by Susie Bright
I could not follow her thinking. First of all, marrying some guy whom none of us knew meant breaking up with Nan, her real wife of the past decade, still her best friend, our business partner, the woman whom she relied upon every day. Nan was our rock.
This fellow had a contracting business and piles of money. Plus two “crazy” ex-wives who “didn’t understand him sexually.” Really? I know this is what the sex business is based on, but why do people marry other people whom they are sexually disgusted by? Why do people turn their lives upside down just to have an orgasm in peace, without humiliation? Does it have to cost so much?
The “groom” was offering to dig OOB out of our considerable hole. The magazine never made any money, our lesbian strip show benefits had their ups and downs, and the video money relied on keeping production going, all the time, without a break. Our creative back was being broken, not to mention our credit and grocery bills.
And here, like a well-curried lamb, was a prince who was grateful that Debi let him enjoy a fetish or two in her arms. Welcome to the world of high finance.
I’m sure she was ready for anything. She’d read every business article and every issue of Fortune, and had watched as the flimsiest and most absurd ideas were funded with millions. But we were “girls.” We were “whores.” Making a sex magazine for “lesbians,” whoever they were. When we stopped to look at the numbers, it was dismal.
Nan came over to my desk one morning and hung her head.“We are in dire financial straits. Debi is going off the deep end and my hands are sweating every night.”
Debi’s groom was supposed to be our knight in shining venture capital. But it didn’t feel like good times. Debi hid in her room with her Marlboros and the wallpaper samples for her new Eichler-retro home remodel in Marin County. We needed her to go to press, and her response was, “If someone interrupts my wallpaper decision one more time, I’m shooting them.”
I’d look at Nan, like, “How can we go on?” and she’d shake her head. We couldn’t stop the train.
Debi asked me to be her maid of honor. She was agonizing about our dresses. I hadn’t been to a wedding before; now I felt like I was stuck in the gum of a Bride Magazine special issue.
We were lesbians, for goodness’ sake. We didn’t do this. We were feminists. We counseled “don’t let the state be your pimp.” Who gave a shit about a wedding to a goddamn john? I didn’t say it out loud, but I talked to my own pillow in frank terms.
Aretha wasn’t one year old yet when Debi was planning her wedding. I talked to my little one many nights, to calm her crying. I cranked her mechanical swing after it wound down, every fifteen minutes, and said, “There is a limit to how long this can go on.”
Maybe the O’Farrell Theater was giving Debi a bigger break than she realized. Art Mitchell had become so dangerously drunk and high by 1991 that he was carrying a pistol to all occasions and had just recently fired it at Mayes Oyster House up on Polk Street, a block from the club.
It was a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to be sure. When I was first pregnant, Artie and Jim had hugged me like a favorite niece. Art had told me with great earnestness how he chose each of his children's names and all his hopes and dreams for them. He cried easily. He brought cushions for my sore back and wanted to be reassured that I was going to have the best prenatal care in the city.
Now, he was a terror. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t threaten someone, quite convincingly, with bodily harm. He attacked our dear dancer Tamara on the staircase, called her a whore, and ripped her costume — and that was only her five minutes of his all-day rage.
Within a week, Tamara had made her successful suicide attempt — yes, the same Tamara with the faithless boyfriend. Her “Plan B” had fallen to pieces. She would never get old.
Tamara had been let down by her family, her fiancé, her insane boss — what was going to happen to Debi? None of this had been conceivable a month before.
Debi invited me over for supper, something we always liked to do. I could see how maybe a meat loaf and two bottles of wine might loosen the lumps in our throats. I wanted to talk. But when I’d start, Debi would say, “Oh, you have to see where we’re going to stay in the Russian River this summer.” She’d get out the brochures and photos, talking as if we were taking a retreat from Condé Nast.
If my eyes brimmed with tears, if I tried to say one name, one note of what we’d witnessed over the past months, her mouth would tense. Her jaw flexed back and forth like she was tasting the toad I’d turn into if I uttered One. More. Word.
I knew that warning strike all too well. Oh Debi, please don’t lose it — Come back, come back, wherever you are. I bit my tongue and hoped for one little break, just one little something, that would save us.
The phone rang in the middle of the night on Wednesday, February 27. I was up anyway, with the baby and her tick-tock swing set. I kissed Aretha. “Please don’t tell me another of our girls is in the ER.”
It was a friend, Cherrie, from the O’Farrell. “Susie, Jim’s shot Art.”
“What? What do you mean? You mean Art’s shot Jim? Where are you?”
“No, Jim has shot his brother. Artie’s dead —” Cherrie broke down in sobs.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
The first thing that crossed my mind was, Jim will kill himself now. I did not know, standing there in the dark, how such a thing could have happened. Self-defense? Planned attack? The most fucked-up Okie intervention ever gone awry? At five am I knew only that these two men were Irish twins, and I couldn’t imagine one living without the other.
The fratricide filled every news headline in the morning. Pornography’s wages of sin were expounded upon by every prig in town. One brother killing his other half, his soul mate, was sensational enough — but add “hardcore” to it, and it was as if everyone in the sexual counterculture was on trial.
Reporters called me: “Did you see it coming? Were you pressured? Were you afraid? Did you get high with them, take it up the ass before the guns came out?”
Their questions were crazy because they all assumed that sex had led to violence. Not despair, not religion, not the empty bottle of abandonment. It was the unraveling of a family knot that should have been all too familiar to those who have watched one half of their kin destroy the other and were never able to put it all back together again.
I remembered the look on my mother’s face when she admitted her sister Frannie had died. Her fingers fretted over and over on our kitchen table, like piano keys. She was too afraid to tell me Frannie’s death was by a rope. I could see that old photograph of her sister, torn to pieces then tearfully patched with yellow tape. But the tape didn’t save Frannie. The threats and Band-aids didn’t save Art. It was so late in the game. The casualties just kept coming.
Debi called me at ten am. I didn’t try to hide my crying this time. “I can’t hear you — bad connection,” she said. “I’m calling because you’d better be on time for the fitting.”
“What fitting?” I looked at the receiver like I’d been slapped.
“We are fitting the bridesmaids’ dresses today in Sausalito, as I told you last week three times, and if you can’t pull yourself together — tappity tap tap — I’m just going to have to call my sister in Minneapolis and see if she can do this without being a complete idiot.”
There we were — our revolutionary dreams crushed by prejudice; our friends losing their jobs, their identity, and their lives, strung out, crazy. Comrades whom we thought were immortal were shooting each other, and Debi was going to ream me if I didn’t get a dress zipped up.
I caved in. I moved through her fittings, her wedding, in a trance. Margie didn’t go. She told me, “Don’t go to weddings on boats. You can’t get off a boat.”
Debi left for her honeymoon the day after her bridal party. I took four loads of laundry down the street to the Giant Wash-O-Mat. I was like a baby about to get the natal veil lifted from her eyes.
Maybe it came
from lifting my own infant every day. It was a pleasure to wake with Aretha, to join her in the evenings, but I felt like I was going to crack, like I couldn’t do the fifty hours at OOB and pick Aretha up from childcare downtown and then go home — the two of us — and just maintain. I was so tired. I could cry at the shake of a diaper pail.
I’d sit there, without any dinner for myself, nursing in the rocker, hypnotized by Star Trek: The Next Generation — the high point of my day.
I had one real baby. I could not carry on with another surrogate baby, the magazine. It was too much. OOB was insecure, and Aretha needed … to be secure. It was plain. I remember going to the kitchen one night and deliberately lighting a candle from both ends to take a photo of what I was doing to myself. The metaphor was on target. My fingertips started to singe.
When I Came Back from My Honeymoon
When Debi went on her honeymoon, I could finally think. The OOB workload was still enormous, the bills daunting, my postpartum health shitty — but the great relief of not humoring Bridezilla was a relief. No tiptoeing around, no fragile egg that might turn into a grenade. My lungs filled with air.
I still felt guilty — that I was in thrall with such a beautiful woman, but that I couldn’t stand her requirements any longer. With Debi out of town, I could at least say it out loud. Did she know we were saying goodbye? I still had her little notes to me on my old OOB production binders: “I love you — D.” I couldn’t look at them.
Walking home from the subway one day, I got a slice of almond cake at Dianda’s Italian bakery. I wanted cake and a carton of cold milk — that sticky almond paste, raspberry jam, and milky swallow. It must have had a magic bean inside.
I licked the last of the powdered sugar off my fingers and thought, This reminds me of when my dad picked me up at the airport in Vancouver and everything was going to change. Reality could look very, very different.
I called Nan that night from bed. I said, “You know, this thing of getting up at dawn to get Aretha to childcare and then picking her up after the sun goes down just isn’t working. And I can’t be the ‘part-time’ editor of On Our Backs. The rubber band has snapped.”
“I know, it’s been pretty tough. …” I could hear Nan’s sympathetic cluck.
“I want to find a successor. I want to know that within a year someone else will be doing this — you know, all these dreamers who write us saying they want to be ‘guest editor,’ let’s put one of them behind the wheel.”
“How long have you been thinking this?” Nan asked. She wasn’t chuckling at my joke. “Have you told Debi? I don’t know!”
“I just had this moment when I realized I’ve been wanting to ‘say the unsayable,’ but it seemed like I couldn’t add to the dog pile … and now it’s finally quiet. For a week. I want to tell Debi as soon as she comes back. But I want to tell you now. You’re not crazy; you’re my partner. I feel like I’m bursting. I want to hire a new editor. I want to find someone wonderful.”
“What is Debi going to say?”
“Well, what do you say? … I mean, I have no idea, she’s always the one who says at any moment she could retire and devote herself to ballet. It’s like listening to Zelda Fitzgerald.”
I could hear Nan’s fingers rubbing something. “I just don’t know … I just don’t know.” Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth.
I told Nan not to worry and to let me know as soon as Debi got home and we’d meet up.
I talked to Jon later in bed, the blanket over my head. “Nan’s scared of her — the way I’m always intimidated by her — but we can’t go on like this, with Debi the scariest part of the whole enterprise.”
Later that night, I woke up when Aretha woke up. I looked at her long lashes and blew on them until they shut. She was my True North, and she didn’t even know it. If I just did the right thing for her, then I would end up doing the thing I should have been doing in the first place.
I never got my chance to deliver my Almond Cake Realization to Debi. I didn’t see her the night she flew in. I came home from work, nursed Aretha, and conked out in a coma myself, half dressed. Jon let himself in, after dark, just off his cab-driving shift. I could feel him pulling off my jeans and rolling me over like a jelly doughnut under the flannel sheets. “Humph.” I never opened my eyes.
My door didn’t have a bell; it had a loud brass knocker. People who knew me just rattled their knuckles on the wood. But at three am, bam bam bam went the knocker, like the Devil himself was paying a visit. I stumbled over a squeaky toy; Jon was right behind me.
I opened the door and there was a young man in a suit coat, a blue tie, and purple trousers.
“Are you Susannah Bright?”
Shades of Mrs. MacKenzie and Garneau Junior High. “Yeah?” I said.
“You’ve been served,” he said, chucking a sheaf of papers at me and turning to skip down the stairs.
I looked the document and saw only a few phrases I understood: “Debi Sundahl … on behalf of Blush Entertainment … suing Susannah Bright … fiduciary duty.”
What time was it, exactly? Well, if it was going to be an all-night party, I was going to start waking people up, too.
I called Nan. ‘Debi has just served me with papers … it says you’re suing me. Is this you, too? What the fuck!”
Nan could barely talk. I could hear her hands wringing; it was like a Pontius Pilate sound effect. “She made me tell her; she doesn't understand,” she kept saying. “I’m sure we can work something out.” She sounded worse than me.
I could hear her hands wringing; it was like a Pontius Pilate sound effect. “She made me; she doesn't understand,” she kept saying. “I’m sure we can work something out.” She sounded worse than me.
Debi’s position demanded that I never write again, and that whatever I did do for a living, I would have to pay her 20 percent of my earnings because I had abandoned my “corporate” duties. Given that all three of us had done everything except give blood to On Our Backs for the past seven years, it was hard to imagine what the rhetoric referred to.
The next week was my last one in our editorial offices. Debi took down all my artwork from the office and disappeared with it. My old Mac disappeared from my desk.
On Friday, she confronted me with a box that had arrived in the office mail from the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater with my name on it.
“What is this bullshit?” she asked. “You’re going to open this in front of me, right now.”
I had no idea what it was. In my mind, I was thinking, Something from someone who’s died. It looked like a brick. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t know what she might do.
She tore off the thick cardboard flap. Two small framed photographs fell to the floor, with a note from Jeff at the O’Farrell theater: “Jim thought you would want these.” We’d taken the photos years ago, when On Our Backs was accused by the Anti-Porn-Feminist-Whomever of running a white slavery ring out of the Mitchell Brothers dungeon. I’d been in Artie and Jim’s poolroom one day, opening some hate mail, and I said, “Why don’t we make a parody of this? Let’s do a tableau where I’m some horrified prisoner of your evil empire.” Our staff photographer Jill Posener grabbed her camera. I posed Jim to look as if he was going to putt a golf ball into my vagina as I lay spread-eagled on the floor, in leather fetish wear, while I asked Artie to hold up my head by my ponytail so I could shoot a look of open-mouthed horror into the camera’s eye.
On top of the photo, we wrote a caption in black Sharpie: “Contrary to the rumors!”
Debi stared at the photos she’d dropped on the rug.
“You know what I remember the most about that photo shoot?” I asked. “Artie was worried that he was pulling my hair.”
“Anything that comes into this office belongs to the corporation,” Deb said, and walked into her office and slammed the door. Her wallpaper samples were strewn all over the shipping tables.
I didn’t know what to do next. I wasn’t leaving OOB for
another job. I didn’t have one. Of course, I had the same freelance stuff I’d been doing all along. I was the only one of the three of us who worked outside of OOB to pay my bills. But there was no sudden call to fame; no one had asked me to sell my Rolodex and become a lesbian superstar. There were no lesbian superstars. At that time, Ellen DeGeneres was inconceivable.
My reason for quitting — motherhood — was a truthful reckoning except for one thing, my anxiety about Debi. I didn’t want to work with her, this new apparition. I couldn’t keep “painting the roses red” every day.
Yet for all Debi’s delusions, I could blame only myself — because I never said, “Enough!” There was always some part of me that believed her, that believed we really would run away and become ballerinas, and her husband would pay everyone’s bills, and Steve Jobs was going to be our best friend, and there was big money in being lesbian pornographers, and … I just kept playing through.
If she could have sued me for being a gutless, codependent, naive nail-biter, she would have had ample cause.
I needed a lawyer. Of all people, my male-chauvinist neighbor, Mr. Hera, counseled me. “Anyone can sue you for anything, no matter how preposterous, and if you don’t sue back, they win.” He gave me the name of his lawyer, Ron Murri, who worked in one of those Montgomery Street skyscrapers that I hadn’t seen since I worked as a temp my first year in San Francisco.
I rode the elevator up to the top floor with three men who looked like John Gotti. I was probably leaking milk in my lavender wifebeater. I had never been to an attorney's office before; my only context was television, and Murri’s suite lived up to the celluloid dream. Everything was massive, mahogany; gorgeous quiet women dashed around getting things for talkative men in suits.
My new attorney listened to my tale of woe and handed me a Kleenex box. He was very experienced. As I talked and cried, he looked through my copies of On Our Backs that I’d brought him and burst out laughing. In delight.
I knew that laugh — it was one of the reasons I loved doing On Our Backs … because people who’d never seen it before had their minds blown. I knew that my magazine was the most interesting forty-eight pages of anything in his entire multimillion-dollar office.
