Praise for Pissing In a River
"Lorrie Sprecher's Pissing In a River is testament to the fact that women are not hidden from the world, we're IN it. And sometimes we make noise about that."—KRISTIN HERSH, lead singer of Throwing Muses and author of Rat Girl
"Beautiful and honest, Pissing In a River chronicles the lives of queer activists: their art, their downfalls, and their epic love stories."—CRISTY C. ROAD, author of Spit and Passion and Bad Habits: A Love Story
"Pissing In a River is a love letter to the obsessions that captivated an outcast generation: punk, politics, passion, and provocation. Sprecher's smart and fiercely emphatic characters evoke the beauty of the chosen family, the shelter from solitude in which they revel together, and the art that keeps them alive."—MARIA RAHA, author of Cinderella's Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground
Pissing in a River
Lorrie Sprecher
Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
Text copyright © 2014 by Lorrie Sprecher
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing June 2014
First ebook edition June 2014
Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com
Text design by Drew Stevens
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sprecher, Lorrie, 1960-
Pissing in a river : a novel / by Lorrie Sprecher.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-55861-852-7 (pbk) — ISBN 978-1-55861-853-4 (ebook)
1. Lesbians—Fiction. 2. Punk culture—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.P674P57 2014
813’.54—dc23
2014010815
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
A SIDE
Track 1: 17 Years of Hell
Track 2: The KKK Took My Baby Away
Track 3: Dancing Barefoot
Track 4: Away from the Numbers
Track 5: Smash It Up
Track 6: English Civil War
Track 7: Guns on the Roof
Track 8: Stay Free
Track 9: The Prisoner
Track 10: City of the Dead
Track 11: White Riot
Track 12: Nobody’s Hero
Track 13 :Staring at the Rude Boys
Track 14: London Calling
B SIDE
Track 15: Wimpy’s Are Shit
Track 16: Catch Us If You Can
Track 17: Shot by Both Sides
Track 18: Fight the Fright
Track 19: In His Hands
Track 20: Save Yourself
Track 21: The Ghost at Number One
Track 22: Strict Time
Track 23: Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)?
Track 24: Chinese Takeaway
Track 25: Hold On I’m Coming
Track 26: Heaven’s Inside
Track 27: There She Goes
Track 28: English Rose
Track 29: Reuters
Track 30: Just Out of Reach
Track 31: D’You Know What I Mean?
Track 32: Potential Suicide
Track 33: Capitalism Stole My Virginity
Track 34: Opinion
Track 35: You’re Nicked
Track 36: Girl’s Not Grey
Track 37: Godspeed
Track 38: Precious
Track 39: Brimful of Asha
Track 40: Joe Where Are You Now?
Track 41: Hold Me Closer
Track 42: George Bush Fuck You
Track 43: Magazine
Track 44: Don’t Worry About the Government
Track 45: Two of Us
Track 46: Return of the Rat
Track 47: Treat Me Well
Track 48: The Seeker
Track 49: Drowning in the Shallow Waters of Prescribed Morality
Track 50: I Wanna Be Sedated
Track 51: Dream Time
Track 52: Rescue
Track 53: I’m Partial to Your Abracadabra
Track 54: When Angels Die
Track 55: Groovy Times
Track 56: You Belong to Me
Track 57: Pilgrimage
Track 58: Rock the Casbah
Track 59: How Deep It Goes
Track 60: Smells Like Teen Spirit
About the Author
Also Available
About the Feminist Press
To Angela Locke
and my two Kurts
—soul love.
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic
orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me
to his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming
presence. Because beauty’s nothing
but the start of terror we can hardly bear,
and we adore it because of the serene scorn
it could kill us with. Every angel’s terrifying.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, “The First Elegy”
A SIDE
TRACK 1 17 Years of Hell
I promised the women in my head that I would get to England even if it killed me. I knew that they were watching over me. Despite my mental glitches, I applied to do a year abroad in Britain and was awarded a place at an English university starting the fall term of 1980.
I’d been listening to Heart’s debut album Dreamboat Annie when I first heard their voices. They started as a murmur, but then I could make out two distinct female voices with British accents talking inside my head. Who were they? What were they doing in there? It was like listening in on someone else’s conversation on an extension phone.
I didn’t freak out because I was used to hearing noise inside my head due to the obsessive-compulsive disorder I didn’t know I had. I endlessly repeated prayers of protection to erase my own bad thoughts before they could hurt someone. I performed mental rituals to keep my hands from falling off for no reason. At seventeen, all I had was the diagnosis of major depressive disorder to explain why I wasn’t coping well with my life.
Even though I was swept up in the punk revolution, I remained loyal to Heart because I was in love with Ann and Nancy Wilson, the two sisters in the band. In 1977, I bought the Sex Pistols and the Clash imports and Little Queen by Heart. Even after Heart became a big-name stadium rock band, I still listened to them and could get “corporate rock sucks” and “I joined the Heart fan club” into the same sentence. I had pink-and-green hair and my biggest secret wasn’t that I was a lesbian, at a time when that still had maximum shock value. It was that between “London’s Burning” and “Anarchy in the UK,” I still listened to “Magic Man” on my stereo.
I believed the two women in my head were punks too, because whenever I entered a punk club, I felt their approval. Soon, instead of just hearin
g them talk to each other, I sensed them having feelings about me. Sometimes I could even see them, these women in my head. The older one had brown hair, shiny as wet tree bark, and her name was Melissa. The other one had dark hair, and I didn’t know her name. I couldn’t see their faces clearly. By looking up the places they mentioned, I figured out that they lived in London.
I felt like I was Moses being pen pals with God on Mount Sinai. I didn’t go to punk clubs just to hear the music. I went to pray. Sometimes I thought I caught glimpses of my two women in the dark corners between the leather jackets, safety pins, and secondhand clothes. This was our sacrament, and I raised my bottle to them when I drank my consecrated beer. My new world was populated by people with punk noms de guerre like Lucy Toothpaste, Pat Smear, Donna Rhia, Becki Bondage, Tory Crimes, and Billy Club. I thought about changing my name to Amanda Mayhem.
Now I was getting ready to study English literature at Exeter University in Devon. As I packed my Sex Pistols T-shirt into my suitcase, I couldn’t believe I’d actually gotten this far. My previous year had not been a good one. The biochemistry in my brain had completely run amok, and I’d succumbed to a full-fledged mental breakdown, which I’d somehow managed to hide from everyone. I’d almost flunked out of school. But one incident in particular got me through my affliction and out of bondage into the Promised Land.
TRACK 2 The KKK Took My Baby Away
I had just finished reading The Bell Jar for the tenth time. I was so depressed I thought about eating the thirty-two codeines I’d been hoarding since junior high school when I’d broken my leg and had my wisdom teeth removed. It might sound nuts, but I’ve always blamed segregation for screwing up my brain chemistry. I was born in a segregated hospital in Prince George’s County, Maryland in 1960, off I-95, near the big Pepsi billboard, and was stuck in the white-babies-only room with all the other white babies shining in their cribs like light bulbs. You can’t tell by looking, but half of my genes are olive skinned. Being born is becoming who you are according to what they say you can be.
When I was five, we’d moved to a southern California town where there were hardly any black people at all, and it was here, as a young adult, that I wondered how Sylvia Plath had waited thirty long years to kill herself. The need for me to do so now seemed urgent, but something was sitting on my chest and preventing me from getting up, a physical force, born of anxiety, pushing me into the bed. Lying there, unable to move, I had an out-of-body experience. I saw myself float into the bathroom to retrieve my codeine pills. I watched myself pour them into my hand and get a Diet Coke to wash them down. I’d been suicidal and survived before, but this time I was afraid I was really going to kill myself.
“Jesus Christ,” the voice I recognized as Melissa’s suddenly demanded, “what kind of person kills herself with a Diet Coke? At least drink a regular Coke. It’s not like the sugar’s gonna kill you.” I felt Melissa’s presence in the room. I kept my eyes shut to see her better. She was wearing torn blue jeans and a fuzzy gray sweater. I swear I could feel her weight on the mattress as she sat beside me. “Don’t kill yourself, love. It’ll be alright.” When she put her cool, delusory hand on my forehead, the pain just stopped. When she left, I could sit up. The gargoyle pressing on my heart had gone. I felt a clear-headed, fragile happiness. I picked up my acoustic guitar and played for several hours. Then I fell into a deep, uncomplicated sleep.
I don’t know if you’d call that a religious experience, but when I woke up in hell again, I knew I was going to live through it. I got myself together enough to stay in school. Then I discovered that the one black woman in my Jane Austen seminar had been born on the same day in the same hospital as I had on the babies-of-color side. And here we were together, even though the whole of society had conspired to keep us apart. I wondered if I would ever meet the women in my head. Surely stranger things had happened.
TRACK 3 Dancing Barefoot
I walked to the record store to get some blank cassette tapes for my trip. “Erase that thought. Erase that thought. Erase that thought,” I said to the beat of my Converse high-tops to protect myself and my family from intrusive thoughts about spontaneous combustion. “Healthy, whole, and safe. Healthy, whole, and safe. Healthy, whole, and safe,” I whispered to myself, trying not to move my lips. I taped my favorite punk albums and Heart so I could take them with me on the plane to England.
When I landed at Heathrow and stepped onto British soil for the first time, I felt a lightness in my head. Dazzled by the sunlight, I searched myself for signs of depression, but my depression had retreated. The voices outside my head, speaking in British accents, suddenly resembled the voices inside, and I achieved equilibrium. I’m here, I silently told the women in my head. I’ve come all this way to find you. I never once bothered to ask myself if I was crazy to have come this far for two voices. Women communicating with me from inside with no separation between our thoughts felt intimate, and our connection ran deeper than blood.
Exeter is two-and-a-half hours southwest of London by British Rail, and Devonshire is the greenest, rainiest borough in the country. The day I arrived with my guitar and suitcases at Exeter St. David’s train station and saw the surrounding green hills and hedgerows full of brilliant flowers, I thought I’d died and landed in paradise.
I lived on the university grounds in Duryard Halls in a women’s residence house called Jessie Montgomery. My room, B320, complete with an electric fire, wardrobe, desk, and single bed, was on the top floor. The grounds had once been botanical gardens and these had been preserved as much as possible. To get to school, I walked through woods full of wild blackberries. To reach the English department, I passed beautifully kept gardens with different flowers each season. I luxuriated in the richness of daffodils, violets, tulips, bluebells, rhododendrons, azaleas, primroses, and crocuses. A statue of Cupid was poised for takeoff against the balustrade in front of Reed Hall. In winter, a dusting of snow on his wings kept him earthbound.
I got on well with the other girls in Jessie Montgomery House and made friends right away. I was always in someone else’s room drinking tea because I didn’t have an electric kettle. And I was a hit with their boyfriends down the road in Murray House, the boys’ residence, because they liked the assertive way I played guitar. The two women in my head were always with me, and as I became more knowledgeable about regional accents, I could tell that the younger one was from the north of England. My OCD static faded to the background.
The walkway from my residence hall to the refectory was lit up with pink autumn leaves. I loved English food—chips with every meal—and the customs at Jessie Montgomery House. By rotation, we were invited in pairs to sit on the dais at the high table with the warden and her guests. It was supposed to be an honor and quite formal. Before tea, there was sherry at the warden’s house. When the girl who lived next door to me at Jessie Montgomery House and I went, we dyed our hair blue with bottles of ink and left blotches on the walls of the warden’s sitting room by accidentally leaning our heads against the white paint. Later we sorted out some proper hair dye, and for a change I wasn’t the only person with punk hair at my school.
On the first afternoon of the school term, I lugged my green-and-white Exeter University book bag up the hill to the university coffee bar on my way to an E. M. Forster tutorial. The town of Exeter and the river Exe were shining below me, and I looked across at the neon-green hills and pastures of grazing cows and sheep. Later I took a bus into town in the afternoon drizzle. In the city center was a billboard I loved advertising meatballs. It said “Surprise ’em with Faggots for Dinner!” I thought, Yeah, that’s right. Put that billboard up in America and everyone will be surprised.
I walked past the small shops lining the High Street and a big indoor market with fresh-cut flowers, fish, and vegetables. I had fish and chips at a nearby chippy. Sitting in the orange plastic booth, I thought about the women in my head as I always did when I had an idle mome
nt. I imagined Melissa’s brown hair smelling of rain and petunias and the other woman’s dark hair curling softly against her collar.
After eating, I headed toward Marks and Spencer, the department store people called Marks and Sparks. Boots Chemists had pink flowers in window boxes and baskets hanging over the pavement. The local buses were bright green. I sprinted up the High Street and caught one back to campus. I liked to ride on the upper level so I could watch the countryside and look down on the traffic.
In between my mostly neglected studies and lectures, I went to London and looked up the places I’d been told about by Melissa and her friend. Everything was where they said it would be, like the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens at Regent’s Park. Like a detective, I searched for traces of them all over the city. On the rare occasions when I was alone in my room at Jessie Montgomery House, I wrote songs to them. And when I played guitar, it was for them because they inspired me.
Exeter was my Eden, and I was the lesbian Eve. There was even an apple tree outside the window of my room. Of course I knew that the forbidden fruit of the Torah was not an apple in Hebrew, but I enjoyed the symbolism anyway. With my OCD and ritualistic thinking, the universe was constantly sending me messages, and the apple tree was only confirmation of what I had already known. This was my home. And when I lay down to sleep, instead of grotesque OCD images of body parts falling off, grisly car accidents, and bodies mutilated by explosions filling my head, I saw pretty things, like the way the sunlight sometimes bounced off the hills turning them an almost unreal lime green.
TRACK 4 Away from the Numbers
Annie was my best friend. We met when I volunteered to work on Gayline, a weekly counseling service for gay students that Annie ran with a guy called Mark. They said they’d never had another woman volunteer for it before. Thursday was the one night a week the university’s telephone help-line and drop-in counseling service guaranteed that an authentic gay person would be available to deal with “gay” issues. I sensed that the younger, dark-haired woman inside my head was gay and had some kind of pain or conflict because of it. I felt like I was doing this for her, that it would bring her comfort. I fantasized about picking up the phone and recognizing her voice.
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