Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  TRACK 10 City of the Dead

  I hadn’t done anything about the war in Vietnam as a child except for scrounging for change amid the wreckage of the Bank of America building that had been blown up in my hometown. I felt very strongly that the AIDS crisis was my war and I had a moral obligation to do something about it. I joined the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power in Washington, DC. As an AIDS activist, I punctuated my studies and teaching with arrests for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. This did not always make me popular.

  The day I attended an ACT UP demonstration at the White House, the air was crisp, and the sky was blue. After chaining myself to the White House fence, I just hung there for hours, watching tourists with their hot dogs, sodas, and ice cream bars, their maps open to historic, downtown Washington, DC. I tried welcoming them to the crack-and-murder capital of the United States, but they had come for the Jacqueline Kennedy furniture, not an ACT UP demonstration.

  I didn’t want to ruin the moment. After all, they’d walked past a lot of homeless people to get here. The poor slept on grates near the US Treasury and across the street in the People’s Protest Park. They were everywhere, but if you planned it well and tilted your head acrobatically, you could manage to act like you didn’t see them.

  Even though it took all day for the police to cut us down, no one seemed to think AIDS activists hanging in front of the White House was a scenic photo opportunity. We weren’t on the postcards. We were shouting, “Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS! The government has blood on its hands!”

  The police cut me down and I went limp, falling to the ground in a heap like I had no bones to hold me up. I was an expert at nonviolent civil disobedience. This was my fifth arrest with ACT UP. My first had been in 1987 at the Supreme Court after the second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. Now I dressed almost exclusively in black: heavy black shoes, black jeans, black ACT UP T-shirt, and my black ACT UP cap. The only alteration to my uniform was when I wore a white ACT UP T-shirt instead. Whatever I did, I looked like I was doing it on black-and-white television.

  I made the cops carry me to the police van. I didn’t blame them for getting grumpy, but we each had a job to do. Swinging between two policemen with my chin just high enough to avoid scraping the pavement, I could see the other protesters waving brilliant green-and-pink ACT UP posters. They were pictures of Ronald Reagan’s face with the word “AIDSgate” stamped across his big green forehead and had the rebellious beauty of the first Sex Pistols album. He looked like Herman from the TV show The Munsters. His eyes were neon pink, and the smaller text read, “Genocide of All Non-whites, Non-males, and Non-heterosexuals . . . Silence = Death.” I had one of those posters hanging in my apartment, and it glowed in the dark. I used it as a nightlight.

  Alone in my holding cell, I felt my heartbeat slow down. My anxiety took a vacation when I was confined, and I didn’t feel depressed. I felt proud. At the university I had given up trying to explain that it was possible to be a punk, a feminist, and a lesbian all at the same time. I was tired of being treated like I was ideologically deranged.

  The cops pushed a woman who was obviously high on something, probably crack, into my cell. She was wearing an unzipped, torn, white leather skirt and a fake fur coat over just a bra. She sat next to me on the metal bed.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  I cleared my throat. “I chained myself to the White House fence to protest the government’s policies on AIDS.”

  She smiled at me, nodding out.

  I wasn’t completely clear on holding-cell etiquette and didn’t know if I should ask her what she’d done when I was pretty sure I knew. But I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t interested. I remembered that the politically correct term for “prostitute” was “sex industry worker.”

  “What are you in here for?” I asked, putting on my politest, most ingratiating smile.

  She looked at me like I was totally crazy. “Baby, I’m a hooker.”

  TRACK 11 White Riot

  The police made everyone who was going to be transferred to Central Cell Block stand up against the wall. Central Cell Block was the one place in DC that everyone–cops, criminals, lawyers, hookers, activists–told you not to end up. It was the dirtiest, most disgusting lock-up in the city.

  The other ACT UP protesters had already been processed, and I was the only one left. A tall cop in a huge, metallic-blue cop coat turned me around to cuff me. She said, “Girl, what the hell are you doing here? You don’t belong here.”

  I looked around the room. I’d never felt so white in my life. In racist DC, the prison population is mostly black. I said defensively, “I belong here as much as anyone. I broke the law. I have a right to be here.” I wished I could switch myself off like a light bulb.

  Later, when I related this story to an African American friend, she said, “You have the right to be there? They’re probably still talking about you! ‘Remember that white girl who said she has the right to be here?’” And she dissolved into laughter.

  When the Central Cell Block cops arrived, a large male officer checked one man’s handcuffs and bellowed, “This isn’t the way we cuff people in Central Cell Block.” He and his cadre took off everyone’s handcuffs and put them on again tight.

  I said to the extra-tall female officer who cuffed me, “Aren’t you gonna ask me my safe word?”

  All around me, people screamed for their cuffs to be loosened, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want anyone to see me squirm. The Central Cell Block cops herded about fifteen of us into a police van divided into two narrow sections by a metal partition. They crammed the men in one side and the women in the other. I slid in first along the bench, my face almost touching the wall in front of me. I pulled up my feet and slammed my monkey boots into the small, plastic window that separated me from the backs of the officers’ heads in the front seat. As I did, I had a vision of the dark-haired woman in my head in her monkey boots.

  The only time I saw my women these days was when I was at an ACT UP demonstration. It was the one unselfish thing I was doing. The rest of the time I focused on myself and my future “career” as a university professor, and this violated a sense of morality we shared. I thought about Gertrude Stein saying in Lectures in America that the writer can either serve God or Mammon. I assumed that this was true for musicians and English lit majors, too. In graduate school, I was serving Mammon.

  The cops drove us into an underground parking garage and left us there. It was hot in the van, and I imagined myself dead and forgotten somewhere along the Potomac. I hadn’t been able to feel my hands for a while, the plastic flex-cuffs cutting into my skin, and I worried about the blood not reaching them. I closed my eyes and tried to quell my worst OCD fear that my hands were coming off. Dead but proud, I assured myself. To keep myself from panicking, I often pictured myself dead rather than mutilated. I saw myself locked up and lost in the system. I thought of an old Clash song: “I got nicked fighting in the road / the judge didn’t even know / what’s my name!”

  I thought about Patty Hearst locked up in a closet and raped repeatedly by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Next to that, I had nothing to complain about, and I tried to contain my claustrophobia. Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people, I thought, remembering an old SLA slogan. The only punk song I knew that mentioned the SLA was “The American in Me” by the San Francisco group, the Avengers. After I was sure we’d used up our entire air supply, the cops finally opened the back of the van and let us out.

  I was the only white person in Central Cell Block. A huge woman behind the desk shouted at us, “You’re in my house now.” My handcuffs were removed, and I was put into a small cell. Left to myself, I evaluated the marks on my wrists and a welcoming committee of cockroaches. The paint on the bars was a filthy, peeling-off, puke green.

  At least while I was in custody, I could re
lax because everything was out of my control. My mental problems peaked during graduate school. Instead of merely being paranoid and thinking that people were judging me all the time, people were judging me all the time. I was in a constant state of anxiety, and even when I stood still, I felt like I was running. My intrusive thoughts intruded even deeper into my head. And I only felt like I caught up with my real self when I was sitting in a cell. I sat on the upper metal bunk, the one without the thin, roach-stained mattress, and felt temporarily at peace.

  TRACK 12 Nobody’s Hero

  In the midst of guilt and angst over my runaway grad-school ego and impending exams, I had to go to court for refusing to leave the office of Jesse Helms, the biggest homophobe in the Senate, until he agreed to resign. If I pled guilty to “demonstrating in a capitol building without a permit,” the “unlawful entry” charge would be dropped. When it was my turn, the judge reminded me that the charge carried a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a five-hundred-dollar fine. I wondered if I could write my dissertation in jail. I had already started collecting subscription information for feminist journals that are “free to women in prison.”

  The judge said, “I’ll give you six mo–” then paused and rubbed his head. I think he was playing with me. “No, wait. I’ll sentence you to thirty days. Thirty days, execution suspended.”

  Oh my God! I thought, hearing the word “execution.” He can’t do that. I tried to catch my lawyer’s eye. Surely we’re going to appeal this. The judge is obviously insane. He can’t give me the death penalty for civil disobedience. “Execution suspended.” Christ, I’m gonna hang by the neck until dead. “I sentence you to thirty days suspended sentence and six months unsupervised probation.” I finally understood what he was saying.

  I’d never been on probation before. I couldn’t get arrested again for six months or I’d automatically go to jail for thirty days, like landing on the wrong square in Monopoly. I would sit in my room listening to the Clash sing “Police on my Back.” If anyone tried to arrest me, I’d have to say, “Excuse me, but you’re fucking up my probation.”

  I was tired of living in the crack-and-murder capital. As I lay on the living room floor with my arms over my head while two armed men ran up my street from the local drug dealers’ corner, I thought about where my life had taken me. I was still in America and, while I loved the challenge of literary scholarship, wasn’t sure I wanted to be an academician.

  But school helped me maintain my sanity. I never taught two days in a row, and my seminars were in the late afternoons and evenings. I had enough of a gap between responsibilities to recover from nights I couldn’t sleep and times I was too anxious to function. This was crucial for me in managing my symptoms. And for some reason when I’m having a nervous breakdown, I read voraciously.

  Being at the university allowed me to have an identity I could live with (“I’m a graduate student, not a mentally ill person who cannot hold down a full-time job”), a purpose (“I’m working on my doctorate and moving forward with my life, not stagnating in mental illness”) and more time to play guitar than I would have had with regular employment. Why didn’t I get a music degree instead? I didn’t want to study music. I just wanted to play it.

  The academic lifestyle also gave me the freedom to practice my politics. I burned American flags without worrying about being thrown out of the English department. That wasn’t a violation of my probation yet. I burned flags at Union Station, at the Capitol, at home, and at barbecues. I lit a cigarette on a burning American flag in front of a television news camera at an ACT UP demonstration downtown, standing next to the then-director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Urvashi Vaid. Soon it wasn’t enough, and I feared I’d get a flag-a-day habit.

  I burned a flag in the park across the street from the White House in 1991 during a parade to show off weapons from the Persian Gulf War. It was the same year Nirvana released their CD Nevermind. The parade route had to be repaved because the tanks were so heavy they wrecked the road. I think it cost about a million dollars, and they only fixed the street because it went past the government buildings. The thing about Washington, DC is that you can live in the worst housing project slum—gunshots, crack houses, liquor stores, and lottery tickets—and still have an amazing view of the Capitol. At night, it gleams like clean, white bones.

  I used to drive over a hill through a drug-and-gang-infested section of New York Avenue and look at the Capitol past the pink neon sign of a very dangerously situated motel. I thought of how Patti Smith had once described the nation’s capital: “It’s the color of fucked.” This was my favorite spot because it epitomized the breach between life in the real world and the federal government. I doubted even Moses could cross that Red Sea.

  Sometimes I drove through Capitol Hill to a lesbian dive called The Phase. It could be a beautiful spring day on Capitol Hill, the ritzy, rich-people area behind the Capitol, but in just one block, the carefully manicured rowhouse gardens of daffodils, tulips, crocuses, rhododendrons, and cherry blossoms ended. The brightly lit corner markets and people in expensive coats walking their small dogs were suddenly gone.

  The next block was a war zone of gutted crack houses sitting in scraggly patches of black-eyed Susans, the brilliant yellow flowers growing up against cardboard windows. The abundance of liquor stores and shops pushing lottery tickets, the poor person’s version of the American dream, reminded me of the Dead Kennedys song “Kill the Poor.”

  The day I burned the American flag at the glorification-of-the-Persian-Gulf-War-and-buried-alive-Iraqi-children parade, there were about ten of us protesting, surrounded by a million white Republicans. I dumped nail polish remover on the flag and dropped a lit match on it. I looked up in time to see a mob of angry white men running toward me. I held out my receipt, screaming, “It’s my property! Burn, baby, burn!” They chased me all the way to the Metro station. Just when I thought they were going to kill me over a four-dollar piece of cloth, they turned back and threw themselves on the flag. You’d think Betsy Ross had sewn it personally.

  I’d heard of “suicide by cop” before, someone who gets herself killed on purpose by forcing the police to shoot her in the commission of a crime. I wondered if I’d almost committed “suicide by Republican.”

  TRACK 13 Staring at the Rude Boys

  By the time I defended my dissertation, I was so exhausted by depression and anxiety I could barely function. I just wanted to be a punk musician. That was the only thought that brought me any comfort. After a brief stint in a mental hospital—that’s Dr. Crazy to you—where I was once again improperly medicated and misdiagnosed, I fled east-coast academia and went back to California.

  With my PhD in English and American literature, I was working as a telephone psychic and writing anti-Taliban songs for RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Located across the border in Pakistan, RAWA provided schools, hospitals, work programs, and food for Afghan refugees and ran secret literacy classes for women and girls inside Afghanistan. But after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration started bombing Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom. I’d never thought of freedom as something to be endured before. And suddenly writing songs for Afghan women while I was living in the United States didn’t make sense anymore. When the Patriot Act was passed, curtailing civil liberties, I made sure my passport was valid.

  Before being fired from a previous job at a residential facility for schizophrenics, where hearing voices isn’t such a big deal, I’d been reading through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s bible, trying to figure out why I was still suicidal on antidepressants. But the copy in our office was an old version. Then I got hold of the new edition in my never-ending quest to find out what was wrong with me. I’d never seriously considered OCD before because I had none of the stereotypical symptoms. I didn’t wash my hands fifty thousand times a day or freak o
ut if my possessions weren’t all facing in the right direction. I was perennially disorganized and untidy. But with the fourth edition of the DSM, there was more of an emphasis on ritualistic thought, not just behavior, and mental acts counted as much as physical ones. People with OCD could be tortured by endless intrusive thoughts and be compelled to neutralize them by praying every waking minute. Not only time-consuming, it could be completely disabling.

  I asked my psychiatrist for Prozac, which wasn’t a cure but was sometimes effective in lessening OCD symptoms. Being the only psychiatrist I’d ever had who actually listened to me and valued my opinion, he gave it to me. And on the tenth day of my new regimen, I woke up and my head seemed strangely quiet. It was as sudden and as simple as that. I still had intrusive thoughts that I had to neutralize, but now I had times when I wasn’t crushed by torpor or anxiety. It might sound ridiculous, but the sky seemed bluer. It was like coming out of an extended coma. I still had trouble falling asleep, but most nights I did sleep eventually. And I was relieved to discover, as I’d always known, that the women in my head didn’t disappear with the advent of proper medication. I couldn’t explain them, but they were not a symptom of mental illness. I still processed my thoughts the same OCD way, but the Prozac had taken a bit of the edge off. Even with the lingering symptoms, I felt better than I had since the year I lived in England. This was a big adjustment, and I felt like I was constantly on vacation from myself. Not in a self-hating way but in a good way. It was like someone had taken a hose and washed off the entire world.