Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (36 page)

On top of the photo, we wrote a caption in black Sharpie: “Contrary to the rumors!”

Debi stared at the photos she’d dropped on the rug.

“You know what I remember the most about that photo shoot?” I asked. “Artie was worried that he was pulling my hair.”

“Anything that comes into this office belongs to the corporation,” Deb said, and walked into her office and slammed the door. Her wallpaper samples were strewn all over the shipping tables.

I didn’t know what to do next. I wasn’t leaving
OOB
for another job. I didn’t have one. Of course, I had the same freelance stuff I’d been doing all along. I was the only one of the three of us who worked outside of
OOB
to pay my bills. But there was no sudden call to fame; no one had asked me to sell my Rolodex and become
a lesbian superstar. There were no lesbian superstars. At that time, Ellen DeGeneres was inconceivable.

My reason for quitting — motherhood — was a truthful reckoning except for one thing, my anxiety about Debi. I didn’t want to work with her, this new apparition. I couldn’t keep “painting the roses red” every day.

Yet for all Debi’s delusions, I could blame only myself — because I never said, “Enough!” There was always some part of me that believed her, that believed we really would run away and become ballerinas, and her husband would pay everyone’s bills, and Steve Jobs was going to be our best friend, and there was big money in being lesbian pornographers, and … I just kept playing through.

If she could have sued me for being a gutless, codependent, naive nail-biter, she would have had ample cause.

I needed a lawyer. Of all people, my male-chauvinist neighbor, Mr. Hera, counseled me. “Anyone can sue you for anything, no matter how preposterous, and if you don’t sue back, they win.” He gave me the name of his lawyer, Ron Murri, who worked in one of those Montgomery Street skyscrapers that I hadn’t seen since I worked as a temp my first year in San Francisco.

I rode the elevator up to the top floor with three men who looked like John Gotti. I was probably leaking milk in my lavender wifebeater. I had never been to an attorney's office before; my only context was television, and Murri’s suite lived up to the celluloid dream. Everything was massive, mahogany; gorgeous quiet women dashed around getting things for talkative men in suits.

My new attorney listened to my tale of woe and handed me a Kleenex box. He was very experienced. As I talked and cried, he looked through my copies of
On Our Backs
that I’d brought him and burst out laughing. In delight.

I knew that laugh — it was one of the reasons I loved doing
On Our Backs
… because people who’d never seen it before had their minds blown. I knew that my magazine was the most interesting forty-eight pages of anything in his entire multimillion-dollar office.

It took Ron a while to realize the state of our assets. Minus zero. The cash flow: nonexistent. Everything was based on potential. Our second distributor had just gone out of business, writing off five figures in debt to us. We hadn’t paid the rent in months, and the printer was holding our film hostage. I was one less mouth to feed. I would never get back the money I had put into the business. I didn’t care; I just didn’t want this psychotic tin can attached to my tail for the rest of my life. Never write again? No way.

Debi had sent a message through her lawyer that perhaps my writing “fiction” would be allowed — with attendant extortion, of course. I had no idea she thought of me as such a cash cow. I certainly hadn’t done anything to warrant it.

Ron moved the tissue box off the desk between us and folded his hands on the table. “Ms. Bright, I’m going to take care of this for you.”

“I haven’t even asked you what this is going to cost. I just have to —”

“No, not at all. I am going to take care of this, myself. Don’t think another thing about it.”

“But what —”

He just shook his head and waved his hand at me, as if a small child had tried to pick up a bar tab. “It’s going to be fine. Forget about it.”

“How can you be so sure?” I wanted to believe him so badly. But that was what had gotten me into trouble with Debi in the first place.

“I will tell you why,” Mr. Murri said, glancing at his watch and then looking straight into my eyes. “Because one day your adversary will have a bigger problem than you — and when that day comes, she won’t be able to get rid of you fast enough.”

It was time to do the laundry again. I had five loads and a giant bag of quarters that I was going to let Aretha play with while I cleaned every last rag. It was a foggy day in the Mission, and I was walking around the corner for a candy bar when I ran into Spain Rodriguez, my neighbor and
Zap Comix
cartoonist friend from down the block.

“Hey, baby,” he said, giving me a big hug. He didn’t know about
On Our Backs
. He had some flyers in his hand. “Do you know anyone who wants to swap pads and live in southern France for a few months?”

I had to burst out laughing. “Yeah, me! I don’t have a job anymore, and I don’t know what I’m doing next.”

I called Spain’s French American friend, Maureen, who was part of a minuscule American expat community in France that consisted of retirees from COYOTE, the first prostitutes’ rights organization, and other Zap artists like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. It turned out that Maureen knew Honey Lee from waitressing, back in the day. Now she needed a house swap so she could care for her American parents and finish a novel. Her home in Languedoc was part of a tenth-century stone fort, alone among miles and miles of farmland and vineyards. I felt a little guilty that all she got in exchange wa
s my freeway-adjacent cottage across the street from a 24-hour gas station.

Maureen’s fort was quiet for an American like me with a little baby. On those rare occasions when I met people who spoke English, I knew they must’ve hailed from North Beach in the sixties.

I worked on a book. I charmed my neighbors with “pancakes” and my little angel, Aretha. I’d draw coal up from the “cave” under the fort to heat a stove every night, and the Mistral blew through and chilled the fort’s stone walls until they were like blocks of ice. Eventually, I got pneumonia. The French midwives in our village came to my bed and gave me shots in the butt. I got better. If there was ever a case of the “kindness of strangers” … I was deeply grateful to the many new friends I made. Little Romper grew up fast. I loved her so much.

One day, I got a long-distance phone call from my attorney’s exquisite assistant in San Francisco. “They’re settling today. Ron just went to court to sign the papers; you’re all done,” she said.

“What happened?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“Ms. Sundahl is apparently in Marin County Jail booked on assault charges.”

I faxed a friend, Sukie, who sold red-haired bud to Debi’s dear husband back in their courtship days. Debi never touched the stuff.

Sukie faxed me back: “OMG! Yeah, he cheated on her, all the time … and when she found out, she beat the living shit out of him. I heard her mother is driving from Minnesota to come get her and take her home.”

Take Debi home? It had been so long since I had thought of her Minnesota origins. What had happened to her son, whom she had spoken of the first day we met? He must be a teenager now. Where
was he? She loved him so much.

I rocked Aretha and watched a
Star Trek
rerun. My phone machine rang but I didn’t pick it up. I could hear the cassette tape taking the message: “Yeah, Susie, this is Gina’s girlfriend. Listen, I don’t know what you heard, but Debi and her old man got in a big fight, he left the house but he came back and found her in the pool about to slit her wrists with razors and he took her to Marin General and they put her in the psych ward and wouldn't let her out until someone took responsibility for her; then her Mom — .”

The tape cut off.

There was no dress for it, no fitting end. I could see Debi’s mother, her car wheels spinning on the highway, cigarettes in her purse, taking her curly-haired woman-child away from all of this, back to where she came from, back to all that deep snow — and something else, something I’d never figure out.

Santa Cruz

Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon.

— H. P. Lovecraft

W
hen I came back to the States, I got an interesting offer. My old faculty adviser from UC Santa Cruz, Carter Wilson, called me and said, “We’re so proud of you. The Community Studies Department wants to know if you’d like to come teach a class, for summer session. What would you like to do?”

Wow. I thought about it. I loved the road show I’d been touring, “How to Read a Dirty Movie”, which was inspired by Vito Russo’s
Celluloid Closet
. I decided I’d love to do an extended version of erotic forensics.

“Ten weeks is a session, right?” I asked. “I want to do something like … ‘The Politics of Sexual Representation.’ Yeah! I don’t want to use cheap code words anymore, like ‘erotic’ or ‘pornographic.’ I want to make students figure out what we’re really saying when we look at sex.”

Carter loved the idea. The department loved it. I called Jon and started talking up Santa Cruz in glowing terms. “I was bored silly when I was an undergrad there,” I told him, “because I didn’t want to jump in the waves or hug a tree; I just wanted to run to another all-night meeting in San Francisco.”

Jon laughed and I could hear him flop down on his bed. “Yeah, I bet you can’t wait to get your arms around a tree now.

What mother of a four-year-old wouldn’t agree? I didn’t want to stay up late anymore; I wanted to sit in the sun and watch Aretha chase seagulls. I could write a syllabus for a class I’d always dreamed of while I basked in the sun.

Jon and I started packing. We decided to live together for real, no more keeping barely separate households. We kept whispering to each other: “It’s ten degrees warmer down there.” I could feel the sun on my shoulders already.

Two days before the moving trucks came, I got another phone call from Carter.

“Susie, something awful has happened. The dean of our division, Murray Sabre, has just written the department a memo, saying” — I could hear Carter sh
uffling papers — “‘Susie Bright will only teach at the University of California over my dead body.’”

What did the dean of the Social Sciences Division have against me? I recalled he was an antiwar leftie back in the day, the kind of guy I had met a million times in the IS. Was he just like Kitty and Andrea, a leftie George Putnam, enraged by “the dirtiest thing” he could imagine my presenting in a classroom? Would I perhaps hold up a picture of “a woman’s private parts”?

I couldn’t bear to tell Jon or any of my San Francisco friends. The moving-van wheels were in motion. We’d already broken our backs carrying a 1905 upright piano down two flights of stairs. We had to go forward.

I drove down to Santa Cruz on my own, along the scenic coastline of Highway 1, always a meditation in California enchantment. Dark blue waves, deep ravines, wildflowers everywhere, rocky cliffs like castles. My dad knew the history of every Indian creek and mountain name from here to the coast of Mexico.

It’s a road made for singing, and I was belting out “Always True to You in My Fashion,” when an enormous tan buck jumped in front of me just north of La Honda Road. I saw the white of his deer eye; he saw the white of mine. I hit the brakes hard, and everything in the van came crashing toward my head. Don’t swerve, don’t swerve — that’s what they always tell you — take the beast head-on.

The buck, floating in the air, came down, glanced off the right side of my bumper, and kept bounding. He was alive! I was alive! The front seat was buried under every fragment of loose belongings we’d stuffed in the back. My head was wet, I hoped with sweat.

No one was behind me — the luckiest bit of enchantment yet. I put my foot back on the gas, accelerated to twenty, twenty-five, thirty miles per hour. Maybe that was the way to do it, slow and easy, count each artichoke in the fields as I passed.