Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  Sasha and I had met in LRY (for Liberal Religious Youth), the official Unitarian teen organization, where, in his alienated way, he was in the thick of things, along with kids like Jordie Burnham and Naomi Marks. Jordie, a crack folk dancer who (Sasha confided) fancied boys, wore his lederhosen with wry elegance. Naomi was sleepy-eyed, with the incandescent hair and pale yet glowing skin of the pre-Raphaelite maiden she’d resemble if she lost twenty pounds and substituted a peignoir for her navy surplus bell-bottoms. She spoke slyly of sugar cubes and knew her way around The Av, the main drag of Seattle’s notorious University District, in those days before LSD and psilocybin hit the major media.

  I had heard Sasha refer to his cohorts as fringies, an epithet converted to a badge of pride by the post-Beat generation that frequented the U District coffeehouses, scorning honest labor in favor of pot and poetry. Given that he was speaking of high school students who hadn’t really left home yet, he was stretching it a little, a fact he must have recognized; he spoke sardonically (his usual way of speaking) and put the word in the mouth of an onlooker: “Dirty fringies!” some hostile straight had sneered at him and his pals.

  For so long straight has been paired with gay in my lexicon that it’s strange to recall this earlier usage, which similarly split up the world into a mainstream of obedient drones and a sexy underground of courageous deviants. Straights were those who could watch Reefer Madness with a straight face, who had no idea that amphetamine was the active ingredient in their diet pills, who thought hash brownies led to heroin. Who couldn’t see why hitting the road of excess might be preferable to paying off a mortgage on little boxes made of ticky-tacky. (“Better a junkie than a professor be,” I was shortly to write in a poem entitled “Disaffection”—a rhetorical flourish, if sincerely meant, as the “heads” of my acquaintance all gave needles a wide berth.)

  From a distance, Sasha projected classic, blunt-featured butch appeal, with wavy chestnut locks that he once sheared off in a buzz cut and would keep relatively short throughout the coming longhaired era. Up close, the effect was radically modified by a disastrous complexion, archipelagoes of purplish acne fanning across his face and chest. His body was slim, a generic young white man’s body, though hardly muscular; physical culture was a straight pursuit. If illegal drugs still represented an affectation for him, his nicotine addiction was full-blown, as proof of which he sported yellow stains on the first two fingers of his smoking hand. He suffered from a sinus condition that prompted frequent blowings of his slightly lumpy nose on wads of toilet paper he stuffed into his pockets. His jack-o’-lantern grin had something feminine about it. He didn’t grin very often.

  The rawness of his skin suggested the rawness of himself. He entertained a chronic, subterranean grievance. His talk was abrasive, almost pugilistic, larded with references to his enemies “the fuzz” (“the heat,” “the state bulls”) and rhetorical victories over “feebleminded old ladies” who tried to tell him about religion. He mocked and shocked. He derided flag-wavers, then turned around and blasted smug Canadians who’d rather rank on the U.S. than address their own social failings. He quoted LeRoi Jones (approvingly) on the subject of killing whites. He used the expression “nigger lipping.” Notwithstanding all the posturing he did, I know he believed deeply—who can say why?—in the finality of his exile from everything that mattered.

  All fall we’d been colliding at LRY events, talking almost as though we shared an understanding. His stern iconoclasm, his corrosive irony, the integrity I was eager to detect in the disrepute he cultivated, all had attracted me since I’d joined the group back in August. (I have to admit I’d also initially embraced much that Sasha would shortly teach me to disdain for its Unitarian, liberal earnestness: a debate between a John Bircher and an ACLU spokesman, the advanced views of George Fava, our assistant minister, who wanted contraceptives delivered in tap water, the uplift in what Jordie Burnham satirized as “happy Jesus songs.”) But on the night of our encounter on the Sunday school classroom floor, I had yet to receive an unequivocal sign that I’d succeeded in positioning myself as girlfriend material.

  At the time, I’d never been on what is called a “date.” I loathed the fanfare surrounding puberty, the publicity attending sexual emergence, all the business of “first” thises and thats, first bras, first dates, first kisses. I’d been burned by junior high sock hops and ballroom dancing lessons, but of course an LRY party was nothing like those corny rites. Despite the deafening presence of a live band in the versatile church sanctuary, it was pretty clear that the advertised dance was largely meant to satisfy an adult prejudice in favor of structured activity. Kids in daring (for 1965) attire—pierced ears and long straight hair were still remarkable on girls—hung in the parking lot, chatting elliptically, tapping their Players or Camel nonfilters on the hoods of cars to pack the tobacco before lighting up.

  I must have seemed an unlikely candidate to join their anti-club. I was wearing, I guess, a demure blouse and skirt, my nylons cinched to a garter belt or girdle. (I was carefully thin but wore girdles anyway; they were part of the standard harness of womanhood, and I always was a sucker for hardship in the name of self-improvement.) I didn’t smoke. I’d never been high. I couldn’t say shit or fuck in a natural tone of voice. My near perfect grade point average was as much an embarrassment to me as inherited wealth to a young Communist, for in my heart I hated all this excellence and virtue. I looked to LRY to help me get beyond it.

  The evening began propitiously, I thought, with Sasha inviting me to view a nearby refuse disposal plant. I accepted graciously, as if I understood the point; among the LRYers, I had noticed, nothing could mark you as dismally uncool so quickly as requiring explanations. My best guess was that he intended a nod to the Beat aesthetic that sought transcendence in trash. The brief excursion unfolded decorously enough, but when we returned to the party he laid his arm across my shoulder, leaving it there where even Reverend Fava could see. Exultant and embarrassed, I finally had proof that he’d decided we were together for the evening.

  We adjourned to the wing of classrooms, a separate building from the sanctuary, to listen to what was then called folk music—anything with an acoustic guitar, from Leadbelly to Richard and Mimi Fariña—on a portable record player. I was where I’d longed to be, in the dark with a lawless boy. The floor was hard, the record ended, the conversation flagged. I felt conscious of my inexperience, afraid to blow my chances before they’d even been defined. Sasha had on jeans, scuffed boots, a capacious leather jacket—soft, intimately stained brown leather—with fringes on the sleeves. He smelled like damp leather, and like the loose tobacco he carried with him to roll cheap cigarettes when he couldn’t afford Pall Malls, as he brought his face close to mine in the dark, and I felt the incongruity of his tongue, its sloppy wetness shocking on my firmly closed lips.

  I flinched, turned my head aside. He didn’t press his suit. My resistance had nothing of calculation in it; the contact seemed an intolerable infringement (I couldn’t have said of what). Surely this isn’t how it’s done was what I felt; “it” meant to me no one specific act, but an enormous, nameless realm of interaction. I might have been licked by a well-meaning dog, or swiped by a dripping dishcloth. I intuited, too, that my objection was expected, that to submit to this abrupt caress would send the wrong signal. But I wasn’t faking my embarrassment. I knew his lunge had been inept, yet couldn’t help suspecting that I should somehow have averted the moment’s awkwardness.

  But Sasha didn’t seem to hold my self-defense against me, to judge by the fact that he offered to drive me home in his parents’ Morris Minor, a cramped, decrepit, but glamorous vehicle (my family had never owned a foreign car) that later would figure importantly in our sex life. He dropped me off in my tidy cul-de-sac, and I performed the soon-to-be-standard maneuver of deciding, on the way to the front door, what bone of partial truth to fling my discreetly hovering parents. Bone flung, I hurried to my bedroom in the basement to write all in my sec
ret journal, explaining my rejection of the slobbery tongue by noting modestly that “it was so new.”

  I’d read On the Road just a few weeks before, Sasha having lent me a well-thumbed paperback with a hint that it had a number of things to teach me. I’d loved it, above all the part where queer Carlo Marx and heterosexually hyperactive Dean Moriarty, wired on speed, spend hours every day “trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our mind.” I saw myself, my longings, in this heroic intercourse; I was more unsure of my relationship to other passages, those concerned with making blondes, balling creamy-thighed brunettes, just in general digging as much as possible “that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy.”

  All my high-flown salacious reading had failed to prepare me for the way in which the literalness of bodies would have to condition this thing known as sex, which I’d imagined as a footnote to the urgent union of two tumescent, somehow genderless, consciousnesses.

  My adolescent embrace of heterosex was many things: a means to radical intimacy in a bookish life practically devoid of ordinary friendships, an objective correlative for a deep anarchy of being that all the beige drapery of middle-class convention couldn’t quite conceal, a paradoxical defiance of my feminine condition. Importantly, it was pleasure at times, but even when it was more ambiguous, even when it was pain, it was at least sensation, the feeling of something, anything extreme, instead of the infuriating blandness that had been palmed off on me and so much of my postwar generation as a form of happiness. Of course teens of both genders nursed a similar sort of grudge, but for the girl I was it had a different edge, a rage at the duplicity of a social order that had begun by promising I could be anything, only to inform me when it came down to it that I had to be a woman. What I did with Sasha was in part my naive attempt to collect on that old promise: I’d go anywhere the boys went. It was also the beginning of my hope (an era’s hope) that my sexuality could be a radical force, smashing old worlds and helping to fashion new ones. My later discovery that I could love women would continue that revolt by other means.

  I suddenly did not want to fulfill the potential everyone said I had, and which my elders and betters so painstakingly nurtured. I suddenly saw that they lacked ambition for me. I seethed with contempt for their notion of achievement, which seemed to have added up to little more than endless sessions in the school cafeteria, a number-two pencil clutched in my competitive small hand, hearing again the familiar instructions about “filling in the bubble” on the printed answer sheet of some standardized text, in order that a machine might tabulate my score and see if the Russians were getting ahead of us.

  In the matter of sex (since I had to be a woman), my first imperative was not to be my mother. I hastened to burn my bridges to “the Clausen way,” with its sense that eros should, like Danish modern furniture, or mood music, or a two-piece outfit, be tasteful and inoffensive. I would find another way to be a woman. I would be sexual, as my mother was not (or thought it was important to appear not to be). Claiming the right to pleasure, deploying my body as I pleased, I would defy that superstition called the double standard, which lurked at the heart of my uneasy sense that my gender had, when I entered puberty, taken on a new and alarming relevance.

  “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” Radicalesbians said that in 1970, in a famous manifesto, “The Woman Identified Woman.” In some sense I still believe it to be true, but as with many a brilliant epigram (“Power corrupts,” “The personal is political”), its fascination rests on a crucial ambiguity.

  Radicalesbians forgot to point out that all women do not share the same rage. The rage that would eventually help condense my woman-identification was not the rage of the woman who, from an early age, has been punished for her gender nonconformity—the girl who played softball and soccer too well, failed to slough off her attachment to a girlfriend when her crowd began to date, or carried herself too much like a boy, eliciting hostile stares when she entered the ladies’ room ambiguously clad in jeans and a windbreaker. My rage was the rage of a girl whose brain was her fortune, whose body at first seemed reasonably attuned to the requirements of standard femininity—from throwing a softball badly to engaging in sex with men—but who in the end was unable to reconcile cosmopolitan intellectual ambitions with the provincial conventions of middle-class womanhood.

  Why, when I emerged from my childhood garden of solitude, did I turn to a boy for the connection I craved? It wasn’t about bodies, not in the first place. It was about what sort of beings seemed to have the gorgeous minds, about who were the movers and shakers, the ones with automatic access to the wide world I’d lately begun to fear I might be excluded from. It was about identifying with Kerouac’s Dean and Carlo (distancing myself from that creamythighed brunette, who was obviously stupid, and sexy in a way with which I couldn’t imagine successfully competing). It was about what was expected and plainly possible (I could do men). It was about, in other words, compulsory heterosexuality, not in the sense that my desires weren’t real or that my participation was blatantly coerced, but in the far more effective sense that I was choosing from a menu of socially preset options, responding to cues designed to mobilize one set of desires rather than another. Unable to imagine an alternative, I eagerly cooperated.

  I’d never met a girl I considered really smart. My having missed out on the passionate friendships many little girls enter into had something to do with the semirural isolation of our home in Eureka, but also, I think, with the facts of my temperament. For me, private thoughts and sentences in books held much of the glow of diffuse eroticism that children often discover in social pursuits, and that, whatever its early origins, persists in adult life, a penumbra of fantasy frequently ignored in the glare and clamor of official sex. When Mother prodded me to “have a friend home after school,” I did it more because I was supposed to than because I savored the company of any girl in particular. I much preferred to hang around adults, or play or read alone in the woods at the top of our gravel road.

  Father’s transfer from Eureka to the Seattle area when I was in the fifth grade brought a new suburban lifestyle, a new affluence and lust for normalcy. I pored over my mother’s magazines, McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal, clipping pictures of beautiful objects, planning my future perfect life, in which great achievements and flawless surfaces would complement each other à la Jackie Kennedy. I entered into some prepubescent friendships—which, it went without saying, had to be with girls—but these were duteous, artificial, undertaken in something like the spirit in which a gay or lesbian teen may attempt a simulation of opposite-sex romance. I went through the motions of group participation, lugging T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom along to Camp Sealth on Vashon Island, escaping into it every chance I got; I pondered Lawrence’s capture and beating at Deraa (the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost, what could he possibly mean by that?) against a backdrop of phony “Indian” Camp Fire Girl rituals (I light the light of work, WoHeLo means work). I savored the thought of male bonding in the desert to deflect the twittering of thirteen-year-olds beneath the western red cedar.

  For a time I consorted with kind, green-eyed Roberta, and quiet Hope, who was blond but no more glamorous than I: diligent, healthy girls from diligent, healthy families who got good grades, weren’t silly about boys, and bored me to a degree I could never justify. I despised the usual teen enthusiasms: dances that made you look like an idiot, rock ’n’ roll groups that attracted howling feminine hordes, “ratted” hairdos and the accompanying hairspray overkill that turned a trip to the girls’ bathroom into a gauntlet of perfumed smog.

  In ninth grade I had a crush on Miss Pease, whose assignments on topics like “My Concept of Freedom” had prompted me to share concerns I’d revealed to no one else. “Tell me, Miss Pease,” I wrote (in a note appended to a paper that argued, “Even a criminal, if he has freedom of the soul, is more a man than
one who never thinks”): “Am I a hopeless case? Will I be an existentialist? Am I an adolescent idealist?” She’d thrilled me by responding, “If you are, so am I,” then going on to explain why in a breathtaking density of tiny blue-inked lines, set at an angle to my own rounded script.

  Miss Pease was thirtyish, plain, with buck teeth and thick-lensed glasses, her brown hair in a brief, utilitarian cut. Though I confided to my journal my excitement that she considered me a “kindred mind,” I didn’t take our flirtation all that seriously. I wanted to fall for a role model, and Miss Pease wasn’t that. I aspired to greatness, and couldn’t help recognizing that teaching P.E. and language arts at the junior high level was not an exalted line of work. I never heard her called a dyke—the kids I knew didn’t talk that way—but she once acknowledged to me that people saw her as a kook. Any hint of oddity could turn me off in those days; I still hoped that “great” would be compatible with “normal.”

  I wonder, looking back, what she felt. I imagine it resembled what I experience these days when I notice that a student has a minor crush on me. There’s a rueful sense of the fragility of all such transference, an urge to escape before the spell is shattered. I owed nothing to Miss Pease, and I’m sure she expected nothing, or rather expected precisely what happened—that I would go on to high school and forget about her. Yet when I think of the ease of that transition, how quickly I reverted to assuming that kindred minds would belong to males, I feel that I committed the capital offense of “leaving a woman for a man” avant la lettre.