120
True Grit
Becoming a feminist - seeing women through the prism of
feminism - meant changing and developing a new stance. For
instance, I hate prisons, but the process of becoming a feminist made me face the fact that I thought some people should be in jail. Years later, after watching rapists and batterers go free
almost al the time, my pacifism would collapse like a glass
tower, leaving me with jagged cuts everywhere inside and out
and half-buried as well. I began to believe that the bad guys
should be executed - not by the state but by the victim, if she
desired, one shot to the head.
When I was still a baby feminist (this being the lingo of the
movement), I was asked to go and interview a felon named
Tommy Trantino, who had published a book of drawings and
stories called Unlock the Lock. The person who had asked me
to go thought that I could write something about Trantino
that might help to get him out.
I went to Rahway State Prison, a maximum-security prison
in New Jersey. I talked to Trantino in a small, transparent
room, almost al glass. I was surrounded by the prison population, not in lockdown. Trantino had been convicted of killing
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Heartbreak
two cops. I read a lot about him before I went. The same
day on which he had kil ed the cops he had also beaten up a
couple of women.
I asked Trantino al the obvious questions, including “Did
you do it?” His response was that he didn’t remember. Then
I departed from the script. I said that I knew he had been in
jail a long time, but had he heard of the women’s movement
and what did he think of it? Hands in his pants pockets, he
spread his legs wide open and said, “Wel , I'm good with women
and I'm bad with women.” That was enough for me, but ever
the intrepid reporter I said that I had noted that he had beat
up two women on the day of the killings; did he think he
would stil beat up on women if he was out? His answer was
an equivocating no, but I heard yes as clear as church bel s on
a Sunday, and as far as I was concerned he could stay in jail
forever. I didn’t think that this was the right way to think, but
I couldn’t stop thinking it.
I began the Socratic course of discussing the problem with
my friends, stil mostly on the pacifist left. Everyone told me,
in different ways, that I had an obligation to help Trantino get
out: prison was the larger evil. Here I was, virtually overlooking the murders of the two policemen; but he hit those women, and I didn’t think there was anything to suggest that if or
when he was out he wouldn’t hit more women.
One weekend someone took me to a benefit for one of the
pacifist groups. I was so offended by the anti woman lyrics to
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True Grit
a song that I got up and walked out. Someone else did, too.
We reached the pavement at approximately the same time.
“I have a question I'd like to ask you, ” I said to the stranger.
I then presented the Trantino problem, which was really
gnawing at me. “It sounds like you already know what you
want to do, ” he said. Yes, I nodded. “You want him to stay in,
right? ” “Yes, ” I said out loud. The man was John Stoltenberg,
and I've lived with him for nearly twenty-seven years. I called
up the friend who had asked me to write the piece and said I
couldn’t do it. I told her the true reason: the women, not the
police.
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Anita
The same friend asked me to go talk with Anita Hoffman,
whose husband, Abbie, had just gone underground after being
busted for selling cocaine. I had donated some money to
Abbie’s defense fund and said he should just keep running.
I didn’t real y know why I was going to see Anita.
The apartment was small and crowded, distinguished only
by a television set the size of a smal country. Anita’s child with
Abbie, America, was playing. She and I sat on what was her
bed to talk.
She and Abbie had not been together for a while. It was
clear that she was poor. She said that she didn’t know what to
do, that a friend of Abbie’s had offered her work as a prostitute (“escort, ” high end of the line) and was put ing a lot of pressure on her. Abbie’s latest caper had left her destitute. This
guy was a friend of Abbie’s, so he had to be okay, right? She
had thought of doing organizing - poor, single mothers like
herself who had no political power in the system; but real y,
what was wrong with prostituting? She could earn a lot of
money and she was lonely. Honey, I thought, you don’t begin
to know what lonely is.
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Anita
I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especial y
about the dissociation that was essential to doing the deed.
You had to separate your mind from your body. Your consciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body.
No one got through it without having that happen. I also told
her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them
would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day
would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal,
smel y, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that
she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp
her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to
make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the
ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the
first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people
thought that women prostituted in order to get money
for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution
became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only
soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they
took away the pain, physical and mental.
I didn’t see or talk to Anita again after that night, but the
friend who had asked me to go said that Anita had moved to
California and had a job as an editor. I don’t know if Anita
ever tried the prostituting, but if so I helped her get out fast
and if not I helped with that, too. I was lucky to have the
chance to talk with her, and I began to understand that my
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Heartbreak
own experiences could have meaning for other women in
ways that mattered. I began to trust myself more.
126
Prisons
Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense
and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison