Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (11 page)

Coach Swensen handed me a glass of champagne, as if I were free, white, and twenty-one. I couldn’t thank him, though, because our Bunny waitress had just turned her back to me.

Her satin cupcake suit was cut up on the sides, so her legs looked unstoppable to the waist. Satin princess seams in the back of the suit cleft her butt cheeks. Right where the outfit disappeared into a thong, where “X” marked the spot, where all donkey tails must be fixed … was a giant, cotton-candy puff of a bunny tail.

When I was a little girl, my mother had a talcum box, from Nina Ricci, that had a powder puff under its lid. I wasn’t supposed touch it, but I loved the smell, and I longed to take that soft cloud out of its box and dust myself like I saw my mother do. The puff was soft as a kitten’s ears. When she was at work, I took baths that lasted two hours, and I let myself take the plunge.

That Bunny’s tail took me right back to those moments. I had to touch it. Had to. Nasty Dan Margolis was a perfect gentleman, wherever he was, compared to my single-minded perversion.

I peeked around the table to see if anyone had noticed my drool, but the others were in a similar hypnotic state. No one was being ID’d. Dan Margolis, “The Man” himself, came right up to me and crowed, “Hey there, baby. Poppa’s got a brand-new bag!” Reeking of Hai Karate, he kissed me wetly on the cheek. He clasped my hands together as he slipped something small and hard, like a bead, into my palm. It had to be the Quaalude.

I saw Darryl across the table drop his pill into a flute of champagne and hold it aloft, making a toast. God, these swim banquets were a gas! Is this what Mark Spitz got to do every weekend?

The disco ball lit up and swept the floor next to our table with iridescent sparkles. The DJ, with a voice as low as the hottest Crenshaw girl, said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen … let’s … get … it … onnnnn!”

The bass guitar hook began:

Money money money money
MON-ey
Some people got to have it
Some people really need it

I jumped up in my baby-blue leotard and joined the whole Uni High, very high swim team undulating in one booty-dipping, shimmering wave of grind.

A Bunny caught my bump and gave me the eye. She was brown, with a towering Roman ponytail. The pink soles of her feet were firmly planted in four-inch mules.

“How old are you, anyway, baby?” she asked, one hand on her hip, the other
holding two martinis perched on a tray.

I breathed out. “Really, really close to you.”

It took so long to say that. Would she wait for me? I had to get one more thing out before she disappeared like a genie into a bunny bottle.

“Could … could I touch it?” She had to know what I meant; I couldn’t get my mouth to form any more words.

“Oh, for you, baby, anything,” she said, taking a perfumed step closer to my reach. Not spilling one drop, she turned around, and bent, just slightly, at the waist.

George Putnam’s Show

F
or all my
Red Tide
activities, I felt like we were swimming against a tide of apathy. From listening to my dad, I felt like nothing cool had happened in L.A. since the sixties: nothing. My dad said that in ’67, when
Sergeant Pepper
came out, everyone in the whole city took the day off, went to Griffith Park, sang “All You Need Is Love,” and dropped acid. He told me the story of how his colleague Peter Ladefoged lost his hearing in one ear because of the police beating he endured while protesting the war, along with ten thousand others, in front of the Century City Hotel when President Lyndo
n B. Johnson came to town.

But by 1973, we were lucky to get four people to stand in a picket line in front of a store carrying Gallo wine, and we were even luckier if Hells Angels hired by the store owner didn’t come along and stomp us. One goon threw Tracey into the gutter and smacked her in the face. He spit a wad of green mucus in mine.

“Is there anything you’d believe in if you weren’t paid off?” We wouldn’t shut up.

I asked my dad, “Where did all the people who give a damn go?” and Bill said, “San Francisco. Or they died trying.”

People always imagine there is something happening in Los Angeles because of celebrities. They think that because they see a movie star buy a bag of marshmallows, it must be an event. They think wiping their ass with the same toilet paper that a movie star’s maid wiped her ass with is an accomplishment. This is a company town, and Hollywood is just as crushing as a Carnegie Steel mill. The vast majority of Angelenos have so much nothing in their lives that “celebrity nothing” makes them feel like they have something.

I could hardly wait to get out of school, to get someplace real as soon as possible. I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial.

I’d had it with chanting in the rain, invisible to the passing crowd. I was already bitter over their indifference, and I was only fifteen. My sole activist feedback at high school consisted of Jewish Defense League-member cheerleaders putting notes in my locker that said, “Our campus does not need bitches like you tearing down Israel” As if I even had time to tear down Israel. I was too busy tearing down Westwood.

And then, something happened.

The Red Tide
got on the news. Not just any news, but the George Putnam newscast, the most right-wing broadcaster in all of Southern California, the fellow who tried to stop a black man, Tom Bradley, from becoming mayor of Los Angeles, because he said that it would “start a Negro revolution from which white citizens would never recover.”

Putnam, like all popular conservative broadcasters, had a gift for articulating the fears of his paranoid “John Bircher” tribe that was a radical’s propaganda dream come true. I secretly wanted everything Georgie prophesied to come to pass. I wanted to be overrun by communists, potheads, and homosexuals! But the left-wing tsunami never arrived.

I don’t know how Putnam got into news, or cold war politics, but he was obviously a frustrated movie star. A great silent star born at the wrong time. You could turn down the volume on his singsong cadence, yet easily understand the entire monologue from his melodramatic performance. He had the grief of Lillian Gish, the grim sorrow of William S. Hart, the eye-popping intensity of Rudy Valentino. He had everything but the humor of Chaplin — the man did not have one funny bone in his body.

We heard through the grapevine of Tracey’s dad, whose sister worked at the KTLA television station, that Putnam had gotten ahold of a copy of
The Red Tide
and was eager to expose us on the air, Friday night.

We scrutinized our latest issue to see what topic he would target. The lead story was about Nixon invading Cambodia, and all his lies and cover-ups.

But we didn’t think the Tricky Dick story would be Putnam’s favorite — he considered Nixon a liberal. Maybe he would go for our story about undercover narcs on high school campuses. Our intrepid photographer Joel had taken surreptitious photos of the fake “high school seniors” — from the LAPD — who posed as perfectly groomed beach boys, trying to score.

Another suspect in our latest issue was our history of the FBI’s infiltration of the Black Panthers — but we thought that might strain Putnam’s reading level. He would face the same challenge with our exposé on sexism in Driver’s Ed class. I loved our Driver’s Ed story, because we’d found an illustration from the student driving manual that showed a blonde who couldn’t figure out how to get the key into the ignition.

Which story would Georgie pick to illustrate our depravity? At six o’clock, we gathered at our clubhouse — the Letwin brothers’ garage — and Darryl twisted the TV antenna to make Putnam’s show appear without floating horizontal lines.

Tracey and my other favorite
Red Tide
girl, Tammy, argued whether we should be down in front of KTLA’s offices protesting this very evening or should wait till the next morning. Michael, whose parents were hosting our vigil, told them if the
y didn’t shut up he would stuff them in the trunk and George would never hear from either of them again. Darryl popped a Bud and turned the volume up. Showtime!

George Putnam held a copy of the latest Red Tide in front of his cameras so the viewers could see the cover and back page on half the screen.

“I have here, before me,” he said, his eyebrows and hair moving with great feeling, “a picture of the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.”

We looked at one another, bewildered.

“I cannot,” he warned, “show this obscenity on television.” He paused. The suspense was unbearable.

“It is an illustration” — his voice dropped to a baritone — “of a woman’s … private parts.”

I grabbed the issue out of Tammy’s hands and ripped it open to the last pages. “Oh my god, it’s the IUD birth control story!” The picture he was referring to was a
Gray’s Anatomy
-style cross-section of a woman’s vagina and uterus.

“Why?” Putnam raised his eyes to the heavens for an answer. “Why are our children subjected to this kind of filth, this kind of promiscuity, in the schoolroom?”

“Oh man, Principal Dornacker is going to have a fit,” Tammy predicted — and it was true, because Georgie was making it look like Uni itself was funding our birth control campaign.

“This rag, if you can call it that,” George said, lowering the paper, “claims to be the work of high school students — yet we know this pornography is the work of a cynical group of so-called adults who fund and exploit their communistic, atheist ideologies on our precious children.”

“Why isn’t he saying feminist?” Tammy demanded.

“Because he doesn’t know that word,” Tracey said.

“Where’s our fucking cynics to fund us, that’s what I want to know,” Darryl said, and opened another Budweiser.

“Our daughters,” George continued, “our daughters cannot defend their virtue when godless putridity is flaunted in their faces!”

“Okay, I’ve got the headline,” Tammy interrupted: “‘George Putnam Claims Women’s Vagina Is Most Disgusting Thing He’s Ever Seen.’”

“It’s the only one he’s ever seen!” Michael said. I looked at a couple other faces in the room, and I wondered if that described a few of our members as well. I knew George Putnam wasn’t a virgin, but some Red Tiders were.

“I think,” Tammy said, “it was the fallopian tubes that did him in.”

“I know George is shocked,” I said, “but this story didn’t even do its job. If we want birth control access for high school students, these stories can’t be so boring and technical, like sex is a valve job. No one we know even reads these.”

I reminded everyone of a short piece I’d written about the essentials of lubrication, the benefits of coconut oil, and how even saliva was better than nothing.

Michael gave me a look. Last time he saw my lube story, he told me he was going to throw up. People were dying in Vietnam, and I wanted to talk about vaginas — how could I?

School went like a slow drip the next day. The same ten people who always watched the news had seen our big “exposé,” but it was like we were in a bomb shelter while everyone else was whistling Dixie.

I was annoyed. I’d rather be on my picket line in the rain, arguing with company goons. After lunch I went to the gym office, where for some reason I was allowed to use the phone with impunity. Ms. Larsen, the only teacher using “Ms.” on campus so far, was lifting boxes of something onto a rolling cart.

“Here, I’ll help you,” I said, taking one of the loads out of her arms.

“I am not giving you a note for PE today, Susannah.”

“Ms. Larsen, you don’t need to. I’m doing independent study PE now, remember? I’ll never need a note again.”

She took two boxes to my one and kept stacking. “Hmpf!” And then, “What do you want, then?”

“Did you see you see the George Putnam show last night?”

“I don’t watch that fat bastard.”

I tried again. “Well, I still want to know if you’re going to sign our petition for the self-defense workshops we want to do during girls’ gym. I put the paper on your desk last week, and you said you’d think about it.”

The petition had been written up by Red Tide women, but we’d given ourselves a liberal name, High School Women Against Violence Against Women. Tracey said that name made her dizzy, but I argued it would work. “That’s the shit they like. We can’t say, ‘Pinko Dykes Who Want to Get Their Hands on Your Daughters.’”

“Susannah, how many rapes exactly do you think are happening on this campus?”

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that!” I dropped a box at her feet. “You, of all people, know that those girls crying in the locker room are not telling anyone what goes on, and that’s the whole problem. No one around here reports rape; it would ‘ruin’ their reputation.”

“What do you mean, me, ‘of all people’?” Ms. Larsen’s face turned beety.

“You’re a feminist —”

“I’m a what?”

“You’re NOT a feminist? Oh, c’mon!”