Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (24 page)

All we brought back was a bottle of rum and a handful of cigars. I found Al in front of the laundromat and gave him a big fat one, along with a pinch of Cuban dirt that he wanted for his secret mojo bag. We had a couple of friends over and lit a few. The smoke smelled good at first, all earthy, reminding me of that time my grandmother took me to the Kentucky State Fair and drug me around to see the biggest zucchinis and fanciest quilts, which were right next to these poles hanging with glistening brown tobacco. But when I woke up the next morning, the whole house still reeked, and my mouth tasted worse than vomit.

We all knew there was going to be another war. In Iraq, this time. Homeland Security kept issuing alerts, and Bush & Co. would follow them up with an exhortation to unite against that tyrant Saddam Hussein, who was responsible for everything bad in the world. He had secret weapons of mass destruction, secret bunkers, secret agents all writing in invisible ink, and training invisible missiles at us, subverting citizens. Like José Padilla. The guy was paraded around as if he were the biggest threat to Western civilization since Osama rode into the sunset, not just a small-time Chicago gangbanger who converted to Islam and got caught up in events way bigger than him. He actually hadn’t lifted a finger when the government designated him an enemy combatant and dumped him into a military brig. We found out years later he got held in solitary with plenty of “enhanced” techniques that turned the guy into one big twitch. Yeah, Saddam and his minions were responsible for everything, just like Uncle Sam was the villain in Cuba. Only there, people had begun to roll their eyes at the propaganda. They knew who to blame.

I could feel it all accumulating, attaching to me like flies attach themselves to those gluey ribbons and die there. I tried to understand: “This is what America is, now,” I told myself. “This is what I am. An American.” I didn’t know what that meant. It was more mysterious to me by far than what it meant to be a lesbian. I quit watching TV, again. I didn’t read the newspapers that made your fingers all inky anyway. Just peeked at headlines online. Walked around with my guts as knotty as my brain. Got these incredible pains that had me bent over in the street looking worse than any drunk.

On February 15, 2003, we put on our warmest clothes and took the subway uptown towards the UN. There was supposed to be a big antiwar rally. No march, because the city had refused a permit, even if Bloomberg was mayor by then. We tried one street, then another. All were clogged with crowds. Cops had put up blockades, trying to prevent the demo from turning into a march. Later we heard they brought in the horses and trampled a few people, pepper-sprayed others, arrested a couple hundred who were mostly trying to get the hell out of there. If you looked, you could still see the smoke rising downtown in two faint wisps.

Trapped, people started holding their rallies on whatever street corner they found themselves. I saw student groups and unions, people with enormous puppets. A lot of signs about Big Oil. Most people figured we were going into Iraq to get control of the oil fields for Cheney’s old company Halliburton. Others thought Bush Jr. was trying to handle his father’s unfinished business from the first Gulf War. I warmed my video camera inside my coat, shot a few minutes, then gave it up. We milled around, circling and freezing and stomping our feet and thwacking our hands together, before crawling back into the subway.

The organizers numbered us at three or four hundred thousand, which seemed a lot until we read that three million came out in Rome. A million and a half in Madrid. A million in London. All those people who had been horrified when they saw the planes hit the Towers were taking to the streets to beg us to stay home. Spain’s Prime Minister Aznar and Britain’s Tony Blair would be casualties later, kicked out of office at the first chance people got for being Bush’s little warmongering lapdogs.

Maybe it would have been different if we’d come back the next day and the next day and the next, paralyzing our cities, like they’d do years later in Egypt, in Tunisia. And a couple times a year in France. But maybe not. When it came to Bush, news analysts had been using the word
unilateral
since he’d withdrawn from the ABM Treaty and the Kyoto Protocol. After the UN wouldn’t approve his dirty little war, and he tried to blame the French, Bush offered an address stating we’d go it alone to protect ourselves. The new buzzword was
preventive.
As in “preventive war.” It had ripples around the world. But instead of deposing tyrants, it unleashed them. While the global media had its eyes on Iraq, Cuba took its own preventive action, tossing seventy-five people in jail, including twenty-nine independent journalists, a bunch of human rights activists, and a couple of people who had set up libraries in their houses with banned books like
Animal Farm.
They’d rot in jail for a decade. In Russia, Putin went after his own enemies.

There were a few more days of international protests against the war, but they were bigger in Europe than in the United States, especially once bombs started falling on March 19. In New York, two hundred thousand took to the streets, half the number of the month before. The war didn’t go well. American troops had been promised it would go quickly, and they would be greeted by Iraqi kids handing them bouquets of flowers, but they just weren’t. Some even fired back. And pretty quickly soldiers were changing their view of Iraqis from poor oppressed victims to enemy combatants. You could tell Iraq was going to be another Palestine or Belfast, only bigger.

I had cousins in the military and they were sent over. My sister Kim had a troubled kid who didn’t want to finish school or find a job, and she made him join the army, too, even though it meant hiding his history of mental illness. I could imagine all too well what the country was doing in my name.

In New York, my friend Al was dying. He’d been in the navy during Nam and gone to the VA, I think, with an infected toenail. He warned them to be careful. He had diabetes. But they screwed around, and a week later he had an infection and they had to chop half his foot off. There was the cancer, too. Lumps growing everywhere. I followed him from hospital to hospital, visiting when I could force myself, which was only every two or three weeks, though his other friends were even worse. There was this really good hospital in the Bronx where they’d give you wine with dinner if you wanted, but it was more of a hospice, and he wasn’t terminating fast enough for them, so he got the boot and ended up at a nursing home on the Lower East Side. It stank of urine and shit and disinfectant, and the nurses were these evil West Indian women who would sit around blabbing about what they would do with machetes and gasoline and lighters if they caught themselves some faggots, some battyboys. Like the songs said, “Boom Boom Bye” and “Bad Man Chi Chi Man.” It was the first time in his life Al stayed in the closet. And I couldn’t save him.

After that, it was back to the VA, where he swapped smokes with the other vets and tried to take a taxi to his apartment, just one last glimpse before he died, of the place stacked with photos, the darkroom. His home. He crawled up the stairs but only made it to the fourth or fifth floor before he was crying so hard with pain that his neighbors called an ambulance, and it hauled him back. I’d bring him stuff to eat, but he couldn’t keep it down. It was the gesture he wanted. Like he’d grab my hand and hang on to it, desperate to be touched with anything resembling kindness. I agreed to put lotion on his back. When I smeared it around, chunks of scaly, gray skin came off on my hand. Al. Al. I met his sister or cousin or somebody when he was hooked up to the respirator. Told her how great he was. Used the word
gay
a few thousand times.

They had a memorial service at St. Mark’s. Afterwards, his relatives and friends absconded with his rings. Other vultures had already gotten ahold of his estate, which was supposed to benefit queer children. They’ve shown his photos of the piers in a lot of exhibits since then, but I don’t think gay kids ever saw a dime. His skin is under my fingernails still. That ashy-gray wizened back. Vulnerable to the hands of enemies. It was a few months after that, in the spring of 2004, that the photos started circulating of all those naked prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib—filthy, piled up on each other in obscene pyramids, collared like dogs, with U.S. soldiers standing over them, giving a big thumbs up, proud as fishermen with a ten-foot marlin. Lots of Americans seemed to think it was okay. If we’re good people, anything we do is good, too.

I reread James Baldwin, who declared it made sense to become “tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. . . . But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

I remember fumbling around in my closet for a cigar box that had tarot cards and dusty fossils, a tiny gold cross this girl Lisa gave me at Myers Middle when I was still a twelve-year-old girl talking quietly about salvation and joy. I loved those fossils. Serrated teeth of ancient sharks. Remnants of plants that I’d gotten from a construction site in Florida once when they had the bulldozers in. I rolled them around in my hands like bones and tried to imagine time. Tried to put things in perspective. This America we live in is just a blip, I told myself. Full of tiny, transitory creatures.

But even a fly with its life cycle of thirty days or so from larva to adult resents the smashing fist. And I was neither the fly nor the fist with my own independent fate. I was powerless to stop anything, but still a part of the destruction like the tail on a rampaging bull. Faustina called in tears. America was getting too much like Cuba. Ana couldn’t stop talking. About Bush. What we were doing to the Constitution, which had its flaws but was better than anything else going. I’d look at her tortured face while her mouth moved and big heart broke. She read all the papers of the world, wrote little, watched the news full of the battered bodies of all those men while we stood and watched. What did that silence make us? What were we doing to Iraq? What were we making of the kids we sent over there?

The bulletin boards were full of Bush bashers. But this wasn’t entirely on him. The problem was all of us, offering our submission and consent by our silence. Which was like Cuba, too. Nobody called for a demo. Nobody took to the streets like they had trying to prevent the Iraq War, or even for Diallo, for Matthew Shepard. I was as bad as anybody. I wrote a couple of articles, but what I really wanted was for Ana to shut up already. But she never did. It was unbearable. I’d’ve chewed off a paw, left it in the trap to get out of there. I stood it for another year, rooting for the underdog Red Sox in the playoffs with the Yankees, hoping their victory was a sign, but Bush was reelected. Pro-torture Alberto Gonzales was confirmed as Attorney General of the United States. “Let’s go to Paris for a year,” I said finally.

A couple of days later, we started looking for a swap. It didn’t take long, though Véronique tried to talk us out of it once she saw our place. “You understand my apartment is very small.”

“We get it.”

“Really small compared to this.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“The whole thing could fit in your living room. Twice.”

I applied for a Schengen visa and shut myself in the car with Berlitz tapes, snickering at the sounds my voice made in French. I loaded up an iPod with Cuban music and bluegrass. From Kathryn I borrowed Johnny Cash and that Icelandic art rocker Björk. Tried to find shoes that weren’t sneakers so at least we wouldn’t stick out as tourists. Bought tapes for the video camera. Speakers for the iPod. Backed up the computers. We gave a neighbor our car, shoved everything of value into one closet between us, and went.

IV. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.

—
O
SCAR
W
ILDE,
T
HE
S
OUL OF
M
AN UNDER
S
OCIALISM

30.

Véronique was right. The apartment was tiny. The kitchen no bigger than a bathroom stall, the toilet instructive, teaching me my first new word,
fuite.
Leak. Also, escape. We walked from dawn until dusk as if we were still in flight, returning only for Ana’s quick translations and to sleep. The city smelled of sun and ripe fruit. It didn’t rain for weeks. When we got hungry, we’d pop into a bakery and grab a croissant or baguette stuffed with
saucisson
or cheese. When we were tired, we’d sit in some crumbling church and listen to organists practicing on ancient tubes. Or slump in cold green metal chairs at the Luxembourg Gardens. The manicured trees didn’t bother me anymore. I liked their knobby fists, the children pushing boats across a tiny lake with poles. I’d stop in front of
Le Triomphe de Silène,
watch Dionysus’s drunken tutor try to get on the mule. We’d visit the beehives, greet the creatures aimed toward light, then walk to the little orchard of apples and pears. Even persimmons unfurled their bright green leaves.