by Orna Ross
"So what's the problem?" I ask. "I thought this was what you wanted."
"Reno Lewis," he groans. "Reno Lewis."
"I'm confused," I say. "Just who are you jealous of here?"
"I'm not jealous. You know I don't do jealous."
"You're doing a good impression."
"Come on, Squirrel, keep to your script. You're my buddy. You're supposed to pat my hand, tell me I've been wronged."
"I can't, you contrary old queen. For months, Gary has wanted you to be a couple and you insisted on your inalienable rights to visit the Glory Holes whenever you fancied. Now he's playing things your way and you're outraged."
"Ouch!" he winces.
"Why are you doing this, Richard? You two are so great together."
"And ouch again! Enough, Cruella."
Our waiter comes over, a new guy, dark hair in a pony tail, whiter than white teeth, very young. Richard and I exchange a look that says: nice, very nice. Richard has taught me how to admire men, how to look at them frankly, without fear. It helps when they are younger, as this one is. He takes our order and departs, the strings of his apron tied into a heart shape over his butt.
Richard sees me look and nudges me. "Eyes off, Squirrel, he's mine."
I groan out loud; he can always tell. "Aren't there any straight men left in this town?"
Richard laughs. I'll get no sympathy on that score, I know. And he's right, it is he who is in the minority, even here in San Francisco. I turn back to our conversation about Gary. "You know, Richard, you can't have everything."
"I don't want everything, O Heartless One. I only want..." He stops.
"Go on."
He looks over his shoulder. "Is this an X-rated restaurant?"
I laugh. "Come on, Richard, be serious. What is it that you want?"
"I am being serious. At least half the time —" he lowers his voice — 'I am the horniest man alive and all I want, all I think I'll ever want, is filthy, glorious, anonymous sex."
"And the other half?"
"The other half, I want what Gary and you and the rest of the goddamn world seems to think I should want: side-by-side TV dinners and hand-in-hand trips to the stores. Romance and undying love with one wonderful man."
"So-o-o-o, all you need is to find someone who understands all that and loves you anyway. Somebody who lets you be both."
"That's all, huh?"
"But, Richard, you have that. With Gary. At least, you had, if you haven't blown it. Your problem isn't that you want everything. It's that while you get one thing, you're longing for its opposite."
He picks up his napkin, and mine, stuffs one into each ear.
"I'm right, and you know it. While you're at home with Gary, you're wondering what's going on down the baths. After a few nights in the Glory Holes, you're thinking: what am I doing here when I could be home with that great guy of mine?"
He takes the napkins down. "While I'm at the Glory Holes, honey, thinking is about the only thing I'm not doing."
I giggle. "But I'm not altogether wrong, am I?"
"You're just telling me back what I already told you. I'm a condemned man. This isn't a phase: it's the story of my life."
He looks so miserable that I laugh. "Come on, aren't you the guy who told me that happiness is a decision?"
"Oh, that. I was only trying to cheer you up. You and I know better than that. Come on, could you ever be happy in Mucksville? Could I, in Telport?" Richard comes from a small town in the Midwest. For him, indeed for many of the people we know, home is a four-letter word.
"But we're not in Mucknamore or Telport any more," I say. "We're here, in one of the best towns in the world for people like us." I reach across and touch his hand. "Look, Richard, I just have to say one more thing, so you can't fool yourself that you don't know. If Gary wasn't scared of you leaving him, he would never have gone near this Reno Lewis. Gary is man enough to let you go prowling if that's what you need to do, once he can trust you to come home to him after you're done."
Our waiter friend comes across with our food. Richard throws him such heavy looks that the poor boy breaks into a blush.
"New to town?" Richard asks.
"Yeah."
"Just arrived from...?"
"Minnesota."
"Well, Minnesota, we'll have to show you around a little. What time do you get off?"
The boy looks uncertain. "Eleven."
"Great."
"Em, I'm not sure..."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Pardon me if you've got better plans."
"No, it's not...It's just..."
"Tell him, Squirrel. Tell him I don't bite."
"He doesn't bite." I say, flatly. The boy looks at me, then at Richard.
"Relax, Minnesota. This is a friendly town. I'll just take you around, introduce you to a few people."
"Okay." He flashes his perfect smile. "Yeah...why not?"
He goes off to attend someone else. Richard is jubilant. "Take that, pal Gary," he says, discreetly punching the air.
Coffee arrives via another waiter and I tell Richard my news. "I got a letter from Ireland today."
"No! Not from the immovable Mom?"
"From her representative, Sister Maeve. She's coming over here for a visit."
"This, I deduce from the droop of your chin, is not a good thing?"
"Oh, Richard, you know what she's like. She only wants to come here so she can have a good snoop around my life and tell me where I'm going wrong."
"That's what big sisters do, I guess."
"She's bringing Donal with her."
His eyebrows lift into a question.
"Her husband. A suit."
"Poor Squirrel. How long will they be here?"
"Two weeks," I wail. "What will I do with them for fourteen whole days and nights?"
"I'll help you."
"Oh...okay. Thanks."
He notices my hesitation. "Unless I'm one of the things in your life that you don't want her snooping around."
"Don't be silly, Richard. It's not you, it's them."
He shakes his head. "She's a big girl."
"Yeah, my big critical sister."
"If she wants to be critical, you can't stop her. Let her be critical."
I make a face. "Come on, what if it was your mother coming to see you?"
He shudders. "That's not too likely, praise be. She can't come because she hasn't told any of her cronies I live here. She's afraid they'll put two and two together and work out why I'm not married." He takes my hand. "Just be yourself, Squirrel. Stand tall."
"I can imagine what she'll say about teaching aerobics." I stick my nose up and imitate my sister's voice at its pickiest: "'I'm sure it's fun, Jo, but it's hardly a proper job, now is it?'"
"Let her come, let her think what she wants, then let her go home again. That's all you have to do."
Richard is the only person who understands why I left Mucknamore and never went back. Why I won't get in touch with my mother or grandmother if they won't contact me. I have told him everything. He lifts my fingers, brushes them with a kiss. "You know you're fabulous, darling. If the Mucksville contingent can't see that, it's their loss."
"Thank you.' I whisper. Then, lighter: "You're right, I am fabulous."
"You are. Too, too fabulous." He looks over my shoulder. "But now," he says, "it would appear that dessert is approaching."
I follow his eyes. Our waiter is crossing to our table, white apron gone. "I got off early," he says, sliding into the chair opposite, his skin glowing with youth and promise.
I get up, leave my half of the check on the table.
"Be nice to him, okay?" I whisper into Richard's ear as I kiss him goodnight. "He's sweet."
He answers me with a horrible leer.
"Night, night," I say, to them both. "Be good."
"Honey, you know I'm the best." His chuckle follows me out into the foggy evening.
San Francisco is my city. I knew that from the moment I arrived, from my v
ery first morning walking through Golden Gate Park, entranced by the smell of eucalyptus and sunny November skies. It was a Sunday, I remember, and the park was full of people, but it was big enough to hold us all. On my way in, I passed a circle of homeless men drinking cider around a set of bongo drums and a guitar. One of them lifted his can to me as I walked past. "You have a good one," he said, smiling, and I found myself smiling back. I couldn't help myself, he seemed so amiable. They all did, though there were eleven of them and only one of me. It was impossible to imagine passing a group of homeless men in London or Dublin and feeling so unthreatened.
I love this place, I found myself saying over and again, as I walked around it. Born out of gold and silver, built on a core of wild spending and carousing, this city that was never a small town but wild and lawless, gaudy and greedy, diverse and world famous, right from the start. In those early days I walked everywhere, getting to know my new city. The first year was difficult, hopping from job to dead-end job, apartment to dreary apartment, trapped inside a void left behind by alcohol's absence. For sanity's sake, I walked and walked — later, jogged — all around the city, up and down the unfeasible hills, through streets where music drummed out from under psychedelic blinds, through parks where grey-haired people went roller skating, through beaches where meditators worshipped the morning sun.
I revelled in the sunshine and also in the fogs that billowed in from the ocean, as if huffed through the Golden Gate by an unseen mouth. I came to love these fogs that shrouded me in a blanket of anonymity as I went, that ensured I never took the sun for granted.
I even came to love the city's faulty underpinnings: San Andreas and Hayward, San Gregorio, Greenville and Calaveras, and the earth shudders they threw up, always hinting towards the long-anticipated "Big One" that might come at any time and topple our town down on top of us, or trigger a tsunami out in the ocean, a tidal wave that would swell and swell as it swept in from the bay, rising taller than the bridges and skyscrapers it broke against, smashing them to smithereens and sweeping away the bits in its flow, like so many pebbles and twigs.
It was frightening to ponder it, especially downtown among the office towers. According to Richard, the risk of earthquake has all San Franciscans permanently on alert. With catastrophe ever imminent, better try whatever you fancy now or else die wondering. I don't fully buy the theory — I can't imagine Richard reining in his excesses, wherever he lived — but he brought me to believe in the value of vulnerability.
I hadn't been here long when I first heard the expression, "only in San Francisco." It came to be widely used afterwards — "only in Hollywood," people would say, or "only in Europe" – and usually used disparagingly, but I first heard it applied to the town I was beginning to own, and I took it as a tribute. So many things could, and did, happen only in San Francisco. This city had given the world beats and hippies, free love and flower power, multiculturalism and gay pride... Only in San Francisco, it seemed to me, was American can-do culture applied so vigorously to realms beyond the commercial.
It was on nights out with Richard that I first cracked open my inhibitions without alcohol. His frankness about matters sexual made me see how I had always stood at the border of my own desires, hesitating, playing safe, nursing my sexual disappointment while berating myself or my lover de jour. By example, Richard taught me to own my full self. By joking, he led me past fear and shame. "Forget what your mother told you about sex," he said. "Apply what she told you about olives instead."
Mrs D. never had anything to say to me about either, but I took the point: sex is an acquired taste and it takes several tries to know which particular flavours you enjoy. There are techniques and responses to learn, social as well as sexual skills to acquire. Richard showed me the way.
But it was the night he turned up at my house with his face disfigured by a gay bashing — for yes, even here in San Francisco there are bigots — that turned our affection for each other into something more. When I found him standing on my doorstep, pretending like he didn't care and brought him in to sit on my sofa and held him hard while he tried to stop his bruised face from creasing into tears, that was when I knew I loved him. With my new, San Franciscan, way of loving.
Susan I met later, and she forced herself on me. I was browsing in a bookshop when she came peering over the top of my book, two enormous brown eyes in a wide black face. "You don't want that," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"That." She pointed at the book I had in my hand: Woman's Words, Woman's Worlds. "You don't want it. It's just another whitey whine."
I pulled back from this intrusion, but she didn't seem to notice. "Trust me. This is the one you want." She held out another book to me. This Bridge Called My Back, it was called. Writings By Radical Women of Color.
I looked up at her. "No," I said. "I don't think so."
"Where are you from?"
"Ireland," I said, instantly regretting that I had answered. I decided to be rude and turned my back.
"I knew it," she said, coming round to my front. "I said so to myself when I saw you. But I'm reckoning on you being the right kind of Irish. That's why I'm saying to you that this here is the one you want." Again, she shoved the book towards me, and resisted as I tried to push it back. When I wouldn't take it from her hands, she carried it across to the checkout. "The lady will take this," she said, pointing across at me.
Now I was annoyed. I worked in a bar back then, a down-at-heel place where the tips were poor and given out once a week with our pay packs. That day I had less than $5 in my purse and, if I bought that book, I wouldn't eat again until payday.
Susan saw my expression and opened her purse. "Here." She handed $20 to the assistant.
"No," I protested "Stop."
"I'm making you do this, honey," Susan said, taking her change. "So don't waste no time feeling bad. But I do have a condition. You've got to call me when you've read it and tell me your opinion." She was writing down her number for me on the paper wrapping. "But you'll like it," she said, handing over the scrap of paper. "Yeah, I'm getting the feeling I know just what you like."
I caught the hint in her voice, enough to make me wonder if she meant what I later learned she did. By the time I knew for sure, I didn't recoil from the notion as I would have on that first day. By then, I knew Susan well enough to be glad that, if she had been mistaken in that, she was right about the book. And about lots of other things too.
It was a great book, just what I needed to read at that time. I had always held that any self-respecting woman had to be a feminist, and living in more than one place had taught me that each culture has its own particular ways of keeping its women under. Just as I was getting used to this idea of a pan-national, trans-historical sisterhood, the essays in this book — by Afro-, Asian-, Latin- and Native-American women — complicated that idea. The essays were eloquent, passionate and thought-provoking, and made me see how I benefited from having white skin. For the first time in my life, I saw myself as a person of relative privilege.
When I telephoned — or called, as I was learning to say — to tell Susan so, she squealed with delight. "I knew it," she cried, her voice an even deeper shade of chocolate over the telephone. "I knew you were the right kinda Irish."
I said, "I don't know what you mean by that."
"Your people come in two types, honey: those who pretend like there never was an attitude that said 'No Blacks, No Irish', the ones like to put as much distance as they can between their black brothers and sisters and their own white, lily-livered asses. Then there's the kind who've learned somethin' more from their own persecution than how to do the same thing to others."
Susan made me quail, still does. I've never had the energy, or maybe the courage, for her kind of stern, one-track anger. All my emotions are mixed. But we talked for a long time on the telephone that first evening and at the end of the call she asked if I would like to come with her on Monday night to Joni's, a woman-only health spa on Polk that hosted
CR sessions three times a week.
CR?
What? I had never heard of Consciousness-Raising? I was going to love it. They were a great group of women and they talked about everything, everything, exploring how their personal dilemmas were politically rooted. There used to be hundreds of such spaces all over this town, but in recent years, she didn't know why, they were closing down, little lights going out.
The spa was in what looked like an old factory building. There was no elevator and we walked up three flights of rickety stairs to be met at the top by a dainty Latina woman, about forty years old, wearing a buttonhole that said: Cunt Power! She hugged Susan and then they both turned to me and she said, "Welcome, Jo, I'm Dolores," and kissed my cheek. Her lips were dry, powdery, and she smelled of something herbal. "Susan has been telling me all about you."
The same smell permeated the lemon-and-lavender-striped corridor they steered me through. "Susan tells me you liked Bridge," Dolores said, taking my arm.
"Yes."
"I'm so glad. It's a really seminal book, I think."
"Shouldn't that be 'ovumnal', sweetheart?" Susan called from behind us.
"Hey, that's a great word," smiled Dolores over our shoulders. "Ovumnal. I love that." She turned back to me. "Have you ever done a naked consciousness-raising before, Jo?"
"Naked?"
"Oh, sorry," said Susan, breaking into peals of laughter behind us. "Did I not mention the naked?"
"Please do not mind her, Jo." Dolores's arm locked mine, propelled me onwards. "It is all very non-threatening. Very gentle and supportive. The idea is we present ourselves to each other in all our vulnerability. We take off our inhibitions with our clothes."
In the spa room, three women were already in the jacuzzi pool. "This is Gloria," said Dolores. "And Zoe. And Arlene. Women, this is Jo."
"Hi, Jo," the three responded, together.
Gloria was fortyish and black, Zoe was my age, white with dreadlocked hair, and Arlene, also white, was much older than the rest. That was all I had time to notice as Dolores led us through to the dressing room. In the time it took me to hang my jacket on the hook and unzip my bag, Susan had her clothes off and was parading around the dressing room, her towel trailing from her fingers. The vast expanse of her body drew me out of my own self-consciousness. Furrows of fat cascaded from beneath the bowls of her breasts. Her girth was frightening, each thigh the size of an average waist. She seemed like a parody of a fat woman, the sort you see in cartoon postcards, with feet that looked too small to support her. Gross and magnificent, she postured around the room.