Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  “Oh, crap. What did I tell you about Scrumpy?” Annie put her arm around my waist and dragged me. I remember being poured into someone’s car. The next thing I knew, I was lying on Annie’s bed and she was handing me a mug of coffee.

  I drank the coffee, and Annie put the kettle on to boil again. She had run out to get Cornish pasties and chips while I was passed out. Now she handed me the food and told me to eat something.

  My red leather jacket hung on a chair, and I noticed a small tear at the elbow. “What happened?” I asked.

  Annie said, “I dropped you,” and we both started laughing.

  By the spring, the tear had swelled and I finally got round to having my jacket repaired. The man with the leather stall in Exeter market noticed the badges pinned all over it: “Don’t Do It, Di!,” “Lesbians Unite,” “Women United in Armed Snuggle.” Because when I returned to pick it up, he offered me a hundred pounds to go to bed with him. He fingered the purple “Punk Dyke” button on my lapel. “I’ve been thinking about you since last Saturday,” he said. “Are you really like that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You don’t think I dress in meaningless slogans, do you?”

  He began to ask those exasperatingly stupid questions unenlightened straight men ask about how two women could possibly have sex “all alone.”

  “For Chrissake, read a book,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’m going to take you out, buy you a meal, and then I’m going to go to bed with you. And I won’t use my fingers. I’m going to change your life. I’ll give you a hundred pounds. If I can’t bring you to climax, you keep the money. Well?”

  I stared at him, trying to work out how his enormous ego could fit inside a normal-sized head. I put on my jacket and pointed to a yellow-and-black badge that said “Piss Off.” “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do it.”

  When I got back to Jessie Montgomery House, I immediately rang up Annie. She and Neil drove directly to my residence hall. Neil had a garment bag full of clothes. “This tie will look smashing.” He held up a green tie to the gray “Eve Was Gay” sweatshirt I was wearing. I’d had it made when we were in Cornwall. Neil had snapped a photograph of me pointing to the bright-red, blasphemous letters with an entire Salvation Army band marching behind me, staring. I put on Neil’s baggy white shirt over a black thermal-underwear top. I put on his suit, and Annie rolled up the trouser legs. Neil knotted the tie around my collar, and Annie tucked my hair into a trilby hat. “You’re Jeremy Lesbian,” Neil pronounced.

  As we left the car park in town, Annie took out the eyebrow pencil she sometimes used to underline her dark eyes and drew a mustache under my nose. Neil stepped back and eyed me critically. “As a gay man, I will say that I could be very attracted to Jeremy Lesbian.”

  Laughing, we walked down the High Street, holding our scarves over our faces against the strong wind. We were nervous and ducked into a wine bar for a quick half-pint to fortify ourselves. Neil drank tonic water. He was worried that the man at the leather stall would take a swing at me when I made a pass at him, and he wanted to be alert enough to pull me out of the way.

  At the indoor market, Neil had a look at our target and said, “Christ, he’s bigger than the lot of us. If he hits her, he’ll knock her bloody head off.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Annie said.

  While they argued, I said, “I’m going to catch myself a real man.”

  “Sorry?” Neil acted like he was offended, running his hand through his hair.

  Annie said, “A real man, missus,” and put her hands on her hips. “Not some bloody poof.”

  I walked up to the leather-stall guy. “Listen,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to take you out, buy you a meal, go to bed with you and change your life. I’ll give you a hundred quid to have sex with me. You need a real man.”

  His face went completely red. Neil and Annie jumped out from behind a fruit and vegetable stall. Then he recognized who I was and calmed down. “Okay, I get your point.” He held out his hand, and I shook it.

  We ran out of the market feeling liberated. We believed that every little victory counted. I took off my hat before it was whipped away by the wind. Pink and white blossoms from the cherry and almond trees swirled around us like confetti. I felt like I was inside one of those plastic globes you shake to make it snow. I had one of Exeter Cathedral, and when I shook it, snowflakes fell around the plastic steeples.

  Neil started the car, and Annie wiped the eyebrow pencil off my face with spit and a Kleenex. I looked out the windscreen at the big drops of rain that plopped down, mashing blossoms into pink-and-white mud on the pavement as people trod on them. It was getting dark, and the yellow streetlights came on. Neil drove through the familiar roundabout to his flat.

  Neil lived on Monk’s Road in a sea of terraced houses with brightly painted woodwork and drainpipes. His flat was red brick with white brick around the bulging, ground-floor bay window. We walked toward the orange “The Canton Fish Bar” sign for some takeaway, then strolled back along the blue, black, yellow, and green-painted terraces, eating hot, mushy chips out of paper bags.

  Neil’s room was in front on the ground floor. We dried our scarves and gloves on the radiator. I unwrapped the newspaper from around my piece of fried battered fish, and Annie pulled back the white, lacy curtains, letting in the light from the street.

  I woke up the next morning to a cup of tea being set on the floor near my head. “Mornin’ sunshine,” Annie said. “Sleep well?” It was Sunday. We drank our tea and went to a nearby café for a proper English breakfast—a “fry-up,” as Annie called it. I had a plate of fried eggs, chips, beans, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, and fried bread. Afterward Annie and I walked leisurely back to the university. A gray cobblestone lane led through blackberry vines, daffodils, and purple crocuses and alongside an overgrown hedgerow. I decided that the real Garden of Eden must be full of daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, primroses, bluebells, white snowdrops, ornamental garlic, and cowslips.

  That evening at Jessie Montgomery, it was regular Sunday tea—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I worked on a long-overdue E. M. Forster essay and had a hot bath. In my little room in Exeter, I felt insulated and safe. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have OCD-induced insomnia. I’d fall asleep listening to the rain beat against the window, surrounded by green hills that were so bright I almost thought I imagined them, tucked in among the glistening hedgerows.

  TRACK 6 English Civil War

  Annie, Neil, and I were appalled when we read in Gay News that the mayor-elect of the town of Trafford, Stanley Brownhill, had announced that homosexuals were “sick” and that their “sickness could be cured by a .303 in the centre of the head.” When Annie and Neil explained that a .303 is a bullet from an army-issue gun, I was even more outraged. That he made the remark in April, which had been designated “courtesy month” in Greater Manchester, was too much to take.

  Annie grew up there. Her parents lived in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Salford, which, like Trafford, had merged with the city of Manchester. Neil and I went with her to protest at a gay-rights demonstration that was going to take place on the day Brownhill took office. By now I was sounding pretty English and most people couldn’t tell I was American.

  We got off the train at Manchester Piccadilly. The local buses were orange. Annie navigated us through oceans of red-and-brown brick terraces to the one she’d grown up in. Her parents were reformed Jews, but they kept a kosher home because her grandparents, who lived with them, were “Orthos,” as Annie called them.

  Annie’s mum and dad were lovely and welcoming. Her grandparents were rather off the grid and didn’t understand why we were there. They inhabited a world where being gay was a concept that barely existed. But they were obviously proud of Annie,
the first member of their family to attend university.

  Annie’s grandmum made us tea. We were standing in the kitchen chatting with her and Annie’s mum when Neil put his teaspoon on the counter. We heard a gasp and saw Annie’s grandmum point a shaking finger.

  “Oh, Neil,” Annie chided, “you’ve accidentally placed the spoon you used to stir milk into your tea on the counter reserved for meat and thrown the earth off its orbit.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Neil quickly removed the spoon and placed it on the dairy counter. “I’m a Catholic, you see.”

  “Now, now, Esther.” Annie’s mum put a calming hand on the older woman’s shoulder and ushered her into the sitting room, giving us an amused, conspiratorial smile. “Good luck protesting tomorrow, you lot.”

  Annie’s dad was a lively bloke with a humorous gleam in his eyes. He kicked around a football with us in the field behind the house as the evening light faded, all the while making wisecracks with Annie. “Her grandmum wanted Annie to marry a nice rabbi. Imagine her surprise when the rabbi was a woman.”

  “You mean rabbit,” Annie said. “I’m going to marry a nice rabbit.”

  “Christ,” Neil said anxiously, “I thought she was going to collapse when I put the spoon on the wrong counter.”

  “Now you see why I’m a vegetarian,” Annie said. “It’s far less complicated.”

  Annie’s dad was a fare collector on a bus. The next day, we rode around Manchester with him for several hours until it was time to go to the demonstration. We hopped off his bus in the city center and caught a crowded one to Trafford. BBC Radio One was blasting the new, sexist pop single from Sheena Easton. “My baby works nine to five,” her voice oozed over the seats.

  “Turn off that crap music,” I yelled, weaving in the aisle and grabbing the overhead bar to steady myself.

  “Oi, you.” Annie pushed me toward the stairs to the upper level at the back of the bus.

  I stood with my big cardboard sign proclaiming “No .303 for Me—Lesbian and Proud” wedged in the aisle. Over the radio noise, I gave a speech to the other passengers about why we had to stop the bullet-in-the-head mayor from taking office. Annie grabbed my arm when it was our stop. I thanked everyone for listening to me. “We now return you to your regular programming,” I said, as I jumped off the bus behind Annie. The long black police coat she’d got secondhand at a surplus shop in Liverpool flapped against the ass of her blue jeans. Her grandmother had helped her sew a large pink triangle on the back.

  We demonstrated in front of Trafford’s town hall where the new mayor was being sworn in. A cop from Stretford took away another protester’s megaphone as he was shouting, “A bullet in my head would make me dead, but it wouldn’t make me straight!” A bunch of people kissed to annoy the police, so Annie and I started doing it. The cops surrounded us and told us to move off. I stood in front of the one giving the orders. I only came up to the middle of his enormous blue coat, staring into the silver buttons.

  I said, “There’s no law against kissing. I’ll kiss her if I want to.”

  Neil and Annie practically lifted me off the ground they dragged me away so fast.

  “Listen, you,” Neil said. “You cannot get arrested. They’ll deport you.”

  “Arrested for what?”

  “He’ll give you the riot act.”

  “Like the Elvis Costello song?” I asked, confused.

  “‘Insulting behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace,’” Annie said. “They can arrest you for doing anything they don’t like.”

  “You mean they can arrest me for my behavior before I’ve actually done anything?”

  We took a bus back to the big square near Manchester Piccadilly to get a transfer back to Salford. It started raining gray shivs. Annie smeared drops of rain off the black metal statue of Queen Victoria. “There’s no law against lesbians, but gay men can be arrested for having sex with any bloke under twenty-one. Queen Victoria refused to sign lesbians into the law making homosexuality illegal because she didn’t believe we existed. Stupid old cow.” She kissed the statue on the head, shivered, and wiped her lips.

  “Like in Gay News,” Neil said. “That article about a thirty-two-year-old man getting nicked for having a nineteen-year-old boyfriend next to the picture of Prince Charles and Lady Di. He’s thirty-two and she’s nineteen, but you don’t see him going to prison for it.”

  I caught Annie’s eye in a way that meant we had unfinished business.

  “The police can’t arrest you for being a lesbian,” Annie said, “so they nick you for ‘insulting behavior.’ That includes kissing and anything they want.”

  “Two women kissing is behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace?” I asked.

  “God, I hope so,” Annie said. “I hope it causes the downfall of civilization as we know it.”

  TRACK 7 Guns on the Roof

  I walked to the Esso garage at the bottom of the hill to get chocolate and fizzy drinks for my trip to Ireland and bunged them in my book bag. I wrapped my long, green-and-white-striped Exeter University scarf around my face and tried to warm myself up. I was freezing when I got to Exeter St. David’s train station. I sat on the train, watching green pastures and back gardens swoosh by, drinking cups of British Rail tea. Annie had spent the weekend in Manchester, and we were meeting in Liverpool to catch the ferry to Dublin. I bought a secondhand British Rail coat at a surplus shop near the docks.

  The ferry wasn’t full, and Annie and I were the only people in the on-board cinema. We watched a Peter Seller’s film and slept in the red-carpeted aisle. Annie shook me awake in the morning. “I need a cuppa. I’m parched.” We had tea, and one of the sailors let us climb out onto the slippery bow with him to see Ireland coming closer.

  In Dublin, we looked for a cheap bed and breakfast. They got lower in price the further we walked away from the river. We found a room, dropped off our gear, and roamed the rainy, gritty streets. Music floated out of the pubs, and I tried to drink a pint of Guinness Stout. The murky, black liquid reminded me of the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles where dinosaurs sank to their death. We bought some cans of lager, got fish and chips, and went back to our room.

  It had stopped raining, but the air felt frozen. Our room overlooked a busy intersection to the west of the Liffey. We’d got water pistols to play with at a corner shop in Liverpool in case we got bored on the ferry. Annie found them in her bag when she pulled out her dry black sweater, or jumper, as my mind now automatically translated. We leaned out the window, spraying the buses below us until the drivers thought it was raining and turned on their windscreen wipers. Annie called it “playing God.”

  After another day in Dublin, we decided to take a train to Belfast. It was April 1981, and the civil war, aka the Troubles, was escalating in Northern Ireland as Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer Bobby Sands led a hunger strike against British authorities in Maze Prison. There was no escaping the violence as IRA and Ulster-loyalist paramilitary groups engaged in armed conflict.

  Annie and I didn’t have a particular agenda in mind. I was just curious to see Belfast for myself, loved the Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers, and didn’t realize that specific day would have any significance. As soon as we crossed the border into Northern Ireland, the train stopped, and British soldiers in green fatigues and flak jackets flooded our compartment waving giant automatic guns. We showed them our passports. Inadvertently, we had arrived in Belfast on the day Bobby Sands was elected to parliament from his prison cell.

  We stepped into a city smothered by rioting.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, just as Annie and I heard an explosion. The people around us scattered.

  “I don’t know. Oi, mate,” Annie caught the arm of someone running past us, “what’s happening?”

  “Bobby Sands was elected to parliament!” he shouted.

  “Are we hap
py or mad?” I looked around and couldn’t tell.

  Four bombs went off in the city that day, and it looked like the entire British army was there. Every time I turned a corner, I found myself staring down the barrel of an M-16. Annie said that was because the soldiers fixed their sites randomly on people who were passing, looking for terrorists. After a few blocks, I stopped worrying about getting my head shot off by mistake. “Guns in my face” was the situation, and I quickly adjusted my sense of reality to normalize that. Sometimes I think our adaptability might be a bad thing.

  The soldiers kept snapping our pictures. “I feel like a rock star,” Annie said.

  “‘The British army is waiting out there, an’ it weighs fifteen-hundred tons.’” I repeated that one line of the Clash song “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” until Annie gave me a jab in the shoulder.

  We were riot-hopping, following the noise from one riot to another, when some soldiers stopped us for interrogation. The soldier who searched me was suspicious when he saw my American passport. He said that Belfast was a strange place to come on holiday. I said if he thought that was strange, I was going to Iran and Afghanistan next. I thought Annie was going to bite off my head. She gave me a solid punch in the arm. “Jesus fucking Christ, this is not Disneyland.”

  I rubbed my arm. There was a woman with the pinkest hair I’d ever seen sitting in the rain on a bench in front of the city hall with its blue-green domes, her hair clashing with the nearby bright-red phone box. All of the shopping precincts had checkpoints where we were searched and asked to show our passports. Soldiers stopped Annie from taking a photo of tanks in the street. They didn’t want us photographing their equipment or them. I guess no one was supposed to know exactly what the British army was doing or how much of it had taken over the city. Soldiers cruised past us pointing submachine guns out the backs of their green Land Rovers.