The Professor and Other Writings (27 page)

Ah—the psychopathology of everyday life:

I frequently consulted the I Ching for guidance but got the same result, Jian, or Hexagram 39, over and over again. This singularly dreary conglomerate of yin and yang—or so Wikipedia now informs me (I long ago forgot whatever I once knew about any of it)—signifies “LIMPING”—with “other variations being ‘obstruction' and ‘afoot.'” “Its inner trigram is
bound=mountain
”—the Wikster continues, “and its outer trigram is
gorge=water
.” Hardly a prediction of fun and frolic. I had yet to visit the scenic campus of Cornell University in hilly upstate New York: but might I, even then, have nonetheless been familiar with the concept of
gorging out
—throwing oneself into one of the famous local abysses? Hard to say, but it's possible.

Of course, I wasn't totally inert in the face of depression; I'm sitting here today, after all, perky and plummy, like the proof in the pudding. And it's true: I made various attempts to find extramural activities in those first months that I thought might help to ground me in my new life. Music was, as always, a mood elevator. True, it was difficult to listen to records from my recent West
Coast past: Alix D.'s
Lavender Jane Loves Women
must have migrated into my Records-I-Never-Play-but-Can't-Bear-to-Throw-Out Pile somewhere around this time. Other music from the spring before (Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Nyro, and a shameful yet ravishing item called
Puccini's Greatest Hits
full of very, very early, pre-obese Pavarotti, recorded just after he'd given up professional football and sang like a hunky angel) was too fraught with reminders of Karen. (She used to sing “Vissi d'arte” every morning in a tiny but perfectly pitched soprano.) I needed, I knew, to lay down some new associations—start building up a soundtrack for the
vita nuova
. The McGarrigles' debut album—later to be the Professor's ill-omened birthday present—was one pleasing early purchase: I adored Anna's spectral, superb, Emily-Dickinson-on-Vicodin version of “Heart Like a Wheel” especially. I'd also found some good budget reissues in the local record store: a
Rigoletto
from the 1950s with Kraus, Merrill, Moffo; Bach cello sonatas; Schubert's C Major String Quintet. Who knew that soon enough the last mentioned would prove more sinister than inspiriting? It still hurts to listen to it. You can almost
hear
the syphilis pinging in the notes, the bacterial catastrophe.

Thanks to Elsbet, country-western music—mainly associated in my mind up till then with Turk, his gambling-addict first wife (the one who dropped dead), and his hillbilly in-laws in Ohio, “Mammy and Pappy Root” (Root pronounced always to rhyme with
mutt
)—became a new enthusiasm and source of campy delight. Elsbet had recently seen Waylon Jennings in concert and did a marvelous satiric impression of him—ramrod-stiff, guitar thrust forward, whamming and bamming through his pile-driver theme-tune, “Are You Ready for the Country?” (No one could accuse Waylon of too many lilting or samba-like polyrhythms.) I got the LP of the same name and was enchanted, both by the honkin' bar-band sound and Waylon's scary-skanky machismo: the greasy black leather “Outlaw” hat, huge belt
buckles, the ugly-wispy Hells Angels beard. Morbidly fascinating, too: how one freezing winter night in 1959, just after he'd been hired as Buddy Holly's new bass player, Jennings had narrowly escaped death by foregoing his seat on the doomed chartered Beechcraft that was to take Holly and his fellow musicians to the next stop on their Midwestern concert tour. Hung over from partying, Waylon elected to stay behind and take the bus the next day; Holly, Ritchie “La Bamba” Valens, and the “Big Bopper” all died when the tiny airplane subsequently crashed in a snowfield in Iowa. Chillingly, several pilots in the vicinity of the crash that starry, starry night reported briefly picking up a faint and quavery chorus of “Nearer My God to Thee” on their cockpit radios.

But the lady singers were the big draw for me—Tammy, Patsy, Kitty, Loretta, and most of all Dolly Parton, just then beginning to parlay a huge musical talent and engaging personality (not to mention Daisy Mae–like bazoombas) into glorious worldwide fame. “Jolene”—her masterpiece—led off my first and still-favorite Parton record,
The Best of Dolly Parton
(1975), and to this day I still find the skittery, throbbing, furiously up-tempo minor-chord guitar vamp at the start of the song the most enthralling opening gambit in all of recorded music. Yes, better than the Prologue to
Das Rheingold
, Furtwängler conducting. Nor was the potent Sapphic depth-charge in Dolly's lyrics lost on me. When the overwrought speaker, terrified that the rapacious Jolene will poach her man, veers off into a lofting, near-hysterical paean to her rival's attractions—

—you didn't need to be one of the Ladies of Llangollen to figure out the supersexy subtext:
Dolly is really into this gal!
The eerie mountain fiddle soaring up behind Parton was yet another dizzying lamia-touch.

A few months later—the night the Professor and I began our affair, in fact—I remember how we listened to this song and laughed at the album's awe-inspiring back cover photo: a full-length picture of Dolly, in red bell-bottoms and a low-cut sequin-studded top so tight, sharp-angled, and geometrically enhanced she resembled a sort of freakishly endowed Demoiselle of Avignon. The stupendous Dolly bosoms—here pointing up and out like a pair of massive triangular battering rams—were so stylized and Brobdingnagian, they seemed indeed to inhabit their own perspectival system, one different, volumetrically speaking, from the one in which the rest of her was located. Confronting this alarming cleavage, the Professor had grinned and mugged and feigned girlish fright, then given me one of her lewd-yet-charming signature smiles.
God,
said she,
I wouldn't want to bump into
THAT
from any angle!
Our eyes locked and it was fantastic.

Of course, even in my new and unfamiliar milieu, I had hardly abandoned my radical politics or the ongoing Struggle Against Patriarchy. Were said patriarchal structures to be eradicated, I figured, it might make it easier for me to find a girlfriend. I was still pretty psyched about it, in fact. I continued to follow the more inflammatory feminist publications—
Off Our Backs, Heresies,
and the like—though, it was true, I often ended up devoting most of my time to the personals ads, sparse and uninviting though they usually were. But I also knew that I needed to make contact pronto with the local version of what was often referred to, in those pious-pawky days, as the “Women's Community.” (The “Wimmin's Community,” I guess I should say: as certain readers may recall, in the hardline lesbian-feminist subculture of the 1970s, the words
woman
and
women
were frequently spelled in new and eccentric ways for sanitary reasons—anything to avoid the odious suffix “-man” or “-men.” Thus
womyn
,
wimmin
,
womon
,
wymmin
, and like oddities.) So eager was I to meet new
wimmin-lovin' wimmin
—or even just some
womyn-lovin' womyn
—one didn't need a Ouija board to figure out that I would fling myself forthwith into the world of regional Amazonia.

And despite my poor track record in the love-and-romance department, I was quite gormlessly optimistic—rather like a young hero in Balzac or Flaubert, just arrived in Paris from the provinces and eager to attend his first salon. The city in which I now resided was undoubtedly bigger and less backward than the small town in which I had gone to college; and given what appeared to be a sizeable “Women's Community,” seemed likely to offer a cornucopia of new social and erotic possibilities. There was a women's bookstore (later to become famous in lesbian circles as the model for “Madwimmin Books” in Alison Bechdel's satirical comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For
); a newly established “Lesbian Resource Center” in a nice, leafy suburb; a feminist health-food co-op with women-owned bakery attached
(yum! carob brownies that taste like cardboard!
); and last but not least,
Your Mama Wears Army Boots
—the community's flimsily stapled, ardently revolutionary, cosmically silly literary magazine.

It did not take long, however, for a certain disillusionment to set in. My initial foray—to a weekly support group at the new Lesbian Resource Center—was hardly inspiriting. The first meeting I attended was a sort of one-woman bitchfest in which a strange monomaniacal lady (not even a lesbian, it seemed) described at length the various atrocities committed against her by her ex-husband and numerous trashy boyfriends. (
He made me strip and crawl round the house wearing a dish rack on my head!
) She looked just like one of Charcot's bug-eyed patients: you could see places on her temples where primitive electrical probes might be connected. Not much for anyone else
to do but endure the dramatic monologue and cluck in bewildered sympathy. Sisterhood was Powerful but in this case the Sisters were at a loss.

Perhaps because of the maniacal lady—though she never came back—subsequent sessions followed a less “talky” format and focused instead on 1970s encounter group–style activities: humming together while lying on the floor, visualizing pleasant ambles on some idyllic tropical beach, meditating about the place we felt “safest,” that sort of thing. At the last meeting I remember attending, the frizzy-haired woman who “facilitated” the weekly session had us do a Fruit Ritual. The latter began alarmingly enough: she gave us each an orange out of a big brown shopping bag and told us to spend ten minutes getting to “know” our orange as
fully as possible
without peeling or consuming it.
Look at it, sniff it, touch it, roll it around in your hand!
—she exhorted.
Feel its skin! Touch its navel! Make sweet sweet love to your fruit!
Thankfully, one wasn't required to put said orange up to one's ear to hear if it was saying anything. Mine was no doubt screaming with rage—in a tiny yet shrill citrus-voice—if only at being forced to take part in such a farcical ordeal.

After ten minutes, in a surprising interpersonal twist, we had to choose another member of the group and present our orange to her as a sort of woman-woman love-gift. Each of us had formed an
intimate bond
with our fruit; now, it seemed, we would
share the feeling.
This part of the activity was a horror story straight out of junior high school.
Would the “cool” girl across the room give you her orange? Would you hold yours out to the attractive lady with the buzz cut, only to have her spurn the tenderly proffered offering?
Nor was that the end of it, either. Having selected your partner—that is to say, having flung yourself in desperation on some equally unpopular, still-unchosen member of the group—you were then obliged to stand there, open-mouthed and arms hanging loose at your sides, while she fed you her orange piece by piece. The roles—natch—were then reversed and you did
the same for her. (I have no memory of my partner in these higher primate-like exchanges, having clearly suffered PTSD as a result of the whole experience.) Such inanity combined with sadism was too disagreeable even for me and I hightailed it out of there shortly afterwards.

My second letdown, alas, had to do with
Your Mama Wears Army Boots
. Because I wrote poetry, I'd hoped to get involved in the magazine and so had volunteered my eager services. Yet the small collective of women who put the thing together—five or six flannel-shirted, incorrigibly middle-class young women, all of whom bore self-perpetrated names like Artemis Longstocking, Sarah Margaret-child, and Pokey Donnerparty—was rather less dynamic, creatively speaking, than one might have hoped. The ringleader was an off-putting gal in army fatigues named Labyris. (Labyris Snakegoddess was her striking
nom de plume
.) She was not especially bright, and though still only twenty-three or twenty-four, so dogmatic on the topic of female oppression as to seem brainwashed—as if she'd been abducted by Sapphic aliens and programmed with phrases from the Redstocking Manifesto. Her small talk was a bizarre mishmash of matriarchal fantasy and Pol Pot—evocative indeed of those edicts and prohibitions one found so often laid down in the lesbian radical press and at consciousness-raising sessions: