The Nix(137)
The women sat in a circle—some on folding chairs, some leaning against the wall. White girls and black girls all wearing sunglasses and army jackets and combat boots. Faye sat down behind Alice and listened to the woman presently talking.
“You slap him,” she said, a finger pointed into the air, “you bite him, you scream as loud as you can and when you do you scream fire. You break his kneecaps. Box his ears to pop his eardrums. Stiffen your fingers and jab his eyes out. Be creative. Ram his nose into his brain. Your keys and knitting needles can be weapons if held tightly. Find a nearby rock and bash his head in. If you know kung fu, use your kung fu. It goes without saying that you should be kneeing him in the groin repeatedly”—and women in the circle nodded, clapped, encouraged the speaker with oh yeahs and right ons—“knee him in the groin and yell, You are not a man! Break his will. Men attack you because they think they can. Knee him in the groin and yell, You cannot do this! Don’t rely on other men to help you. Every man in his heart wants you to be raped. Because it confirms your need for his protection. Armchair rapists, that’s what they are.” And Alice shouted “Hell yeah!” and other women whooped and Faye didn’t know how to compose herself. She felt stiff and nervous, and she looked around at the women and tried to enact their casually bad posture while the speaker wrapped it up: “Since men have their potency and masculinity vicariously confirmed through rape, they will never do anything to stop it. Unless we force them to. So I say we take a stand. No more husbands. No more weddings. No more children. Not until rape is extinguished. Once and for all. A total reproductive boycott! We will grind civilization to a halt.” And to this the woman got great applause, the others standing and patting her on the back, and Faye was about to join the ovation when from a far dark corner of the room came a loud gnashing of metal. Everyone turned to look, and that’s when Faye saw him for the first time.
His name was Sebastian. He wore a white apron covered in pitch, smudged gray where he’d rubbed his hands, his shaggy bowl of black hair flopping in front of his eyes as he looked back sheepishly at the group and said, “Sorry!” He stood behind a machine that seemed built like a train—all black cast metal, shining with oil, silver spindles and toothy gears. The machine hummed and vibrated, the occasional tock of metal falling down chutes somewhere in its innards, like pennies dropped onto a table. The man—he was young, olive-skinned, a hangdog look—pulled a sheet of paper from the machine and Faye realized the contraption was a printing press, the sheet a copy of the Free Voice. Alice called out to him: “Hey, Sebastian! What’s cooking?”
“Tomorrow’s edition,” he said, smiling, turning the paper to the light.
“What’s in it?”
“Letters to the editor. I had a stockpile.”
“Are they good?”
“They’ll blow your mind,” he said, loading more paper onto the bed of the machine. “Sorry. Act normal. I’m not even here.”
And so everyone turned back and the meeting began again, but Faye kept watching Sebastian. How he fiddled with knobs and cranks, how he lowered the head of the machine to smash ink onto the paper, how he pressed his lips together in concentration, how the collar on his white shirt had been stained a deep, dark green, and she was thinking about how he looked like some beautifully sloppy mad scientist and how she felt connected to him in the way outsiders feel a certain kinship with each other when she heard someone in the group say something about orgasms. Faye turned to see who was speaking—tall woman, blond hair like a waterfall down to her back, a string of beads around her neck, a bright red shirt with a deep neckline. She was leaning forward and asking about orgasms. Can you have them only in one position? Faye could not believe she’d said such a thing with a boy in the room. Behind them, his machine punched at paper, throbbing like a heartbeat. Someone suggested that you could have orgasms in two and perhaps as many as three positions. Someone else said the orgasm was a fiction. It was invented by doctors to make us feel ashamed. Ashamed of what? That we don’t have them like boys do. People nodded at this. They moved on.
It was suggested you could orgasm on weed, and sometimes acid, but almost never on heroin. Someone said sex on the natch was best anyway. One woman’s boyfriend couldn’t have sex unless he was drunk. Another woman’s boyfriend had recently asked her to douche. There was a boyfriend who, after sex, spent an hour cleaning the bedroom with a mop and germicide. There was another boyfriend who named his dick Mr. Rumpy-Pumpy. Another only wanted blow jobs until marriage.
“Free love!” someone said, and everyone laughed.
Because despite what the newspapers said, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of free-love writing, when free love was widely condemned, rarely practiced, and terrifically marketed. Photos of topless women dancing in public in Berkeley were greatly criticized and distributed. News of the oral-sex scandal at Yale reached every bedroom in the country. Everyone had heard of the Barnard girl who was living with a boy she wasn’t even married to. The imagination was seized by the pelvic regions of university girls—stories of once-chaste daughters turned to deviants in only one semester. Magazine articles condemned masturbation, the FBI warned against clitoral orgasm, and Congress investigated the dangers of fellatio. Never before had the authorities been so remarkably explicit. Mothers were taught the warning signs of sex addiction, kids were counseled against criminal and soul-destroying pleasure. Police flew helicopters over beaches to catch bare-breasted women. Life magazine said slutty girls had penis envy and were turning real men into pansies. The New York Times said excessive fornication caused girls to go psychotic. Good middle-class kids were becoming queers, dopers, dropouts, beatniks. It was true. Heard it on Cronkite. Politicians vowed to get tough. They blamed the pill, permissive liberal parents, the climbing divorce rate, raunchy movies, go-go clubs, atheism. People shook their heads, appalled at youth run amuck, and then set out looking for more tawdry stories, found them, and read every word.