Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (14 page)

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 funny 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 … ?”

Nothing. Goddammit.

“Mom, if you don’t open this door, I’m going to call the police again and they won’t be looking for Patty Hearst — they’ll make you and me go to the hospital!”

Another one of her faces, the “Snow Queen,” opened the door an inch. I was relieved to see her standing up, intact. “I am fine,” she said. “Your things are packed; you may go.”

“I’m really sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry I made you upset, I —”

She closed the door in my face. But she didn’t lock it this time. She really didn’t like the police.

I was relieved to catch the train back early. My face had a funny blush on one side, but I didn’t think anyone would notice. I had to pee, but I could wait till I got back to L.A..

I left Elizabeth’s apartment and walked across the landing to ring the bell at Apartment 2G. All the older ladies at this apartment complex knew each other.

“Hi, there, Mrs. Koperski.” She recognized who I was — I look exactly like my mother. “Yes, I’m fine; I have to go to the train now, but would you go check in with my mom in a little bit? She’s not feeling well, and I made her some tea. I’m worried she’ll forget to drink it.”

“Oh yes, sweetheart, of course I will. …”

My mom’s neighb
ors were good-natured busybodies. I didn’t want them to discover her body, but I had to do something. She’d probably pull it together to save face. She’d forget what had happened between the two of us. Presto. I wish I could pull that off. I wish I could just turn around, like Pussums, and show you what I looked like walking away from every last bit of it.

Dago Armour’s Apartment

I
finally got permission from my dad to go to “Commie Camp” in Detroit the summer of 1975. I was seventeen, and you would have thought I’d been invited to a tour of Europe; I was so excited. As far as I could tell, Motor City was filled with charisma, a 100 percent working-class town with factories on every corner, like pastry shops in Vienna. I could not wait.

But I had no money for my destination, no ticket to ride. I was going to have to baby-sit and hamburger-fry my way to the revolution launch pad.

My father didn’t say anything directly about my plans. It was more like: “You earn it, you plan it, go ahead.”

But his newest girlfriend, Judy, didn’t hold back, and I heard her dramatizing it on the phone to one of her girlfriends. “She wants to go to Detroit for the
summer …

“Ha! Yeah, I know, why not throw in Newark and Carbondale and make it like a cruise! I told Bill, I told him, you’re her father, you …

“No, no, I don’t think Susie has any idea; she’s never really been out of California. She says to me [using a prissy schoolgirl voice], ‘I’m sure there are nice places in Detroit, just like anywhere else!’ Yes, I know, we’re all waiting for the film to be developed!”

More laughing. I didn’t think Judy had ever been to Detroit, either, so what did she know? I’d develop the pictures all right, and I wouldn’t show them to her.

Judy was so ignorant — she didn’t understand that Commie summer camp was not going to be in the city itself. It was a real camp, the kind of place out in Michigan’s forests that gets leased to Girl Scouts and Rotarians. I guess the owner didn’t have a problem with Reds, either, at least for a week.

Or maybe the camp managers didn’t know who we were. One year we organized a high school anti-apartheid conference, for which I made up phony brochures for the kids’ parents that said that the whole thing was being sponsored by the YWCA. It was the only way we could get those permission slips!

I had a couple more months to make the money for my bus ticket. I had applied for a scholarship to the camp itself that would cover my bunk and meals. I asked Geri and Ambrose to plea on my behalf. Geri called me back with somethin
g I didn’t expect. “Some of the members of the Executive Committee think your family is loaded.”

“What?”

“I know, I know — they think everyone in California is a millionaire, unless they’re industrialized.”

“Well, did you set them straight?” I was so embarrassed. I thought the Executive Committee met in robes to solemnly discuss the future of Leninist cadre building, not Sue Bright’s dad’s financial statement.

“Of course I did. I told them that the average feeder driver at UPS makes more than your dad does teaching, and don’t you worry, they’re going to do it. I told them they were full of shit. But it’s just like rubbing salt on a wound to tell the Executive Committee your dad is a professor … that’s what they were supposed to be if they hadn’t dropped out and become Teamsters.”

“Those guys went to college?” I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the receiver like it was alive.

“You didn’t know that? That’s their secret shame — they’re all Cal and Columbia dropouts.” She told me that Mac Lofton was one quarter away from his PhD in English literature.

“Is it really a secret?” When I saw Mac in public, he wore a blue satin Teamsters’ jacket with the American flag embroidered on the chest above Local 5. He married a comrade named Arlene, even though she was a lesbian, and listened to George Jones because “that’s what workers do.” Every time he saw me, or one of the other kids from
The Red Tide
, he’d make a face, like someone had put a hippie hair in his Danish. And every time I saw his wrinkled face, I thought, My god, you don’t know a single “worker” under sixty-five. I loved the Teamsters Union rank and file, but Mac acted like no one matt
ered who wasn’t over fifty and driving “over the road” — while most Teamsters I knew were young and loading trucks, like at United Parcel Service. We weren’t listening to George Jones.

“Everyone knows,” Geri said. “It’s the story of half this organization — don’t let them fool you. They don’t want any of you kids to go to college, ’cause they would have to see you graduate when they didn’t.”

I’d never heard her talk like that. “Geri, didn’t you drop out of school, too?”

“Yes, I hated it, but it had nothing to do with communism — I just got pregnant, and I wanted to live on an organic farm and bake bread with my baby on my back.” Geri cracked up at herself. “It’s no secret and no shame; I have no regrets. If I ever go back to school, I’ll be doing it for me.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. Mac and the rest of the IS leadership acted like going to college was the same as turning your back on the whole class struggle; it was like saying you were going to a fiesta while people were starving. I agreed a thousand percent. I was not going to waste the revolution’s time by sitting in a classroom with a bunch of dilettantes who thought they were going to ge
t a degree and be somebody. Whenever someone said that shit to me, I’d come back with, “Instead of being somebody, why don’t you do something for a change.”

Yet here was Geri, acting like it was no big deal one way or the other.

She had one more question for me. “Sue, I didn’t know what to say about this, but can your mom help you out? I don’t even know if you talk to her.”

“My mom?” I acted like it was something you might or might not have, like an extra limb. “Look, I’m baby-sitting and housecleaning my ass off for the bus ticket, and I can work at camp, too — isn’t there something I can do for my room and board?”

Geri called me back the next day and told me that Murray, the International Socialists head pressman, was going to be running the kitchen, and that I would do supper duty with him each night. Excellent. Murray even sent me a postcard, telling me he’d learned to cook in the Navy Brig, and now he was going to share all his special recipes with me.

The Greyhound ticket from L.A. to Detroit, roundtrip, was $172. The problem was that I was making $1 an hour babysitting, and $2 for housecleaning. I had a couple weeks left, and aside from bus fare, I still needed cash for everything else before I left: burritos, books, ice cream.

Danielle, who’d turned me onto my first cleaning jobs, advised me: “Raise your prices.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

“Whaddya mean? I did.” She slammed her cigar box shut and started tamping down a hand-rolled cigarette. “These assholes can afford it,” she said, licking the paper. “Stop cleaning their dope for free. Stop taking record albums instead of money. Start charging them for blow jobs.”

“Jesus Christ, Dani, I’m not going to charge money for sex!”

“Jesus, Sue,” she mimicked me with an American drawl, “what will you charge money for?
Qu’est-ce que tu fais maintenant?”

This was why we couldn’t keep cleaning together — she knew how to clean, but she also knew how to get on my nerves. I knew she didn’t want me to leave, either.

I went to the Dennis’s that night to take care of their twins. I wasn’t having sex with Mr. Dennis or Mrs. Dennis — hah! They were a middle-class Ebony magazine-type family, probably the only people I worked for in the canyon who didn’t have giant spider plants in a macramé baskets, or a shoe box full of Colombian. I couldn’t imagine asking them for more money — they were so nice; and I imagined they moved to this neighborhood so their kids could go to West L.A. schools without being bused for two hours.

My lover Reggie Johnson came over to pick me up from their house at ten thirty. Mr. Dennis took one look at Reggie at the door — Reg’s twelve-inch Afro and black leather coat, versus Mr. Dennis in his suit and tie — and made a terrible face.

I could read his mind:
What are you two trying to prove?

“Don’t say anything!” I mouthed to Reggie behind Mr. Dennis’s back.

Mrs. Dennis came to the door, too, with some homemade macaroons. “Do you want some for you and your friend, honey?” she asked, just like a mommy in a TV show.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dennis,” Reggie and I said in a one-two chorus. I was glad Reggie’s mom was kind of like Mrs. Dennis, because at least he had good manners with her.

The next day after school, it was time to clean Dago Armour’s apartment. He was a self-professed filmmaker whom I had never seen leave his apartment except to go to Odie’s Stop ‘N’ Go for more beer. But Dago was very smart and had stories about every single person in Beverly Glen, from the kids working on The Partridge Family to Beatle George Harrison’s secret masseuse.