Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (16 page)

“You’re disgusting!”

“I’m so glad you noticed. And hurry up, too, because my boyfriend’s coming over, and I don’t want him looking at you and having a heart attack on my divan.”

“Boyfriend” was Dago’s drinking, Truffaut-watching buddy who was some kind of dirty old man by proxy. He wanted to do everything Dago did, but I don’t think he’d been laid in a million years.

“He doesn’t have my looks, angel; that’s what the young girls demand,” Dago said, cackling and lifting his glass. “Here’s to all the angels, and to all the communists!”

“I’ll never forget this, Dago,” I said, grabbing my granny pack and the money and shaking the cocaine dust off of everything. “When I get back, I’ll wash your walls and beat your rugs, I promise.”

“If you do that, the whole neighborhood will be plastered for a week,” he said, and swiped at my thigh as I leaned against the front door to leave.

“You’ve still got my come dripping down your leg,” he said.

“I do not!” I yelped, jumping over his broken porch stair into the garden. “You’re such a sick fuck.” That’s what he would say. I’d never said it before. I hoped he knew I was joking — because after I went to Detroit, I never saw Dago again.

The New Branch Organizer

M
ichael, Joe, and I were leaving for Detroit, maybe for summer camp, maybe forever, each of us scrambling for money and rides. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles IS branch was being “reorganized” by the Detroit Executive Committee. They figured our youthful Red Tide energy — a.k.a. 24/7 devotion — would be missed. Our newspaper was moving with us; there would be no more Los Angeles Red Tide — instead, the Detroit Unified School District was about to have its collective student body mind blown. Yahoo! I had only two months left till school got out, and I counted the days.

In April, Stan Holmstrom was assigned to Los Angeles from Seattle, to become our new branch organizer. He drove straight from the airport by himself and showed up at one of our Teamster organizer meetings with a six-pack.

Stan wasn’t the family type. There was steely resolve by the IS Executive Committee to send us someone who wouldn’t sing folk songs or make brownies or wipe your nose when it ran.

We got to have someone fresh from Seattle — someone mysterious, single, childless. He told the Teamster comrades that he not only drank beer, he knew how to brew it.

He needed a home, so everyone pitched in to set him up in less than twenty-four hours. Stan’s first gift was
The Red Tide
’s old white sofa, from Michael’s parents’ garage. Stan took one look at our monster, all eight feet of it, and it was as if every semen, weed, and Top Ramen stain were visible to him, illuminated on its ratty gray-white nap.

Joe said someone should’ve cried. Tracey said someone should’ve cleaned it.

Ambrose said Stan drove out his first day in Lynwood to play pickup basketball games a couple blocks away in Compton. “He picked his location because it’s right off the freeway and a couple blocks from some courts.”

Stan didn’t come on like a ton of bricks. He had a loping gait; he moved like he was always on the court. His hair was shaggy, if not exactly long, and it hung in his eyes. He was tall, taller than anyone else in our group. Michael said he was almost thirty. He dressed in work shirt, blue jeans, leather belt, and sneakers every day. Dressed like a kid, played ball like a kid, but with those sad downward-turning eyes like someone older.

I didn’t know someone so quiet could be a branch organizer. Geri was charismatic, and Ambrose was always chatty. Michael was an orator, Joe would not stop arguing, and the other half of the branch were loquacious UCLA professors. Even young members like me would argue and make speeches at the drop of a card.

Some of the other women, the “girlfriend” members — women who never said a word but were someone’s girlfriend — they were quiet. We’d have these private talks afterward where they’d promise to say something “next time,” but then they never did.

Stan sounded sure of himself when he spoke, but he didn’t offer a lot of explanation or rah-rah. It was just, “This is what we’re going to do.”

The idea was that by having a laser focus, we would reform a moribund and corrupt union. Just saying, “I’m going into Teamsters,” to anybody else on the Left was outrageous. Everyone thought we were joining an organized crime syndicate.

“There is no other left sect in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, because no other group would have them,” Joe said.

“Isn’t Fitzsimmons like Nixon’s lapdog?” I asked. The Teamster’s current president appeared in press photographs with the president all the time.

“Yeah,” said Joe. “Drinking buddies, for sure.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do in Teamsters?” I asked.

Joe pinched my tummy. “You can head up the ladies’ auxiliary, Sue.” He’d made me come with his mouth the night before, and it had just made my head spin. His teeth were white, and he was young like me. Was that love? But I loved everybody in our branch — sleeping with them just made it a little deeper.

Stan gave everyone an assignment at the next branch meeting, except me. I raised my hand: “What can I do?”

“Yeah, right,” he said, not looking up. “You can report here, tomorrow, oh six hundred. You can flyer the Gateway yard with me.”

Gateway: that meant trespassing and chatting up total strangers. I was good at that.

“I don’t get out of school until after three; I could come then —”

Stan scowled. I saw it like a comic bubble over his head: Haven’t we gotten rid of all the bourgie college coeds yet? What a jerk; he didn’t even know who I was.

Geri touched his arm.

“Sue’s still in high school, Stan.”

He shook his hair out of his eyes for a minute and snorted.

Fuck him. My god, he’d been here only a week, and he was sitting on what had been my bed with Joe and Reggie.

“I’ll be here by three,” I said. I wasn’t going to use military time, either.

Temma, another Red Tider who’d dropped out of Uni, passed me in the hall when I got up to use the bathroom. “Oh, he likes you,” she laughed.

“Don’t bullshit me!” I whispered.

“I fucked him last night —”

“What?”

“Yeah, yesterday — he’s okay. You should check him out … his partner, Shari, you know? She’s in Fresno all the time.”

I hooked my arm around belt loops and dragged her into the bathroom with me.

“What partner? Are you kidding? Are you going to do it again?” It was like hearing she’d made a statue come alive.

“He’s practically married to Shari Z. — that’s why he’s down here, because she got an offer to teach women’s studies at Fresno, and she’s going to come visit him when she can on weekends. We don’t have any comrades in Fresno, so —”

I cracked up. “Oh yeah, well, she can build a branch out of the Women’s Studies Department, and they can come make cookies for the Teamster meetings!”

I couldn’t believe Stan was acting like the Original Mr. Worker, and his old lady was a professor. One of the unrepentant ones who wasn’t going to industrialize, apparently.

“His first wife, Marie, she’s famous; she’s the queen of the Wolf Socialist Party, and she’s like the biggest dyke in Seattle. Even the local pigs are afraid of touching her … she’s some kind of wild woman.”

“He was married to her?” God, he was old.

“Yeah, that’s what Geri told me, but I guess she ‘expelled’ him for being a man at some point.” Temma laughed and pushed me off the toilet seat. “It’s my turn.”

Somebody knocked on the door. “Hey, High School, get off the can.”

Temma reached over and pushed in the lock. “Go run the water,” she told me. I turned on both spouts.

“Shari’s going to be at Ambrose and Geri’s tonight, for the potluck,” Temma said. “Come early, ’cause she’s not a night owl. She’s this perfectly nice white academic; she comes up to about Stan’s elbow. Dresses just like him, but in tighter jeans.”

The knocking started up again, warpath-style. I knew Temma would no sooner open the door than surrender at Pearl Harbor, but I had to get out. She’d already lit up a cigarette and opened the window; I opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through.

One of the older women, Xena — a professor’s wife — blocked me, looking outraged. She’d been outraged ever since I fucked someone she’d fucked a hundred years ago. Jesus.

“There’s still someone in there,” I said, like I’d come out of a train station lavatory.

“Someone!” she spat. I shrugged.

Stan appeared behind her. “Hey, take it easy,” he said, and he touched her lower back. She shuddered, then moved up against him, like a kitten that couldn’t help it. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

I walked into the meeting space again with my arms open wide. “I’ll show you a Teamster ladies’ auxiliary, gentlemen,” I said, bowing to everyone huddled on the floor. “Give me some flyers.”

Temma was right about the tight jeans. Shari was petite and curvy. I found myself scrutinizing her body more than I did Stan’s. She was one of those women who make a sacrifice by not wearing a bra, because she was narrow-shouldered, and her tits were full and … pendulous. Every time I said that word, I felt like I was sneaking a peek in
Penthouse
magazine. I wished my breasts were on the pendulous side. It was sexy. When I told Geri that, she said, “Oh, you’ll get your wish eventually.”

But when? I could be really, really old by then.

Shari had a tiny waist. Her hips flared out, like a Mexican guitar. Short legs, and, due to her strict feminist costume, flat sandals. It was funny, because sure enough, the UPS women who came to the potluck, including Geri, all wore at least three-inch platforms. So did Temma, who’d permed her hair into an Afro, and had burned herself a dark red-brown at the beach.

I patted the top of her perm to see what it felt like. “You went to the Boardwalk after the meeting.”

“You could have gone, too; the Hare Krishnas fed everybody,” she said, slapping my hand away. “But I guess the ‘ladies auxiliary’ was calling — are any of you holding?”

I tilted my head behind me. “Go ask Joe, or go through his pockets, if you can stand it. He’s the new dope dealer of the 208 Teamster hiring hall.”

Joe was rarely working a shift, but he wore his blue Teamster jacket all the time. He said he was making more money selling weed and speed to drivers than he’d ever made on campus.

I heard someone take Linda Ronstadt — Ambrose’s heartthrob — off the turntable, and Kool and the Gang started up.

I joined some of the girls in the living room, swaying and chanting:

Watermelons, fresh ripe tomatoes, apples and oranges, Idaho potatoes, yeah … Fruitman!

Geri was ladling out chili, and it smelled so good, but I just wanted to dance.

Stan may not have liked high school, but he was lucky
The Red Tide
was there. He was lucky to see Temma in her high heels, plus all the local girls and all the non-Teamsters, the ex-Panthers and “crazy motherfuckers,” as J
oe called them. We knew how to have a good time. It was the only way new people, our “contacts,” would ever give our politics a chance; those awful meetings would kill them first.

Stan wasn’t dancing; I didn’t know where he was. I kept picturing the way Xena shuddered against him. Shari was dancing without him, her arms around Xena’s husband’s shoulders.

Soon, I wanted to lie down, crash in one of the other rooms where there wasn’t any dancing. Ambrose and Geri had a room in the back where they kept a plush leather coffee table. I found it, curled up, and dozed off, until Geri came in and put a blanket over me and tucked a little pillow under my head. It must have been a pillow for the baby. I dozed off again.

Shari stumbled in and woke me up. She cursed the stack of books on the floor that she’d tripped over. She didn’t know where the bathroom was. She looked excited, or really high, or both. Fresno must be awful.

I wish I could remember what I said first. It was a polite question. I wish I could remember if I was precocious, or awkward, or earnest. I felt all three afterward.

I only remember how she answered: “Go for it … He’s a great fuck.” Her smile was like sunshine itself. Her blond ringlets bobbled as she nodded her head.

I remember thinking, Wow, this is how it’s supposed to be. You’re supposed to be able to approach your sister and say, “Comrade, I’m feeling it for your old man. May I proceed?”

And then she would say, just like Shari did, “Go for it … he’s a great fuck.”

You could say, “Women are more important to me than men.” You could blush and stammer, saying, “I wanted to ask you, if you wouldn’t mind, and I don’t mean to be rude, and this really isn’t a big deal —” But I don’t know what came out of my mouth. I wasn’t even sure I wanted Stan. I just kept thinking about Xena’s back arching up.

It didn’t seem to matter. The Blond Goddess would’ve cut me off, with a warm smile, like a mother to her chick: Go for it. He’s a great fuck.

Shari was so low-key, just the way I imagined it would be after a massive sexual revolution. Women wouldn’t be catty. No one would bother to be jealous. Who would have the time? Sex would be friendly and kind and fun. You’d get to see what everyone was like in bed. You’d learn things in bed, and that would be the whole point. Romances would seem like candy cigarettes. You could have all the sex and friendship you wanted for free. Exclusivity would be for bores and babies.