A Word of Our Own: Ch 11 Cincinnati
An interlude in Cincinnati in which I write poetry, make art, pray to trees and finally sleep with an out lesbian.
A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
Thank you for reading!
…Yeah, how I burned. On fire myself, and careless the way the young are, I tossed cigarette butts here and there in a place that hadn’t seen rain in years. So many bridges caught fire, so many reduced to ash.
I’d pass through cities like Sherman. Like a combustible and suicidal Candide.
11. Cincinnati: Consider the Options
Was I on fire? Or ashes, emptied out, adrift? There was no refuge in submissive-loving God. My sisters had already married, or were going to. The latest image I had of my father was his fist waving in my face when I asked him why he’d dropped me from his insurance. “You never call unless you want something,” he accused, confusing me with my sisters. I, the youngest, never called him at all. Was too pure and smug to ask for anything.
As for my mother, I’d persuaded her to come to an awards ceremony the night before graduation, earn her approval for once. But when I refused to change out of my “disgraceful” clothes, black top, brown maxi skirt, and dangly earrings, she got back in her car and drove away. I collected my prizes alone, tossed them in the trash, was persuaded by the prof I no longer detested, and practically aped, to go to the English department party where she pressed glass after glass of wine in my hand.
Afterwards, I packed my few things for the move eighty-three miles north to the Cincinnati of the Yankee north, waiting tables at the university, sanding drywall to the sound of Guns N’ Roses. For a while I hung out with Clyve, a guy from the crew, sprawling on his couch in the dim light of his basement apartment listening to smooth Al Green and drinking forties. But once, when he left to get more, his friend pushed me against the wall and asked what a white woman was doing hanging out with a black man. “You must really want it a lot, and I’m the one to give it to you,” he said. “Not a little runt like him.”
Clyve got home before it went further. We didn’t hang out any more after that, lost in a mutual shame. I stole a box cutter from work and carried it with me, swaggered to show I wasn’t scared. I’d still tuck a notebook in my pocket and walk everywhere at all hours. A pedestrian poet in a city, a state, a nation of cars. Some guys going by in an old Chevy threw a beer bottle at me, “Fucking dyke. Dyke. Dyke.”
“Am not. Am not,” I called out. “I’m bi,” I told myself. “Bi.” I’d had a couple of dates with boys after all. Then there was the guy by the pool I slept with during college, or tried to, that summer I read the Bell Jar, and like Sylvia Plath was determined to lose my virginity. We went into his air conditioned apartment and he showed me his hairy balls and how to put a condom on his dick, and then he climbed on top of me and tried to stick it in, but my legs didn’t want to spread apart, and my cunt closed up like a clam because when it came right down to it, I didn’t then, and never have liked dick. He was lucky, though. God knows what would’ve happened if he got it in. There may have been teeth there. There may have been a tiny guillotine.
Sometimes I’d go to open mikes where I’d read my poetry and organize performances. Once, I got a huge room of women to stand up and eat apples, just apples, taking bite after bite while I said nothing at all. It was the gesture that mattered. The sound of their teeth gouging into the fruit. The juice spurting out. I rented a space from the woman who stood longest, ate her apple until only the stem remained.
I slept on a mattress in her living room and pelted her with poems that I’d churn out by the dozen like some kind of incontinent puppy. And on nights when the moon came through the window near my niche, I’d shift my mattress into its path and wait to be moonstruck, a lunatic. I got into Gertrude Stein and read Three Lives, and Making of Americans but had to stop because even without the moon I couldn’t sleep, the earworm of her writing for herself and strangers driving me loony. And the word which described her circling and repeating itself in me.
I hung out, also, with two sisters who were from Kentucky, too. I felt at home with them, maybe because like me they had abandoned their faith, and like me replaced it with art. Though maybe it was because together we made three, of which I was the youngest again. One was already a video maker. The other a painter, getting an M.F.A. I modeled for her sometimes. I think that was the first time I gave consent to be intensely looked at, stared at even, as Becky traced my outline, smudged her fingers with oil pastels as she smudged my eyes and nose, my elbows onto paper. We three collaborated once in a piece about abortion called Consider the Options. We infused it with religious overtones and it featured strange Jesus cards I found when we were packing to leave New York for good. We went to the ‘89 March on Washington for Women’s Rights. I felt like a hayseed, a hillbilly when we got there. I’d never seen so many people, so many women in one place.
Abortion had only been legal for 16 years, but already that Great Communicator Reagan had declared war on it. And I sneaked through the line of security and shot photos of all these luminaries in white with long hippy hair or short practical hair and white floppy smocks that turned out to be big names—Gloria Steinem, Joan Baez that I understood intellectually had something to do with me, but made me feel like an alien. They were so womanly, womanish, these older females with crows’ feet like my mother, so comfortable waving to the crowd.
Sometimes after a session at her studio, the painter would invite me for dinner and cook spaghetti, and we’d eat, maybe have a glass of beer, or wine. And I felt something. This terrible nameless emptiness. Sometimes, I’d stay over. One night, beside her in her bed, pretending to sleep. I turned over. Put my leg over hers. And then, after a moment, pulled it back. Nobody has ever been as immobile as her. So silent and distant. She didn’t say anything the following day. Me, either. We continued as before. She had a boyfriend, though I knew she’d dated a girl before him. She read the shocking Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School. Was so free with her little birds that she let them fly and shit everywhere. They built their nests with her long blond hairs as pale as the moon. One day, she came back from her studio and discovered one of them hanging dead in her locks.
In my time off, I wrote, I read, I wandered the streets. If I had to pray, it was to trees I spoke. At the university campus there were giant ones. One night, I hung out in a trunk that was hollow from the bottom to the top like a cannon waiting for a cannonball—which I suppose was the moon. What a difficult year. I put myself in danger. Distressed I had no goal. Or country. Or people. Just a certain emerging knowledge. If I’d been a fag, I would have learned to cruise in parks, in toilets. But I was a dyke. Practically. And I didn’t know how to find others like me. Though when I did, they just confused or terrified me.
The artist sisters introduced me to Aralee Strange, an Alabama poet dyke with a thick Southern drawl. Once, she invited me to go to a “women’s” bar, which I didn’t understand meant dyke, and we met up at her loft where I was impressed almost as much at the casual sophistication of a glass cheese bell that I’d only seen in movies, as by her leather pants and this silky blouse. She usually wore jeans and a tee shirt, but when I got to the bar I saw why. There were all these girls, girls, girls hitting on each other and flirting, and drinking and dancing and sweating and making out like crazy. The music was deafening, the combustible energy revealing to me just how fake I was, so I fled. Walked back home through the city at night. Thumbing the blade of my utility knife. Praying to trees which lifted their branches so high.
Waiting tables at the university, I’d become friends with this Puerto Rican grad student poet who listened to nothing but Tina Turner and introduced me to his poet boyfriend who told me there was a library dedicated just to poetry, and sent me there. It was so quiet, so beautiful, almost holy. What could be more hopeful than those slim volumes? The poet librarian guy, Jim something, who wrote poem cycles based on the Perry Mason TV show, encouraged me to participate in some kind of women’s writing collective. I refused because the last thing I wanted was to be shuttled off to the gynodome. But he also helped me work up my nerve to ask visiting poet Marilyn Hacker if I could audit her class, which she agreed to. Which was great. I owe her, too.
I ended up meeting them, anyway, the collective, when Hacker assumed I was a dyke (and completely out) and invited me to a potluck they were throwing at somebody’s house and it was full of these really nice women that I remember as being motherly, in that androgynous dyke sort of way. Their kindness frightened me, too. The ease with which they accepted me. I remember sitting on some steps with a bottle of beer in my hand, and staring at the carpet wondering how long I’d have to stay. Somebody must have driven me. I don’t remember riding the bus. Was it Angie—this girl I’d met in Hacker’s class? I met George there, too. And dated them both, never quite going all the way with George though on a trip to his father’s house in Kentucky which was so fancy it had wings, I whacked him off and was horrified when the cum flew all over the velour bedspread and we couldn’t get the smears off. He was a junky, and I quit seeing him for good after that time he tore apart my room looking for the one valium tab I’d had for about three months feeling very cool, just owning it. At least I’d already taken the last blotter I had. I’m bi. See? I’m bi. Not a loser dyke at all.
Later, I wondered if Marilyn Hacker was The One. She was nice to me, after all. Encouraging about my poetry, and I remembered that in my Women’s Lit course it was always implied that woman should mentor each other, the way men did in what we called the Old Boys’ Club, so months after the class was over and she was back in New York I sent her a letter asking her to be mine, a mentor. It’s also possible I said, that I thought of her as a spiritual mother. Or just a mother, period. OMG, this poor woman who was inviting me into her community as a peer. I never heard back. I spotted her coming towards me in Paris thirty years later, and ran away in shame. I wonder if she remembers me, the girl writing a sonnet series about getting raped by a man in Spain.
If nothing else, I met Angie, as I said, there in her class. We hooked up. She was the first girlfriend I had who was out, at least to herself and her friends, even if she was a preacher’s kid. We could hold hands if we wanted, smooch in front of others just like we were straight. She was plugged into the dyke network. The kind that played softball and went to music festivals. One of her friends did the circuit and had cut some folk albums. She’d play guitar for us sometimes and sing. And drink. Lord how she drank. And smoked. There were always clouds of it at Angie’s. And so many dykes there, too. Lesbians were as common as the good, rich earth. Though I’m not sure if they used the word. There was a community even without it—if you knew where to look. And I learned to. On softball fields, bars, organizing things.
They were all so nice, these women who were political in a soft, nonviolent sort of way. Probably they’d all gone to the same March as I had in Washington, and marched in their white smocks between Gloria Steinem and Joan Baez. They wore buttons against racism. For choice. They just weren’t what I needed. They believed in something I couldn’t. Peace. And love. In the name of it, had created bookstores, and cafés, collectives, sisterhoods. Which burned like salt in a wound.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 12…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K
Devouring these chapters. I've been in a reading slump for months? years? but I can't put this down.
You’re bringing back so many memories of that time, our “community.” How you could find it in pockets, and there was a familiarity to it, like a recipe for curry, with regional variation.