Big s.e.x Little Death.

A Memoir.

by Susie Bright.

Preface.

At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the whiffs I get from the ink of [women writers] are fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin's whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.

- Norman Mailer, Advertis.e.m.e.nts for Myself Advertis.e.m.e.nts for Myself[image]

How does a woman, an American woman born in midcentury, write a memoir? The chutzpah and the femmechismo needed to undertake the project go against the ap.r.o.n. I was raised with, "Don't think you're so big." Yet to be a writer at all, you have to inflict your ego on a page and stake your reputation. To be a poet, the effect should be transcendent, and disarming.

I already knew the best result of my memoir, before I finished it. The days of my writing - a couple years in earnest - inspired many of the family and friends around me to write their story, to put a bit of their legacy in ink. Reading what they had to say was a revelation. If more of us knew the story of our tribe - and carried it from one generation to the next - it seems like the interest would pay off.

I know so little of my own family history that, when I was young, I often read memoirs in search of blood relation. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.

At the onset of my memoir, I thought I would bring myself up-to-date on the autobiography racket. I researched the current bestsellers among women authors who had contemplated their life's journey. The results were so dispiriting: diet books. The weighty before's and after's. You look up men's memoirs and find some guy climbing a mountain with his bare teeth - the parallel view for women are the mountains of cookies they rejected or succ.u.mbed to.

The next tier of bestselling female memoirs, often overlapping with the diet tales, is the tell-all by a movie star, athlete, or political figure. The first two subjects are designed to exploit gossip - the last are so boring and circ.u.mspect you wonder if they're funded by government cheese.

The last group of popular memoirs - and this goes across the gender divide - are the ones in which the author unloads a great deal of weight in the form of psychic burdens from childhood. The subject is nearly driven mad by lunatic or intoxicated parenting, sidetracked by years of self-destruction bred into their family line, only to be redeemed at the end by a clean break from addiction and pathology.

I'm as vulnerable as anyone to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love? I have a lot of sympathy for the dark places in my family history, while at the same time repeating my mantra, "This can't go on."

I came of age and became a s.e.xual adult at the moment that women - in jeans and no bras, of course - were taking to the streets. s.e.xual liberation and feminism were inseparable topics to my best friends in high school. As I entered my twenties and feminists began to disown one another over s.e.xual expression, it reminded me all too well of what I went though in the labor movement, civil rights, the Left - "let the weak fight among themselves." Radical feminists didn't need FBI infiltration - the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.

When I was first involved in politics, it was part of our group ethos not to proclaim our names and so-called talent all over the map - it went against our sense of the collective. When people ask me how I became a professional writer, I couldn't give them a "climb-the-ladder" scenario, because I went out my way to be part of a group. Everyone was supposed to know how to write, talk, run a web press, unclog a toilet, stage a demonstration.

I saw a news article today by a corporate headhunter who said he liked to get under his applicants' skin by asking them how, exactly, they were most misunderstood. What an endearing literary question!

It was a good interrogation to ask myself, mid-memoir. What do people think about me that is off base? And how do I gauge this misperception?

Most people unfamiliar with my work imagine that anyone with the youthful nickname of "Susie s.e.xpert" must be an adolescent airhead, a happy but too-dim nympho, someone who set out to shock her strict parents - or, alternatively, was raised in a den of hedonists.

They also think, along the "dumb blond" trajectory, that I just haven't thought things through, about where s.e.xual liberation might lead - how a female Narcissus could drown in a pool of c.l.i.toral self-absorption and drag unfortunate others with her.

I would say, for one, I was motivated, always, from the sting of social injustice. The cry of "That isn't fair!" gets a more impulsive behavior from me than, "I want to get off."

My parents were far more radical than I am, because of basic changes in their generation: My mother didn't die in childbirth. She went to college. My parents married even though they weren't of the same religion. They divorced - before that became the American way of life. My father's ashes can be found in a Native burial ground instead of a WASP family plot. They strayed so much further than I did from their immediate ancestors. They were better educated than I, but I have had a bigger mouth. I don't know who to blame for that.

The other side of my character, the one that isn't the "Si, se puede" version of Auntie Mame, is exemplified by loss, constant and too-early. I'm more preoccupied with people dying than people coming.

In the world of s.e.xual risk and revolutionary politics, a lot of voyagers die before their time. Evangelist Jerry Falwell famously preached at feminists, queers, and integrationists that all their fatal problems - their a.s.sa.s.sinations and plagues - were retribution from an angry G.o.d, who wanted people to keep their legs crossed and drink at the "colored fountain."

I don't believe in G.o.d or retribution, but I accept that there are consequences from pushing, hard. Pioneers don't look good on an actuarial table. s.e.x radicals tend to be excellent at hospice care, at the rites of the dying, at memories that leave legacies. Perhaps because we are blunt about s.e.x, we're not so afraid of death's taboo, either.

Every loss uncovers an edge about why we persevere in spite of the empty s.p.a.ce. s.e.x - its quixotic vitality, not its ba.n.a.l marketability - is one of those things that makes you feel like, "I'm not done yet."

This memoir is a progress, not a final deliverance. You'll see some of the flowers that pressed themselves into my sc.r.a.pbook. Using Mr. Mailer's criteria, I'm going for "dykily psychotic," definitely "bright," and, hopefully, crowning.

First Bites

Baby Teeth.

I couldn't sleep last night. Every drunk yelling under the window finally slipped away by four am and left the street silent. My lover was deep in slumber. I curled up against his back and woke him up. couldn't sleep last night. Every drunk yelling under the window finally slipped away by four am and left the street silent. My lover was deep in slumber. I curled up against his back and woke him up.

"Jon, tell me a story," I said. "You know, a really personal story."

It's a little joke between us that if he talks to me in intimate, sonorous tones, I will fall into a dead sleep. The more secret the story, the sooner I'll drift off.

I thought of a question to get him started. "When you were a little boy, what was the first time you can remember getting hurt?"

Jon remembered a spill. He took a fall in the public commons of a housing project in State College, Pennsylvania. He was running - tripped and sc.r.a.ped his knee on the edge of a slate staircase. He remembered the blood pouring out of his knee, the shock of all that red ink. His mother came running out, bundled him up, wiped his tears. I've always wanted to be bundled like that.

I fell asleep dreaming of a mommy's blanket.

I remember the first time I got hurt. I was bit by a little girl, hard enough to bleed.

I was in a daycare, the first daycare I can remember. My mother was working as a secretary, and we were living in Berkeley after her divorce from my father.

I hated this daycare. The rooms were large, cold - even in my memories it looks like a set from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When the teachers got impatient with you, they rolled out dark, narrow, wooden panels, seven feet high, that they could wheel into position and use to effectively trap you in a box, anywhere on the floor.

You could see light at the top - the panels did not reach the ceiling - but otherwise it was like being stuck in a refrigerator. You lay on the floor inside your "box," and they told you not to make a sound or it would get worse.

Outside the cla.s.sroom area, there was an asphalt yard. One afternoon a little girl with raven curls and blue eyes - I remember being struck by how pretty she was, even at two - came right up to me, grabbed my forearm, and sank her teeth in.

I have no idea why. I yelled b.l.o.o.d.y murder; I saw the marks and red holes welt up on my skin. Someone - not our mothers - rushed over and punished both of us. We were walled up in separate boxes.

I had complained about the box to my mother with no effect before. But this time, there was no hiding the injury. I remember her outrage - and her impulse. Elizabeth jumped into the car and I sat at home watching the kitchen clock, imagining the tongue-thrashing she was going to give them. I never had to go back there again. When she came home, she was grim, but I could tell it was over.

There's never any misunderstanding about broken skin. No "What if?" or "Should I care?" We yell or cry out, hit or block; there's no wondering how we feel.

When I first started teaching about s.e.x, in my thirties, I tried to whittle down what it was that people viscerally react to when s.e.x horrifies them. I kept coming back to our openings, the expected and unexpected openings to the body. We don't like invasions we didn't ask for.

I did an exercise with a cla.s.sroom of mine, students a.n.a.lyzing s.e.xual representation. I said, "Let's try to get to the nitty-gritty of what is called 'offensive.' Let's stop talking about it." I gave them all crayons and butcher paper, reminiscent of a daycare.

I set the mood. "I want you to quickly sketch the most disgusting, abhorrent thing you can think of, the thing you are utterly repelled by, the thing that you cannot endure for one second."

I told them I didn't care if it was phobic, or irrational, or if everyone would probably agree with their choice. Just to go for it.

I asked them to draw two pictures. One that depicted an "offensive" situation that was not about s.e.x. Another one that was pointedly s.e.xual.

We pinned the drawings to the wall. It was a parade of horrors and sillies. It was hard to stop laughing or gasping. Of course, most of the students were not adept renderers, and their pictures were crude. I had given them only a few minutes.

The nons.e.xual themes of offense evoked brutal violence, the monster vs. the mouse. Images of people hurting children, or animals, or each other in a vast war. The red crayon was used to draw the cuts, the explosions, the cruelty. The world split open. Faces with blue tears pouring out of the eyes. Anyone can draw that.

The s.e.xual offenses were sometimes fetishistic, other times universal. Many students went to s.h.i.t. One student drew an ice cube tray of "s.h.i.t-sicles" - G.o.d, how did he ever think of that? There were the bugaboos of the s.e.xually inexperienced: a.n.a.l s.e.x, ew. Oral s.e.x, ugh. One young man drew a dripping s.n.a.t.c.h, the horror. But others drew a p.e.n.i.s that wouldn't stop ejaculating, choking its recipient. Gang rape was represented. One young woman drew the aftermath line of a violent abortion. Her belly and v.a.g.i.n.a cut open. Someone drew a p.e.n.i.s forced in another's ear.

The themes of bullying and powerlessness unified us. But s.e.xual confessions were more surreal. They were unusual ... or symbolic. The students knew that their fears were unlikely to come true, or were exaggerated - but the horror persisted nevertheless.

I kept saying, "Look at the openings." The place where we say, "I can push out, but you can't push in."

We take tremendous pleasure in those same places, but there's no ignoring their perilous entry. We don't want to be caught off guard; we don't want to be preempted and struck.

Our nose, ears. Eyes, mouths, v.a.g.i.n.as. a.n.u.ses. Our tender flesh. We arrive bundled up, and we don't want any poking. We work up the courage to invite another's hands, tongue, a soft or persistent pleasure.

It's the opposite of automatic. When you're born, you don't know you're separate from your mother. As your baby-self grows, it starts to dawn on you: The umbilical cord is gone. You become conscious of where you begin and where your mother ends. You realize you have to protect your own tender openings.

I didn't want to get bit by that pretty little girl at the evil daycare. She reminded me of Rose Red. I was Snow White. I was smitten with her perfect face and piercing eyes. I thought she was coming to me with a wreath of flowers instead of incisors.

So my early desire was nipped. I wanted to smell, to listen, to taste, to be felt and achingly fondled ... with discrimination. I wanted to speak my mind and be understood. That bite proved something I wasn't able to get across any other way.

Would I have learned anything without being hurt? I was hurt too much, like most of us ... and not by incoherent, dazzling two-year-olds. More by the wall-boxers. There was way too many of them.

I was bullied as a kid because I was intellectually precocious but socially inappropriate. I read constantly, but I had my thumb in my mouth half the time. My moral universe was populated with fairy tales my mother read me, opera librettos and folk songs she'd sing to me - I had no idea what kids were talking about down the street. I wore thick gla.s.ses at a time when you didn't see many children with prescription lenses. My shoes were funny and the hems of my hand-sewn dresses fell below my knees. I attended ten schools before I was seventeen and had a vocabulary that didn't sound as if it had come from anywhere nearby, because we never had.

My mother and I moved every year or two, all our belongings stuffed into a 1963 VW Bug. When Elizabeth got fed up with something, she cleared out. There was no doubting the injustice that propelled her.

One time she was teaching English and German at a local high school in Contra Costa County, the barren eastern side of the San Francis...o...b..y Area. It was Christmastime, and she decorated her cla.s.sroom with a few UNICEF cards, National Geographic-style photographs of people celebrating winter seasonal holidays all over the world. I remember urging her to put the Diwali card in the best-lit corner, because I loved the photograph of the little Indian girls surrounded with candles, bangles sparkling on their arms.

Elizabeth had costume jewelry pins to wear for all the holidays; I loved helping her clasp them to her Jackie Kennedy shifts. She was so slim she could carry them off like a model - and would wear every bright color, including fuchsia lipstick, especially on drab days. For Diwali, she wore some of her blue and gold gla.s.s bangles from the early days of her marriage when living in Bangalore with my father.

The vice princ.i.p.al came into the cla.s.sroom the first afternoon of Diwali - you had to wonder, who'd tipped him off about a Hindi holiday?

"He told me to take the cards down," Elizabeth said, "this instant - that UNICEF was a front for the Communist Party and would not be tolerated at Amador High." She laughed, as if CP members would take an interest in a rural spur of California that was about to change from walnut groves to suburban tract homes.

"What did you say, Mommy? What does that mean?"

Elizabeth dragged in some empty milk cartons from the car to load our records and books. She had already made the decision to move. "I told him he was an idiot."

I didn't get explicit political rhetoric in our house. It was all inferred. I had no idea what communism was, or what its opposite might be. Hating winter solstice?

What I understood is that there were bigots and bullies everywhere, and you coped with them by giving them a piece of your mind and then turning your back on them forever. Did the silent treatment teach them a lesson? I was never there long enough to find out.

After 1965, I knew the drill. I lifted my most beloved possession, our fifteen-inch black-and-white Zenith, into the front seat, tucked under my feet. I couldn't wait to get to our next destination and plug it in. From Contra Costa County, we moved to Riverside County, in the tumbleweeds. Then the San Gabriel Valley Mountains. Up to the Bay Area, back down to Los Angeles. There was a tiny hole in the VW's running boards where you could see the road rushing underneath us, like water. I daydreamed that if I was small enough, I could slip right through.

I was thrilled when my mother turned her sword of indignation on others - but I was afraid to be alone with her. She'd get in these moods. I didn't see them coming when I was small, but by the time I was six, I was adept at avoiding her. Just not adept enough. Sometimes she'd ambush me in the night, storming out into the living room where I slept on the sofa and throwing a bucket of dishwater on my snoring body. An excellent cure for snoring. Or she'd turn on me in the kitchen with a wooden spoon or her hand across my face. I was "an idiot," too. Then she'd cry and say she was sorry. She wanted me to hold her tight. She couldn't help that she wished me dead, along with everyone else who was tormenting her.

The Boys' Dean at Amador High School got off light, in my estimation.

As I grew older, I wished Elizabeth would leave me, and go away forever. Finally, she did. The bite is quite lasting, isn't it? Only now can I look at some of my memories, the ones I don't have a photograph to prompt, and see how all the little marks come together.

India

Pretend I was born in India. I'll wind your worn sari around my shoulders and waist. I'll take your bright pink lipstick and put a mark on my forehead. We'll pretend that all the freckles are gone. I'll bathe in lemon juice, and they'll disappear. My hair will be so black, glossy, and long that I'll be able to sit on it, or twist it up on top of my head like Sita.

I know where all my mom's Ravi Shankar records are. I can put the needle down on the vinyl without scratching. I know the location of the jam jar where she keeps her sandalwood.

My mom didn't make jam, and her mom ... I don't know. Agnes Williams Halloran, my maternal grandmother, died from pneumonia in 1932, shortly after giving birth to her fifth child. I do know she had a lively life before she married and started having babies - she was the first Nickelodeon piano player in Fargo, North Dakota. She got beautiful autographed photographs and letters from all the early stars, and judging from her collection of the dark-eyed femme fatales, like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, I think she would have understood why I wanted to pretend I was born in India, somewhere very far away from milquetoast and freckles.

My first memories are of this game: "Pretend I Was Born in India." I would beg my mom to play with me in our apartment in Berkeley, on McGee Street, shortly after my parents' divorce. They had lived in Bangalore in the fifties, as linguists and travelers, and my mom had gotten pregnant on their voyage home. The things they brought home in their suitcases were the furnishings I lived with as long as I stayed with my mother. It had nothing to do with the hippie embrace of all things Indian that emerged in the sixties. It was mythological. It was proto-beat Berkeley.

When we moved to a new apartment, we'd turn one of the moving boxes upside down, put the red-and-white Indian tablecloth on it, and that was the coffee table. The prayer statue of Krishna dancing with his flute might go in one corner of sunlight, and the one where he is a baby, playing with his ball of b.u.t.ter, might go next to him.

My mom had a set of twenty-some cloth dolls representing all the castes in India, every sort of person, perfectly dressed and bejeweled. The pale-skinned raja has a sword and red satin jacket with gold braid and pearls, while the untouchable mother is barefoot, her baby tied to her back and a bra.s.s pot sewn at the top of her soft kinky braids.

She told me all the stories of what each caste meant - and I was beside myself over the inequity. I foisted my Cinderella fantasies on the entire doll collection, making the Brahmins leave their castles in disgrace while the teachers and carpenters and slaves got to take all their jewelry.

I was actually born in Arlington, Virginia, as my parents stopped in nearby D.C. as they reentered the country, looking for English as a Second Language jobs. I have some photos of them lying on a blanket on the banks of the Potomac with me, an infant, in April, and they look very hot but blissful. My mom said they were in brick government housing that was like an oven. She hated it there.

When I would ask her later what it was like "having a baby," she said that as they wheeled her into the hospital, she was so mad that it had turned out to be the "Confederate" Virginia location, instead of D.C., that her last words were, "I don't want my baby born in the South!" Then they gave her shot, and she didn't remember anything else.

At my christening, in a Catholic church, the witnesses - other linguists - are also recent arrivals to the United States. The women are dressed in saris; my mom's long hair is in a bun, and her gold bangles cascade down her arms.

My dad, who had been studying every writing system and language in India, writing books on Tamil, essays on Sanskrit, was finishing his PhD in a different kind of "Indian" language, the Karuk Native American tribe in northern California, on the Klamath River. My mother had published her field notes, songs, and stories on other California tribes such as the Patwin, Hoopa, Yurok. Even after their divorce, they would still go to Brush Dances, sometimes to hand me off for a weekend or school break visit.

To say that I didn't really get the difference between "Indian" and "Indian" for a very long time is an understatement. I gathered only that there was this sensual, spiritually omnipresent world, a "gone" world that was under attack, and then there was white, square world, pinched and plastic, away from which parents couldn't distance themselves enough.

My parents found that world, their India and Indians, through their education in Berkeley. In my young childhood, I had no idea how far they'd come.

The Irish Side

Irish are Spaniards who got lost in the mist ...