Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (17 page)

The way Shari spoke to me, the way her curls bounced everywhere, was the new shine. Like a challenge. I wanted to go back to Fresno with her and drink from the same fountain. I’d negotiated boys with my own girlfriends before, but it never sounded like this.

I thought I understood women. I never knew what went on in a boy’s head before I went to bed with one. I always wanted to see. See how it was. I liked the whole finding-out part. They were so brainy and vulnerable at the same time.

Shari was different … she was advertising her man. She wanted a tribute! Was I supposed to file a report? Maybe none of my friends had ever bragged about anything, because there was nothing special to brag about. Just what did this Stan do in bed that was so extraordinary? I felt like I should call and make reservations right away, before he got a cramp or something.

But for someone so generous, Shari bowed out a little quickly.

I was saying to her, “Wow, thank you, thanks for letting me know …” Maybe I was a little breathless.

She exhaled a short breath, out of her nose, and turned on her flat heels away from me, before I finished expressing my gratitude. Maybe I was too much. Maybe she was on her way to fuck someone else.

She left me sitting there, like a kid with the wrong pizza delivery. Her shine had settled on everything around me. The brown carpet twinkled, the purple sofa and love seat were royal. I could feel my wet underarms, and even my head felt damp.

“Hey, Sue, what’s the matter; you look soaked!” It was Joe.

Everyone came through this room on the way to a nonexistent toilet.

“I’ve just been dancing too much, I gotta change,” I said, getting up, “I’m so glad it’s you.”

Geri had told me her grade-school-age son, Billy, went through three T-shirts a day, he was so hard on clothes. I bet he had one I could borrow, and my chest wasn’t that much bigger than his. I went down the hall to find his stash.

Joe followed me and saw me staring into the kid’s dresser mirror.

“‘Who dat?’” he said, reading the slogan on my T-shirt.

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “Do I look okay?”

“It sure is tight,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his jean pockets.

“You wanna go somewhere?” I felt like I could slap him or fuck him, but not much else.

“We can go for it in the john, if you want,” he said. “Jesus, you’re wound up.” He walked over and put his hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t want to be wound up!” I hissed. “Close the door — oh shit.”

Little Billy was dead asleep on his bunk bed with a pile of coats stacked up on top of his covers. Only a little neon light from the window leaked into the room.

“He’s dead to the world,” Joe said. “So, what’s up?”

I made him sit with me on the floor on someone’s leather trench coat. I held the sleeve up to my face. “God this smells good.” It was like a tonic.

“Shari Z. just said something really trippy to me; I gotta tell you,” I began. I quoted her. Joe burst out laughing, but Billy didn’t miss a beat of snoring.

“You’ve gotta be quiet! Do you think she was being sarcastic? Is that why you’re laughing?” All my anxiety came back again. I was going to soak this fine House of Wilson leather coat with my sweat.

“I don’t know what that chick means, but I know you’ll hold her to it, Sue; that’s a promise. Man, she is in for it —”

“It sounded like she was giving Stan a guarantee, like he came with a certificate!”

I could feel Joe scowl, even if I couldn’t quite see his face in the dark.

“Yeah, call me right afterward and tell me how he ate you out,” he said. “I wanna hear if it’s a six-point-oh.”

“Oh, c’mon, Joe, don’t pout; this is serious!”

He started giggling. “Oh man, serious, yeah, I wanna know
, too. If he’s that good, I wanna fuck him.”

“He’s straight, Josephine!”

“Yeah, that’s the point. He’s straight, white, over thirty, can’t dance — what else do you need to know?”

“He’s twenty-nine!”

“Right.”

“You are so fucking cocky,” I said. I was starting to relax.

“You know I’m right. Here — here’s my bet. If he eats you out the first time you do it, I’ll …”

“What?”

“I’ll give you my green flake helmet that you want.”

“Really?”

“You can count on it,” he said, and took my hand and pressed it against his erection.

I squeezed his cock too hard on purpose and rolled over on top of him.

“Hey, mean girl, cut it out,” he said, grinding against me. The neon light cut up and down across my Who dat? tits. I took off the T-shirt and bent down to his ear.

“You are a funky worm, Joey Baloney,” I said. We sealed his promise with our tongues all tied up.

The Master Freight Agreement

I
cut my last period, high school Driver’s Ed with Mr. Burns. He wouldn’t understand that the revolution was not going to wait for me to take his stop-signal exam. Instead, I grabbed the bus and showed up at Gateway Freight yard right before the start of swing shift, as promised.

I’d changed my clothes, too — I looked like a Teamster girl in tight jeans and a T-shirt, standing in mile-high platforms instead of hippie sandals.

Stan pulled into the parking lot right after me in his Valiant. I wondered how many decades he’d had his driver’s license. Temma told me he’d dodged the draft in Canada, married and divorced, and lived underground for five years before he popped up and started running the Seattle branch of our little insurgence. That was a lot of driving.

He handed me a pile of flyers and told me to go to one end of the employee’s parking lot while he took the other. The leaflets were an invitation to a meeting of rank and filers that we called Teamsters for a Decent Contract — people getting together to talk about the upcoming contract and what we thought might go down. Not socialism, just this miserable corrupt union and shitty job. You had to start somewhere. The expiration of the master freight agreement was a good place to begin — it covered every over-the-road driver in North America.

“Temma said you know how to talk to people,” Stan said — apparently my only vote of confidence.

I thought,
Did she tell you that in bed?

Instead, I was chipper. “Yeah, it’ll be fine.” I smiled at him like a Girl Scout. “I’m a regular ‘Teamster girlfriend,’ according to Sister Temma.”

“You are?” he asked, picking up a clipboard like he was going to write my answer down.

“Yeah, I’m sorry; what’s your excuse for being here?” I said, not wanting to go where he was leading.

“Maybe I’ll be a Teamster boyfriend.” He flipped his wrists.

That cracked me up. It was going to be okay. Maybe he wasn’t such a snob after all.

We walked to opposite corners. The parking lot was enormous; there must’ve been more than a hundred cars. No one had come out of work yet. I talked to some taco truck guys who were packing up. They liked my leaflet. I had typed, laid out, and printed this thing on the mimeo machine — it didn’t look half bad. I’d put a cartoon I liked at the top: Fitzsimmons and Nixon having a toast together in bed, with their feet sticking out from the sheets at the bottom of the bed.

I went up to each vehicle and tucked a flyer underneath the windshield wiper. I got a rhythm going, singing that Ohio Players vamp to myself:

Roller-coaster / Of Love / Say What? /
Roller-coaster/ ooo-oooo-ooo-ooo

Fuck! Something hard, really hard — like a brick — punched me in the lower back. I fell, sprawling onto my hands and knees in the dirt. I couldn’t breathe.

“Hey, girlie!”

I pushed up off my belly, my hands on fire. A squat, muscular guy with a worse grin than a junkyard dog stood above me, a wrench in his hand. I’d been smacked before, but neither my mother nor the nuns had ever smiled at me while they were doing it.

“What’s this crap you’re sellin’, girlie? This is private property. You better get your can outta here.”

He grabbed the goldenrod flyers in my satchel, which was still hanging from my shoulder. I scrambled to stand up, spilling most of the papers onto the ground. Blood was dripping on everything, but I didn’t know where it was coming from. I couldn’t feel anything.

The wind picked up the flyers and started sailing them over the cars. I wished I could sail away, too. My mind was leaving the premises. I had missed Driver’s Ed for this.

My palms, that’s where most of the blood was coming from, like stigmata. The pitbull man held up his wrench again.

“Now look what you’ve done!” he shouted, like he was personally offended. “You little whore, you’re gonna clean up this fucking lot before I stick my foot up your ass —”

We both heard a loud click, and the little man stopped talking.

There was Stan — right between me and the demon. Instead of just his blue work shirt, Stan was wearing a blue work shirt and a holster. He was holding something, too.

He said two things. “Don’t talk to the young woman like that — we’re leaving now.”

And to me: “Get in the car.” He threw me his keys. I caught them without a bounce.

I don’t know what else he said. I ran with the keys — ran, ran, ran, like the Gingerbread Man — to Stan’s white Valiant, climbed into the back seat, locked the doors, and threw his old-dude basketball sweats over my head. I wanted to crawl in the trunk. It was ninety degrees, but I didn’t crack the window. I was freezing, shaking; my clothes were like wet rags. I’d never had a man look at me like that, like he was going to enjoy hurting me. He was a head shorter than I was — even if he was twice as wide — and he’d made me pee in my pants.

“Sue!” I could hear Stan jogging up to the car. I lifted my head up to peek out the window. He didn’t look hurt.

I unlocked the door and handed him his keys. He took my one of my cut-up hands in his, like it was a petal. “Are you okay?”

I burst into tears. Finally time for questions, and that’s when I fall apart. “Who was that?” I sobbed through my snot. “Was he from the company or the union? What did you do?”

“Hold on …” Stan got in the driver’s seat, started up the engine, and peeled out. “I’m taking you home; this was bullshit. You never should’ve been here.”

I cried harder. What did that mean? I’d failed at my assignment because I hadn’t kicked that bastard in the nuts? I was frozen? I was useless, wasn’t good enough to pass out a fucking flyer?

Stan pulled into the circle driveway in front of his duplex and parked at the door. “Don’t move,” he said.

He came around to the back door and opened it up, crouching down so he could look me in the eye.

“I’m sorry; I’m okay, I can get out,” I said, holding my hands up in front of me. But when I glanced down at my chest, I saw my shirt was ripped open, too. Who had done that? I started gulping air again.

Stan put his arms around me. “Hold on to my neck,” he said. He coaxed me out of the car, and once he got me to my feet, he picked me up like a new bride — a bride who couldn’t stop sobbing — and carried me through the front door. I don’t know how he managed the lock.

He laid me down on the white sofa and went to get one of his extra work shirts for me to change into. I heard him take off the .45 and the holster. No more clicks. He came back with a bottle of Povidine, the shirt, and a steaming wet towel.

I had some bloody scratches on me, plus snot and sweat — not as bad as it seemed. The warm towel felt so good.

“What do you drink?” Stan asked. I could hear him opening his kitchen cupboards.

“Ginger ale?”

“Yeah, right,” he said, and came back with two jam jars and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Drink up,” he said, handing me the glass like it was medicine.

I took a sip. Worse than medicine! It was almost as bad as Nyquil.

I gagged, and he laughed.

“Don’t laugh at me; this is horrible.”

“The horrible part is over — we’re lucky to be alive. You’re going to be okay, baby.”

Baby.

“You think I shouldn’t have been there,” I said, “because I can’t handle it, because I’m not part of the new macho Teamster campaign and I don’t have a six-shooter to wave around, like I’m some freak girlfriend diaper baby.”

The Jack was giving me something to talk about.

Stan said no. He said it was his fault. He said Ambrose and Geri and Joe and Michael all thought the world of me; he said he’d been a bastard. Temma was right; I was sweet as pie.

He tucked me in, found more blankets and a couple of pillows. I slipped on his shirt and kicked off my pants. Was he watching? I didn’t care. I passed out on his sofa like it was the middle of the night.

I woke up with a start; I had to pee. Had it been hours or minutes? The streetlight poured in through Stan’s bamboo blinds. I could see a blue clock in the corner that Ambrose had donated to our new branch organizer’s furnishings. Three am. It’d been twelve hours since we’d been in the parking lot.

Stan’s apartment was two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. One bedroom was the production room, with the mimeo, ditto machines, and paper supply. I crept into the bathroom next to it, the tile floor icy under my feet. Stan’s shirt barely covered my ass. I thought about my warm waterbed back at my dad’s house, and our kitty making her nest in the middle of my quilts.