Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright

  When Danielle said no, she meant it, and when she said yes, it was without duress. I wanted to have the nerve to touch my clit when I was fucking, just like she did. Dani didn’t apologize or explain.

  “I want to be like you,” I murmured under my breath more than once my first year of fucking. “I don’t want to be trying to prove anything.”

  You Are Now a Cadre

  After my sixteenth birthday, I wanted to get more serious about politics. The Red Tide was aging — what were we all going to do when we got out of the playpen? Many of us joined the “grown-up” socialist group we were most attracted to at the time, a small sect called the International Socialists, the IS.

  Why them? In some ways, it was probably chance — there were a lot of left groups that salivated at the idea of recruiting a bunch of fearless teenagers who never slept. The IS was attractive because they weren’t doctrinaire about many things the rest of the Left was hysterical about. They were all in favor of independent feminist groups, gay organizing, black power, whatever — you didn’t seem to have to choose between causes. You just brought your class consciousness to every potluck, and that was easy enough to do. They also — and this spoke directly to our generation — didn’t believe in a socialist paradise that might be thriving a plane ride away. I got so embarrassed listening to other Reds talk about China or Russia, like they was some kind of Shangri-la.

  The IS, at that time, had two branch organizers, a mom and dad with two kids. They were normal. They were not Hollywood; they were not ascetics. Geri and Ambrose could talk Marxism or labor history all night, but they’d feed you macaroni and cheese and watch Star Trek reruns.

  I knew I’d have to ask their permission to join the IS. They thought of me as a baby, a slightly older baby who could diaper their youngest. I knew they cared about me, but they were protective. Plus, as they were always pointing out, I didn’t even have a driver’s license.

  I kept bugging them; I didn’t want to keep being treated like a kid. They fretted and fretted — and finally told me to meet them at Betty’s Lamplighter coffee shop to talk about “possibly joining.”

  I made a face: “Gee, should I get a note from my dad?”

  “Yes,” Geri said, “this isn’t going to happen at all if you don’t have his permission.”

  Betty’s Lamplighter coffee shop was in the Valley, next to a nursing home, and there were no bus stops for miles around. I’d need a ride. My idea of a cool place to meet to talk about my entrée into full-time revolutionary knighthood would’ve been one of the cooler joints down by the beach, someplace where you might smoke a joint outside and order a cream-cheese veggie roll with a smoothie on the side. Close to the bus lines.

  But Geri and Ambrose, like bobble dolls on a dashboard, just shook their heads at me. No, no, no. Workers went to the Lamplighter. Petty bourgeois wankers went to smoothie bars. Wankers were hippies.

  But we were hippies, weren’t we? Geri knew the wacky version of every folk song in the Pete Seeger songbook:

  Oh, they always have to ask her if she comes …

  Oh, they always have to ask her if she comes …

  Oh, they wouldn’t have to mention if they’d only pay attention,

  Oh, they always have to ask her when she comes.

  I’d seen Ambrose tie-dye socks for his oldest son. They couldn’t fool me. Lots of workers were hippies, too.

  I waited for them in the Lamplighter like an unrepentant flower child in my catsuit, granny glasses, and cutoffs — which I’d embroidered with a version of Whistler’s Mother, holding a machine gun, stitched on my ass.

  I couldn’t have imagined a duller word than worker before I was initiated into the IS’s inner sanctum. Before, if I’d said “that worker over there,” it meant someone of an indeterminate profession, hanging out in a field or on a sidewalk. The guys who wait to be picked up in front of the hardware store were “workers.” Miserable fucks standing in line at the unemployment office were “workers.” The white-collar version would be drones squeezing into a subway. Who knows where they worked? We only know they must hate whatever it is they do and they grind away at it like a stone. Work away, you suckers — I didn’t ever want to be like that.

  Sometimes I’d hear an old Woody Guthrie song, or see Henry Fonda wiping his brow in The Grapes of Wrath, and I’d think about my grandma and grandpa during their dust bowl days. The farm the bank took away from Grandma Halloran. Then I’d think worker with a little compassion and guilt. A Dorothea Lange black-and-white photograph. Now I got up every morning, spoiled rotten, and ate sugar-frosted flakes.

  But at this point worker meant something else to me. I’d been educated. “Worker” had Studs Terkel written all over it. It meant turning everything you knew upside down. The untapped potential, the General Strike, the lie exposed. Workers controlled the means of production, and I thought that was the most brilliant idea anyone had ever come up with.

  Ambrose didn’t wear anything colorful to the Lamplighter. Neither did Geri. But who needed color when we sat in bench seats of fluorescent orange and gold, while red cuckoo clocks chimed five different times on a fake rock wall?

  Our waitress and our food were more impressive than our opening conversation. Geri and Ambrose seemed fidgety, but the hash browns were perfect. The lady serving us could kick fifty smoothie-stand operators on their butts. She had a red beehive and a lot of wrinkles, but she moved like a lightweight artillery unit.

  I watched her handle ten tables while Geri and Ambrose rattled on about how the IS had five industrial priorities that each member needed to get involved in. Like a quiz-show kid, I quoted them back before they could finish their sentences: auto, trucking, steel, coal, phone. The idea was to build a rank-and-file movement in the most critical areas of American industry, and then, you know, “strike,” like a Commie cobra.

  I twisted my menu in my hands, looking at “Flo” in her gingham uniform. “It’s too bad ‘food service’ isn’t one of our priorities.” We needed forces of nature like her. People do have to eat.

  Geri followed my eyes. “I waitressed for fifteen years, Sue, I was working in a place like this when I had my first baby … and you’re right, these women deserve pearls instead of the swine they serve. But they’re not unionized; they are frozen in these jobs, and they’re never going to get out of them until the strongest people in labor start taking the lead.”

  “Yeah, like him?” I asked sarcastically, rolling my eyes toward a hungover trucker, the next booth over, whose breath was so bad I had to wave my hash brown steam in his direction to cover it up.

  “Exactly like him!” Ambrose pounced on me. “That guy drives for Roadway. He’s in Local 208, and they’re about to vote on a national master freight contract that, if contested, will lead to a strike in which the whole over-the-road trucking system will be paralyzed.”

  “Which means this restaurant won’t get its hash browns delivery,” Geri added, taking the ketchup bottle out of my hands.

  “If this waitress demands a raise or bitches too much, she’s going to be fired, and you’ll never hear from her again,” Ambrose went on. “You have to look at the material conditions, Sue, not your emotions.” His face looked like an unmade bed. They were pregnant with their second kid.

  “But what about the garment workers in Texas who’re in the news today?” I asked. “They’re not our priorities; they just unionized, and people are flying in from all over to congratulate them.” Mexican women making blue jeans in this little border factory where no one cared whether they lived or died — now the whole labor movement was carrying them on their shoulders.

  “They should be congratulated,” Geri said. Her eyes were red, too.

  “A century ago, they would have been up there with coal —” Ambrose started.

  “But the garment unions are being wiped out by overseas factories” Geri finished. Ambrose and Geri traded sentences without even noticing it.

  “Oh Christ, don’t tell me, they’re the e
xception that proves the rule!” I raised my hands in surrender.

  “What does your dad have to say about all this?” Ambrose asked.

  “About me being a trucker? Or working in a coal mine?”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

  “I’m not! I told him that I didn’t want to go to college, that it was my idea of the bourgeois nightmare.”

  “And he said?”

  “That he felt the same way!”

  Ambrose cracked up. “When’s your dad retiring from UCLA?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “He’s not that old.” My dad seemed like a feature at the school, the perennial professor. “All I’m saying is, he doesn’t think a college degree is the be-all and end-all. He told me if I wanted to be a gardener, he would have the highest respect for me.”

  They both shut up at that. Geri finally said, “If our parents had ever said anything like that to us, we probably wouldn’t be here today. …”

  “I would definitely be composting.” Ambrose nodded.

  “But he just says that because it’s like a Zen aspiration,” I said. “It’s cool, but you know, for him, it’s just a wish to be free of all the bureaucracy. He doesn’t think working in an auto plant is inspiring, but he understands that I’m not into it for the cars.”

  “Well, you’re fifteen, so the whole thing is a moot point for a good long while,” Geri said, comforting herself.

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “Yeah, well, we feel like we’re a hundred and sixteen, cutie-pie.”

  “Let’s move on to state capitalism versus bureaucratic collectivism,” Ambrose suggested. He licked some ketchup off his fingers.

  Was I going to be quizzed on the finer points?

  “I’ll take state capitalism for five hundred!” I brightened up. “Bureaucratic collectivist definitions are for losers!”

  “You don’t even know the difference, I bet,” Geri said.

  “Half the people in our branch don’t know the difference,” I said. “What the fuck does it matter what you call Russia as long as you’re not some kook who thinks it’s a paradise? They’re just like the United States except there’s only one corporation, the Party. Pretty soon they’ll do the same thing here, except it’ll be Chevron or Bank of America —”

  “Oh hell, you’re in.” Ambrose said, and laid his fork down.

  “What can you pay in dues?” Geri asked, who looked like she was going to make me pay in tomatoes now that I’d emptied the bottle.

  “Uh, nothing?” I had no idea there were dues.

  “Geri, she’s out on the picket lines every day, and no one’s paying her for that, either.” Duncan passed me the salt.

  “I can tell you’re going soft,” Geri said, “because Sue thinks she’s embraced the state capitalist position.”

  “I can do five dollars a week or something,” I said, wondering why I’d picked that number. That was five hours of baby-sitting, and it meant I’d have to forgo pot, blue jeans, and used records.

  Geri threw up her hands. “I’ll cover you; forget it! Someday you’ll get a decent job.”

  Flo came over with a second bottle of ketchup so things wouldn’t get ugly. I didn’t want her job, but I sure would like to organize with her, or, better yet, follow her to wherever she went after work. I wished someone like her was confronting the Master Freight Contract instead of the lizard muncher behind us.

  “Sometimes you just have to get people who have some fight in them,” I said, but I was looking at my plate when I said it.

  “From the mouths of babes,” Geri said.

  “Lord help us,” Ambrose finished. He took his IS button off his Teamster jacket, and I fastened it to my peasant blouse.

  Patty Hearst

  I took the train up to Paso Robles to see my mom right after I joined the IS. She’d moved three times since Edmonton.

  Elizabeth was the city librarian at a little Carnegie-era round edifice in the town square. Almond orchards, cattle ranches. She lived with her white Persian cat, Pussums, in only apartment complex in town, right near the freeway exit. Pussums had huge yellow eyes and paws as big as bedroom slippers. When I talked to her on the phone, she’d turn and make a remark to him. I hadn’t seen her for two years.

  Sometimes we’d talk about what she was reading, her New Yorker issue. She was as interested in politics and literature as ever. If she could expatriate us to Canada, surely she would glean why I wanted to move to Detroit, why I wanted to do something. But her reaction surprised me.

  “What about Patty Hearst?” she asked. She was referring to the famous California newspaper heiress who’d been kidnapped by a self-described “revolutionary” group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). They proceeded to rob banks, shoot guns, and were eventually wasted down to nothing but ash by the L.A. SWAT team. Patty was one of the few survivors.

  “Yeah, what about her? Mom, that has nothing to do with me; I’m not running with a bunch of crazy people.”

  She raised an eyebrow. My mom never said, “Susie, you’re wrong; capitalism is grand.” She didn’t say I was exaggerating or melodramatic. Why would she? I got my bleeding Irish Catholic heart from her.

  The difference was, she didn’t join up with other people who agreed with her. She thought that was just another setup. “Who are these people, Susie?” she asked, her brow digging in. “You don’t know them. You act like they’re family — but they’re not your blood.”

  I had to work on my straight face for that one. I hadn’t seen a single one of her blood relatives since 1965.

  My mom’s voice got higher. “I just don’t want to see anything happen to you.”

  “I’m not blowing anything up,” I said. “I’m not robbing banks. That’s not our plan. Those people who kidnapped Patty Hearst aren’t even for real, they’re FBI —”

  She turned away and spoke to her kitty. “Little Pussums, Mommy’s little Pussums, is hers a little bit thirsty?”

  I waited.

  “My brother called himself a socialist,” my mom said with a snort, putting fresh water in Pussum’s bowl.

  “Really?” I’d never heard her say anything about her brother except one thing.

  “But he was too busy drinking to do anything about that, either,” she said.

  Yep, that was it.

  “I worshiped him when we were young,” she whispered.

  “But why was Uncle Bud a socialist?” I asked.

  “Oh, the CCC camps, during the Depression,” she said, like I would know what she was talking about. “They let the Irish in, and so all the young men from our neighborhood went.”

  “All the Irish were socialists at those camps?” I asked. I loved this kind of stuff.

  She thought that was funny. “They were all a bunch of ‘social pests’ is what they were,” she cackled. “But it was good thing, what FDR did, or those boys would’ve starved. Those were the only jobs they could get before the war, the only thing an Irish kid could do.”

  She started talking to Pussums again. “Little baby, little baby’s not going to listen to her mommy, is she? Hers just won’t listen!” Pussums had perfected the art of turning up her back and ignoring your every word.

  I don’t know why I even bothered. I mean, Mom didn’t know anything about what I was doing; she’d never ask if I didn’t bring it up. But sometimes I felt like she ought to know. What if I did end up in jail, or something happened? Was she just going pretend like it wasn’t happening? I wanted Walter Cronkite to come by here, train my mother’s eyes on him, and say, “Elizabeth, your daughter needs you to pay attention to what’s going on.”

  I looked at the clock. There were two more hours before I had to be at the bus station for my trip back to L.A. Maybe she would like me to cook something. I could cook; I bet Patty Hearst didn’t know how to do that. I bet they ate a lot of cereal in their SLA hideout. I wonder if they taught Patty to shoot the way Munk had taught me, with the beer can targets in the desert. That would be fun
ny if we went shooting in Simi Valley and met them! They would rise up and shout some overwrought slogan — “Venceremos!” — before they pulled the trigger. Drama queens. I was embarrassed to read about their sex lives in the paper, how one man had mesmerized all those women with his cock and his rhetoric.

  “What does your father say?” I heard mom’s voice behind me.

  Maybe if I had known Grandfather Jack, I would’ve understood what she was driving at. It was always her prelude to losing control.

  I stuttered. I could never think of the right answer to this one. “Oh, he’s kinda like you; you know, he’s supportive, but he worries about me, too.”

  “You have to do what your father says, Susie!”

  But he doesn’t say anything. He was more interested in asking me what I thought he should do.

  “You need to listen to him, Susie!”

  More advice from someone who had cut her father off when she was twelve.

  “Well, he doesn’t say anything except ‘Good luck and take it easy!’” I snapped. That was a mistake.

  “Well, where is he, what is he doing, is he with his new wife?” She didn’t wait for my reply; she didn’t need it. “I suppose she’s very pretty,” she said, curling her fingers tight. “But that doesn’t mean that he can —”

  “Mom, stop, this is going —”

  “Well, your father has had everything handed to him, and that’s —”

  I’d have given anything to talk about Patty Hearst again. But Elizabeth was past talking.

  Her hand cracked my cheek and knocked me back. I didn’t hear her last words. She burst into tears and ran. I heard the bathroom door slam. I felt my face with my palm and fingertips; it was sizzling, but I was okay. I’d better not cry, or she’d get really mad.

  I went to her door and spoke through it: “Mom, are you okay? Mom, are you there? Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. I tried the door, but she’d locked it. “Mom, just tell me you’re okay. I have to go to the bus, and I don’t want to leave you like this. Mommy … ?”