Big Sex Little Death_ A Memoir Part 21

My daughter is capable and caring - I bask in her virtuous light quite unfairly. She is her own doing.

But if I had to answer parenting questions, how new parents might have a fighting chance to raise a s.e.xually mature and wise young adult, here's what I'd say: Don't hit them.

Don't lie to them.

Respect their privacy and your own.

Good food would also be nice - and birthday cakes, and warm coats and mittens, all of that - but I'd say those three actions are the most important.

Since I first started giving s.e.xual "advice," I've been hearing people's confessions. What causes the most damage, the biggest problems in people's s.e.x lives, is when they have been abused within their own family or church.

Following the heels of that crime is the sin of growing up with terrible lies about who you are, where you came from, what's happening right in front of your nose. Violence is always part of that original lie: "We're punishing you because you were bad, Everything is fine, but you better not tell anyone else because it's all your fault."

Finally, privacy. That pearl of quiet and self-awareness. That's the most nuanced rule to explain. Kids need time to be on their own, to read, to play, to talk to themselves and their stuffed animals, to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, to write, to daydream, to kick a can. And we, their parents, need the same. People who don't know how to have private moments of clarity are in a difficult spot to grow up.

When Aretha was fourteen, she came home from basketball practice with another girl, Lorraine, who was a year older than her. Lorraine looked so different from Aretha - physically mature, a head taller. But she followed behind my daughter like a younger sister.

Aretha took Lorraine's hand. "L's worried that she might be pregnant - and she can't tell her parents, they'll throw her out."

Lorraine pulled her hand back.

"I told her to come home with me, that you could help her." She turned back to Lorraine and took her arm again. "Really, it's going to be okay."

I looked at the two of them. I had not taken a girl to the free clinic for a pregnancy exam in nearly thirty years, since I was in The Red Tide The Red Tide.

I offered Lorraine a chair. "I'll help you; we both will," I said. "There's a clinic just down the street that will give you a checkup for free, totally private, and all the birth control or medical help you need. That's their main thing, helping teenagers and people who don't have their parents to turn to, or a lot of money."

Lorraine looked at me through her long blond hair. She had perfect eye makeup. I couldn't read her.

"Sweetie, we can do this right now, or tomorrow if you like." I wanted to bite my nails, but I didn't want to do that in front of her. "But I have to ask you ... are you sure you can't tell your mom?" Because even if I wasn't getting along with Aretha, when it comes to something like this, I would want to be the first person on her side."

Lorraine shook her head vigorously.

"Your mom loves you -" I started.

"I don't know," she said. "Yeah, but not this. She couldn't handle it."

I said, "You know, we'll do this, and you'll get whatever you need, and next time you'll know how to do it on your own or with your lover. ... But you will probably not get to know me - and I'll never get to know your parents - because I couldn't stand to get close to your mom and keep a secret like this.

"You might even be embarra.s.sed to see me later on. ..." I traced a pattern on her chair with my finger. "But maybe if you ever tell your mommy, like when you're thirty, you can call and tell me it's over, so I can exhale."

She laughed, the first time. "I'll never tell her!" As if, "and you and her would never be friends."

We took Lorraine to the Planned Parenthood clinic. She turned out not to be pregnant, but she had pelvic inflammatory disease and anemia - along with four or five other things. The doctors weren't surprised. I was.

Aretha and Lorraine giggled over an enormous bag of condoms they were given at the end of the appointment. I looked inside the bag: "G.o.d, who's going to live long enough to use all these?"

My activism was always maternal, and I never knew it before Aretha. I knew the fight in me was creative, erotic, intellectual, historic - but I never knew it had a nurturing engine.

Motherhood is not for all. I wanted to be parented, very much - and I thought I wouldn't be good at parenting anyone else. It turned out the opposite: I could mother someone, even more than one - and it was like the balm that makes the burn go away. I turned out to have a thing for wearing ap.r.o.ns, and kissing tears away, and holding on tight.

Aging Badly

I wasn't ready for Debi's reaction the day she got cut from the Mitch.e.l.l Brother's club dancer schedule. After seven years of continuous stripping service for the most elite club in town, she did not see it coming - I don't think any veteran does. wasn't ready for Debi's reaction the day she got cut from the Mitch.e.l.l Brother's club dancer schedule. After seven years of continuous stripping service for the most elite club in town, she did not see it coming - I don't think any veteran does.

I knew something bad happened. She picked me up in her Saab and started gunning down Divisadero Street, through the Castro, barreling on Twenty-fourth, barely missing babies in strollers.

"What is it?" I asked. I wanted to grab her hand, but I was afraid to touch her.

"It's what I always told you; it's what I told everyone: They call you in, and you're telling them you don't want to work Wednesdays next month, and all of a sudden, they're like, 'Why don't you take a break; we don't have anything open right now.'"

"What does that mean?"

"Yeah, right! What does it mean? That's the temptation, to ask, like it's not dawning on you? And Vince is like, 'Maybe it's time for a change,' and then you're sitting there -"

"I don't understand, you've been making the same money you always have; you look exactly the same!" My attempt at comfort.

"That doesn't matter. They have a new lineup of eighteen-year-olds, and so it's snip, snip, snip at the other end." Debi rolled down all the windows. The wind was fierce.

"Red light!" I yelled at Folsum Street. I wondered if she had control of the door-locking mechanism as well.

We were waiting at the light. Some vato, his baseball cap low over his eyes, walked up to the car, leaned in on the Debi's windowsill, and made a play: "Where you goin' tonight, beautiful ladies?"

Debi didn't say one word to him. She took her cigarette out of her mouth, exhaled, and with one sweep of her hand crushed out the b.u.t.t - on our visitor's forearm. He yanked his arm off the door just at the embers reached his short and curlies.

"f.u.c.kin' b.i.t.c.h!" He stumbled onto the asphalt.

Deb flicked the f.a.g on the ground and just sat there. The light turned green. "This is a setback," she said.

And that is the last rational word we had on the subject.

Debi set about marrying one of her customers from the O'Farrell. She was in love with the idea of pulling a fairy-tale ending out of a bag full of s.h.i.t.

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 s.e.xually." Really? I know this is what the s.e.x business is based on, but why do people marry other people whom they are s.e.xually disgusted by? Why do people turn their lives upside down just to have an o.r.g.a.s.m in peace, without humiliation? Does it have to cost so much?

The "groom" was offering to dig OOB 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. 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 "wh.o.r.es." Making a s.e.x 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 Bride Magazine special issue. 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 s.h.i.t about a wedding to a G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 rea.s.sured 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 wh.o.r.e, 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 fiance, 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 Conde 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 f.u.c.ked-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. p.o.r.nography'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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.s before the guns came out?"

Their questions were crazy because they all a.s.sumed that s.e.x 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 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." - 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 ident.i.ty, 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 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. 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 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. 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 OOB workload was still enormous, the bills daunting, my postpartum health s.h.i.tty - 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. workload was still enormous, the bills daunting, my postpartum health s.h.i.tty - 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 OOB production binders: "I love you - D." I couldn't look at them. 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 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.