Riding Fury Home (29 page)

“Sure, no problem.” I had not yet learned that word for boundaries, “n-o.”

Karen and her new sweetie arrived a week later in the evening. As soon as I showed them into my place, the girlfriend took one look at my shabby futon that I'd opened as a bed for them in the living room, and started screaming, “I'm not staying in this rat hole! We have to leave, now!” When Karen shook her head, the lover said, “That's it, I'm going back to L.A.!” and stormed out.

“Aren't you going after her?” I asked.

“Nah, I'm staying here. She's been bugging me the whole drive up. A real pain in the ass.”

“Ah . . . okay.”
Gulp
—alone with Karen. Left to play hostess, I asked, “What do you want to do?”

“Let's go dancing!” And for three nights, we did. At a lesbian bar complete with a disco ball, the air thick with cigarette smoke
and sweat, we lubricated ourselves with Black Russians. We moved to the thump of the bass, the disco lights pulsing to the music. Our bodies slanted toward and away from each other as Donna Summer sang, “
Oooh, love to love you baby”
for sixteen minutes, the relentless beat and the colored lights inducing trance. In the sway of our movement, I could feel the pull of Karen's body, its enticement. She threw her head back as she danced, raised her arms as she snapped her fingers, which accentuated her large breasts, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips. I resisted by sitting out the slow dances.

Each night, Karen slept on the living-room futon. The third night, we came back to the apartment half-smashed. I had already crawled into bed when Karen appeared and sat down, her body close to me. She was leaving the next morning. “I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful time I've had.”

She reached over and stroked my hair, leaning forward for a dark hug. I was starting to reach up and pull her toward me when Gloria's face flashed in my mind. My mother was my rock, outlasting all the lovers who had come and gone.

Stone sober now, I said, “Good night, Karen.” It almost sounded like I was talking to myself.

 

 

ONE VISIT WHEN GLORIA was coming West, I drove my battered blue VW Bug to the San Francisco airport to pick her up. The car had a broken heater and a hole in the floorboard, but it was summer, so the drive across the bay to Oakland wasn't so bad. It was hard to talk over the loud
click-click
of the engine, and I had to focus on holding the stick shift in a vice grip to keep it from popping out of fourth gear.

Back on my block, Gloria suggested, “Let's see if we can go to the country. I'm dying for nature. Whadda ya say?”

There were feminist groups living on communes in the country, so we called around and found WomanShare in southern Oregon. They were a collective who gave five-day workshops to support themselves. By luck, they had a workshop coming up in a couple of days. The topic was lesbian sexuality. “Sign us up!” I said over the phone.

We got a ride from a local woman who had a decent car. It wasn't until we had arrived and unloaded the car, been greeted by the five collective members and several attendees, been fed soup and homemade bread, and were sitting in the living room as a group, beginning the first evening's check-in, that it hit me:
I'm at a sexuality workshop with my
mother
. Oh shit!

Gloria and I prided ourselves on not being uptight with each other about our sexuality. Our lives had blossomed in the women's movement culture, whose heart was the belief that sharing intimate truths was liberating. We had—separately on East and West Coasts—participated in group self-help gynecological exams with warmed speculums, flashlights, and mirrors.

But this—to be at a small sexuality retreat together—was a bit close to the edge.
Thank God,
I thought, when I heard an organizer explain that each day there would be two workshop times to choose from, and some all-group activities: swimming in the river, folk dancing, and softball. I planned to head for whatever meeting my mother didn't.

It took maybe half a day for me to fixate on a woman in the group. I had been single for two years—my longest period ever. Over this time, my longing and libido had landed on one woman after another. Unable to restrain myself, I would declare my feelings to the woman in question as if I were making a commencement address:
topic, argument, conclusion, usually ending not in thunderous applause, but in a panicked stare or a firm “Sorry, I like you, but only as a friend.”

This time, I tried to be subtler. I just gazed ardently at Lucinda when we spoke, and managed to eat lunch next to her. She chatted with me, and laughed with great guffaws, so I felt encouraged.

Much of the day, my mother and I went our separate ways. At night, we shared a little wood structure with twin beds. It was called the Coop, after the chicken coop it had once been. Lying in our beds, we would recount to each other details of our day. I bemoaned not knowing if Lucinda reciprocated my attraction, and how when I was near her there was buzzing in my chest, tightness in my stomach, and a brain filled with molasses.

The next-to-last afternoon, the entire group met outdoors around an unlit campfire circle. Women from a neighboring collective called Cabbage Lane were giving a guest lecture. Calling themselves the Radical Singles, they explained how they had spent the summer in an experiment to learn how not to be possessive with their love. The goal was to open up to loving more than one; exclusive coupledom was discouraged as proprietary and limiting. In the quest to live their principles, each night they put their names in a hat, shook it up, and picked one. The agreement was that you would spend the night with your hat-picked partner, and together explore whatever level of intimacy and sexuality you wanted to share. “So,” the Cabbage Lane women said, “want to try it tonight?”

That night after dinner, one of the Cabbage Lane women passed around slips of paper for us to write our names on. Someone produced a straw hat.

The hat started its round on the side of the room opposite me. I watched as Lucinda's paper scrap fluttered into the hat.
Yes,
I
whispered to myself. When it came to my mother, she held the hat in her lap for a moment, then shook her head and passed it on.

Half of those participating put in their names; the other half would draw names, until everyone had a partner. My turn: Close my eyes, reach my hand in, feel the thin paper slips against my finger pads, lift one out. Resting in my palm in simple blue ink, but leaping at me as if neon: Lucinda. I announced her name and grinned at her across the room. I couldn't tell her reaction—was that weak smile an attempt at covering disappointment, or was she suddenly shy?

I raced to the Coop to grab my toiletries and headed for the bathroom, where I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth, and changed my underwear. When I went back to toss my dirty things on the bed, my mother was on her cot, reading a paperback. She looked up. “Nervous?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Try to relax and enjoy yourself,” she said. “After all, it's only for one night.”

Lucinda was waiting for me, sitting on one of the log seats that surrounded the campfire circle. I sat down next to her, clutching my sleeping bag. She had said something, but it hadn't penetrated.

“What?” I asked.

“I've changed my mind,” she repeated. “I'm sorry, but I realize I just don't want to do this.”

“But we don't have to
do
anything,” I said, trying not to plead, but my voice came out in a high-pitched squeak. I took a breath and tried logic. “The agreement was to spend the night with the person, no matter what.”

“I know, and I'm sorry, but I changed my mind.” She reached out and squeezed my arm as she rose, and then she was gone.

Back in the Coop, my mother sat on my bed with me while I leaned into her and cried, but she could comfort me only so much. It seemed obvious to me this rejection was personal. Hadn't Lucinda put her name in, willing to spend the night with whomever—except, apparently, me?

The next morning, I joined the other name-in-the-hatters at the fire ring. We were supposed to report back on how it had gone. Two of the Cabbage Lane women were facilitating. Lucinda had shown up, but sat away from me. As soon as we began, I blurted out the story, then broke down crying. The woman next to me put her arm around me. The Cabbage Lane women lit into Lucinda—very bad show, to step up to such an agreement and not carry through! The others made murmurs of sympathy for me. Lucinda looked like she might cry.

My satisfaction was immense. I could almost feel these women lambasting all the past lovers who had done me wrong.

WHEN PATTI HEARST WAS kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment in 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army sent her ID to KPFA to prove they were the ones who had her. I was at the station, working on a
Lesbian Air
program, when Randolph Hearst came by to pick up his daughter's ID. In his wake, there was excited buzz throughout the station. We could look out across Shattuck Avenue and see the great telephoto lenses the FBI had set up, pointing at us from the suite they were occupying on the seventh floor of the Great Western Bank building. Over the next weeks, the drama intensified: The SLA sent several recorded communiqués to the station to be broadcast, the FBI kept trying to get its hands on those tapes, and station staff and volunteers figured all our phones were tapped.

In the midst of it all, our Lesbian Air group was in crisis, split over ideology: the lesbian separatists versus the socialists. I straddled both camps. In daily life, I was a separatist, having friendships exclusively with other lesbians. By inhabiting feminist, often women-only
spaces—bookstores, music festivals, and lesbian bars—we developed a feeling of kinship, a shared vision in which we mixed erotic charge with radical rebellion against patriarchy and a thrilling sense of empowerment. But as an ideology, separatism seemed to me to be a dead end: Since men wouldn't disappear from the earth, if they were hopeless to change, then we were doomed. I hadn't abandoned caring about racism or class inequities, or the belief that economic justice meant a socialist system where wealth and resources were shared, but I was swept up in lesbian feminism's focus on sexism as the root base of the oppression pyramid, and it obscured those connections. I was confused about how it all fit together.

Then Erica joined the radio group. A Jewish girl from Hoboken, she had a New Jersey accent that reminded me of home. She was a firebrand, her lips pursed in passionate monologues, and I went gaga. She worked for a separatist newspaper,
Dykes and Gorgons,
and painted large canvases, abstracts with vulva-shaped triangles. We became instant friends, and once, sitting on her couch together, I leaned close and stammered, “Um, I, um, I'd like to kiss you . . . ” She looked alarmed and wouldn't let me touch her, arousing an aching longing in me. I never tried again, but I kept half hoping for something more, the unrequited ache so familiar it was almost a comfort—didn't love always involve suffering?

With Erica present,
Lesbian Air
meetings became even more fraught with diatribes and verbal warfare. At one meeting, altogether too much like the others, Erica proclaimed, “Lesbians have
got
to band together. It's for our own survival to fight off the male supremacist society. They're raping our world!”

Helen shouted, “What about capitalism? Working-class men are oppressed, too! How in the hell can we have a just society if we don't all work together?!”

I hated conflict. “Can we get back to talking about our next show on self-defense? Who wants to interview that jujitsu teacher?” I ventured.

It wasn't long afterward that the socialists announced that we separatists were kicked out of the group. Despite my ambivalent politics, I was presumed separatist because of my association with Erica.

The world was spinning upside down. Patti Hearst, after weeks kept blindfolded in a closet, emerged with a new identity: “Tania,” proud revolutionary. The SLA photographed her holding a submachine gun, standing in front of the SLA logo of a seven-headed cobra.

I'd changed my look a bit, too. My friend Sonia had agreed to trim my midback-length hair, but she cut it crooked, and with each attempt to straighten it, it got shorter and more crooked. I loved my long hair, but long hair did not fit the prevailing dyke look. I stared mournfully in the mirror at Sonia's latest disastrous attempt to even it out, now chin-length. “Oh, just cut it the fuck off,” I told her, going for razor short, finally jumping off the hippie-femme high wire. Or was I pushed?

The irony was that we separatists had to go to the Man for justice. We sat in station manager Larry Bensky's office and told him our tale of expulsion. His decision was swift and Solomonic: In Free speech radio, no group would be allowed to censor its members, so our baby would be split in two,
Lesbian Air
now alternating shows with our newly formed
Radio Free Lesbian.

 

 

ONE BY ONE OVER the next year, all my sister programmers dropped out, either too busy, losing interest, or embittered by our squabbling. Even Erica left. I was the sole survivor of both radio
programs. My love of radio and my stubbornness kept me hosting the show for a community I now felt torn up by. It felt altogether
too
much like family. But I still believed in the power of women sharing stories, and in that basic tenet of feminism:
The personal is political
. That women taking action, through art or politics, create change.

A year later, I stood in the hallway of the radio station, staring at a notice thumb-tacked to the wall: “KPFA is currently accepting applications for a two-year grant position of full-time production engineer.” I'd never wanted a job so badly.