Robin nudged, “Are you afraid there’d be a hole in your life if you just quit, or not enough other projects to keep you busy?”
“No, that’s not it,” I retorted. “The pigs have almost caught Patty Hearst twice in the last few months. Penny is prepping me for an interview with one of the SLA members when the Feds capture them. And I’ve been talking with Judy Freespirit and Ivy Bottini, you know, the new dyke from New York, about my dream of starting a national lesbian feminist organization…like the Women’s Movement has done with N.O.W. I don’t have enough time…”
“Then why are you still hesitating?” Robin prodded. “Are you worried about how Rachel will feel if you quit the strike?”
“I don’t think so,” I hedged. Rachel might well be upset and confused if I dropped out of the lawsuit. She might think I was deserting her. “Hell Robin, I can’t let her feelings make this huge political decision for me.”
“What about the rest of our community?”
“I’ll have some explaining to do to the Westside Women’s Center and other lesbian groups. That won’t be easy. But it might bring relief too. Lots of dykes are worn out with this.”
“The Tide and The Freep staff will be happy to have your focus come back to them.”
I smiled at Robin, feeling blessed that she was trying to frame my angst with a silver lining. A silence fell between us. Joking and making straw stick people were not changing reality.
“So, one more time…” Robin dealt an uppercut. “Why are you afraid to walk away?”
My lips tightened. I looked at Robin, afraid to give words to my thoughts. My shoulders slumped and I laid my stick lady to rest on a napkin coffin. My words came haltingly. “I don’t want to have to choose between the woman side of me and the homosexual side of me,” I whispered. “I just want to feel whole.”
My hands reached up to cover my eyes as I sank into tears. I was so exhausted.
Robin got up and came over to my side of the booth. Instinctively, she shielded me from others in the restaurant by putting her arms around my shoulders and hiding my head on her chest. She knew I didn’t want other activists to see me falling apart. But she didn’t pull me close or try to shut down my sobbing. My best butch pal handed me some rough paper towels and whispered, “This is good. This needs to be over.”
Half an hour later, I stood in front of Patton’s building again. My waves of conflict and grief had subsided; I felt lighter and calm. I knelt down on the sidewalk and gave my stones back to the garden. I would throw no rocks today, but I would drop a figurative boulder on my lawyer’s desk.
Striding down the corridor to her private office unannounced, I found her door open. “Sylvia,” I called out, as I walked up to her desk.
Patton looked up and cocked her chin. Her brow furrowed. “What brings you here, Córdova?”
“I need to let you know. I’m out of here,” I said quietly. “The negotiation breaking down this morning was it for me.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I want you to take my name off the lawsuit,” I replied, trying to breathe confidence into the tremble in my voice. “It means I won’t be on the picket line. It means I’m moving on with my life and I don’t want to be part of the strike anymore. It means I quit.”
“You’re not coming to the next strikers’ meeting when I present the Center’s offer?”
I shook my head. “We both know there’s no point to that. Many of the strikers will vow to keep going. GCSC will continue their stalling and pretending they’re the good guys. Right before the lawsuit goes to court in a couple of years, Morris will offer realistic terms. By then GCSC will have solidified their old boys club. It will be too late to make the Center co-gender in its leadership.”
Patton objected, “We can’t know that will happen.”
“It’s your job to say that, Sylvia. But it’s my job as an organizer to know what’s gonna happen and what that means for the future.” I stuffed my hands into my pockets, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. “Dykes and feminists have no more leverage with that institution. The herstory of the Gay Community Services Center has been the history of lesbians leaving it. It will take a cataclysmic event for gay men to accept working equally with women.”
She took off her glasses, staring intently at me. “That’s what I thought this was.”
“Me, too,” I said. “We were both wrong.”
Patton stood up from behind her desk and took off her glasses. “I wish you wouldn’t do this, Córdova,” she pleaded.
“There’s no future here,” I said as I turned and walked out of her office.
Chapter 29
A Fall From Grace
[Los Angeles]
Late September, 1975
After more than a year and a half as fugitives on the run, Patty Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris had finally been captured by the FBI. It was late at night at The Freep as I clicked off the Selectric; I’d finally finished my letter of appeal to Emily Harris asking the just-captured revolutionary for her first interview.
Dropping it on Penny’s desk I wondered how and when my editor would get my request to Harris’s attorney, Leonard Weinglass. That would be Penny’s problem, I muttered to myself. It now seemed clear that the well-heeled Hearst family—owner of the San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the all-American standard, Good Housekeeping magazine—wanted their brainwashed daughter to go on trial separately from her SLA mates. It was almost certain that Emily Harris would be tried here in Los Angeles for the robbery of a Melrose convenience store she’d pulled off with Patty and husband Bill. Therefore she’d be held at L.A.’s Sybil Brand Institute for Women, a short drive from The Freep. Emily had since reiterated her request for a feminist female reporter. For a host of personal and political reasons, I wanted her to choose me.
I’d also written yet another letter to Rachel pleading with her to come back to me emotionally, to choose me again—rather than the square-jawed butch I’d seen her with at the San Diego festival. This was my third such epistle.
BeJo had an evening shift tonight so I drove home to Culver City to lick my wounds in private. Joe’s haunting death, Morris’s ultimate betrayal, my decision to quit the strike, and most of all, Rachel’s unexplained abandonment had left crushing voids in both my political and personal life.
The phone rang, but I ignored it. Only last week BeJo had bought us a new invention, a small box that recorded incoming messages if one did not pick up the receiver. A fabulous activist tool, I grunted as I poured myself another ounce of Jim Beam and watered it down with Coke. Lying on the sofa, watching Johnny Carson, I was too bummed to talk to anyone.
“Jeanne,” a hushed voice came out of the small box. “It’s Rachel. I don’t want to speak into this machine…”
Stunned by the familiar treble, I leapt to pick up the phone.
“I’m here, Rachel!” I said trying to normalize my voice.
“Oh, thank God. I saw on the news a few days ago that they’ve captured Patricia Hearst and the other SLA woman. I thought you must be upset.”
“Yes, very,” I said, wondering if Rachel’s seclusion included not watching TV for several days. “I’m bummed about that…and other things.”
“I just heard that you quit the strike. I was shocked. Everyone is mad at you. How are you feeling?”
“Numb, but resolved,” I answered, the wound still raw. “I’ve made some follow up calls, talked to Pody and others. June and her crew hate me anyway. I’ve had some explaining to do to The Tide Collective and wider community. But I feel free and ready to move on.”
I sat down, breathing shallowly. “I’m hoping you didn’t call me for the first time in weeks to talk politics?” Deeply wounded, I could barely control my voice. “No. Yes, I mean, no.” I heard Rachel’s voice break, as though she too was trying to hold on. “Is BeJo there? Can we talk?”
“BeJo won’t be home for hours.” I paused, not knowing what else to say, afr
aid to pry into anything that would make her hang up, too angry to deny that the name Jacki was screaming in my head.
“So, how are you and I? Or should I say you and Jacki?” The words blew out despite me.
“There is no me and Jacki,” Rachel shot back.
“Is there a you and me?”
“I wish giving up on each other were an option.”
“Then, we should see each other.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Can you come to me now?”
Walking up Effie Street, I felt once more the giddy high that proximity to Rachel always aroused. Her front door was ajar. Baez’s Diamonds and Rust jacket lay on the living room floor. The door to the bedroom stood half open.
“You’re here!” Her voice called out timidly from the back porch staircase. Rachel came in out of the night.
She wore a low cut olive-colored blouse and my jade heart at the base of her throat. On one of my late night trips looking for her, I’d left the heart on her doorstep hoping she’d take it back. Tonight she looked as lovely as the first time she’d greeted me at Effie.
We stared at one another across the living room’s hardwood floor. The distance between us felt like a hardened prairie spent by drought and longing. I rubbed my eyes telling myself that my tension was the product of a rough work week.
Rachel studied the ground between us, and I looked past her to the landing that crowned the stairwell on which we’d so often made love. Anger, desire and panic swept through me. Should I turn and walk away, I wondered, dump my still unannounced commitment of monogamy, and let the scab that had begun to grow in her absence begin its healing work?
She came toward me with a wide radiant smile. “Would you like me to make you something to eat?” she asked. As she walked past me into the kitchen I heard her chuckle under her breath, “Pretty butch.”
I followed her into the kitchen. “I hate when you call me that,” I repeated my usual refrain.
“Calm down,” she laughed, “I never say it in public. I’ll make some eggs. A little protein will help.”
Help what? I wondered, as I took my usual seat at her kitchen’s yellow Formica table.
I felt strangely ill at ease. My lover shows up with another butch at a public festival, avoids me for a month, then calls out of the blue and shows me an open door. Her behavior felt irrational. So why was I the one who felt like a nutcase? I sat and stared at her Hansel and Gretel porcelain salt shakers, wondering if I should blurt out now that I’d ended my arrangement with BeJo. Or should I wait, get us to make love first, and then talk—when intimate words would come more easily to me?
Rachel cracked eggs against a skillet. “I was shocked to hear that GCSC released our unemployment benefits . They never even went to the hearing.” She handed me some plates for our meal as she reported, “June went ballistic when Patton presented Morris’s offer. She and Dixie vowed to keep picketing through the winter. April and her followers were sad to hear you’d resigned.”
My lover sat down across from me, her lips turned downward. “I had such faith, Jeanne. Both in the Center and then the day you and I went to negotiate with Morris. I cried when Pody told us what Morris did, and how he’d gone back on his promise to you and me.”
I studied her face and watched her eyes moisten. “Last fall, when I left my husband and come out and found my job at the Center I thought I’d found a loving family that would help me begin my new gay life. I thought GCSC stood for family. But this battle has felt like a reincarnation of all that was bad in my childhood. My father fighting with my sister and mother, and me trying to come in between and calm everyone down. I don’t know if I have the strength to continue.” Her voice broke as her tears took control.
The sad catch in her voice melted my resolve to stay removed. I reached and took her hand. “I’m sorry your first movement struggle had to end this way.”
Rachel dried her eyes, stood up, and returned to the stove.
I sat back in my chair, afraid to go to her and wrap my arms around her shoulders. “I suppose…” I began but then drifted, distracted by Rachel’s lean forearms moving rapidly, one hand scrambling, the other shaking the skillet. The last time I’d studied her body was in Lionheart’s front seat at The Freep.
“You suppose what?” Rachel repeated, her back toward me.
“Oh?” I came to. “I suppose you’ll be happy to get those unemployment checks?”
“You bet!” she laughed. “The Saloon isn’t doing so well. Colleen’s cut back my hours.”
I’d been surprised to receive my unemployment check in the mail since I was getting payment, though irregular, from The Freep. Guess the porn boy owners weren’t declaring me as salary. I was also getting food stamps from time to time, believing, as all us radicals did, that any accidental funds from the government were small recompense for gays being a disenfranchised class of people with no rights.
“I’m going to stick mine in a piggy bank,” I said. “Save to buy a house someday.”
She turned from the stove and faced me. “A house for you and BeJo?”
“Of course not. How many times do I need to tell you? BeJo and I are not lovers anymore.”
Rachel’s face clouded over. “So what do you call it when you just live with her and sleep in the same bed?”
I banged a knife on the Formica, my eyes flashing, “I call it not being with the woman I want to make love to!”
She began to laugh. Hearing my own words, I began to laugh too. Rachel and I were together now and that’s all that mattered.
Scooping the eggs onto our plates, Rachel said. “Well, for that remark, I should have made us bacon too!”
She sat down across from me. The simple peace of eating together seemed to calm us.
Time passed, but watching her face, the mouth I loved, I couldn’t keep my hurt suppressed. I finished the eggs and laid down my fork. “I saw you that weekend at the music festival with her.”
Rachel stared at me in silence as though I hadn’t said a thing. She titled her head, resting it on her palm, her blue eyes staring into mine. “I adore you,” she whispered, “I’ve never said that to another human being, but just sitting across the table like this and looking at you, I adore you.”
My gaze settled on the curve of her upper lip. It had always beckoned. “And her? Tell me—is she your lover?”
“Jacki?” Rachel seemed surprised. “She means little to me, a safe harbor.”
The sound of another woman’s name on her lips, the lips that had taken my heart before I gave it away, enraged me. “Is that why you’re sleeping with her? She’s your emotional sugar momma?” I demanded, my fist hitting the table.
Rachel jumped to her feet. “God, you can be so cruel.” And she walked away.
I followed her into the big room, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Look at me, Rachel! The cruelty is mutual. How could you leave me for weeks on end? Don’t you know how that feels?”
“Yes, I know how that feels, Jeanne!” She shook my hands off her shoulders, “It feels like the sun doesn’t come up in the morning.”
“Then why?” I screamed, fighting back tears.
She stationed herself in the shadow of the back porch door, placing the room between us once more. “Jacki had been calling me for weeks—to go to the movies and on hikes, to garden in her backyard. She seemed to want my company, unlike some people I know,” she added sarcastically.
“I thought you were in love with me?” My voice came out low and dead. “You could have waited for me for a few more months, some people wait years for the one they love.”
Rachel slid to the floor, covering my jade heart and her face with her hands. “Oh babe, I didn’t know what else to do. The day you left me in the car, you broke my heart. Right after I’d given myself to you in a parking lot! I couldn’t face myself after that!”
I rushed to her, going down on my knees. “I’m so fucking sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t think about the implications of leaving until afterw
ards. I don’t know what I was thinking. I promise that will never happen again.”
“I had to go away.” Rachel kept sobbing. “Inside myself, or over to Jacki’s house in Venice. Some place where I could think. I need stability in my life. This room, these chairs and pillows,” she cried waving her arm around the room, “my house is filled with you and the strike and…too much strife. I told the strikers they can’t meet here anymore. I need to calm my life down. I realized that BeJo is not the one keeping Jeanne from me, Jeanne is keeping herself from me! You’re married all right, but not to BeJo. You’re married to the movement, to politics. You don’t want a domestic relationship. That’s why I stay at Jacki’s sometimes—to get away from all this.”
Rachel’s reasoning confused me. “So what do you want from me?” I asked, still kneeling beside her crumpled form. “Is tonight about breaking up or coming back together?”
“I thought about breaking it off. But I love you too much. I can’t imagine not having you in my life. I can’t help but hope, maybe someday your life will settle down and you’ll want a fuller relationship. Maybe we just need to give each other time. In the meantime, maybe if I spend time with others and get some of my needs met, it won’t hurt so much that you’re so seldom around when I need you. So, I think I should be non-monogamous too.”
Her words cut through me like a knife in the ribs. The front of my skull filled with rage, the back with grief. “Are you telling me you want to be non-monogamous, to see other women…like Jacki? Have you fucked her yet?” I asked, cringing at my lack of grace, yet praying I’d hear her denial.
“Don’t ask me!” she screamed. “For God’s sake, Jeanne, I never asked you.”
We sat huddled on the floor inches and miles part.
Finally, Rachel took a deep breath. “I want to go out with Jacki or whoever makes me feel more centered.” Her tone sounded vacant and rehearsed. “Seeing other people will take the pressure off me wanting everything from you. I’ll need less from you. Then I can get on with the changes I need to make in my life.”
“Changes? What kind of changes?”
When We Were Outlaws Page 36