dozen times. It took forever to print six thousand back-to-back in red ink: No Contract, No Work. I did feel like a traitor now, the ink stains all over my arms, legs, and face. The first time I had ever turned on the machine, six months ago, Chewy had shown me into the press room, hauled out a mountain of goldenrod 8½" x 14", and said, “Turn straw into gold.” That’s how he left me.

  Sammy and Sheila couldn’t say enough about Louisville when I got home. They were living vicariously through my imminent escape.

  “The handsomest men in this whole organization are in Louisville,” Sheila said with authority. She was so good-looking herself, with her titian hair, you had to take her at her word. “If it wasn’t for Sammy, I’d be on a train myself.”

  I’d seen the comrades she was talking about at an anti-apartheid conference the previous March, and it was true. All of the Louisville comrades, women and men, were better-looking than average. Maybe they just slept at night.

  I’d been entertained in Louisville one weekend. Jimmy J. and Cary R. had taken me to Churchill Downs, not when the horses were running, but on a slow day, to admire the place.

  They took me to the Winner’s Circle and put a wreath of roses around my neck. We all posed for a picture, the two of them on either side of me, their arms encircling my waist. Jimmy had been an English teacher before he started driving trucks for Rykoff. Cary was a photojournalist, an old ballplayer from the minor leagues, and he posed me in front of his granddaddy’s Oldsmobile. I never stopped laughing except to put some barbeque in my mouth. It was a beautiful day.

  I told Sheila about our day at the races. “See, I told you so!” she said, petting my hair. She was one of the only ones I could talk to about a day off, who wouldn’t look at me like, What do you mean, you fiddled while Detroit burned? She knew I needed a pleasant memory to pack my bags and move somewhere where I really didn’t know anyone at all.

  Sheila snuggled with me under her satin quilt, along with a week’s worth of papers she was determined to catch up on. She admitted to me that I was not likely to sleep in a bed of roses every night at my new destination. It might be hard.

  Louisville was in the national news all the time in 1975. Sheila read a story aloud from the Times, saying how nine out of ten white families had pulled their daughters out of high school because they didn’t want them going to school with blacks.

  She looked at me, apologetically, and whispered, “The only white people in Louisville defending busing are communists.”

  Well, great, I’d fit right in then. I wasn’t nearly as fetching as Sheila, but I had no fear. I was not afraid of anyplace that I could run away to.

  The Perfume Counter

  My first order of business in Louisville was to find a job. I rented a cheap carriage house apartment in St. James Court, where I subsisted on one can of tuna per day.

  As before in Detroit, no local comrade could help me find work because they were already known to their employers as “communists” and “nigger-lovers.” I turned in my applications as a complete stranger. My references were two thousand miles away: Would you like to call them?

  No one did. My appearance was deceiving.

  The first position I found, I discovered in the Courier Journal classifieds. It was for a stock clerk at the largest department store in town, Byck’s. It reminded me of the old I. Magnin’s in San Francisco. They featured a glove counter. Perfume tables filled the foyer with aroma. The most expensive ladies’ garments were on the third level, where I was also interviewed by Miss Dreycall, the store manager.

  She gave me a written exam, of a type I hadn’t seen since junior high. It asked the meanings and contexts of words like ancillary and infrequent. There were some arithmetic questions, and a story problem about a squirrel that went to a party. I had to squirm instead of giggle because Miss Dreycall was sitting ten feet away from me.

  The test had nothing to do with fashion. I’d hoped she would ask me, “Who is your favorite designer?” or “How do you make a Dior Rose?” As long as it was impossible for me to industrialize, I might as well enjoy my other interests. No one ever asked those kinds of questions in the IS.

  Or maybe no one asked because of the way I looked those days — not exactly a Dior Rose. White, but no debutante. I appeared before Miss Dreycall in an acrylic striped sweater and denim skirt; ribbed, pilled tights; and scuffed Mary Janes.

  Miss Dreycall had me sit in front of her at a tiny desk with a built-in chair, like a Catholic schoolgirl, while she graded my paper.

  “You seem to be quite intelligent,” she said, peering over her glasses. I wished she would tell Hugh that.

  “Are you planning to attend college in the future?” That sounded like a trick question.

  “Yes, ma’am, but I need to work right now.”

  “You will be assisting Miss Love, our couture buyer. She will require your courtesy and attention at all times — she needs a smart girl.”

  Miss Love! With special sauce, I hoped.

  I was put to work in a back room, filling out inventory cards with a group of five other young women, each of whom lived either with her father or her husband. You didn’t need to know a thing to do this job, except how to count to twenty.

  All the girls who lived with their parents were engaged, except Shelley, who was “almost engaged,” and in a panic about her ring. Shannon, the youngest, was engaged at sixteen, and she had been pulled from high school when busing started.

  “Well, my father put his foot down!” she explained, as everyone else nodded. Of course. “I don’t know any girls who haven’t left,” she added. More vigorous agreement.

  I went to an IS meeting that night and asked Katrina, a local girl, to spell it out for me. “Does that mean that their fathers are afraid they’ll have a black boyfriend or something?”

  “That’s not the way they’d put it,” she said. They’d say, “No nigger is going to rape my little girl.”

  “Oh, c’mon!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So if someone’s dad doesn’t pull his daughter out, that means he wants her to get raped?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s end of public schools as far as they’re concerned.”

  “But this girl I work with didn’t even get through tenth grade!”

  “Neither did you,” Katrina said, and poked me in the side. She had graduated with honors from Oberlin. All these Phi Beta Kappa Teamsters.

  “That’s different. I went to Pinko U. instead.”

  It was hard to be ringless at Byck’s. I’ve never had so much attention paid to my bare hands. I got asked if I had a boyfriend, and I stuttered. They must have thought I was either frigid or a prostitute. Of course, I was a Yankee, and Yankee girls don’t have anyone looking after them, which is why they are frigid. Whores.


  I could not say to them, “I’m having sex with the branch organizer and the head of the Teamster caucus after our meetings — sometimes with the two of them together — but it’s not serious.”

  I could not say, “You should really go to the West End clubs sometime and see what it’s like not getting raped and having a ball instead.”

  It was funny to me that they thought “not-white” men were so sexually aggressive — paralyzingly attractive. As if they weren’t just men. No, they thought a black guy just looks at a white girl, and her legs fly open. A pulp novel: She screams, but no words come out. She is caught on the flypaper of his cock; it’s inescapable. She’s ruined afterward, unsatisfied by anything else, unwanted by her own kind.

  What a fantasy. Tell it to your vibrator.

  Here you are, I’d think to myself, in imaginary arguments with my co-workers, with a grade-school education and nothing to look forward to after your wedding except an endless line of Tupperware products and racist legends.

  The Byck’s girls never said anything about the appeal of their men, not even that they were cute. What was appealing was getting out of their mothers’ kitchens into one of their own. Plus, those diamonds on their fingers.

  I ate my Baby Ruths alone at lunch, uninvited to showers and shopping sprees. They talked around me, as if I was a potted plant.

  The day Miss Dreycall hired Byck’s first black employee, it was like a bomb went off. The young woman was immaculate, of course. On her first day, she wore white gloves with a mustard-colored melton coat. Her hair looked like a ’do from a 1965 Ebony magazine. Her name was Belinda Matthews. She did not use contractions when she spoke.

  No one else spoke at all. The stockroom went from a henhouse to a Christian Science reading room. Deirdre had tears in her eyes because her desk was right next to Belinda’s. She kept her coffee cup on the farthest corner.

  In the cloakroom after hours, I heard Deidre whisper to our veteran inventory clerk, Peggy. “I haven’t told my father ’cause I need the money for the wedding — but if he finds out, I’ll have to quit. And I just don’t know if I can take it.”

  Belinda was terribly proper. Her posture made the rest of us look like degenerates. I could not share anything with her — my only success in her presence was to be unfailingly polite.

  “Would you like the creamer, Miss Matthews?” I’d ask at the coffee table.

  “No, thank you, Miss Bright,” she’d reply. She never took anything offered from my hands. And no one else offered her anything at all.

  The day she was fired, two weeks later, I was called into Miss Dreycall’s office again. I wondered if she was going to try to explain Belinda’s disappearance. I was livid. I had fourteen bags of ugly sequined prom dresses on my desk that I couldn’t care less about. What the fuck did they think they were doing with their pathetic little affirmative action program? Go ahead, give the Yankee a reasonable excuse. Maybe Dreycall understood that, because I was so “intelligent,” this would upset me and I needed to know why it hadn’t worked out.

  Miss D. asked me to sit down in the schoolgirl chair, and then she stood up. My god, was it really that bad?

  “It pains me to tell you this, Miss Bright,” she said, “but we must pay utmost attention to the personal hygiene of our staff.”

  Belinda was fired for hygiene? But she was like a bar of Ivory soap!

  “You must bathe and use deodorant every day before you come to work,” Miss Dreycall continued. “Miss Love is very upset.”

  Me? I felt the chair turn into a wasp hive under my bottom. My face and chest flushed as red as the roses on Dreycall’s desk. Worst of all, the acrylic sweater under my arms seemed to turn, in one instant, to liquid stink — I could feel the cloud of it overcome me. I smelled so bad I couldn’t move.

  “I realize you are above-average in IQ,” Miss Dreycall said, and sniffed. “But there is no position at Byck’s that does not demand personal hygiene as the first priority. Do you understand me?”

  I tried to open my mouth.

  “This is your warning, and there will be no other,” she continued.

  I thought of the labor meeting I had to get to after work, where we would discuss the telephone contract, and the coalition of black and white workers who were holding together by a slender thread, despite the busing issue. They were trying to keep their maternity leave and overtime hours — but all I wanted was a shower. “Gee, I’m sorry, comrades, but at my job, I’m going to get canned because I smell bad.”

  I went to the cloakroom by myself and got my navy peacoat. I buried my head in its dark lining and took a deep breath. It smelled like damp wool. The crisp snowflakes from early morning had all melted. I sobbed into the felt.

  Someone touched me softly on the back. I didn’t want to know who it was. I was never going to take this coat off my head.

  “Miss Bright...” It was Peggy. “Don’t cry … Miss Love can be very, very demanding.”

  Peggy had been married two months before. Her diamond was yellow, one carat, and she had the honeymoon special package from Tupperware. “Why was Belinda fired?” I asked, still not coming out of my peacoat shell.

  “Belinda! What?” Peggy pulled her hand away. “Well, she was stealing.”

  That did it. I pulled my head out, stared right at her, and wiped my snot on my arm. Why not.

  “Oh yeah?” I snorted. “Is that what Miss Love says?”

  Peggy took a step back. “No, that’s what we all say,” she said, and turned on her ivory patent-leather flats. “All of us.”

  Expulsion

  The day that Luke, the Louisville branch daddy, took back his shotgun back from me was the day before everyone drove to Cincinnati for the special “expulsion” convention.

  The IS was having another faction fight. I’d heard about faction fights in history books, among Bolsheviks, and here I was in the center of one myself. The last one in the IS had been in the early seventies when I was in eighth grade, innocent in Edmonton.

  A special convention was being called to throw the dissidents out. That would include me. There really wasn’t any suspense; Hugh Fallon had the majority votes in his pocket. So why were we even going?

  I knew there were big “principles” at stake, but it seemed to me another sort of worm had turned. Working-class solidarity had become a fetish game: wonderful people were being kicked out like dead wood. There wasn’t a vision; there were only snitches and bullies.

  A couple years later, I discovered that this very same Luke, Mr. Louisville Autoworker, Our Beloved Branch Leader, was on the payroll of the FBI, infiltrating the IS to plea-bargain down a drug arrest.

  In 1979, he drunk-dialed his old IS girlfriend from a rehab center, to sob out the whole soggy mess. He’d been busted selling coke again.

  No wonder Luke had been so eager to lend me his gun. I guess he hoped I’d do something exciting with it, to impress his G-men friends.

  But in 1976, I only knew that Luke was on the majority team of a faction fight, a minor captain in our Lord of the Flies reenactment.

  The day I’d arrived in Louisville six months before, I had no reputation to speak of. But now it was mud. Every Klan member in town knew where I lived. When I was at Byck’s one day, they broke into my apartment, left dead rats on the toilet and in my bedsheets, and a little white supremacy note tacked to the mirror above the headboards: “Niger-Loving Communist Cunt.” I guess they dropped out of spelling class, too.

  Luke came on the Tuesday before the expulsion convention to get his firearm. He knocked at the door, at the bottom of the stairs, and when I ran down, he could hear my thump, thump, thump on the narrow steps.

  I probably sounded a little heavier carrying a shotgun. It was still cold, and he was standing outside, hidden behind my glass and wood-frame door, which was covered in a glaze of ice. When I opened the door, I saw his forehead was covered in sweat and his long blond hair was matted. Good lord, he was really worried I might blow him to kingdom com
e.

  I had to suppress fit of nervous giggles. Before he said a word, I handed him the shotgun and reached into my bathrobe pocket to cup the shells in my hand. I offered them to him like chocolates, five of them. Luke’s face relaxed when he realized I’d removed all the ammo. Such a little guy, really. He didn’t ask for the sixth shell. I imagine he couldn’t think that straight.

  It’s odd what I remember about being expelled. I remember the white Indian elephant earrings I chose for the occasion, the denim I wore, and a telegram that I got from Stan. Yes, Stan Holmstrom. He was back with Shari; Hugh had relocated them to Indianapolis. Stan couldn’t look me in the eye in Cincinnati, but I bet he watched my ass walk out the door.

  Lots of people couldn’t look me in the eye in Cincinnati. I had thought of them as friends for life, as family, but I realized I didn’t know anything about anybody further back than two years. Who were these people, before the IS? I had no idea. But I’d taken a bullet for them.

  Expulsion was the end of all that.

  We’d dodged gunfire and been put in handcuffs, stood up in court together and been told we were ‘menaces to society.’ Each of us had a FBI file three inches thick with every other word blacked out for ‘reasons of national security’.

  Now we would cross the street and not say hello.

  I remember asking my mom once if she would say hello to her own father if she ever saw him in a crowd, and she shook her head no. She meant it. I didn’t know if I could be as hard as her.

  I thought about the guy who’d rung up my books at Papa Bach’s the day before I left California for Detroit on the Greyhound. He told me he’d gotten thrown out of a Trotskyist sect in 1969. Now he was a yoga guru. Was that how bad it could get? You got expelled and put on leotards?

  I liked my Indian elephant earrings because they reminded me of living with my dad. Home. Where was that, now?

  “E is for elephants. E is for expulsion.” The IS faithful gathered in the Cincinnati Veterans Hall — you always had to wonder who these patriots thought they were renting to. There were American flags hanging over a piano in the corner. Half the IS national leadership were wearing flags on their jackets, too, to better appeal to the “regular” Teamster. A couple hundred people were about to expel a couple hundred other people.