I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (22 page)

the morning after

T
he Bush administration blocked the availability of the morning-after pill over the counter, saying that it would promote "promiscuity." I beg to differ. When I was younger, I never had any kind of access to morning-after pills, but that did not stop me from fucking my way through the USA like I was Lewis and Clark.

The "fact" that the morning-after pill may promote promiscuity is the main objection to its availability. I would keep a stash of them under my bathroom sink, just in case, and I'm married. My chances of
promiscuity are nil. When you get to a certain age, you become absolutely sick of fucking around. It's sad, but it happens.

But here is the fact. The morning-after pill does not promote promiscuity; it promotes ease in dealing with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. Unplanned or unwanted pregnancy does not equal promiscuity. All we are doing by making the morning-after pill readily available over the counter is to provide women with an alternative to having children they did not mean to have, prevent abortions, give more choices to women in need of more choices.

It's simple: There's got to be a morning after. The morning-after pill should be available over the counter, right by the Listermint strips, the Mentos, the toenail clippers, the tabloids—all those impulse buys. I want morning-after pills with my check at dinner. I want morning-after pills on my hotel pillow before I go to bed at night. Reproductive rights are not "rights" that we should need to struggle to get. They should be a given.

And if the problem is promiscuity, then why does the immense popularity of Viagra go unchecked? Doesn't it make more sense to leave the bullets out of the gun than to try to avoid being shot? Especially when the gun is an old musket, and you have to clean it out and tamp down gunpowder, melt down scraps of lead and pour it into a mold, wait for it to cool . . . only to have it take forever to finally go off?

So then are we to assume that the prevailing attitude about women's sexuality is that, if left unchecked, without the possible consequence of pregnancy, women would fuck willy-nilly until everyone
is left waiting for a ride home from school or dinner because we are all out trying to hump fire hydrants? Are we in danger of losing half the workforce because we might be generating a huge pussy cyclone, threatening to engulf everything in its path? "Just spotted off the coast of Florida, it's Hurricane Poontang!" Is a vagina without restraint just as good as a vagina gone wild at spring break? Have we no faith in reserve, prudence, common sense, education, social mores, parenting, when women are left to themselves?

This is a political debate. Who argues about choice for women and health care? If it isn't politicians and doctors being lobbied by political groups, then who? If the argument against the morning-after pill is that it poses a danger to underage girls, then why does this have to exclude all other women? Even so, isn't having to have an abortion more of a danger to girls?

Look, I have had an abortion. If I were to use the most polite terms to describe my experience, I would say, "It wasn't a fucking tea party." It is painful and hideous. Everyone leaves in a bad mood, which turns worse. If it could have been prevented by going to the drugstore to pick up some pills, then it wouldn't have ruined my sex life for several months afterward, as I tried to heal the wounds that the surgery had left behind. I would have been able to return to work sooner. I would have been able to feel like I wasn't being punished somehow for the choices that I made regarding my own health and sanity.

We are all women, but we are not all mothers. No matter how much love and respect I have for mothers in general, there are many
women who are not cut out for that particular occupation. I, for one, am far too overqualified, and far too grossly unfit. I would be an unremarkable and selfish parent. In fact, I would go as far to say that I would be a ghastly mother.

If there is a safe way to avoid the horrendous methods that we use today to terminate pregnancy, hand it over. Do it now. Before it gets ugly. It's already too ugly to begin with.

plan c

I
t's absolutely ridiculous to preach to the younger generation that abstinence is the only way to go with sex. At that age, your body is saying just one thing: "This feeling that I have inside is soooo goood, I just wanna do it, here's someone who is gonna do it with me, I don't really get it because everybody's telling me to practice abstinence, but fuck that. So, since we're both in trouble anyway, fuck it. LET'S DO DIS!!!" Preaching abstinence is not right, is not realistic, is just plain stoopid, ignant, duh-duh-duhm.

Remember the young woman who flew to France to get RU-486 and then got right back on the plane and returned to the U.S. only to be greeted by flashbulbs and police? What the fuck is wrong with people? I'm not saying that everyone should fuck themselves insane bonobo style and then throw their shit all over the place, but what's with this puritanical attitude? Like this woman needed a big
A
sewn
on her chest to show all that she ABORTED. I want to sew a big
I
for IGNANT on everybody's chest who was involved in putting this woman through fucking hell for having a body and the courage to do what she wanted with it.

Plan B is the morning-after pill that the FDA decided American women could not be trusted with.

What is plan A? Abstinence? And we got rights over everybody and their mama's uterus? Put it in the A-S-S only?

I am not pro-death. I am pro-choice. I am of the mind that young people will find a way to do what they naturally will do without possibly hurting themselves even if we tell them NOT TO DO IT. Young people have strong emotions, intense hormones, that will not be silenced as easily as saying, A-B-S-T-I-N-E-N-C-E. What they need is education, options, condoms, counseling, help, confidence, gentle awareness, trust in teachers, confidentiality, equality, reality, the fucking truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help us all God—not GUILT.

Because ABSTINENCE = GUILT.

Guilt = low self-esteem.

Low self-esteem = everything you're going to get if you offer only abstinence as your only solution.

So if they're going to limit the availability of plan B, then I would like to propose plan C.

C
stands for CUNT. Not a curse word, not a slur, not a bad thing. As Inga Muscio's important, brilliant book of the same name, CUNT is the celebration of the woman and the world, as we are one and
the same. We would have no world without the CUNT, so anyone who uses this as a negative, transgressive word is denying the fact we are alive. We are all born from cunts. Where we all come from as a human race, our very first home address. No matter where your mail gets forwarded to now, everyone everywhere had this on that first mailbox:

Me, CUNT, the World.

This makes the cunt powerful. And that power includes the power of choice, the power of knowledge, the power of attorney, the power of cunnilingus, the power of veto, the power of everything it wants and DOES NOT WANT, anytime, anywhere, anyway, all the time for all time. For real. That is what I am talking about.

west memphis three

D
amien Echols currently is on death row in Arkansas. He has been there for almost eleven years for a crime he did not commit. He is there because of bigotry. Currently, Damien is part of the West Memphis Three, accused of the murder of three little boys, and caught up in the insanity of a community that sentenced him to death and the other two, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, to life without parole.
No evidence was ever found to connect the then teenagers to the killings. It was all hysteria over the possibility of a satanic cult thriving in their community, and a complicit court system, which glossed over the facts in order to placate the outrage of the locals, and, to this day, cannot admit what they have done wrong.

One day, three little boys were found dead in a river, their bodies drained of blood and horrifically mutilated. A grief-crazed community looked desperately for a killer in their midst. Most of the clues had been washed away down the river, having first been trampled on by hapless law enforcement officials. Damien, Jason and Jessie were charged with the murders not because there was any kind of proof that they had indeed committed the crime, but because they were loners, outsiders, throwaway kids, and, therefore, convenient scapegoats. They dressed in black and listened to heavy metal, and logic, rationality and justice could not compete with the anger and fear of the small town, the small-minded locals.

There have been two documentaries made about the case,
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
, and several books and articles have been written or are in the works. There are Web sites dedicated to the West Memphis Three. And celebrities like Eddie Vedder and Winona Ryder have tried to help. All to no avail. What right does a system that cannot even sufficiently prove their guilt have to their lives? Not only have the terrible crimes gone unpunished, their effect has grown and spread like a cancer in the lives of these three young men and their families.

Of course, there are criminals who have been apprehended and justly jailed for their crimes. I am not asking that prisons and institutions for the criminally insane open their doors, like school is out forever. Still, how can we allow those who do not benefit from the technological advancement that forensic science has made in the last decade to wither behind bars? (I say "we" because unless they are free, none of us are free.) DNA evidence is the real deal, the be-all and end-all when it comes to determining who is lying and who is not. It's better than Wonder Woman's golden lasso. Unfortunately, it's expensive, and therefore mostly unavailable to those who are serving time for crimes they didn't commit years ago. The only reason they probably were incarcerated in the first place is that they couldn't afford to mount a proper defense. But here is a case where we have the most technologically advanced evidence—and it points to wrongful conviction. We have a case where the wrongfully convicted enjoy wide and passionate support and still the government does nothing. What chance does that leave for some poor kid on death row who is not in the media spotlight, who lacks the resources to prove his own innocence?

I have followed the West Memphis Three case for many years. I can't help but identify with their situation. I understand their sense of isolation and exclusion. They are my people, disaffected, disillusioned, disappointed and discarded by the world. I feel for them, and I want to know what else I can do. Recently, I have decided to step up my game. I started by sending Damien books from his
Amazon.com
wish list. I began to write to him about what life and the world is like
out here. I learned that he's bright and gentle, and very apologetic when he falls behind in his correspondence. We write to each other about books, art, spirituality, prison life, married life. We find we are very much alike, just that I'm out here and he's in there.

Then I decided to visit him.

The people in Little Rock are friendly—alarmingly so. The politeness and hospitality there borders on invasive. Everyone is a guest in their state, and you are treated accordingly, lest you forget it. We are welcomed with questions and curious smiles. It is strange, especially coming from Los Angeles, possibly the rudest city in the nation, with a population that is exceedingly unhelpful. Once I was screamed at by the operator manning the 911 switchboard for trying to report a dead body I had seen on the street. Apparently, I was not the first caller, and somehow I should have known that.

But we are in Little Rock to visit Damien Echols, who is incarcerated at the maximum security prison in Grady, an hour outside of the city. Everyone wants to know what we are doing here, why we are doing it, when we are doing it, what we expect to get from doing it and when we think we will be done doing it. Then it's cheery smiles all around, which fade slightly once we get out of earshot.

We have a glorious dinner with Damien's amazing and lovely wife, Lorri Davis. She is a true hero in the face of injustice, and her work inspires me every day. We are meeting with their new lawyer, Theresa, who is doing great work on the case, and with Mara Leveritt, the author of
Devil's Knot
, the definitive book on the West Memphis
Three. We discuss the politics of the case at length, the difficulty of the appeals process, how hard it is to undo the damage that the law itself has brought on due to its own mistakes.

Here is a remarkable trio of women, committed to justice and freedom, who are invested not only on an extremely personal level but on a philosophical level as well. The bottom line of all of this is, you cannot let the government throw people away, because there will always be a fine net of tenderness that prevents it. Humanity is a natural foil for inhumanity, and humanity is what will ultimately keep us going when all else has failed.

A kind of failure is evident when we approach the prison in our rented minivan. It's early in the morning and already approaching 100 degrees, with lung-stopping humidity. The insects congregate in thick clouds near the ground, and they carpet the inside of the car when the doors are cracked open. We pass a large group of inmates, mostly black men, working the field with hoes. They break the ground under the blazing sun and the heated gaze of many Boss Hogg–type guards, on horseback and with rifles at the ready.

We blink several times to accept his reality. It looks like
Roots
, which can never be a good thing. Not then, and certainly not now. I hope that these prisoners have done wrong, that they are being punished fairly, that they are supposed to be here, that their karma has brought them here and not the bureaucratic unfairness of capitalist society. How can we be sure anymore? I have been around so-called criminals, reformed and otherwise, for my entire life. What is com
mon among them is forever claiming innocence, no matter what the accusation is or how much evidence is stacked against them.

Often, it's easy to tell who is guilty and who isn't. Here, it is less obvious. The story of the West Memphis Three makes you question whether any of these young men toiling in the muggy morning heat deserve their lot. Damien once wrote to me that Jessie Misskelley worked the hoe squad and that he felt sorry for him.