Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (27 page)

She spoke up loud and clear, “I have to got to get a Magic Wand; all the other girls at the switchboard have one!” She was an AT&T telephone operator. She didn’t share one furtive glance, one troubled whisper.

I felt the click, the chamber turning. Here was someone who wasn’t claiming to be sick, troubled, widowed, hopeless … just a hip chick who wanted to get what all the other gals were talking about.

She pointed at the stickers on the plastic vibes that said, Do not use on unexplained calf pain.

“What’s that for?”

“It’s just as silly as you think. … It’s a response to a lawsuit from so long ago that even the manufacturers don’t remember. No one uses battery vibes on blood clots, let alone on their calves.”

“No shit!” she said. “Is there such a thing as ‘explainable’ calf pain?”

“That’s a great question!” I wish the novelty factory morons could meet women like her. They didn’t even understand there was such a thing as a woman who bought sex toys. They didn’t get that we wanted toys to be attractive and witty and not like some kind of crutch.

The phone rang. It was Olive Oyl. At least, that’s exactly what she sounded like, Olive Oyl after a pack of cigarettes. She said her name was Dori Seda, a cartoonist, and she wanted to come down with photographer Terry Zweigoff and cartoonist Robert Crumb and some other dame, and tie themselves up in vibrator bondage and shoot a “photo-funny” — like the kind you see in Mexican comic novella.

“Okay, I have to call my boss Joani, and then I’ll call you right back. What’s your number?”

Joani was a reliable iconoclast. “Oh, it’s for Last Gasp,” she said, “the underground comix publishers. Ron Turner’s an old friend of mine.” He was going to be publishing Crumb and Dori’s mad comic, Weirdo.

“Of course,” she said. “Give them my love — and no smoking!”

I told the Weirdo crew to come over when the store closed, so they didn’t scare anyone away. I said, “You know, there’re no curtains in the windows, so you have to put up with whoever’s walking by. We’re a block from a Catholic church.”

No problem. Dori led her troupe in. She was the only one babbling. I loved her, with her big dark eyes and painted Twiggy eyelashes, as tall and knobby as a popsicle stick. Robert kept his comments to things like, “How exactly is this used?” as he picked up the most unusual object he could find on the shelf and waved it at
me. He was already drawing it in his mind. Terry chain-smoked. But I didn’t want to kill the mood.

“Could I be your vibrator bondage choreographer, or something?” I asked. “Because this will take forever if you don’t know the toys.”

“Oh yes!” They were in unison.

Their narrative structure was based on
The Perils of Pauline
: Two innocent girls are trapped by dirty old men in a vibrator store and must fight to escape!

I did draping and artful slipknots with electrical cords. I picked up the rabbit-fur mitt and stroked the Dori’s cheek with it. “Oh my god, that feels so good.” She sighed against my hand.

“Everything in here feels good, but you have to endure a photo shoot instead.”

Dori told me she woke up at noon and went to bed at dawn, that she lived right around the corner. She invited me to come over and try on rumba panties and draw and drink with her, draw the new feminist revolution comic book together.

“I can’t draw, and I can’t really drink, but I sure would like to visit you.”

I had other customers I fell in love with for other reasons.

One day two nuns walked in. I know that sounds like a bar story. They were women who’d left their order five years previously. They had both been novitiates at the same time, as teenagers, and had fallen in love. They left the convent to be together openly. The two of them dressed as modestly and primly in my vibrator store as any nunnery would’ve required.

They wanted a vibrator and “something for vaginal penetration.” They conferred with each other patiently. They’d been saving up for this purchase the way someone else would be socking it away for a car. I wanted to give them everything for free.

“How long have you been together?” I asked.

The younger one with blue button eyes cocked her head. “Oh, twenty years, right?”

Her lover concurred. They were delighted at the number. “It’s our vibrator anniversary!”

I was single. I had never been with any one person seriously more than, I don’t know, six months. I was friends with many of my exes, and loved them as family. But day in and day out, for twenty years? How did they do it?

“What’s your secret? Why aren’t you grumpy and bored and itchy?” I pulled my hair up into a bun, like Marion the Librarian.

They laughed. The older one — with crow’s-feet around her eyes — said, “I think it’s just because … we love each other, so much.” She slowed her words down, each one followed by a little pause.

I shook my head, not sure if they were teasing me. I guess I had to humor them. Call “Dear Abby,” call the Vatican —
we have the answer here: “love.” But I was disappointed. I wished they would really figure it all out and tell me.

The Baby Showers

D
ebi Sundahl, the co-founder of
On Our Backs
, threw the first baby shower I ever attended, in 1983. She also invited me to the last one I’d attend, when I got pregnant myself in 1990. I can’t believe our lesbian guerrilla operation was bracketed by babies, but maybe many women’s adventures are like that.

I hadn’t attended feminine rituals like baby showers before. I was twenty-five, and I’d never been to a wedding. My mom didn’t go for that sort of thing — I observed only the sitcom versions. I had no idea what to expect.

Debi’s showers had silly games, pastel wrapping paper, and little plastic baby shoes as party favors. Plus a houseful of strippers, most of them just coming off their shift. They all worked at a peep show called the Lusty Lady, in North Beach.

The timing in ’83 couldn’t have been better. I’d been re-reading that fan letter about my poetry for weeks, the one that Debi’s work wife Myrna had sent me. They did girl/girl sex shows together, a seven-hour shift, and they’d been planning their magazine for months. Myrna said
On Our Backs
was going to publish its first issue “any minute.”

So many minutes and months had passed by. What was the holdup?

I didn’t have a phone number for either of them, just Myrna’s letter, with an address in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. I walked there from the 33 MUNI bus with a handwritten letter that I planned to slip under the door. The address was on Beulah Street, Beulah and Waller. A pink two-story with a basement window that saw a lot of action, people walking up, filling a short transaction, and walking away — like a pie shop, only with baggies and cash.

I ignored the basement queue and walked up the front stairs to the second-floor flat, stuck my letter in the mail slot. I wanted to knock; I stood there rubbing my cold nose, but I couldn’t do it. Sometimes I’m ready for anything, but this time I wasn’t.

I wrote to Myrna in my letter that I could do most anything involving putting a magazine out. It’s odd to think that at that time, 1983, I really could, because publishing technology hadn’t changed much since Gutenberg. I could ink a press, set the type, write the headlines — whatever you wanted.

My phone rang that night. Debi, Myrna’s partner. Of course I couldn’t see her over the phone, but I can imagine her now, sitting at the kitchen butcher block,
chain-smoking, her long nails tapping on the wood, blond afro bobbing and weaving as she punctuated every question with her Marlboro. She was so friendly, but businesslike, like a charismatic Avon Lady setting up a full encampment in your living room.

“Have you ever sold advertising?”

That was the last thing I expected to hear. Advertising? I’d sold communism to Teamsters and high school students … wasn’t that practically the same thing?

I wanted to say yes so badly to anything she asked. “Sure, is that where you’re at right now?”

“That’s it; we have a certain number of preorders, but we need advertisers to meet the printer deposit before Gay Day,” she explained.

The idea was to distribute
OOB
’s first issue when a million people descended into the San Francisco Civic Center for the June Gay Day bash. We’d make so much money in one afternoon, Debi said, that we could pay the printer the balance in cash and leave a tip. Six hours to make $10K. Doable!

“Lesbians are lined up to purchase your goods and services!” That made me laugh. When did lesbians ever do anything but line up for the bus? But Debi would’ve said treating lesbians like they had money was the whole fucking idea.

“Lesbians have never been treated with respect as consumers; no one’s ever come to our community with anything sexual we want,” Debi said. I heard her take a big breath and exhale through her nose.

When I went out with my dyke friends, we’d walk through the Castro and see all the gay men’s business, a vertical column of fag capitalism. I temped at a Castro Street bookshop — and more than half of the books we sold were titles that have seldom, if ever, been seen in a straight bookstore. Every real estate transaction, every ice cream cup, every T-shirt was in queer vernacular, man to man. Five miles away in the Mission, you’d walk down a littered, dirty street to a feminist book
store — a sweet academic haven — but as impoverished as a church mouse.

“This is my business plan; we can talk more about it later,” Debi said, tappity-tap-tap. “We’re going to have a baby shower for Goldie this afternoon. Why don’t you come over?”

“Who’s Goldie?”

“She works with me at the Lusty. She’s eight months pregnant — such a sweetheart.”

Goldie was a doll; she was like a Creole Kewpie — brown skin, brass-colored sausage curls, tummy out to here. She sat on a velvet couch of glory. The house was beautiful in the back, off the street. Debi shared the whole place with her lover, Nan
— and Myrna. A sunlit Victorian with ferns hanging in the eaves, the smell of pies and chili in the kitchen — no sign of a drug man downstairs.

Debi, the tallest, was surrounded by other dancers. It was like being in the locker room of a girls’ varsity team. Their bodies were incredible — all different shapes but so strong, so … conceited. Tight clothes, high heels, muscles. Any of these women could pin me with one hand and do a French manicure with the other.

The question on my lips was, How can you be pregnant and strip? Just as obvious to me was that I couldn't ask anything so stupid without blowing my chances. Goldie was lamenting the day of her maternity leave, her disappointment at leaving the Lusty’s daily schedule: “The money’s soo good, you know, too good!”

I realized that I, too, might pay good money to see Goldie’s naked body with her bump. Had I ever seen a pregnant woman naked, talking to me? I didn’t think so. Most of the customers at Lusty Lady had probably not had that opportunity, either.

One of the other dancers — who’d come in with a waist-length red wig but had taken it off to get comfortable in her crew cut — had a whole rap worked out on the value of alternative sex education at the Lusty. She was a college girl from the Art Institute. “They oughta send the whole UCSF medical faculty down here to talk to Goldie,” Vanessa said, pointing up the hill from Debi’s house to the university campus. “She has schooled these men — they are better papas for it, better men for it. Poorer, but better!” She winked at me, her lashes covered in glitter.

Goldie blushed.

Debi motioned to me to start serving cake. She seemed so experienced at everything. “My son’s having his tenth birthday this week, too,” she said, licking frosting off her fingertip.

Ten? She had a ten-year-old? Where?

“He’s with his father now; it’s his turn!” she said. “I did the single-mom thing from the time Kenny was born, but when I met Nan, I had to turn it around. Everything we were reading, all signs said: ‘California.’ We had to come out here; we’re lesbians. I’m going to bring Kenny out here for the summer, and he’s going to love it.”

She sounded so normal. I imagined Kenny’s father was like some Minnesotan version of Alan Alda … doing his share while Debi got her turn to follow a dream. But my thoughts wavered. I knew it was backward, but I thought women gave up their children only because they went mad, flew out the window, lay sick at death’s door.

One of the girls turned up the stereo, Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girls.” Vanessa drew her arm across her body like Gypsy Rose Lee and stepped in front of Goldie’s throne. She began to dance for our momma-to-be, her belly trembling, executing a perfect back bend. The other dancers screamed and ululated. A dance-off for Goldie! How was she ever going to choose who was the best?

I cheered — but cleared plates. I’ve never moved like that in my life.

“Frannie, I love you!” Goldie shouted over the music, blowing kisses in Debi’s direction.

“Who’s Frannie?” I asked.

“That’s my stage name,” Debi told me. “Frannie Fatale. This is so great you’re here.”

Fanny’s business plan was one-part subscription presales, one-part advertising, and a Hefty bag of dollars that she and Myrna were making on their backs and in their high heels, strutting stages with gold chains around their waists.