The Year of Five Liberations (2 of 5)

by John Shannon

art by Paul Takizawa

3

She wanted to do everything in bed right away as if it was another way to punish her parents for their money and I was callow enough to take whatever I could get as if I’d never had my share before. How come we Protestants have to hammer at life so? She had my penis out before I could blink and she went down immediately, almost but not quite forbidden fruit, I know it’s hard to believe today.

“I want you in my ass, too,” she said in a short break from the blowjob.

I’m glad she couldn’t see my shock, but what the hell. Dina was in her early twenties with a round Scandinavian face that wasn’t pretty but was still appealing in a way that made me think of her as soap-and-water Dina and she had huge tits which sealed the deal. Hell. It was Rocky who’d recruited her at a demo against a big faraway corporation that was taking over the college’s bookstore, but something steered her toward me. She was a botanist and she learned things fast. She actually read Capital and took reading notes, asking me questions about it that I couldn’t answer.

She was so expert at the sex that I came fast and afterward she looked like she wanted to apologize for something, poor kid. Actually she was a year older than me. She was a vegetarian, too, and into Yoga and into not wearing underwear for some reason.

“My poor dad,” she said. “Mom’s never given him a break.”

She was such a militant on women’s issues, or as we said then, on the woman question, that this reversal of sympathies surprised me.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. They had a big enough place up against the hill where all the rich people live and the Mercedes and all, but they were always spending over their heads and mom didn’t like that. She couldn’t live out her days at Gucci and the fancy pubs for lunch with her girlfriends. No, that’s not really fair. I think it was because Dad was always anxious and she hated anxiety. It was so middle class.”

“I bet I’d like him,” I said.

She lit a Gauloise, an affectation she’d brought back from a summer in France. It didn’t seem to go with the vegetarianism but I smoked then, too, so I didn’t think about it much, though I hated the smell of that acrid air-cured French tobacco.

“You might not. Dad acts like he’s an authority on everything and it can be pretty annoying, but he really does know an awful lot.”

Then we couldn’t talk for a while as I was occupied going down on her. When did all this non-Missionary sex start becoming matter-of-fact? She took a hell of a long time though and years later when I met her in passing I joked about the scene in Annie Hall with Woody Allen complaining about his jaw locking up and she actually blushed.

“Johnny, do you really think we can make a better world?” she said a lot later. Surely a common post-coital comment.

“God, it isn’t asking so much,” I said. “Think of some peasant farmer in Central America. No, think of some dirty orphan in some horrible huge city like Sao Paulo, some wild child running with other orphans and digging in the garbage to survive. Why can’t we at least put an end to that? One less CEO salary could save a thousand street orphans, maybe a million.”

She reached over and held my flaccid penis in her fist. “I don’t know how to make sense of all these things. This and the primitive accumulation and the labor theory of value. Not much activity here. Whoa. Some life reasserts itself.”

“I think your head alone can lead you wrong,” I said, meaning no pun whatever. “Stuff that’s too logical probably doesn’t fit the real world and then you’ve got somebody like Stalin or Gordy trying to make it all fit by force. It’s a hell of a presumption to think you can diagram out the forces of history.”

“So, you prefer the heart?” she asked.

“I suppose that has its own limitations, but human compassion is hard to beat.”

“Beat this,” she said, rolling on top of me.

4

Dan Storm was the key to our group. He tried to teach us to think in the longer term, to organize as widely as possible, teach and cajole and demonstrate by example, insert ourselves gently into the dialectic as I might have joked had I been inclined to joking. Many of the groups back then had an Old Guy. The unlucky ones inherited an Old Guy who was an unreconstructed hard-liner, incapable of letting a small group of young people develop at their own pace, a man who’d been thrown out of the Old Left probably because he was still overfond of Uncle Joe and his ferocious certainties. The luckier groups got a Dan Storm, a living link to the humane streak in that immigrant wave of old world Jewry who imported Karl Marx in their steamer trunks and brought a more disciplined social democracy to the heady freeform American radicalism of free silver and farmer-labor and Wobbly agitation, a guy who had no trouble dealing with the fact that the real world was always a lot more ragged than any theory.

He’d been born Daniel Sternecki in Krakow, but in the 1940s he Americanized himself at Bethlehem Steel—Lady Beth—in the industrial wasteland southeast of the big city, and became Dan Storm. Later, long after the Party had kicked him out for various doctrinal sins including I think an excessive fondness for Leon Trotsky, when Vietnam and civil rights were reanimating a generation, the three of us became friends and then a triad, an inner politburo for our new group. I always had the feeling that Dan liked Rocky more than me, not in a personal sense—loyalty was never a personal question for Dan—but because he saw more possibilities in him. I don’t think it was a question of Rocky’s intellect, always prickly and impatient at any form of complexity, but something about his charm or decisiveness or just an instinct he showed for sitting down comfortably with working people. I don’t want to speculate on motives too much. This is all recollected in tranquility, which can invest the past with far more clarity than it deserves.

5

One evening I was conducting a meeting in our house and pushing the night’s agenda forward fast. There were almost 25 of us. I was proud of the way I was getting things decided so quickly that there was no chance for one of those endless ego-soaked squabbles that drove me nuts. Then, all at once I noticed a cloud scud in across Dan’s face. Eventually he stopped me cold, and diplomatically, or maybe not so diplomatically, he made it abundantly clear that I was steamrolling people who disagreed and destroying any chance of reaching a real consensus. And he was dead right. Dan never had the slightest trouble shifting gears toward a painful reality, at least on a small scale. Robert’s Rules of Order meant no more to him than Emily Post. (I once found him reading an old copy of Emily Post and howling with laughter.) I never forgot that moment, and the chagrin he made me feel for using pure energy to coerce my views on others.

I kept that image of him in my head for years, a kind of nagging conscience of what a truly committed and selfless organizer can be.

6

Another evening, in the runup to a film showing that we were putting on in a cheap civic auditorium to show Cinda Firestone’s heart-wrenching documentary about the Attica takeover, I saw Dina looking nervous in the lobby. The hall seated 500 or so but there were only maybe 100 there. Not so bad really for us. Our “periphery.”

I may have wondered for a millisecond why Dina looked like she’d swallowed a hedgehog as I hurried past but I was preoccupied with the event and with getting to my graveyard-shift job on time even though I seemed to have delegated all the crucial duties and I didn’t even have to thread the damn balky Bell & Howell and make sure it didn’t lose its loop and tear up a foot of ratchet holes. Then I came back through again and noticed that Carrie Banks was standing behind Dina. Carrie was probably the hardest core feminist I’d ever met. She thought everything on earth hinged on women’s issues and just about considered all sex to be rape.

I suddenly had a sourceless fear of massive injury, as if Carrie had a big stun gun ready to go and Dina was going to help her use it on me. But I couldn’t think of what it was I’d done.

“I need to talk to you, Johnny,” Dina said gravely.

“Sure.” Hoping against hope that it was about some simple promise I’d forgotten in my manic state, I nodded and followed her back into an inconspicuous corner where the old faux marble wallpaper was peeling loose. I guess you could say I looked but didn’t see, I saw but didn’t heed. I wasn’t then thinking of trying to live in the moment or trying to be present to what was truly happening. That was one of the things I started to learn later, after the collapse.

She had to swallow hard before she could get it out. “It’s about your sexism.”

It was like someone had slammed a long needle into my spine and I didn’t even think, This is a setup. All the air around my head vibrated and burned with an enormous dazed culpability and I could only set my jaw and wait.

Poor Dina. It was terribly hard for her, I’m sure. “When we worked on that lesson plan, you just overrode all my objections as if they didn’t matter.”

What I absolutely didn’t think at that moment was, But you hadn’t read the book, D. I thought, Yes, Yes, I did.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“In meetings you always look around at the men when you’re speaking or trying to explain something. Unless it’s a women’s issue and then you only look at the women—as if that’s all we’re good for.”

Yes, yes, I thought. “I’m really sorry.”

Arrogance, self-regard, being automatically dismissive of women, even humor at the expense of women. It went on for quite a while longer but it’s hard for me to reconstruct now, I was so overcome by remorse and so addled by feelings of desolation.

“I need you to think about it,” she said, and I saw tears in her eyes but they were in mine, too. She touched me once on the cheek which almost melted me away and then she went into the hall to leave me standing there like a deer in a dozen headlights, a dear in a searchlight, a deer facing the fireball of the Bikini bomb.

And then Carrie drifted up and I was so numb I didn’t even care.

“‘I’m sorry,’ is not really a political response,” she said, almost neutrally.

I nodded.

“You should say, ‘I accept the criticism,’” she completed, and really there wasn’t any untoward satisfaction evident on her face.

“I accept the criticism,” I said.

No irony, please. I know it’s fashionable now to dismiss all this as a kind of loony perfectionism, modeled on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—repressive political correctness. (What a horrible term PC has become, as if sympathy for the weak is some kind of ailment! We’ve become a nation of smugness and killers and we no longer even consider siding with the underdog.) I actually agree with the practice of criticism/self-criticism, as we called it, at least to the degree that it makes one more self-aware. Even when it comes, as it often must, in bursts of overreaction. Is it so wrong to try to be sensitive to the pain of others?

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.