Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (21 page)

Marty was moaning. I could hear his labored cries, and no one else’s.

“Sue!” Michael tried once more. “Are you are sure it was this guy Earl, this guy with the hunting knife? There’s no one else?”

I nodded. “He talked about carving people up the whole ride; he’s hysterical about … communists … he’s still fighting in Vietnam.”

Michael took it in. His eyes were dotted with red. “I have something very important for you to do, Sue. I want you to leave, now, out the fire exit in the back, and go to the Betsy-Do Laundromat, right off Demby — you know where that is?”

Yeah, I knew, but —

“Samuel’s there; you need to go tell Samuel what’s going on and get him over here.”

Samuel Jaffe was our National Chairman, the one guy above Hugh.

Our National Chairman was doing his laundry? I had never seen him do a single practical thing, not even fill a glass of water. I had never even talked to the man; I’d only listened to him expound on the minutia of the “U.S. economy in crisis.”

“Is Marty going to live?” I said.

“Just go get Samuel, okay?”

I ran there.

I ran past Larry’s Diner; past the 1-2-3 Budget Shop, where I got the tight jeans I was wearing; past the Pretzel Bowl, where Pepsi waitressed and had introduced me to gin and tonics and Bob Marley on the jukebox.

I was amazed I could run this hard and think at the same time. It was as if I couldn’t think at all crouching in the office watching a man with blood pouring out of his chest — but with my legs moving, I could see it all.

Marty was alive; he hadn’t passed out. I heard his voice. The IS wouldn’t want a murder investigation, because the police would have an excuse to tear the place apart. Everyone was armed to the teeth because of what the FBI did to the Panthers. And look at what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. God knows what revenge the current Teamster president, Frank Fitzsimmons, might exact against our reform efforts.

“Earl Van Nuys the Third” — why did he attack Marty in the bathroom? He didn’t even know the man. And Earl had been in such a merry mood when I last saw Hank helping him stumble up the sidewalk. He wanted to take a piss, right? He
didn’t want to kill anybody, not then. Steve P. said that I had charmed him, that he’d been charmed into drunken bonhomie. I thought he was going to piss all the whiskey away and fall into a dead sleep.

Marty didn’t have anything to do with it. Marty was alive.

I walked into the Betsy-Do. Its hot dryer smell, the waves of heat, rendered me stupid for a minute. All my keen powers of sprinting endorphins left me. I was in a hot room with dryers spinning, old ladies folding clothes, some kids playing with Matchbox cars on the floor.

No Samuel in sight, but I kept scanning the machines and rows of orange plastic chairs, like there would be a revelation.

One of the figures in the chairs rustled a newspaper to turn its pages, and I saw it was the Wall Street Journal.

“Samuel!” I called, and he lowered his paper, his limpid eyes peering at me as if I were a stranger.

I pushed someone’s cart out of my way and got down on my knees in front of him.

“Samuel, it’s Sue, Sue B. I’m from the L.A. Red Tide, remember? I’m Zelda’s friend?”

He used to sleep with Zelda, surely that must register. I could see it was dawning on him that I was there for a reason. He dropped the paper. His skin was yellow in this light.

“Samuel, I’m sorry,” I said, my voice sounding strange even to me. “It’s Marty, Marty Breyer; he’s been stabbed at the office by one of our contacts, in the bathroom.”

Samuel and Marty had been very close; they went to grad school before Marty industrialized in the mines. Someone told me they’d been bar mitzvahed together, but I think that was a joke.

Samuel said, “Would you please say that again?”

I did.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, yes, I heard his voice; the ambulance is coming — he was alive when I left, and that was five minutes ago.”

He looked down at me, the child at his knee.

“Hmm,” he said, as if he’d wanted to say something else and stepped on it. “Would you stay here until my clothes are dry and then take them back to my house?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key. “It’s 23 Pasadena,” he said, “and Fritz won’t be there; he’s in Philadelphia this week.”

Fritz Epstein was another one of our Executive Committee members who’d reportedly never been laid. He wouldn’t have picked up a gun, either. I wondered if Samuel had.

“Would you do that?” he asked again, sharp, and I realized I hadn’t answered him.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, looking past him. “Which dryer is it?” I finally asked, but Samuel was gone and had taken his paper with him.

The kids had left, too, and the last old lady was walking out the door, struggling with her cart. I went over to help her, and she looked a little jumpy, like she’d rather I didn’t.

The door shut behind her. Even though it was so loud in there, with both dryers groaning, it was finally still — no more wash cycles. I could see Samuel’s socks flipping in circles through the plate glass of the front loader. I sat down on the orange chair that faced his dryer and watched them spin a few revolutions, like I was watching the most interesting television program that ever aired.

And then I saw that my reflection was part of this program — Susie and the Flying Socks. My hair was crazy, falling out of its ponytail, and my glasses were half cocked, like they’d been since I mended them with tape. Maybe that old lady had been freaked because, without my jacket, it was obvious I wasn’t wearing a bra. My face looked weird, but I couldn’t see it well enough in the dryer glass to figure out why.

I rubbed my eyes. I felt something sticky on my face, and I wondered what time it was. It was twilight outside. Michael had my coat, Hugh had Michael’s shirt, and I had all these socks — what? To fold?

I found a pillowcase someone had abandoned and piled all Samuel’s laundry into it. I pressed it to my chest. It felt wonderful, the most wonderful warmth spreading across my heart. Samuel lived across the street, just a few steps away. I walked out with the hot pillow in my arms, not feeling the cold at all, and crossed Woodward against the light.

Relocation

M
arty was still in the hospital, but he was stable. Seventeen stab wounds to the chest, and he never lost consciousness. His wife told me that when she got him out of there, she was getting out of the IS for good. I wondered if she’d have any trouble convincing him.

We were supposed to get “back to business.” Every morning, we’d begin with a meeting, and after we stopped donating blood, we weren’t supposed to talk about Marty anymore. Move on; don’t look back. I was a malingerer.

The morning meetings began at Larry’s Diner downstairs, with the coffee and doughnut order. Red, another comrade from East Oakland, would ask me for money for a doughnut.

“Why are you asking me?”

“You look like a rich white girl.”

“You are high.”

“Always, always, sugar pie —” Then he’d hit up Hank. And then Chili, and then Steve P. Finally, one of them would give in. I couldn’t figure it out, because Red made more money dealing that all of us put together. He just didn’t believe in paying for himself.

Michael ignored him. Red never asked Michael for a doughnut. And I don’t think I saw Mikey ever eat anything as strong as coffee or doughnuts. He would order a glass of hot milk and a piece of toast. When I asked him about his diet, he just shook his head.

“Ulcers.”

“You’re nineteen; there’s no such thing as ulcers.” But maybe Michael did have a special ulcerated intestine that affected only young men who looked like they hadn’t had a carefree moment since they were in diapers.

Whatever happened at Larry’s, set the tone for the group criticism to come. It followed us right up the stairs to our big room overlooking the original Ford plant. In bad weather, you could watch the rain fall right onto the old shop floors. All the factory’s windows were knocked out.

“How come they don’t open the Ford factory for tours or something?” I once asked. “I mean, it’s historic!”

“People here are trying to get out of factories, Sue, not into them,” Chewy said. He always had a stern word for me.

Sure, everyone in Detroit was dying to get out of the factories and move to California, except for demented communists like us who were trying to get in.

You didn’t count for shit in the IS until you got an shop-floor union job. But none of our comrades could help me get a job, because they were all known “agitators.” The last thing a company was going to do was hire another one of their little pinko friends.

Without friends, how did you get work? I showed up in job application queues that circled for a mile around the block and was turned away. I was too young to pull it off against local folks my parents’ age.

So far, I had a night shift at McDonald’s, and a part-time nonunion factory job making carburetor parts in Royal Oak. Hot oil and metal filings settled into the pores of my hands, as if I were a caricature of the Incredible Hulk.

“How many newspapers did you sell yesterday?” Chewy held up a clipboard inches from my face. Why did he always volunteer to “supervise” us? He was older than my dad. In Los Angeles, no “grownups” came to our Red Tide meetings to manage us.

“Ten.”

“Where’s the money?”

“I already turned it into Steve P.”

“How many schools did you get to; did you get to the four we outlined?”

“I got to Mumford, Cooley, and Cass before the third bell.”

“You gotta get there before the second bell; where’s your contact list?” Chewy’s glasses were falling off his nose. His shirt looked like it hadn’t been changed in a week.

I pulled out a piece of paper with the names of all the kids I’d met who’d given me their phone number.

At the top was Alicia — she was so cool; she wanted to go to L.A. and become a big star. She had almond eyes with lashes as long as Maybelline’s. She asked me if she had the right attitude for making it, and I told her, “Colossal.” She had slender, articulate hands that looked like they should be waving from a Rose Parade float.

Alicia told me to come back after school and tell her everything, everything she had to know about Hollywood. I promised her I would.

“Who is this?” Runninghorse held up my contact sheet like it was bad evidence. I stared at the button on his beret — Free Gary Tyler! — instead of his face, so I didn’t have the urge to smack it.

“I told you,” he yelled,” if you can’t get the last name of the contact, don’t bother doing it at all!”

“I’m not going to interrogate some ninth-grader for her last name, Hank; this isn’t the Gestapo, we’re supposed to be making friends.”

“Yeah, well, Sue, you spend all day ‘making friends’ while other people are dying, other people who need some discipline among comrades —”

“Shut up, Hank.”

“Little Miss Friendship can just take her petit bourgeois ass and have a tea party!” Runningmouth cackled, and he brought his face down to mine to slide out his tongue.

I screamed and dropped my pen, bringing my hand straight up to connect with his cheek.

Chewy grabbed me. “Goddammit, if you two can’t behave yourselves, I’ll send you home.” He looked right at me.

My mouth dropped open. Runningmouth took out a piece out of me every morning, and they treated him like he shit gold bricks.

Michael came back through the door with a stack of newspapers for the afternoon shift. He looked so disappointed. He knew me; he knew I’d never hit anyone in my life. What had happened to me? Hank could turn a daisy into a killing machine, he really could.

“Sue, I’m going to need you for this detail,” Michael said. “Hank, where do you drive to next?” He gave a long look to Chewy. Stay out of it.

It wasn’t that Hank Runninghorse couldn’t recruit. He could recruit young men looking for a daddy, a serious daddy. He could con young women into his bed — but only the most patient martyrs would stay. Then he’d start beating them.

I wish I could make him pay. He had the whole Executive Committee snowed. They accused everyone of not “trying” with him, and you wondered just how many of their wives he’d have to fuck, punch up, or insult before they wised up. He was their little bulldog.

I made up my mind at the end of that week. I decided to move to the IS Louisville branch. Chewy, our “nanny,” wouldn’t have a clue; Hank would be thrilled to think I’d left with my tail between my legs. Michael would understand; Sammy and Sheila encouraged it. All of us who were fed up with the leadership in Detroit were quietly making our move.

Louisville was an alarming destination choice for an organizer — it was hell down there; anyone with the most milquetoast liberal agenda found themselves right up against the KKK. But I swore Kentucky would be like Paris in springtime compared to the crew on Woodward Avenue.

I called up the Louisville branch organizer, Luke, to tell him that I’d like to move there in two weeks. He said he’d loan me one of his shotguns.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Well, if I were you, I’d sleep with it.”