I heard a snap, looked down, and saw that I’d broken a pencil clutched in my fist. I should make up my mind, I thought, before some kind of political violence crossed my path. If push came to shove, what would I do?
The Women’s Saloon & Parlor, located on the rumbled block of 4900 Fountain Avenue in East Hollywood, was fast becoming the new hangout of L.A. lesbian feminists. A relatively unknown redhead named Colleen McKay had opened the place on behalf of the Feminist Research & Reading Society who wrote on the sidewalk advertisement board that the new restaurant was “a way to invade society and create a place that reinforces what feminists believe.” No one knew any of these researching society-mates of Colleen’s, except her eccentric artist lover Sidra, but after Colleen announced that she had sold her Jag to buy a proper stove for the restaurant, everyone simply referred to her as the owner.
The eatery was a cavernous room decorated to look like the offspring of a fifties diner mated with a hippie coffeehouse. Twenty mismatched wood tables were flanked by assorted chairs that looked like they’d been pulled, two at a time, from various garage sales between Beverly Hills and Orange County. The walls were thinly whitewashed with patches of brick and concrete poking through. A periwinkle hand-painted quote from one of Judy Grahn’s poems {3}was lettered on a wall. The words, “the common woman is as common as the best of bread, and will rise,” greeted each woman as she walked in. Men, common or exalted, were not allowed.
I strode toward the bar cocky and sure. No men was fine with me; walking into women only places—like the Woman’s Building and the Westside Women’s Center—made me feel proud. We’d carved these safe houses out of parts of the city discarded by men and capitalism. It was one thing to work with gay men politically, but socially they had their turf and we had ours.
Leaning against the bar’s long solid wood counter, I canvassed the tables, glad that I’d arrived before Rachel. I positioned myself so that I could see her come through the front door. I’d pick her up at the entrance. That made it somewhat like a date.
A tape of mixed music, now playing Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” was on full blast. Perhaps Rachel and I would dance—a good excuse to touch her.
“I’ll take a Coke, with lots of ice,” I said to the flannel-shirted bartender who looked eighteen.
“Comin’ at ya,” she replied.
I turned back to the crowd and watched Pody serving three tables full of GCSC fired employees and our supporters. They were ordering off a calligraphied menu which bore condiments such as “handmade mayonnaise with fresh herbs from The Yellow Brick Road” and tofu in many different incarnations. Under the menu’s logo, it said the Saloon featured “gentle spirits, art, crafts, plants, and etcetera.”
Pody and I saw less of each other now that we were no longer working together. I wanted to go over and say hello but hesitated. Sometimes I thought Pody flirted with me and it made me uncomfortable. It’s not like butches never crossed the line and slept with one another; feminism insinuated that butch/femme pairing was heterosexist. To be truly egalitarian butches should sleep with butches, and femmes with femmes. A ridiculous conclusion, I thought, twirling the ice cubes in my glass. No wonder everyone was having “short meaningful relationships.”
I also resisted the urge to approach Pody because she was serving June’s table and I didn’t want another argument tonight with my orange-headed nemesis. The Gay/Feminist 11 and the protest against GCSC had become a hugely popular, community-wide issue. The Saloon’s staff wanted to make it policy not to serve anyone who voiced support of GCSC.
Ever the Latina charmer, Pody, now happily single, seemed to be flirting with everyone. Now she stopped at another table, leaned over, and flirted with a woman with a sweet smile who looked something like BeJo. Watching her intently, a new possibility dawned on me—maybe it wasn’t Rachel or me that Pody was interested in—maybe it was BeJo. Perhaps that’s why I’d heard a particular undertone in her voice when she pronounced BeJo’s nickname. And, BeJo had referred to Pody as “that cute blonde butch friend” of mine. Suddenly, it clicked! Yes, BeJo and Pody. I no longer needed a thermometer to define the warm air rising between them. And yes, I’d feel less guilty about Rachel if BeJo found someone to date. Maybe she’d be happier with me if she were happy, part time of course, with someone else.
I turned back to the bar and ordered another Coke. Penny had warned me that I might have to work later tonight, so no beer for me. A certain high level Freep source might call her for a last-minute interview with a particular friend who was coming into town. I didn’t want anything to encroach on with my time with Rachel, but I also didn’t want to jeopardize the interview. Politics never took a backseat to date night.
Energy shifted in the room, and I turned to see Rachel. She strolled through the door confidently, clothed in a powder blue V-neck and tight black jeans. I watched the silver of her hooped earrings catch a reflection from the ceiling’s galvanized pipe, and saw to my delight that she wore the Rita Mae Brown “Army of Lovers” pin from my jacket that I’d left in lieu of a note the other night at Effie Street.
Rachel’s eyes swept the room and I waited, flushed with pride that it was me she sought. Finally, I called out to her. As she approached me her face was radiant. “Hi, babe,” she whispered and came in close to kiss my cheek.
I reached out, and she slid into my arms. ‘“Babe’? How sexist!” I teased. Her skin felt like the finely brushed Egyptian cotton I’d once felt on an expensive set of sheets.
Rachel tucked her head into my neck and planted a string of kisses along my collarbone. “Perfect fit,” she repeated, allowing her head to rest on my shoulder.
“We can’t just stand here making out,” I said, embarrassed.
“Do you want to go back to my place now?”
“I thought you wanted a proper date?”
“That was before I touched you.” She laughed.
“There you are!” Pody pounced on us, grabbing Rachel out of my arms. “There’s trouble in the kitchen,” she said. “We need you, Rachel!”
The Saloon was a do-it-yourself café. Customers were supposed to go get their own silverware, napkins, coffee and ice water from a common side table. It didn’t hurt to bring a sandwich if one was hypoglycemic or otherwise impatient. Pody had told me that tempers had flared the first couple of nights over the almost nonexistent service.
I ambled back to the bar counter, wondering what level of crisis would keep Rachel and for how long. I wanted to find us seats at the tables, but June was still over there, with her new loud supporter, Dixie Youts. After the last Gay/Feminist 11 meeting, I’d realized that June and I came from two different worlds. I had five years working in the gay and lesbian movement alongside gay men. My newer identity as a lesbian feminist wasn’t going to erase that. What world did June and the others came from that made it okay to close down a Center serving homosexuals? If she meant what she said, her politics would never fly with me.
Rachel’s return interrupted my thoughts. “Come back to me,” she said.
“Did you solve your crisis?”
She picked up a menu from the counter and pointed to an item that read, Rachel’s Lentil Curry.
“Far out! You’ve already made headlines.”
“They couldn’t find the curry powder,” she explained. “And then I got called into a debate with the waiters who were arguing about whether it was sexist, or not, to serve Sweet’N Low because it implies that women should be thin.”
The music started up again with a slow one from Carole King’s “Tapestry,” an album that seemed to be playing everywhere these days.
“Dance with me,” I said, pulling Rachel toward the makeshift dance floor between the tables.
She snuggled close. “When I came back, what were you thinking about?”
“June, and GCSC, the protest and Morris Kight.” I said.
Rachel’s eyebrows arched in surprise.
“He used to call me all the time, but does
n’t anymore,” I said. “My real father doesn’t talk to me since he found out I’m gay. Not that we were close before that, but I can’t go home anymore to see my younger sibs. Morris has been like a father to me.” Intimate words seem to fall from my mouth when I was around Rachel. Why did I trust her so easily?
“This fight with GCSC must hurt you more deeply than you’ve let on.”
“Maybe so.” I looked away from her. “Morris is a swishy fag and I’m a butch dyke. We both stand for freedom to exist outside our gender roles. Hell, I’m one of his protégées.” I turned back to look behind Rachel’s eyes, wondering why she cared.
“Since you weren’t close to your Dad, were you and your mother close?”
“On a surface level, no.” I shrugged. “Yet on a psychic level she can read me. Every time I’m really down, somehow she knows it and calls. But she can’t seem to figure out whether to relate to me like a daughter or a son. So that’s been awkward. I didn’t see much of her growing up. There were twelve of us so I kind of got lost in the crowd.”
“Good Lord!” Rachel gasped. “You have eleven brothers and sisters?”
“Hey, the music stopped playing,” I stepped away from Rachel.
She brought me back close and whispered, “I want to know who you are, Jeanne. Whatever you tell me is between us.”
Her body pressed against mine and I let myself relax into her.
“So what do you want to know about me that hasn’t been garbled by my reputation?”
“I did hear on the grapevine that you used to be a nun?”
I winced, and pulled back. I knew the rumor was out there but I rarely spoke of my spiritual life, God or the convent to activist friends. I wanted to slap myself upside the head for all but inviting her into this topic. “Yes, that’s true.” I managed a tight grin. “Never took final vows to become a full-fledged woman of the cloth, but I did enter the convent right out of high school. In fact the novitiate radicalized me.”
“Why on earth did you want to be a nun?” she prodded.
“I was a simple parochial kid from a medieval Catholic family. Loving God or perhaps Mary a little too much was my real and only motivation.” I laughed at my own Virgin joke, hoping to distract Rachel.
“Then what happened, why did you leave…what do they call it…religious life?”
I smiled at Rachel’s use of the correct term, and wondered how or why she’d studied Catholicism.
“I managed to make one crucial, though accidental, decision that directed the course of my future life as well as the exit from the one I was living. Have you ever heard of the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns?”
“Yes, I have read about them! They were a very pro-feminist and radical order, correct?”
“That’s my order, yes, and proud of it!” I nodded, pleased that she knew. “I almost went into the cloistered Carmelites, but back in ‘sixty-six the IHM’s were thought to be liberal, even radically so about supporting the modernization of the Church by the Vatican II Council. When I was at the novitiate, a group of priests were suddenly coming to Montecito and teaching us one-shot classes about the Viet Nam war and our duties to go into ‘work in the vineyards of the Lord’ –which meant in the ghettos among the poor. So they sent me to the vineyard of Watts the following year. But later I realized there was something surreptitious about these theologians who would suddenly drop into our sacred off-limits grounds—teach—and be gone a few days later. Years after I left, I put those teachers’ names together with my new political knowledge and I realized they were radical anti-war activists, priests like the Berrigan brothers or laymen being hunted by the FBI over war or race issues.”
“Your timing is rather amazing. I’m so jealous,” Rachel bubbled in my arms.
“It wasn’t all exciting new thoughts. Falling out of love with God, falling in love with Mother Superior’s lay friend, Connie, learning about the international hypocrisy of the Holy Roman Church and how it wouldn’t let the IHM sisters become feminists or modernize, or go out and correct the grossness of poverty, racism, and dead boy soldiers shown on TV every night…”
“You’re still angry after all these years?”
I stopped talking. Rachel was right. I hadn’t really come to terms with those radicalizing years, not spiritually.
A silence followed us around the dance floor.
“Do you ever miss the convent?” my new lover asked.
Shocked, I lost my step and landed a foot on hers. “I never thought about it,” I lied, then paused. “I guess once you’ve heard the call you never get over it.”
“By ‘it’ do you mean God?”
“Yes, he was the It of it. Although it feels strange now to use the masculine pronoun. But, yes. It was an intimate love. My mother taught me how to have a personal relationship with God. I’m finding that’s a rare knowledge.”
Rachel stroked my neck intently, her roughened fingers familiar. “I experienced a personal relationship with God…when I was studying Buddhism. I wanted for years to become a Buddhist nun.”
“Really?” It was happening again. When Rachel and I were together secrets seemed to come out as if they had been laying in wait. “Why didn’t you enter an ashram?”
My new lover sighed. “Eventually I shrugged it off as a teenage phase. My mother the atheist would have had a stroke if I’d mentioned it out loud.”
“We never would have met with both of us behind the walls,” I said, kissing her eyebrow gently.
“I love your hands on me,” she said. Her eyes were half-closed with happiness.
Out of nowhere, Pody reappeared. “Phone call for you, Córdova,” she said, slapping me on the back. “You can take it in the kitchen.”
“Back in a minute, sweetheart,” I said to Rachel, knowing that the phone call had to be from Penny. I’d had to give my editor the Saloon’s number. Fuck; I didn’t want to leave Rachel.
As I walked to the kitchen, it occurred to me that I’d called her sweetheart. The word had simply fallen out of my mouth. Tonight’s date was being unexpectedly intimate. That scared me, but I wasn’t ready for the night to end.
“Penny?” I barked into the receiver.
“Yes, it’s me,” Penny replied. “Thank God, I found you. Our source, Donald Freed, finally called. His source is in town and wants you to meet him tonight.”
Freed, a playwright and an investigative journalist who’d just co-authored Agony in New Haven: the Trial of Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party, was a known associate of radical Leftists, including some who were fugitives. Two weeks earlier The Freep’s City Editor, Tom Thompson, who’d been doing a series of articles about CRIC, the Citizens Research & Investigation Committee, and its discovery of LAPD secret spying squads, had told Penny that Donald Freed had a fugitive comrade who wanted a meeting with the paper. Freed’s source had asked for me, by name, to do the story. I’d promised Penny I’d be available, whenever and wherever. There’d be no second chance.
“When?” I asked Penny, hoping I’d misheard.
“Tonight. Now.”
“Fuck, Penny,” I whined. “I’m in the middle of a very important date.”
“Fugitives can’t wait, Córdova. I’ve got the directions. I don’t want to give them to you over the phone. Are you sober enough to drive to the office, pick them up, and then go do the interview?”
“Of course I’m sober, Penny. I never drink on the job. But when I see this Freed I’ll give him a piece of my mind for his outrageous interruption.”
Penny paused, wondering if I was being facetious.
“Then, I’ll see you in a few minutes?”
“You’re at the office this late?”
“I’ve been waiting for his call. This is important, Córdova.”
I hung up. Damn the revolution! It was making mincemeat of my personal life.
Rachel was at the counter talking with the bartender when I returned to her.
“Who was that?” she asked. I could already
see the hurt in her eyes.
“My editor,” I said gently, as I pulled her away from the bar.
“Oh, just your editor,” she said, relaxing into my arms. “So...can we go home now?”
“Not really.” I paused. “Remember when I said I might have to do an emergency interview later tonight? Well, later is now. I have to go cover a story.”
“Cover a story at eleven o’clock on a Friday night?”
“Someone very important just came into town.”
“Meaning I’m not?” Rachel took her arm off my shoulder and walked back to the bar. “Another beer. To go,” I heard her order.
Her switch from intimate to chilly took me off guard, but I followed her and hugged her, pressing my chest against her back, and whispered gently, “It’s with someone running from the cops. That’s why I had no warning.”
She turned to face me. “So it’s really not someone else you’re seeing?”
“God no! I was digging being with you tonight.”
“Really?” She turned and started to walk away toward the kitchen. “Even straight men limit themselves to one lover per night,” she shot back over her shoulder.
I was shocked. My new lover really hated surprises. One moment she was supportive, the next moment, furious.
“The woman is pissed with you,” Pody said to me as I turned to leave. ”You’ll do serious time behind this one.”
When We Were Outlaws Page 16