Yolanda says that all sex workers will receive training in the manual art of their choice, be it auto repair, locksmithing, air conditioning and refrigeration, or computer programming.
At some point they agree that all men are pimps. In theory. Meeting adjourned.
Tania sits on the floor in her panties, topless. She leans against the couch, her legs extended under the scarred coffee table. Her paint-spattered clothes are piled on the floor. She feels grimy, bone tired: two units today, at a complex up in Diamond Heights, a mixed neighborhood as they say, with black families trudging home from the Safeway, laden with grocery bags, beneath clean modern houses built into the bluffs overlooking the city. She’d felt safe enough venturing out, but the landlord, a friendly old guy with a limp, someone’s good grampa, had brought them lunch and then stuck around to argue good-naturedly with Roger, Giants versus Dodgers stuff, so she’d withdrawn from sight, actually putting in a day’s work, finishing off the first unit in the hot bare sun streaming through the western windows and then doing the hated bathroom of the second. In a daze of ennui and fatigue, she sits holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a paperback book in the other, staring blankly at one smudge among many on the wall.
The book is The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents. Teko found it while prowling around Moe’s — a stupid move, his going there; Tania doesn’t even want to know if he pocketed it — and he presented it to her casually one day, almost like a joke, after Tania had mentioned offhandedly that she wanted children eventually.
“This here’s like the Soviet Dr. Spock,” he said.
As she might have known, whereas someone normal might expect a thank-you note, what Teko requires is a full report on A. S. Makarenko’s tome, and she has barely cracked its spine.
Makarenko says, “Such parents never command discipline. Their children are simply afraid of them and try to live out of range of their authority and power.”
Fuck Teko. She gets up and walks into the dark kitchen to drink cold milk out of the container, standing in the light of the fridge.
She returns to the living room and flips on the Philco, stands watching, right hip jutting out and her weight resting on her left leg, as the old set warms and the image spreads gradually across the surface of the picture tube. And here’s the Miss Universe pageant. The girls strut their stuff down the runway in the ballroom of the National Gymnasium in San Salvador, each of these hardworking beauty queens appearing in what Tania gathers is traditional native garb. Misses Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay. Bob Barker’s narration of the procession skillfully combines both veiled lecherousness and false reverence for the honored customs each elaborate outfit represents. “Miss USA,” he announces casually But wait. The pretty brunette sauntering across the screen appears to be wearing combat fatigues, a beret, and an automatic rifle. She arrives at the edge of the stage, like all the milkmaids, priestesses, and native dancers going before her, and, flashing a gorgeous smile to acknowledge the sustained applause that has greeted her appearance, lifts the weapon to her hip, and trains it on the members of the audience, swinging slowly to the right and then to the left, as she might if she were to clear the room, firing full auto.
Tania watches the pageant until the end. Miss USA ends up coming in third, behind the first runner-up, Miss Haiti, and the winner, Miss Finland. She is named Miss Photogenic, having tied with Martha Echeverry of Colombia for the honor.
They’re sitting in traffic one day, Teko and Jeff up front, Tania and Susan in back, the car like an oven, when Jeff and Teko begin to argue, then fight. They slap and shove each other across the sticky front seat, breathing hard, pausing for a moment so that Teko can throw the car into park. They struggle, aiming shots carefully across the short distance separating them, covering up, panting in the swelter, in the blare of horns.
More movies:
She sees Dark Star (isolated outer space explorers become bored, cynical, and out of touch with the original purpose of their mission, living only to wreak violence while arguing endlessly among themselves).
She sees The Stepford Wives (women who resist the stifling conformity demanded by their small town and the patriarchal group that runs it are replaced with compliant replicas).
Jeff Wolfritz brings an old friend around, a white man doing grad work in Afro-American Studies at Berkeley, the idea being for them to submit themselves to the guy’s scrutiny, become the subject of his fieldwork. But the man is perplexed and piqued. Where are my black people? he demands. The answer is, Hang on, any minute now. We’re doing the best we can.1
After going early one morning to firebomb the house of the day’s fascist, a construction company executive (the bombs, which explode at dawn, destroy a small greenhouse and kill a cat), Tania and Roger take a drive down Highway 1. It’s a brilliant day, the ocean sparkling below them, and they stop at Montara, sit on rocks overlooking the tidal pools, hold hands. Sweet Roger. A group of children, bundled up in sweatshirts and windbreakers, plays on the beach. Their parents, huddled on wind-ruffled blankets, watch benignly as the children pretend to shoot one another and to be shot, rolling on the sand in extravagantly enacted death throes. One of the kids, fresh out of murder victims, rushes up to them.
“Pougghhhh!” he says, pointing a reasonable facsimile of a snubnose revolver at them.
“Pow!” says Roger, who carries an automatic concealed in a camera case.
“You’re dead,” says the boy. There’s no heat to the remark, only a simple statement of fact. He stares at Roger, the snubnose held at his side, and Roger obliges him by toppling over into the sand.
“You killed him!” says Tania. She kneels and turns Roger over. He doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t crack a smile. A thin dusting of sand coats his cheek and lips. “You’ve killed my husband!” She takes a crack at keening.
The boy, alert to the wit involved, cautious about becoming the butt of the joke, takes a wary step forward to examine Roger’s immobile form up close. This is something you want to check out. Tania recalls the childish thrill of playing so hard, pretending something so intensely, that you just about believe it if all the cards fall right, if everybody cooperates, your stupid friends don’t mess it up, call time, screw you out of the climax that is your due. Here comes the kid’s mom, looking halfway curious, halfway concerned.
“What’s going on here? Michael?”
She’s about thirty-two, wears black toreador pants greenish with age, a San Jose State sweatshirt, and sunglasses. Her hair is tied back in a scarf. She sips something from a Styrofoam cup.
“Don’t bother this man and lady,” she says.
Roger opens his eyes and sits up, brushing sand from his face. “It’s OK. We were just—”
“He was dead!” the boy screams, outraged at Roger’s resurrection. “You’re dead! I killed you!”
He runs to join the other kids in his group.
“I’m sorry,” the mother says. “I don’t want him to play with guns, but he wouldn’t let up. The others. Look at them all! I’m so sorry.” She seems as distressed as if Roger really had been shot.
“It’s OK,” says Roger.
“It really isn’t,” she says.
“I didn’t mind.”
“It’s not OK.” She says it sharply this time and leaves.
Blowing things up becomes just another job. A routine is established. A workaday mood prevails. Owing to her past experience with Willie Clay’s Revolutionary Army, Joan is drafted as explosives expert. She’s a little rusty. Some of her bombs blow up; some don’t.