by Judy Juanita
“Let’s get into it,” he said. I handed him a rag wrapped around a pencil to clean the chamber. “Let’s fuck.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You know you want to.” He blew smoke from his cigarette in my face.
“I don’t have to sleep with you.”
“You know you want me; I can tell.”
“Barry, frankly, you’re detestable.”
“C’mon woman, let me jump on it.”
I put my hand on my hip. “Since you can’t pay money, pay attention. I am not going to fuck you.”
“That’s what you think.” He put the barrel across his thighs and looked into the chamber. “Baby, here I am working from can’t see in the morning till can’t see at night, and you gonna refuse me some poontang.”
“Barry, staying here is not about free fucking.”
“Oh, you charge for your shit? I bet if it was Huey P., you be singing a different song.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
* * *
When I visited Huey in jail he gave me instructions for the paper, always polite, and always specific about the lumpen proletariat, everyday black people, about revolutionary art and the importance of the editorial cartoons, about the manifestos he was working on and where they should go. He alerted me when to expect position papers from Eldridge, which always went in the centerfold, and letters of support from important people, national figures and international ones, like Bertrand Russell. I knew I was a little potato on the way to big stew. Once, behind me, Huey’s lady stood waiting patiently, a straight-haired brown-skinned sister who sang opera and towered over Huey. She looked bourgie. But then, I looked revolutionary, though I was afraid to sign my name on a paper the government might see.
That part of me wanted to learn how to fuck someone I held in contempt. Nobody put a gun to my head and made me fuck Barry . . . like I was a member of a Mississippi chain gang: I was forced to sleep with a fugitive. Fuck that.
“Yeah, pigs get itchy fingers when they see bros riding around fo-deep in black leather. Any nigger they see with black leather on, they want to fuck with.” He put the gun on the side of the bed. “Pigs changed up for now. They the ones riding around fo-deep, ’cause you got to bring some to get some.”
“Bring some to get some?”
“Yeah, if they want us, they got to come to our neighborhoods, and they ain’t coming alone. ’Cause they scared, dig it?”
“Are you scared? Ever?”
“Hell, yeah. But I ain’t scared to be scared. Che say, ‘Whenever death may surprise us it will be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, reach some receptive ear.’”
I sat next to him. I saw the dark beard of Che Guevara, the fierce look on Che’s face, I saw a picture flash by of the island hemmed in by U.S. Navy battleships, Kennedy and Khrushchev eyeball to eyeball, playing brinkmanship. I saw the whole world tilting on its axis and people falling like dolls off the earth into space, I saw myself sitting next to an unwashed funky guy getting ready to fuck him, whatever we did anticlimactic to what was going on around us. I put the tip of my tongue into the oval of decay and sucked the ashy spit from his tongue. The jagged edge of Barry’s teeth tore my tongue. I tasted blood. When he didn’t finish reciting Che, I scolded him with the rest of it: “that another hand be extended to pick up our weapons, and that other men come forward.” I ran my fingers over his balls. I was trying to fuck him and fuck with him at the same time, but he overpowered me. I looked at his torso, lean and bare. I took a deep breath of funk, cleaning fluid, smoke. Fuck him and get this out of your system. He’s fuckable. I went deep off in the funk, all the way in and all the way out.
“Baby, you so dark you ain’t even got rim round your fingernails. Damn, that’s dark.”
“I’m fucking your fugitive ass for free and you’re putting me down.”
“Don’t get me wrong, baby. I like it. Your pussy hair kinked so tight it’s stinging me.”
When we switched and he went down on me, I came really hard. He gasped as my thighs clapped against his ears.
“Your pussy lips dark as a bulldog’s nostrils. I like it.”
We came out of the clinch.
“Black as boysenberry.”
* * *
Good grief, stranger fucking was stranger than fucking. Brides in the revolution didn’t stand on ceremony. In the revolution I had signed on to willfully there was no dating, no waiting.
44
I liked the fluidity of the revolution. yeah baby yeah burn baby burn, reading ecstatic poetry as an opening and closing act for LeRoi Jones. Up and down the peninsula, arousing cheers and fears—it caught up with me. I flunked two classes at State running with the Panthers and being a little star. I applied to Cal State Hayward for the summer to pull my GPA up to snuff, a common strategy among State students. Li-an said nobody’s irreplaceable, and sure enough, another sister, from LA, came in to help with the BPP newspaper. My roomies used my VW to do revolutionary work while a friend from social psychology hooked me up with her ride from the city to Hayward.
* * *
Cal State was different from State: modern new spacious empty devoid. Was it too hot to take classes? I became an anthropological specimen. Sisters wore their hair cascading onto their shoulders, black Barbies. My kinky hair was confrontation. Just walking to class minding my own I stirred things up. They looked at me, smiled weakly. One person was halfway hip. This guy, Drummond, was president of the black student group. “Call me Drum.” I wanted to tell him, I’m already there square. But he wasn’t square, just bourgie conceited unctuous full of it. We met in the hall between the buildings by the pool, yeah. We real cool we meet at the pool. That’s how black we were. That’s where he laid down his heaviest rap, me in my swimsuit with the foam rubber cups, him with his stuff hanging out anthropologically. We met surrounded by white folks swimming and sunning, the rest of the world in a snit over Vietnam. San Francisco and the long hot summer of urban riot fears a world away.
Drum said: “Let me take you to the beach. We could get down and around.”
“Take me to the beach? Not let’s go, let me take you? You a camel with humps?”
“Let’s play hooky,” he said. I knew this was about nookie. He touched my hair, fascinated by a natural woman. He said the biggest turn-on was seeing me float on my back with no cap on like a white girl. What did this dude want? Yeah man, got down with a queen, made her holler and scream. Wouldn’t know my name if I plastered it on my forehead. I drew my leg to my chest, extended it to the sky. I was an aquanette. His rap sounded light in the sun, like margarine for butter.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I walked home every afternoon from where my ride dropped me off, the hippies shitting in doorways, psychedelic posters plastering the windows, doors, streets, phone poles, windshields, up and down the street. I got high with my roomies. We tripped down Haight Street, zeroed in on brothers with white girls, creeping up on them. Xavi had her lighter; I had the SNCC poem; Xavi lit her fire as I fired off the poem syllable by syllable:
Bro / ther / we / don’t / want / to / harm / you / we / on / ly / want / to /
bring / you / home
If the white girl dared open her mouth we threw down with our homemade poetry:
Shut up hussy / before we burn / your blond
stringy stuff back into baldness / like a
baby / !huh!
School was unreal. I ripped off my books. The bookstore was a joke. I bought Rocky Road candy bars, five for fifty-nine cents, and stashed the books in my big straw bag. The more I stole the bigger bag I had the next time. The only cheating, stealing, lying I didn’t do was on my own test. Too smart to cheat, I thought, but wouldn’t say so to my buddies, who suggested we sit in a row at the back of the room and copy from our driver. I used my own answers. I aced the test, sailed out hig
h, took my bag to the campus bookstore, got even higher on the LP collection I had eyeballed for days—Coltrane Miles Pharaoh MJQ Archie Cecil. I was supposed to pass on all that? It was my finest hour, actually two. I stuffed my bag, waited for the bookstore to empty, put in a couple of albums, chatted with the clerk, waited for her to gab on the phone, put in a couple more, kept my eye on the clock so I wouldn’t miss my ride. My purse was too heavy to walk itself across the bay. I’d have my roomies gaping at me when I got home. I put my initials on each album, even though my roomies said they were the property of the house.
I passed all my tests, got cockier, went back to the bookstore the next week and outright lifted two chunky textbooks—my straw for gold—figured on thirty bucks. The buyback desk kept me waiting. I saw a student go by I’d known at City College. I felt for him. I wondered if he ever got laid, left his mama’s house, got loaded, wondered, wondered, wondered, when a campus cop took me by the hand, escorted me gingerly to the storeroom. Stacks, cartons, piles, reams, shelves, towers of books surrounded us. He questioned me. Where did I get the books? I stonewalled. What do you mean where? Here. When did you buy them? A few weeks ago. Did I know they put them on the shelf today? Today? Yes today. Sign this. I read a sign-on-the-line don’t-do-this-dastardly-deed-ever-again-here-or-you’re-a-goner form. No arrest. No record. Just a good scare. I signed my name. My hand was shaking. A damn good scare. I got up to leave, didn’t want to miss my ride to the city. A brother came in, maybe thirty years old. He looked hipped to it, short, bearded, dark-skinned; the other man left. The brother motioned for me to sit. I sat. He asked questions. I answered the truth: who I was; where I lived; where I went to school. He looked like a black Rumpelstiltskin, a gnome, but we thought the same thing about the campus: scenic, panoramic, breathtaking; students dull, unimaginative, content. I told him about State: big gray buildings, nothing to look at, exciting as hell, overflowing with jam-packed students on the floors and windowsills, ideas, demonstrations, haps. He said this like he’d been waiting to get it off his chest for days: “I’m from Harlem. People don’t play this revolution bullshit back there. You Californians are out to lunch.” That’s all he had to say. I didn’t know what he meant, because people were political in Harlem and joining the BPP there too. His words echoed LeRoi Jones’s wife Sylvia’s rant on California at the Black House. No matter. I was off the hook and about to miss my ride. He shook my hand. What a grip. He held me as if I was falling into an abyss, reminded me three months’ grace on the paper I signed, wished me luck. I got out of there, got to the parking lot just in time to see my ride leaving me, the artful dodger, to bite that red-awful Hayward dust and ride the bus back home sweet home.
Senior
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
45
Even though I was doing my work, what was going on outside the classroom was far more compelling. But I finished the year, thanks to Cal State Hayward, with decent grades:
Psych 196, Theoretical Backgrounds, [B];
Psych 112, Psych Measurements, [C-];
Counseling 190: Principles and Practices, [A];
Educ 177, Miseducation of the Negro, [A];
Geol 5, Historical Geology, [B];
English 27, American Literary Eras, 18th century, [B].
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Dillard was waiting on my steps when I got home one night.
“My Ghia’s been stolen,” he said. “Let me use the VW for a few days, Gee.”
“I can’t loan you the car even for the night.” I thought, Little brain, dick brain when he started talking. It was the first time I put the paper to bed by myself. The biggies were out commanding the troops up and down California.
“Why? Muni runs twenty-four seven.”
“Because I work for the people around the clock. That’s why.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand perfectly. Let me tell you, shit gets old, even good shit, your shit too. Everything gets old.”
I screwed up my mouth. He wanted to lord it. He was yesterday.
“So who you screwing in the party?”
“No one.” I thought of Bibo.
“That’s impossible,” he said. As fine and neat as he was, he sounded like an old, broken-down car, not sleek like his Ghia. “What’s the diff between screwing for the revolution, Geniece, and servicing the quarterback on the football team? Different team, same position.”
He wanted me to feel like him, but I didn’t want an angry man. That had thrilled me, the headboard banger—fuck hard, fight the system even harder. No more. The movement had softened my anger at my father for leaving. My father was a victim of the harsh reality of racism and leaving was his way of not being a victim.
“What’s the deal?” Dillard said. “You back to jacking yourself off? You think you got a dick down there? I’m here to tell you—you don’t.”
Later for his bitter ass.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Becoming a senior was my dream come true. I thought of Juliegirl off in South America, probably a hippie with long flowing hair instead of the Dutch Boy bob. I had gone my very unorthodox way too, but getting out was still my goal. I didn’t know what I could do with a psych degree in the revolution. Draft counseling? It was hard to think beyond my immediate situation. It seemed sacrilegious to think about making money while making revolution. All the same, I signed up for a yearlong seminar or special study that required enrollment in both semesters simultaneously. My faculty adviser, an old leftie with Abraham Lincoln Brigade posters all over his office, signed me off:
English 199, Exploring Poetry, 6 units—Fall-Spring
Geology 119, Seminar in Geologic Hazards, 6 units—Fall-Spring
Psych 177, Seminar in Community Teaching, 6 units—Fall-Spring
Statistics 2, 6 units—Fall-Spring
Geology and Stat were the toughies. I had used up my allowed Experimental College units. But I could handle six units of tough, as long as the other six units required papers or community work. I could finagle anything written. Maybe there would be field trips in Geology. For some reason, I loved geology. That left Statistics to barrel through.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I kept doing my do, working on the paper, managing my classes, going to tutorial. Xavi was more and more pulling a disappearing act. I figured she was involved with somebody who was apolitical. Chandro-Imi wasn’t coming around so much, but I wasn’t there long enough to figure out his and Li-an’s stuff. I saw and heard about drug tripping. It was all around me. Various people in the party took various stuff. I took bennies to meet our deadlines for the printers. We had grown to a circulation of 125,000 after Sacramento. Bennies enabled me to stay up for two or three days at a stretch. I found out why it was called speed. Others took what I considered to be crazy-making drugs. I took pride in staying away from anything psychedelic, just weed, and that only occasionally since I had moved across the bay. Mainly I didn’t want to trip out and become irredeemable, wandering through the streets of my emptied mind. A stumbled-into-nothingness spook. Something about people who drank too much made me afraid of drugs. However, I was a sucker for colors, prisms, rainbows, kaleidoscopes, impossible dreams, anything mutable, rain when the sun shines, and serious young men.
Bibo was one of the brothers who was always helping the staff at the paper, all around go-get-it guy, food, supplies, and drugs. He was like my shadow. When school was out and the tutorial program ended for the semester, I met up with him again on Oak Street. I never mentioned or asked him about robbing the man on the street. And he didn’t either, like it was a silent initiation rite that I had to do once and never again. Whenever we pulled an all-night watch on Oak Street after putting the paper to bed, Bibo started te
lling me about mescaline as we were doing a lips-only make out. I liked kissing him and liked that he didn’t push for more. He said mescaline was beautiful, mentally purifying, astounding, breathtaking, woodsy green, free meadows, spring blossoming, eye delighting, brain sensitizing, nature phantasmagoria, I fell into the witches’ brew, fear, rationality, and semibourgeoisie disdain notwithstanding.
But I had one condition—I did not want to be left alone. Bibo assured me he wouldn’t let that happen. I took a half tab. Nothing happened. I didn’t trip out. I didn’t freak. My soul stayed with me. And I didn’t see any fantastic spring or summer, or transeasonally green Elysian fields. When I complained, Bibo said I should take the other half, because his trip was mellow. He said his heart was poised outside his body, where he could see and hear it beating, like a tom-tom. When he lay down it positioned itself.
I was getting unscrewed enough to enjoy his trip, even if mine was a no-show. Then my thighs lifted me farther from him. He was floating about the room, pink and moist, with arteries routing into his ears. Weird, I thought, but harmless. I couldn’t quite deal with his joy, the goofy smile and aura so unlike his regular cool. His show was releasing him from his front. I wanted mine to do likewise, but I didn’t want to play with my heart. It would be okay to sit in a meadow.
As I left to go upstairs to get the other tab, it happened, i.e., the consciousness of it, lightness, as if I had taken off ten pounds. The door at the base of the stairs was open. When I closed it behind me, something in me turned liquid, some organ near my stomach dissolving. I clutched my stomach and inside my closed eyelids were the countless diagrams I had seen of ovaries. I was on them, a comic miniature of myself about the nose and face, a white pipe-stem body sitting on a left ovary. This isn’t too bad. Kinda silly, but no scary stuff. Might this be my exit and the end of my mescaline trip?