The George Putnam Show
“It is this reporters opinion that to destroy a nation, and enemy must begin by destroying the youth of that nation.”
For all my Red Tide activities in the 1970s, I felt like we were swimming against a tide of high school apathy. Listening to my dad’s memories, I felt like nothing cool had happened in L.A. since the sixties; nothing. Bill said that in ’67, when Sergeant Pepper came out, everyone in the whole city took the day off and went to Griffith Park to sing “All You Need is Love,” and drop acid. He told me the story about how his colleague Peter Ladefoged lost his hearing in one ear because of the police beating he endured among 10,000 antiwar protesters in front of the Century City hotel when LBJ came to town.
But by the early 70s, at the height of the United Farm Workers boycott, our band of high school organizers were lucky to get four people to join a picket line in front of a store carrying scab wine— and we were even luckier if company-hired goons from the Hells Angels didn’t show up to stomp us. “Hired” was the operative word. I said to one biker who threw me into the street and made my nose bleed: “Is there anything you’d believe in, if you weren’t being paid?”
At home, I said my dad, “Where did all the people who give a damn go?” and Bill said, “San Francisco. Or they died trying.”
I couldn’t wait to get out of school, and get to someplace real as soon as possible. I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial.
I’d had it with protesting in the rain, invisible to the passing crowd. I was already bitter over public indifference and I was only fifteen. My sole activist feedback at high school consisted of Jewish Defense League-member cheerleaders putting notes in my locker that said things like “Our campus does not need bitches like you tearing down Israel!”— As if I had time to tear down Israel. I was busy tearing down Westwood.
And then, something happened.
The Red Tide got on the news. Not just any news, but the George Putnam newscast, the most right-wing broadcaster in all of Southern California, the fellow who tried to stop a black man, Tom Bradley, from becoming mayor of Los Angeles, because he said that it would “start a Negro revolution from which white citizens would never recover.”
Putnam, like modern-day rightwing TV grifters, had a gift for articulating the fears of his paranoid “John Bircher” tribe. They were afraid of the young people’s revolution. I wanted everything Georgie grimly prophesied to come to pass. I wanted society to be overrun by communists, potheads, and homosexuals! But the leftwing tsunami never arrived.
I didn’t know how Putnam got into broadcasting or Cold War politics. He was a silent-movie star born in the wrong era. You could turn down the volume on his singsong cadence, and still understand every word of his melodramatic performances. He had the grief of Lillian Gish, the grim sorrow of William S. Hart, the eye-popping intensity of Rudy Valentino. He had everything but the humor of Chaplin— Putnam did not have one funny bone in his body.
We heard through a sister who worked at the KTLA television station, that Putnam had gotten a hold of a copy of The Red Tide, and was eager to expose us on the air, Friday night.
We scrutinized our latest issue to see what topic he would target. The cover story was about Nixon invading Cambodia and all his lies and coverups.
We didn’t think the Tricky Dick story would be Putnam’s favorite— he considered Nixon a liberal. Maybe he would go for our story about undercover narcs on high school campuses. Our intrepid photographer Joel Levine had taken surreptitious photos of the LAPD fake “high school seniors” who posed as perfectly groomed Beach Boys, trying to score.
The other suspect might be our history of the FBI’s infiltration of the Black Panthers (by Danny Letwin)— but we thought that might strain Putnam’s reading level.
He would face the same challenge with our exposé on sexism in Driver’s Ed. class. (Written by Gail Mautner and Bonnie Bogan). We’d found an illustration in the student Drivers’ Ed. manual that showed a blonde who couldn't figure out how to get the key into the ignition.
Which story would Georgie pick to illustrate our depravity?
At six o’clock, we got together at our clubhouse— the Letwin brothers’ garage— and Darryl twisted the antenna to make Putnam’s show appear without floating horizontal bars.
Tracey and Tammy argued whether we should be down in front of KTLA’s offices right this minute. Darryl popped a Bud and turned the volume up. Showtime!
George Putnam held up a copy of the latest Red Tide in front of his cameras, so the viewers could see our cover on the screen.
“I have here, before me,” he said, his eyebrows and hair moving with great feeling, “A picture of the most DISGUSTING thing I have ever seen.”
We looked at each other, bewildered.
“I cannot,” he warned, “show this obscenity on television.”
He paused. The suspense was unbearable.
“It is an illustration—” his voice dropped to a baritone, “of a woman’s private parts.”
I grabbed the latest issue out of Tammy’s hands and ripped it open to the last pages. “Oh my god, it’s the IUD story!”
The picture he was referring to was a Gray’s Anatomy-style cross-section of a woman’s vagina and uterus.
“Why?” Putnam raised his eyes to the heavens for an answer, “Why are our children subjected to this kind of filth, this kind of promiscuity, in the schoolroom?”
“Oh man, Uni’s principal is going to have a fit,” Tammy predicted— and it was true, because Putnam was making it look like the school establishment was funding our birth control campaign.
“This rag— if you can call it that,” George said, lowering the paper, “claims to be the work of high school students— yet we know this PORNOGRAPHY is the work of a cynical group of so-called adults who fund and exploit their Communistic, atheist ideologies on our precious children.”
“Why isn't he saying ‘FEMINIST’?” Tammy demanded.
“Because he doesn't know that word,” Tracey said.
“Where’s our fucking cynics to fund us, that's what I want to know,” Darryl said, and opened another Budweiser.
“Our daughters,” Putnam continued, “our daughters cannot defend virtue when godless putridity is flaunted in their face!”
“Okay, I’ve got the headline—” Tammy interrupted: “George Putnam Claims Women’s Vagina Is Most Disgusting Thing He’s Ever Seen.”
“It’s the only one he’s ever seen!” Michael said.
I looked at a couple other faces in the room, and I wondered if that described a few of our young members as well. I knew George Putnam wasn’t a virgin, but some Red Tiders were.
“I think,” Tammy said, “It was the fallopian tubes that did him in.”
“I know George is shocked,” I said, “but this story didn’t even do its job. If we want birth control access for high school students, these stories can’t be so boring and technical, like sex is a valve job. No one we know even reads these.”
I reminded everyone of a short piece I’d written about the essentials of lubrication, the benefits of coconut oil, and how even saliva was better than nothing.
Michael gave me a look. Last time he saw my lube story, he told me he was going to throw up. People were dying in Vietnam and I wanted to talk about lube— how could I?
School went like a slow drip the next day. The same ten people that always watched the news had seen our big “exposé,” but it was like we were in a bomb shelter while everyone else was whistling Dixie.
I was annoyed. I’d rather be on my picket line in the rain, arguing with company goons.
After lunch I went to the gym office, where for some reason I was allowed to use the phone with impunity. Ms. Larsen, the only teacher using “Ms.” on campus so far, was lifting boxes of something onto a rolling cart.
“Here, I’ll help you,” I said, taking one of the loads out of her arms.
“I am not giving you an excuse note for PE today, Susannah.”
“Ms. Larsen, you don’t need to, I’m doing independent study PE now, remember?— I never need a note again.”
She took two boxes to my one and kept stacking. “Hmpf!” —And then, “What do you want this time?”
“Did you see you see the George Putnam show last night?”
“I don’t watch that fat bastard.”
I tried again. “Well, I still want to know if you’re going to give us a permission signature for the self-defense workshops we want to do during girls’ gym. I put the paper on your desk last week and you said you’d think about it.”
The petition was written up by Red Tide women, but we’d given ourselves a respectable name like “High School Women Against Violence Against Women.” Tracy said that name made her dizzy, but I argued it would work. “That’s what the older liberals like. We can’t say, “Pinko Dykes Who Want to Get Their Hands on Your Daughters.”
Ms. Larson made a face at my petition. “Susannah, how many rapes exactly do you think are happening on this campus?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that!” I dropped a box at her feet. “You, of all people, know that those girls crying in the locker room are not telling anyone what goes on, and that’s the whole problem. No one around here reports rape, it would ‘ruin’ their reputation.’”
“What do you mean, me, ‘of all people’?” Ms. Larsen’s face turned beety.
“You’re a feminist—”
“I’m a what?”
“You’re NOT a feminist?— Oh, c’mon!”
“You don't even know what you’re talking about.”
Everyone else acted like Ms. Larsen was some gray-haired stoic, but I felt like I’d been in a bar brawl with her every time we were alone for five minutes.
“Do you know what people think you’re saying, when you say ‘Fem-i-Nist’?” she whispered. Her blue eyes darted at mine.
“I don't know— what do you mean? Who are you talking about?”
She stared at me and we both stopped picking up heavy objects. I felt tears coming up. Why did she have to always break my balls?
I tried again: “Are you trying to get me to say something, like they think I’m a lesbian?”
Ms. Larsen’s head shook back and forth like a tic she couldn’t stop.
“I don't care what they think!” I said, “They’re in the dustbin of history, they’re not what’s going on! What does their prejudice have to do with anything?“
“It has to do with how you are perceived by this administration, the faculty, and the rest of the community. “ She barely moved her lips.
“Well, if they ‘perceive’ me as a dyke, I don’t care,” I said. “I don't care! I mean, I am bisexual.”
Larsen took a step back and held up her hand in front of her eyes. “You can’t talk to me like this, Susannah,” she said, and moved closer to her desk.
“Ms. Larsen, you know things are changing, you don't have to be ashamed anymore.” I leaned against her desk, and hoisted myself to sit on top of it.
It was too much. She grabbed my wrist, and pinched me until it hurt.
“Jesus!”
“You have no bloody idea what shame is.” She didn’t let go. I could count every dark line on her face.
“Ms. Larsen, I do know what shame is—” I yanked, but she had me in a vise. “Shame is a fifteen-year-old girl in the gym locker next to me who’s bleeding from her vagina and won’t tell anyone but me that a varsity player raped her and told her he’d kill her if she ever told anyone.”
She let go of my arm.
“Where’s your fucking piece of paper?”
“You’re standing on it.” It had fallen off her desk, but I could recognize my handwriting on the floor. I picked it up and handed it to her, half-torn. Her eyes were watery. My heart was ready to burst out of my chest.
“You can fix it with some scotch tape,” she said, and pulled a red pen from behind her ear, signing the bottom of it. Her phone rang, like a stage cue, and she turned to answer it, steely as ever: “Coach Larson, what-do-you-want?”
I tried to read her first name on my self-defense petition. Who was my gym teacher, really, and what did she want? Her signature was unreadable, like a little scarlet scar.
Brilliant! Poignant and SO FUNNY!