Riding Fury Home

by Chana Wilson

  Constant honking jarred the night. My nerves twitched with each horn bleat. I noticed a skinny drag queen wearing a sleeveless minidress and heels standing on the sidewalk outside a bar. He must be freezing, I thought. His face was turned toward the exiting patrons, a middle-aged face, and his blond bouffant wig was slightly askew. So pitiful, he can’t get anyone to take him home. Something about the way his eyes beseeched each patron made me think he was one of the most pathetic people I had ever seen. Then, it was as if his loneliness found a home in me and echoed throughout my chest cavity. I felt consumed by sadness, and suddenly, the Village that I had found so vibrant had become sordid and dismal. It was unbearable. I tore my eyes from his face and stared down at the filthy curb. “Let’s go back! I need to go back to the apartment,” I said.

  When we got inside the front hall, I lagged behind Camille and Jim, fumbling in my jean pocket for my room key. I called to their backs, “You two go ahead; I’m gonna hang in my room.”

  Camille turned around, walked up close to me. “Come on,” she said softly, “let’s all hang out together.”

  Something in the intense way Camille was staring at me felt creepy and cloying. Get away from me, leave me alone. Camille reached her hand toward me, but I backed up. “No, really, just need to be by myself.” I escaped into my room and locked the door.

  I opened the wooden shutters on the two windows that faced the street, and pulled the room’s one bentwood chair up close to the window nearest my bed. The street was deserted. I stared at the darkened windows of the small corner restaurant across the street, the only business on our residential block. The restaurant sat on the bottom floor of a nineteenth-century apartment building, five stories tall, with ornamental cornices, its brick facade painted white. I had thought the building beautiful, but now it loomed like an unfriendly hulk. Probably no one spoke to each other in its halls. The traffic light on the corner was turning the street shadows red, yellow, green, red, yellow, green—a silent urban metronome. Emptiness ticking.

  The street colors beat in the rhythm of my loneliness. Alone, all alone; alone, all alone. Hadn’t this forlornness gripping me lived in my body forever? For a brief time, it had crouched hidden in some crevice—abated by the camaraderie of Freedom School, the euphoria of coming out in a feminist community—but now it pounced, rising through my heart into my throat, spreading down my limbs. Paralyzed with its weight, I stayed in the chair, staring, leaden.

  Camille was pounding on my door. “Karen, are you all right? Karen?”

  I managed to get up, go to the door, but I kept it locked. I leaned against the wood, found words. Focus on my mouth. Move the jaw, the lips. “Yeah, Camille, I’m cool.”

  “Come on, Karen, you don’t have to be alone! Come sleep with us.”

  For a moment, longing rushed through me. I imagined cuddling with Camille in her loft. Being held against her softness. But, of course, he would be there, too. Would Camille be in the middle, or would I have to sleep between them? Then hands were stroking, reaching for me, hands and a penis and lips . . . was that what she meant? It was arousing and repulsive at the same time. “No, just want to be alone!” I found myself shouting through the door. Did I? The biggest lie on Earth. I heard her footsteps fading in the hall.

  Back in the chair, staring. Night had deepened to predawn, and the stoplight colors no longer seemed to fill the street. Coming down. The loneliness percussed its litany, but more slowly: No Natalie, no Kate, no one loves you. I was tearless, pupils dilated. At first light, I willed myself: Leave the chair. Go.

  My wobbly legs knew their way along Eleventh. By now, the doorman at Stella’s recognized me, and just nodded as I made my bleary-eyed way to the elevator.

  It was Mom, wearing a long T-shirt and nothing else, who opened the door. “Shhh, Stella’s asleep,” she whispered. Then she looked at me, swaying in the doorway, reached out her arm, took my hand, brought her face close. “What happened?”

  “I’m tripping on acid, been up all night, Mom.” Mom—the name just slipped out. I hadn’t called her that since the end of high school.

  She pulled me closer, into the room, closed the door with one hand while holding on to me, then turned her body next to mine and guided me by the elbow to the couch, as if I were a disabled person, or a toddler. She helped me lower myself, then stood nearby, looking down at me. “I’m thirsty,” I managed to croak in a whisper.

  Mom went to the kitchenette in the corner of the studio and returned with a glass of orange juice. Cool, sweet acidity; I could feel its progress down my throat.

  Mom sat down on the couch. She moved her body right up against mine and put her arm around my shoulder. The couch sat along a wall opposite a curtainless bank of windows that looked down Sixth Avenue. I could feel the warmth of Mom’s arm on the back of my neck, the calming sensation of her hand stroking my shoulder, as we stared toward the apricot dawn lighting the skyscrapers. She sat with me in blessed quiet, no questions.

  I leaned my head onto her shoulder, letting myself close my eyes. Mom was murmuring, “Shusssh, shussh,” as she stroked my hair. My hair follicles were sending pings of current along my scalp. For a moment, my reflexes gathered themselves to fight her—I don’t need you—and then something in me gave way, letting go to an exquisite consolation. I could have wept, but I simply rested there, as if it were forever.

  Chapter 35. Unlearning to Not Speak

  I HAD BEEN FOOLING MYSELF, I had to admit, wanting to be so urbane, so cool. Although I loved New York, it was too much for me. When I was growing up, nature had embedded itself as a primary solace, and I just couldn’t go on in this absence of green. It wasn’t that I wanted to return to the country; I needed urban, but softer. Time to go back to California, to the city by the bay.

  I hated to leave my mother. It tore me up, but I believed if I stayed, my roots would grow too deep and I would be stuck in New York City for the rest of my life. Besides, it didn’t seem fair that Kate should inherit California in our breakup. I’d be damned if I’d let her. My San Francisco friend Stephanie had called and offered to do the legwork to find us an apartment, since she’d just been dumped by her lover. Her offer made it easier to return—at least I’d have a companion.

  I remembered that other leaving, the day I left Mom after high school. Then, I had fled, trying not to feel terrible about abandoning my depressed mother.

  Now, she and Stella walked with me the block and a half from Mom’s to Fifth Avenue to hail a cab. They flanked me, my two mothers. Standing waiting for a taxi, Mom gave me the fiercest hug, her eyes full and sad. As the taxi pulled to the curb, Stella and Mom added a flurry of kisses and hugs as the driver put my two suitcases in the trunk. There was the taxi door closing, the blur of movement. I glimpsed them, holding hands on the sidewalk as the taxi shot away, waving their free hands furiously. My mother—there was so much more life in her now. That helped me go, and gave me something to hold on to.

  MY FRIEND STEPHANIE had found us an apartment in an Oakland neighborhood composed of stucco cottages and two-story wood-frame houses, their tiny front lawns varying from neat to disheveled. As I walked to the co-op supermarket on Telegraph Avenue and returned with my arms loaded with groceries, the nearly deserted streets seemed a suburban wasteland, devoid of the vibrancy of New York, the quirky Victorian urbaneness of San Francisco, just across the bay, or the beauty of my longed-for California countryside.

  At night, I did not feel safe roaming the streets, as I had in Manhattan. The Big Apple rocked twenty-four hours a day, and I had felt relatively free to walk its avenues in the postmidnight hours. Now, Stephanie and I spent the evenings in our living room, drinking screwdrivers made from cheap vodka and frozen orange juice, and smoking pot when we had it, while we played Joni Mitchell’s new album, Blue, over and over. The empty vodka bottles piled up in our trash.

  The loss of Kate and our house in the Sonoma countryside haunted my dreams. Night after night, I dreamed of the cottage nestled in pines,
with the scrub-covered hills I’d loved to hike rising behind it. Inside the cottage, Kate laughed with Dotty while their backs were turned to me. Nightly, my gut felt lanced with betrayal and rejection, and I woke with a pounding headache.

  I got a part-time job working the lunch shift at the Red Barn hamburger chain. Workers had to wear hideous orange smocks and orange caps. Hungover, I could barely keep up with the frenetic pace, and I quit after a few weeks to avoid the embarrassment of being fired. My next job was running a luncheonette in an office building: restocking vending machines, making coffee, and ringing up purchases. In slow times, I sat doodling in a notebook and writing mournful poems. The hours blurred. One night, my boss called to say I was fired because I had left one of the vending machines with its door open, its cash accessible.

  Being far away from my mother and Stella left me hollow and disoriented, as if there were no ground under my feet. Neither my mother nor I could afford frequent long-distance calls, so we wrote letters, both declaring how we missed each other terribly. I longed to run back to her comfort, but stubbornly refused to cede California to Kate. I sensed only vaguely that something in me needed to find myself outside the shelter of my mother.

  In February, two months after I had left New York, my mother wrote that she’d broken up with Stella. Stella had plummeted into her chronic depression, something I hadn’t witnessed during our jubilant days together in Manhattan. I felt sad for all of us, but in a dull, distanced way. I couldn’t let myself feel how shattering it was, to lose this new family in which, for the first time, my mother had found love. It was an odd twist to have my mother be the one to leave a depressed person, but I thought I understood: Gloria had lost so many years to her own grief that she didn’t want to be with someone trapped in despair. I wrote, “I’m so sorry it’s worked out this way, but your sanity and strength are most important. If Stella’s depression and need for you are sapping your energy, it’s no good.” I didn’t see the irony in my advice: how my childhood had been sapped by my mother’s depression, but I’d had no option to leave.

  ONE EVENING IN EARLY summer, I went to a Gay Liberation Front meeting in San Francisco. Someone announced that KPFA, the local listener-supported Pacifica radio station, wanted to start two gay programs: one created by gay men, one by lesbians. Who wanted to work on it? I leapt to sign up. Two groups emerged from that meeting and began producing shows: the gay men started Fruit Punch, and we women initiated Lesbian Air.

  Only one of our group of eight had any radio experience. I was excited but nervous that we had a weekly hour-long show to fill. But to my relief, when we arrived at KPFA, we were welcomed by straight feminists who, at this station, had fought for and pioneered a feminist radio program called Unlearning to Not Speak, named after the Marge Piercy poem taped to the door of their office.

  . . . She must learn again to speak

  starting with I

  starting with We

  starting as the infant does

  with her own true hunger

  and pleasure

  and rage.

  The Unlearning programmers tutored us. We broke into two groups, with four of us per group clustered around one of the professional reel-to-reel tape recorders as our mentor demonstrated how to locate the exact spot on the tape to cut, how to lay it on the metal editing block, cut it on the diagonal with a razor blade, and splice two cuts together. The skill of these foremothers, and their we can do this stance, helped me overcome technology phobia. To discover I could do this was thrilling, better by far than learning to tune up my VW Bug.

  One afternoon, I went into one of the tiny editing booths with an unedited tape of a coming-out story—one of several we were using for our first program—a notebook, and a fresh razor blade. The claustrophobic booth was lined with white soundproofing particleboard, and only just big enough for one Ampex reel-to-reel tape machine, a rickety rolling desk chair, and a tall garbage can. I began listening on headphones, pausing the tape to take notes on a pad, starring the parts of the story that seemed most vital. As I rewound the tape and went over the interview again, I became completely immersed in the woman’s story and the creative process of paring it down—making an edit, listening to it, adding a tiny splice of a breath if the timing was too tight. I was so swept up, the closed-in space dropped away. Finally, a grumbling stomach roused me to glance at my watch—my God, hours had gone by!

  During our early shows, I discovered something about myself: Live on the air, I was terribly shy, but during prerecorded off-air interviews, to be edited and broadcast later, I relaxed into a curiosity about the women I interviewed, engrossed in the details of their stories, and able to ask questions. I didn’t know yet what I had stumbled on—something so fitting that I would spend the next ten years as a radio producer and recording engineer.

  IN THE WINTER, Gloria visited me at the lesbian collective I’d moved into. She slept on our frigid, unheated back porch, chipper and uncomplaining. My housemates loved her: the hip lesbian mom, happily eating our vegetarian meals and sharing our feminist vision.

  My mother had agreed to be interviewed for the radio show, so I took her to the recording studio. At the radio station, we faced each other across a long metal folding table, mikes on stands pointed at each of us. In the three years since we’d both come out, I’d heard bits and pieces of my mother’s story, but had never really asked for details of what she’d experienced and what it had meant. Now, I asked my first question: “I’d like to know how you felt when you married my father.”

  Gloria leaned toward me, bringing herself closer to the microphone. “One of the reasons I married your father was that I wanted to get away from home. I wanted to have a home of my own, and I wanted to have children. I certainly don’t think I was in love with your father; I liked him as a person—he was a nice man—but . . . ”

  “Did you ever tell yourself in your head that you loved him? Did you feel like you loved him?” I asked into my own mic.

  “No. I thought I liked him, that he was a good man and we could be friends. But I never really was excited about him. I never felt that I really loved him.”

  This was no big surprise, given what I now understood as my mother’s suppressed sexual identity. Yet her stating this lack of love was oddly comforting—it made sense of the deadness and silent tension between my parents. I went on without much pause, “Did it ever occur to you not to get married—that you had that option?”

  “No, I was brought up to feel that that was what a woman did: get married. Work wasn’t important; school wasn’t important. You went to school to meet a man, and you went to college to meet an educated man.”

  “You went to college, but you didn’t take it seriously?”

  “No, I guess I didn’t.”

  Once I began asking my mother questions, I stopped noticing the studio’s microphone stands piled up in one corner, the white soundboard walls, or the tan wall-to-wall rug mottled with stains from years of recording sessions. My focus was on my mother’s expressive face as she spoke. Finally, we could share this.

  “So, when did you start having a relationship with a woman?”

  “Marian. It was when you were a baby. She was my best friend. I really loved her as a person. We spent a lot of time together, just as friends, talking, going fishing, sharing our ideas and our thoughts. And then one day she told me how beautiful love could be between women. She meant love on every level—including the emotional, sexual, intellectual. She didn’t have to convince me, because right away it felt natural. Because I really loved her as a person. When I say ‘I loved her,’ I know I didn’t have those feelings for your father. I may have liked him a lot and thought he was a good person, but I wasn’t thrilled by him, or excited by him. I was bored.”

  “Did you go through guilt feelings, or did you feel perverted or anything, when you started being lovers with her?” I wanted to know this, mostly to understand my mother, but also because my generation had no sense of lesbian history, no imag
es of women before us loving each other without shame.

  My mother’s round face widened with her smile, as she shook her head a couple times in remembrance. “When I started being lovers with Marian, I never felt better in my life. I was excited and thrilled and all the things you read in the books. I felt so good that I wanted to take you, leave your father, and just go off with her and live forever and ever together.”

  “Did you ever ask her if she’d do that?”

  “No, because I knew that wasn’t what she wanted. When I look back on it, it was very ‘closet-y.’ We were both married. We really cared for one another, but she wanted the security of her home. Anyway, I saw her every day, and you saw her every day, when you were very little.”

  I interviewed my mother for close to two hours. Knowing I would later edit it gave us the freedom to wander through her story. She elaborated on the despair of losing Marian, how electroshock therapy wiped out her memory, her experiences in the mental hospitals, going through withdrawal from psychiatric drugs when I went off to college, and having sex with many women during her first, wild year after coming out. We both spoke of the deep connection between us. There had been so much secrecy, shame, and unexplained grief, and now, we were giving voice publicly to the unspoken and taboo, to what it was like to reclaim a joyous, woman-loving life.

  THE NIGHT THE INTERVIEW was broadcast, I sat in an alcove outside the on-air control booth, hunkered into a tweed wool love seat with frayed arms. It had sunk low over the years it had served as a way station for guests or programmers waiting to go on the air. Tonight, I couldn’t bear the bright lights of the on-air booth, with all its electronic paraphernalia: the bank of shiny silver tape machines—one of which would have my tape whirling—the microphones, turntables, and control board fanned in a U surrounding the board operator. I needed a place that was dark and soft.