by Marge Piercy
Felice and I became involved in 1967 in the first feminist organization either of us had ever heard of, a group of SDS activists who met regularly, somewhere between a women’s caucus and a consciousness-raising group. We discussed our lives, politics, male chauvinism in and out of SDS and wrote little position papers. We did some actions I no longer remember. They merge for me into later WITCH actions (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and those launched by the Women’s Center. But this group was important to me because we met as women to talk about women’s issues. Our group was not greeted with enthusiasm by the men we knew, but we needed one another, desperately. It was the first time I had ever talked with other women politically about being a woman, and although it was tepid in its actions compared to the women’s groups I would be joining soon, it broke ground.
In August I met one of the leaders in the regional SDS office, who was already in an open relationship with Felice. By October we were in love, and finally I had some emotional and sexual counter to Robert’s adventures. Of course, with any political man, there is always another agenda. I had experience organizing off campus. Hardly anyone else did, and that was what he was interested in. He wanted me to work with him and gradually pried me out of NACLA and into the SDS regional to do just that. We worked together for the next year and a half and were lovers for that long. Both involvements blew up at the same time in 1969. I called him Goss. He had hair as black as mine and eyes as dark. He was lithe rather than muscular, sensual, charismatic and accustomed to charming women. He began relationships easily but tended to let them lapse. Ours was his only other involvement besides Felice that endured so long. I probably cared more for him than he for me. He was moody, as changeable as Felice—sometimes sunny and able to throw himself thoroughly into cooking, feasting, lovemaking, playing—other times lost in a maze of Marxist jargon and academic quibbles, sometimes in dark hateful moods when sourness leaked from every pore, sometimes willing to sacrifice anyone to his political goals. He was a natural leader but was not always as responsible in that role as he should have been. He would push less experienced recruits into situations beyond their capabilities or understanding—acting as spokesman, leading a demonstration—and they would get burned, would fail and feel guilty.
I can still remember my intense feelings climbing the rickety, dirty stairs on East Twelfth Street to their small tenement apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen, simmering with passion, anxiety, hope, fear—a seething kettle of emotions. Sometimes everything was good and we were a strong trusting family united by our ideals, our practice, our caring for one another. Sometimes he was evasive, sometimes she was, sometimes I felt deluded, manipulated, used. Sometimes we fought and it hurt; sometimes silence was between us, among us like a judgmental fourth person. Sometimes we just clicked into perfect synchronicity. I can remember Goss bopping around the kitchen making what he called “brown eggs” with burnt butter poured over them. I can remember Felice and me with our arms around each other sitting on the floor at meetings, nursing our bruises from one demonstration or another, speaking as one joined mind and body. Whatever it was and was not, it was real, powerful, often satisfying. For the next seven years I would seek to recapture that tight sense of being one organism together and would put up with many rough passages in an attempt to do so.
Once I had one additional relationship, I found it easy to start others, less serious and less demanding. At one time, I was involved with five people, but I found that exhausting and changed several of them back into friends. My first extramarital involvement was the most committed, and as long as it lasted, it was sometimes my major emotional relationship. I truly loved him and we shared more of our lives than I was sharing with Robert. My relationship with Felice also turned sexual at this time, but the first thing she said to me when we disentangled our limbs was, Don’t tell anyone. That made me feel rotten. The sexual component did not last because she was too ambivalent. She became involved with Robert instead. She wanted me to desire her more than to make love to her. Elements of power and manipulation were involved. I felt almost as if she were counting coup. If she knew I was interested in someone, like Popov, she would immediately flirt heavily with them and have a quick affair. I became increasingly aware of that pattern. I did not care for her less, but I felt warier. Her relationship with Robert was hot and heavy for several months, during which Robert paid her rent (and Goss’s): money he made playing poker with a group of well-off men. Again, Robert liked to share, to help. He really cared for Felice. Then abruptly she broke it off. He was desolate.
At that time, he was interested in group sex. I tried it with him twice, but I did not like it. I could not reach orgasm that way, and it felt weirdly mechanical and performance oriented. There seemed little intimacy in the tangle of bodies. After the second time, I would not do it.
The main advantage for me of an open relationship lay in how other people related to me, politically, personally, in friendship or in a sexual way: I simply was not a married lady in the eyes of the men and women I met, and that was a great advantage in working with people then. Married people were a little mistrusted, for they were considered conventional, perhaps bourgeois—the curse word of the time—certainly less committed, less open, less available. Everybody’s private life was considered fodder for discussion. If we were closer to one another than I am to anyone except Ira now, we were also nosy and judgmental. All decisions—the way you dressed, the way you spent money, how much money you had to spend, what you ate and drank and smoked, how you behaved in every conceivable situation—everything was the stuff of group discussion, of sessions in which everyone’s behavior or choices were up for scrutiny and painful dissection—criticism, self-criticism sessions. I had to defend my choice of not getting busted at Columbia so that I would be able to leave the country that June to go to Cuba, where I had been invited.
We knew more people in a personal and political way than I can now imagine. Cho-Cho generally enjoyed the coming and going. She would seduce even the most dog-oriented guests. Arofa liked Felice, but hardly anyone else was acceptable. Several times she bit someone for being in my bed. She was possessive and territorial, and they were interlopers. During this period of intense and all-consuming political activities and multiple intimate relationships, I could work only by getting up before everyone else. That meant simply going without sleep, because we had meetings or events every night. Seldom did I get into bed before midnight, if then.
By waking at six, I could have a few hours before the phone started ringing, before guests were looking for breakfast, before people started coming to the door, before demands and meetings and demonstrations and deadlines. I rewrote Going Down Fast that way and tried to get my agent, Peter Matson, to circulate it. He was reluctant but finally did so, and the first place it went, Trident, then a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster, bought it.
I could not believe it. I had a book of poetry in the process of publication, and now I had sold a novel. I found that this news struck people quite differently. Sol and Adrienne were delighted that I had finally broken through. None of the people I was involved with intimately were pleased. They all saw it either as selling out or as somehow differentiating myself from them, except for Robert, who was astonished. I realized he had never really expected me to sell a novel. He kept saying not to believe it until I had a signed contract in hand. But I did believe it. I had not needed the five years he had promised me. I was beginning to be self-supporting as a writer: I was giving free readings still, but I was also being paid for performing at universities, libraries, conferences. People would actually pay to listen. My poetry was in demand for benefits, and I began to be asked for poetry for publication, instead of submitting blind.
That fall, I read at the West Side YMHA with another poet considered at that time up-and-coming. James Wright, whose poetry I loved, was to introduce the two readers and moderate the discussion supposed to follow the reading. I was intensely excited. My oldest fantas
ies seemed to be finally reaching fulfillment. I felt as if an immense stone I had carried for years inside my chest had melted away and I was freer than I ever had been. I was not deluded. I was not insane. Some people actually wanted to read or listen to my work, and I was getting paid for it.
That evening of coming out publicly as a poet turned into a nightmare. My lover Goss, who was jealous of my writing and its importance to me, stood up and made a speech about how this was a hierarchical event in the service of the establishment. James Wright made a derogatory comment about Bob Dylan, at that point a total icon-saint of the movement and of just about everyone in the audience under thirty. It turned into a brawl. For years people spread the story that I had insulted James Wright and brought a gang of hoodlums into the Y to disrupt. This event I was so thrilled about was a disaster that haunted me. I sat up there feeling exposed, miserable and helpless. I felt guilty that I had been pleased to be asked to read at the Y, ashamed both of the scene my friends and their allies were making and of my own inability to control or even affect the situation.
I have never been so intensely involved with other people as I was then. I was either hugely happy or thoroughly miserable. I was uncentered. My writing had been pushed to the side until my novel sold, and even after that, I had to fight for work time and generally only got it by giving up sleeping or eating or whatever else seemed inessential. I burned with energy. I could lead three or four lives simultaneously, I believed. I could try to satisfy the needs of everyone around me, write successfully and organize full-time in the movement while carrying on a multitude of consuming relationships. I could do it all.
I began to have health problems. Besides my smoking, I had been gassed in demonstrations. I was coughing all the time, suffering a raw throat. Codeine terpin hydrate was available without a prescription. I don’t have an addictive streak, so I never became dependent on it, but when I was sick and I had to attend a conference or chair a meeting or write a pamphlet, I used the stuff to get me through. I thought of myself as an unlimited resource and used myself accordingly. I imagined I could push myself twenty hours a day forever.
I still had not learned that sex and my body were not panaceas. Peter, with whom I was working on certain projects in spite of being an off-campus organizer with Goss, became very jealous of Goss. We had a friendship and a work relationship, but not a romantic or sexual connection. He not only made scenes about Goss. At the regional SDS conference in Princeton, I was dancing with a pleasant young man whom Peter attacked, physically. A few days later, he became so angry at what he saw as my flirting with another man that he threw a large standard office typewriter across the room. He was a big man and his temper scared people. Peter’s jealousy was tearing him apart and interfering with our friendship and our work. I went to bed with him, thinking this would help. It didn’t. It felt incestuous to him. We all imagined we could do anything we conceived of as correct, without having the psychological sophistication to carry it off. He moved downtown and withdrew from our work and largely from NACLA and would not speak to me for two months.
In the summer of 1968 Robert and I went to Cuba. After the first few weeks, I was free to come and go as I pleased, and I got to know Cubans of a variety of ages, backgrounds, politics, sexual preferences and religions. It was a complex and moving experience, but this is not the place to discuss it. We left the cats in their home this time with a couple from the SDS regional office staying in the apartment. When we got back three months later, there were twenty people living in the apartment and a million roaches. Cho-Cho had gotten plump and Arofa had gotten skinny. Both were desperately glad to see us. My editor—the one who had bought the novel Going Down Fast and given me guidelines for revising it—had been fired. The novel was now under the supervision of the equivalent of an office boy—just out of the army, young, inexperienced and powerless. Needless to say, the book came out with little notice and no publicity—but it got good reviews anyhow. I began another novel that fall—Dance the Eagle to Sleep. It went slowly because I was getting bronchitis on and off and because I was one of the two principals—with Goss—in starting a new organization specifically for off-campus organizing. It blossomed quickly. We had a teachers group, a group of social workers, of city planners, of people working in publishing. We had affinity groups and started a food co-op and a day care center. We had an affiliated theater group and put out a newsletter. Astonishingly, Wesleyan accepted my second book of poetry, Hard Loving. They had discouraged me from submitting it, saying it was too soon after the first. But I knew the poems were much stronger and that it was a powerful book. They agreed and planned to bring it out quickly, in less than a year.
Being a small woman, I was often injured in demonstrations. I used to get diarrhea beforehand, but then I would rev myself up. The movement had no place for cowardice or hesitation, and there is an electricity about a crowd in movement that carries you. Robert now went to demonstrations, but he was not in them. He went with his camera. He had a Nikon I had bought him. Michel had finally paid me back the money for the apartment. I needed it dreadfully when I was down-and-out, but now I just took it and bought Robert the camera of his dreams. He felt safe photographing. I understood that because of the fragility of his bones, he could not risk himself in a demonstration. So often in those years, my conscience made me do what I was most afraid of. That fall, I was dragged on a car for half a city block before my clothing ripped. My back was severely injured.
The spring of 1969, everything personal and political blew up. SDS was tearing itself apart in a spate of dogmatism and Marxist blather. I was essentially forced out of the off-campus organization I had helped create when my relationship with its cofounder collapsed. I found myself pregnant in spite of taking the pill—my life was so irregular I had missed days. I miscarried a child I had not known about. My health was rotten. My throat was bleeding and I was coughing blood. The movement doctor who treated me free said it was not worth his time. I had nearly destroyed my lungs through smoking and through being gassed, I had chronic bronchitis, and I would be dead in two to three years. I walked out of his office and stopped smoking that same hour. I did not mourn the pregnancy that had surprised me, but I was shocked by my own carelessness. Robert had a vasectomy, so I felt it was not fair to become pregnant, even if I did not plan to have the baby. The fear, the fuss, the nuisance were not right to inflict upon him. I began to think of being sterilized, but every doctor I approached said I was too young. Many of my friends had children, but that triggered no desire to procreate. When passed a friend’s baby to hold and admire, I would stand awkwardly, acting out my discomfort—fearing if I relaxed for a moment, they might hand off the baby to me for good and I’d be stuck with it. I worked on this attitude and finally managed to fake an interest that, if never felt by the mother to be sufficient, was at least no longer insulting. I liked many of my friends’ children as they grew older: I was a good aunt. But I never desired to possess them or have one of my own.
After I had been off cigarettes for a while, it became apparent my body’s reaction to being poisoned with tobacco was to become allergic. At that time in history, it was like being allergic to air. Ninety percent of my friends smoked. All public places and meetings were full of tobacco smoke. I became extremely unpopular extremely fast. My allergy made me a pariah, seen as a puritan extremist, trying to force my antismoking bias on other people who were just having a good time.
Robert left his company and started a computer co-op in a ground-floor apartment two blocks from ours, on West End, begun with tremendous enthusiasm and idealism. They were to do socially beneficial work, making their technology available to those who needed it, and to take only as many innocuous paying jobs as they decided they needed to live on, minimally. “People in MIA will be making an explicit choice when they spend money, when they consume. To consume is to recognize that some time will have to be used to pay for that consumption and that time will not be available for those projects really worth doing
.” Unfortunately, although a couple of the people who worked for the co-op in a low-level way were used to scrabbling by on movement minimum pay, like Peter, the people who could actually do the computer programming and systems analysis were not about to live that way—certainly Robert wasn’t. I enjoyed the comforts of the middle-class life, although when I was traveling for the antiwar or the women’s movement, I could sleep on floors, under desks or tables, like everyone else.
That summer, the computer co-op rented a house in Truro for August. The experience was a revelation. I had fallen in love with the Cape when I was visiting with Goss just before Cuba, but a whole month there felt like paradise. Besides everyone in the house we had rented, we were also friends with a house of gay men. My smoking allergy annoyed everybody, but we were outside most of the time.
The house the computer co-op rented was made of whitewashed cinder block and sat on a hill among pitch pines, fragrant and runty. To this day, the cry of a seaside sparrow will call up to me the intense sensations of that August and the next. I had never been out of the city in the summer since those one-week vacations with my parents on little lakes in Michigan. The cats were taken on walks and even allowed outside when it became clear they would not wander. We were about half a mile from the ocean via a series of paths. The beach was a nude one—before the rich summer citizens of Truro put pressure on the National Park Service, one beach in Truro and one in Wellfleet had been nude since time out of memory. Things had been tense and factional in the city. It was bliss to get away. Every day we took long walks exploring sand roads. Every day I worked on my novel. I got more done that month than I had since I returned from Cuba. I finished the novel Dance the Eagle to Sleep.
Everyone else went back to the city, but Robert and I did not want to leave. We had to clear out of our house, but some people in the gay house had left, and we were invited to stay in an empty room upstairs for ten days. That week, a hurricane passed out to sea. Tall breakers crashed in. Everyone was stoned much of the time and basically treated the beach as a living room. We all went out on a sandbar to eat a picnic supper while watching the sunset over the bay. The surge of cold water from high winds that sprang up cut us off. I have never been much of a swimmer. I can barely stay afloat. The water rushed into the Pamet River and it quickly became deep. The current was swift and difficult to make way against. The water was numbingly cold. Well after the others had landed and strolled off, I finally managed to make it across, but I wrenched my back muscles badly. If I had drowned, no one would have noticed. My back injury from the old demonstration was exacerbated. Exhausted, I crawled into bed.
