Kill the dove!

by Francis Kroncke

  Chapter 33: Womanfire

  Char is your target!

  After the West Eleventh Street townhouse explosion in New York City back in early 1970, talk among the Weathermen focused on the image and reality of “underground.” Those who had been spurred on by the West 11th Martyrs began to practice a discipline of steel. They hammered their bodies into warrior stamina and thrust their minds into kamikaze mold. They armed themselves and festered inwardly.

  Their vision was of the inch; life was without memory of the previous moment or planning beyond the next. Now, after her Milan visit with Jared, a bit over three weeks ago, recruiting “the true Vanguard” is the obsession that sets Aaren on to Char. She tells her Vanguard Sisters, “When she comes with us, more of the hippie and radical feminists, even many of the war resisters will come.”

  Like the faithful renewed by the fire of the Holy Spirit after a Sunday revival, Aaren’s eyes glaze over as she ponders the opportunity Steve’s given her—Steve, who she still thinks of as “a ninny, toad, running dog. Smart, but not as smart as us!”

  Within herself Aaren has no doubt that she can and will convert Char. “The correctness of our ideas and the purity of our vision make it inevitable.” She trumpets, “Victory is ours!”

  Her zeal for Char’s enlistment borders on incautious. Fortunately, she’s tempered by the advice of several other Sisters. “Don’t let your enthusiasm outstrip your evaluation of the situation. Otherwise you’ll end up like Joplin and Hendrix and that dead Door you once so adored—dead yourself!”

  Concerned, those who make the bombs, the technicians of the Revolution—who merely have to not place the red negative where the yellow positive belongs—these who are disciplined at the flashpoint of blast and oblivion are the ones who pull her back. For she’s gotten too juiced. Back from her recent visit with Jared, she started into her old ways, the habits that those more sober among the Sisters know are her short route to apocalyptic ranting. “She’s already preaching daily sermons from Mao’s Little Red Book. How many times have we heard, ‘Leaders must march ahead of the movement, not lag behind it!’?”

  When she’s not in earshot, they chuckle a bit at her “over the top commitment.” “Goddess protect us! It’s that and Jimmy Hendrix all night long!”

  Aaren benefits greatly from her ongoing visits with Jared. For the first time she’s actually Inside, not just a jail but a prison, “The Slammer!” She loves the melody of the clashing bars! Hears the message of their simple song, that it will not end as the Apocalypse nor with the boom! gone nuclear in the mushroom cloud. No, it’s now clearer than ever. Aaren holds that prison validates the truth of Ho Chi Minh’s statement, “We will outlive you!”

  “This means,” she proclaims with all the fervor of discovery, “this is what all revolutionaries must prepare for—to live! Not to die.” She asks her cadre to consider, “They were suicides, not sacrifices, these much idolized self-immolators of the fall of 1970. Neither anti-Christs nor new Christs. Don’t revere Hendrix, Joplin, or Morrison! It was simply their Eve of Destruction. Let the damn counterculture die with them!”

  For her, the hippie movement is just crap. Lies and crap. “It isn’t a peace movement, a culture that values life. No, Sisters, comrades, just the opposite. It’s a death movement. That’s what the Holy Trinity of Jimi, Janis and Jim are all about—dying. Look at that puke Lennon. He’s Revolutionary Enemy Number One!”

  She derisively sings a refrain from his song, “Revolution.”

  If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,

  you’re not gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.

  “Fucking asshole!” Lennon takes center stage on her Wall of Crap.

  Aaren can’t stop herself once her evangelical fervor resurfaces. So at their weekly Maoist cell meetings, she plays Lennon’s song for the cadre because it jacks her up, motivates her. “See, he’s linking revolution with sex. If you’re a Weatherman, he says, you’re not going to make it with anyone, anyhow. That’s pure bullshit! Just the opposite. When you carry pictures of Chairman Mao, you’re gonna make it with everyone, every time!” Often this is her segue to chanting, “Wargasm! Wargasm!” It’s a spark to a powder keg. The cadre picks it up, forms a Congo-line and dances into the central living room. They merge: one into the many; all into the one.

  “Wargasm! Wargasm!” The chanting brings chilly heat and shivers of lust to her image of Char. Conquer Char!

  Char turns towards Aaren as she lifts the steaming kettle. Tea is prepared, a soft peppermint sweetness that Char knows is a healing anodyne. She’s conscious of the moment, of the sharing of water with her Sister.

  “It’s wonderful. That we’re Sisters,” Aaren says, “but aren’t we more than Sisters?”

  “How do you see that?”

  “We are Mothers!”

  “Mothers?” Her tone frames the oddity of Char hearing that word from Aaren—this woman, now Sister, whom Char has once indicted before the Collective as wanting to be Father and All Male.

  “It’s just thrilling! Imagine, Mothers . . . being Mothers is the only correct anti-imperialistic stance!”

  Char settles back in her chair, opens to being pleasantly surprised by this shift in Weathermen ideology. An ideology that Char always believed could never, would never, bond women.

  Aaren: “It’s the Fathers who are the imperialists. They who seek to usurp our birthing rite. Glory be! Thank the Great Mother! They have become their own undoing.”

  “More, tell me more.”

  “In the Bomb they’ve concatenated their power and simultaneously rendered themselves impotent. For who can wage a nuclear war and live? Their atomic logic has fallen, crushed by its own ferocious powerlessness.”

  Char is pensive. They sit quietly for several minutes, sipping tea. Aaren’s patiently moving Char up one rung of the ladder at a time.

  Aaren: “Marx is right on about religion as the opiate of the people, but he failed to see that the Father—himself, that bastard wife thrasher!—made sex their religion.”

  “I didn’t know the Weather’s become so spiritual,” teases Char.

  “Goddess! It’s wonderful. Listen, my Sister, do listen. Please, open your mind. Eve’s transgression was sexual. The Father’s expulsion condemned Eve to a life of total submission to the cock. Woman’s sexuality was obliterated. The Male creation story is a sexual genocide, like Vietnam, like our Native American brothers and sisters. We—women, Goddesses, mothers, Sisters—were rendered invisible.”

  Char: “Not so. It’s just the reverse. Men need women for birthing. If anything, Adam was alone . . . and he had to have a woman.”

  “Revisionist Christian crap!” Then a dead silence. Aaren’s response has blasted out before her internal censor could artfully guide her tongue. This phrase is one of Aaren’s stock condemnations, often hurled in heated discussion when debating with Christian feminists. She instantly regrets losing ground. But just as quickly she reevaluates the timeliness of this tactic. Sometimes you get more flies with shit than honey!

  “Jesus fucking Christ, sometimes you are a dumb-assed broad,” Aaren spits at Char, then stands, goes to Char’s chair and swats her teacup to the floor. Char is frightened. Aaren’s a storm of violence.

  Char wants to say, “Sister, this is also my house. Not a Weathermen’s barrack. Get control of yourself,” but only her mute fear addresses Aaren’s eyes.

  After several tense minutes, Aaren turns, closely facing Char. Her tone is conciliatory, sisterly. She employs a tactic of reverse psychology that one Sister taught her. “Turn empathy into antipathy into sympathy,” was her instruction.

  “Sweet Char, look, I thought they needed us. That we needed them.” Aaren kneels down before Char.

  “It was my fantasy . . . Jesus I can’t believe I really believed this. What an ass, but never mind. Listen . . . I wanted a cock, and I wanted them to have a cunt. I wanted men and women to be equal with a capital E, Equal. For both to bear c
hildren, for both to be bisexual—revolutionary hermaphrodites—and all that shit.” She waves her hands about as if to dispel thoughts now gone rank. “I always—Jesus, you have to believe how captured by false consciousness I was!—I mean, I always made them butt-fuck me. True. Made them promise, You can have pussy but you got to fuck my ass! Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, I wanted them to fuck me as if I were a man.”

  Within, Char is gasping for air. She’s never ever desired what she deems not only useless but painful. She’s never asked; was never asked.

  “Char. I confess this. We did . . . fuck butts . . . jack off on command. Goddess, what a mess! But listen, hell, we don’t need them, get it? The Sisters’ future society will be cockless because we can harvest sperm and by then raise babies in test tubes.”

  “Wait, stop. Stop!” Char stands, steps back, turns and walks away from her, halfway across the room. “This is all loony tunes. You’re sounding like an acidhead on a bad trip!” She walks about the room, stopping here, touching this and that, trying to ground herself in something solid.

  Aaren presses on, “You must understand! You must strip yourself of their every dream. Root out and destroy their myths. You must become Eve revenged!”

  “But—” Char turns, spins slowly one way, then another. She’s feeling odd, like something magnetic or magical, something truly powerful is reorienting her brain’s neural pathways. “But what can that mean but more violence?”

  “Eureka, Sister, yes! But Womanly violence, Motherly violence, the violence of Kali. We must become Black Widows. Females who once and for all and forever kill the Male, castrate him, gut him. Sexual technology can set us free from him! We must abandon him to his masturbation—that’s all he wants anyway!”

  “Never, never . . .” Char is resisting.

  “No, ever, ever! It must be done forever, now and for all time yet to come. Imagine and rejoice! For we can now seed ourselves. The ultimate contradiction of Capitalism is not just political, not just the Stateless State, but the cockless ecstasy. We don’t need them. Can’t you see how clear this is? You must join us, the Vanguard—witches! True revolutionaries! Women without cock!”

  Char resists, shuts down the evening. “No, this I cannot go with.” She touches her belly, then her breasts. They know the male. Too much of Jared is still present to her in the room upstairs. With a tone of finality, Char states, “This is all too much violence.”

  Clever as she is, Aaren withdraws at Char’s request, but she also stays on point. Her words are carefully chosen to imply a shared bond and an expectation of further conversation. “Just think about it, Sister, just dwell on it a bit more.” Aaren leaves. They don’t hug.

  In the aftermath, Char realizes clearly that she definitely did not enjoy the meeting. As much as she sees the rightness in Aaren’s lightning bolts of change, she’s left with cold dreams. Searching for more information, she doesn’t seek Aaren out, but does ask around, “What’s she doing? Where does she go every day when she leaves the commune?” But no one knows. Some think that she’s visiting the Weatherman underground. It’s a hot rumor that her Weathermen faction is planning a major event. Ha! There are always rumors about Weathermen violence, although little has happened since the explosion at the jail.

  Aaren continues visiting Jared every other week. She intentionally doesn’t talk about Char. Even when mentioning her name seems logical, she finds a way to sidestep. With her Maoist sisters—her cadre does go underground in a fashion, for only her and another comrade remain working to pay the bills—she focuses on forging deeper erotic ties, practicing true revolutionary sex. They go deeply underground in psychic plunge and shadowy rage. They merge their sisterhood with dark witchcraft, forming a coven that is communal in all ways sexual and violent.

  Wargasm sessions are now twice a week. Wargasm works to keep the cadre together. It releases all the pent-up anger, outrage and desire for revenge that rises from their ideological analyses and oppressed lives. All together—with a companion cadre of Weathermen “radical cocks”—they break down their sexual, personal and political inhibitions. The upshot is a wild, orgiastic, crazed, frenzied event at once athletic, erotic, maddening, even fulfilling.

  Aaren often takes the lead position. Within a musical ocean they swim and are tossed about by hard rock and acid rock. Often they are thrown up onto the beach by the force of African beats, heart-thumping drumming. As Wargasm’s quarterback Aaren calls out the plays. “Hand jobs!” Then, “Pussy lick!” Then, “Stick and suck!” There’s also “End run!” and “Up the middle!” Mostly offensive, not defensive calls. All in all, as the sexual war game plays itself out, the group falls into smaller groupings—men with men and women with women, it goes on. More than not, they often end up chanting, sounding at times more like Buddhist monks than they intend. This is a cacophony of unstructured, unfettered, free emotions. They noisily grunt, howl, shrill, and shriek. Humorously, this dissonance and bedlam does not draw knocks on the door from the police, since the neighborhood is heavily migrant worker, poor and in urban blight.

  One day, after an exceptionally intense Wargasm, something happens to Aaren that she can’t describe without robbing phrases from psychological therapy and the Catholic Mass. She really doesn’t care to label it correctly, whether Primal Scream or Real Presence, but it happened and she wants to tell Char.

  When Aaren visits Char, now a full month later, she brings a gift of Celestial Seasonings herbal tea. They parted in tension and she’s come to know that drinking tea is a way Char and her closest Sisters bond. This small act of thoughtfulness is received with a smile and a hug, but Char is taken aback at what she sees. Aaren?

  “The Weather Movement is dead!” doesn’t have to be stated because Aaren’s mode of dress proclaims the message. The two women move into the living room and Aaren settles into one end of Char’s overstuffed couch. For anyone who knows her, Aaren is a startling image of “without.” Without her boots, without her military accessories, without the harshness of Marxist cosmetics: no red star patches. She sits looking not hippie, not radical, not Vanguard, just plain and simple. Char takes immediate notice that an aura of inner peace surrounds her.

  Char sits down at the other end of the couch. Both sip the hot brew. Slowly, a comforting silence wraps them. Aaren snuggles into Char’s tender eyes as she blows away strings of steam; she’s amused at Char’s befuddlement.

  Char is the target! This now means something profoundly different. Aaren wants to, needs to, share with Char. She wants her to experience as best her words can convey, her astounding, life-altering transformation. Carefully, as the two women share tea, Aaren slowly unfolds her tale. Her characteristic zest and fiery passion nourish her, but she modulates her pace. She’s enjoying the moment.

  Although Char knows about Wargasm, she isn’t prepared for the daunting sexual athleticism she hears described. Intuitively, she knows that what Aaren has come to share concerns her heart, not the details of sexual play.

  As Aaren nears the key scene of transformation, the pace of her speech picks up. The volcanic spew for which she is well known bursts forth. “Jesus fucking Mother of Christ! JJEESSUUSS mudda fucking K-rist! It was like I gave my calling card to the Universe. All of a sudden, from where I don’t know, I hear my name, Aaren!” She sips from her cup.

  “Right there, in the middle of Wargasm—just like in the middle of battle, pow! It came to me. Ha. I came that day—eight, a hundred times, I don’t know. I looked around and there were mouths and eyes, moving like fireflies in the late summer sky, flashing, and I came, orgasm and juice flowing, and hard cocks all over me and my sucking this one and that teat, and Jesus, oh, god! Fuck it. I was really fucked! Glorious! That’s how it happened. I came . . . really came. What can I say? The weather’s changed!”

  Breathless. It’s the only word that describes Char’s reaction, when she retells the story later. “I was breathless! Imagine. Wargasm leads to love! Who would have ever thought that?”

/>   “But that’s not it,” said almost regretfully, “I just, I don’t know, maybe it’s all so new—too new even for me!—but it wasn’t the sex, hell, sex is sex, not that, I saw, fuck, I felt, my heart burst into fire, sounds stupid, but true, “It’s all wrong,” I said to myself, “This is what the fuckers want us to do—just be lost in sex. The real war is the war against war.” She pauses, Char waits, it is difficult for Aaren, she’s wrestling the words, “It’s intimacy.” Hard pause. Confessional: “I’ve never had that, you know.” Char’s eyes mist. She reaches over and touches Aaren’s cheek. “Isn’t it wonderful!” Aaren finishes, as if concluding but actually asking for Char’s comments, her reactions. Again, “Isn’t it wonderful!”

  “What?”

  “Love.”

  “Love?”

  “Blissful! Female love, Sister love, true intimacy . . . WomanFire!”

  Distrustful, suspicious, only too familiar with the devious ploys of the Weathermen, Char waits. The prior meeting left her with a cache of unresolved suspicions about Aaren’s intentions.

  Aaren: “Many Sisters have told me about you, especially your nonviolent Sisters. I know about your heart. Your words have come to me upon their kisses and within their embraces.”

  “What do you know about my heart?”

  “That you believe in love, have preached love . . . know the love of the Sisters.”

  “True,” unsure, somewhat tired of anticipating her snare. “That’s true, but it’s love without violence, a love that isn’t terror.”

  “Sure, I know, it’s intimacy, right? But see—” Aaren puts down her cup and sits on the floor, places her back against the couch’s frame, “I didn’t know love as intimacy, never did, only thought I did, but all my posturing—and it was posturing—was still the Male Trick. Still, even when our Wargasm included women loving, it was still fucking.” Here she halts in the embarrassment that’s also the gateway to the creative. “I was fucking women and they were fucking me, but then after that day, that breakthrough, I met Ellen. She showed me true love.”

  “Ellen.”

  “I know she’s been your lover.” Fear of rejection; jealousy?

  Char without a breath responds, “Please, understand, I am her love. But we’ve moved on or let’s say “beyond”—we’re more mothers together now. It’s a deeper love,” but she doesn’t want to distract Aaren, “but that’s for later.”

  Char moves to sit on the floor closer to Aaren. This time there’s a genuine magnetism of erotic attraction that draws them together.

  Aaren: “She loves me. It’s crazy to say, but it’s the most, the greatest of sex, but not with possession. She gives birth to me, my soul. She’s freed me from being a sexual warrior, showed me what she calls my precious self. This is Womanfire!”

  Char: “Yes, true, this I understand, go on.”

  “With her—better to say, within her, her embrace, I finally—Goddess, how dreadful all those years of self-imprisonment, oh well—within her embrace I found my own love. I loved myself.”

  Char leans forward, hugs and kisses Aaren on the forehead. “Sweetest of Sisters, yes, Goddess be praised, that’s it!”

  Char is truly amazed. The Goddess works in mysterious ways!

  “And men?”

  Aaren responds instantly, an evidence of her heartfelt sincerity. “Not to be hated, just not necessary or essential . . . not irrelevant, but maybe not of great concern. It’s a blessing. Simply, we have another path. Who knows where it will lead?”

  Twilight is upon them. They rise, bonded through the ritual of sharing water, of tea and conversation. Two females of the species homo sapiens rise and are drawn together by yearnings of Motherly spirits that have lain dormant for many centuries, oppressed!

  They move to the bathroom, undress each other. Their eyes dance smiles, messages, unformed hopes. They agree to bathe each other, as Ellen has guided each of them. “This water is our water. We are one drop, together.” They soap, lather, dust each other with bubbles and so cleanse each other. “May our blemishes humble us and point to the inner beauty we are as Sisters.” Then they dry one another. They touch with soft cloth, caress with tenderness, and end within an embrace and a shower of kisses.

  This is all and everything that Aaren wanted from Wargasm. It is now delivered by the sparrow and the dove, not by the claw of eagle and hawk. Together they walk into Char’s bedroom and draw back the covers, fluff several pillows, then, in duet, lie down in each other’s arms.

  For time not counted they kiss and drink the restfulness within each other. They talk—dream talk, rambling thoughts, sweetness upon sounds. They rest within the silence of the non-word, of the heart and the will. They embrace closely, entwine. All that is known and felt in this moment is healing.

  Aaren and Char—whom Jared calls Liquid Fire and Soothing Water—are two women who now commune together within a shared intimacy . within an embraced presence. They consciously join together to create a common fire: Womanfire.

  Within the week Aaren moves into Char’s bedroom. Each day they grow more strongly attracted and attached to the other as they share their life stories. Char learns that Aaren is the youngest of four and the only girl. Her upper-class family suffered several major financial setbacks and so her home was fraught with all the anxieties and play-actings of those who must convince themselves that they are superior. Her father’s morality twisted Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” into a carnivorous Calvinism. They were raised to accept that others are fated to be shark meat, and that it is their moral obligation to be sharks. “Shark or shark meat,” her father would say, “It’s all part of God’s mysterious plan!” Competition with one another and everyone else was considered an act of righteous behavior. As a woman, Aaren was charged with finding a mate who would try to master her. “Love,” so her mother told her, “is a battle between the sexes.” Only in personal combat—no matter the arena—would her life find meaning, so did young Aaren learn.

  Her parents divorced while in college. She watched her mother swim through booze and pills and become a floozy. She totally disintegrated into silliness and weakness of mind, body and soul. Just before she graduated, Aaren buried both her mother and father. They died six months apart. Worse, her father died near penniless.

  Broke but gifted with sharkness, Aaren found and took off down her own path of conquest. She set out to triumph over not just the Market but the Earth, itself. Her new passion was at once global and cosmic. Politically and metaphysically, she put aside her father’s vision and knelt in revolutionary adoration of Mao and the revolutionary gods: Marx and Lenin.

  Ironically, Char’s father also experienced severe economic ups and downs. Once a family farmer, he then became a sharecropper and is now a minion of a vast global combine. But instead of anxiety, her father and mother labored to raise their children as optimists. “God cares for you. He created the whole world just for you to enjoy!” The believed this despite hearing all the scriptural stories during their childhood about original sin and mankind’s fallen nature. In their hearts and souls, they were farmers more than church goers, meaning that they were people of the land, of the dirt. More importantly, they practiced what they preached. They nurtured everything and everyone around them.

  Char was also the last child, but of five, two of them boys. They were all just two years apart. Hers was a prototypical small town, Midwestern storybook life, complete with riding ponies and eating sweet corn at picnics after dips in the lake. For a brief period, in her early teens, she became both fascinated and terrified by the emphasis her Sunday school teacher placed on Jesus’ sufferings. “Jesus died for you!” did not make her feel loved by God—rather, she felt guilty for being the sinner Jesus had to die for. Eventually her mother changed her whole perspective on Christianity by saying, “Jesus rose from the dead for you. He calls you to live a resurrected life!” With that upbeat, life-affirming message, Char grounded her sense of identity and purpose. She becam
e a nurse, and a leader of social justice causes.

  Aaren falls fully under Char’s spell. What Char enables Aaren to tap is a wellspring of inner affection. Char’s touch, her mere presence, gradually fills Aaren with a sense of security that she’s never experienced. They become true friends and Sisters. This is the basis for the flowering of their love. In that deep embrace of entwined hearts, they express to all the joy of making present Womanfire.

  Yet something is yet to be transformed. Aaren is beset by a thorn in her flesh. Like the stiletto of days gone by, she keeps her visits with Jared sheathed and hidden. Why am I not telling Char this? The thorn is deep within her flesh because it’s more than not telling Char about her visits with Jared—she’s also not telling Jared about Char. Why am I not telling them?

  Am I afraid that they will not forgive me? Trust me?

  What she does have is so good—she has love as she has never known it before—that she chooses to walk the razor’s edge. Char now knows her as true Sister and she doesn’t want to lose that love. Jared—he doesn’t know about Witson’s deal—so she can continue as before since he never knew that her “love letters” were acts of subterfuge and deception. What were once sweet words carrying hate now express her earnest affection and desire. As before, Aaren’s letters begin, “Oh, Sweetheart,” but end alluding to, “Things I must tell you, truly exciting things, on my next visit.” But she hasn’t yet.