Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (5 page)

We barely had time to celebrate before we were on to the next actions, focusing on St. Valentine’s Day. It was tempting to massacre a few assholes, but what we did on the 13th was take the train out to a neighborhood in Queens armed with lyrics for a serenade. It was snowy, dark, and cold. There weren’t many streetlights among the row houses, just the yellow squares from windows, so after ringing the doorbell of the white-haired, homophobe Mary Cummins, we could barely see our lines to sing, “Cupid, get out your bow, la, la, la, Shoobey-doo-waa.”

It was enough. A hook-nosed Irishman charged out, bellowing, “Why the hell don’t you go home? You’re disturbing the peace.” His voice shook with anger and fear, though the only real affront was the key we tried to sing in. Still, I can imagine what he and Mary thought in their dirty minds. “First those lezzies turn up at the grade school, and now at our own door. Singing!” Which was somehow more offensive and terrifying than anything I could have dreamed up, like egging their house or setting bags of burning shit on their doorstep that they’d have to stamp out.

On St. Valentine’s Day itself, more mittened Avengers made their way to the New York Public Library in midtown where enormous stone lions stand guard over rare books and researchers housed inside. The Avengers were more interested in the snowy Bryant Park in back, where there is a statue of Gertrude Stein.

I can’t remember when I first heard of her. In art history, I think, when they flashed that portrait Picasso did where she was more boulder than woman. The professor didn’t say much about her, just repeated the legend that when someone told Picasso that Stein did not look like her portrait, he replied, “She will.” And she did. Later on, when I found out she was a dyke, and a writer, and I was, too, I carried around a postcard of her and Alice B. Toklas. I didn’t read anything by Stein until that year between college and New York when I was living in Cincinnati, writing poems, and doing rogue performances. Like having a handful of women stand up to crunch apples in the midst of an audience expecting poems.

It was around then that I gobbled down so much of
The Making of Americans
I almost made myself sick. That rhythm got in my head, repeating Americans endlessly repeating themselves, and I couldn’t sleep for weeks. What audacity, grappling with what an entire country was, what humans are, at the same time she was upending the novel, turning words into hallucinogens. It couldn’t have been easy keeping at it. Her own brother scoffed, nobody published her work for years, and when they did, most critics sneered. Not just because her writing was experimental, but because she was a big dyke and didn’t hide it.

The Avenger goal outside the library was to reunite that statue of Gertrude with one of her lover, Alice, and, as Maxine Wolfe put it in her opening words, to celebrate the connections between dyke love, dyke art, dyke activism. It looked pretty good, that Alice statue. The committee had been working on it for ages, besides rehearsing a Thespian Avengers version of Stein’s poem “Lifting Belly.” The bill also boasted experimenting dykes like our own Sarah Schulman, and a ton of others like Yvonne Rainer and Eileen Myles, whom I’d met during those few months I kept company with the dancer Jennifer Monson.

I think we got together over Mason jars of kerosene and bits of old sheets during the fire-eating lesson. We played on the swings at Tompkins Square Park and traipsed out to see the ducks in Jamaica Bay. It wasn’t just how they floated and flew, but the invisible paths they traced in migration. A kind of globe-trotting dance. Jennifer lived in Williamsburg, which was still full of abandoned buildings, and we’d go to explore, sliding under ribbons of yellow warning tape. Light streamed through broken roofs. Holes gaped in the floor. She’d grab me by the hand and pull me forward past the dirty needles and condoms until we could barely see. If we had to, we could almost navigate by the burnt-sugar stink of the Domino factory a few blocks away.

Her apartment was a loft bed in the dance studio she and her roommate DD Dorvillier built in the old matzoh factory on Bedford Avenue. If I was still there when rehearsals started in the morning, I’d join in warm-ups when all the dancers started squirming across the floor or throwing themselves around on it. Sometimes I’d stay to watch them collide as hard as they could in the air, waltz upside down on their hands, try on the furry legs of fauns instead of tutus and tights, and disrupting, if you will, the time-space-gender continuum I’d always accepted as dance. Once, I went with her and her posse of dancers to the foot of the bridge. It was night. We began climbing. I only made it a little way, but they kept inching their way up, from one handhold to the next. Jennifer went furthest. She always did, hanging on like she hadn’t forgotten her evolutionary roots and had that much more connection to the starry, threatening sky.

It was around then we took a workshop with her friend Eileen Myles, this amazing dyke poet who wasn’t exactly what you’d call an activist but in ’92 had campaigned as a write-in candidate for president, claiming America in her own way, like Wojnarowicz had and the Avengers were beginning to. The class was in a loft somewhere farther east in the East Village. I remember one girl who had tattoos and piercings, or should have, and played in a band. And Eileen would hand out Xeroxes of John Ashbery or whoever she was into that day, and we’d read our own poems. She didn’t mind it when I handed over sonnets—yeah, sonnets—all typed out, the rhymes doing their best to nail together my own uncontrollable life. She was one of the first dyke poets to write about her own, and dare leave her life so messy and raw only the poetry itself redeemed it. Later on, I read with her a few times, including at Mona’s on Avenue B way up near Fourteenth Street. I always liked hearing Eileen read. She didn’t get too singsong or pretend to be incanting anything. She just set her jaw and got going, letting all the sounds of working-class Boston spill out.

That afternoon, the crowd was stuffed with Avengers. And the words were working for me, too, every poem lodging in the audience like pleasant little hooks that bound us briefly together. It was the same feeling I got running around with fire, when every other voice amplifies yours. Every body delivers the message you exist.

I don’t know what Jennifer thought of me. I was kind of a mess, writing about being broke and sick, pressing this burning body against hers that could do back flips. We never were good at communicating. She was a dancer. I was a writer. And writers aren’t the best with words when they don’t have a blank page in front of them, and time to revise. More than once, Jennifer bit me in the throws of some emotion that may have been passion, maybe not. Sometimes I suspected she was a maenad considering the best way to rip me limb from limb to get the poetry out. I gave consent to be devoured. We all did. She persuaded a couple dozen Avengers to be in a dance at P.S. 122. When it was time, we ran from the audience to the stage, threw ourselves on the floor, pounded and screamed, then left after the tantrum. She also tucked away that image of a small group of burning figures surrounded by the rising buildings of Fifth Avenue. It echoes through her work even now.

Filmmaker Su Friedrich saw the Avengers in front of the elementary school wearing “I was a lesbian child” T-shirts and was seized by the idea for
Hide and Seek,
part documentary, part fiction. Sue Schaffner and Carrie Moyer—who designed so many of our flyers—took Avengers for their Dyke Action Machine posters, posing us as
American Gothic,
as spoofs of Benetton ads. Sarah Schulman inserted us in her book
My American History.
And haunted by the burning deaths of Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, Ana Simo wrote
The Table of Liquid Measures.
Maybe it was a continual summer, after all, this incredible fecundity. Rage and joy ripening on the vine. No matter what the season. And Gertrude Stein was the mother of us.

When her snowy statue was united with Alice, and the last poem read, somebody cranked up a boom box, and the Avengers danced their own experimental versions of foxtrots and tangos, first upright, then horizontal, rolling around like puppies, like pigeons in the snowy grass.

A couple days later, Lower Manhattan shook with an enormous explosion and sirens went off all over the city. There’d been a bombing downtown at the World Trade Center. Six dead, a thousand injured. More than one preacher blamed queers for it as if all we had to do was exist with our lesbian bodies, and lesbian voices, and lesbian jeans, and lesbian coats for the inhabitants of Jericho to shake with terror, and the walls of Jericho fall.

7.

Not that gestures don’t have their power. What is that gazillion-dollar endeavor of advertising (or politics, or activism, or art) but an almost religious manipulation of images?

Just before Lent started, I got some 2x4s and built an enormous caduceus in the living room to explore my own concerns about lesbian bodies. Barbed wire snaked up the form instead of a reptile, and the double arms of the cross hinted at abstract wings. I hung relics here and there, used lacquered tampons and test tubes filled with toe jam, fingernails, chunks of hair, or my own mysterious blood that doctors grabbed sometimes hoping to cure my mysterious fevers, later, my tangled guts. The treadmill came mail order, maybe from Amy’s credit card points, and every day during Lent I walked in front of the caduceus for as long as I could stand it, sometimes two or three hours, sometimes more, but never until I dropped. I called the performance
Surviving Salvation,
got blisters, and bruises on my heels, new aches, fevers, and nightmares, and a case of boredom so profound I could’ve died of it.

On Sundays, visitors were encouraged, but not essential. I wore a hospital gown with my ass hanging out and made guests put on those surgical latex gloves with talcum inside to make them feel complicit with the stern and snickering gods of the medical establishment. I only invited Avengers, tossing a few postcards in the center of the room at the end of meetings when people made announcements. Some came and wrote comments in the comment book. One woman asked me if I prayed. Another picked a fight about alternative medicine and said I could be perfectly healthy if I only wanted. “Try this for fever. That for joints. You should meditate.”

Some freaked out at the enormous cross-like thing. Others were disturbed that I chatted while I walked in front of it, as if I were a hostess. Su Friedrich videoed for a little while, though there wasn’t much to shoot. I was pretty much just walking in place, without emotion or anything. It was cold so I didn’t even sweat. I didn’t realize she was a real filmmaker until later. Nobody in the Avengers waved their creds. She was just this long-haired woman who kept the books and had a cranky New York sense of humor, a blunt naïveté. Jennifer came and draped Guatemalan amulets on the barbed wire.

Fire-eating friends turned up one day bringing beer, and smoking cigarettes in the dusty hallway because it was banned in our apartment. I joined them for a while, leaving the treadmill running, and considered counting the movement in absentia. But I couldn’t make myself do it and went back in, climbed on, and walked. I didn’t mind when they called me a wuss. It was something to write down in my notebook.

Sarah Schulman came, too, and in her abrupt way asked if I’d shaved my head to make myself look sicker. “I’m not sorry for you.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s not the point.” Though if she’d wanted to pat me on the head and buy a round, I would’ve drunk it, no problem. The shaving was mostly to signal the end of one thing, the beginning of another. Or at least induce a moment of contemplation. In Nepal, that’s what you do when a relative dies. I’d done a whole unscheduled shaving performance at NYU when I figured out that most of grad school was about taking whatever was natural and true and stuffing it into inaccessible language and appropriate, official forms. Pretty much like my mother tried to stuff me into the shape of a proper girl. It was infuriating. What was the point of thinking things and trying to know things if you were only going to communicate them to people just like you? Maybe they didn’t notice the gap, those other students of the academic caste whose parents were professors. Not clerk-typists like my mom, and whatever it was my father did. He was not an engineer, no matter what my mom taught me to tell the other kids in elementary school.

I reserved the rounded, windowed classroom at the intersection of two hallways, put up a few notices, and when the moment came, plugged in the razor, stripped naked, and buzzed myself from toe to legs, crotch, underarms, arms, head while the audience gaped from outside. They gasped loudest at the eyebrows. “Is she really going to . . . ? Omigod, she did.” Afterwards I applied pantyhose, skirt, deodorant, blouse, lipstick, and eyeliner, with a quick spritz of breath freshener. That, I called
Art-Official Ritual.

The chair of the department flipped out and called me into her office with her co-chair to see if I needed counseling. “You understand this is an academic program?”

I should have known better. I’d already had a run-in with the official art authorities when I’d visited with my contemporary art class from Transylvania University in Lexington. During a tour of MOMA, or the Guggenheim, maybe, I went bananas when I saw a Dadaist work stuck behind a barrier with a Do Not Touch sign on it, even though it was a card catalogue type thing, whose whole point was to be touched, browsed through, and smudged. And I sneered aloud, “They’ve killed it. They’ve killed it. What a horrible place. They don’t understand art at all.” And went on in that vein until the whole tour came to halt, so I could get chewed out. A friend comforted me by saying one day we’d come back with water pistols full of acid and liberate the spirit of the thing by dissolving it entirely. Later, though, I heard he’d become an art conservator.

The night after that performance in grad school, I got kicked out of the apartment I shared in Corona, Queens, with Jorge, the brother-in-law of an ex-girlfriend’s ex, and Rosa, an elderly Colombian lady that I used to help with errands. Jorge told me, “Rosa called the landlady and told her you’re a child of the devil. You have to be out of here tomorrow morning. She only let you move in because I told her we were engaged. I’m really sorry.” So at dawn I was squatting outside Tisch School of the Arts, waiting to stash my bags at the
Women & Performance
journal where I’d been working for a whole two weeks.