by Susie Bright
I don’t think anyone had told me my writing was wonderful save my parents and a couple grade-school teachers. Those had been fairy tales I’d made up. There’d been a gap. My propaganda efforts for The Red Tide were always critiqued for their bourgeois individualism, inappropriate humor, and the lack of a socialist imperative summary. I’d become expert at aping other people’s writing that could get the seal of approval. It was dreary.
Poetry was the one place where originality — my personal lair — was prized. I didn’t feel self-conscious.
I wrote Myrna back with one of my green ink fountain pens.
“I would love to,” I wrote. “I will do anything to help get the first issue out. I know how to do paste-up, sell ads, write copy — anything you need to get it together. You have given me the best laugh in a very long time. Call me.”
I told her that I might be working at the women’s vibrator store on Twenty-second Street, next to the Catholic school and the barbershop. She could probably find me there.
The Feminist Vibrator Store
My job at Good Vibrations was lonely in 1981. Sometimes, I’d have only one customer per day. Even if that customer stayed for an hour or two, I had lots of time to sit there and think about what she had said.
“My husband has died and I will never achieve climax again.”
“The therapist has told me I am sexually dysfunctional and sent me here.”
One little boy darted in and spat at me: “My dad’s in prison, and he has a bigger dick than anything you got in here.”
I could rock our customers’ world with just a little information. One little chat, and they wouldn’t think they needed to rely on someone else for their orgasm. Nor would they remain distraught that an MD had “sentenced ” them to a vibrator store. The kid who taunted me about his dad in prison and ran out the door — I could say something kind to settle him down. Sex education was so powerful because even the smallest effort was enlightening.
I got bored when the store was slow. I read every book on our shelves. It seemed strange that the catalog of decent sex information was so small that one could read it all in a couple of weeks. There was only one book for kids about sex that wasn’t focused on pregnancy and disease. One! There was a single photo book about men and masturbation that didn’t treat it like a juvenile disorder or failure. And all of the contemporary “women-authored” erotica had been penned by Anaïs Nin, circa the twenties. We had Nancy Friday’s sociological surveys of women’s fantasies, but I would advise customers just to read the fantasies, not the pathological critiques of why these women fantasized in the first place. It would have only discouraged them!
We had what my boss Joani Blank called “the try-out room.” The “world famous try-out room!” I called it, although it was really the world’s biggest secret.
It was only a bench adjacent to the bathroom, behind drapes. There were two basic electric vibrators plugged into the wall sitting on the bench’s flowered seat cover. Customers widened their eyes when I suggested giving it a whirl.
“You'll understand after you turn on the vibrator,” I’d say. “You’ll understand in one second, literally.”
You could be wearing fleece-lined snow pants and a parka, but if you brushed the Hitachi Magic Wand to the outside of those snow pants, you’d know whether you liked it or not. For many women, it was the first time they’d experienced what men would call an “instant boner.”
People always ask me if the try-out room was “abused.” It never really got a chance to be during my tenure. Everyone jumped out of there quickly because they couldn’t wait to get their own vibrator home.
The only reason to take an extended interest in the try-out room would’ve been to impress me, and that happened only twice. Each time the customers were friends of the owner.
A cabdriver, David Marshall, who was some kind of sex guru on the side, came in with his girlfriend. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” he said, walking in with his trophy girl. “Lana, show Susie your tattoo!”
Lana was wearing a long gown that split open on the side. She had turquoise eyes and Lady Godiva hair. She released her magic snap and the Greek-style dress fell open, revealing a serpent that crept up from her instep, around her hips and breasts, and up to her neck.
I was their captive audience. I had a gong under the cash register if they became too obnoxious. But they didn’t. I was still interested. I’d never seen anyone with a body-length tattoo before. I didn’t want them to stop.
David heralded the wonders of the try-out room to his mistress. I hoped Lana wouldn’t be disappointed. I mean, it was barely more than a water closet. They disappeared behind the mauve curtains, and their moaning began a moment later. I suppressed my laughter since I figured they could hear me as well as I could hear them.
This is what everyone thought my job was like, eavesdropping on ardent lovers in the back room, everyone dripping in sweat. In fact, this was a once-in-my-career performance.
David and his Serpent Girl popped out of the try-out room and turned to me, flushed, their afterglow aflutter.
I could have crushed them with indifference, but that was just too mean. They had pushed me a bit to be the voyeur, but really, was I unwilling? No. I had a flash of how unusual it was to be in a sexual space where the rules are what you make them. In my previous life, when men had exposed themselves, they always they got the drop on me before I had a chance to respond. This time I was in the lead.
“You look happy!” I fanned at them with my copy of the Chronicle.
“Do you want Lana to show you more?” David asked. She stared down her aquiline nose. Ouch.
In my fantasies, I was beautiful, too, not the stepsister sleeping in the ashes.
“No, I’m good,” I said.
Lana hooked up her toga, and they swept off into their chariot. It was the week of vibrating dangerously.
Another customer walked in, right in their wake, with a honey beehive and sensible pumps.
She spoke up loud and clear, “I have to got to get a Magic Wand; all the other girls at the switchboard have one!” She was an AT&T telephone operator. She didn’t share one furtive glance, one troubled whisper.
I felt the click, the chamber turning. Here was someone who wasn’t claiming to be sick, troubled, widowed, hopeless … just a hip chick who wanted to get what all the other gals were talking about.
She pointed at the stickers on the plastic vibes that said, Do not use on unexplained calf pain.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s just as silly as you think. … It’s a response to a lawsuit from so long ago that even the manufacturers don’t remember. No one uses battery vibes on blood clots, let alone on their calves.”
“No shit!” she said. “Is there such a thing as ‘explainable’ calf pain?”
“That’s a great question!” I wish the novelty factory morons could meet women like her. They didn’t even understand there was such a thing as a woman who bought sex toys. They didn’t get that we wanted toys to be attractive and witty and not like some kind of crutch.
The phone rang. It was Olive Oyl. At least, that’s exactly what she sounded like, Olive Oyl after a pack of cigarettes. She said her name was Dori Seda, a cartoonist, and she wanted to come down with photographer Terry Zweigoff and cartoonist Robert Crumb and some other dame, and tie themselves up in vibrator bondage and shoot a “photo-funny” — like the kind you see in Mexican comic novella.
“Okay, I have to call my boss Joani, and then I’ll call you right back. What’s your number?”
Joani was a reliable iconoclast. “Oh, it’s for Last Gasp,” she said, “the underground comix publishers. Ron Turner’s an old friend of mine.” He was going to be publishing Crumb and Dori’s mad comic, Weirdo.
“Of course,” she said. “Give them my love — and no smoking!”
I told the Weirdo crew to come over when the store closed, so they didn’t scare anyone away. I said, “You know, there’re no curtains in
the windows, so you have to put up with whoever’s walking by. We’re a block from a Catholic church.”
No problem. Dori led her troupe in. She was the only one babbling. I loved her, with her big dark eyes and painted Twiggy eyelashes, as tall and knobby as a popsicle stick. Robert kept his comments to things like, “How exactly is this used?” as he picked up the most unusual object he could find on the shelf and waved it at me. He was already drawing it in his mind. Terry chain-smoked. But I didn’t want to kill the mood.
“Could I be your vibrator bondage choreographer, or something?” I asked. “Because this will take forever if you don’t know the toys.”
“Oh yes!” They were in unison.
Their narrative structure was based on The Perils of Pauline: Two innocent girls are trapped by dirty old men in a vibrator store and must fight to escape!
I did draping and artful slipknots with electrical cords. I picked up the rabbit-fur mitt and stroked the Dori’s cheek with it. “Oh my god, that feels so good.” She sighed against my hand.
“Everything in here feels good, but you have to endure a photo shoot instead.”
Dori told me she woke up at noon and went to bed at dawn, that she lived right around the corner. She invited me to come over and try on rumba panties and draw and drink with her, draw the new feminist revolution comic book together.
“I can’t draw, and I can’t really drink, but I sure would like to visit you.”
I had other customers I fell in love with for other reasons.
One day two nuns walked in. I know that sounds like a bar story. They were women who’d left their order five years previously. They had both been novitiates at the same time, as teenagers, and had fallen in love. They left the convent to be together openly. The two of them dressed as modestly and primly in my vibrator store as any nunnery would’ve required.
They wanted a vibrator and “something for vaginal penetration.” They conferred with each other patiently. They’d been saving up for this purchase the way someone else would be socking it away for a car. I wanted to give them everything for free.
“How long have you been together?” I asked.
The younger one with blue button eyes cocked her head. “Oh, twenty years, right?”
Her lover concurred. They were delighted at the number. “It’s our vibrator anniversary!”
I was single. I had never been with any one person seriously more than, I don’t know, six months. I was friends with many of my exes, and loved them as family. But day in and day out, for twenty years? How did they do it?
“What’s your secret? Why aren’t you grumpy and bored and itchy?” I pulled my hair up into a bun, like Marion the Librarian.
They laughed. The older one — with crow’s-feet around her eyes — said, “I think it’s just because … we love each other, so much.” She slowed her words down, each one followed by a little pause.
I shook my head, not sure if they were teasing me. I guess I had to humor them. Call “Dear Abby,” call the Vatican — we have the answer here: “love.” But I was disappointed. I wished they would really figure it all out and tell me.
The Baby Showers
Debi Sundahl, the co-founder of On Our Backs, threw the first baby shower I ever attended, in 1983. She also invited me to the last one I’d attend, when I got pregnant myself in 1990. I can’t believe our lesbian guerrilla operation was bracketed by babies, but maybe many women’s adventures are like that.
I hadn’t attended feminine rituals like baby showers before. I was twenty-five, and I’d never been to a wedding. My mom didn’t go for that sort of thing — I observed only the sitcom versions. I had no idea what to expect.
Debi’s showers had silly games, pastel wrapping paper, and little plastic baby shoes as party favors. Plus a houseful of strippers, most of them just coming off their shift. They all worked at a peep show called the Lusty Lady, in North Beach.
The timing in ’83 couldn’t have been better. I’d been re-reading that fan letter about my poetry for weeks, the one that Debi’s work wife Myrna had sent me. They did girl/girl sex shows together, a seven-hour shift, and they’d been planning their magazine for months. Myrna said On Our Backs was going to publish its first issue “any minute.”
So many minutes and months had passed by. What was the holdup?
I didn’t have a phone number for either of them, just Myrna’s letter, with an address in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. I walked there from the 33 MUNI bus with a handwritten letter that I planned to slip under the door. The address was on Beulah Street, Beulah and Waller. A pink two-story with a basement window that saw a lot of action, people walking up, filling a short transaction, and walking away — like a pie shop, only with baggies and cash.
I ignored the basement queue and walked up the front stairs to the second-floor flat, stuck my letter in the mail slot. I wanted to knock; I stood there rubbing my cold nose, but I couldn’t do it. Sometimes I’m ready for anything, but this time I wasn’t.
I wrote to Myrna in my letter that I could do most anything involving putting a magazine out. It’s odd to think that at that time, 1983, I really could, because publishing technology hadn’t changed much since Gutenberg. I could ink a press, set the type, write the headlines — whatever you wanted.
My phone rang that night. Debi, Myrna’s partner. Of course I couldn’t see her over the phone, but I can imagine her now, sitting at the kitchen butcher block, chain-smoking, her long nails tapping on the wood, blond afro bobbing and weaving as she punctuated every question with her Marlboro. She was so friendly, but businesslike, like a charismatic Avon Lady setting up a full encampment in your living room.
“Have you ever sold advertising?”
That was the last thing I expected to hear. Advertising? I’d sold communism to Teamsters and high school students … wasn’t that practically the same thing?
I wanted to say yes so badly to anything she asked. “Sure, is that where you’re at right now?”
“That’s it; we have a certain number of preorders, but we need advertisers to meet the printer deposit before Gay Day,” she explained.
The idea was to distribute OOB’s first issue when a million people descended into the San Francisco Civic Center for the June Gay Day bash. We’d make so much money in one afternoon, Debi said, that we could pay the printer the balance in cash and leave a tip. Six hours to make $10K. Doable!
“Lesbians are lined up to purchase your goods and services!” That made me laugh. When did lesbians ever do anything but line up for the bus? But Debi would’ve said treating lesbians like they had money was the whole fucking idea.
“Lesbians have never been treated with respect as consumers; no one’s ever come to our community with anything sexual we want,” Debi said. I heard her take a big breath and exhale through her nose.
When I went out with my dyke friends, we’d walk through the Castro and see all the gay men’s business, a vertical column of fag capitalism. I temped at a Castro Street bookshop — and more than half of the books we sold were titles that have seldom, if ever, been seen in a straight bookstore. Every real estate transaction, every ice cream cup, every T-shirt was in queer vernacular, man to man. Five miles away in the Mission, you’d walk down a littered, dirty street to a feminist bookstore — a sweet academic haven — but as impoverished as a church mouse.
“This is my business plan; we can talk more about it later,” Debi said, tappity-tap-tap. “We’re going to have a baby shower for Goldie this afternoon. Why don’t you come over?”
“Who’s Goldie?”
“She works with me at the Lusty. She’s eight months pregnant — such a sweetheart.”
Goldie was a doll; she was like a Creole Kewpie — brown skin, brass-colored sausage curls, tummy out to here. She sat on a velvet couch of glory. The house was beautiful in the back, off the street. Debi shared the whole place with her lover, Nan — and Myrna. A sunlit Victorian with ferns hanging in the eaves, the smell of pies and chil
i in the kitchen — no sign of a drug man downstairs.
Debi, the tallest, was surrounded by other dancers. It was like being in the locker room of a girls’ varsity team. Their bodies were incredible — all different shapes but so strong, so … conceited. Tight clothes, high heels, muscles. Any of these women could pin me with one hand and do a French manicure with the other.
The question on my lips was, How can you be pregnant and strip? Just as obvious to me was that I couldn't ask anything so stupid without blowing my chances. Goldie was lamenting the day of her maternity leave, her disappointment at leaving the Lusty’s daily schedule: “The money’s soo good, you know, too good!”
I realized that I, too, might pay good money to see Goldie’s naked body with her bump. Had I ever seen a pregnant woman naked, talking to me? I didn’t think so. Most of the customers at Lusty Lady had probably not had that opportunity, either.
One of the other dancers — who’d come in with a waist-length red wig but had taken it off to get comfortable in her crew cut — had a whole rap worked out on the value of alternative sex education at the Lusty. She was a college girl from the Art Institute. “They oughta send the whole UCSF medical faculty down here to talk to Goldie,” Vanessa said, pointing up the hill from Debi’s house to the university campus. “She has schooled these men — they are better papas for it, better men for it. Poorer, but better!” She winked at me, her lashes covered in glitter.
Goldie blushed.
Debi motioned to me to start serving cake. She seemed so experienced at everything. “My son’s having his tenth birthday this week, too,” she said, licking frosting off her fingertip.
Ten? She had a ten-year-old? Where?
“He’s with his father now; it’s his turn!” she said. “I did the single-mom thing from the time Kenny was born, but when I met Nan, I had to turn it around. Everything we were reading, all signs said: ‘California.’ We had to come out here; we’re lesbians. I’m going to bring Kenny out here for the summer, and he’s going to love it.”
