Big Sex Little Death_ A Memoir Part 6

Everyone else acted like Ms. La.r.s.en was some gray-haired stoic, but I felt like I'd been in a bar brawl with her every time we were alone for five minutes.

"Do you know what people think you're saying when you say 'feminist'?" she whispered. Her blue eyes darted at mine.

"I don't know - what do you mean? Who are you talking about?"

She stared at me, and we both stopped picking up boxes. I felt tears coming up. Why did she always have to break my b.a.l.l.s?

I tried again: "Are you trying to get me to say something like, they think I'm a lesbian?" I was hot now, too.

Ms. La.r.s.en's head trembled back and forth.

"I don't care what they think!" I said. "They're in the dustbin of history; they're not what's going on! What does their prejudice have to do with anything?"

"It has to do with how you are perceived by this administration, the faculty, and the rest of the community. " She barely moved her lips.

"Well, if they 'perceive' me as a d.y.k.e, I don't care," I said. "I don't care! I mean, I am bis.e.xual."

La.r.s.en took a step back and held up her hand in front of her eyes. "You can't talk to me like this, Susannah," she said, and moved closer to her desk.

"Ms. La.r.s.en, you know things are changing. You don't have to be ashamed anymore." I leaned against her desk, then hoisted myself up to sit on it.

It was too much. She grabbed my wrist and pinched me until it hurt.

"Jesus!"

"You have no b.l.o.o.d.y idea what shame is." She didn't let go. I could count every dark line on her face.

"Ms. La.r.s.en!" I yanked, but she had me in a vise. "Shame is a fifteen-year-old girl in the locker room next to me who's bleeding from her v.a.g.i.n.a and won't tell anyone but me that a varsity player just raped her and told her he'd kill her if she ever told anyone."

She let go of my arm. "Where's your f.u.c.king piece of paper?"

"You're standing on it." It had fallen off her desk, but I could recognize my handwriting on the floor. I picked it up and handed it to her, half-torn. Her eyes were watery. My heart was ready to burst out of my chest.

"You can fix it with some Scotch tape," she said, and pulled a red pen from behind her ear, signing the bottom of it. Her phone rang, like a stage cue, and she turned to answer it, steely as ever: "Coach Larson, what do you want?"

I tried to read her first name on my self-defense pet.i.tion. Her signature was unreadable, like a little scarlet scar.

s.e.x Education

My first partnered s.e.x was a group of three. My best friend, Danielle, and I seduced and conquered an older man of twenty-seven from down the street. Gary was an unemployed soap opera actor, hustling for commercials, going to auditions every day. I was almost sixteen, Danielle a year younger. She'd only been in the States six months, from Belgium, coming to stay with her father, just like me.

I found out that Gary's soap career consisted of playing "teenagers" - no wonder he cried about his aging process. We thought he was ridiculous - but pretty. He envied our lack of concern about growing up.

Kissing Danielle is what I remember the most. We were all on the futon, watching the World Series after we'd finished doing Gary's laundry. Danielle and I had a housecleaning/-sitting service, and every other Thursday we went to Gary's apartment to hose down his man cave. We pestered him with nosy questions about s.e.x; we found his driver's license and taunted him about his real age; we skinny-dipped in the pool. Danielle delighted in being rude, and I was one of her few calming influences.

The Orioles got the lead. Danielle and I were lying down, telling Gary how boring baseball was and how he should get a life. Dani started to pa.s.s me a joint she'd rolled, and our cheeks brushed each other. How could a tough girl be so soft?

My lips touched hers. It was a shock; it almost hurt. I thought, Am I trembling because it's Danielle, or because it's a girl, or because it's my first time?

I had never kissed anyone before. Never held hands, never played "Post Office" or "Doctor". I had read every page of The Hite Report and the Kinsey research, but I had never kissed anything but my pillow.

We kissed Gary next. We triumphed over baseball. I don't know what made him surrender that day - we had told him so many times before that we wanted to lose our virginity and that he should oblige us by being the guinea pig.

"It's so weird," he said afterward. "Sue, you have a better figure, but Danielle, she has something that I just can't put my finger on. It just compels you."

"Jesus, Gary," I said, "it's not an audition."

"You just insulted both of us," Danielle added. It's true - it should have hurt to hear his crude appraisals. But when I was with Dani, his words bounced off like rubber arrows.

I felt safe and bold with Danielle - I'd do things with her I'd never do by myself. We could seduce anyone; we could get out of - or into - any situation we wished. When we were alone, she told me that my kissing was terrible, that Americans didn't know how to kiss. She ran a bath for us, and when we got into the tub to practice, we turned on the shower, too, the water pouring down our heads."

Men were intimidated by us, which we thought was funny. Funny, but great leverage. For the first couple months of my s.e.x life, I was too intimidated to do anything alone with a guy - Danielle was my big dog, my fearless leader, the one I could temper and reason with. I loved her. s.e.x with her, alone, made me shiver. We never talked about it.

At the same time, Danielle had no interest in the women's consciousness raising (CR) groups that were sprouting all over Los Angeles. She was her own Amazon. She didn't join groups. Maybe it wasn't a Belgian thing to do.

I was in two or three CR groups simultaneously. The first one, a formal session, was all older women, except me. I think I gave them the first taste of teenage impulsivity they'd had since they'd been in high school themselves. A couple of them were ready to turn me in to the police, because they imagined I was the type to steal their boyfriends without a second thought.

I argued with them, in my fawn-like attempts at s.e.xual liberation. "First of all, I don't even know your boyfriend," I said to one mad hen named Marcie. "And second of all, why does it bother you that, if I f.u.c.ked him, theoretically, it wouldn't 'mean' anything to me? What is it supposed to mean? Why can't I be your friend, have s.e.x with your old man, and then have dinner with both of you the next night. Why is that so hard to imagine?" I saw this as a direct line from Engels's Origins of the Family Origins of the Family.

Marcie hissed at me and used the parental language that I didn't experience at home with Bill. "You are an infant who has no idea what you're dealing with," she spat.

I never knew how to reply to that. Marcie, and the other over-thirties, didn't get that I was so much closer to my girlfriends than I was to any man. I barely understood men at all. The older women's approval and affection were critical to me. I could, and sometimes did, have one-night stands with their men, but I never felt with these men the intimacy I had with the women in the CR group. And I didn't understand the women's investment in these relationships.

The second women's group I was in, which was the most influential in the long run, was "The Speculum Club," as I called it. We were a self-help group modeled on the famous Feminist Women's Health Centers. The aim was not to talk about feelings, but rather to take down our pants every session and look at our cervixes.

We monitored our cycles, detailed our s.e.xual response, learned our fertility symptoms inside and out, performed vacuum aspirations on our uteruses, and seized control of the birth control process when necessary. My written diary from that group was extraordinary in its detail and observation. It was the first science cla.s.s I'd ever paid attention to.

I went from a teenage girl who took the Pill without giving a hoot about its hormonal consequences to a rabble-rouser who would preach, "When you're not afraid to touch your v.a.g.i.n.a, you can use birth control that doesn't screw up your body every day."

The Pill was ideal for marketing to women who had never taken a mirror and looked at their genitals. They never had to deal with their c.u.n.t; they just popped a colored tablet in their mouths - "Barbie Birth Control."

When you use diaphragms, cervical caps, condoms, it's a hands-on experience - and hands are so good for everything s.e.xual. The girls in my locker room at high school, who were always trying to "borrow" a Pill for a special occasion, didn't take to my exhortations. Well, maybe some who were eavesdropping did.

I remember Julie, the girl with the locker next to mine, who, aside from thinking that the Pill only had to be popped within a couple days of "doing it," was particularly disdainful of my approach to letting boys know what was going on.

"I'd rather die than have my boyfriend see me sticking my hand down there!" she said. "What a turnoff! - how do you expect to get a date?"

We were talking different languages. "Dates" were for morons and squares.

"Why, are you trying to convince him that you're infertile?" I asked. "That you have a magic p.u.s.s.y that can't get knocked up?"

"STOP SAYING 'p.u.s.s.y'!" Julie screamed, loud enough for the guys in the boys' locker room to hear her.

As much as I lectured Julie on her backwardness, I wasn't so liberated myself beyond the birth control basics. I was so timid about bringing my o.r.g.a.s.m out of my secret masturbation life and into bed with someone else. I knew, technically, that v.a.g.i.n.al poking was unlikely to make me come without more direct c.l.i.toral stimulation, but I was too shy to "lead the way." I wished someone would just look into my eyes and know. I couldn't believe that so many older guys I met with Danielle seemed neither to know nor to notice whether a girl came or not.

The third women's group I belonged to was the broader group of women at high school my own age. We were all devoted to the women's movement, especially the music. It was a happy lesbian-bi launching pad - everyone was so game, so open to "what could happen if you just tried it," unlike my older CR comrades or the nerds of my Speculum Club. My high school girlfriends were the ones who schooled me about what it looked like to get turned on enough to just follow your c.l.i.t to its natural conclusion.

Sure, they were shy sometimes; we were all shy. But when your arousal level exceeds your timidity, you don't need an instruction manual. Like Danielle - she just went for it.

My girlfriends' bedroom conversations were deeper than anything I ever said in a circle with chairs and tortilla chips. We talked about our s.e.x with other people - with boys and men of all types, and with other women, those inexperienced like ourselves and committed d.y.k.es.

When Danielle said no, she meant it, and when she said yes, it was without duress. I wanted to have the nerve to touch my c.l.i.t when I was f.u.c.king, just like she did. Dani didn't apologize or explain.

"I want to be like you," I murmured under my breath more than once my first year of f.u.c.king. "I don't want to be trying to prove anything."

You Are Now a Cadre

After my sixteenth birthday, I wanted to get more serious about politics. The Red Tide The Red Tide was aging - what were we all going to do when we got out of the playpen? Many of us joined the "grown-up" socialist group we were most attracted to at the time, a small sect called the International Socialists, the IS. was aging - what were we all going to do when we got out of the playpen? Many of us joined the "grown-up" socialist group we were most attracted to at the time, a small sect called the International Socialists, the IS.

Why them? In some ways, it was probably chance - there were a lot of left groups that salivated at the idea of recruiting a bunch of fearless teenagers who never slept. The IS was attractive because they weren't doctrinaire about many things the rest of the Left was hysterical about. They were all in favor of independent feminist groups, gay organizing, black power, whatever - you didn't seem to have to choose between causes. You just brought your cla.s.s consciousness to every potluck, and that was easy enough to do. They also - and this spoke directly to our generation - didn't believe in a socialist paradise that might be thriving a plane ride away. I got so embarra.s.sed listening to other Reds talk about China or Russia, like they was some kind of Shangri-la.

The IS, at that time, had two branch organizers, a mom and dad with two kids. They were normal. They were not Hollywood; they were not ascetics. Geri and Ambrose could talk Marxism or labor history all night, but they'd feed you macaroni and cheese and watch Star Trek Star Trek reruns. reruns.

I knew I'd have to ask their permission to join the IS. They thought of me as a baby, a slightly older baby who could diaper their youngest. I knew they cared about me, but they were protective. Plus, as they were always pointing out, I didn't even have a driver's license.

I kept bugging them; I didn't want to keep being treated like a kid. They fretted and fretted - and finally told me to meet them at Betty's Lamplighter coffee shop to talk about "possibly joining."

I made a face: "Gee, should I get a note from my dad?"

"Yes," Geri said, "this isn't going to happen at all if you don't have his permission."

Betty's Lamplighter coffee shop was in the Valley, next to a nursing home, and there were no bus stops for miles around. I'd need a ride. My idea of a cool place to meet to talk about my entree into full-time revolutionary knighthood would've been one of the cooler joints down by the beach, someplace where you might smoke a joint outside and order a cream-cheese veggie roll with a smoothie on the side. Close to the bus lines.

But Geri and Ambrose, like bobble dolls on a dashboard, just shook their heads at me. No, no, no. Workers went to the Lamplighter. Petty bourgeois w.a.n.kers went to smoothie bars. w.a.n.kers were hippies.

But we were hippies, weren't we? Geri knew the wacky version of every folk song in the Pete Seeger songbook: Oh, they always have to ask her if she comes ...

Oh, they always have to ask her if she comes ...

Oh, they wouldn't have to mention if they'd only pay attention, Oh, they always have to ask her when she comes.

I'd seen Ambrose tie-dye socks for his oldest son. They couldn't fool me. Lots of workers were hippies, too.

I waited for them in the Lamplighter like an unrepentant flower child in my catsuit, granny gla.s.ses, and cutoffs - which I'd embroidered with a version of Whistler's Mother, holding a machine gun, st.i.tched on my a.s.s.

I couldn't have imagined a duller word than worker before I was initiated into the IS's inner sanctum. Before, if I'd said "that worker over there," it meant someone of an indeterminate profession, hanging out in a field or on a sidewalk. The guys who wait to be picked up in front of the hardware store were "workers." Miserable f.u.c.ks standing in line at the unemployment office were "workers." The white-collar version would be drones squeezing into a subway. Who knows where they worked? We only know they must hate whatever it is they do and they grind away at it like a stone. Work away, you suckers - I didn't ever want to be like that.

Sometimes I'd hear an old Woody Guthrie song, or see Henry Fonda wiping his brow in The Grapes of Wrath The Grapes of Wrath, and I'd think about my grandma and grandpa during their dust bowl days. The farm the bank took away from Grandma Halloran. Then I'd think worker with a little compa.s.sion and guilt. A Dorothea Lange black-and-white photograph. Now I got up every morning, spoiled rotten, and ate sugar-frosted flakes.

But at this point worker meant something else to me. I'd been educated. "Worker" had Studs Terkel written all over it. It meant turning everything you knew upside down. The untapped potential, the General Strike, the lie exposed. Workers controlled the means of production, and I thought that was the most brilliant idea anyone had ever come up with.

Ambrose didn't wear anything colorful to the Lamplighter. Neither did Geri. But who needed color when we sat in bench seats of fluorescent orange and gold, while red cuckoo clocks chimed five different times on a fake rock wall?

Our waitress and our food were more impressive than our opening conversation. Geri and Ambrose seemed fidgety, but the hash browns were perfect. The lady serving us could kick fifty smoothie-stand operators on their b.u.t.ts. She had a red beehive and a lot of wrinkles, but she moved like a lightweight artillery unit.

I watched her handle ten tables while Geri and Ambrose rattled on about how the IS had five industrial priorities that each member needed to get involved in. Like a quiz-show kid, I quoted them back before they could finish their sentences: auto, trucking, steel, coal, phone. The idea was to build a rank-and-file movement in the most critical areas of American industry, and then, you know, "strike," like a Commie cobra.

I twisted my menu in my hands, looking at "Flo" in her gingham uniform. "It's too bad 'food service' isn't one of our priorities." We needed forces of nature like her. People do have to eat.

Geri followed my eyes. "I waitressed for fifteen years, Sue, I was working in a place like this when I had my first baby ... and you're right, these women deserve pearls instead of the swine they serve. But they're not unionized; they are frozen in these jobs, and they're never going to get out of them until the strongest people in labor start taking the lead."

"Yeah, like him?" I asked sarcastically, rolling my eyes toward a hungover trucker, the next booth over, whose breath was so bad I had to wave my hash brown steam in his direction to cover it up.

"Exactly like him!" Ambrose pounced on me. "That guy drives for Roadway. He's in Local 208, and they're about to vote on a national master freight contract that, if contested, will lead to a strike in which the whole over-the-road trucking system will be paralyzed."

"Which means this restaurant won't get its hash browns delivery," Geri added, taking the ketchup bottle out of my hands.

"If this waitress demands a raise or b.i.t.c.hes too much, she's going to be fired, and you'll never hear from her again," Ambrose went on. "You have to look at the material conditions, Sue, not your emotions." His face looked like an unmade bed. They were pregnant with their second kid.

"But what about the garment workers in Texas who're in the news today?" I asked. "They're not our priorities; they just unionized, and people are flying in from all over to congratulate them." Mexican women making blue jeans in this little border factory where no one cared whether they lived or died - now the whole labor movement was carrying them on their shoulders.

"They should be congratulated," Geri said. Her eyes were red, too.

"A century ago, they would have been up there with coal -" Ambrose started.

"But the garment unions are being wiped out by overseas factories" Geri finished. Ambrose and Geri traded sentences without even noticing it.

"Oh Christ, don't tell me, they're the exception that proves the rule!" I raised my hands in surrender.

"What does your dad have to say about all this?" Ambrose asked.

"About me being a trucker? Or working in a coal mine?"

"Don't be a smart-a.s.s."

"I'm not! I told him that I didn't want to go to college, that it was my idea of the bourgeois nightmare."

"And he said?"

"That he felt the same way!"

Ambrose cracked up. "When's your dad retiring from UCLA?"

"I have no idea," I said. "He's not that old." My dad seemed like a feature at the school, the perennial professor. "All I'm saying is, he doesn't think a college degree is the be-all and end-all. He told me if I wanted to be a gardener, he would have the highest respect for me."

They both shut up at that. Geri finally said, "If our parents had ever said anything like that to us, we probably wouldn't be here today. ..."