by Susie Bright
It took Ron a while to realize the state of our assets. Minus zero. The cash flow: nonexistent. Everything was based on potential. Our second distributor had just gone out of business, writing off five figures in debt to us. We hadn’t paid the rent in months, and the printer was holding our film hostage. I was one less mouth to feed. I would never get back the money I had put into the business. I didn’t care; I just didn’t want this psychotic tin can attached to my tail for the rest of my life. Never write again? No way.
Debi had sent a message through her lawyer that perhaps my writing “fiction” would be allowed — with attendant extortion, of course. I had no idea she thought of me as such a cash cow. I certainly hadn’t done anything to warrant it.
Ron moved the tissue box off the desk between us and folded his hands on the table. “Ms. Bright, I’m going to take care of this for you.”
“I haven’t even asked you what this is going to cost. I just have to —”
“No, not at all. I am going to take care of this, myself. Don’t think another thing about it.”
“But what —”
He just shook his head and waved his hand at me, as if a small child had tried to pick up a bar tab. “It’s going to be fine. Forget about it.”
“How can you be so sure?” I wanted to believe him so badly. But that was what had gotten me into trouble with Debi in the first place.
“I will tell you why,” Mr. Murri said, glancing at his watch and then looking straight into my eyes. “Because one day your adversary will have a bigger problem than you — and when that day comes, she won’t be able to get rid of you fast enough.”
It was time to do the laundry again. I had five loads and a giant bag of quarters that I was going to let Aretha play with while I cleaned every last rag. It was a foggy day in the Mission, and I was walking around the corner for a candy bar when I ran into Spain Rodriguez, my neighbor and Zap Comix cartoonist friend from down the block.
“Hey, baby,” he said, giving me a big hug. He didn’t know about On Our Backs. He had some flyers in his hand. “Do you know anyone who wants to swap pads and live in southern France for a few months?”
I had to burst out laughing. “Yeah, me! I don’t have a job anymore, and I don’t know what I’m doing next.”
I called Spain’s French American friend, Maureen, who was part of a minuscule American expat community in France that consisted of retirees from COYOTE, the first prostitutes’ rights organization, and other Zap artists like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. It turned out that Maureen knew Honey Lee from waitressing, back in the day. Now she needed a house swap so she could care for her American parents and finish a novel. Her home in Languedoc was part of a tenth-century stone fort, alone among miles and miles of farmland and vineyards. I felt a little guilty that all she got in exchange was my freeway-adjacent cottage across the street from a 24-hour gas station.
Maureen’s fort was quiet for an American like me with a little baby. On those rare occasions when I met people who spoke English, I knew they must’ve hailed from North Beach in the sixties.
I worked on a book. I charmed my neighbors with “pancakes” and my little angel, Aretha. I’d draw coal up from the “cave” under the fort to heat a stove every night, and the Mistral blew through and chilled the fort’s stone walls until they were like blocks of ice. Eventually, I got pneumonia. The French midwives in our village came to my bed and gave me shots in the butt. I got better. If there was ever a case of the “kindness of strangers” … I was deeply grateful to the many new friends I made. Little Romper grew up fast. I loved her so much.
One day, I got a long-distance phone call from my attorney’s exquisite assistant in San Francisco. “They’re settling today. Ron just went to court to sign the papers; you’re all done,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“Ms. Sundahl is apparently in Marin County Jail booked on assault charges.”
I faxed a friend, Sukie, who sold red-haired bud to Debi’s dear husband back in their courtship days. Debi never touched the stuff.
Sukie faxed me back: “OMG! Yeah, he cheated on her, all the time … and when she found out, she beat the living shit out of him. I heard her mother is driving from Minnesota to come get her and take her home.”
Take Debi home? It had been so long since I had thought of her Minnesota origins. What had happened to her son, whom she had spoken of the first day we met? He must be a teenager now. Where was he? She loved him so much.
I rocked Aretha and watched a Star Trek rerun. My phone machine rang but I didn’t pick it up. I could hear the cassette tape taking the message: “Yeah, Susie, this is Gina’s girlfriend. Listen, I don’t know what you heard, but Debi and her old man got in a big fight, he left the house but he came back and found her in the pool about to slit her wrists with razors and he took her to Marin General and they put her in the psych ward and wouldn't let her out until someone took responsibility for her; then her Mom — .”
The tape cut off.
There was no dress for it, no fitting end. I could see Debi’s mother, her car wheels spinning on the highway, cigarettes in her purse, taking her curly-haired woman-child away from all of this, back to where she came from, back to all that deep snow — and something else, something I’d never figure out.
Santa Cruz
Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon.
— H. P. Lovecraft
When I came back to the States, I got an interesting offer. My old faculty adviser from UC Santa Cruz, Carter Wilson, called me and said, “We’re so proud of you. The Community Studies Department wants to know if you’d like to come teach a class, for summer session. What would you like to do?”
Wow. I thought about it. I loved the road show I’d been touring, “How to Read a Dirty Movie”, which was inspired by Vito Russo’s Celluloid Closet. I decided I’d love to do an extended version of erotic forensics.
“Ten weeks is a session, right?” I asked. “I want to do something like … ‘The Politics of Sexual Representation.’ Yeah! I don’t want to use cheap code words anymore, like ‘erotic’ or ‘pornographic.’ I want to make students figure out what we’re really saying when we look at sex.”
Carter loved the idea. The department loved it. I called Jon and started talking up Santa Cruz in glowing terms. “I was bored silly when I was an undergrad there,” I told him, “because I didn’t want to jump in the waves or hug a tree; I just wanted to run to another all-night meeting in San Francisco.”
Jon laughed and I could hear him flop down on his bed. “Yeah, I bet you can’t wait to get your arms around a tree now.
What mother of a four-year-old wouldn’t agree? I didn’t want to stay up late anymore; I wanted to sit in the sun and watch Aretha chase seagulls. I could write a syllabus for a class I’d always dreamed of while I basked in the sun.
Jon and I started packing. We decided to live together for real, no more keeping barely separate households. We kept whispering to each other: “It’s ten degrees warmer down there.” I could feel the sun on my shoulders already.
Two days before the moving trucks came, I got another phone call from Carter.
“Susie, something awful has happened. The dean of our division, Murray Sabre, has just written the department a memo, saying” — I could hear Carter shuffling papers — “‘Susie Bright will only teach at the University of California over my dead body.’”
What did the dean of the Social Sciences Division have against me? I recalled he was an antiwar leftie back in the day, the kind of guy I had met a million times in the IS. Was he just like Kitty and Andrea, a leftie George Putnam, enraged by “the dirtiest thing” he could imagine my presenting in a classroom? Would I perhaps hold up a picture of “a woman’s private parts”?
I couldn’t bear to tell Jon or any of my San Francisco friends. The moving-van wheels were in motion. We’d already broken our backs carrying a 1905 upri
ght piano down two flights of stairs. We had to go forward.
I drove down to Santa Cruz on my own, along the scenic coastline of Highway 1, always a meditation in California enchantment. Dark blue waves, deep ravines, wildflowers everywhere, rocky cliffs like castles. My dad knew the history of every Indian creek and mountain name from here to the coast of Mexico.
It’s a road made for singing, and I was belting out “Always True to You in My Fashion,” when an enormous tan buck jumped in front of me just north of La Honda Road. I saw the white of his deer eye; he saw the white of mine. I hit the brakes hard, and everything in the van came crashing toward my head. Don’t swerve, don’t swerve — that’s what they always tell you — take the beast head-on.
The buck, floating in the air, came down, glanced off the right side of my bumper, and kept bounding. He was alive! I was alive! The front seat was buried under every fragment of loose belongings we’d stuffed in the back. My head was wet, I hoped with sweat.
No one was behind me — the luckiest bit of enchantment yet. I put my foot back on the gas, accelerated to twenty, twenty-five, thirty miles per hour. Maybe that was the way to do it, slow and easy, count each artichoke in the fields as I passed.
When I got to the Santa Cruz apartment we were subletting, there was a crayon note on the door, from one of the assistants in the Community Studies Department:
Sad News/Glad News! Murray S. has had a heart attack and will NOT be returning to campus anytime soon. Class is ON. See you next Monday — bring everything.
Aretha came running out of the apartment with Jon, who’d arrived earlier in a separate truck. She had a red plastic bottle of soap bubbles in her hands, shouting, “Look at this, Mommy. Look!” She blew a bubble the size of my head. A pair of lungs to be proud of.
It really was ten degrees warmer in Santa Cruz. I looked up at Jon. “You would not believe what happened on the way down here — twice. You’re going to forget all about carrying that piano.”
“Even the water’s softer here,” he said, holding up a pile of sheets. “And there’s a surfboard in the garage.”
“Do you have to drive back the city tonight?” I asked. I felt like I could sit on this stoop for a while, maybe until “Porno 101” began on Monday.
A white goose, don’t ask me from where, waddled across the front lawn ten feet in front of me. Every animal familiar was greeting me. I was Saint Francis, and they were all paying me a little hello.
“Yeah, I’m working tonight,” he said, standing in a flurry of Aretha’s bubble making. “I’ll drive back tomorrow. And then —”
“Yes, then!” I said, opening my arms wide to the sky for a mountain lion appearance, a bear, some coyote scat.
Jon said, “Yes, then, I think, we can start the rest of our lives.”
One of Aretha’s iridescent soap bubbles floated toward my face. I stuck my finger in it. The surface tension was just strong enough that it went all the way around my finger and never popped.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the following family, friends, and colleagues who contributed so much to this book with their insight, memories, and support: Kim Anno, Jon Bailiff, Larry Blood, Larry Bradshaw, Aretha Bright, Phyllis Christopher, Honey Lee Cottrell, Greta Christina, Greg Day, John Everett, Donna Galassi, Ariel Gore, Judy Grahn, Andy Griffin and Julia Wiley, Rebecca Hall, Steve Harsin, Nan Kinney, Michael Letwin and the Letwin family, Joel Levine, Jessica Lockhart, Chris Mark, Lise Menn and family, Caitlin Morgan, Mariette Pathy Allan, Jill Posener, Shar Rednour, Nora Reichard, Gayle Rubin, Cory Silverberg, Jane Slaughter, Brooke Warner, Barbara Winslow, Jill Wolfson, and my agents Jo-Lynne Worley and Joanie Shoemaker.
Notes
The Red Tide and On Our Backs, respectively, were significant publications with hundreds of people involved over many years, dozens of whom were my close friends and colleagues.
For my narrative purposes, I have changed the names of many people who never became public figures. I also made composite characters out of individuals who each deserve their own special edition. Time was greatly compressed in this story, and snapshots have been taken of long campaigns. I hope many of the figures I remember from these years will add their own memoirs and biographies to our history.
The histories of The Red Tide, and On Our Backs are not well documented.
For research purposes, the best place to look at The Red Tide is an Internet archive of all the back issues and relevant documents, which Michael Letwin has curated.
For On Our Backs, there are university libraries, such as Brown University, that have a complete collection of back issues. There is the book Nothing But the Girl, the photographic homage to OOB photographers edited by Jill Posener and myself. Jill’s and my notes and audiotape interviews with all the OOB photographers are archived at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. Debi Sundahl and Nan Kinney’s video company, Fatale Video, made several erotic videos in the eighties and nineties that document the On Our Backs heyday, including live documentaries of the first lesbian burlesque shows.
Photo Credits
Unless otherwise noted, photos are by author and her family.
Title Page: Susie, “Waiting for Aretha,” 1990. Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell.
Baby Teeth: Susie and her father, Bill Bright. Berkeley, CA, 1960.
India: Susie’s parents, Bill and Elizabeth. Lal Bagh, Bangalore, India, 1956. Photo by Satyanarayana Rao.
The Irish Side: Susie’s mother, Elizabeth Halloran, the eldest daughter, and her siblings. St. Paul, MN. 1935.
Way Out West: Susie’s grandfather, Oliver Bright, Oxnard, CA, 1958.
D – I – V – O – R – C – E: Susie’s parents, Bill and Elizabeth, during his army tour. Florence, Italy, 1953.
Runs Through It: Elizabeth Bright’s fingertips in photocopier, self-portrait. Minneapolis. MN, 1990.
Bleeding: Susie’s First Communion. Walnut Creek, CA. 1965.
The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said: Girl Scout. Sierra Madre, CA, 1968.
The Bunny Trip: Cover of University High School Warrior newspaper. Los Angeles, CA 1973. Jane Fonda and Senator Robert Dornan both came on campus to speak “for” and “against” the war in Vietnam. The Red Tide invited Fonda, the school administration countered with Dornan.
The Churning Mist: Red Tide graffiti, University High School, Los Angeles, CA, 1970. Photo by Joel Levine.
Swim Banquet: The Red Tide “List of Demands.” University High School, Los Angeles, CA, 1973.
George Putnam’s Show: Susie and Michael Letwin speaking to press at L.A. Board of Education at a rally to “Protest Police Sweeps, Get Cops Off Campus.” Los Angeles, CA, December 11, 1974. Photo by Joel Levine.
Sex Education: Susie and Danielle on first acid trip, “Cal Jam 1” rock concert. Ontario, CA, 1974.
You Are Now a Cadre: Susie at Nixon Impeachment demonstration. MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, CA, 1974. Photo by Joel Levine.
Patty Hearst: Bullet-hole at the scene of the LAPD SWAT squad shootout with the Symbionese Liberation Army in Compton, CA. The surrounding quiet working class neighborhood was turned into a battle zone. The Red Tide covered the story from the neighbors’ point of view. Photo by Joel Levine.
Dago Armour’s Apartment: Misty’s corral, the informal gathering place for Beverly Glen teenagers in the early 1970s, Los Angeles, CA.
New Branch Organizer: Red Tide-inspired Graffiti, “Don’t Fergit to S.C.O.R.E.,” (Student Crazies Rapidly Organizing Everywhere), University High School, Los Angeles, CA, 1971. Photo by Joel Levine.
The Master Freight Agreement: Tattered flag, Lynwood, CA, 1975.
Greyhound to Detroit via Amarillo: Susie asleep on bus to Delano, CA, 1974. Photo by Joel Levine.
The Aorta: Red Tide march to support the innocence and release of Angola State Prison’s seventeen-year-old inmate, Gary Tyler, who was sentenced to life under controversial circumstances after a white boy was shot at a Klan anti-busing demonstration in Louisiana. Tyler is st
ill serving his sentence today. Detroit, MI, 1975.
Commie Camp: Susie at work in IS newspaper production office. Detroit, MI, 1975.
Relocation: Taking a spin in John Everett’s Grand-dad’s car, Louisville, KY, 1976. Photo by John Everett.
The Perfume Counter: Susie on “joy ride,” Louisville, KY, 1976. Photo by John Everett.
Expulsion: Susie the night before I.S. expulsion convention, at Christina Bergmark’s apartment, Louisville, KY, 1976. Photo by John Everett.
School Days: Susie her junior year, University of California at Santa Cruz. 1979.
How I Got Introduced to On Our Backs: Susie posing with labyris and “Castration Squad” t-shirt, On Our Backs office. San Francisco, CA, 1986. Photo by Jill Posener.
The Feminist Vibrator Store: Susie at National Leather Association Conference. Seattle, WA, 1985. Photo by Cookie Hunt.
Baby Showers: Laurie “Raven” Parker and Mary “Cassie” Gottschalk, modeling for On Our Backs. San Francisco, CA, 1985. They were both legendary strippers at the O’Farrell Theater who decided to start a “women-client-only” escort business. Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell.
Models Crying: Susie in front of graffiti at Van Ness Boulevard and 15th Street. San Francisco, CA, 1984. Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell.
Les Belles Dames Sans Merci: Susie and Caitlin Morgan in promotional still from their play “Knife Paper Scissors.” San Francisco, CA, 1983. Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell.
The Daddies: Susie, Scott Worley, and Tede Matthews in front of the Castro Theater during the gay film festival; San Francisco, CA, 1983. Photo by Greg Day.
Motherhood: Aretha and Susie. San Francisco, CA, 1991. Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell.
Rotation: Jon Bailiff and Susie. San Francisco Art Institute, CA, 1993. Photo by Jill Posener.
