by James Reich
The young women had told her about something they called post-traumatic stress disorder. They felt that Cash suffered from it. There was a time when no one knew what this trauma was, not even Cash. Yet, slowly, the unexploded bombshell charged with the secrets of her birth had been uncovered from beneath layers of ashen dust. The young women took it as their responsibility to lure the withdrawn girl from the dark cavity where she seemed to exist, shaking and preoccupied.
Nona was the eldest at twenty-five. Nona told Cash about women with strange names: Sojourner Truth, bell hooks; and she introduced Cash to Wonder Woman comic strips on yellowing paper. Even as a child, as she stole sips of beer, Cash understood that this Christmas was special. Herland resounded with blasts from mix-tapes as Cash struggled to carry the black plastic ghetto blaster from room to room. They danced together in the disintegrating living room, kicking clots out of the carpet, pulling strips of yellow wallpaper from the plaster walls. Most of all, Cash watched and listened to Nona as though she were the whisper at the eye of a storm. Nona had almost symmetrical freckles on her brown cheeks, and she kept her head shaved down to soft dark fuzz. She called herself a Creole. She had left an abusive boyfriend in Louisiana and driven to the Northwest, where something magical and radical was happening. In her red leather biker jacket, Nona approached Cash through a wall of feedback and gave her another stash of crumbling vintage comics and clippings that looked as though they had been bartered away from pack rats. Nona explained:
“Cash, do you remember how I told you that Wonder Woman is from a tribe of powerful women called the Amazons? Her priority is truth. That’s what she cares about, exposing things to the light.” Nona smiled tenderly and stroked Cash’s cheek.
The gang, Cash thought, was happier than she had ever seen them. And they were smart. They were her school, her society, and her mothers. Nona turned to the others, as Cash began to leaf through the comics. “This is a good time,” she began, “for the riot grrrls, or whatever we are”—she laughed—“to decide whether we are a political movement or a cultural movement. I think that if we’re only a cultural movement, then we’re even more vulnerable to exploitation. We want to be more than a radicalized fad, right? It’s got to be more than middle-class white girls being able to go to punk rock shows.” Nona reached up for the exposed lightbulb and swung it like a pendulum. Shadows flamed around the walls.
“Exactly.” Leaning against the door frame to the kitchen, beneath boughs of mistletoe, Janelle Gresham wiped her blond hair back, wetting it with beer that she poured from a can into her palm. The beer spilled onto her black and glitter-flecked Runaways T-shirt. The angles of her hips shone above the waist of her ripped jeans. “Riot grrrl is one thing. The girls agree that the music is cool. But we’re coalescing around a set of PA speakers. I mean, it’s amazing, but, seriously, it’s going to be musical chairs at some point. I mean, what will happen if the music stops? Will all these new feminists drift away?”
“I think that it’s for life. It’s like once you learn to read, you can’t forget how.” Zel was short for Zelda. Zelda Pierce was fifteen years old. Zelda wore thick cat’s-eye liner, lifted from a movie still of Cleopatra. Cash remembered that in those days, Zelda always had a camera around her neck on a red plastic cord.
Janelle said, “Almost anyone can read, Zel, but who really does? You know what I’m saying? Potential is not the same as practice.”
Nona laughed, and she turned back to Cash who was pushing the treble sliders on the tape deck, Bratmobile doing “Where Eagles Dare.” “We’ve got the politics, kid—you, me, Janelle, and Zelda. We’ll keep it strong, right? Don’t ever let yourself be called sassy. That’s what culture calls a strong, intelligent young woman that it is afraid of. It’s the same as when a person of color is called uppity. She is uppity, they’ll say. She is sassy.”
Janelle cocked her beer bottle in the rainbow rays that glowed and spread from the Christmas lights. “What if we discover that, outside of our own representation of ourselves, young women cannot be represented authentically, without caricature?”
All night, Herland rocked with dissonant screams, the radical and ecstatic noise that came with the ending of the Cold War, the last wash of the second wave of female power in the Sex War, and the first swells of the new wave. Zelda picked Cash up in her arms and swung her around. “We love you, Cash! Don’t you get sick!” she said. Janelle held up a pile of black-and-white pamphlets and ’zines and called out from across the room, “The Cold War is finished! Revolution, grrrl-style, now!” They screamed with joy. The third wave would be a tsunami.
In those days, Varyushka would go out in the silicon rain of Portland and panhandle close to the Portlandia statue on SW Fifth Avenue. She saw the fifty-foot-tall bronze woman, kneeling and reaching down from her vast pediment, extending her hand, one breast almost exposed, her trident held back behind her. Cash would pull her left hand inside the torso of her sweater and hide it behind her back, letting the empty sleeve dangle, faking amputation. As people passed, the small girl in the rain would ask, “Cash? Cash?” Some people said that the Amazon women trained to fight by binding one arm behind their backs.
2001. Ten years later, when the gang at Herland was splitting up, Cash and Zelda drove from Portland to San Francisco. Cash was fourteen and Zelda twenty-five. When they arrived in the Castro, it felt as though all the women had been driven out. Walking between muscle and studs, glints from collars, Cash and Zelda linked arms as they traipsed the wet sidewalks, vainly counting the solitary lesbians. Zelda said, “By that time, the Castro had become little more than a suburb of Robert Mapplethorpe’s ass.”
They had come down to San Francisco on the pretext of seeing a Cindy Sherman exhibition at SFMOMA, and to see the Cramps at the Fillmore, but they had no illusions that they would return to the house in Portland. They sold Zelda’s car immediately, for money they could use to rent an apartment. Later, they ran down Market to Macy’s in the rain so that Zelda could use their bathrooms; she had her period. They walked the undulations and trolley tracks of the city, Alcatraz postcards, dried seahorses in Chinatown.
It had been Cash’s idea to finally abandon Herland. As the bridges receded in the rearview mirror of Zelda’s car, Cash experienced a profound relief. The Columbia River flowed through Portland. Cash used to walk like a zombie over the blue-gray bridges and gaze down into it, the vast and shining serpent of the Northwest. For years, she had concealed the aspect of her being that regarded it with primal fear. She knew that 200 miles back up the Columbia River was Hanford. For a time, as Cash entered puberty and her teens, she had studied Hanford obsessively. Silently, she had torn out pages from library books and slipped them inside her old comic books. The Hanford Site artificially inseminated the world with the plutonium that was transported from there to the Trinity test site, where it lit the first atomic bomb that turned the desert to deadly green glass, before being pay-loaded into gleaming B-52s. Hanford was built to mass-produce plutonium, and became the most dangerous place in the United States, sprawling with reactors along the Columbia River that flowed beneath her boots in Portland. Each time that Cash looked down into the river that flowed through Portland, she saw floods of contaminated water waiting to soak into her bones. Hanford was another 600 square miles of the earth that have been murdered by the nuclear industry. She felt that she was leaving a crime scene, as though the outlines of her parents were chalked into every street. She had no grasp of them, merely memories that she did not trust.
At the Fillmore, Poison Ivy, guitarist for the Cramps, wore rubber snakes in her hair. She was diffident and cool; her face was cast from glamorous, unyielding, unflinching stone, and her Gretsch guitar was creaking against her tight rubber dress. Whatever the men did onstage around her was incidental. The sound was all fuzz and all Ivy. Cash and Zelda smoked cigarettes and kissed in a bathroom stall. Zelda was Cash’s first kiss. Her mouth tasted of sweet lipstick, chewing gum, beer, and exhaled cigarette smoke. Cash pushed her
body into Zelda. They pulled at one another’s clothes, pushing hands inside jeans. Cash whispered, “Make me come . . . ” They shivered and fell deliriously through the revolutionary voices of women that would speak to them from riots and velvet dreaming, from gallery installations, from photocopies, from PA systems, from science, from literature, and from within the plurals of their flesh, all the things that they would be . . .
2003. Two years later, while they tried not to starve in the Tenderloin, Cash lied about her age and became a stripper. One night, after months of letting her leopard-print bikini fall from her body under the red searchlights, she devised a more ambitious act. She decided to perform a burlesque act under the stage name the Radium Girl. Zelda said, “Why don’t you call yourself Marie Curvy?” Cash researched the act: During the Cold War, during the bright tail end of first-wave burlesque, the girls who painted watch and instrument faces with luminous radium paint were murdered by the radium corporations of New Jersey and beyond. Men employed women, encouraged them to undertake work that the men, secretly, knew to be lethally toxic. The corporations of men suppressed the scientific evidence and manipulated the doctors. They called the cancers and necrosis of the jawbone disfiguring the young women syphilis. In other words, they were whores, the men said, encouraging the women to lick their paintbrushes to maintain their points. The factory workers were already dead; they were the same as the French soldiers, proletariat and the Tuareg tribesmen, forced to march slowly toward the outstretched arms of nuclear explosions, the animals tethered to the bombed warships at the Bikini atoll. The men in the corporations, in the lead-lined bunkers of male privilege, waged war on women who sought emancipation, employment, and wages. They called them whores, mutated them, and slowly and deliberately murdered them with radiation. For Cash, burlesque was nothing but nostalgia for the bomb. She understood it: The sadomasochistic visions of Bettie Page in bikini and bondage, bound between the cross spikes of palm trees on some recreated California atoll, are the same as the visions of students pathetically shivering beneath furniture, school desks, beds, or inside closets during the four-minute warning of atomic extinction. She considered Bettie Page’s iconic black bangs, following the pretty brow line of lobotomy, her innocent smile. Cash looked up photographs of the radium girls in Life magazine. With Zelda, she experimented with silicon rubber in the bathtub. Zelda told Cash about David Bowie performing in a play called The Elephant Man. The Radium Girl was ready.
The Radium Girl stepped onto the pitch-black stage. She held her breath, waiting for her music to begin: “Listen, the Snow Is Falling,” played by Galaxie 500. The spotlights and the clamshell footlights were switched off. To the men in the audience, set in their comfortable miasma of cigarette smoke and the fumes of their cocktails, she was invisible. The guitars began, plangent and filled with sonic motes of white ash. The men saw only the blank dark of the stage, as a soft, high voice broke forth from the PA speakers. A tambourine began a funereal shingling. She listened to the macho murmurs of disappointment emanating from the audience, their sweat dripping onto the sordid patina of their tables, an uneasy shifting in their red velour seats, faces half-caught in the weak Japanese lanterns of the booths. Slowly, she dipped her broad painter’s brush into the can of luminous, pale green paint in her left hand, and began to daub her ankles and shins. At close to three minutes, the drums began to pound and guitars pierced the veil. The men caught on. Gradually, as she ran the painter’s brush across her skin, the luminous denuded image of a young woman materialized on the stage before them, glowing paint dripping over her small breasts, her thighs and shoulders, across her arms and torso, and the limits of her throat; wolf whistles, applause, and howls of arousal erupted. The men wanted her, they cried out for her reverse striptease, for the Radium Girl to manifest. Furtive hands slid into pockets. Money blew in the current from the stage fan. Cash stepped forward, setting her painted luminous body into a rhythmic shaking as the music gathered toward a crushing wave of sound. But as the final flow from her paint brush traveled across her hair, face, and her grotesquely distended prosthetic jaw, the men stuttered and gagged, erections reversing like disturbed snails. The silicon mask she had created with Zelda dripped bright drops of green, disfigured, cancerous, hideously bulbous and distended with aberrant cells. Her neck slackened and the huge head drooped to one side. She wiped her hand across one breast and the paint came away, leaving a black space where the visible breast had been. Someone screamed. The Radium Girl never worked at the strip joint again.
Since the Cold War had been one of macho propaganda, scattered stockpiles of missiles and submarines, Cash understood that there was no front as there was in conventional war. There were many vanguards, occluded black zones, and razor wire. When they lived in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, Cash and Zelda became aware that they did, in fact, live within a mile of one such shadowed site, one that had tangled with the Pentagon and fought with it for supremacy. In those days, that site was still operational, but a shade of its former condition, for it had battled with the Pentagon, and lost. They would walk beneath its chintzy windows and hesitate there in awe, shuddering in the rains. Cash and Zelda learned that the trajectory of the Cold War had been directed by Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, a woman named Joan Quigley. Donald Regan, Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff, blew Joan Quigley’s cover in 1988. By that time, she had been dictating passages of the Cold War from her socialite bunker in San Francisco for seven years, preparing astrological charts that decided that the Reagan-Gorbachev Aquarius-Pisces summit of 1987 should take place in Moscow on December 8 at 2 PM.; that determined when it was safe for the president to travel and so forth. She would jam the White House telephones with abort messages if Reagan’s movements were counter to her reports from the stars. No one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that we slept innocent to the conflict between the pentagram and the Pentagon, the credulous and the culpable. As Zelda put it: “The president couldn’t even take a shit without full disclosure of the transits of Uranus.”
For Cash, there was something profoundly chilling in knowing that this shadow-Pentagon of superstition and stars held lives in the balance, that the diplomacy and tactics of the nuclear future were run by daily horoscopes. Yet, such was the female hand in the close quarters of the Cold War. Nancy Reagan and Joan Quigley fretted and interfered with horoscopes as the world hung at the abyss—women worse than Nero.
Zelda secured employment at Macy’s, and Cash continued to work the streets, wearing the brown corduroy jacket of an academic, and brogue shoes. They rented a small Mission apartment, with a radiator and queen bed. The stove had only one functioning burner, but the apartment possessed a claw-foot enamel bath. Zelda would steal what she could from the department store, and in front of its glass façade, Cash would improvise with a red plastic collection can that she had found protruding from a pile of plasterboard and broken glass in a dumpster. She would keep her one arm behind her back, hidden inside the jacket, permitting the empty sleeve to swing at her side as she skipped along beside the consumers. “Fight female circumcision in Africa, ladies!” Cash and Zelda would split the takings with the Red Cross and spend the remainder on groceries and winter heat. “Gentlemen, please donate to oppose breast ironing and the mutilation of young girls in Cameroon!” They also used the money to fund their actionist group: the Nancy Reagan Astrological Society. Photocopied pages would mysteriously appear in the women’s bathrooms at Macy’s, or they would be stapled or pasted to telegraph poles. Cash would hand them out to women on their way to work in the early mornings.
Crapricorn (Dec.22nd – Jan. 19th): You are a thrill-seeker, and this week you find yourself deciding to leave your mace spray at home. Take a gun instead. Locate a dark, forbidding alleyway full of muggers, rapists, dude-ranch rejects, and forlorn wife-beater businessmen, and simply wait for the party to get started. Just Say No to “gang rape” (which is another way of referring to the “glass ceiling” at your office).
Libra(tion) (Sept. 23rd – Oct. 22nd): Just Say No to sexual intercourse with males until the Equal Rights Amendment is a ratified reality. Since you are not a person, your husband or boyfriend should not want to fuck you, any more than he would want to fuck his own office chair. He might, grudgingly, grant that you are a person of sorts, but not an equal. Therefore, your abstinence from all sexual activities with males will protect his conscience from the revulsion and guilt he would suffer when confronting the fact that he is fucking a slave. Vir(a)go (Aug. 23rd – Sept. 22nd): You are about to have an abortion, because it is your right, and because you were raped by the tall, handsome stranger we mentioned last week. In other areas: Just Say Yes to political acts, political thought and imagination. Build your muscles not to give better hand jobs, but to give yourself a fighting chance. Taurus(t in me) (Apr.20th – May 21st): This week, you find yourself contemplating how few women work at nuclear power plants, in oil drilling operations, coal mines, dropping bombs, using flame-throwers, machine guns, etc. Chivalry is a male protection racket, keeping you stupid and clean. It might be time to get your hands dirty
—Nancy Reagan Astrological Society Horoscope Bulletin;
Number 17, 2003.
10
OUTSIDE OF THE ATOMOGRAD OF PRIPYAT, BEYOND AND SURROUNDING the state blocks and high-rise dormitories, there was a green belt called the Wormwood Forest. Cash thought that this must have been where she was conceived. Sperm flashed up against the bright atoms of egg in her mother, a series of divisions and diffusion resulted in a girl, splitting and decaying like radioactive material until it became unrecognizable, safe and contained by society’s concretes. Her parents were strange Soviet ghosts. She could only believe that when they smuggled her into America, they were already sick and dying from the inferno at Reactor IV. They hoped to take her so far, toward medicine, toward promises made by friends, before resigning themselves to dust.
