Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (17 page)

Ana finally came back moved and excited and a little disturbed at how these seventeen dykes greeted each other with a kind of freedom that she’d never seen at Avenger meetings. It was a kind of epiphany, realizing that the dykes of color in the Avengers never did what she’d seen elsewhere, chattering in corners, drawing attention to themselves as Latina or black. There at Marlene’s, they laughed a little louder, smiled more broadly. And god, how they talked. They talked and planned and plotted for seven full hours, drinking beer and eating enchiladas and chips, filling little note cards with their thoughts.

They are yellowing now, the rubber band that held them together turned to a strange hard brittle substance that breaks apart like a strand of dried, whole wheat linguini. A lot of their criticism affected everybody. The group may have been open, but its cliquish nature put off newcomers and made it hard for people to speak, especially if they thought their voices weren’t welcome. There was a lack of basic courtesy. A need for a formal orientation telling people what the group was about—a question that was getting more and more urgent.

At the next meeting, Marlene passed around a press release about a great zap the San Francisco Avengers had done. They’d released “locusts” at the offices of Exodus International, which ran a bunch of programs to “cure” queers of homosexuality. And for the first time they’d posted the press release online. The problem was they’d also changed the tag line of the group, redefining the Lesbian Avengers as “a direct-action group of lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered women focused on issues vital to our survival and visibility.” They’d both redefined the membership and dumped the whole focus on “issues vital to
lesbian
survival and visibility.” Once again,
lesbian
was turned into a simple modifier for women along with many others. We had no specific issues, no culture, community, or visions. No right, or need, to organize by ourselves.

Ana went insane for a couple of days. Laundry lists were part of what she’d been fighting against when she’d begun imagining the group. She asked why diversity almost always meant including bi, transgender, often straight females—mostly white. “If we keep this up,” she said, “the Avengers are never going to be able to recruit dykes of color. Do they think we’re morons? We know they don’t care.” She wrote a whole furious letter. Spent hours revising. Then shoved it into a file. We began to admit that the group was slipping away. All that work down the toilet trying to establish once and for all that lesbians had the right to exist and to organize. That she had a right to exist. This Latina lesbian.

Though she still beat against the glass. It made a horrible sound. The whole rest of the story is horrible. Hope is always horrible, when you know it’s going to be smashed.

Skim Milk decided to organize formally as a caucus for Lesbian Avengers of Color and held a bunch more meetings, while the remnants of the Radio Mega group outlined the plans for a project dedicated to city actions to counterbalance the group’s focus on national issues. The first meeting was March 10. I think it was me who came up with the name CITYAXE, which annoyed Ana because it didn’t have lesbian in it, but everyone else thought it was okay. And we spent several days drafting a huge working paper that talked a lot about how issues intersected: class, race, homophobia. Banking on the idea that logic and reason and more hard work were going to save the day, we outlined strategies about how to insert ourselves as out lesbians into existing issues, from the battle over community gardens to school board policies.

If announcements from the Lesbian Avengers of Color caucus were met with silence, CITYAXE was met with resentment and disdain. Maybe it was the sound of our voices. They were too shrill, too emotional at that point. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone into detail with all this theory. The strength of the Avengers was action, not blab. But I’m not sure it would have been much different if we’d just come up with some actions and pitched them. Probably we would have been hung out to dry again, like we were with the Radio Mega thing, where the group approved the action but a handful of us did all the work, almost no one came to the demos, and when things finally went sour, we took all the blame.

We tried appealing to the masses with a big mailing meant to bring some of the old-timers back. Sitting around the table at Ana’s, avoiding protruding nails, we came up with a letter that was somewhat critical of the group but still hopeful for our prospects.

We were optimists to expect that all right-thinking people would rally around us, shouting, “You go, girls. How can I help?” Instead, they asked to be removed from the mailing list. Anne and Marie, who were embroiled in their own fights with ILGO, sent me an irate, insulting letter demanding I explain why we were attacking them. Thinking of Las Buenas Amigas and AALUFSC, we’d put something in our own mailing about avoiding arrests, trying to minimize danger so as many people as possible would feel welcome, but they’d taken it as a direct rebuke to their efforts. And if it wasn’t an attack, they said, it was badly written. I sent a letter back on my high-flying horse, explaining we had no such intention. It was not badly written. They were just insane, etc.

God, I hope they threw it away.

All the pressure from CITYAXE started to strain the Lesbian Avengers of Color group. There were older alliances than ethnicity or race. Like sex. Plenty of dykes of color had white girlfriends. There were even more important ties. Maxine Wolfe, one of the oldest, most experienced Avengers, had been an important mentor to the members of LACROP, particularly Chanelle. Maxine and Marlene had also become good friends. We heard she was pressuring them both to back off. “All these discussions are tearing the group apart.” Maxine wasn’t wrong, but there was no easy way to move on. It wasn’t that we wanted to just highlight issues of dykes of color, but that we wanted “lesbian” visibility to reflect us all.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, instead of fighting with the group, we had founded an East Village Avengers chapter, for instance, or a Queens Avengers, and sent a letter to LACROP asking them to help us organize in the region. Would they have sent help, then? Would the room have opened their hearts? I shouldn’t joke. Poor LACROP. They came back from Idaho to this shit storm, already worn out and having trouble readjusting to their New York lives.

Maybe that was part of it. We were all very tired, worn out, running on nerves. You can’t live the way we did with ten meetings every week, trying to save the world, which, guided by entropy, was falling apart anyway.

On April 19, 1995, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was attacked. When all the people were finally pulled from the wreckage, the dead tallied 168, including 19 kids. Almost seven hundred had been injured. For a couple of days, everybody was looking under their beds for Arab terrorists, but the culprits ended up being a couple of American men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, with a grudge against the government for the deaths at Ruby Ridge, and Waco, Texas, exactly two years before.

CITYAXE held a meeting and decided that if we were going to do anything at all, we’d have to do it outside the group. On May 2, we went to the meeting and read our letters resigning from the Avengers. It was all very heartfelt, dramatic, and useless. Because alone, we only stumbled on a few more months before the whole thing collapsed. And even our dramatic departure fizzled, because afterwards Lidia, who had been part of CITYAXE, sent her own letter agreeing with some of what we said but denouncing us for being on high horses, emoting rather than offering solutions.

There’s a word for that Buddhist moment when you no longer perceive the separation between the object and mind that’s observing it. All is unity. All enlightenment. Wikipedia says it’s
Bodhi.
Well, what I felt was the opposite of that. I walked around seeing the world all splintered and fractured, and me separate even from the shards. Every night I relived those horrible Avengers meetings with white and black faces glaring at each other. Replayed Carmen’s and Patricia’s attack, trying to work my way to a different ending. I experienced again how the Avengers sneered at us there on the ground with our pants pulled down.

I shrank from the world. I’d hear J-Lo singing from a radio in the street and turn away. I cringed at the sound of Albita. Was conscious of my skin, that impermeable membrane bound by words. I wanted to drag them all out, flay us all, destroy all the artificial separations of history. You’d merely done what I had, after all—split from two cells into four then eight then sixteen until you’d accumulated all your arms and legs and organs and pushed yourself into the world—so fucking what? You honkey, nigger, spic, dyke, cunt. If I cry out, who will hear me?

But I didn’t call anybody anything, or even say much to Ana, who was chewing over her own role, believing that she had killed the Avengers, or at least hastened their death. It was around then that she left Dyke TV, having similar fights there. Her grandmother died, and we suddenly had to deal with her mother, and all that brutal Cuban history. Our house was full of anger and grief.

Back at Avenue B, one of the actresses from that film
Go Fish
moved into the loft. The one with the name of a Russian princess, Anastasia. Anne d’Adesky moved there, too, with her girlfriend, Cindra. Everybody in those days was consolidating or moving to Williamsburg. Or fleeing the gentrifying city altogether.

No more Mister Nice Gal, I decided to start eating meat again, took a bite of Amy’s bacon at Odessa’s, then moved on to the Filet-O-Fish at McDonald’s. I needed to toughen up. It wasn’t like fish were particularly sentient, anyway. A pig had them beat. Hell, a pig had most humans beat, smarter than small children, and we didn’t eat those but maybe should.

I unwrapped the pale blue paper and stared at the sandwich a long time. That little square of deep-fried flesh gloppy with tartar sauce and cheese. The stale white bun. I took a bite. Then another. I felt queasy but kept on going, right until the end.

III. A Laboratory of Identity

Now I am ready to say how bodies
are changed into other bodies.

—
O
VID,
T
HE
M
ETAMORPHOSIS

22.

Melanie moved out, fleeing the former activist den, and we turned her bedroom into an office with a desk for each of us. I was done as an activist, I declared. Done as a poet. I didn’t do another performance until long after we moved to Paris. My lofty thoughts were all about money. I decided to try my hand at the voodoo of fiction. First, a screenplay set at the New York headquarters of a tobacco company with a cast of interracial queers solving a murder. See how easy it is to get along if you just know your lines. Next was a mystery set in Gertrude Stein’s Paris, called
The Clever American.
The sleuth was a Janet Flanner–type journalist before I ever thought of being one. A dyke from Kentucky, less virtuous than anybody in my Benetton cast.

I was sure it would be a gold mine. Amy’s shelves were full of dyke mysteries. Somebody was writing them. Others were buying. Not at all like sonnets. I really churned it out, typing a couple thousand words a day on Ana’s old PC, giving people their comeuppance, organizing a world that resisted order. It was avenging by proxy, now that I think of it. I envied Marlowe his fedora, the dirty glass in his drawer, wanted desperately to be him taking a punch, and still cracking wise though the city burned.

In New York, like old LA, the fat cats were still obese. Cops rousted black and Latino kids who harassed each other and any white dyke at hand, while ordinary people stood on dignity they didn’t have. Life was a morality play, all the old noirs said. This is the rich guy’s role. This belongs to the poor. Or the white or the black. Here’s the tragic outsider. At night we’d rent movies from Kim’s Video, with gangsters in black and white talking out of the sides of their mouths, going soft on tough-talking dames, and everybody ending up dead. On the way back and forth to the Catskills, we’d discuss the best ways to kill somebody. We were eating French fries on the road once, and when I fed Ana a sharp one, she nearly choked. “Perfect,” I said. “You eat the evidence afterwards.” Icicles seemed clever, too. You stab somebody with one, the evidence melts. Though you might leave traces of fiber if you were wearing gloves.

Around then I had the idea we should start doing the holidays with Ana’s mother and middle brother, Carlos, an unknown blustery man. Faustina was alone, after all, this older lady rattling around an empty apartment out there in Queens. She had nothing to look at but the car wash across Queens Boulevard and a White Castle. The trick, I figured, was to keep everybody’s mouth so full they couldn’t fight. For Thanksgiving I made salmon and couscous and this enormous chocolate Sachertorte. For Christmas Eve, I did a cod dish of
bacalao a la vizcaína
and snuck in Kentucky ham, and made pecan pie with blackstrap molasses and Kentucky bourbon just to keep my equilibrium, so outnumbered by Cubans.