Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (18 page)

In the spring, I drug Ana down south, aiming to show her where I was from. We broke the drive in Gettysburg, where farmers still dug up bones. In Louisville, we zipped past the little brick houses in the suburbs, the patches of grass, the highways dividing them all. I was an awful guide. “There’s the church. There’s the school. There’s the house I grew up in. Speed up for fuck’s sake.” Ana demanded to go in the church, found the sanctuary full of light and oddly peaceful. Said my old high school looked like a jail. The big cinderblocks. The chain-link fence.

We got out of the car and we walked through the sports fields around it. One for practicing field hockey. “Watch for the crawdad holes. The creek’s back there.” Another for football. “I used to sit there, watch the sunset, and pray.” I could hardly remember what for. My mother probably. My angry sisters. My dad hardly figured in, usually working out of town. Them I omitted from the tour. For their own good, really. If they were mean to Ana, sneered at her accent or beige skin, if they turned up their noses at our relationship, I would’ve had to kill them. Downtown, the guidebook directed us to buildings with cast-iron facades like in New York. Artists were taking over old factories.

We went to the mountains afterwards, lifting up our mining eyes to the hills. Went to a national park my family used to visit as a kid. We saw the blooming dogwoods, cinderblock houses built by the Army Corp of Engineers, big muddy scars from strip mining, and played chicken with fat coal trucks barreling down the middle of the road. Sinking Spring Farm, where Abraham Lincoln was born, smelled cool and minerally and as familiar as the dust in my grandmother’s attic. I was moved and tried to cover it with jokes. Asked Ana to take a picture of me in front of the log cabin replica. “I’ll tell ‘em I was born here. That’s what everybody up in New York imagines anyway.” But I forgot to take my shoes off. And when I had my fill of the accents, and dry counties, and Taco Bells, we bolted straight east across two or three states until we got to the ocean. And ended up in this strip of North Carolina sand that has since been eaten away by the rising seas.

It was that June, I think, that Ana pestered her mom until she agreed to walk with PFLAG in the Gay Pride Parade. “It’s the least you can do.” “I’m too old.” “I don’t care.” Faustina probably would have refused if she didn’t depend so much on us. She began the morning sullen as a teenager but was reassured when she saw that the other parents looked like ordinary heterosexual people. When we started walking and the crowd cheered to see somebody’s, anybody’s, parents out there in support, I swear I saw a tear in Faustina’s eye. She wiped it away quickly, but it was there.

It was a kind of landmark. As big for her as Ellen’s big coming out a few months earlier in April ’97. Ana and I watched at Crazy Nannies. When the bumbling character of Ellen Morgan managed to declare, “I’m gay,” over the airport’s loudspeaker, we all cheered, white and black and Latina alike. And when the ultrafamous Oprah Winfrey, playing Ellen’s shrink, said, “Good for you. You’re gay,” the whole house came down. It was like we’d finally gotten our green cards, been admitted to the Union, even if only until the next commercial break.

Lesbian chic was long gone, along with the Lesbian Avengers and ACT UP, which had lost its urgency since protease inhibitors started saving lives the year before. Around then was also when Clinton had caved to the Right and signed the Defense of Marriage Act. He was up for reelection and had to buy a few votes after the mudslinging of Whitewater and the early fiasco of health care reform. It worked, feeding us to the howling Christian Right, feeding hate. He got a second term.

On August 9, 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was picked up by cops after a fight outside a club in Brooklyn. He got smacked around in the cop car, inside the precinct, drug to the bathroom, and raped with the handle of a toilet plunger, while the cops shouted the usual slurs, plus, “This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time!”
He started hemorrhaging in the holding cell, his intestines all ripped up, and barely got to the hospital in time. His face was on the newsstands for weeks, the half-closed eyes and swollen lips. The hospital gown.

When the blue wall of silence went up, thousands of protesters took to the streets, waving Haitian flags and plungers, and calling the NYPD just another version of Haiti’s brutal Tontons Macoutes. But then the crowd started to chant, “Sodomites, sodomites,” etc., etc. Like an antigay lynch mob. Which it would have been in Haiti. Nobody’s moral ground is as high as you’d wish.

A year later, in June 1998, three white guys in Texas grabbed a middle-aged black man walking home from a party. They wrapped a logging chain around his ankles and dragged him behind their pickup truck hooting and hollering with joy with every bump, every scream. James Byrd Jr. finally died when a culvert sliced off his right arm and head. They dumped his torso in front of an African American cemetery. In October, two white guys picked up a young gay student in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, beat the faggot to a pulp, and tied him to a fence like a dead coyote or bloody Christ. Matthew Shepard was awake, too. Conscious of his own slow death while his attackers went looking for more fun, tried to beat up a couple of Hispanic guys, but got a taste of their own medicine, and one ended up in the hospital himself, where he was arrested.

That image of a thin, white gay kid tied to a fence and left for dead finally woke queers up again and we remembered the street. Ana and I ventured to the center when a couple of people put out a call for action, a political funeral. It was one of the first times that the rabble was roused by e-mail instead of mobilizing phone trees or wheat pasting. We expected a couple hundred protesters, got five thousand confronting hate in the vulnerable flesh. There were almost as many cops as demonstrators. It was a mess. Police trying to barricade the way. Protesters trying to go around. I was carrying a kind of symbolic coffin with a bunch of kids from the Hetrick-Martin Institute for queer youth when police blocked the street, and the sidewalk, too. One officer went nuts, and I almost got guillotined when he shoved the two by fours and barbed wire against my neck. Thank god none of the kids let go.

After that, cops on horseback charged the crowd. I got smashed up against a car by a fat haunch. Most people ran away, but pretty soon some started running back toward the police, throwing the pathetic candles we’d meant to light for Matthew Shepard. Bystanders got arrested. Along with all the marshals. It was the lead story in every rag the next day; even
El Diario
called up Ana for info, her number still on speed dial from the Avenger days, the Hate Radio fiasco good for something. In every article, at least one participant hailed the protest as the beginning of a new LGBT movement. As if it just took one death, one demo.

I was torn by what happened, excited at how many people had come out, a real mixed crowd in terms of races and ages, but furious at the organizers. At least some of the mess was our fault. I wrote a long letter trying to assess everything that had gone wrong from the minute the first meeting was called rounding up the usual suspects (white) and omitting the rest, to the casual attitude toward marshaling. No training sessions, no scoping out either the beginning or ending sites to make sure they could accommodate a large crowd. Just relying on experience.

And probably my rage was all out of proportion, but I finally understood why Sarah Schulman blew her top at me at the UN action when I hadn’t done nearly enough prep. So much could go wrong. People could have been hurt. Somebody could have been killed. We’d acted like amateurs. Which I suppose we were. Because we sacrificed a lot and didn’t get paid. But to be so nonchalant. Calling people into the streets to play at revolution. When we were taking on a state that doesn’t want to be reengineered, not by you, not by anybody.

The race stuff got me especially. When we’d gone to the center for the organizing meeting, there were almost all white faces, maybe a third of them former Avengers. And while you shouldn’t worry about who your friends are, what does it cost you, really, to look around and see who’s missing? Reach out beyond the magic circle? Especially in the case of Matthew Shepard, when the connections were so clear with James Byrd and Abner Louima, and the rise of violence and beatings and deaths. Bigots hated us in our very bodies, wanted not just to kill but to obliterate us all.

Sometimes I’d look over at Ana and wonder why. I’d caress the soft curve of her neck, her cheek. Press my face against the tender flesh of her belly, which I love, along with her strong, small delicate hands that somehow manage to capture octaves on the piano. Her taut narrow back. Her eyebrows that oddly remain black. The gray-green eyes that even strangers fall in love with. Her skin the color of Earl Grey with milk until she’s been in the sun, and then it turns to toast. Her bones, her nerves. Those ears she thinks protrude. Yes, I love her body, every cell of it, that you would like to destroy.

I was remorseful after sending the strident, chiding letter, even if I wasn’t wrong. Fuck me and the high horse I rode on. Better something than nothing. Maybe. I resolved again to retire from activism. I was too burnt out, too sensitive, too shrill. Let me work out my life in print. One good thing, though, that came of the demo was that Ana got a tearful call from her mother, who had been following the story, gone to the march herself, and taken another step toward understanding what she’d done to Ana in Cuba.

23.

We got offered a free apartment for a couple of months in Puerto Rico, packed our bags, and fled an America that let black men and queers die in the streets while they discussed the really important things, like stains on a blue dress and blow jobs in the Oval Office. The taxi driver who took us to the airport in New York was an old Puerto Rican guy with salsa on the radio, a crucifix, and limp P.R. flag on the dash. When he found out we spoke Spanish, he slammed the latest referendum on statehood, along with everybody who bothered to cast a ballot. “All the votes get used as toilet paper, you know, because the place is a U.S. colony, and only the Feds can make it a state. Or anything else, for that matter, since they snatched the island in 1898. The Spanish-American War, you know.”

When we got to San Juan, it seemed the same driver waited for us, with salsa on the radio, curses for the referendum, and a battered flag. Like only
independentistas
drove cabs, or we hadn’t really gone anywhere. I was still an Anglo surrounded by Latinos, beginning to grapple with my role in the world. Did I participate? Resist? What did it mean to be an American?

I looked for signs and saw them literally on the billboards painted that pale swimming-pool American green, in the streets filled with Fords and Chevys, in rust seeping from every building on Condado Avenue. Iron railings dripped onto the cement plastering below. The rebar of skyscrapers still under construction with American dollars trailed a lovely brownish red onto their foundation. Even new cars grew a crop of corrosion in the arc over their tires, or around the doors, as if the very land rebelled against the colonizing presence.

The apartment itself was a history lesson. Just down from the Walgreens, and sandwiched between a Haitian trinket and art gallery and a Condomania, the white gay American owner had decorated it in a squalid fantasia of Early Spanish Inquisition and late Americana complete with sharp black metal pikes, carved virgins, dripping red and black candles, crucifixes, and a fuzzy green La-Z-Boy. The couch was a stained brown velvet. The red shag carpet under it had roaches, sand, and rot. We scrubbed a lot and went to the beach, where I got to know the sand, surf, and the angry volcanic rocks called
dientes de perros,
dogs’ teeth, that rip the crap out of your feet, though the sea was a refuge, indifferent to everything. I threw myself in.

We fell into a routine. In the morning, Ana sent her translations using the miracle of e-mail. I wrote poems and took notes for articles I was sure to sell. During the day, we walked on the beach. I observed everything. The air thick with salt and the scent of ravenous plants. Bats dive-bombing our heads after dark. I had nightmares in the strange bed, surrounded by papier-mâchéd mangoes and pineapples from the Haitian trinket shop. Creatures crept from the roof through the open back door. A woman floated through the grill above the air conditioner, a lost blonde tennis-racqueted American who disappeared when I screamed, then came back, retreating again when Ana woke up to save me. She was my alter ego. The gringa. What people always thought Americans were.

The old Spanish city was full of narrow climbing streets, cats, old colonial buildings that were built with a mix of local woods that resisted insects and rot, and nearly eternal stone. The Plaza de Armas was decorated for Christmas and featured the city’s other giant Walgreens, along with Americans disgorged from big cruise ships. I stared at them, too, to see what we shared as they wandered up and down looking for tax-free bathing suits in the Speedo outlet store, or shorts at Banana Republic, cigars, rum, postcards, cheap traditional shirts embroidered with parrots.

In a greasy spoon off the Plaza de Colón, we ran into some Hoosiers who had stopped to eat across from a statue of Columbus. The TV was turned to CNN and announced that the United States was bombing Iraq again. A fat man in an NYPD T-shirt slapped his pal on the shoulder, “About time,” while his wife scratched swollen red mosquito bites on her white legs. During a brief update on the Clinton impeachment trial, but before the TV went back to the Puerto Rican variety show, the tourists ordered fish with big sides of French fries, which they washed down with jumbo Cokes and Coors, just like at home.

More than once we saw a whole horde of red-faced, white-tennis-shoed screaming Americans descend on a local pizzeria with an outdoor terrace that the local intelligentsia used as a café. It was interesting how the waiter would cram them inside in a far corner, containing their screams for ketchup and Coca-Cola. The regulars didn’t even look around, refusing to hear or see them, continuing with their conversations about something at the university, or a book they’d read, while inside the Americans honked at each other over their air conditioning and Cokes and sloppy fries. Nobody was shooting up a Capitol building like Lolita Lebrón, or even eating fire, but erasing the Yanks was a form of Puerto Rican resistance. There was also this bagel place that sold “cappuccino” for almost four bucks but would give you the same thing for two if you asked in Spanish for
café con leche.
I wondered if these were small nonviolent victories of passive resistance, or the mass delusion of colonial subjects.