Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright

  She cracked up. “I can’t believe you’re still thinking about that.”

  “I’ve never seen a Bunny; I really want to.”

  She reassured me, and on we went into March Madness. I did not tell anyone in The Red Tide, whose meetings I now attended weekly, that I was still a surreptitious swim team score girl. I picketed liquor stores selling nonunion Gallo wine; I marched to impeach Nixon; I listened to every word the lesbians and the birth control women from Planned Parenthood had to say — and I talked to “Marilyn Monroe” in typing class about why the ERA didn’t go nearly far enough.

  I read Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital on assignment to make a presentation to The Red Tide’s Thursday-night study group — it was by far the most difficult “pamphlet” I’d ever read in my life. I had to read whole sentences more than once. Our high school classes didn’t teach this level of critique.

  Midstruggle, I walked into my after-school job at McDonald’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, and it hit me like a brick. Why did people put up with this exploitation? Why was everyone falling for it? Capitalism was a con job beyond anything P. T. Barnum had ever dreamed of. Why had people formulated revolution so long ago, yet nothing, nothing had changed?

  That night I got off work and took the bus home. I smelled bad, and my feet were killing me. There was an old lady in the next seat playing her transistor radio, oblivious to my french fry stench. It was the news hour:

  And in the market today, U.S. productivity has dipped three percent since the first of the year. … Productivity is how Americans work more efficiently, and when workers are more productive, their bosses are able to give them raises.

  “HOW CAN THEY SAY THAT?” I pounded my seat like Khrushchev with a shoe. The radio lady darted her eyes at me. I had tears in my mine. “THEY’RE LYING, AND EVERYONE JUST KEEPS SLEEPING!”

  I stood up, even though it wasn’t my stop, and hailed the bus driver: “When was the last time you got a raise?”

  He pointed at the red plastic sign dangling by his mirror: Favor De No Estar Chingando.

  “Exactly my point,” I said, and got off a mile early to walk the rest of the way. That was the day I became a devoted socialist.

  I abandoned most of high school — other than protesting its petty nuisances, and attending swim meets. My life was The Red Tide — or hiking with my dad, driving everywhere with him on weekends from Mexico to Mojave to the Sierras. He told me about a gifted student he had named Carlos Castaneda, who was writing a dissertation he couldn’t put down.

  I told him everything that went on in my Red Tide meetings.

  I asked Bill what he thought about “picking up the gun,” and he told me how much his stint in the army had deepened his pacifism. He was like a rock about it.

  “But what if someone was pointing a rifle right at you?” I asked, waving my arms as only a fifteen-year-old girl can do to emphasize her point.

  “I would not shoot back,” Bill said, implacable, bending down to look at some coyote scat on the mountain we’d been climbing.

  “Okay, what if they were going to shoot me?” I spit back.

  Bill stood up slowly and looked at me. His eyes filled up. “I would defend you,” he said.

  I felt like a murderer. I had to stop talking like this. Did the others in The Red Tide have these debates with their parents? How did anyone win at these questions?

  My duties as the swim team score girl were a cool, dull relief. Everything just stopped except the splash splash rhythm of laps up and down the pool. And yet swimming was not as square as basketball. I was sure the swim coach, Dale Swensen, smoked pot — he was under thirty, a substitute teacher, and seemed to be doing something progressive at UCLA that he cared about more than high school sports. He was not an overt racist; that alone made him unique.

  Plus, there were no cheerleaders in swimming. Those girls were harpies with pom-poms.

  I also started having sex. Not with anyone at school, but with the socialists, the ones with all the ideas in their heads. Some of them were married. Some of them were hookers. Some of them drank all the time. But lucky for me, some of them were really, really good in bed — and since everyone was down with women’s liberation and nonmonogamy, that made things extra good for me.

  I was in no one’s debt; I was no one’s property. What little I thought about school anymore involved feeling bad about how scared everyone was: scared of having sex, scared of leaving their gilded cage, scared of dreaming about anything that hadn’t been premeditated by their parents.

  I decided to drop out of school in June and take one of those instant diploma tests that the state was starting to offer. I saw a preview of the exam that asked you to figure out the best deal on toothpaste in a given supermarket comparison. I could do that. I’d been doing all the shopping and cooking for both my parents for years.

  Tracey, Jimmy, and Darryl found me sorting a box of flyers after we swam in an intercity conference Memorial Day weekend. I had to hurry; I was on my way to a labor solidarity picnic. My double life!

  “We have to plan this Playboy thing,” Jimmy said. He’d grown his curly brown hair all the way down his back and kept it tied in a navy bandana when he rode his Honda. Tracey looked like his sister — they were both in pin-striped overalls covered with patches.

  “What’s to plan?” I asked. “I’m not wearing a dress.”

  Darryl explained: “Everyone wants ’ludes, but no one seems to be able to score.”

  “You should ask Coach,” I said. “He’s probably wrapping them up in ‘Mr. Natural’ cellophane at Royce Hall.”

  Tracey said we could call a dealer named Bruce, but that I had better connections with him, ’cause Bruce’s old man was a burned-out Maoist. I, on the other hand, baby-sat for people in the canyons who paid me good money to clean a kilo for them after their kids were put to bed.

  Tracey was in such a good mood, I had to ask her about Dan Margolis. Dan was now seen on campus in gold chains, shiny polyester shirts, and a cloud of cigarette smoke. He looked like pornographer from Studio City. But now that I was actually fucking, I had the strangest feeling Dan was still a virgin.

  “Oh Susie, it doesn’t matter about Dan. I’m only seeing women,” Tracey said. She had a little smile like a halo over her head.

  So there really were going to be lesbians at the Playboy Club.

  Jimmy interrupted. “I promise you I’ll keep Dan ten feet away. He’ll be mesmerized, anyway, by the —”

  “BUNNIES.” We all said it.

  Swim Banquet

  The morning of the swim banquet, I had my first hangover. My stomach felt like a garbage pail.

  I’d spend the whole day before target shooting with Comrade Munk’s guns out in Simi Valley, beyond Magic Mountain, in the scrub off of Highway 5. Munk and five other comrades, all the boys, brought several twelve-packs, a fifth of whiskey, two shotguns, three rifles, a .45 automatic, and a .357 magnum. I had no idea they had such a kick.

  “I’m scared,” I admitted to Munk.

  He gave me a little pep talk. “You haven’t learned gun safety; that’s why you’re scared. A firearm isn’t a wild animal; it’s a tool. After today, you won’t be afraid of guns anymore, but you’ll have learned to be wary of people who don’t know how to use them.”

  Munk’s pedagogy was impeccable — I learned all the safety basics, plus I experienced the thrill of beginner’s luck and the “female aim” advantage, according to him. I blew the stuffing out of those beer cans, which the rest of our party drained in quick succession.

  I’d never tasted hard liquor before, and the after-taste in my mouth was, as Daddy would say, “execrable.”

  I went home to my little bathroom, with the mirror above the sink, and saw that I didn’t look like myself anymore. I had something stuck in my teeth from the night before. Besides the beer yesterday, I’d had only a burrito. I was sixteen; I couldn’t really be old, but it was the first time I’d noticed I wasn’t a child. I didn’t have my mother�
��s choice of bowl haircut; I had visible breasts; I’d picked out the glasses I was wearing; I had calluses on my hands.

  When I sat down on the toilet, I could see my stomach slightly curving out instead of in. I’m fat, I thought. I can’t go anywhere, it’s the end. Then I was ashamed of myself for caring. I felt like I was six, sixteen, sixty.

  After our target practice had ended, we’d driven all the way back to Lynwood for a Teamster organizer meeting. One of my lovers, Joe, who’d skipped the firearms training, passed me a note during an agenda item. He scrawled, “As Marx said to his Jenny, ‘I care more for your sweet thighs than anything else.’”

  “Really?” I wrote back. I was so enamored of Marxism now. After the meeting, when we rendez-voused in the bathroom, he kissed me and said, “I hate to tell you I made that up. … I love you.”

  I loved him, too; I loved all these guys. But if we shot guns in Simi Valley again, I wasn’t going to drink anything just to make empty targets. I went to sleep on my sloshy waterbed, and when I woke up, it was Tracey calling to ask me what I was going to wear to the Playboy Club that night.

  I had a halter-top leotard I really liked at the time. It was a baby-blue, frosty stretch velvet. It snapped at the crotch and was skin-tight. I had to wrestle on my jeans, which had two zippers on each side of my belly, like sailor pants with zips instead of buttons.

  I hoisted them on lying down, for maximum tummy flatness. Then I slipped on the silver labyris earrings that Tracey had gotten me. Finally, my hippie sandals and my mother’s ring — as much as I dreaded hearing from her, I wore that ring every day.

  Jimmy picked me up in his Chevy Nova. I realized it was a real date, and that I’d never been on a date … I just went to meetings and demos and ended up in bed with my friends.

  We went to pick up Darryl, then Tracey, who jumped in the car, wearing the same jeans as me, maybe tighter.

  “Bunny!” she said, sliding in.

  “Bunny-Bunny!” I echoed back.

  “You guys are embarrassing me,” Jimmy said, who had a nifty technique of rolling a joint with his hands and driving with his knees. I finally zeroed in on what he was wearing.

  “Your blue tuxedo matches Sue’s leotard!” Darryl noted.

  Tracey was nicer. “I’ve never seen you boys look so good out of Speedos.”

  I thought that when we got to the Playboy Club, it was going to be organized the way Uni planned our movements for games, where the coach herded us into a group, and we marched around like summer campers.

  But this scene was as if … we had graduated. Jimmy drove his car up to a valet and pulled a wad of money out of his blue trousers. “I’ve got it.”

  Valet parking jobs looked much better than my shifts at McDonald’s. We saw some other kids we knew, all decked out in glitter and rainbow colors. We all were walking into the Playboy Club as if it were our usual routine on a Friday night.

  Dan Margolis hadn’t made an entrance yet. “Is everything okay with him?” I whispered. This was too good to be true.

  “Oh yeah, he hooked up with one of his bloods; I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” Darryl said. He was resplendent in peach satin.

  We walked down a long red-carpet-style foyer. A maître d’ greeted us like old friends, and we could see Coach Swensen waving his hand — gaily, no less — from a table near the dance floor. He had on a shirt with at least five buttons undone, and a silver and turquoise peace pendant hung around his neck.

  Finally, everywhere, like pixie dust, were the Playboy Bunnies. They were more magnificent than the magazine had ever showcased. Their figures were unbelievable — packed into satin bathing-beauty suits like pastel cupcakes: periwinkle, coral, and lavender hourglasses. Their breasts spilled out almost to the nipple, poured in like cake batter. You couldn’t help but stare. Their faces were heavily made-up — every one of them with false eyelashes — and their hair was teased high and long, like Nashville’s Loretta Lynn. At the tippy-top were their fuzzy rabbit ears.

  Coach Swensen handed me a glass of champagne, as if I were free, white, and twenty-one. I couldn’t thank him, though, because our Bunny waitress had just turned her back to me.

  Her satin cupcake suit was cut up on the sides, so her legs looked unstoppable to the waist. Satin princess seams in the back of the suit cleft her butt cheeks. Right where the outfit disappeared into a thong, where “X” marked the spot, where all donkey tails must be fixed … was a giant, cotton-candy puff of a bunny tail.

  When I was a little girl, my mother had a talcum box, from Nina Ricci, that had a powder puff under its lid. I wasn’t supposed touch it, but I loved the smell, and I longed to take that soft cloud out of its box and dust myself like I saw my mother do. The puff was soft as a kitten’s ears. When she was at work, I took baths that lasted two hours, and I let myself take the plunge.

  That Bunny’s tail took me right back to those moments. I had to touch it. Had to. Nasty Dan Margolis was a perfect gentleman, wherever he was, compared to my single-minded perversion.

  I peeked around the table to see if anyone had noticed my drool, but the others were in a similar hypnotic state. No one was being ID’d. Dan Margolis, “The Man” himself, came right up to me and crowed, “Hey there, baby. Poppa’s got a brand-new bag!” Reeking of Hai Karate, he kissed me wetly on the cheek. He clasped my hands together as he slipped something small and hard, like a bead, into my palm. It had to be the Quaalude.

  I saw Darryl across the table drop his pill into a flute of champagne and hold it aloft, making a toast. God, these swim banquets were a gas! Is this what Mark Spitz got to do every weekend?

  The disco ball lit up and swept the floor next to our table with iridescent sparkles. The DJ, with a voice as low as the hottest Crenshaw girl, said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen … let’s … get … it … onnnnn!”

  The bass guitar hook began:

  Money money money money

  MON-ey

  Some people got to have it

  Some people really need it

  I jumped up in my baby-blue leotard and joined the whole Uni High, very high swim team undulating in one booty-dipping, shimmering wave of grind.

  A Bunny caught my bump and gave me the eye. She was brown, with a towering Roman ponytail. The pink soles of her feet were firmly planted in four-inch mules.

  “How old are you, anyway, baby?” she asked, one hand on her hip, the other holding two martinis perched on a tray.

  I breathed out. “Really, really close to you.”

  It took so long to say that. Would she wait for me? I had to get one more thing out before she disappeared like a genie into a bunny bottle.

  “Could … could I touch it?” She had to know what I meant; I couldn’t get my mouth to form any more words.

  “Oh, for you, baby, anything,” she said, taking a perfumed step closer to my reach. Not spilling one drop, she turned around, and bent, just slightly, at the waist.

  George Putnam’s Show

  For all my Red Tide activities, I felt like we were swimming against a tide of apathy. From listening to my dad, I felt like nothing cool had happened in L.A. since the sixties: nothing. My dad said that in ’67, when Sergeant Pepper came out, everyone in the whole city took the day off, went to Griffith Park, sang “All You Need Is Love,” and dropped acid. He told me the story of how his colleague Peter Ladefoged lost his hearing in one ear because of the police beating he endured while protesting the war, along with ten thousand others, in front of the Century City Hotel when President Lyndon B. Johnson came to town.

  But by 1973, we were lucky to get four people to stand in a picket line in front of a store carrying Gallo wine, and we were even luckier if Hells Angels hired by the store owner didn’t come along and stomp us. One goon threw Tracey into the gutter and smacked her in the face. He spit a wad of green mucus in mine.

  “Is there anything you’d believe in if you weren’t paid off?” We wouldn’t shut up.

  I asked my dad, “Where did all t
he people who give a damn go?” and Bill said, “San Francisco. Or they died trying.”

  People always imagine there is something happening in Los Angeles because of celebrities. They think that because they see a movie star buy a bag of marshmallows, it must be an event. They think wiping their ass with the same toilet paper that a movie star’s maid wiped her ass with is an accomplishment. This is a company town, and Hollywood is just as crushing as a Carnegie Steel mill. The vast majority of Angelenos have so much nothing in their lives that “celebrity nothing” makes them feel like they have something.

  I could hardly wait to get out of school, to get someplace real as soon as possible. I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial.

  I’d had it with chanting in the rain, invisible to the passing crowd. I was already bitter over their indifference, and I was only fifteen. My sole activist feedback at high school consisted of Jewish Defense League-member cheerleaders putting notes in my locker that said, “Our campus does not need bitches like you tearing down Israel” As if I even had time to tear down Israel. I was too busy tearing down Westwood.

  And then, something happened.

  The Red Tide got on the news. Not just any news, but the George Putnam newscast, the most right-wing broadcaster in all of Southern California, the fellow who tried to stop a black man, Tom Bradley, from becoming mayor of Los Angeles, because he said that it would “start a Negro revolution from which white citizens would never recover.”

  Putnam, like all popular conservative broadcasters, had a gift for articulating the fears of his paranoid “John Bircher” tribe that was a radical’s propaganda dream come true. I secretly wanted everything Georgie prophesied to come to pass. I wanted to be overrun by communists, potheads, and homosexuals! But the left-wing tsunami never arrived.