That Takes Ovaries! (30 page)

“Barricade the apartment door. Don’t let him back in. We’re on our way,” I said.

Sue and I drove to my sister’s apartment, where we saw a struggle had taken place. Her always immaculate home looked like a hurricane had touched down.

“Where are the children?” I asked.

Three little heads came up from behind the overturned couch where they were hiding. “Hi, Aunt Judy. Hi, Aunt Sue,” they said. The relief on their faces fueled our rage.

“Where’s Mike?” I was boiling now.
This had gone on long enough.

“Probably at one of the bars,” Sis said.

We nodded and handed her a baseball bat for protection.

Sue and I started cruising the parking lots of neighborhood dives. We discussed possible ways to confront Mike to stop this madness, but dealing with an alcoholic rarely allows reason as an option. We came to the conclusion that we’d have to be prepared for anything. As someone who came from generations of alcoholics, I knew violence was only one swig of liquor away.

At the second bar, we spotted Mike’s pickup truck. Adrenaline began seeping from my every pore. We discussed disabling his vehicle so he couldn’t leave before we “chatted him up.” Our first idea was to remove the distributor cap. No good: the hood
was chained and padlocked. (What does that tell you about Mike?) Plan B: Flatten a tire.

“Do you have your pocketknife?” Sue asked, rhetorically.

My knife is like the credit card in that commercial; I don’t leave home without it. She leaned down and stuck the blade in up to the handle. I didn’t know if the tire would explode or what, but it went so smoothly, we decided to puncture another.

“I’m cutting the tires high up on the whitewall, so they can’t be fixed,” Sue explained.

Nice touch.
How do I love thee, my woman? Let me count the ways …

Next, we peered inside the bar’s glass front door and immediately saw Mike in the foyer talking on the pay phone. When Sue pulled the door open, we heard him yelling at my sister. He was threatening to hurt her and the children again!

From there on it was like watching a surreal movie. Sue looked as if she was walking in slow motion as she crossed the floor in three long strides. Her arms lifted up and she wrapped both hands around Mike’s throat. The phone receiver dropped and swung back and forth like a pendulum. Without loosening her grip on his neck, Sue began beating his head against the plate-glass window. With each slam she said, “How do
you
like it? How do
you
like it?” His tongue had little trouble touching the bottom of his chin. His eyes looked like twin eight balls racked—and still she didn’t stop. In all our years together, I’d never seen her like this.

God, she’s gonna kill him,
I thought.

My plan of staying outside ended. I couldn’t allow her to get into trouble because of him.

When I loosened her hold, he was barely able to stand. He wobbled around, feeling for a bar stool to sit on. As if nothing was happening, his compadres continued their drinking. The woman tending bar, on the other hand, came out yelling, “I called the police!” I told her what had inspired the incident, but she didn’t care. “Out. Now.” She pointed to the door.

The pause gave Mike enough time to catch his breath and
regain his boozy bravado. He started making threats. He had nearly been killed, and yet he still acted as if he had won.

Without thinking, I walked over and stuck my forefinger in under his sternum. “Your days of tormenting my sister and her children are over. I’m going to cut your f
^***
ing heart out.”

The way his face froze, he must have thought my finger was my knife. Maybe the bartender did, too. She kept yelling, “The police are on their way! The police are on their way!”

And they were; we heard the faint wail of sirens. “Time to go,” I said. We exited the bar and ran to our car. As we pulled out, the police pulled in—parking in the same spot we had vacated. They must have seen us leaving and not given it a second thought:
Two women. Nothing important. Gotta hurry and stop the bullies beating up the guy inside.

Later that night, while we were reviewing the bar scene with my sister, Mike called.

“Come pack up your crap and vacate the apartment,” I told him. He did.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of Mike. He made another appearance six months later, insisting on moving back in. Sis simply had to pick up the phone, and Sue and I arrived within minutes. Once again, we escorted him and his belongings outside. As I stood in the open doorway to make sure he left, he swaggered to his truck, pulled a.12-gauge shotgun out of the gun rack, and laid it on the seat. Was it meant for my sister, or for me? It didn’t matter. I stood my ground, figuring if necessary I’d fall backward into the apartment before he could get a shot off. Luckily for all of us, Mike just left and never came back. He finally understood: The Dyke Disposal Unit (DDU) need only hear the plea of a woman in trouble before they’d be there on the double.

I was at a restaurant bar with two girlfriends when a man approached us. It took only three seconds before he started acting like a jerk. When he then asked if he could buy me a drink, I said, “No, but could I have the money instead?”

That did the trick; he fled quickly.

Women lazed across multicolored blankets dotting the grass, passing jugs of Kool-Aid and listening to the band play “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I had expected frightened, upset people, but this looked like a summer camp sleepover.

I glanced sideways at my boyfriend, Kevin (who was discreetly checking out other women), before spotting Stella under the
Mad-at-Dad
banner. “Seen anyone from group?” I asked her. The night before we’d tried to talk members of our incest survivors’ support group into coming to this Father’s Day rally.

“No, just us.”

A middle-aged woman took the podium. She began reading the names of women and girls killed by husbands, boyfriends, and fathers.
Mary Jane Doe: Ex-husband stalked her for six months before shooting her outside the Laundromat. Lucy Jane Doe: Boyfriend beat her to death after burning his mouth on the dinner she’d served him. Baby Jane Doe: Father slammed her head against the rails of her crib, dead before she even had a name.
Nancy Jane Doe. Sally Jane Doe. The list went on.

“I have to go meet Judy,” Kevin announced suddenly. Judy was Kevin’s old girlfriend. He was seeing more of her lately.

“Okay then,” I said, too quickly. “See you later.”

“Do you suppose he’s screwing her?” Stella asked after he was out of earshot.

I hesitated, ran my hand over the grass. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

Women lined up at the gazebo. One by one, they walked to the microphone to broadcast the names of men who had violated them, sometimes saying what the men did. As Stella and I took our places in line, a large brick lay heavy in my stomach.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Stella whispered.
“They
did.”

I went first, reciting the names.
My father—molested me. My brother— molested me. My therapist—molested me.
I was sick of protecting them and not myself. Then it was Stella’s turn. She reached for my hand.
My brother—molested me. My teacher—molested me.

My legs wobbled as we walked from the podium. The line of incest survivors stretched around the gazebo, twice. After we sat back down, two women moved from blanket to blanket spreading the word. “Stick around after the rally,” they whispered. “We’re planning an action.”

Fifteen minutes later, a small crowd gathered behind the gazebo. “Okay, listen up,” said a short, muscular woman, with curly blond hair. She looked like a high-school basketball coach, without the whistle. “We’re marching to the Red Light District to occupy one of the porn shops.”

I felt my face turn red. My father had brought me to the District when I was fifteen. I hadn’t been back since.

“Wait. Why?” someone asked.

“Because we’re sick and tired of being victims.”

“What do you want to accomplish?”

“Personally,” the woman said, “I want to see what they have to say to a hundred angry women.”

A laugh rose in my throat. These women weren’t afraid of anything.

“I’m going,” Stella whispered. “Are you?”

The group set off, chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho—pornography has got to go!” We sounded like a pack of demented cheerleaders, and it felt good. We numbered about fifty but it seemed as if we were thousands stomping down Washington Street. We stopped in front of the Nasty Girl Bookstore. A husky, middleaged man grinned at us through the plate-glass window. Our chant was angry: “Pornography has got to go!”

“F
^***
off,” he mouthed to us.

Across the street, in front of the Pussy Cat Theatre, a woman in a halter-top and spandex skirt watched. She was smoking a cigarette and smiling. XXX, the marquee behind her read. LIVE SEX ACTS. “You go, girls,” she shouted. “You just go.”

Just then something clicked in my head—and I was ready. I was finally ready. The front door to the Nasty Girl Bookstore swung open. Fifty women piled in and crammed themselves between four narrow aisles. As I was propelled forward by the crush of the crowd, I thought in slow motion:
The Nasty Girl Magazine Shop for Perverts and Pigs.

That’s when a shelf of magazines came crashing to the floor. There was a whoop of joy as the unspoken message traveled through the shop:
We’re going to close the Nasty Girl.
Another shelf was shoved over and two women jumped up and down on it. Magazines were ripped from their plastic sleeves and pieces of paper flew through the air. Bits of women’s bodies—breasts, crotches, backsides—were torn, thrown, and trampled on.
I F
^***
ed My Cousin,
one magazine was called.
Horny Coeds
was another. I surveyed the shelves and fixed my gaze on
Daddy’s Little Girl.
On the front was a blond child, her hair in pigtails, an
oversized lollipop resting on her lips. She was fully made up and no more than five years old.

I clenched my teeth, tore the magazine in half, and tossed it into the air with the others.

I began to laugh, nervously. I had never done anything illegal before. Now, for sure, I was breaking the law and would have to pay. Perhaps my father was right—maybe
I would
go to jail for telling other people about what we did in secret.

There was a loud crash in the front of the store. I looked up to see the coach wielding a chair. She lifted it over her head and brought it down on top of a display case filled with handcuffs, hoods, and pacifiers shaped like little penises. For an instant, I felt pride.

“Look at this crap,” she shouted, holding a fistful of pacifiers over her head.

Behind her, the shop owner, face twisted in anger, reached for a whip tacked to the wall.

“Watch out,” I shouted, hearing my own voice echo in my chest.

The coach turned quickly and grabbed the whip. The two struggled, but she won. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pocketknife, cut the whip in pieces and let it fall to the ground. The floor was already littered with penis pacifiers, and the crowd crushed them under their shoes. The handcuffs were then taken outside and dropped in the sewer. There. We were done at the Nasty Girl. Not a single magazine was salvageable. It had taken only five minutes.

Above the din, I heard sirens. “Split up,” the coach yelled. “Go in different directions.”