My Life on the Road (22 page)

·
I’m having lunch at West Hollywood’s Café Figaro with Florynce Kennedy. She is explaining to me that she quit being a lawyer because “the law is a one-ass-at-a-time proposition, and what you have to do is stop the wringer.” This is inspired by the sight of seven waitresses and no waiters, an index of suspicion. Flo says tips are probably being used as a legal excuse to pay less than the minimum wage.
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We quiz the manager. He assures us the pay is terrific, all seven waitresses adore their jobs, and more women are waiting in line.

Back home in New York a week later, I find a letter waiting from those waitresses: “We don’t think any other occupational group can appreciate what you do for women as much as we. It’s not enough that we work hard for ridiculously low wages, we’re expected to softly come on to male customers so that they’ll spend more and return again. Our wonderful male manager advances the theory that it’s really to our benefit—we’ll get bigger tips. God, what an intellectual cripple. Don’t ever let up! The Subversive Seven.”

Now it’s decades later, in 2014. I’m reading about beloved comedian and actor Bill Cosby, who has been accused by no fewer than thirty-nine women of drugging and sexually assaulting them at some time in the past. Each one feared she would not be believed, but when one came forward, they all began to. One is Linda Joy Traitz, who at nineteen was a waitress at Café Figaro, where Cosby dropped in occasionally because he was its part owner. He offered her a ride home, then, in his car, she says that she was confronted by a briefcase full of drugs and booze, plus his sexual assault.

I wish Flo were here to learn her instincts were right. Eighteen years older than I, with a life that stretched from seeing her parents threatened by the Ku Klux Klan to becoming a civil rights and show business lawyer, she was nearly always right. Traveling with her was better than any college education.

I once saw her buy a purple pantsuit for a young white salesgirl in a small-town dress shop, something the salesgirl wanted but could never have afforded. When I went back after Flo’s death, that now middle-aged woman told me Flo’s generosity had opened up a new view of life.

·
In 1980 I board a crowded plane for Detroit and find myself seated among a group of Hasidic Jews. The men are wearing wide-brimmed black fedoras over their yarmulkes, the women are in dark-haired wigs and long-sleeved dresses, and the children are as neat and well behaved as miniature grown-ups. I notice some hurried rearranging of seats. The goal seems to be that no woman sits next to a man not her husband—or next to me. My seatmate turns out to be the oldest man, stooped and gentle, reading his prayer book. Knowing that no Hasidic man is allowed to touch a woman outside his family, not even to shake hands, I do my best to be respectful and keep my arm off our shared armrest. Still, I’m surprised that separating me from the women seemed to be a higher priority than isolating me from the men. I hear the word
feminist
in English amid the Yiddish from two young men sitting in front of us, and they peer back at me between the seats.

When we arrive at the Detroit airport, I go into a ladies’ room—and there are the wives and daughters. The youngest wife checks the stalls into which the older ones have disappeared, looks me straight in the eye, and smiles. “Hello, Gloria,” she says firmly. “My name is Miriam.” That smile is worth the whole trip.

·
It’s 1996, and I’m in Kansas, home state of U.S. senator Robert Dole, who has just run for president of the United States. I turn on the television in my motel. Dole is on camera, smiling, talking about his ED—erectile dysfunction—in a paid commercial for Viagra. As Liz Smith, the smart and funny Manhattan gossip columnist, always says, “You can’t make this stuff up.”

·
Just as the millennium is about to end, I’m in a car with two women students on our way to a political meeting in Arizona. We’ve stopped at a construction roadblock in the searing desert heat, and a big man is walking toward us carrying a pickax. Suddenly, we’re hyperaware that no other car is in sight. Leaning into my window, he says he noticed our
Ms.
T-shirts—he’s a
Ms.
reader. This seems so improbable that I’m sure it’s a joke or a con. Then he cites an article of a year ago about
los feminicidios,
the hundreds of young women whose raped, tortured, and mutilated bodies have been found in the Mexican desert across from El Paso. Speculation about the motive has ranged from sex trafficking to the sale of organs, from raping and murdering young women as part of a gang initiation to a twisted taking of revenge against women for being wage earners. These murders have been going on for decades, but since they are sexualized and the victims are “only” workers in the
maquiladoras
—factories just across the Mexican border where products are assembled cheaply for sale in the United States—news coverage has been sensational and arrests have been zero.

I notice tears in this man’s eyes. He is saying that ten years ago his sixteen-year-old sister became one of
las feminicidios
and today is the anniversary of her death. He wants to thank us for paying attention, for remembering. He is grateful to anyone who makes these deaths visible. He himself will remain in mourning until her murderer is caught.

We shake his callused hands. He says there is something mystical about our appearance on this day. We are feeling it, too. As he walks back to his roadwork, we sit silent for a long time. Over the years, I will forget the larger purpose of this trip, but I will never forget this man and his sister.

·
In 2000 I’m driving with a friend from Texas into rural Oklahoma. I can tell where the first state ends and the second begins because roads get better, cattle roam freely instead of being tethered in the boiling sun, and roadside businesses are more likely to be gas stations with convenience stores than topless bars and entertainment arcades. This seems like a good thing—until the Bible Belt gets tighter, and I see paired billboards along the road. One promises everlasting life through Jesus Christ. The other promises to reverse vasectomies.

·
During a discussion after a university lecture in the early fall of 2003, a student stands up in the audience and says that President George W. Bush will board a plane carrying a large plastic turkey and fly to Iraq for a Thanksgiving photo op with our troops. Since we’ve been discussing the phony pretext of weapons of mass destruction with which Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in the first place, the phony turkey gets a big laugh.

After Thanksgiving the press breaks a top secret: Bush boarded
Air Force One
carrying a big hand-painted plastic turkey, flew to Iraq in the middle of the war, posed for photos with our troops and the turkey, and flew back to Washington—all at taxpayers’ expense.

Who was that student? How did he know?

·
While traveling in Georgia, I see lawn signs for the reelection campaign of Max Cleland, a much-admired U.S. senator and a war hero who lost both legs and one arm to a grenade in Vietnam.

I’m in Atlanta again in 2002 and see TV ads that call him unpatriotic, and compare him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The excuse is only his vote against two of many antiterrorism measures. This is a Joe McCarthy–type Big Lie. Veterans in both parties protest the ad, and eventually it is removed. Still, its very extremity has created doubt in a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire way. Cleland is defeated.

A year later, I see this successful tactic rolled out nationally against U.S. senator John Kerry, also a Vietnam War hero, who is running for president. Television ads feature veterans who deny his heroism as a Swift boat captain. Though the charges are later disproved, they contribute to Kerry’s defeat.
Swiftboating
enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called
trashing,
attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all.
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Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.

·
In the presidential election of 2008, a banner year for Surrealism in Everyday Life, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh opposes the Democratic candidacy of Hillary Clinton. He accuses her of wearing pantsuits to conceal “bad” legs. Instead, he supports Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate because she wears skirts to reveal “good” legs. Actually, Republicans have nominated Palin at the last minute to pick up some votes from disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters. This makes no sense. Palin opposes reproductive freedom and most other majority needs of women, enjoys shooting animals from helicopters, and has always earned more support from white male voters than from diverse female voters. Her selection is the biggest political mistake since the first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, expecting to get more votes from African Americans. Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.

·
For serial surrealism, nothing beats right-wing and religious efforts to confer legal personhood on fertilized eggs. This would nationalize women’s bodies throughout their childbearing years. Not surprisingly, the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has failed, but many state and local tactics are succeeding, from bombing clinics and murdering doctors in the name of “pro-life,” to denying birth control as a part of health insurance, and closing clinics with impossible building regulations imposed by antichoice state legislatures. Over time, I’ve also noticed that local pickets of clinics often personify this surrealism.

To enter the Blue Mountain Clinic in Missoula, Montana, I have to pass picketers who are crowded at the edge of the legal buffer zone. They are shouting, “Abortion is murder!” and “Baby killer!” Inside, staff members show me around the clinic, which has been providing a full range of health services since the early 1970s. In 1993 its building was firebombed and completely destroyed by anti-abortion terrorists, even though, as with most such clinics, providing safe abortions is a tiny fraction of its health care mission. I understand that repairing the damage has taken two years and a lot of work. Now Blue Mountain is operating behind a slender buffer zone and a tall protective fence.

A staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day. This sounds surrealistic to me—but not to the staff member. She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They then feel guilty—and picket even more. This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.
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When I visit clinics, I’ve learned to ask the staff if they have ever seen a picketer come in, have an abortion, and go back to picketing again. From Atlanta to Wichita, the answer is yes. Yet because staff members see the woman’s suffering and guard her right to privacy, they don’t blow the whistle.

Meanwhile in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who performs late-term abortions—only about 1 percent of all procedures but crucial when, for instance, a fetus develops without a brain—is shot in both arms by a female picketer. He recovers and continues serving women who come to him from many states.

I finally meet Dr. Tiller in 2008 at a New York gathering of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I ask him if he has ever helped a woman who was protesting at his clinic. He says: “Of course, I’m there to help them, not to add to their troubles. They probably already feel guilty.”

In 2009 Dr. Tiller is shot in the head at close range by a male activist hiding inside the Lutheran church where the Tiller family worships each Sunday. This is done in the name of being “pro-life.”

·
I’m sitting next to a very old and elegant woman on a plane from Dallas to New York. Assuming that she needs company, I start a conversation. She turns out to be a ninety-eight-year-old former Ziegfeld girl who is on her way to dance in an AIDS benefit on Broadway with her hundred-and-one-year-old friend from chorus girl days—something they’ve been doing since the tragedy of AIDS first appeared. Humbled by this response and looking for advice on my own future now that I’m past seventy, I ask her how she has remained herself all these years. She looks at me as if at a slow pupil. “You’re always the person you were when you were born,” she says impatiently. “You just keep finding new ways to express it.”

·
It’s the end of the 1980s, a time of corporate profits going up and the Berlin Wall coming down. I’m on a private plane to Palm Springs. I know only one of the ten people on board, the man I’m with. He’s one of only two rich men I’ve dated in my life. The first inherited his wealth and so was terminally insecure, though he headed his father’s book publishing business. Since in my East Toledo neighborhood reading books was a sign of rebellion, I didn’t realize that, for him, books meant conforming. The man on the plane is more secure because he made his own money, yet he has acquired limousine and private plane habits that have begun to isolate him. On the plus side, however, we both love dancing and laughing and have no time to argue about all the things we disagree on.

Together with four presidents of major corporations plus their wives or long-term girlfriends, we’re headed for a long Thanksgiving weekend. This is business for the man I’m with and, I hope, fund-raising from his colleagues for me. The executives on the plane respectively reign over a snack food empire, a pharmaceutical company, a cable channel, and a major credit card company. They just might support health and antiviolence projects for women and girls, who are as much as 80 percent of their consumers, yet receive only about 6 percent of corporate charitable dollars.

We land at a private airport near Palm Springs and are driven in air-conditioned limos through a scorching hot desert. We arrive at a compound with high stucco walls and double electronic gates. After a security check, we’re in the midst of emerald lawns, manicured gardens, and pools of water lilies, all drenched by twirling water sprays. In the desert, water is gold. This is Fort Knox.

Each couple is taken to a bungalow with its own garden. Men are changing for a fast game of golf, women for tennis. Since I learned neither growing up in East Toledo—a bowling and canasta kind of place—I stay in the air-conditioned bungalow to work on a seriously overdue article. I discover a pantry full of unhealthy snack foods made by one of the host corporations, and begin to eat my way through it.

Thus begins a time of sports and camaraderie for my companions, and writing, air-conditioning, and eating junk food for me. Evenings consist of banquets of flown-in food and wine, and amusing anecdotes that sound as if they’ve been told before.

For Thanksgiving Day, we’ve been invited to an afternoon buffet at the nearby desert home of Frank Sinatra and his fourth wife. Our connection is tenuous. It seems the late father of one of the women in our party knew this famous singer. When we arrive, three older men in pastel golf sweaters are watching a football game on television, one with a holstered gun in his belt. Servants bring us rounds of drinks, but our hosts are nowhere to be seen. We’re served Thanksgiving dinner from a massive buffet that has all the intimacy of a hotel.

Finally, Barbara Sinatra, a onetime Las Vegas showgirl and a former wife of one of the Marx brothers, arrives to greet us. She is a calm and queenly presence. My hope of fund-raising rises when she mentions chairing a Palm Springs hospital benefit for abused women and children, but it goes down when she chastises me and the women’s movement for not taking up this new-to-her issue.

I swallow my pride. I don’t have time to explain that the women’s movement named domestic violence in the first place, sought its prosecution by police and by new laws, created the first shelters, and has been working for thirty years to explain, for instance, that the moment of leaving is the time when a woman is most likely to be murdered, thus answering questions like “Why doesn’t she just leave?” Instead, I just describe effective survivor-run programs that are in need of support.

Still, I can feel her interest straying. For one thing, those programs aren’t linked to the charity ball she is chairing, and for another, Frank Sinatra is finally arriving with a drink in his hand. He looks very much like, well, Frank Sinatra. I watch as this queenly woman turns into a geisha serving him turkey.

After dessert, our group is ushered into a separate building that houses the largest collection of toy trains I’ve ever seen. Tracks stretch out on tables that are themselves miniature landscapes, with roads, trees, lakes, and tiny buildings. Passenger cars are lighted from within and have tiny people silhouetted in the windows. Sinatra puts on a conductor’s hat, presses buttons, and speeds trains through tunnels and over bridges. He looks happy and in his own world. I try not to think about how much all this cost.

The next day, back in our lush compound, I return to writing and junk food. Before we leave Palm Springs, there is one activity that I love: riding horses in the desert. However, I discover that the junk food has taken its toll. While I am riding, my jeans split up the back. I retreat to the bungalow for needle and thread.

On the plane going home, men talk about mergers and acquisitions, and women talk about weight loss. I know that one wife once had a high-level job in Washington, and another recently climbed Mount Everest, yet neither brings this up. Since we’re all in a small space, I try one last time to describe projects that individuals and corporations might well please women consumers by supporting—but I get polite disinterest. I am an isolated island around which an ocean of talk flows. I fantasize about parachuting out of the plane.

We land at a private airport in New Jersey. Each couple gets in a separate limousine, though one could have held us all. In three days of talk about how to make money, I haven’t been able to insert one idea about what to do with it. I’m angry—at myself. They are playing the game as it exists. I’m trying to change it—and I’ve failed. There is little more painful than surrealism when you yourself are the only contrast.

·
I’ve passed by Laurel, Maryland, on trips to and from Washington, D.C., for years, but I haven’t a clue what goes on there. Then one day in 1982 when I’m enjoying being at my desk at
Ms.
magazine after a long stretch of road trips, I get a call from Connie Bowman, a brand-new marketing director at the Freestate Raceway in Laurel. Since harness racing is a national and global attraction for the subcultures of racing and betting—and since both subcultures are overwhelmingly male—Bowman wants to attract more women. Her idea is to invite me and Loretta Swit, star of one of the most-watched series in TV history, to race each other in an event to be called
M*A*S*H
vs.
Ms.
In return, each of us will get a percentage of the gate to give away.

This captures my attention.
Ms.
magazine has discovered that very few advertisers will support a women’s magazine that doesn’t devote its editorial pages to praising the products it advertises: fashion, beauty, home decoration, and the like. To make up for the lack of ads in
Ms.
—and to meet requests for subscriptions from battered women’s shelters, prisons, welfare programs, and just readers who can’t afford them—we have to raise contributions.

This is why I find myself on a warm summer evening, dressed in white pants and green and gold racing silks, standing in front of a huge, blindingly lit stadium filled with thousands of shouting strangers cheering for their favorite horses plus the novelty bet of Loretta or me. Loretta is wearing white pants plus blue and red silks, and we are both peering out from under white crash helmets emblazoned “
M*A*S*H
vs.
Ms.
” Beyond us is a huge oval racetrack so preternaturally lit up by klieg lights that I’m told astronauts can see it from space. Both of us are about to put our lives in the hands of horses and jockeys we don’t know. This feels more surrealistic than it sounded on the phone.

Officials walk us to our respective rigs. Mine is pulled by a beautiful chestnut mare and guided by a skinny, older black driver. He is unusual in this traditionally white world of southern horse racing. Loretta has a younger white driver and a dark-coated gelding. We each seat ourselves next to the driver on a plank no bigger than an ironing board that is attached to a superlight rig. The whole thing is more like a coat hanger than the Ben-Hur chariot I envisioned. As we trot out to the track where other teams are assembled, we already seem to be going very fast. After the starting signal, that speed is much faster. I realize I’m sitting only inches above a track that is whizzing underneath me in a blur. Nothing but the ironing board is between me and being trampled by the horses behind us.

Then suddenly horse, driver, and I are in a capsule by ourselves. A blur of light and wind surrounds us. We are isolated for what could be minutes or hours, as one with this powerful horse. I think: Racing a car may be about ego, but racing a horse is about trust.

As we begin to slow down, the blur sharpens back into trees, stadium, fence, people. My driver turns to me, smiles, and says,
We won!

We parade in front of the huge, noisy stadium. An amplified male voice booms out, “
Ms.
beat
M*A*S*H
!” He doesn’t say that a mare beat a gelding, or that an old black driver beat a young white one, but I hear Loretta saying to a reporter with delight:
The outs beat the ins!

Like Alice in Wonderland, I feel as if I’ve fallen into another universe. I was horse crazy as a child. Now I remember why I loved these smart, sleek creatures that deign to let us travel with them.

Our share of the gate turns out to be disappointing—under $5,000 each. We even forgot to bet on ourselves. Each of us could have raised more money in less time and with way less danger. However, now whenever I pass the Laurel sign on the way to and from Washington, I have a sense memory of speed and blur, a proud driver, a beautiful mare, a moment of altered reality.