Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (26 page)

Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Lesley, made Jiffy Pop popcorn and crackers and onion dip. Even Mrs. Lesley’s miserable teenage son crept into the room for the moon walk. All the miserable vapors from America’s culture wars disappeared for one evening, as weightless as space junk.

With that history, I was sure I could master the City College astronomy class. When I arrived the first day of school, I was like a constellation, so white, so fair, so filled with literary references. The only way I could remember anything the professor handed out was to recall the Greek myths my mother taught me. It was as good a route as any into my professor’s heart.

My last course in college became a treat instead of a burden. I would get a respectable B. My real problem became housing, money. I was crashing in my sleeping bag in a gay commune at 986 Valencia Street. All the bedrooms were full, but there was a generous sill below the window in the storefront. The sun poured down on my Therm-a-Rest. Upstairs, a Rajneesh commune performed their self-titled “chaotic mediations” and fucked their brains out while we, the pinko queers downstairs, tried to have meetings. They called it their “spiritual practice.” We called the police.

I did janitorial gigs, waitressed a few banquets out of Local 2, cleaned sinsemilla from the Spinsters in Humboldt and sold it for $40 an ounce. I just wanted a normal wage job. Tracey had moved to San Francisco, and she pointed out a notice in the newspaper: The Golden Gate Bridge District had been ordered by the courts to hire women, after years of discrimination. They needed lane changers, the people who move the traffic cones during rush hour. I could do that! I had the perfect interview gambit: “Yes, I know the bridge weather is cruel. It would scare any normal person, b
ut you have to understand: I’ve been living on a mud pallet in Alaska and skinning my own squirrels. This is nothing.”

Those bridge veterans probably met vigorous and physically able women all day long. I was the one who was impressed with my heretofore undiscovered physical prowess. I didn’t know I had it in me.

My love life and my political interests filled every spare minute I wasn’t job scrounging. I was part of a queer artists’ collective called Mainstream Exiles that went a lot further than anything I’d experienced quoting Rita Mae Brown. Wasn’t she dating tennis players now and raising racehorses? Her revolution had taken a detour to plusher pleasures.

I had a lot of crushes in our group — there were so many charismatic people: Rhiannon, Max Valerio, Marga Gomez, Tom Ammiano, Tede Matthews, Reno, Lea DeLaria — it was the birth of the San Francisco gay comedy and performance art scene.

I wanted to do a show, too, my own show. I knew what the title would be:
Girls Gone Bad
. I had a treasure trove of old pulp novels from the golden years of early paperbacks, the ones that presented titillating case histories of twilight women — insatiable, fiendish, and horny. These kinds of books didn’t get discussed in school, but you’d find them in drawers, tackle boxes, under car seats. I was fascinated with literature that everyone knew about but no one spoke of. I wanted to mash up some of that genre with the catechisms of Catholic virtue I’d been brought up with.

One of my old lovers from Alaska — Terry — came up to crash with me on a holiday weekend. It was Carnival, the holiday that turned the Latin Mission District into a tsunami of samba. Tede, my roommate, found a magenta-pink taffeta ball gown in the streets outside my window, and said, “It’s you, Cinderella.” It felt so good. If he could wear beautiful skirts and corsets, surely I could be just as quixotically femme.

When I made love to Terry that night, I put my whole hand inside of her. It just happened. My fist curled like a rose hip, inside a place that was so soft. She coiled around me, like she was lost, like a kitten who hadn’t opened her eyes yet.

The day after our rendezvous, my ball gown came off, and I was back in Astronomy 101 in my cutoffs and Queers Support the Sandinistas T-shirt. I didn’t pay much attention to anything our dear professor was saying, because I was busy writing a love poem:

1. Rocky outer crust
Icy mantle
liquid nitrogen, a kernel
Hissing at the core.

2. Compare planets with lovers:
As with cosmic evolution,
There are many mysteries

Does life exist on other planets?
Where did we come from?

Your orbit
Was like a magnetic field
baby
That hurts
I was so attracted too

And now
I cannot touch
Your outer rim
Without remembering a dream

I fucked you round a dance floor
Like a wheelbarrow, your hair mopping the ground
And legs about my waist

The sweat ran down my neck
And trickled on the underside
Of your breasts
They curved like a sulphur plume

The next night, Tede invited me to read at Modern Times Bookstore Collective, just two doors down. A gay Marxist bookshop: yummy.

I read my poems. I felt like Elizabeth Taylor in Maggie the Cat’s nylons. My words gave me a presence that my spectacles and hunched shoulders wouldn’t otherwise suggest.

Someone during the show’s break told me that Good Vibrations needed a “feminist vibrator clerk;” I thought maybe I’d apply for that along with the bridge job. Good Vibes had one employee who’d left town suddenly with broken heart. I wondered who that was.

Vibrators, huh? That could be more fun than changing traffic cones. My heart was the opposite of broken — it was bursting with leaps of faith.

Two days after the Modern Times poetry reading, I found in my mailbox a handwritten letter from a stranger.

The message was curlicued, in fountain pen, a beautiful hand, from a young woman named Myrna Elana. She said she was the cofounder of a new magazine in the works called
On Our Backs
(
OOB
). I burst out laughing before she even got to the title’s explanation: they were dedicated to tweaking the prudery of puritanical feminist publications like
off our backs
. The conservative feminists believed sexual liberation was playing into the hands of the bestial impulses of male dominance. Ah, science!

The premise of
OOB
was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distant planets. We were alive to sex and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be. I couldn’t wait.

Myrna wrote that my writing was “beautiful,” that she had been sitting on one of the metal folding chairs at Modern Times. She asked me if they could include my poems in the first issue — or anything else I might have in my desk drawer. She said she’d loved to meet me. It was my very first fan letter.

I don’t think anyone had told me my writing was wonderful save my parents and a couple grade-school teachers. Those had been fairy tales I’d made up. There’d been a gap. My propaganda efforts for
The Red Tide
were always critiqued for their bourgeois individualism, inappropriate humor, and the lack of a socialist imperative summary. I’d become expert at aping other people’s writing that could get the seal of approval. It was dreary.

Poetry was the one place where originality — my personal
lair — was prized. I didn’t feel self-conscious.

I wrote Myrna back with one of my green ink fountain pens.

“I would love to,” I wrote. “I will do anything to help get the first issue out. I know how to do paste-up, sell ads, write copy — anything you need to get it together. You have given me the best laugh in a very long time. Call me.”

I told her that I might be working at the women’s vibrator store on Twenty-second Street, next to the Catholic school and the barbershop. She could probably find me there.

The Feminist Vibrator Store

M
y job at Good Vibrations was lonely in 1981. Sometimes, I’d have only one customer per day. Even if that customer stayed for an hour or two, I had lots of time to sit there and think about what she had said.

“My husband has died and I will never achieve climax again.”

“The therapist has told me I am sexually dysfunctional and sent me here.”

One little boy darted in and spat at me: “My dad’s in prison, and he has a bigger dick than anything you got in here.”

I could rock our customers’ world with just a little information. One little chat, and they wouldn’t think they needed to rely on someone else for their orgasm. Nor would they remain distraught that an MD had “sentenced ” them to a vibrator store. The kid who taunted me about his dad in prison and ran out the door — I could say something kind to settle him down. Sex education was so powerful because even the smallest effort was enlightening.

I got bored when the store was slow. I read every book on our shelves. It seemed strange that the catalog of decent sex information was so small that one could read it all in a couple of weeks. There was only one book for kids about sex that wasn’t focused on pregnancy and disease. One! There was a single photo book about men and masturbation that didn’t treat it like a juvenile disorder or failure. And all of the contemporary “women-authored” erotica had been penned by Anaïs Nin, circa the twenties. We had Nancy Friday’s sociological surveys of women’s fantasies, but I would advise cus
tomers just to read the fantasies, not the pathological critiques of why these women fantasized in the first place. It would have only discouraged them!

We had what my boss Joani Blank called “the try-out room.” The “world famous try-out room!” I called it, although it was really the world’s biggest secret.

It was only a bench adjacent to the bathroom, behind drapes. There were two basic electric vibrators plugged into the wall sitting on the bench’s flowered seat cover. Customers widened their eyes when I suggested giving it a whirl.

“You'll understand after you turn on the vibrator,” I’d say. “You’ll understand in one second, literally.”

You could be wearing fleece-lined snow pants and a parka, but if you brushed the Hitachi Magic Wand to the outside of those snow pants, you’d know whether you liked it or not. For many women, it was the first time they’d experienced what men would call an “instant boner.”

People always ask me if the try-out room was “abused.” It never really got a chance to be during my tenure. Everyone jumped out of there quickly because they couldn’t wait to get their own vibrator home.

The only reason to take an extended interest in the try-out room would’ve been to impress me, and that happened only twice. Each time the customers were friends of the owner.

A cabdriver, David Marshall, who was some kind of sex guru on the side, came in with his girlfriend. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” he said, walking in with his trophy girl. “Lana, show Susie your tattoo!”

Lana was wearing a long gown that split open on the side. She had turquoise eyes and Lady Godiva hair. She released her magic snap and the Greek-style dress fell open, revealing a serpent that crept up from her instep, around her hips and breasts, and up to her neck.

I was their captive audience. I had a gong under the cash register if they became too obnoxious. But they didn’t. I was still interested. I’d never seen anyone with a body-length tattoo before. I didn’t want them to stop.

David heralded the wonders of the try-out room to his mistress. I hoped Lana wouldn’t be disappointed. I mean, it was barely more than a water closet. They disappeared behind the mauve curtains, and their moaning began a moment later. I suppressed my laughter since I figured they could hear me as well as I could hear them.

This is what everyone thought my job was like, eavesdropping on ardent lovers in the back room, everyone dripping in sweat. In fact, this was a once-in-my-career performance.

David and his Serpent Girl popped out of the try-out room and turned to me, flushed, their afterglow aflutter.

I could have crushed them with indifference, but that was just too mean. They had pushed me a bit to be the voyeur, but really, was I unwilling? No. I had a flash of how unusual it was to be in a sexual space where the rules are what you make them. In my previous life, when men had exposed themselves, they always they got the drop on me before I had a chance to respond. This time I was in the lead.

“You look happy!” I fanned at them with my copy of the Chronicle.

“Do you want Lana to show you more?” David asked. She stared down her aquiline nose. Ouch.

In my fantasies, I was beautiful, too, not the stepsister sleeping in the ashes.

“No, I’m good,” I said.

Lana hooked up her toga, and they swept off into their chariot. It was the week of vibrating dangerously.

Another customer walked in, right in their wake, with a honey beehive and sensible pumps.