In the midst of guilt and angst over my runaway grad-school ego and impending exams, I had to go to court for refusing to leave the office of Jesse Helms, the biggest homophobe in the Senate, until he agreed to resign. If I pled guilty to “demonstrating in a capitol building without a permit,” the “unlawful entry” charge would be dropped. When it was my turn, the judge reminded me that the charge carried a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a five-hundred-dollar fine. I wondered if I could write my dissertation in jail. I had already started collecting subscription information for feminist journals that are “free to women in prison.”
The judge said, “I’ll give you six mo–” then paused and rubbed his head. I think he was playing with me. “No, wait. I’ll sentence you to thirty days. Thirty days, execution suspended.”
Oh my God! I thought, hearing the word “execution.” He can’t do that. I tried to catch my lawyer’s eye. Surely we’re going to appeal this. The judge is obviously insane. He can’t give me the death penalty for civil disobedience. “Execution suspended.” Christ, I’m gonna hang by the neck until dead. “I sentence you to thirty days suspended sentence and six months unsupervised probation.” I finally understood what he was saying.
I’d never been on probation before. I couldn’t get arrested again for six months or I’d automatically go to jail for thirty days, like landing on the wrong square in Monopoly. I would sit in my room listening to the Clash sing “Police on my Back.” If anyone tried to arrest me, I’d have to say, “Excuse me, but you’re fucking up my probation.”
I was tired of living in the crack-and-murder capital. As I lay on the living room floor with my arms over my head while two armed men ran up my street from the local drug dealers’ corner, I thought about where my life had taken me. I was still in America and, while I loved the challenge of literary scholarship, wasn’t sure I wanted to be an academician.
But school helped me maintain my sanity. I never taught two days in a row, and my seminars were in the late afternoons and evenings. I had enough of a gap between responsibilities to recover from nights I couldn’t sleep and times I was too anxious to function. This was crucial for me in managing my symptoms. And for some reason when I’m having a nervous breakdown, I read voraciously.
Being at the university allowed me to have an identity I could live with (“I’m a graduate student, not a mentally ill person who cannot hold down a full-time job”), a purpose (“I’m working on my doctorate and moving forward with my life, not stagnating in mental illness”) and more time to play guitar than I would have had with regular employment. Why didn’t I get a music degree instead? I didn’t want to study music. I just wanted to play it.
The academic lifestyle also gave me the freedom to practice my politics. I burned American flags without worrying about being thrown out of the English department. That wasn’t a violation of my probation yet. I burned flags at Union Station, at the Capitol, at home, and at barbecues. I lit a cigarette on a burning American flag in front of a television news camera at an ACT UP demonstration downtown, standing next to the then-director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Urvashi Vaid. Soon it wasn’t enough, and I feared I’d get a flag-a-day habit.
I burned a flag in the park across the street from the White House in 1991 during a parade to show off weapons from the Persian Gulf War. It was the same year Nirvana released their CD Nevermind. The parade route had to be repaved because the tanks were so heavy they wrecked the road. I think it cost about a million dollars, and they only fixed the street because it went past the government buildings. The thing about Washington, DC is that you can live in the worst housing project slum—gunshots, crack houses, liquor stores, and lottery tickets—and still have an amazing view of the Capitol. At night, it gleams like clean, white bones.
I used to drive over a hill through a drug-and-gang-infested section of New York Avenue and look at the Capitol past the pink neon sign of a very dangerously situated motel. I thought of how Patti Smith had once described the nation’s capital: “It’s the color of fucked.” This was my favorite spot because it epitomized the breach between life in the real world and the federal government. I doubted even Moses could cross that Red Sea.
Sometimes I drove through Capitol Hill to a lesbian dive called The Phase. It could be a beautiful spring day on Capitol Hill, the ritzy, rich-people area behind the Capitol, but in just one block, the carefully manicured rowhouse gardens of daffodils, tulips, crocuses, rhododendrons, and cherry blossoms ended. The brightly lit corner markets and people in expensive coats walking their small dogs were suddenly gone.
The next block was a war zone of gutted crack houses sitting in scraggly patches of black-eyed Susans, the brilliant yellow flowers growing up against cardboard windows. The abundance of liquor stores and shops pushing lottery tickets, the poor person’s version of the American dream, reminded me of the Dead Kennedys song “Kill the Poor.”
The day I burned the American flag at the glorification-of-the-Persian-Gulf-War-and-buried-alive-Iraqi-children parade, there were about ten of us protesting, surrounded by a million white Republicans. I dumped nail polish remover on the flag and dropped a lit match on it. I looked up in time to see a mob of angry white men running toward me. I held out my receipt, screaming, “It’s my property! Burn, baby, burn!” They chased me all the way to the Metro station. Just when I thought they were going to kill me over a four-dollar piece of cloth, they turned back and threw themselves on the flag. You’d think Betsy Ross had sewn it personally.
I’d heard of “suicide by cop” before, someone who gets herself killed on purpose by forcing the police to shoot her in the commission of a crime. I wondered if I’d almost committed “suicide by Republican.”