by Susie Bright
I was told ahead of time that I would be formally expelled for “traitorism.” Like Judas. Had I betrayed them all with a kiss? Probably. Everyone had fucked everyone, and now one half was jilting the other.
I had lied to Hugh. I had organized secret meetings to bitch about our wretched decline. I had written letters abroad to sympathetic comrades.
I was accused of joining or leading a cult of personality. Which one? I didn’t know what my personality was anymore. The opposition’s list of complaints and deceits sounded tinny. I hadn’t changed at all except for the innocence bit, which had blown away like dandelion fluff. Did Judas betray in despair; did he kiss in desperation?
I still felt the same way about the world that I did the day I begged Geri and Ambrose to let me join the IS. I noticed they weren’t at this monkey trial.
I wore a tight jean skirt and vest I’d bought with my last check from Byck’s. I was sealed up, nothing flimsy showing. I sat on one side of the room, with “our” crowd, the traitors. I sat on one side of the room, with “our” crowd, the traitors. Michael was the only Red Tider there with me. He was furious, hollowed out.
The little girls from Detroit were crying on the other side of the aisle, all the girls I remembered from Cass, Western, Cooley High. Alicia’s face was puffed up. Hank R. gave her a punishing look, but she couldn’t stop. Baby-faced Marika, who once stayed up at night with me to ask me what a lesbian was, snuck a peek at me. I was waiting for it. She was fourteen, too young for this crap. I mouthed, “I love you,” but Hank jerked her aside.
It was a forbidden to whisper “I love you” in this room. Hugh, at the mic, was entertaining a motion to expel.
I counted heads. Under three hundred people. Less than three hundred people could afford to split in half? Here we go! We’d moved so many mountains, now we would divide a grain of sand. Ronald Reagan had won.
I don’t remember a single word at the mic. Nor did I save the tower of documents that lay in my lap. I dropped them all in a Help Our Vets! wastebin on my way out the door.
Stan’s telegram in my pocket was the one memento I saved.
He sat across the aisle and voted to expel us like the rest of them. He hadn’t returned my letters when I wrote him six months earlier and asked him what he thought was going on. I’d asked him how he felt about the “workerism,” which was turning more surreal every day. I reminded him how we used to make fun of sectarians who pledged to use only “powdered garlic” in their kitchens, because the working class wouldn’t ever use the raw stuff.
Stan was the Indianapolis organizer now; Shari had gotten a tenure track position at a local campus. He hadn’t written me a love letter since my first month in Detroit, and I didn’t expect one now. But I thought maybe a faction fight would persuade him to say a few words to me. Pick me up, Stan; remember who I am. I didn’t hear anything back.
The night before the expulsion, while packing my army trunk in Louisville, I received a delivery from Western Union:
Dear Sue,
You’re a sweet kid. Have a nice life. Men are shit.
Stan
It was yellow, one of those old-fashioned telegrams from Western Union that was supposed to say: “i love you stop am having your baby stop arriving tomorrow stop”
I didn’t know Western Union would let you write “shit.” Stan’s last word. I didn’t recall characterizing men as shit. Was that his old Amazonian wife Marie talking through his memories? Did I remind him of her? Maybe he had gotten us confused.
Stan had taught me how to enjoy a good breakfast; he had read The Economist out loud to me while I curled up in his lap; he’d nursed me and brushed my hair when I was sick. We watched The Treasure of Sierra Madre together, my first time seeing it. I made him a triple-layer cream cake for his thirtieth birthday, embroidered a Dylan lyric on his work shirt, and helped him blow out the candles. No one else was there on his birthday except us. He cried when he took me to the airport. Did I get anything right?
Hugh banged a gavel on the Veterans Hall podium. Michael, all the others, and I stood up in a group. We paraded out of the meeting room with sticks up our asses. I caught a cab to the airport, destination LAX.
My dad had arranged my ticket. He’d called me my last day in Louisville, after Stan’s telegram. I told him I was about to get the boot from the IS, and I didn’t know what to do next.
“You can come home, you know,” he said.
“Really?”
“You could apply to one of the state colleges,” he said.
He said it so quietly. I knew he remembered my vow not to go to university.
“What would I do there?”
“You don’t have to figure that out now; no one else knows what to do, either.”
He loved me so much. Why hadn’t we talked in so long? There was no way I was going to say, I can’t go to college because all those people who just kicked me to the curb will say it just goes to prove that I’m a wanker.
I couldn’t get over it, that my dad wanted to help me. My dad. I’d thought I was surrounded by people who wanted to be with me, help me, share everything we did together. Now we looked like we’d been run over by a six-way split.
I packed up all my stuff; it wasn’t much. I decided I could let go of about fifteen Lenin posters. I liked them, but it was like Vladimir was staring at me, doubting me. I didn’t have any other belongings besides my clothes and books.
When I arrived in Los Angeles, it was a beautiful day, a lovely day in paradise. Bill drove us back to the West Side along Lincoln Boulevard, so I could smell the ocean. I kept holding his arm; letting him drive with only one hand. I remembered the same feeling I had when my mom had shipped me back to California from Canada: I could breathe again. You could always turn to the ocean; you always knew where the sea lay, where the mountains stood.
I had a summer to work in Santa Monica before I started my first semester at Cal State Long Beach. I got a job in a copy shop, printing out parish bulletins, weird amputee pornography, whatever anyone walked in with.
The pressman asked me the first week how I had learned how to run the machines, and I said, “I was a socialist organizer.” He didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t miss his three-martini lunches, either, so he wobbled away.
The only Teamsters I saw were the UPS guys who delivered at three in the afternoon. I had a quickie with one of them, on a Friday when everyone else had left. Afterward, he remarked, “You sure know a lot about my job.” I sure did.
Tracey, my best friend from Uni, from the original Red Tide, came to collect me, and we went to Venice Beach. She was enrolled in the Feminist Women’s Art Studio downtown. She’d shaved her head and looked like a dyke priestess, with jade rings on her fingers. She asked me if I’d heard of the band Castration Squad, and invited me to the Pussycat Theater basement to see them that night. Double bill with the Dils.
Sure, why not. She referred to it as punk rock. I liked that; I felt “punky.”
I put on my Boycott Coors T-shirt, the one with swastikas where the double O’s fell in the brand name.
“Pin razor blades to it,” Tracey said.
“Yeah, right on the nipples,” I said. I started dulling some safety razors from the medicine cabinet. I came out of the bathroom, with the blades swinging from the apex of my shirt.
“You look great,” she said.
I smiled for the first time that night.
“You know, I hate to say ‘I told you so,’” she said.
“Well, go ahead and say it, while I’m armed to the tits.”
She laughed. “Are you ever going to break down and admit the IS was all a big crock?”
“But it wasn’t … I’ll never say that!” I frowned. She sure knew how to wipe the grin off my face. “If that’s what you think, I don’t even know where to begin. I can hardly tell myself what went wrong. But it wasn’t all that way.”
“Well, I can tell you — your leadership was a bunch of male chauvinist bullies �
�� art-hating, self-loathing, egocentric closet cases who could use a good ten years of radical therapy.”
“I wouldn’t waste a psychiatrist’s time.” I took out my pink lipstick and turned to the mirror again.
Tracey wasn’t getting my joke. She grabbed the lipstick out of my hand. “You condemned all of us before you left! You never wrote me! You abandoned all your friends and acted like were all a bunch of nothings, because of what? Because we didn’t industrialize? What the fuck industry are you in now, and what have you got to show for it?”
I pressed the tips of the blades hanging on my T-shirt against my fingers. If I bled a little, I would be able to feel something. But I didn’t. “Tracey, look how it all turned out. You all are thriving. Your art is beautiful. I’ve got a rap sheet and gunpowder burns from fucking Michigan. I’m at your mercy. Are you going to give me another chance?”
“I don’t know.” She was angry now; her eyes were stinging. Was another expulsion coming?
I felt like I’d been saying “I’m sorry” for a million years, a clothesline of apologies that went round and round, dripping wet.
I hated saying it anymore. Flawed, yes, I was — you’d never come to the end of my regret. I was a traitor, a slut, a moving target; I was a wanker, a commie dyke nigger-lover. I still kept Danny’s sixth shell in my jean jacket pocket.
Did she want me to apologize for not joining her milieu? For not staying in high school? For not playing guitar in a punk rock band? What industry was that? I could line my coat with razors, and there’d never be enough “sorry’s” to please everyone.
“Death by a thousand cuts” — that’s what Ambrose said when I asked him, “What happened to us?” When the first 999 nicked us, we didn’t even notice.
I could stand in the shore break at Venice Beach, the tidewater pooling around my ankles, and tell you where I lived. That was real. I could breathe again. That part was good.
But I was cursed by too little faith, and too many kisses, like Judas and the rest of his crowd. I couldn’t begin to tell you what was going to happen next. Maybe a little bit more suffering. What’s one more cut?
I took Tracey’s hand and brought it up to my cheek. “Please don’t get pissed at me for a while. I love you, and I don’t know what else to say right now. I never stopped loving you.”
She grabbed me, and we held each other, the blades pressed flat between our chests.
“Oh, come on, then,” she said. “I like last chances.”
We got in her ’67 Mustang and headed down Sunset Boulevard.
All Along the GirlTower
School Days
I entered college the way some people enter the Witness Protection program. I was supposed to start my “new life,” but I had no idea what that looked like. I was in disguise — I looked like a freckle-faced undergraduate, but I had come out of an underground cell.
I got a campus job pasting up the Cal State Long Beach school newspaper, and it reminded me of my days as a basketball score girl. The merry headlines of The Forty-Niner celebrated sports team wins and a new candy machine at the campus bookshop. Everyone on the editorial staff was serious about being a journalist, but their idea of big-time news was to cover a fire. My take was that you started your own fire, and people covered you. Then you wrote a blistering editorial!
I couldn’t help myself. I did a small story unmasking a fraudulent college job agency (“Students! Earn $1,000 a Day in Your Spare Time!”). When the Ginsu Knives big shot called the paper administrators to complain, I was sent to an ‘appointment’ with a faculty adviser whose Harlequin glasses sported rhinestones that matched the sparkles on her cardigan sweater.
“Susannah,” she said to me. Why is my full name employed only when I am in trouble? “You are endangering your college career.”
“I’m used to all kinds of danger,” I told her. I switched my paste-up hours to the graveyard shift, which seemed to employ the stoner faction — none of them were enrolled in the J-school, but many were moonlighting over at the local daily, the Long Beach Press Telegram.
I decided to give up being practical-minded and just sign up for the classes that caught my whim. The theater department, I discovered, was putting on an alternative works “festival,” and I heard a rumor that there would be a “lesbian collective” script. Before the IS had all but banned the arts from my life, that was the kind of thing The Red Tide used to whip up between classes. We used to have fun.
CSULB had a brand-new Women’s Studies Department. Just walking by their small office in the sociology building, I could tell they were the most radical professors on campus. Their potluck flyers looked like Marxists’.
I thought all you had to do to be part of an “alternative lesbian play” was to show up on time with a labrys around your neck and piles of enthusiasm. I had practically memorized Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle:
Why does everyone have to put you in a box and nail the lid on it? I don’t know what I am — polymorphous and perverse. Shit. I don’t even know if I’m white. I’m me. That’s all I am and all I want to be. Do I have to be something?
I was ready!
But my first day in the actors’ studio, I didn’t see any bare-breasted Amazons. Instead, I met members of a very serious theater department who’d all had formal training. Everyone had to audition to get into the festival. The program director expected us to have a monologue in our back pockets. Many of these young actors were in school only between frantic drives to Hollywood for tryouts. I realized this was the competitive world of the child actors and film colony castoffs I’d known in my father’s old neighborhood. They would all get commercials and soap operas and cop shows — some of them would even end up on Broadway.
I didn’t have a memorized piece of anything in my pockets. I ran back to my Long Beach squat to see if my lefty book crates held any monologues I could memorize in an afternoon. I found a big pile of scripts from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, including “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel” — but no long solo pieces.
Aha! I discovered a paperback, a black drama anthology, which was sort of an “Up Against the Wall Motherfucker” compendium of black theater. There were only a couple pieces for women in it, and one character was an elderly black woman sharecropper contemplating her life. It was five pages, and I could do that before four pm.
Professor Brainen, the festival director, called all the women trying out for the “lesbian collective” onto a small stage. First, we had to “vocalize,” open our vowels and lungs. She led us in a chanting exercise that seemed familiar to everyone except me:
Lolita, light of my life
Fire of my loins
My sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta!
My vowels were disgraceful.
We lined up in alphabetical order to audition. First up was a redhead who did a rendition of feminist poem by Alta, called “i’m frigid when I wear see-thru negligees.”
I didn’t realize we could do something like that.
Someone else did a set piece from Ibsen’s Doll’s House — in costume.
It was my turn. I launched into my version of what seemed to be Miss Jane Pittman’s radical cousin. My gold-rim glasses slipped up and down my nose. I was still dressed like a Maoist bookstore clerk, all in blue. Since I was incapable of any Southern dialect besides imitating the girls at Byck’s Department Store, I spoke in my normal voice, prefacing my recitation by saying that that I knew this piece had nothing to do with dykes, but it was about a strong fed-up woman, and I was dying to do this show.
The group flinched when I said dyke. But wasn’t that why we were all here?
There was complete silence at the end of my five minutes.
“Where did you find this monologue, Miss Bright?” Professor Brainen asked.
“It’s a Leroi Jones anthology, I think,” I said, “a black drama anthology from the sixties.”
“Leroi Jones?” Brainen said, apparently aware of the author’s black nationalist reputation.
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br /> I think that’s when it finally dawned on everyone that my character wasn’t supposed to be a white teenager.
In the locker room, I received a ray of hope. Renata, the first theater major to speak a kind word to me, touched my shoulder and said, “I thought it was alright. Black students have to do white monologues all the time,” she said, referring to her own satchel of books and scripts.
I found out from the well-spoken redhead, Caitlin, that it was gumption that got me into the dyke play, after all. Brainen had taken her aside — Caitlin was the Meryl Streep/Joni Mitchell of our department — and asked her what to do with me.
“Cast her!” Caitlin said. “She has so much energy.”
I was still underage. I had never been part of gay bar life, or the closet side of the L.A. entertainment industry. Everyone I knew who was queer was out of the closet and parading down the street with a sign. After all, the first American homosexual civil rights group, the Mattachine Society, was founded by embittered Communist Party members. I took this for granted. I thought if you were “out,” you were on the Left and spoke your mind. It floored me that most of my new friends in the theater department were gay in their personal lives but didn’t say one public word about it.
Long Beach was thick with drinking clubs of all kinds, including at least a dozen gay bars in the worst parts of town. Some of them were close to the docks and shipyards, like the dives in Wilmington, where you had to know the right code word to get in the door. I made a fake ID on a first-generation color copier we’d just acquired in the Forty-Niner newsroom. Now I could finally get into the finest queer establishments in town.
My first night in a Wilmington club, the Long Beach police department made a raid at midnight. Everyone in the bar ran yelling and tripping for the exits. One minute we were dancing to Robert Palmer’s “Every Kind of People,” and the next, it was chaos, even the DJ leaping out of the booth.
