Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (21 page)

The Gully
stepped up efforts offering resources for activists and encouraging people to get involved, write e-mails and letters, hold demos protesting the election, and helped people network. When I posted a link to the Lesbian Avenger handbook, some helpful soul wrote in to say that he was sure our hearts were in the right place and all, but probably some people would be put off by the source, and maybe it would be better if we found one that was, you know, more mainstream. And I responded that I thought it would do hets good to know who their allies were. We were in it together like a bad marriage.

And there
was
a small protest movement. Mostly online, though thousands got on buses and turned up at Bush’s inaugural, where network TV carefully framed them out of the picture like they didn’t exist. Luckily, there were alternative media sites that posted photos and showed video. Every week hundreds of Oral Majority activists denounced Bush from the sidelines of some Republican event. Planes with banners questioning Bush’s victory flew over opening-day baseball at Cincinnati’s Synergy Field and circled Churchill Downs during the Kentucky Derby.

But we didn’t push back hard enough to count. And the mainstream media, those protectors of democracy, characterized us all as loudmouthed freaks. Silence, apparently, was for the good of the country. When the Supreme Court ended the Florida recount, the big dogs of the
New York Times
and network TV hysterically howled that anything short of public unity would end with heads in baskets and mobs at the palace gates. Not to mention the ejection of reporters from the inner circle of the irritable White House.

When Bastille Day came, celebrating the bloody end of kings, Ana and I threw a party with lots of red wine and Bush’s head in a basket. The day after, the
New York Times
very nearly acknowledged that the election was a fraud; the Florida vote was dirty. So Gore should have had the state and the election. But as Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer said, “The nation, the president and all but the most partisan Americans have moved on.”

Nobody wondered what a scam like that would give birth to. Maybe a president who thought he was above the law whether it came to environmental treaties or launching wars. Maybe a timid opposition so demoralized they’d cave in to his every high-handed demand.

I started hanging out in front of the laundry, even when I didn’t have any. I’d met Al Baltrop, this black gay guy who’d sit in a chair in front with this incredible walking stick by his side. He dressed in a mix of Africana and Blaxploitation gear, knuckledusters on his hands. A camera usually, stuffed into his bag. He was a photographer. And a dirty dog. He’d freak out the skinny white and Asian women folding their clothes by loudly declaring that what he liked were fat boys, with some meat on their bones. Something to hang on to. Make a meal. “I don’t understand skinny. All that bone. You can hurt yourself,” he cackled. I nodded my head, played the role of choir. “Uh huh. Exactly. Preach on.” He’d show pictures of how fat he was before the chemo. “Look at me now. Terrible.”

He reminded me of home. For better and worse. His mother was from the South like a lot of black New Yorkers. Serving up Southern fried homophobia along with biscuits with sausage gravy. Fried ham. Pie. My god, pie. Pecan pie. With molasses. We’d groan at the thought. He’d learned to cook from the women at her church. That was before she’d kicked him out and ripped up his photos when she found out he was a fag. He’d had some good shots, too. Of the Black Panthers in New York. Later, he caught all these beautiful men living and dead against the backdrop of the piers. I posted some in
The Gully
along with an interview.

He was our biggest fan, thought it was cool that you didn’t have to rely on galleries and museums or newspapers anymore. They never supported people like us until we were dead. And I’d tell him about the stuff we wrote about Namibia or Zimbabwe, where Mugabe sponsored ferocious antigay campaigns and burned his opponents alive. I’d gripe, “At least people there are fighting back, resisting.” And Al would tell me what was going on in the neighborhood. This little girl on the street that was going to be a dyke. How he told her parents to lay off when they tried to force her into dresses and bows. There was another kid, a boy thrown out by his West Indian preacher father. Al let him sleep on his floor a couple nights. “I make it clear there’ll be no favors exchanged. So he feels safe.” We talked about whether or not the down low was just a sexy term for the closet (Al thought it was).

I invited him over for dinner once, made jambalaya with big fat shrimp and the tastiest pie. Ana’s mom, Faustina, came over, too, and her eyes got all wide at his stories. I sent them both home with leftovers, and woke up in the middle of the night, puking my guts out, terrified I’d poisoned them both. The guy with cancer. The old lady. And when Ana woke up I had her call and check they were both alive. And order them, if they were, to toss out the stew. Al thought it was hilarious. Told everybody at the laundromat what a killer jambalaya I made.

26.

It woke me up, a man’s voice from the building behind us, screaming, “Holy shit! Holy shit!” A minute later a woman echoed, “Holy shit!” before giggling hysterically. We thought it was the usual New York farce until we turned on the TV and saw flames coming out of the top of one of the Twin Towers. It seemed like a movie and any second they were going to switch back to the news and Alan Hevesi’s fleshy red face, and Mark Green’s smarmy one, or the earnest flip-flopper Fernando Ferrer, and the mayoral primary. Except then the second plane hit. Ana threw on some clothes, grabbed a notebook, and dashed downtown to cover the story for
The Gully.
I went up on the roof with all my neighbors and just stared downtown. The sky was blue, like the one Icarus fell out of in that Brueghel painting. Sunny and blue. There were ragged plane-shaped gashes in both towers with smoke trailing from them. Everybody had cameras. I reminded myself I was a journalist and went back down to get my own.

When the first one collapsed, it seemed to come down slowly, almost gracefully. Shiny things flew into the air. Karen from next door screamed a little self-consciously. Neighbors asked each other how many were inside. Somebody asked me where Ana was. “Down there,” I said. “Getting the story.” A couple of minutes later the other tower went. Karen screamed some more, then stopped when we ignored her. I took more pictures that I didn’t develop for months. I stood there for a long time, until I had to pee, then stayed in the apartment and stayed watching it replay in slow motion. It seemed hours before Ana came back covered in ashes and dust, and we churned out some of the first stories.

I kept my distance from that word
terrorism.
Though the attacks were meant to inspire fear, like a series of gay bashing or pogroms, it felt more like a natural disaster. An earthquake. Maybe an industrial accident. Ana and I had just been down there two days before, walking south along the East River toward the tip of Manhattan, accompanied by the smell of muddy water and burnt sugar. We passed the enormous feet of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan, the Brooklyn. There were old Latino men with their lines in the water, then Asian ones with their Styrofoam coolers and poles. The sidewalks around Fulton Street Fish Market were slippery and rank. We cut in, heard the big vents of the Towers as they breathed in and out.

Geopolitics wasn’t enough to explain the two plumes of smoke, all the dead, what came after. Later, I’d try to write a poem comparing it to a fire that started at a garbage heap in Centralia, Pennsylvania, “that dove underground and found the seam of coal and burns still, buckling highways, gulping down towns, gathering violence to itself because the only art of fire is to burn.” I could see what was coming. The bloody tide of patriots and martyrs on all sides. I wondered if that was what he expected, Mohamed Atta, when he climbed into the cockpit and set the course on the Tower. Or did he think it was a tactical strike that would punish the United States for meddling in the Middle East, supporting dictators? Somehow force us to withdraw? So many deaths and voilá. Just like that. Like Bush and Cheney who thought they were in control when they responded in kind.

There were little shock waves. One of them erased the local politicians and city news anchors, often black and brown and female, the other usual suspects on TV. Gone were black activist Al Sharpton and dyke councilwoman Margarita López. Plus no more mediocre politicians duking it out for the Democratic spot on the mayoral ticket. We had Giuliani 24/7 in firemen’s or NYPD ball caps. There were white male congressmen with the occasional shot of Bush Jr. trying to look presidential, the rare glimpse of New York Senator Hillary Clinton. An upswing in New York of white masculine power.

Our neighborhood was also transformed. With all the barricades, it was as deserted as a movie set, or an abandoned town in Spain with only a few people out in the dust and sun. One afternoon, on Second Avenue, I saw a solitary figure, an old man, suddenly fall down dead. It was like he was supposed to have died in the Towers, but Death hadn’t caught up with him until then. Two or three people rushed over, then an ambulance came, but he was already gone.

Telephone poles grew faces of the dead.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON
? Flags sprouted like kudzu, colonizing car bumpers, windowsills, T-shirts. Hardware stores sold out of them. Somebody, maybe from the Chinese Merchants Association, Xeroxed a couple thousand in color and taped them to all the doors in Chinatown like a smear of blood beseeching angry gods, Please pass over. We’re one of you. The image was backwards, but I doubted anybody noticed. Some of the bodegas, too, put up flags, and once Al Qaeda was confirmed, all the Middle Eastern and North African employees suddenly spoke stilted English to each other and didn’t joke any more in Arabic with their taxi driving compatriots who came in.

Here and there, white guys started beating up Muslims and Indian Sikhs who weren’t Muslim but had turbans, and what difference did it make, right? When cops responded to a complaint from a guy out in Brooklyn, whose apartment had been graffitied, they yanked
him
in for questioning. He was a member of a gay Muslim group, Al-Fatiha, which had been working to free the Cairo 52, these gay men grabbed at a dance and tortured until they confessed to a whole slew of crimes. They were being tried in Egypt’s special emergency court, set up to deal with their own Islamic terrorists. Apparently, they thought, like so many U.S. preachers, that two men screwing can bring down a nation like an H-bomb.

Most New Yorkers, though, chose a different road. The white bourgeoisie kept popping by their delis to ask the Arab guys how things were going, keeping an eye on them. Al said he used his walking stick to beat the crap out of a guy who was making towelhead jokes and sneering at the dead. In the supermarket, blacks and whites and Latinos were so kind to each other, it was a little disturbing. Newspapers were printing half-page ads from community groups expressing their shared grief with the city we all loved, despite its problems.

Three or four days after the Towers fell, Ana got herself to the LGBT Community Center to ask if we were going to do the same. At least have a memorial service or something, so we could grieve together as New Yorkers and as queers, sharing our anger and loss. Shouldn’t queer citizens express themselves, too? The receptionist just stared at her like it was a ridiculous idea and sent her to the administration office. The functionaries there asked her to repeat, explain, and elaborate the question like it was in a foreign language, then showed her the door.

Even after our institutions recovered from the initial shock and started providing services to the community, making sure queers got disaster benefits or grief counseling, there wasn’t any sense that we were a part of the nation’s civic life or public discourse, unless you count the preachers blaming us for the attacks. There was no sense that the silent masses of ordinary LGBT folks might want to merge two identities and grieve as queer New Yorkers. No sense of a broader connection to the larger society, the possibility of integration, without complete assimilation.

When Ana wrote an article lamenting our community’s lack of vision, queers blasted
The Gully.
It wasn’t the moment to call attention to our difference. As if we alone had to choose in times of crisis. Love it or leave it. As if gayness were like a limb available to be amputated from ourselves and from society. And when, in the future, that troublesome bit was firmly reattached by enough legal change, nothing would distinguish us. We will forget the Avengers, the irritating indigestible likes of David Wojnarowicz, Audre Lorde, Valerie Solanas. We will become honorary straights with just a few seams showing.

When some fool started to send little envelopes of anthrax around the week after the attacks, the Bush team capitalized, keeping their citizens busy with a bunch of color-coded threat levels, and daily press releases about the imminent dangers of dirty bombs in Grand Central Station. In the mayhem, Bush declared a War on Terror, issuing an executive order legalizing kidnappings, indefinite detention, secret military tribunals, and hidden prisons for any suspect. He cooked up a new program called TIPS that would have had us spying on each other, and encouraging cable and telephone repair guys to snoop around and look for anything suspicious. Books in foreign languages? Porn? The Koran? No matter what it was, your name could end up in a big government database forever. He tried to get permanent exemptions from bodies like the International Criminal Court, which prosecuted things like war crimes and torture. And he bombed Afghanistan and split, leaving behind not much more than a skeleton crew.

They entered my nightmares, the civilians that got hit. Along with giant fireballs, I dreamt of limbs missing. Bodies buried under rubble like a continuation of the other bombing.

Iraq was already on the drawing board. From the beginning, Rumsfeld pushed the CIA to blame Saddam for it all. After the first Gulf War, the Bush family had unfinished business there, and George Jr. had found a reason to go back. And aimed also at Iran, and North Korea. Bush burned with a religious mission. Every day there was a new enemy in his Axis of Evil. Somebody else that had to be punished. Reined in, destroyed. When Undersecretary of State John Bolton offered dark suggestions that something would have to be done about rogue states like Cuba, Ana and I decided it was time to make a trip. She hadn’t been back since she left the place. And didn’t want to wait until it was all rubble. Like Kabul.