by Shaw Sander
By sixteen, there was nothing to stop me from hitch-hiking to California to try to find Cora.
I asked farmers if I could sleep in their barns at night. Once one of the farm wives brought me a hot plate of meat and potatoes.
“What is it?” I’d asked politely and she said she’d tell me when I was done. Turned out to be moose. Kind of chewy but really just like pot roast. I appreciated her hospitality and deflected her worried looks by moving on before they awoke next day.
Culverts and bridges provided night protection from the elements and my down sleeping bag kept me toasty. I never let my Bowie knife leave my hand when I was sleeping. I prayed to the Universe for my safety. Nothing and no one ever touched me.
The Bowie knife I was sure to show everyone as a precursor to the ride. Strapped to my belt, it kept everyone on the up-and-up. Truckers, VW microbuses full of hippies, suburban mothers wanting to help, businessmen with evasive intentions all gave me rides and ended up laying money on me as I’d hop out, thanking them for the ride. By the time I hit Berkeley I had made over two hundred dollars simply by being a charming conversationalist. In the end, they’d all wished me well, pushing their addresses and phone numbers into my hand. They shared sandwiches, coffee, cigarettes, weed, clothing and one guy gave me a collapsing camping cup, a treasure of concentric rings I’d never before seen.
In a red phone booth in Berkeley I inserted a dime and put my trembling finger into the circular dial’s little holes. A man answered on the fourth ring and said there was no Cora there, they’d moved a long time ago, he didn’t know where.
“How old are you?” he’d asked warily, as tears clouded my throat.
“Seventeen,” I was able to squeak, not sure why he wanted to know. Lying felt like the smart thing. I was on the defensive.
“Well, we’re Sunshine,” he’d told me. “You’re welcome to crash here.”
“Is he ‘black’ enough for you?”
Malcolm stretched both arms across the back of the wooden booth, swirling his toothpick on the side of his mouth.
I put my fork down, cocked my head and smiled. He didn’t have to explain it.
“Oh, he could go all DMX on somebody if he had to. Simon’s great in bed. He’s a black Marine from Oakland, baby. I don’t have to tell you how black that is.”
Malcolm rubbed his fingers together.
“And,” he said slyly, “is he ‘white’ enough?”
“Yup. That, too. Plenty of mainstream culture in the man. Simon’s a brainiac, kinda nerdy, very endearing. He says really goofy stuff for a six-foot-some black man, like ‘Super deal!’ and ‘Oopsie-daisy!’ He religiously watches ‘Battlestar Gallactica.’ He won’t dance, he can’t play basketball, and he knows all the words to every fluffy song on the easy listening station. He likes James Taylor. He joined the Marines to truly help change the world, not in a naïve way like the commercials but in a genuine, heart-felt humanitarian way and to show kids coming up that you didn’t have to be an asshole to be an officer. This from a guy who grew up, like you, at the height of the Panthers Black Power movement on their home turf. So yeah, he’s ‘white’ and black enough. Thanks for knowing him so we could meet.”
“Can’t have me, so you pick my old friend from back in the day?”
“No, Malcolm, you sexy man, you and I had fun but this man is steady as hell. You are like expensive candy. He is everyday sunshine at the breakfast table. And besides, as you so strongly pointed out to me years ago, you are not available. We passed that point, you and I. Move on. Or are you jealous that your old buddy and I are getting along so well?”
“Of course I’m jealous! Remember what Mix said: ‘Jealousy is every man’s weakness,’ and he’s right. I’m an alpha dog, baby, so naturally I don’t want anyone else having you. You mine, baby, marked territory. That’s the way men see shit, don’t matter what they say.”
“I had a guy on route say something just like that last week,” I remembered. “One of my customers. One guy in the office made some reference to asking me out, and the office manager stepped in and said, ‘Hey, I saw her taking off her sweater in her truck the other day. She’s mine.’”
Malcolm burst out laughing.
“See? Like the stripper making eye contact so the men think it’s all about them. He saw you take off that FedEx sweater over your head and he claimed you, man. In his head, it was already a done deal.”
“You men are really fucked up. You look at a woman so somehow she is yours?”
“Thas’ right. And I’ll bet since the office manager was the one who claimed you first, the other guy slunk away, right? The manager out-ranked him.”
“He did! That’s exactly what happened. Weird.”
“Nothing strange about it. Men follow their dicks, baby.”
Chapter Seven
The Sunshine family I’d crashed with was kind but I was a burden, I was sure. They were attempting their own re-structure in the demise of our common bond and didn’t need a Pony minor complicating things.
I took the amazing new underwater BART to San Francisco, heading for City Lights Book Store, sure the famed landmark’s air itself would pulsate with knowledge and direction that I’d receive by osmosis. Just walking into the book store itself would change everything for me, I knew, as I’d entered the hallowed place with my knapsack and little down sleeping bag rolled on top.
I’d been right. The books spoke.
I wanted to be a writer.
Everything about them made my newborn mind latch on to their nipple. I spent a few hours curled up in a circular chair in the back, glowing with purpose, waiting for the next sign, when a man spoke softly.
“Hey, sweet thing,” came his velvet voice from the book stacks.
An enormous, dazzling black man emerged, a black beret on top his tight afro, reflective sunglasses darkening his eyes. He stood wide-legged, his hands in the pockets of his black leather jacket. I stared, breathless, amazed at the Cosmos for putting exactly the right sign in front of me. The delicious apparition raised one eyebrow and spoke again.
“Wanna make some bread?”
LeRoi was a high-ranking Black Panther, busy returning power to the people by offing the pig and upping the revolution. He also had a high-paying side job moving kilos of cocaine and could afford to hide a white mistress in a studio off Jones and Eddy. White women made his dick hard but my skin color for him, politically, was something of a liability, needing subterfuge for satisfaction.
We struck a deal.
I took the apartment and spread my legs for LeRoi on demand, getting cash and a place to live with peace and quiet most of the time, free to pursue my new goal of writing. I needed a place to practice my craft off the street, something solid that would stick around for a while.
It seemed less like prostitution and more like an ideal situation to me. My every need was provided for. I got excellent, wild sex many times a week and then he’d leave me alone to create. I was doing my part to further the revolution and he was happy as hell I kept quiet and out of the way.
We were never seen in public together.
Despite having his own private prostitution elite, he had a Panther sense of fairness and equity that kept things balanced. Once LeRoi heard of my Sunshine past, he suggested gently that I could make serious money servicing his friends in kinky sexual trains. Every safety precaution would be taken, he assured me, and they would all pay handsomely for the privilege of secretly fucking white pussy.
Wide-eyed and learning as I went, I actually enjoyed the work. Bonus: my fuck-able naiveté alone got me hundreds in the bank.
It seemed so easy to me, getting paid to fuck gorgeous men in their very prime, my wrists held tight while they spread my pussy and pressed deep into me. None of them would dare hurt me knowing LeRoi would slit their throats if I whispered one word of difficulty.
The women’s movement had spread to the Panthers and LeRoi had been the first to side with the ladies, my working for him always m
y choice, my power. He told me I could opt out anytime I wanted to be free but worshipped me for my detachment, sex separate from emotion.
After the men would leave he would run me a hot bath, rub my back and feet, tell me how gorgeous I was, what an incredible woman, how he wanted to marry me and give me children, we’d move away to the country.
I knew he could never reconcile marrying an ofay with his political stance.
“Let’s wait on that part,” I’d smile into his long-lashed brown eyes as we would cuddle on the waterbed. “I want to see the world.”
But I didn’t, really.
I just wanted to find Cora.
LeRoi died at the business end of a gun.
I was devastated and had to leave the apartment in a hot hurry. The Panthers were infiltrated, charged with federal offenses and dissolved. Asian gang wars broke out in the Tenderloin. I wasn’t really safe alone. I had no money or skills, save for prostitution, which looked mighty unappealing without LeRoi as a buffer. I had no clues to find Cora and now no money or place to crash.
I caught a Greyhound for Vegas, not knowing what else to do. On my 21st birthday, I bet everything I’d saved working for LeRoi and woke up next day with twenty bucks to my name.
What could I do? I went home.
Back in Chicago, I knuckled down with my birth family, now in a four-bedroom in Rogers Park. I was put on the sun porch in the front of the brownstone and cried for ten days straight.
Joey brought me chamomile tea and rubbed my back in silence. Faustino and my mother listened to my raving disconnect, telling me it would all ease down in time, that time takes time. Summer and Rain amused me with stories about the alternative college they attended.
Ray-Ray came by with Chinese food, his apartment in Wrigleyville off Addison twenty minutes away on the Howard L. He told me about His N’ Hers, the gay bar under the L tracks owned by a cigarette-voiced wise crone who told him about the old days, when police raids and ruined careers shadowed gay life. Ray-Ray had discovered Halsted Street’s Boys Town and felt comfortable there.
I raved and ranted about Black Panthers, diamond bracelets, my quiet room, the multi-colored pillows I’d sewn to re-create the Fawn Camp. Everything I’d made was gone. Everything I owned was in three bags at my feet.
Someone produced a thirty-pound black Royal Manual, leaving it outside the bedroom’s French doors. A bottle of White-Out and a scarlet-ribbon-wrapped ream of crisp new paper glowed white next to the machine.
A desk space was immediately cleared of my knapsack and spare change, everything swept to the floor to make way for this perfect new machine. I pushed the clothes off the room’s chair, dragging it to the newly created office.
Shiny keys each cupped to perfectly fit my fingers. Holding the smile-shaped edge of the hole on top I lifted the typewriter’s metal lid to see curved metal prongs topped with upper and lower-case backwards letters. The smell of the horizontally striped red-and-black ribbon hit my serotonin receptors, making me high with hope.
I stopped crying and began to write.
I was 25 when Cora walked into The Heartland Café on the arm of a brooding, protective butch.
My heart double-filled with a lifetime’s joy then burst the next moment. The partner clearly wasn’t gonna let me anywhere near her Cora.
“Cora?” I whispered, leaning into her shoulder as I walked past her table, drawn without thinking, my need more urgent than anything before or since.
“Annalee!” she yelped, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms around me.
This increased the dark-haired butch’s scowl and forever sealed me as her enemy. Cora did not introduce me.
“When can I see you?” I howled, meaning, of course, alone, and at this the butch got to her feet.
“Cor, let’s go,” she demanded, hands on hips, legs wide apart, ready for a gunfight at the Not-Okay Corral.
I didn’t have room for this kind of energy in my life. I wasn’t a fighter but my need to see Cora was greater than anything alive.
“Edgewater 4-4291,” I whispered quickly as I kissed her cheek goodbye, heart pounding up into my throat. I then kissed her other cheek, repeating the number of my place on Castlewood in her other ear. I made a mental note to never leave home ever again in case she called.
Cora held me at arm’s length as if drinking me in with her eyes, blinking a lot. I wondered if there was a hint of something else---domestic violence, maybe? Was she signaling something to me I couldn’t read? Cora leaned forward and hugged me close, whispering “Mohawk3-9110. Sherry’s gone until suppertime. I love you.”
I’d tried to rescue Cora but I used a little too much force. I wanted her free so badly I planned a middle-of-the-night escape, ready to take her to California, Madagasgar, wherever she wanted, just away from there. It took months of furtive phone calls to convince her it was the right thing, then more months to plan the getaway to the Left Coast.
The night of our rendezvous, Sherry came home unexpectedly early.
Words got hot, fists connected.
The cops got involved. There was blood evidence. Polaroids were taken of the bruises, the black eyes.
Cora chose to bail out the assailant, who had beaten her. Sherry threatened me with a knife and began a campaign of terror, repeatedly flattening my tires, stealing my license plates, calling and hanging up a hundred times a day and stalking me.
I finally took out a restraining order against Sherry. I didn’t need more signs from the Universe. I gave Cora and the situation up for lost.
The next week I met Joe and a year later I was a mother.
Amanda had been my Pony-sister, one of the few with whom I’d managed to keep in touch. Her family had settled in Chicago, too, after the Ziller zenith and they had done their best to maintain relations with as many Sunshine as they could. Their door was always open, the coffee percolator always popping, hoping for company.
When Amanda had married, she and her husband had stayed in loose touch with me, sending solstice cards, party invitations, birth announcements from people I knew. I stayed more connected to Amanda than my own family. Chicago was a big town and my family moved a lot. They drifted away.
But if Amanda hadn’t been a resource, Dew would have ended up at Cook County Psych Ward after a rough bout with the Chicago police, kept in custody longer because of the holiday weekend.
The Universe had protected my child through my unusual tribal connection, something others could not experience. I had to do something tangible to give back in my own world, just between me and the Spirit.
I built a temporary altar in my living room, placing a photograph of a double rainbow over Maui at the apex. Photos of Amanda and one of Ziller and Fernfeather were off to one side, a picture of Dew, Peanut and me on the other. Burning black boysenberry incense beneath Birds of Paradise and humanely-harvested peacock feathers in tall blue vases, I knelt on a purple silk cushion in silence, grateful to be alive and given so many gifts.
I wanted to Universe to know.
Drake’s recovery was slow and painstaking. The facial stitches healed but itched unbearably. If Drake scratched at them, they would scar. The broken bones weren’t setting as fast as the doctor liked and talk of metal pins for stability began to surface in the doctor’s vocabulary. Drake didn’t have disability and his savings were getting depleted just trying to take time to heal. The anxiety in his voice rose higher every time we talked.
“I’m going to end up under a bridge!” he would wail and I’d spend a few minutes talking him out of such a scenario. Things will shift, I’d say, everything will be fine, you’ll see.
“The sun will come out tomorrow…” I sang into the phone, doing my best Annie.
“Easy for you to say. You’re healthy and well employed.”
“Easy?” I snorted. I was pissed white hot in a second. “I have just lived through the evisceration of my child’s entire brain and you think my life’s easy?” .
“Back off, Bob-a-Lou-ie. D
on’t be a Quickdraw McGraw. We are on the same side here,” Drake tut-tut-ed.
“Sorry. I’ll take it down a notch. Dew’s been gone a few days now, back in Chicago for school but I haven’t quite recovered.”
“You will eventually, darling. Mothers always do. They smile through it all, weeping inside, remember?”
“I’m no martyr.”
“No, you’re not. That’s my job. Hello? Back to me, please.”
“Back to you, then. Where were we? You can come live with me and I’ll take care of you forever, a lap robe thrown over your useless legs, Fluffy and Tiger joining you in your wheelchair while I ply you with goodies to keep you alive.”
“I can be ‘Heidi’!”
“With braids sticking out in a U-shape on either side of your head like Pippy Longstocking.”
“I’ll have little petticoats and pantaloons under my Swiss skirt and all the boys in nothing but leather lederhosen will carry me up to the top of the mountain where after an afternoon orgy I’ll miraculously walk again.”
“Sounds like you’re going to be okay.”
“Thanks to you, Grandfather, and the Swiss air. It’s a miracle!”
“Seriously, when do you get your casts off?”
“In six more weeks. They’re being cautious. The wrist isn’t healing at all and the leg has two spots that still don’t look good in the X-rays. I’m on my second cast with the arm and we’re trying to avoid inserting pins in the leg.”
“Wanna go see a movie or something?”
“I’m so sick of movies. It’s all I can do in this fucking little apartment.”
“Suggest something.”
With Drake there was usually an agenda. He was a master at steering the conversation where he wanted it to go. It was easier to just cut to the chase and let him direct.
