Rachel clasped my hand tightly, even as she held Delene with her other hand. “Don’t leave,” she whispered in my ear. “We need more time together.”
“I won’t. I’ll make the calls using your phone.” I smiled at her before going to the living room.
As I left I overheard Delene crying, “I’m so scared they’re going to fire me next for being friends with you.”
Thirty minutes later I hung up on my last call. I’d spoken to our lawyer, Sylvia Patton, and the other strike leaders, June included. We had all agreed—GCSC was not going to get away with stopping the picket line. We had agreed to call everyone in the community and meet in front of the Center in two hours. We’d show them a picket line longer and louder than it had ever been!
I was about to reenter the kitchen when I heard Delene’s voice whispering to Rachel. “Just be careful. You seem to be getting in pretty deep with Córdova. She’s never with one woman for very long.”
My feet stopped.
I heard Rachel answer, “It’s too late, Delene. I’m already in love with her.”
I grinned from ear to ear. So just trot yourself home, Delene.
She continued to Rachel. “Others think you might be too influenced by her politically, but I don’t care about the politics. I just don’t want you to be left with your heart on your sleeve.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rachel answered. “I know what I’m doing, and I’m proud to be with her, especially politically. The others can keep their opinions to themselves.”
I heard chairs move, but decided not to go in and say good-bye to Delene. The door opened and closed. Seconds later, Rachel rushed into the living room and jumped into my arms.
“I’m so glad you’re staying,” she said.
I kissed her long and deep. “Have I told you that you make me very happy?” I bit her softly on the ear.
“Come back to bed with me.”
“We can’t yet,” I said, sad about the loss of an afternoon in bed with Rachel. “I just called half the town and they’re calling the other half. We’ve marshaled a double-down session this afternoon on the line to show our defiance. You and I have to be there.”
As Lionheart pulled to the Highland Avenue curb, Rachel and I saw the picket line already in full swing. The circle was packed much tighter than usual. Women, and more men than I’d ever seen on the line, were bumping into each other. I counted almost fifty bodies. Smelling the sweat of acrid anger, I heard the chanting, “What do we want? Close it down! When do we want it? Now!” An Afro-headed lesbian in denim and work boots hoisted a fresh red painted placard. “Say NO to the Gay Community Scabbing Center,” it read. A long-haired hippie fag dressed in a flowing gauzy skirt was on top of the news and mood of the day. His sign shouted, “No Injunction Will Stop Us!” Among the men, I saw a number in black T-shirts and figured they must be from Michael Weinstein’s group. Weinstein, a fiery, quick-talking, ex-New Yorker in his twenties was the head of a new gay socialist organization. He and a few of his radical sidekicks from the Lavender and Red Union had recently come to support us. The strike was becoming a national cause célèbre among gay socialists in the country. It was the gay movement’s first labor confrontation. And, goddess help us, the last, I swore under my breath.
I was relieved to also see radical dykes from the Westside Women’s Center, bringing plenty of additional women’s bodies. Their bell-bottom jeans, beaded earrings and necklaces, and Birkenstock sandals, were easy to spot. I greeted the leadership of the Westside Center. Their presence felt heartening to me. I let go of Rachel’s hand and lock-stepped into the circle, and raised my fist in time with the chants.
Suddenly, an elderly gay man opened the front door of GCSC and poked his head out. He stared at us for a long while, his expression confused and befuddled, as if to say, “What does this mean?”
A Tide staffer, a socialist feminist who worked with BeJo in circulation, responded by walking up to him and sticking her banner “Sexist Board Has Got To Go” in his face. I broke out in an anxious sweat. If the courts shut the picket line down, where would all this rage go? And if GCSC closed down, where would people like this elderly gay man go?
Two hours passed under the flat summer sun. The sizzle from the sidewalk made its way up through our boots and sandals as if trying to further fuel the line’s rage. Suddenly the mood picked up. I heard chatter, felt ripples of anxiety. Morris Kight was approaching the building from the south end parking lot. Shit! The picket line had finally caught the Chairman of the Board, between us and his own front door.
As he came toward us wearing his usual baggy slacks and thrift store shirt, silver hair pasted to his forehead, I had a moment of dissonance. I felt as though I didn’t know this man. Yet it had always been Morris and me concocting civil disobedience, staging demonstrations on the steps of the Park Center headquarters. It was Morris and me attending each other’s birthday parties, which always turned into movement fundraisers. Christ! I knew the names of each tree in his McCadden Place memorial garden, each named after an historical figure like Oscar or Eleanor.{1} Somewhere and somehow Morris’s politics had changed and somehow I had missed it. The founder of L.A.’s Gay Liberation Front—named in solidarity with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front—had left his radical roots. He’d sold out, left the ranks of the oppressed and evolved into a bureaucrat, an Establishment social worker, ever-hungry and willing to compromise for the next government grant.
“Hey chief scab,” a picketer called out. “How was your lunch? I hope you choked on it.”
But wait…the jeering seemed to be directed not at Kight, but at a woman with him. Tall and lean, she froze in her walk at the jeer “chief scab.” The woman, I knew, was named Lillene Fifield and she’d just last week been appointed Director of Women’s Programs. The new title and position at GCSC made her the top woman employee, hence to us strikers, “chief scab.” Fifield was the only lesbian to accept a job at GCSC since the firings. Therefore, she’d become the focal point of lesbian disgust. Still, I was shocked at the vitriol aimed at her. A sour feeling crept into my throat. As the tall, long-faced woman tried to sort through the line, picketers deliberately blocked her path. In the blink of an eye the circle opened to swallow her. She kept a stone face, never saying a word. Engulfed, she was jostled and pushed. Finally, she got close enough to reach out and grab the handle on the front door. Ms. Chief Scab was absorbed into the building.
I wiped my forehead, relieved that I had been on the north end of the circle and not close to the rage surrounding her. I had no personal gripe with Fifield, but the woman had knowingly put herself in the line of fire. Still, sister against sister violence was hard to swallow even from a distance.
My attention turned to Morris. What would he say or do to get through the line? And what could I do to help—or stop—him? Did I want to help, or stop him?
My godfather was trying to negotiate through a clump of male picketers. Do something, a child voice called inside me. That’s when Morris caught my eye. He tilted his head quizzically, studying me as if I were as out of place as a polar bear on a beach. It was the first time he and I had come face to face on the picket line. He opened his mouth as if speak to me. But his eyes shifted suddenly and fixated on something behind me. He gasped, as if witnessing a horror. His normally pinched-pink face went white. A turquoise-studded hand shot up to cover his mouth.
I turned around.
A male picketer behind me had a sign pointing dead center on Morris. He came closer, his voice raging, trumpeting the words on his placard, “Down with the KKK: Kight, Kilhefner, Ken!”
Fuck! I gulped. Turning back, I faced my mentor. The man had marched in the South with Martin Luther King against the Ku Klux Klan. Rosa Parks had been his friend, his “saint liberator.” An expression of horror had settled on his face. He shuddered and stumbled against the center’s wall. I fought down an adrenalin-fueled impulse to rush to him. My heart wanted to save him, but politics glued my feet to the gro
und. You’re the man,I wanted to scream at him. You’re the only one who can stop this travesty. Do something!
But the sun’s hot glare glazed out the distance preventing Morris and me from connecting again. GCSC’s door suddenly opened from the inside. Someone reached out and grabbed him. My erstwhile friend disappeared into the forbidden zone. I kicked a picket stick out of my path. Damnation! It wasn’t my job to save Morris Kight. He’d kicked me out of his house, just like my father had seven years ago.
Memory tugged me back to another hotly glaring summer afternoon when I was nineteen and had taken my lover Judy home to a party at my parents’ house. The family seat was now in San Marino, the Beverly Hills of the San Gabriel Valley, a well-lawned enclave that was haughty about everyone who wasn’t rich and white, except my Mexican father, now a multi-millionaire, and a few dozen wealthy Chinese families. Judy, a petite working class dyke from my gay softball team, wore Frank Sinatra black wing-tipped shoes and combed her brown-gold hair straight back in a ducktail. With her ‘50s hairstyle, blue eyes and classic features, she looked like a butch version of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Back in ‘68 I was a newbie to lesbian bar culture and had not yet learned that the whole world was divided into butch and femme. I was neither, and simply attracted to Judy’s kind welcome of me as “the new college kid” on the team. We both played infield and had simply dropped into bed. Judy had introduced me to the men’s department at Sears just a few weeks before and now we bought all our clothes there. It’s not like I was asking Dad to accept a pot smoker into his house or a bad-mouthing anti-war Democrat. No, I was just coming home for dinner. And yes, it had somehow escaped me that Judy’s very butch attire would leave no room for parental denial.
As we walked through the large, carved wood front door of the family mansion no one stopped us. Dad was upstairs, I was told, hiding as he tried to avoid the crowd and to ponder how he, a private intense guy who hated noise, had fathered twelve children.
I could feel my mother’s blue eyes following Judy as we partied with my siblings on the backyard veranda. Watching her troubled eyes was my first clue that the day would not end well. You’ve never brought someone who looks like a homosexual to our home, Jeanne,she seemed to be telling me. I didn’t think Mom would know what a butch looked like since she was still calling me a tomboy. Fortunately, Mom was too gracious to be impolite to any guest. I’d hear about it later, her eyes told me. Older brother Bill gave Judy more than one sideways glance, but my younger sibs crowded around me oblivious of my unusual friend.
Somehow fate placed me in the house next to the telephone in the downstairs foyer the very single moment that Dad chose to descend the spiral staircase above the phone box. Judy needed to make a phone call. I had walked her to the phone. I could feel him coming before I saw him. The hairs on my back of my neck were jumping to attention before I heard his polished black dress shoes hit the top stair. Paralyzed with fear, my first instinct was to run. Dad couldn’t meet Judy and me alone like this— separated from the protection of my mother and siblings! But fleeing was too humiliating. I was a grownup now, paying my own way through college. I ground my teeth like a trapped bear cub. Now he was close enough to see Judy perched on the embroidered chair next to his serpentine marble telephone stand.
“Hi, Pop!” I feigned as he hit the bottom stair.
He came toward me, staring at Judy like she had the word atheist tattooed on her forehead. The wrinkles on his forehead seemed to bulge out instead of in. Something was wrong. He was standing too close.
“What’s this?” His voice was tight and dry as he pointed to Judy.
A thumping began in my chest. He couldn’t talk that way to a friend of mine. “This-is-my-friend-Judy-Whiting,” I said all in one syllable. “Judy, this is my father.”
Judy stood to greet him.
Dad studied Judy: saw the shoes, the cowboy silver buckle on her belt, her Sears men’s pants and button-down seersucker plaid shirt. He turned to me. “What the hell is she doing in my house?” he screamed.
“We just…ah…Mom said come home for the party…we won’t be staying very long—”
His hands were on Judy before I could finish the sentence. He’d grabbed her by the back of her belt with one hand and dragged her through the foyer like a garbage bag, flung open the front door and tossed Judy’s size two frame onto the front grass. Though the open door I saw Judy’s knees crack the ground; she rolled over trying to break the Dad’s velocity. Then he turned to me.
“Don’t you ever even think of bringing someone like that home to my house again!” he screamed at me.
I raced through his damn front door toward Judy, turning mid-step to scream at him, “And that means I won’t be coming home ever again either!”
Dad slammed the door in my face, disappearing into his own forbidden zone, a zone I hadn’t returned to since.
“Fuck them both,” I said out loud, still marching in the picket line.
“Fuck who?” Rachel had dropped out of the circle and come to my side.
“Morris Kight and my father,” I shouted over the din. “Let’s get out of this place.”
The next day I asked Rachel to come to my work to have lunch. I felt closer to her now and I wanted to show my new lover off to my Freep mates. Walking her back out to her car after sandwiches at my desk, we strutted hand-in-hand down the middle aisle of the production department. Despite the Freep’s progressive politics, it wasn’t every day that the office witnessed an open display of the Left’s newest radical issue—homosexuality. Rachel didn’t care that people stared. I loved that about her. Walking alone, she was feminine and could easily pass as straight. Yet she gripped my hand and lifted her chin defiantly, telling a room full of beaded, bearded lefties, “Here come the dykes!” I was proud she used me as her badge.
Approaching Bryan’s reception desk, I felt a sudden shift of energy. A peculiar hush had dampened the twitter directed at strolling dykes. Something felt different, oddly wrong. I stopped, bidding Rachel to halt too, as I studied Bryan through the glass wall and open door. The boy was sitting straight-backed in his chair, his body language rigidly contained. Bryan was never contained. Two men in dark suits with abnormally block-shaped heads and closely shaved flattops stood in front of his desk. Definitely not our readership. Penny’s words “men in suits…” rang in my ears.
I crouched down in back of the art boards pulling Rachel with me. For a split second, I wondered if The Freep was just having a bomb scare with the LAPD come to warn us. But no, Brian would then be flapping his wrists. “Those men don’t belong here,” I whispered to Rachel. “Go sit on that stool over there,” I pointed to a layout desk. “Pretend you work here. You don’t know me.”
I spun on my boot heels and raced back upstairs. In my office, I rushed to find my keys and bent over to unlock the last drawer of my desk. I had to dump my rack of cassette tapes.
“Miss Cordova, I assume?” a deep voice threatened.
I straightened up kicking the bottom drawer closed. Pitching my voice toward casual, I asked, “Who wants to know?”
Bryan’s dark-suited strangers glared at me. For big guys they’d vaulted the stairs quickly. One of them was a short and broad-shouldered line backer; the other was an enormous giant.
“We’re with the FBI,” the extra testosterone came from the lineman. “You interviewed Joseph Tomassi?” he said. But he wasn’t asking. The giant held up the front cover of the paper’s cover story with Joe’s picture—and my byline.
“Oh, right.” I smiled, trying to feign some emotion besides fear. Where was Penny! “Would you gentlemen like to sit down?”
“We won’t be here long enough to sit down,” the shorter football player with a choking red tie answered. “And neither will you if you don’t give us the tapes of your interview with that Nazi.”
I parried for time. “What tapes? There are no tapes.”
“Nobody memorizes all that Marxist crap without tapes,” Mr. Red Tie b
arked. “We can arrest you if you don’t give them over. He’s a fugitive, young lady.”
Young lady—made me snap. Nobody called me that gender-fucked appellation except my father. And suddenly I was standing again with Judy at the front door of my father’s house, my cheek stinging from his slap. The old, dark pain snapped me out of my fear. The fear, not the punishment, was the thing to conquer, I told myself.
My fear melted. I threw my shoulders back into soldier stance. Time again, to stand or fold.
“We will arrest you!” the giant bullied. “Choose carefully, jail is not pretty especially for you pretty types.”
I sat down calmly. I was an investigative reporter. I would not give up a source. Not to Dad and certainly not to the Feds. “Where is your search warrant?” I said, hoping that Penny or Tom were on their way.
“If that’s the way you want to play it, we’ll get one,” the shorter guy reached forward and picked up the phone on my desk and dialed. He spoke into the receiver, “Then get a judge out of his martini. We need a warrant up here at The Free Press now!”
I sat, cornered and cooked.
And suddenly, Penny’s high-pitched decibels came screaming into my office. “What is the meaning of this invasion? I’m the Editor in Chief. You can’t come in here.”
Burly Tom stomped in behind her. “This is a newspaper!” he shouted. “Have you ever heard of the First Amendment?”
The suits turned toward Penny “A search warrant is on its way,” red tie thundered.
Penny didn’t pause to catch a breath. “Leave my reporter alone!” She flapped her arms like a mother hen in heat. “Get out,” she scolded Hoover’s finest. “Get out of here until you have a warrant.”
Tom circled in back of the agents, as Penny steered them away from me.
“Come into my office,” Penny demanded. “How dare you try to intimidate my reporter!”
Whispering hoarsely, Tom leaned his black-bearded face close to mine, “You need to get the fuck out of here.”
When We Were Outlaws Page 23