Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (15 page)

Patricia’s response was to snicker, tell a story of her own about growing up in Costa Rica and hating the foreign kids who had arrived from Cuba with their parents. All the local children threw rocks at them or chased them with sticks. Sitting next to her Cuban girlfriend, Patricia laughed as if she still thought it was hilarious, attacking these little Cuban kids. I figured I misunderstood the Spanish, but when I asked Ana later, she confirmed it.

I began to avoid them, spent more time with the other members of Las Buenas Amigas. Like Adriana, a funny butch Colombian dyke who wanted to be a cop when she finished up at CUNY. Or her pal Diana, a photographer and another Colombian Amazon. There was also Cathy Chang, an Ecuadorian dyke who poked fun at everyone, including herself. She knew Ana from way back and treated her like a normal person, and not some luminary. Without her, things may have collapsed even before the first joint demo.

We did an enormous workshop beforehand, explaining our legal rights. A lot of Latina dykes were worried, even if they were legal U.S. residents. Some of the African American dykes were also plain nervous about Giuliani’s cops. Still, a huge crowd turned out at the Spanish Broadcasting System on November 17, a few days after the midterm elections when Clinton’s Democrats got dumped. It was all the dykes from the working group plus hundreds more, this whole enormous sea of black and Latina faces that at first were tentative in the twilight, surrounded by the huge buildings of midtown. They were more and more happy as they brandished their signs, and chanted in English and Spanish, and pounded drums. Spanish-speaking Latinas giggled trying to chant in English. African Americans and the few white dykes did their best in Spanish. For many of the dykes of color, it was their first time on the street as themselves. They looked at each other and smiled. Their voices got louder and louder. They shouted, transformed with joy, cheering when the beast of homophobia, racism, and misogyny was slain with a giant sword.

When demos click like that they’re incredible. What amazing energy. Unified, what potential to transform a divided city, lead a divided country. For once a huge campaign of phone calls and press releases paid off, and we actually made it into the Spanish press. New York’s
El Diario,
the biggest Spanish-language newspaper in the country published a photo with a long caption. Ana was thrilled. On behalf of the three groups she sent out press releases about the successful rally, announcing an awareness campaign in New York Latino neighborhoods and trumpeting our achievement. In a fax cover to Colleen Marzec at the
Washington Blade,
she wrote, “Never has there been a coalition of this kind: for the first time in history, ethnic-based lesbian groups are doing
direct-action
in their own ethnic communities. We think this is a turning point for lesbian activism in this country.”

19.

It was a turning point, all right, but not for the better. Things got more and more weird between Carmen and Ana. I kept to the role of Ana’s delightful white girlfriend who miraculously spoke Spanish. They weren’t interested in seeing beyond the mask. Maybe they didn’t realize it was one. In the early fall, I’d disappeared for a few days on a trip to Louisville. Took a Greyhound down, saw the seasons change in reverse, yellowed shrunken leaves plumping out, turning green again. The highway cut through the crumbling, shale hills and ended in a generic decaying sprawl of a modern metropolis that had all these separate little pockets, from white-trash rural exiles and crumbling black slums, to an aspiring middle-class and a genteel, Gentile upper class.

My grandmother was dying. I can’t remember who called to tell me. My mother never spent a dollar on a phone call when a seventeen-cent stamp would do. My sister Kim picked me up at the bus station and took me straight to the yellow-brick Suburban Hospital where I had volunteered when I thought I was going to be a doctor. My grandmother was in a private room and didn’t look human anymore. She’d been plump and pretty with black hair streaked with grey that she kept in an old-lady perm. All the color and curls had drained away. The roundness of her face was gone, leaving just skull and the whiskers she’d grown on her chin. She looked like a primate. That’s where we come from. That’s what we all become. Graying apes among the white sheets and tubes. Only her belly was rounded. Later, the nurse said the morphine made it impossible for her to shit. They had to go in there with their fingers and dig it out when enemas didn’t work anymore.

She kind of recognized me—or pretended to. Or maybe it was just the enthusiasm from my aunts and uncles in the room. Cancer had eaten away at her bones until they were like Swiss cheese. She’d complained for years that they hurt, but all old ladies complain, right? And she’d had shingles just a year or two before, and the pain often lingers.

My mother shrieked loudly with false joy at what the cat drug in and gave me uncomfortable pats while she looked me up and down for traces of the monster I’d become, and any weight gained, which would make me like my lazy no-good father. She also worked in a surreptitious sniff to see if I stank, which I did, perfumed with diesel and sweat and disinfectant after twenty-four hours on the bus. And she said, “Shooey. They don’t let you bathe up there? No wonder you can’t get a man. Haw haw.” All grinning and laughing hysterically.

Then my aunts and uncles asked what I had been up to with that peculiar mix of curiosity and disdain that forces you to respond as vaguely as possible. “Still writing?” “Uh huh. Poems mostly.” “Any money in it?” “Well.” My face turned green under the fluorescent lights, the distance imposed by their old-fashioned twanging speech, and what everybody knew now and didn’t say. Maybe because it was just as strange to be a writer up north as it was to be a lesbian.

And I imagined trying to translate that room, those people with their homemade clothes and union cards, to the folks in New York and couldn’t bridge that gap either. My grandmother, who had considered it an accomplishment to complete fifth grade, which she had gone to on a pony through twelve feet of snow. Who had moved back and forth from the dirt-poor country to the city where she’d worked in a factory, raised kids, saved money, bought the house there on Dundee Road. Owned it outright. Her husband sometimes worked, sometimes not. He was one of a dozen or so kids, and the Pierces always were as lazy as sin. The old man married one woman after another to raise the new baby that had killed the last wife. My grandmother confessed to me once how happy she was after her fourth baby, when the doctor told her that it would kill her to have more and tied her tubes. She whispered that she understood those women “who, you know. . .” We were looking at knitting needles at the time. The wooden ones her father had whittled for her not long before he died, leaving her at the mercy of her relations.

Or maybe there was no gap at all. New York’s all surface. Half the closets, even of Ivy Leaguers, are stuffed with a dirt-poor grandma from somewhere, a granddad planted in the living room watching football in silence and occasionally teasing the kids, “Pull my finger.” We didn’t leave them behind. My uncle Bill, who brought us biscuits and cinnamon rolls in tubes from the Pillsbury factory. My uncle Phil, who aspired to own a camper and do cross-country trips with his wife when he retired. The mysterious women sitting around the tiny kitchen table talking about their blood sugar and cholesterol as the ham cooled on the counter and the corn boiled.

My grandmother would pour me a glass of iced tea, ask if I wanted it sweet, and when I said yes, would stick her finger in it, and laugh while I howled, explaining, “That should be enough, sweet as I am.”

The last time I’d seen her, she’d been in a retirement complex, handing me bits of old lace she’d hooked when she could still see properly. She patted me on the back and told me that she had a relation like me, who’d lived with a friend all her life. She called them both “aunt.”

And there she was in the hospital bed, changed utterly.

My sister wanted me to go home with her, but I kept vigil with Nana, one night, anyway. It was the least I could do. She dozed off, then hallucinated, and spent a couple of hours threading the needle of a vast factory sewing machine. And then it was a water pump. She was pissed off at someone for not fetching a bucket like she asked. “I’ll get it for you,” I offered. But she didn’t hear. And later, she came to her senses and wept a little.

I held her thin, cold hand and asked if she was hurting bad and needed more meds. Or if she was afraid. And she said, “Yes.” It was God and his judgment that terrified her. And I told her she had nothing to worry about, but she wasn’t convinced. And I got in deeper and promised that God was merciful, and all she had to do was let go, and then the pain and suffering would be over, and she’d sit on those cool, green banks of flowing rivers that I used to imagine when I’d walk my old neighborhood, pause at the football fields, watch a sunset and pray, or compose a poem like I’d read in the Billy Graham newsletter. I stroked the greasy gray wisps of hair across my grandmother’s forehead. I held her hand. She seemed calmer, for a minute, as I kept mouthing the words I’d believed once, and she fell into a true sleep. I made a bed of the extra chairs the nurse brought me and curled up in the twilight of the monitors and buttons and bells.

I wanted her passing to be easy, but I only relieved her for a few hours. It took her another three weeks to die. I was back in New York by then and told Ana when we were up at the cabin.

I stayed with Nana all morning, drinking decaf, eating leftover breakfast from the patients. Kim came in the afternoon and we went to Taco Bell, where the colors were too bright and there was sauce on the counter. The server had a big accent, like Ana, and Kim twanged, “I don’t know why they cain’t speak English right. If they’re going to come here . . .” She sounded just like my mom who locked the car door with her elbow when she saw a black person, not at all like the older sister I’d admired, tried to be, stealing her T-shirts. I think that was just after Kim had created a family scandal by marrying a black man, then divorcing him when he tried to kill her. She’d already been married once, had a kid and a dog that she locked in the bathroom with her, while her new husband screamed outside with a knife. I wonder what kind of blonde, blue-eyed devil he imagined cowering behind the door. I wonder what she thought when she married him, what he meant to her. Was he himself, or just a little bomb she wanted to set off among the hicks?

I hung around a day or two, visiting my grandmother, holding her hand, smiling at the relations. My mother’s anyway. My dad’s parents, the ones who paid to have my tumor removed, sent the message through my mother that I was absolutely not to visit or call. When I asked why, she smiled smugly, “They hated those pictures you sent. Said you looked like a refugee. What’s the point? You being what you are.” I probably ignored my dad, even if he lived in town with his second wife and young daughter, still humiliated that I had competed with his dog—and lost.

God, I was happy to take the bus back home. That’s what New York was. My mother, as much as I sickened her, recoiled when she heard it, “Home. I’m going home.” And when I got to that filthy chaotic terminal at Port Authority after almost a night and day, I nearly bent down and kissed the dirty linoleum. Though it didn’t quite end there. I’d been infected, you see, by her eyes. And when I stopped by my own room on Avenue B it suddenly seemed shabby. And my clothes were ugly. And I stank. And the people I knew had no direction. And there was no music to their voices. I was wasting my life. Even Ana’s accent seemed briefly obscene. The Irish girls had each other. There were Cubans everywhere I looked. But girls from Kentucky? None. Nowhere. I was adrift, unmoored, again. At the loft, Amy tried to console me, but when she got out her banjo, I had to leave.

20.

When I wasn’t working on the radio project, I tried to write a poem about my grandmother, describe how it felt to live exiled in a place where people from Kentucky were sometimes subtitled on TV, if they appeared at all. I’d stare ambivalently at the weather map and point it out to Ana. “There, right there. That’s where I’m from.” And she’d look, searching for a minute, then turn back to her work.

The coalition was pushing forward despite the weirdness between Ana and Carmen. They wrote letters and faxes pressuring the sponsors to complain to the station, tried to get the mainstream press to cover bigotry in the Spanish media (even Anglos should have noticed the blackface when they were channel surfing), and asked the FCC why they didn’t enforce the same rules governing obscenity in the Spanish-language press as in the mainstream. Were they American or not?

The videomaker Janet Baus, who had Cuban roots herself, held a fund-raising party at her house for Latina lesbians, and Ana got a friend of hers, Carmelita Tropicana, to do a benefit show of her new performance,
Milk of Amnesia.
It was a hit with Las Buenas Amigas even though Carmen and Patricia seemed doubtful about such a highbrow event. “Half the members have never even been to the theater!” But everybody laughed at the jokes and practically fell on the floor in hysterics when Carmelita appeared in man drag as Pingalito, “Little Dick.”

We organized a flyering campaign for several neighborhoods including Bushwick and Spanish Harlem, and Ana and Melanie and I went to the Avengers and tried once again to pitch the project: “It’s historic.” “It’ll have an incredible impact in a city wracked not only by homophobia but color lines.” But we only picked up a few including a white girl, Kristen, and a young black woman called Yancey. And we were back to wondering why almost no white Avengers came to the demo, and why the group was unaffected by our excitement even though we’d taken over a fucking radio station and mobilized all these new activists. Was it straight-up bigotry? A demographic shift? It seemed to us the Avengers were more and more full of dykes that had come from the Midwest to go to Barnard or NYU and had remained isolated and fresh-faced in their dorms. Flatbush and El Barrio were like foreign territories to them. They sweated hearing anything but standard white English. Is alienation, or cowardice, the same thing as racism?