The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Heartbreak

thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I

never slept with faculty members, only their wives.

4

Music 2

Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for

memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got

a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could

never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was Tales from the Vienna Wods by

Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece

was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even

though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics

at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there

was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my

mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and

smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with Tales were like a drum corps around the shrinking room. Later, cousins told me about their father’s sexual

molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the

youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond

and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he

stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children

when they were very young, including when they were infants

5

Heartbreak

- I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even

though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to

think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in

an infant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .

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Music 3

There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or

college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find

used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My

best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard

Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel

Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear

Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of

screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am

here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey

summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky

and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with

his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a