Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (23 page)

What a fantasy. Tell it to your vibrator.

Here you are, I’d think to myself, in imaginary arguments with my co-workers, with a grade-school education and nothing to look forward to after your wedding except an endless line of Tupperware products and racist legends.

The Byck’s girls never said anything about the appeal of their men, not even that they were cute. What was appealing was getting out of their mothers’ kitchens into one of their own. Plus, those diamonds on their fingers.

I ate my Baby Ruths alone at lunch, uninvited to showers and shopping sprees. They talked around me, as if I was a potted plant.

The day Miss Dreycall hired Byck’s first black employee, it was like a bomb went off. The young woman was immaculate, of course. On her first day, she wore white gloves with a mustard-colored melton coat. Her hair looked like a ’do from a 1965 Ebony magazine. Her name was Belinda Matthews. She did not use contractions when she spoke.

No one else spoke at all. The stockroom went from a henhouse to a Christian Science reading room. Deirdre had tears in her eyes because her desk was right next to Belinda’s. She kept her coffee cup on the farthest corner.

In the cloakroom after hours, I heard Deidre whisper to our veteran inventory clerk, Peggy. “I haven’t told my father ’cause I need the money for the wedding — but if he finds out, I’ll have to quit. And I just don’t know if I can take it.”

Belinda was terribly proper. Her posture made the rest of us look like degenerates. I could not share anything with her — my only success in her presence was to be unfailingly polite.

“Would you like the creamer, Miss Matthews?” I’d ask at the coffee table.

“No, thank you, Miss Bright,” she’d reply. She never took anything offered from my hands. And no one else offered her anything at all.

The day she was fired, two weeks later, I was called into Miss Dreycall’s office again. I wondered if she was going to try to explain Belinda’s disappearance. I was livid. I had fourteen bags of ugly sequined prom dresses on my desk that I couldn’t care less about. What the fuck did they think they were doing with their pathetic little affirmative action program? Go ahead, give the Yankee a reasonable excuse. Maybe Dreycall understood that, because I was so “intelligent,” this would upset me and I needed to know why it hadn’t worked out.

Miss D. asked me to sit down in the schoolgirl chair, and then she stood up. My god, was it really that bad?

“It pains me to tell you this, Miss Bright,” she said, “but we must pay utmost attention to the personal hygiene of our staff.”

Belinda was fired for hygiene? But she was like a bar of Ivory soap!

“You must bathe and use deodorant every day before you come to work,” Miss Dreycall continued. “Miss Love is very upset.”

Me? I felt the chair turn into a wasp hive under my bottom. My face and chest flushed as red as the roses on Dreycall’s desk. Worst of all, the acrylic sweater under my arms seemed to turn, in one instant, to liquid stink — I could feel the cloud of it overcome me. I smelled so bad I couldn’t move.

“I realize you are above-average in IQ,” Miss Dreycall said, and sniffed. “But there is no position at Byck’s that does not demand personal hygiene as the first priority. Do you understand me?”

I tried to open my mouth.

“This is your warning, and there will be no other,” she continued.

I thought of the labor meeting I had to get to after work, where we would discuss the telephone contract, and the coalition of black and white workers who were holding together by a slender thread, despite the busing issue. They were trying to keep their maternity leave and overtime hours —
but all I wanted was a shower. “Gee, I’m sorry, comrades, but at my job, I’m going to get canned because I smell bad.”

I went to the cloakroom by myself and got my navy peacoat. I buried my head in its dark lining and took a deep breath. It smelled like damp wool. The crisp snowflakes from early morning had all melted. I sobbed into the felt.

Someone touched me softly on the back. I didn’t want to know who it was. I was never going to take this coat off my head.

“Miss Bright...” It was Peggy. “Don’t cry … Miss Love can be very, very demanding.”

Peggy had been married two months before. Her diamond was yellow, one carat, and she had the honeymoon special package from Tupperware. “Why was Belinda fired?” I asked, still not coming out of my peacoat shell.

“Belinda! What?” Peggy pulled her hand away. “Well, she was stealing.”

That did it. I pulled my head out, stared right at her, and wiped my snot on my arm. Why not.

“Oh yeah?” I snorted. “Is that what Miss Love says?”

Peggy took a step back. “No, that’s what we all say,” she said, and turned on her ivory patent-leather flats. “All of us.”

Expulsion

T
he day that Luke, the Louisville branch daddy, took back his shotgun back from me was the day before everyone drove to Cincinnati for the special “expulsion” convention.

The IS was having another faction fight. I’d heard about faction fights in history books, among Bolsheviks, and here I was in the center of one myself. The last one in the IS had been in the early seventies when I was in eighth grade, innocent in Edmonton.

A special convention was being called to throw the dissidents out. That would include me. There really wasn’t any suspense; Hugh Fallon had the majority votes in his pocket. So why were we even going?

I knew there were big “principles” at stake, but it seemed to me another sort of worm had turned. Working-class solidarity had become a fetish game: wonderful people were being kicked out like dead wood. There wasn’t a vision; there were only snitches and bullies.

A couple years later, I discovered that this very same Luke, Mr. Louisville Autoworker, Our Beloved Branch Leader, was on the payroll of the FBI, infiltrating the IS to plea-bargain down a drug arrest.

In 1979, he drunk-dialed his old IS girlfriend from a rehab center, to sob out the whole soggy mess. He’d been busted selling coke again.

No wonder Luke had been so eager to lend me his gun. I guess he hoped I’d do something exciting with it, to impress his G-men friends.

But in 1976, I only knew that Luke was on the majority team of a faction fight, a minor captain in our
Lord of the Flies
reenactment.

The day I’d arrived in Louisville six months before, I had no reputation to speak of. But now it was mud. Every Klan member in town knew where I lived. When I was at Byck’s one day, they broke into my apartment, left dead rats on the toilet and in my bedsheets, and a little white supremacy note tacked to the mirror above the headboards: “Niger-Loving Communist Cunt.” I guess they dropped out of spelling class, too.

Luke came on the Tuesday before the expulsion convention to get his firearm. He knocked at the door, at the bottom of the stairs, and when I ran down, he could hear my thump, thump, thump on the narrow steps.

I probably sounded a little heavier carrying a shotgun. It was still cold, and he was standing outside, hidden behind my glass and wood-frame door, which was covered in a glaze of ice. When I opened the door, I saw his forehead was covered in sweat and his long blond hair was matted. Good lord, he was really worried I might blow him to kingdom come.

I had to suppress fit of nervous giggles. Before he said a word, I handed him the shotgun and reached into my bathrobe pocket to cup the shells in my hand. I offered them to him like chocolates, five of them. Luke’s face relaxed when he realized I’d removed all the ammo. Such a little guy, really. He didn’t ask for the sixth shell. I imagine he couldn’t think that straight.

It’s odd what I remember about being expelled. I remember the white Indian elephant earrings I chose for the occasion, the denim I wore, and a telegram that I got from Stan. Yes, Stan Holmstrom. He was back with Shari; Hugh had relocated them to Indianapolis. Stan couldn’t look me in the eye in Cincinnati, but I bet he watched my ass walk out the door.

Lots of people couldn’t look me in the eye in Cincinnati. I had thought of them as friends for life, as family, but I realized I didn’t know anything about anybody further back than two years. Who were these people, before the IS? I had no idea. But I’d taken a bullet for them.

Expulsion was the end of all that.

We’d dodged gunfire and been put in handcuffs, stood up in court together and been told we were ‘menaces to society.’ Each of us had a FBI file three inches thick with every other word blacked out for ‘reasons of national security’.

Now we would cross the street and not say hello.

I remember asking my mom once if she would say hello to her own father if she ever saw him in a crowd, and she shook her head no. She meant it. I didn’t know if I could be as hard as her.

I thought about the guy who’d rung up my books at Papa Bach’s the day before I left California for Detroit on the Greyhound. He told me he’d gotten thrown out of a Trotskyist sect in 1969. Now he was a yoga guru. Was that how bad it could get? You got expelled and put on leotards?

I liked my Indian elephant earrings because they reminded me of living with my dad. Home. Where was that, now?

“E is for elephants. E is for expulsion.” The IS faithful gathered in the Cincinnati Veterans Hall — you always had to wonder who these patriots thought they were renting to. There were American flags hanging over a piano in the corner. Half the IS national leadership were wearing flags on their jackets, too, to bett
er appeal to the “regular” Teamster. A couple hundred people were about to expel a couple hundred other people.

I was told ahead of time that I would be formally expelled for “traitorism.” Like Judas. Had I betrayed them all with a kiss? Probably. Everyone had fucked everyone, and now one half was jilting the other.

I had lied to Hugh. I had organized secret meetings to bitch about our wretched decline. I had written letters abroad to sympathetic comrades.

I was accused of joining or leading a cult of personality. Which one? I didn’t know what my personality was anymore. The opposition’s list of complaints and deceits sounded tinny. I hadn’t changed at all except for the innocence bit, which had blown away like dandelion fluff. Did Judas betray in despair; did he kiss in desperation?

I still felt the same way about the world that I did the day I begged Geri and Ambrose to let me join the IS. I noticed they weren’t at this monkey trial.

I wore a tight jean skirt and vest I’d bought with my last check from Byck’s. I was sealed up, nothing flimsy showing. I sat on one side of the room, with “our” crowd, the traitors. I sat on one side of the room, with “our” crowd, the traitors. Michael was the only
Red Tider
there with me. He was furious, hollowed out.

The little girls from Detroit were crying on the other side of the aisle, all the girls I remembered from Cass, Western, Cooley High. Alicia’s face was puffed up. Hank R. gave her a punishing look, but she couldn’t stop. Baby-faced Marika, who once stayed up at night with me to ask me what a lesbian was, snuck a peek at me. I was waiting for it. She was fourteen, too young for this crap. I mouthed, “I love you,” but Hank jerked her aside.

It was a forbidden to whisper “I love you” in this room. Hugh, at the mic, was entertaining a motion to expel.

I counted heads. Under three hundred people. Less than three hundred people could afford to split in half? Here we go! We’d moved so many mountains, now we would divide a grain of sand. Ronald Reagan had won.

I don’t remember a single word at the mic. Nor did I save the tower of documents that lay in my lap. I dropped them all in a Help Our Vets! wastebin on my way out the door.

Stan’s telegram in my pocket was the one memento I saved.

He sat across the aisle and voted to expel us like the rest of them. He hadn’t returned my letters when I wrote him six months earlier and asked him what he thought was going on. I’d asked him how he felt about the “workerism,” which was turning more surreal every day. I reminded him how we used to make fun of sectarians who pledged to use only “powdered garlic” in their kitchens, because the working class wouldn’t ever use the raw stuff.

Stan was the Indianapolis organizer now; Shari had gotten a tenure track position at a local campus. He hadn’t written me a love letter since my first month in Detroit, and I didn’t expect one now. But I thought maybe a faction fight would persuade him to say a few words to me. Pick me up, Stan; remember who I am. I didn’t hear anything back.

The night before the expulsion, while packing my army trunk in Louisville, I received a delivery from Western Union:

Dear Sue,

You’re a sweet kid. Have a nice life. Men are shit.

Stan