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Andrea Dworkin

The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

BOOKS BY ANDREA DWORKIN

Woman Hating

Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

the new woman’s broken heart: short stories

Pornography: Men Pos es ing Women

Right-wing Women

Ice and Fire

Intercourse

Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)

Let ers from a War Zone

Mercy

Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings

On the Continuing War Against Women

In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings

(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)

Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Wrmen’s Liberation

To Ricki Abrams and

Catharine A. MacKinnon

To Ruth and Jackie

Continuum

The Tower Building

11 York Road

London SE1 7NX

www. continuumbooks. com

This edition first published 2006 in the UK by Continuum

Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit ed

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission

from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-8264-9147-2

Typeset by Continuum

Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwal

Je est un autre

Rimbaud

Contents

Preface

Music 1

Music 2

Music 3

The Pedophilic Teacher

“Silent Night”

Plato

The High School Library

The Bookstore

The Fight

The Bomb

Cuba 1

David Smith

Contraception

Young Americans for Freedom

Cuba 2

The Grand Jury

The Orient Express

Easter

Knossos

Heartbreak

Kazantzakis

Discipline

The Freighter

Strategy

Suf er the Little Children

Theory

The Vow

My Last Leftist Meeting

100

Petra Kel y

104

Capitalist Pig

108

One Woman

112

It Takes a Vil age

117

True Grit

121

Anita

124

Prisons

127

Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

130

The Women

136

Counting

139

Heartbreak

145

Basics

148

Immoral

155

Memory

158

Acknowledgments

164

Preface

I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am

myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to

give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be

couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious

they rival the injuries of organized war.

A woman writer makes herself conspicuous by publishing,

not by writing. Although one could argue - and I would -

that publishing is essential to the development of the writing

itself, there will be exceptions. After al , suppose Max Brod had

burned Kafka’s work as Kafka had wanted? The private writer,

which Kafka was, must be more common among women than

men: few men have Kafka’s stunning self-loathing, but many

women do; then again, there is the obvious - that the public

domain in which the published work lives has been considered

the male domain. In our day, more women publish but many

more do not, and despite the glut of mediocre and worthless

books published each year just in the United States, there

must be a she-Kafka, or more than one, in hiding somewhere,

just as there must be a she-Proust, whose vanity turned robust

when it came to working over so many years on essentially

Heartbreak

one great book. If the she-Proust were lucky enough to live

long enough and could afford the rewards of a purely aesthetic life, aggressive self-publication and promotion would not necessarily fol ow: her secret masterpiece would be just that -

secret, yet no les a masterpiece. The tree fel ; no one heard it

or ever wil ; it exists.

In our day, a published woman’s reputation, if she is alive,

wil depend on many small conformities - in her writing but

especial y in her life. Does she practice the expression of gender in a good way, which is to say, does she convince, in her person, that she is female down to the very mar ow of her

bones? Her supplications may be modest, but most often they

are not. Her lips wil blaze red even if she is old and gnarled.

It’s a declaration: I won’t hurt you; I am deferential; al those

unpleasant things I said, I didn’t mean one of them. In our

benumbed era, which tries for a semblance of civilized, voluntary order after the morbid, systematic chaos of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao - after Pol Pot and the unspeakable starving of Africa

- it is up to women, as it always has been, to embody the

meaning of civilized life on the scale of one to one, each of

those matchings containing within and underneath rivers running with a historical blood. Women in Western societies now take the following loyalty oath: my veil was made by Revlon,

and I wil not show my face; I believe in free speech, which

includes the buying and selling of my sisters in pornography

and prostitution, but if we cal it ‘trafficking, ” Pm agin it -

Preface

how dare one exploit Third World or foreign or exotic women;

my body is mostly skeleton and if anyone wants to write on

it, they must use the finest brush and write the simplest of

haiku; I have sex, I like sex, I am sex, and while being used

may of end me on principle or concretely, I will fight back by

manipulation and lies but deny it from kindergarten to the

grave; I have no sense of honor and, girls, if there’s one thing

you can count on, you can count on that. If this were not the

common, current practice - if triviality and deceit were not

the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remarkable in who I am or how I got the way that I am.

It must be admit ed that those who want me to account for

myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their

projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or

arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become

accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most

respects but not al I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kil

the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,

alone in a small room.

xi i

Music 1

I studied music when I was a child, the piano as taught by

Mrs. Smith. She was old with white hair. She represented

culture with every gesture while I was just a plebe kid. But I

learned: discipline and patience from Czerny, the way ideas

can move through sound from Bach, how to say “Fuck you”

from Mozart. Mrs. Smith might have thought herself the

reigning sensibility, and she did get between the student and

the music with a stunning regularity, but if you could hear you

could learn and if you learned it in your body you knew it

forever. The fingers were the wells of musical memory, and

they provided a map for the cognitive faculties. I can remember writing out the notes and eventually grasping the nature of the piano, percussive and string, the richness and range of

the sound. I wanted music in writing but not the way Verlaine

did, not in the syllables themselves; anything pronounced

would have sound and most sound is musical; no, in a different

way. I recognized early on how the great classical composers,

but especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without

using any words at al . Repetition, variation, risk, originality,

and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I

Heartbreak

wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems

by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paperback books with the English translations reading like prose poems - and I'd recognize that the power of the poems was

not unlike the power of music. For a while, I hoped to be a

pianist, and my mother took me into Philadelphia, the big

city, to study with someone a great deal more pretentious and

more expensive than Mrs. Smith. But then I tried to master

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for which I had developed a somewhat warped passion, and could not. That failure told me that I could not be a musician, although I continued

to study music in col ege.

The problem with that part of my musical education was

that I stopped playing piano, and Bennington, the college I

went to, insisted that one play an instrument. I didn’t like my

piano teacher, and I wasn’t going to play or spend one minute

of one day with him hovering over my shoulder and condemning me with a baronial English that left my prior teachers in my mind as plain-speaking people. I loved the theory classes. Mine was with the composer Vivian fine. The first

assignment, which was lovely, was to write a piece for salt and

pepper shakers. I wrote music away from the piano for the

piano, but after the first piano lesson I never deigned to darken

the piano teacher’s doorway again. At the end of the year, this

strategy of noncompliance turned out to be the equivalent of

not attending physical education in high school: you couldn’t

Music 1

graduate without having done the awful crap. When my

adviser, also a musician but never a teacher of music to me,

asked me why I hadn’t shown up for any of the piano

lessons, I felt awkward and stupid but I gave him an honest

answer: “I don’t like the asshole. ” My adviser smiled with

one of his this-is-too-good-to-be-true looks - he was amused

- and said he’d take care of it. He must have, or I would not

have passed.

My adviser, the composer Louis Callabro, taught me a lot

about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization

- I’d bring the poems, the short stories, every now and then a

novel. Lou was a drunkard, much more his style than being

an alcoholic. I had met him without knowing it on first

ar iving at Bennington. I loved the old music building and

sort of haunted it. He came out of his studio, pissing drunk,

stared at me, and said, “Never sleep with a man if you want

to be his friend. ” I adored the guy. Eventually I’d show him

my music and he’d show me his short stories. It was a new

version of I’l -show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. I later

understood that the all-girl Bennington’s expectation was that

the girl, the woman, any female student, should learn how to

be the mistress of an artist, not the artist herself: this in the

college that was the early home of Martha Graham. The

equality between Lou and myself, our mutual recognition,

was no part of the school’s agenda. This is not to suggest that

Lou did not screw his students: he did; they al did. I always

Heartbreak

thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I

never slept with faculty members, only their wives.

Music 2

Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for

memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got

a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could

never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was Tales from the Vienna Wods by

Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece

was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even

though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics

at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there

was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my

mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and

smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with Tales were like a drum corps around the shrinking room. Later, cousins told me about their father’s sexual

molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the

youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond

and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he

stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children

when they were very young, including when they were infants

Heartbreak

- I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even

though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to

think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in

an infant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .

Music 3

There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or

college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find

used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My

best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard

Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel

Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear

Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of

screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am

here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey

summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky

and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with

his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a

visceral love of Charlie Parker that I still have, listened to

“K. C. Blues” covers wherever I could find them. When I was

a teen, I also came across Bil ie Holiday, and her voice haunts

me to this day - I can hear it in my head anytime - and with

“Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” she sounded more

Heartbreak

like a blues singer than a jazz woman; but the bulk of her

work, which I heard later, was jazz. It was her voice that was

blues. When her voice wasn’t blues, it meant the heroin had

dragged her way down and she couldn’t go lower. “Strange

Fruit” was worth anything it took from her, and so was “God

Bless the Child. ” I’m not happy with art as necrophilia, but I

think these two songs, and “Strange Fruit” in particular, were

worth her life. They’d be worth mine.

My brother, Mark, and I both had a taste for the Ahmad

Jamal Quartet. I loved the live jazz in the clubs, the informal

jazz I found live in the apartments of various lovers, and I

wanted to hear anyone I was lucky enough to hear about. I

craved jazz music, and the black world was where one found

it. There was a tangle of sex and jazz, black culture and black

male love. There was a Gordian knot made of black men and

Jewish white women in particular. Speaking only for myself,

I wasn’t going to settle in the suburbs, and New York City

meant black, jazz meant black, blues meant black.

Philadelphia, in contrast, had folk music and coffeehouses

with live performers. Most were white. I liked Dave Van Ronk

and in junior high school stole an album of his from a big

Philadelphia department store; or maybe it was just the bearded

white face on the album cover, an archetype egging me on.

My best friend in high school liked the Philly scene with its

scuzzy, mostly failed musicians and its folk music. I'd go with

her when I could because Phil y promised excitement, though

Music 3

it rarely delivered. She and I flirted with a small Bohemia, not

life-threatening, whereas when I was alone in New York City

there was no net. In the environs of Philly I went to hear Joan

Baez, whose voice was splendid, and I listened to folk music

on record, Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot,

who rambled in those days mostly in Philadelphia. These took

me back to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston.

By the time Bob Dylan came along, I was uninterested in the

genre altogether until some friends in college made me sit

down to listen to Dylan soi-meme. Even then, it was his politics that moved me, not his music. That changed. It changed the first time because he was an acquired taste, and after

listening enough I acquired sufficient love of the music-with-

lyric to be one with my generation; and it changed the second

time, years later, maybe decades later, when his mar iage fel

apart and I found out that he had been a batterer. He lost

me. I can’t claim any purity on this, because I’ve never lost

my taste for Miles Davis, and he was a really bad guy to

women, including through battery. So I love ol’ Miles, but I

sure do have trouble put ing any CD of his in the machine. In

Amsterdam I met Ben Webster, but so did any white girl. He

was way past his prime, but he still played his heart out.

I remember the saliva dripping from his lips and the sweat

that blanketed his fat body or the visible parts of it. He’d sit

in the sun in Leidseplein; he always wore a suit; and he’d be

the Pied Piper. I wished he had been Fats Wal er, whom I’ve

Heartbreak

rediscovered on CD. I heard B. B. King in concert a few times

there, and the Band once. I loved B. B., whom I met years

later, and I loved the Band.

But it was Bessie who came to stand for art in my mind. I

found her albums, three for 33 cents, in a bin on Eighth Street

while I was in high school, and once I listened to her I was

never the same. I don’t mean her kick-ass lyrics, though those

are pretty much the only blues lyrics I can still stomach. I

mean her stance. She had at itude on every level and at the

same time a cold artistry, entirely unsentimental. Her detachment equaled her commitment: she was going to sing the song through your corporeality. Unlike smoke, which circled

the body, her song went right through you, and either you

took what you could get of it for the moment the note was

moving inside you or she wasn’t for you and you were a bar ier

she penetrated. Any song she sang was a second-by-second

lesson in the meaning of mortality. The notes came from her

and tramped through your three-dimensional body but graceful y, a spartan, bearlike bal et. I listened to those three albums hundreds of times, and each time I learned more about what

art took from you to make: not love but art.

Before the compact-disc revolution, you couldn’t get good

or even passable albums by Ma Rainey, so she was a taste

deferred, and the brilliant Alberta Hunter came into my life

when I was in college and she was singing at the Cookery in

New York City, a very old black woman with a pianist as her

Music 3

sole accompaniment. I would have done pretty much anything

to hear Big Mama Thornton live, and, of course, for me,

college-aged, Janis Joplin was the top, the best, the risk-taker,

the one who left blood on the stage. When I lived on Crete,

still col ege-aged, Elvis won me with “Heartbreak Hotel. ”

Even now I can’t hear it without the winds from the Aegean

blowing right by me. But when it comes to conveying ideas

without words, jazz triumphs. A U. S. writer without jazz and

blues in her veins must have ice water instead.

The Pedophilic

Teacher

I was lucky enough to have three brilliant teachers in junior

high and high school. The first, in junior high, was Mr. Smith,

who was a political conservative at a time when the word was

not in common usage and not many people, including me,

knew what it meant. He taught English, especially how to

parse and diagram sentences, over and over, so that the structure of the language became embedded in one’s brain and was like gravity - no personal concern yet omnipresent. You could

run your fingers through English the way God could run his

fingers through your hair. He was the Czerny of grammar.

The second was Mr. Belfield, who taught honors American

history. I had him for two years, the eleventh and twelfth

grades. Very lit le at Bennington later was as interesting or as

demanding. He had unspeakably high standards, as befitted

someone who had wanted to be secretary of state. It was wonderful not to be condescended to; not to be simply passing time; not to waste the hours waiting for some minor diversion to make one alert; to have one’s own intellect stretched

The Pedophilic Teacher

until it was about ready to break. He too was a political

conservative and seemed to live a solitary, affectionless life.

But then, I wouldn’t know, would I? And that is exactly right.

There is no reason for any student to know. The line separating student and teacher needs to be drawn, and it’s up to the teacher to do it. The combination of Mr. Belfield’s own

intel ectual rigor and his substantive demands were a total

blessing: he taught me how to write a book. I worked hard in

his class, and I cannot think of any other teacher who was so

authentic and commit ed, whose pedagogy was disinterested

in the best sense, not a toying with the minds of students nor

fucking with their aspirations for bet er or worse: he wanted

heroic work - he demanded it. You might say that he was the

Wagner of American history without the loathsome anti-

Semitism and misshapen ego. Other people accused him of

ar ogance, but I thought he was humble - he was modest to

use his gifts to teach us. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Belfield

ever al owed the deep sleep of mediocrity; neither wanted

narcoleptic students; you couldn’t play either of them for favors,

and they didn’t play you.

The third great teacher was dif erent in substance and in

kind. He liked little girls, especially little Jewish girls. I don’t

mean five-year-olds, although maybe he liked them too. But

he liked us, my two best friends and me. He had sexualized

relationships with the three of us. He played us against each

other: Who was going to get him at the end of the day or

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through his machinations get to skip a class to see him? Who

had spent the most time with him that day? Who had had the

sexiest conversation with him? I thought that he and I were

going to found a school of philosophy together; he would be

the leader and I would be his acolyte. The sexiest thing about

him was the range of his experience, not only concerning sex.

He knew jazz; he introduced me to Sartre and Camus, though

not de Beauvoir, certainly not; he had smoked marijuana and

talked about it; he encouraged identification with bad-boy,

alienated Holden Caulfield and through Holden the wretched

Franny and Zooey; he drew me pictures of al the sex acts,

including oral and anal sex; he printed by hand the names of

the acts and instructed me in how to pursue men, not boys;

he suggested to me that I become a prostitute - as he put it,

it was more interesting than becoming a hairdresser, which

was the one profession in his view open to women of my

social class; he encouraged disobedience in general and

af irmed that I was right to be so disenchanted with and contemptuous of the pukey adults who were my other teachers and to hate and defy al their stupid rules. At the same time,

he was very controlling: my friends and I danced his dance;

he partnered each of us and al of us; he created configurations

of sex and love that manipulated, sexualized, and intensified

our friendships with each other - it was a menage a quatre; he

knew what each of us wanted and there he was dangling it and

if you were part of his sexual delight he’d give you a taste.

The Pedophilic Teacher

We thought that he was the one honest one, the one hip one.

He knew who Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were; where

Tangiers was; the oeuvre of Henry Miller and of Lawrence

Durrell; what the politics of the Algerian War were, especially

as it related to Camus; in fact he had actually been to Paris; he

knew that sometimes, like Socrates, you needed to swallow

the poison and other times, like Che, you needed to use the

barrel of a gun. In other words, he was dazzling. He was the

world outside the prison walls, and escape was my sole desire.

His best trick was giving the three of us passes to get us out

of classes we didn’t like, and we’d get to spend that time with

him learning real stuff: sex stuff or sexy stuff. For instance,

instead of the traditional candy bar, he of ered me writ en

excuses from my mathematics classes, time bet er spent with

him: it’s a wonder I can count to one. He fucked one of us on

graduation night and kept up an emotional y abusive relationship with her for years. I almost commit ed suicide at sixteen because I didn’t think he loved me, though he later assured me

that he did in a hot and heavy phone cal : under his influence

and Salinger’s I had walked out into the ocean prepared to

drown. The waves got up to about chest level when I realized

that the water was fucking cold, and I turned myself around

and got right out of that big, old ocean, though the ocean

itself, not suicide, continues to entrance me. In my heart from

then to this day, I became antisuicide; it took me longer - far

too long - to become antipedophilic.

Heartbreak

I thought Paul Goodman was right when he wrote in

Growing Up Absurd that sex had always been passed on from

adults to children; college-aged, I met Goodman, watched and

experienced some of his cruelty to women, and was bewildered, though I knew I didn’t like the cruelty and I didn’t like him. How could someone write a rebel’s book and be so

mean? To me, that was a formidable mystery. In later years my

friend Judith Malina, who directed a play of Goodman’s

though he taunted her repeatedly by saying women could not

direct, told me about how he slapped her during a therapy

session - he was the therapist. Of course, Goodman was a

pedophile and a misogynist, as was Allen Ginsberg, whom I

met later. I say “of course” because there is a specific kind of

education the pedophilic teacher gives: the education itself is

a seduction, a long, exciting-but-drawn-out coupling, an intellectual y dishonest, soul-rending passion in which the curiosity and adventuresomeness of the younger person is used as the

hook, a cynical use because the younger person needs what

the older provides. It may be at ention or a sense of importance or knowledge denied her or him by other adults. In my case I was Little Eva, and a snake offered knowledge and the

promise of escape from the constriction of a dead world in

which there were no poets or geniuses or visionaries. Al the

girls, after al , were expected to teach, nurse, do hair, or clean

houses, or combinations as if from a Chinese menu. Because

most adults lie to children most of the time, the pedophilic

The Pedophilic Teacher

adult seems to be a truth-tel er, the one adult ready and willing to know the world and not to lie about it. Lordy, lordy, I do still love that piece of shit.

“Silent Night”

It was the sixth grade, I was ten, we had just moved from

Camden to the suburbs, and I wouldn’t sing it: that simple.

They put me alone in a big, empty classroom and let me sweat

it out for a while. Then they sent in a turncoat Jew, a pretty,

gutless teacher, who said that she was Jewish and she sang

“Silent Night" so why didn’t l? It was my first experience with

a female collaborator, or the first one that I remember. They

left me alone in the empty classroom after that. I wasn’t a

religious zealot; I just didn’t like being pushed around, and I

knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and

I knew I wasn’t a Christian and I didn’t worship Jesus. I even

knew that Christians had made something of a habit of killing

Jews, which sealed the deal for me. I was shunned, and one of

my drawings, hung in the hal on a bulletin board, was defaced:

“kike” was written across it. I then had to undergo the excruciating process of get ing some adult to tell me what “kike”

meant. I thought my teachers were fascists in the style of the

Inquisition for wanting me to sing “Silent Night” when they

knew I was Jewish, and I stil think that. What they take from

you in school is eroded slowly, but this was big. I couldn’t

“Silent Night"

understand how they could try to force me. Transparently,

they could and they did. Force, punishment, exile: so much

adult firepower to use against such a little girl. To this day I

think about this confrontation with authority as the “Silent

Night” Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood

up to by children, period. It’s good for them, the adults, I

mean. Pushing kids around is ugly. The adults need to be

saved from themselves. On the other hand, students should

not, must not shoot teachers. The nobility of rebellion student-

to-teacher requires civil disobedience, not guns, not war -

pedagogy against pedagogy In this context, guns are cowardly

I was, however, in crisis. I had read Gone with the Wind

probably a hundred times, and like Scarlet I was willful. My

problem was the following: abortion was illegal and women

were dying. How could this be changed? Was the best way to

write a book that made you cry your heart out and feel the

suffering of the sick and dying women or to go into court a la

Perry Mason and make an argument so compelling, so truthful and poignant, that people would rise up unable to bear the pain of the status quo? You might say that in some sense I was

fully formed in the sixth grade. My frame of reference was not

expansive - I did not yet know about Danton or Robespier e

or any number of referent points beside Perry Mason - but in

formal terms the dilemma of my life was fully present: law or

literature, literature or law? By the end of that year, I had

decided that they could stop you from going to law school -

Heartbreak

and would - but no one could keep you from writing because

nobody had to know about it.

It was my mother whose politics were represented by the

abortion theme: she supported legal birth control and legal

abortion long before these were respectable beliefs. I had

learned these prowoman political positions from her, and I

think of her every time I fight for a woman’s reproductive

rights or write a check to the National Abortion Rights

Action League or Planned Parenthood. Our arguments for the

abortion right now might be more politically sophisticated,

but my mother had the heart and politics of a pioneer - only

I didn’t understand that. These were the reproductive politics

I grew up with, and so I did not know that she had taught me

what I presumed was fair and right.

Eventually she would tel me that the worst mistake she had

made in raising me was in teaching me how to read; she had a

mordant sense of humor that she rarely exercised. The public

library in the newly hatched suburb of Delaware Township,

later to become Cherry Hill, was in the police station or next

door to it; and my mother found herself writing notes giving

me permission to take out Lolita or Peyton Place. To her credit

she did write those notes each and every time I wanted to read

a book that was forbidden for children. Or I think it’s to her

credit. I don’t know why later she would not let me see the

film A Summer Place with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue (the

two are teenaged lovers and Sandra gets pregnant) when I had

“Silent Night”

already read the book. We had a screaming match that lasted

several days. She won, of course. It was the sheer exercise of

parental authority that gave her the victory, and I despised her

for not being able to win the argument on the merits. She’d

blow up at my curiosity or precociousness, and it seemed to

come out of nowhere to me. What she hated wasn’t what I

read or the movies I saw but what I started writing, because

sixth grade was the beginning of writing my own poems.

They’d be small and imitative, but they were piss-perfect,

in-your-face acts of rebellion. The adults could keep lying, but

I wouldn’t. My mother’s real failure was in telling me not to

lie. I had a literalist sense of the meaning of the admonition.

I was a “kike” and would continue to be one: never once have

I sung “Silent Night” nor will I. I recognized that there were

a lot of ways of lying, and pretending that Christmas and Easter

were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one. Whether

the issue was segregation or abortion, I, the sixth-grader, was

going to deal with it, and my vehicle was going to be truth:

not a global, self-deluded truth, not a truth that only I knew

and that I wanted other people to follow, but the truth that

came from not lying. Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one,

a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken

for self-righteousness. If put ing my body there when it ought

to be here was required but to do so was to lie, I wasn’t going

to do it. I’d write and I wouldn’t lie. So when self-help writers

tel one to find the child within, I assume they don’t mean me.

Plato

A girl is faced with hard decisions. What is writ en inside

those decisions is inscrutable to her; by necessity - her age,

time, place, sex discrimination in general - she sees or knows

only the surfaces. So in junior high school I was thrilled when

I was allowed to wear lipstick for the first time, a rite of passage that has nothing to do with sexuality but everything to do with maturity, becoming an adult fast and easy. My first

lipstick was cal ed Tangerine, and like other girls I spent hours

thinking about what it went with, what it meant, and how my

life was final y beginning to cohere. It was also the first recognition from my mother - al -important, the whole deal has little to do with men or boys at al - that I was nearly adult

but certainly no child.

I'd wear Tangerine, along with a favorite dress that let me

see my own breasts, a deep V-neck, a cut I stil like, and I’d

be making my way through Plato’s Symposium. It had been

communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of

women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in

famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick

without the requisite face powder. On my own I added my

Plato

own favorite, Erase, which went over the powder (or was it

under? ) and got the lines under your eyes to disappear. In this

way I could hide my late-night reading from my parents -

circles under the eyes were a dead giveaway. I would pretend

to go to sleep; I'd wait for them to go to sleep; I'd turn on my

reading light, read, and simultaneously listen for any movement at their end of the house, at which point I'd get rid of any light in my room, hide the book, and wait until I heard

my mother or father return to their bed.

I was taunted by this problem: how could someone write

something like the Symposium and make sure that her nose did

not shine at the same time? It didn’t mat er to me that I was

reading a translation. I'd read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and

not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose

shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either

one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi

Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose.

It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any

way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough

time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.

Plato was my idea of a paperback writer: the Beatles were not

yet on the horizon, and anyway I’m sure that John would have

agreed with me. There was nothing I wanted so much in life

as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words,

the calzone approach at enuated with Bach. I'd look at my

cheap Modigliani reproductions or the reproduced females by

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Rodin or Manet, and I didn’t see the shine, except for that of

the paper itself; but more to the point, in no book about the

artists themselves that I could find was the problem of the

shine addressed. These were the kind of girl-things that preoccupied me.

Or, for instance, when it came to lying: in elementary

school one would play checkers with the boys. My mother

had said don’t lie and had also told me that I had to lose at

games to the boys if I wanted them to like me. These were

irreconcilable opposites. It was, first of al , virtually impossible to lose to the boys in an honest game of checkers. Second, who wanted to? Third, how would I ever respect him or them

in the morning? It did strike me that the boys you had to lose

to weren’t worth having, but my argument made no impression on my mother nor on anyone else I was ever to meet until the women’s movement. And it was damned hard to lose

at checkers to the pimply or prepimply dolts. I now think of

the having-to-lose part as SWAT-team training in strategy,

how to lose being harder than how to win. It was hideous for

a girl to be brazenly out for the kil or to enjoy the status of

victor or to enjoy her own intelligence and its application in

real time.

I stil remember how in the eighth or ninth grade Miss Fox,

one of my nemeses among English teachers, made us skip the

first three pages of Romeo and Juliet - the part about the maidenheads - only to read aloud Juliet herself throughout the rest of

Plato

the play, partnered with the captain of the footbal team as

Romeo. Stereotypes aside, his reading was not delightful. And

yet we al had to sit there and wait while he tried manfully, as

it were, to sound out words. Her pedagogy was to encourage

him while let ing the rest of us rot.

I, true to form, wanted to know what a maidenhead was,

and to say that I was relentless on the subject would be to understate. Miss Fox’s retaliation was authoritarian and extreme. I had been out of class sick and had to take a makeup vocabulary test, multiple choice. I failed. I did not just fail: I got a zero. I was pained but respectful on my first five or ten trips

up to her desk to ask her how it was possible to get a zero on

a multiple-choice test, even if one did not know the meaning

of one word on the test. Final y, exhausted, I just asked her to

regrade the test. Since she was sure of her rightness in al things

English, we struck a deal: she’d regrade the test and whatever

the outcome I’d shut up. She glistened with superiority, Eve

the second after biting into the apple; I was tense now that the

challenge had been taken up. It turned out that she had used

the wrong key in grading the test; the answers she wanted me to

give were for some other test. I was good but not that good.

I wanted out, Tangerine lipstick notwithstanding. I wanted

smart people whether or not their noses shined enough to

illuminate a room or a house or a city. I wanted someone who

cared about me in particular, as an individual, enough to

notice that I could not get a zero on a vocabulary test because

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I had too big a vocabulary. I was so worn out by Miss Fox that

when she graded an essay on contemporary education a B

because, as she said to me, some commas were wrong and it

wasn’t anything personal, after a halfhearted and utterly futile

argument I accepted the B. She even put her arm around me,

genuinely adding insult to injury. I knew I’d get her someday

and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was

easy.

The High School

Library

Nowadays librarians actively try to get students Internet access

to pornography, at least in the United States. Organized as a

First Amendment lobby group, librarians go to court - or their

professional organizations do - to defend pornographers and

pornography. Truly, this does not happen because James Joyce

and Henry Miller were banned as obscene a hundred years

ago; I once wrote an affidavit for a court on the differences

between Nabokov’s Lolita and a pimp’s pictorial with words,

“Lolita Pissing. ” These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I

used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography

could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual

pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they

weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to

stock Ulysses. If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest

of us. Instead, the idea seems to be that keeping a child -

someone underaged - away from anything is akin to treason.

One is violating sacred constitutional rights and assassinating

Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (for the second time).

Heartbreak

In my high school days, librarians were the militia, the first

line of defense in keeping the underaged away from books, al

sorts of books in every field.

My high school library was tall, I remember, as if piles of

books held up the ceiling; it was dense with books organized

according to the Dewey decimal system. I liked to look at and

to touch the books. I believed I could feel the heat emanating

from them, and no heat meant no light. My father had told

me I had to read everything, that to read books of only one

view was the equivalent of a moral wrong. When I asked why,

he uttered the incomprehensible words: “Sometimes writers

lie.” In my early years, my parents made up for the latitude

they gave me in reading by seeing to it that I read on a continuum, both political and literary. When I went weak in the knees for Dostoyevsky, my dad gave me some Mark Twain or

my mother one of Eric Bentley’s books on the theater. I just

wanted to read everything; there was never enough. It wasn’t

quite as simple as it sounds. My mother was more tense about

what I read than my father, but then, she was in the thick of

it: my bad attitudes, bad habits, and bad behavior. I did get

ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished

by the pro-pornography argument that people are not influenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films? One wants to persuade. One wants to knock

the reader senseless with the shock of the new or the old

reconceived. Rimbaud articulated the writing ambition when

The High School Library

he wanted to derange the senses, though he meant his own.

Sometimes it’s the rawness of the writing that makes everything inside shake and break; sometimes it’s the delicacy of the writing that makes everything inside simply recognize a reality

different from the known one or experience a lyricism heretofore unknown. For me, subtle writing was almost always anti-urban; it took me to the steppes of Russia or Huck Finn*s

South.

The library brought the world to me: I went with Darwin

on the HMS Beagle and I dived with Freud into the mind and

I plot ed with Marx about how to end poverty. I had read

most of Freud, al of Darwin, and most of Marx before I graduated from high school. This was not with the help of the high school librarians.

Instead, I learned their work schedules, because we were not

allowed to take out more than two books a day and I needed

a bigger fix than that. Al records were kept by hand. So if I

went into the library during a new shift, I could get two more

books, then two more, then two more. The librarians treated

the books like contraband, and so did I. My friends and I had

a commitment to Catcher in the Rye, which was not allowed

in the library. We bought a lot of copies over time. We shelved

them. Each time it would be a different one of us who had

the responsibility for get ing the book into the library, on the

shelves. Sometimes we catalogued the book - what was gained

if no one knew it was there? - and other times we shelved it

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as if it were plastique. Eventually the head librarian would

find it; we’d know by the dirty looks we got from her long

before we got to check on the book itself.

Catcher was a rallying point for our high school intelligentsia. I remember going to my parents for help: I asked if they would fight with the school board to get the book in the

library. They would not. I found this refusal confusing, an

abrogation of everything they had taught me. Actually it

outraged me. One of my friends had his editorial removed

from the school paper because it was about the wrongness of

banning Catcher from the high school library. So we fought

on, invisible guardians of one orphan book.

Then one day it happened: the school board took things

in hand themselves. They went through the library to get rid

of al socialistic, communistic, anti-God books. Surveying the

damage when they had finished, I saw no Eugene V Debs or

Norman Thomas, certainly no Darwin, Freud, or Marx; but

one slim volume cal ed Guerril a Warfare by a person named

Che Guevara had escaped the purge. I was bound for life to

the man. I studied that book the way the Chinese were forced

to study Chairman Mao. I planned revolutionary attacks on

the local shopping mall. We had a paucity of mountains in

the suburbs, so it was hard to apply many of Che’s strategic

points; the land was flat, flat, flat; the mall - the first in the

country - was boring, boring, boring, emphatical y not Havana.

I studied Che’s principles of revolution day in and day out,

The High School Library

and the school board was none the wiser. The shelves in the

library now were roomy, and the room itself seemed lower.

There weren’t books in piles to hold up the ceiling, nor were

there books that emanated heat and with the heat enough

light to be a candle in the darkness. It was as if anything the

school board recognized it did away with. I was almost out.

My term of imprisonment was almost up. My own hard time

was coming to an end. The pedophilic teacher had a lot of

anger and despair to fool around with, and he didn’t let any

of it go to waste. He’d tell you any story you wanted to hear,

give you the narrative of any book gone missing; Anna

Karenina went from being Tolstoy’s to being his.

The Bookstore

Sometime during high school the very best thing happened:

at the mal a bookstore opened. This was a spectacular bookstore, independent, few hardcover books but they were out of my socioeconomic league anyway; and there was a whole rack

of City Lights books, yes, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and

Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn and Gregory Corso and

Yevteshenko - anything City Lights published would show up

on that rack. It was al contemporary, al poetry, al incendiary,

al revolutionary, each book a Molotov cocktail. I'd be down

and the owners would point me to something, and I'd be up

and they’d point me to something else. It was a whole world

of books that I never dreamed could be so close to me, to

where I was physical y on the planet: this horrible, awful, stupid

suburb. The store was owned and run by two adults, Stan and

Phyl is Pogran, who were not trying to get between you and

the books; they brought you right to the trough and let you

drink. You could read the books in the store (there were no

chairs in bookstores back then); you didn’t have to buy and I

rarely could, although any money I had went to buy books or

music, which is stil the case. I had never met adults like Stan

The Bookstore

and Phyllis. Later they separated and divorced, but I swear

they kept me alive and kicking: I never had a mood I couldn’t

find on their shelves.

There was never a book they tried to hide from you. At the

same time, they weren’t trying to use you - you weren’t the

day’s kick for them; they were the opposite of the pedophilic

teacher. They let me talk to them about books and about

being a writer and they talked right back about books and

writing. Amid the vulgarity of the shopping mall, with its

caged birds and fountains, its gushing-over department stores

and restaurants, there was this one island of insanity, since the

rest passed for normal. You could get close to any poet you

wanted and they, the booksellers, didn’t enforce the law on

you: they didn’t bayonet your guts until al the poetry had

spilled out, al the desire for poetry had been bled to death, al

the music in your heart had been lanced, al your dreams

trounced on and ripped to pieces. I found James Baldwin there

and read everything he had writ en; I breathed with him. I

found Mailer and Gore Vidal. I found Tennessee Williams and

Edward Albee. I’d walk over from my house in any spare time

I had - “I’m going to the mall, Ma” had its own legitimacy, a

reassuring, implicit conformity - and I’d haunt the shelves and

I’d find the world outside the world in which I was living.

I’d find a world of beauty and ideas. Corso liked Shel ey, so

I read Shelley and from him Byron and Keats. I read Joyce

and Miller and Homer and Euripides and Hemingway and

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Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. They were al there, in this one

tiny bookstore, and my love af air with books became a wild

and long ride, bucking bronco after bucking bronco; I found

Genet and Burroughs; I read The Blacks and Naked Lunch.

Literature exploded. I found and read the early pirated edition

of The Story of O.

The only bad part was that I couldn’t live there, sleep in a

corner resting my head on a messed-up coat; the store would

close and I had to go home. By the next day I’d barely be able

to breathe from the thrill of knowing I was going to find a

way to get back to the bookstore and find another book and

one after that, another author and one after that.

It would be a few years before the feminist ferment would

begin to produce a renaissance of luminous and groundbreaking books; and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett did change my life. I was one of the ones it was writ en for, because I had

absorbed the writers she exposed, I had believed in them; in

the euphoria of finding what I thought were truth-tellers, I

had forgotten my father’s warning that some writers lie. But

stil , one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know, even Mailer,

even Albee. It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can

see and so one can say, “There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten

by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone wil fil

in the empty patch and I’l find what I need, what I must

know in order to lead a ful and honorable life. ” These writers,

Stein excepted, did not acknowledge women as other than

The Bookstore

subhuman monsters of sex and predation; and their prose and

chutzpah made me a fellow traveler. Al one can do is to fight

illegitimate authority, expressed in my world by adults, and

find a church. Books were my church but even more my native

land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on,

but exile welcomed me; it was where I belonged.

The Fight

I loved Al en Ginsberg with the passion that only a teenager

knows, but that passion did not end when adolescence did. I

sent him poems when I was in high school and barely

breathed until I heard back from him. He critiqued the poems

I sent on a postcard that I got about three weeks later, though

it seemed like ten years. I thought I would die - he acknowledged me as if I were a writer and we lived in the same world.

In col ege I went to every reading of his that I could. My heart

breathed with his, or so I thought, but I was too shy ever to

introduce myself to him or hang around him until the one

reading after which I did introduce myself. “Call me, ” he said

to me a half dozen times as I was walking backward out of the

large room, backward so that he could keep talking to me.

“Cal me, ” he had said, “but don’t come to New York just to

cal me or you’l drive me mad. ” He had scribbled his phone

number on a piece of paper. “Call me, ” he repeated over and

over. I could have happily died then and there.

I did go to New York just to see him, but when I got to

New York I was too shy to cal him. I'd spend every waking

hour worrying about how to make the cal . I picked a rainy

The Fight

night. He answered the phone. “Come on over now, ” he said.

I told him that he was much too busy. I told him that it was

raining. I went anyway, shaking on the wet sidewalks, shaking

on the bus, so nervous on the five flights up to his apartment

that I could barely keep my balance. As always when I was

nervous, I broke into a cold sweat.

He had warned me that he was working on proofs for a

new book of poems and would have very little time for me,

but we spent the whole night talking - well, okay, not al of it

but many hours of it. He then walked me down to the bus

in the rain and told me he loved me. I counted. He told me

eleven times.

I called him one more time many months later. I had a

standing invitation to see him, but I never went back. I stayed

infatuated but I stayed out of his way. I did not know that this

was a shrewd move on my part for the writer I wanted to be.

Being in thrall to an icon keeps you from becoming yourself.

When Woman Hating was published in 1974, I met the

photographer Elsa Dorfman. She was a close friend of Allen’s

and had photographed him and other writers over years, not

days. She photographed me for the first time as a writer. When

Elsa had a baby I was asked to be his godmother and Ginsberg

was his godfather. We were now, metaphysically speaking,

joined in unholy matrimony. And still I stayed away from

him. I did not see him again, since that time in college, until

my godson was bar mitzvahed. By this time I had published

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many books, including my work attacking pornography - the

artifacts, the philosophy, the politics.

On the day of the bar mitzvah newspapers reported in huge

headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornography il egal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be.

I did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a

pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man-

Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction

that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from

what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I

made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck

children and his constant pursuit of underage boys.

I did everything I could to avoid Allen and to avoid

conflict. This was my godson’s day. He did not need a political struggle to the death breaking out al over.

Ginsberg would not leave me alone. He followed me everywhere I went from the lobby of the hotel through the whole reception, then during the dinner. He photographed me constantly with a vicious little camera he wore around his neck. He sat next to me and wanted to know details of sexual abuse I

had suf ered. A lovely woman, not knowing that his interest was

entirely pornographic, told a terrible story of being molested

by a neighbor. He ignored her. She had thought, “This is

Al en Ginsberg, the great beat poet and a prince of empathy. ”

Wrong. Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent

person who had the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get

The Fight

around enough. He pointed to the friends of my godson and

said they were old enough to fuck. They were twelve and

thirteen. He said that al sex was good, including forced sex.

I am good at get ing rid of men, strictly in the above-board

sense. I couldn’t get rid of Allen. Finally I had had it. Referring

back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child pornography he said, “The right wants to put me in jail. ” I said, “Yes, they’re very sentimental; I’d kil you. ” The next day he’d point

at me in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in

jail. ” I’d say, “No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants

to put you in jail. I want you dead. ”

He told everyone his fucked-up version of the story (“You

want to put me in jail”) for years. When he died he stopped.

The Bomb

There is one reason for the 1960s generation, virtually al of

its attitudes and behaviors: the bomb. From kindergarten

through the twelfth grade, every U. S. child born in 1946 or

the decade or so after had to hide from the nuclear bomb.

None of us knew life without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In

K-3 we hid under our school desks, elbows covering our ears.

From grades four or five through graduation, we were lined

up three- or four- or five-thick against wal s without windows,

elbows over our ears. We were supposed to believe that these

poses would save us from the bomb the Soviets were going to

drop on us sometime after the warning bel rang. In the later

grades, our teachers herded us, then stood around and talked.

They didn’t seem to think that they were going to die, let

alone melt, any minute. They seemed more as if they were

going to chat until the bel rang and the next class began. In

the earlier grades the teachers would walk up and down the

aisles and tel us an elbow was outside the boundary of a desk

or we should stop giggling. Any child too big to get under the

desk wholly and ful y might wish the Soviets would nuke us;

after al , who wanted to be in school, in rotten school with

The Bomb

rot en teachers and rot en classmates? By the time I was being

herded in the seventh or eighth grade, I simply refused to go.

Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in

the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain

why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a

wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly

down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic

way. “I'd rather take a walk,” I would say, “if I'm about to die

now. ” My father was called in, a scene he described to me

shortly before he died at eighty-five: “I asked them what the

hell they expected me to do. ” The real question was, What

was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves

of time and life - my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they

expect us to be so dim and dull?

They were helped by the saturation propaganda about both

the Soviets and the bomb. On the Beach was a really scary

novel by Nevil Shute about the last survivors down in

Australia. I remember just computing that it wasn’t going to

be me and maintaining an at itude of anger and disgust at the

adults. There were endless television discussions and debates

about whether or not one should build a bomb shelter and

fil it with canned food and water. The moral question was

whether or not one should let the neighbors in, had they

been obtuse enough not to build a shelter. Everything was

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calculated to make one afraid enough to conform. I can

remember times wanting my father to build a bomb shelter

for the family. Of course that’s hard to do in the cement of the

city, and by the time we had soil in the suburbs I had decided

it was al a scam. Maybe al the students except me and a few

others rested wearily against wal s and kept quiet, but most of

us knew we were being lied to, being scared on purpose, and

being treated like chumps, just stupid children. Those boys

who didn’t know ended up in Vietnam.

I’d read in newspapers and magazines about the people in

cities like New York who would not take shelter when the

alarms were sounded. Following on the model of the London

blitz, sirens would scream and everyone was expected to find

hiding in an underground shelter. But some people refused,

and they were arrested. I remember writing to Judith Malina

of the Living Theatre when she was in the Women’s House of

Detention in New York City for refusing to take shelter and I

was a junior in high school. The thrilling thing was that she

wrote me back. This letter back from her was absolute proof

that there was a different world and in it were different people

than the ones around me. Her let er was a lot of different

colors, and she drew some of the nouns so that her sentences

were delightful and fil ed with imagination. Since I had already

made myself into a resister, she affirmed for me that resistance

was real outside the bounds of my tiny real world. Her letter

was mailed from a boat. She was crossing the ocean to

The Bomb

Europe. She wouldn’t stay in the United States, where she

was expected to hide underground from a nuke. She was part

of what she called “the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution, ” and I was going to be part of it, too. I'd follow her to the Women’s House of Detention, though my protest was

against the Vietnam War, and then to Europe, because I could

not stay in the United States any more than she could. She

probably didn’t have my relatives, who were so ashamed that

I went to jail; and she probably didn’t have my mother, who

said I needed to be caged up like an animal - bad politics twice

over. I would not meet Judith for another fifteen years, but

she remained an icon to me, the opposite of the loathsome Miss

Fox, and I knew whose side I was on, where my bread was

but ered, and which one I would rather be. I did not care what

it cost: I liked the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution,

and so did most of my generation - even if “anarchist” was a

hard word and “nonviolent” was an even harder discipline.

There was another kind of bomb scare. Someone would

phone the school and claim to have hidden a bomb in it. The

students would be evacuated and, when the teachers got tired

of keeping us in lines, left to roam on the grass. There never

was a bomb, and there was no context of terrorism, and the

threats seemed only to come in nice weather - otherwise we

might al have got en cranky. We discussed whether or not the

grass under our feet felt pain, which teachers had infatuations

with each other, how we were going to thrive on poetry and

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revolution. These were the good bomb scares, after which

we’d be remilitarized into study hal s and classes and time

would pass slowly and then more slowly. There was never anything good about the nuclear-bomb scares, and even the conformists with elbows over ears did not like them. I was appalled that the United States had used nuclear weapons and

was now both stockpiling and testing them. My father said

that he would have died if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

because he shortly would have been sent to “the war in the

Pacific” as it was cal ed. When Truman used the nuclear bombs,

he saved my father’s life. I thought my father was pretty selfish

to hold his own life to be more important than so many other

lives. I thought it would be a good idea not to have war

anymore. I could feel nuclear winter chilling my bones, even

though the expression did not yet exist, and I had a vivid

picture of people melting. I’ve never got en over it.

Cuba 1

There was one day when al my schoolmates and I knew that

we were going to die. According to historians the Cuban

missile crisis lasted thirteen days, but to us it was one day

because we knew we were going to die then, that day. I don’t

know which of the thirteen it was, and I don’t know if I’m

col apsing several days into one, but I remember nothing

before the one day and nothing after. In the back of the school

bus al the girls gathered in a semicircle. We talked about the

sadness of dying virgins, though some of us weren’t. We spoke

with deep regret, like old people looking back on our lives; we

enumerated al that we had not managed to do, the wishes we

had, the dreams that were unfulfilled. No one talked about

get ing mar ied. Children came up in passing.

The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The

missiles were pointed at the United States, and the range of

the ICBMs was about from Cuba to the school bus - the

northeast corridor of the United States. For probably the first

time, I kept my Che-loving politics to myself. I don’t think

I even had any politics on that day. I don’t remember

the geopolitical blah-blah or the commie-versus-good-guy

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rhetoric - except that it existed - or how the United States was

the white hat standing up for the purity of the Americas. I do

remember television, black-and-white, and the images of stil

photographs, a grainy black-and-white, showing the bombs or

the silos. The United States had been untouchable, and now

it could be touched, and we’d feel our own bones melt and in

the particle of a second see our own cities drowned in fire. I

wasn’t afraid to die, but sitting stil and waiting for it was not

good. I still feel that way. We al , including me, felt a little

sorry for ourselves, because everything we had ever known

had been touched by nuclear war; it was the shadow on every

street, in every house, in every dinnertime conversation, in

every current-events reprise; it was always there as threat, and

now it was going to happen, that day, then, there, to us. The

school bus was bright yellow with black markings on the outside, just the way they are now, but everything was different because we were kids who knew that we were going to be

cremated and killed in the same split second. I could see my

arm withered, the flesh coming off in paper-thin layers, while

my chest was already ash, and there’d be no blood - it would

evaporate before we’d even be dead. Inside the bus the boys

were up front, boisterous, fil ed with bravado. I guess they

expected to pull the missiles out of the air one by one, new

superheroes. The girls were serious and upset. Even those who

didn’t like each other talked quietly and respectful y. There

was one laugh: a joke about the only girl in the school we

Cuba 1

were sure was no virgin. She was famous as the school whore,

and she was widely envied though shunned on a normal day,

since she knew the big secret; but on this day, the last day, she

could have been crowned queen, sovereign of the girls. She

represented everything we wanted: she knew how to do it and

how it felt; she knew a lot of boys; she was really pret y and

laughed a lot, even though the other girls would not talk to

her. She had beautiful y curly brown hair and an hourglass

figure, but thin. She was Eve’s true descendant, the symbol of

what it meant to bite the apple. Tomorrow she would go back

to being the local slut, but on the day we were al going to die

she was Cinderel a an hour before midnight. I wished that

I could grow up, but I could not entirely remember why. I

waited with my schoolmates to die.

David Smith

He was one of the United States' greatest sculptors, not paid

attention to now but in my high school and college years he

was a giant of an artist. He was especially at ached to

Bennington College, where he had taught and near where he

lived. One night I went to a lecture by art critic Clement

Greenberg, probably the most famous visual arts writer of his

time. Greenberg was a name-dropping guy, and most of his

lecture was about the habits of his bet ers, the artists he

deigned to crown king or prince. At some point during the

lecture, Greenberg said that great sculptors never drew. A

huge man stood up, overshadowing the audience, and in a

deep bass said, “I do. " While Greenberg turned beet red and

apologized, the big guy talked about how important drawing

was, how sensual it was; he gave specifics about how it felt to

draw; he said that drawing taught one how to see and that

drawing was part of a continuous process of making art, like

breathing when you were asleep was part of life. After the

lecture a friend who was a painting student asked if I wanted

to go with her to meet David Smith. “I wouldn't want to

bother him, " I said, not having a clue that the big guy was

David Smith

David Smith and he was staying that night in Robert

Frost’s old house, owned by painter Kenneth Noland, rented

by the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at

Bennington. We got into my friend’s truck and went. I felt

shielded by my painter friend. The visit was her brazen act,

not mine.

It was my first year at Bennington, and I did not know the

anthropology of the place. Anyone famous who came to

Bennington was provided with one or more Bennington girls;

my college was the archetypical brothel, which may have been

why, the semester before I matriculated, the English seniors

recreated the brothel in Joyce’s Ulys es as a senior project and

for the enjoyment of the professors.

So my friend and I got to the old Robert Frost house. It

was deep in the Vermont countryside, old, simple, painted

white, with hooks from the ceiling on which, I was told, animals

had been hung and salted. There were bookshelves, but they

were mostly empty, with only a few books about Kenneth

Noland, at least in the living room. Mr. Smith was deep in a

bot le of 100-proof Stolichnaya and scat ered like inanimate

dolls were some of my fellow students from Bennington,

each in a black sheath, each awaiting the pleasure of her host,

Anthony Caro, and his guest, David Smith. As happens with

habitually drunk fuckers of women, Smith could not have been

more indif erent to the women who were there for him, and

he wanted to talk to me. I was trying to leave, embarrassed for

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my classmates and too shy to talk to Smith. But Smith did not

have to be nice to the women acquired for him, so he wasn’t.

He dismissed my fellow students with a gesture of the hand

and told me and my friend to sit down and drink with him.

He said that he had always wanted to provide Bennington

with a graduate school in art; that his name had been on a

pro-Cuba petition signed by artists and intellectuals; that John

Kennedy had cal ed him up and told him to get his name of

of that petition or he’d never get his graduate school; that

he had removed his name and in so doing he had whored.

“Never whore, ” he said; “it ruins your art. ” He told me never

to tell anyone and until now, with some private exceptions,

I haven’t. He’s been dead a long time, and that puts him

beyond the shame he felt that night. He said that taking his

signature off the pro-Cuba petition had made him a whore

and he couldn’t work anymore because of it. “Work” was

literal - it meant making sculptures; “whore” was a metaphor

- it meant not compromising one’s art. He warned me repeatedly; I only wish he had meant it literally as wel as metaphorical y because I might have listened. Since then - since I was eighteen - I’ve always measured my writing against his admonition: never whore. He also taught me how to drink 100-proof Stoli, my drink of choice until in the late 1970s I switched to

bottled water and the occasional glass of champagne. He was

talking to me, not to my painter friend; I’ve never known

why. I always hoped it was because he saw an artist in me. A

David Smith

week and a half later he died, crashing his motorcycle into a

tree, the kind of death police regard as suicide.

Contraception

At some point when I was in junior high or high school, my

father gave me the inevitable books on intercourse, more

commonly called “how babies are made. ” He was embarrassed; I rejected the books; he shoved them at me and left the room. I read the books about the sperm and the egg. There

were a few missing moments, including how the sperm got to

the egg before it was inside the vaginal tract, for example,

intercourse, and how not to become pregnant. By the time I

was sixteen, I understood the former but not the lat er. When

I asked my mother, she said that one must never let a man use

a rubber because it decreased his pleasure and the purpose was

to give him pleasure. Always ready to beat a dead horse into

the ground, I elicited from my unwilling mother the fact that

she had never let my father use a condom and that she had

used birth control. Beyond this she would not go, no hints as

to how or what.

One night I was summarily sent to the local Jewish

Community Center by my parents acting in tandem. There

was to be a lecture on sex education, and I was going to be

forced to listen to it. I cried and begged and screamed. I

Contraception

couldn’t stand being treated as a child, and I couldn’t stand

the thought of being bored to death by adults tiptoeing

through the tulips. I had learned that adults never told one the

real stuff on any subject no mat er what it was. It stood to

reason that the sex education lecture was going to be stupid

and dull, and so it was. There was the sperm and the egg and

they met on a blackboard.

By that time I had learned always to listen to what was not

being said, to the empty space, as it were, to the verbal void.

The key to al adult pedagogy was not in what they did say but

in what they would not say. They would say the word “contraception, ” but they would not say what it was. This was a time in the United States when contraception and abortion

were both still illegal. I knew about abortion, or enough

about it to suit me then. I asked about contraception and got

an awkward runaround. I fucking wanted to know what it

was, and they fucking were not going to tell me. I couldn’t let

it go, as usual, and so got from them the statement that they

discussed contraception only with married people. The group

that sponsored the lecture, with its almost-famous woman

speaker, would not come clean; now that group, headed by

the same woman until she died in the last decade, is part of

the free speech lobby in the United States protecting the

rights of pornographers.

What I learned was simple and eventually evolved into my

own pedagogy: listen to what adults refuse to say; find the

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answers they won’t give; note the manipulative ways they

have of using authority to cut the child or student or teenager

of at the knees; notice their immoral, sneaky reliance on peer

pressure to shut up a questioner (because, of course, if one

persists, the others in the audience get mad or embarrassed).

The writing is in the configuration of white around print; the

verbal answer is buried in silence, a purposeful and wicked

silence, a lying, cheating silence. Every pregnant girl owes her

pregnancy not to the heroic lover who figured out how the

sperm gets inside her but to the adults who will not show her

a diaphragm, an IUD, a female condom, and - sor y, Ma - a

rubber. I left the lecture that night with the certain knowledge

that I did not know what contraception was even if I knew the

word and that adults were not going to tell me.

Miss Bel , my physical education teacher who also taught

health, had the only method that successful y resisted both my

Socratic urgency and emerging Kabalistic axioms: on one test

paper she mimeographed a huge drawing of the male genitals,

and the students had to write on the drawing the name of

each part - “scrotum, ” for instance. In an equivalent test on

female sexuality, she had this true-or-false statement for extra

credit of twenty points: if a girl is not a virgin when she gets

married, she wil go to hel . I was the only student in my class

not to get the extra twenty points.

Young Americans for

Freedom

I wanted to know what a conservative was. I read William

Buckley’s right-wing magazine National Review, as I stil do. I

knew about the KKK, and I had an idea of what white

supremacy was. One girl in my class had neighbors who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, which she seemed to find reasonable.

I had an English teacher in honors English who was the

equivalent of Miss Bell, the gym-health teacher; but because

he was more literate there were many paths to hell, not just sex

outside of mar iage. Told to stay after school one day, I faced

Mr. Sullivan as he opposed my reading Voltaire’s Candide,

which was proscribed for Catholics, which I wasn’t but he

was. He told me I would go to hell for reading it. I stood up

to him. I thought he was narrow-minded, but conservatism

seemed something different, Buckley’s magazine notwithstanding. What was it exactly, and why didn’t history teachers or political science types or civics teachers talk about it?

It was a mess just to try to think about it. Walking home

from high school one day, I passed a neighbor, Mr. Kane. No

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one on the street talked to him or his wife, an auburn-haired

model. They painted their ranch house lavender, which was

downright unusual, though it framed Mrs. Kane’s auburn hair

beautiful y. Mr. Kane cal ed out to me and asked me to come

inside the side door to his house. I knew that I was never

supposed to talk with strange men or go anywhere with them,

and Mr. Kane was strange as hel . But I couldn’t resist, because

curiosity is such a strong force in a child, or in me. Inside Mr.

Kane had literature: he wasn’t the sexual child molester, no, he

was the political child molester, with endless pamphlets on

how JFK, a candidate for president, was the Catholic Church’s

running dog, so to speak; on how whites were bet er than

what he cal ed niggers; on how kikes were running the media

and the country. He gave me leaflets to take home: these went

easy on the kikes but hit the Catholics hard. At home I felt

ashamed to have even touched the things, and also I knew

that I had broken a big law, not a small one, by going with a

strange man. I tried to flush the leaflets down our toilet and

when they wouldn’t flush I tried to burn them. Wel , yes, I did

get that in the wrong order but I was guilty of fairly heinous

crimes and was desperate to get rid of the evidence. I was just

trying to find a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard where I

could bury them when my mother came home. She saw the

stuf , dripping wet al over, an additional sin I hadn’t thought

of, and sent me to my bedroom to wait for my father. I knew

the stuff was filthy and bad, my own behavior a mere footnote

Young Americans for Freedom

to the sinister material I had brought into the house. It’s

amazing how seeing hate stuff and touching it can make one

viscerally sick.

I was called out into the living room. My mother and father

were sitting on the formal sofa that we had and I was expected

to stand. My father had the junk beside him on the sofa. He

had called the FBI. They were going to come and question

me. They came and they did. Mr. Kane disappeared from the

street and Mrs. Kane would stand out on the lawn, her auburn

hair crowning her beauty, alone; she was now alone. Their

house was eventually sold.

The crime, it turned out, was to threaten a candidate for

president of the United States. The dirty drawings and words

were taken to be direct threats against Kennedy, as were the vile

insults targeted to the Catholic Church and the pope. I, too,

was punished, but not by the government. I can’t remember

what the punishment was, but it was tempered with mercy

because I had helped shut down a hate enterprise. I knew that

Mr. Kane was not a conservative in the way that Mr. Buckley

was, even though Mr. Buckley supported segregation, to my

shock and dismay.

To find out what was and was not conservative as such, I

approached a group called Young Americans for Freedom.

Their leader was a somewhat aristocratic man named Fulton

Lewis III. This was far outside any prior experience of mine.

I wanted to debate him. I set up the debate for a school

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assembly. I hurled liberal platitude after liberal platitude at

him. He won the debate. This made me question not my

beliefs in equality and fairness but how one could communicate those beliefs. I felt the humiliation of defeat, of course.

I don’t like losing, and I was stunned that I did lose. Stil , the

home team had lost because students thought that Mr. Lewis

III was correct. These were the years of the John Birch Society

and None Dare Cal It Treason, a book in which commies and

socialists were hidden in every nook and cranny of the government and the media, and the point was that these equality-minded folks were Soviet dupes, low and venal. I didn’t see

how my classmates could think being against poverty or for

integration were Soviet ideas or treasonous ideas. Mr. Lewis

was exceptionally gracious.

This was the beginning for me of thinking about something

the entertainer Steve Allen, a liberal, had writ en in National

Review. Roughly paraphrased, Mr. Allen’s piece asked why a

person was categorized as just a liberal or just a conservative.

Wasn’t that same person also a musician or a teacher and a

husband and a father? The patrilineal approach was the only

approach in those days, liberal or conservative. I thought it

was probably wrong to hate people for their politics unless

they were doing evil, as Mr. Kane was. The argument remains

alive; the stereotypes persist, veiled now in a postcommie

rhetoric; I think that hate crimes are real crimes against groups

of people, imputing to those people a lesser humanity. And

Young Americans for Freedom

even though I’ve lost debates since the one with Mr. Lewis

III, I still think it’s worth everything to say what you believe.

There are always consequences, and one must be prepared to

face them. In this context there is no free speech and there

never will be.

I think especially of watching William Buckley, on his Firing

Line television program in the 1960s, debate the writer James

Baldwin on segregation. Buckley was elegant and brilliant and

wrong; Baldwin was passionate and bril iant and wore his

heart on his sleeve - he was also right. But Buckley won the

debate; Baldwin lost it. I’l never forget how much I learned

from the confrontation: be Baldwin, not Buckley.

Cuba 2

The bad news came first from Allen Young, a gay activist: in

Cuba homosexuals were being locked up; homosexuality was

a crime against the state. A generation later I read the work of

Reinaldo Arenas, a homosexual writer who refused to be

crushed by the state and wrote a florid, uncompromising prose.

I read the prison memoirs of Armando Val adares and heard

from some friends raised in Cuba and original supporters of

Castro and Che about whole varieties of oppression and

brutality. There was also more recently a stunning biography

of Che by John Lee Anderson that gave Che his due - coldblooded kil er and immensely brave warrior. Of course, the river of blood and suffering makes it hard to say why so many

of us, from David Smith to myself, saw so much hope in the

Cuban revolution. Batista’s thuggery was indisputable; his

thievery, too, from a population of the exceptionally poor and

largely illiterate was ugly; but the worst part of it was U. S.

support for his regime. That support made many of us challenge the political morality of the United States. Castro claimed he wanted an end to poverty and il iteracy, and I believed him.

Castro up against Batista is the mise-en-scene. With Castro

Cuba 2

the poor would have food and books. Castro also promised to

stop prostitution, which had destroyed the lives of thousands

of poor women and children; prostitution was considered

one of the perks of capitalism, and Havana in particular was

known for prostitution writ large. Where there was hunger,

there would be women and children selling sex. Now we would

know to look for other phenomena as well: incest or child

sexual abuse, homelessness, predatory traffickers. It would

have been hard to think of Castro as worse than Batista

outside the context of the cold war. When the tiny band of

guerrilla fighters conquered Havana and extirpated the Batista

regime, it was hard to mourn unless the prospect of equality,

which was the promise, inevitably meant tyranny (which I

think is the right-wing argument). Virtual y forced by the

United States into an alliance with the Soviets, Castro’s

system of oppression slowly supplanted Batista’s. Watching

the United States now cuddle with the Chinese because

Chinese despotism is rhetorical y commit ed to capitalism,

one can only mourn the chance lost to the Cuban people

thirty-some years ago when the United States might have

been a strategic al y or neighbor. I’m saying that the United

States pushed Cuba into the Soviet camp and that Castro

became what he became because of it.

The Grand Jury

I was eighteen; it was 1965; a grand jury had been impaneled

to investigate the charges I had made against New York City’s

Women’s House of Detention, the local Bastil e that sat in the

heart of Greenwich Village, in the heart of Bohemia itself. I

had been sexually brutalized and had turned the internal

examinations of women in that place into a political issue

that would eventually topple the ancien regime, the callous,

encrustated Democrats.

I had been subpoenaed to testify on a certain day at a certain

time. My French class at Bennington was also on that day, at

that time, and I was hopeless in the language. My French professor took my haplessness in French rather personally and refused to give me permission to miss the class. I explained

that I had to be absent anyway, and I was. She backed off of her

threat to give me a failing mark and gave me a near-failing

mark instead.

I stayed at a friend’s apartment in New York the night

before my testifying, and Frank Hogan, New York City’s

much-admired district attorney, came with another man that

night to see me. The magnitude of his visit is probably not

The Grand Jury

self-evident: the big pooh-bah, prosecutor of al prosecutors,

came to see me. He seemed to want to hear from me that I

would show up. I assured him that I would. Just be yourself

and tell the truth, said the snake to Eve. I assured him that I

would. He kept trying to find out if I was wary of testifying

or of him. I wasn’t. I was too stupid to be. The rules have

since changed, but in 1965 no one, including the target of a

grand jury investigation, could have a lawyer with her inside

the sacred, secret grand jury room. I was not the target, but

one would not have been able to tell from what the assistant

district at orney did to me. Hogan had assured me that al

the questions would be about the jail and pret y much said

outright that the jail had to go, something to that effect. He

probably said sympathetically that he had heard it was a horrible place and I assumed the rest. After al , if it was hor ible, why wouldn’t one want to get rid of it? The grand jury room

was big and shiny wood and imperial. I sat down in what

increasingly came to seem like a sinking hole and had to each

side and in front of me raised desks behind which were

washed white people, most or al men. The assistant district

attorney, who had been with Mr. Hogan the night before but

had said nothing, began to ask me questions. Where did I

live? Did I live alone? Was I a virgin? Did I smoke marijuana?

I started out just being confused. I remembered clearly that

Mr. Hogan said the inquiry was about the jail, not me, so I

answered each question with some fact about the jail. Did I

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live alone? They knew I was living with two men. I described

the dirt in the jail or the excrement that passed for food. Did

I smoke marijuana? Was I going to betray the revolution by

saying no? On the other hand, was I going to give the grand

jury an excuse to hold for the righteousness of the jail by

saying yes? I answered with more details about the jail. And

so it went for several hours. I eventually got the hang of it.

The pig would ask me a personal question, and I would

answer about the jail. He got angrier and angrier, and I stayed

soft-spoken but firm. They could have jailed me for contempt,

but they didn’t want me back in jail. I had created a maelstrom

for them; because of the news coverage, which was, for its

time, massive, huge numbers of people in the United States

and eventually around the world knew my name, my face, and

what had been done to me in the jail. Put ing me back in jail

could only make the situation for Mayor Robert Wagner, head

of the cor upt city Dems, more difficult. I had spoken on

the same platform as John Lindsay, a liberal Republican who

would eventually become mayor, and I had something to

do with making that unlikely event happen. After I testified I

went back to college. While probation would have been the

normal status for someone not yet convicted of anything

and released on her own recognizance, I was on parole, which

allowed me to cross state lines to go back to school without

violating the court’s rules. The system was being so good

to me.

The Grand Jury

A couple of months later there was an article in the New

York Times saying that the grand jury had found nothing

wrong with the jail. Everything had hinged on my testimony,

so they were also saying that I was a liar. I left the country

soon after, but seven years later, when the place was final y

closed, a lot of people thanked me. Years later Judith Malina

would say I had done it. When I challenged that rendering of

the politics, she said that political generation after political

generation had tried but I had succeeded - not that I had done

it alone, of course not, but that without what I had done, for

al anyone knew the jail would still be there, thirteen floors of

brutalized women. Most of the women in the Women’s House

of Detention when I was there and in the immediate years

before and after were prostituted women; I had the unearned

dignity of having been ar ested for a political offense. Frank

Hogan had a street named after him after he died.

Probably the best moment for me happened one day when

I was approached by a black woman on a Village street corner

while I was waiting for a light. She worked in the jail, she said,

and couldn’t be seen talking with me, but she wanted me to

know that everything I had said was true and she was one of

many guards who was glad I had managed to speak out. You

tell the truth and people can shit al over it, the way that grand

jury did, but somehow once it’s said it can’t be unsaid; it stays

living, somewhere, in someone’s heart.

The Orient Express

I was going to Greece. There were two countries in Europe

where one could live cheaply - Greece and Spain. The fascist

Franco was stil in power in Spain, so I decided on Greece. I

took a boat, the appropriately named SS Castel Felice, from

New York to a port in the south of England, then a train to

London. I had two relatives there, old women, hard-core

Stalinists, who talked energetically and endlessly about the

brilliant and gorgeous subway stations in Leningrad. It’s a

disorienting experience - listening to the worship of a subway

system. They saw me off on that legendary train the Orient

Express. It has since been rehabilitated, but in 1965 it was a

wretched thing. I had under $100 and the clothes I wore

along with some extra underwear and T-shirts. We changed

trains in Paris in some dark, damp, underground station, and

we kept going south. Somewhere outside of Paris people began

exiting and cattle began coming on. There was no food, no

potable water; as the train covered the terrain downhill we’d

get more cows accompanied by a peasant or a peasant family.

I hadn’t anticipated this at al - I, too, had read about the

elegant and mysterious Orient Express. A sweet boy offered

6 6

The Orient Express

to share his canned Spam with me, but I foolishly declined. It

was a four-day trip from London to Athens, each hour after

Paris more sordid than the one before. I did love the train ride

through Yugoslavia because the country was so very beautiful,

and I promised myself I would go back there someday, a bad

promise nullified by war. I had never been in a communist

country; there were more police than I had ever seen in my

life, and each one wanted to see everyone’s passport and go

through everyone’s luggage. I was easy on that score. I had

one small piece of luggage and nothing more.

While still in Yugoslavia, I began talking with an American

named Mildred. She was wrinkled as if her skin had been

white bread, squooshed and rolled and then left to dry. She

had smudges of lipstick here and there and was very kind to

me. I needed water desperately by the time we reached

Yugoslavia, but I was afraid to run out to the station when the

train stopped because I didn’t know when it would start up

again. I’ve always found traveling by train exhausting and anx-

iety-making. Mildred gave me water or pop or something I

could drink. The cows were in touching distance now, and so

were the peasants, though there were many more cows than

peasants.

Mildred was going to Athens. Someone had stolen al of her

money. She wondered if she could borrow some from me -

what I had would be exactly enough for her to liberate her

things, being held by an irate landlord, and then later that

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same day she would have the money wired to her by her son

so she would be able to pay me back. We made a date to meet

in a town square in Athens for the day following our ar ival.

I gave Mildred pretty much al of my money. I had enough for

the YWCA that first night. The next day at the appointed

hour I waited in the square. She never came. The direct consequence was that as it started turning dark I had to find a man to take me to dinner and get me a room. And I would

have to do the same the next day and the day after that. I

kept hoping I'd find Mildred here or there. I never held it

against her.

6 8

Easter

I went to Crete to live and write. I didn’t know much about

it except that my roommate at the Y was from there. What I

found was heaven on earth: the bluest sky; water in bands of

turquoise, lavender, aqua, and silver; rocks so old they had

whole histories writ en on the underside of their rough edges;

opium poppies a foot high and blood red; a primitive harbor;

caves in which people lived; peasants who came down from

the mountains to the city for political speeches - there would

be a whole family in a wooden cart pulled by a mule with an

old man walking the mule; there was light the color of bright

yellow and bright white melted together, and it never went

away; even at night, somehow through the dark, the light

would manifest, an unmistakable presence, and in the darkest

part of night you could see the tiniest pebble resting by

your foot. This was an island on which old women in black

cooked on Bunsen burners, olive trees were wealth, and

there was a universal politics of noli me tangere with a

lineage from 400 years of Turkish occupation through Nazi

occupation; the people were fierce and proud and sometimes

terribly sad.

Heartbreak

The place changed for me one day. It was Easter. I was with

an English friend and a Greek lover. The streets began fil ing

up with gangs of men carrying lit torches. They seemed a

little KKK-ish. Their intentions did not seem friendly. My

Greek lover explained that the gangs were looking for Jews,

the kil ers of Christ. That would be me. My companions and

I hid behind a pil ar of a church. I don’t think there were other

Jews on the island, because this search for Christ’s kil ers had

gone on year after year, even before the Turkish occupation. I

wondered if the gang of men would kil me. I thought they

would. I was afraid, but the worst of it was that I was afraid

my Greek lover would give me up - here she is, the Jew. I was

the faithless one, because this question was in my heart and

mind. I wondered what would happen if the torches found us,

saw us and took us. I wondered if he’d stand up for me then.

I wondered how the people I’d been living with could turn

into a malignant crowd, a hate crowd. If there were no other

Jews on the island, it was because they had been killed or had

fled. (Tourist season had not yet begun. )

The next day teenaged boys dove into the Aegean Sea to

look for a jeweled cross blessed by the Orthodox priest and

thrown by him into the water; one boy found it and emerged

like an elegant whale from the water, cross raised above his

head as high as he could hold it. The sun and the cross merged

into an astonishing brightness, the natural and the man-made

making the boy into some kind of religious prince. It was

Easter

beautiful and savage, and I could see myself bleeding out the

day before, a corpse on cold stone.

Knossos

I didn’t know anything about anthropology or the reconstruction of the ancient Cretan palace of Knossos by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. I didn’t know it was the labyrinth of Daedalus or the palace of King Minos, the Minotaur symbolizing generations of sacralized bulls. I had no idea of

the claims that would be made for it later by feminists: the

bull was the sacred animal of Goddess religions and cults, the

symbol of the Great Goddess. One of the great icons of

modern feminism originates in Crete - the labyris, the double

ax. Both the bull and the labyris signified the Goddess religion,

and Knossos was a holy site. From 3, 700 years before Christ

to 2, 000 years before Christ, Crete was the zenith of civilization, a Goddess-worshiping civilization.

Originally I saw it from the opposite side of the road. A

friend and I went to have a picnic in the country north of

Heraklion; we had wine and a Greek soft cheese that I particularly favored; we were in love and trouble and so talked in our own pidgin tongue made up of Greek, English, and French.

I found myself going out there alone and finding refuge in the

intriguing building across the road, Knossos. I found the

Knossos

throne room especially lovely and intimate. I would take a

book, sit on the throne, and read, every now and then thinking about what it must have been like to live in this small and intimate room. The rest of the palace that had been restored

was closed, and as soon as I heard the first busload of tourists

sometime in late April I never went back. But for a while it

was mine. I felt at home there, something I rarely feel anywhere. Once I was inside, it was as familiar as my own skin. I loved the stone from which everything, including the throne,

was made. I loved the shape of the room and the throne itself.

I loved the colors, as I remember them now mostly red and

blue but very pure, the true colors painted on stone. I don’t

think it is possible to go back to a place that has such a grip

on one’s heart; or I can’t. When I die, though, I’m going back,

as ash, dust unto dust - not to the stone walls or throne of

Knossos but to a high hill overlooking Heraklion. I belong to

the place even if the place does not belong to me.

Kazantzakis

In the early morning I would walk from my balcony near the

water to the market. I’d buy olives. There had to be dozens

of different kinds. Of al the food for sale, olives were the

cheapest, and I’d buy the cheapest of those - about an eighth

of an ounce - and then I’d find a cafe and order a cof ee. I’d

keep fil ing the cup with milk, each time changing the ratio of

cof ee to milk. I’d have the waiter bring more and more milk.

As long as there was stil some cof ee in the cup I couldn’t be

refused. This was a rule I made up in my mind, but it seemed

to hold true. Early on I stole a salt shaker so that I could clean

my teeth. Salt is abrasive, but it works.

I had read about the square where I took my coffee in

Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Freedom or Death, a book I carried

with me almost everywhere once I discovered it (and I stil

have that paperback copy, brown and brittle). A novelist who

captures the soul of a country or a people writes fiction and

history and mythology, and Freedom or Death is such a work.

It is the story of the 1889 revolt of the Cretans against the

Turks. It is epic and at the same time it is the story of

Heraklion, Crete’s largest city and where I was living. Inside

Kazantzakis

the epic there are love stories, stories of fraternal affection and

conflict, sickening details of war and occupation. In the square

- the square where I was sitting - the Turks would hang rebels,

the solitary body often more terrifying than any baker’s

dozen. Only a writer can show that precise thing, bring the

disfigured humanity of the dead individual into one’s own

viscera. One forgets the eloquence of the single person who

wanted freedom and got death. I could always see the body

hanging.

In those days political women did a kind of inner translating so that al the heroes, almost always men except for the occasional valiant female prostitute, were persons, ungendered, and one could aspire to be such a person. The point for the writer and other readers might well be masculinity itself,

but the political female read in a different pitch - the body

shaking the trees with its weight, obstructing both wind and

light, would be more lyrical, with the timbre in Bil ie Holiday’s

voice. Freedom or Death set the terms for fighting oppression;

later, feminism brought those terms to a new maturity with

the idea that one had to be willing to die for freedom, yes, but

also willing to live for it. Each day over my prolonged cup of

coffee I would watch the body hanging in the square and

think about it, why the body was displayed in torment as if

the torture, the killing continued after death. I would feel the

fear it created in those who saw it. I would feel the necessity

of another incursion against the oppressor - to show that he

Heartbreak

had not won, nor had he created a paralyzing fear, nor had he

stopped one from risking one’s life for freedom.

I haven’t read Kazantzakis since I lived on Crete in 1965. I

have never read Zorba the Greek, his most famous novel

because of the movie made from the book, a movie I saw

maybe a decade or two later on television. Freedom or death

was how I felt about segregation back home, the Vietnam

War, stopping the bomb, writing, making love, going where

I wanted when I wanted. Freedom or death was how I felt

about the Nazis, the fascists, the tyrants, the sadists, the cold

kil ers. Freedom or death was how I felt about the world

created by the compromisers, the mediocrities, the apathetic.

Freedom or death encapsulated my philosophy. So I wrote a

series of poems cal ed (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose

poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a

novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on

Burning Boyfriend; and poems and dialogues I later handprinted

using movable type in a book cal ed Morning Hair. The burning boyfriend was Norman Morrison, the pacifist who had set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War.

Discipline

I learned how to write on Crete. I learned to write every day

I learned to work on a typewriter that I had rented in

Heraklion. I had thin, light blue paper. I’d carve out hours for

myself, the same every day, and no mat er what was going on

in the rest of my writer’s life I used those hours for writing.

I learned to throw away what was no good. One asks, How

does a writer write? And one asks, How does a writer live?

At first one imitates. I imitated in those years Lorca, Genet,

Baldwin, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller. I read both Miller

and Lawrence Durrel on being a writer in Greece. It seemed

from them as if words could stream down with the light. I did

not find that to be the case, and so I thought that perhaps I

was not a writer. Then one wants to know about the one great

book: can someone young write only one book and have it be

great - or was there only one Rimbaud for al eternity and the

gift is al used up? Then one needs to know if what one wrote

yesterday and the day before has the aura of greatness so that

the whole thing, eventually, would be the one great book even

though that might have to be fol owed by a second great

book. Then one wants to know if the greatness shows in one’s

Heartbreak

face or manner or being so that people would draw back a little on confronting the bearer of the greatness. Then one wants to know if being a writer is like being Sisyphus or perhaps

Prometheus. One wants to know if writers are a little band of

gods created in each generation, cursed or blessed with the

task of finding themselves - finding that they are writers. One

wants to know if one wil write something important enough

to die for; or if fascists wil kil one for what one writes; or if

one can write prose or poetry so strong that nothing can break

its back. One wonders if one will be able to stand up to or

against dictators or police power. One wonders if one has the

illusion of a vocation or if one has the vocation. One wonders

about how to be what one wants to be - that genius of a

writer who takes literature to a new level or that genius of a

writer who brings humanity forward or that genius of a writer

who tel s a simple, gorgeous story or that genius of a writer

who holds hands with Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or that genius

of a writer who lets the mute speak, especially the last, letting

the mute speak. Can one make a sound that the deaf can hear?

Can one write a narrative visually accessible to the blind? Can

one write for the dispossessed, the marginalized, the tortured?

Is there a kind of genius that can make a story as real as a tree

or an idea as inevitable as taking the next breath? Is there a

genius who can create morning out of words and can one be

that genius? The questions are hubristic, but they go to the

core of the writing project: how to be a god who can create a

Discipline

world in which people actually live - some of the people being

characters, some of the people being readers.

The Freighter

I learned how to listen from my father and from being on the

freighter. My father could listen to anyone: sit quietly, follow

what they had to say even if he abhorred it - for instance, the

racism in some of my family members - and later use it for

teaching, for pedagogy. Through watching him - his calm, his

stillness, the sometimes deep disapproval buried under the

weight of his cheeks, his mouth in a slight but barely perceptible frown - I saw the posture of one strong enough to hear without being overcome with anger or desperation or fear.

I saw a vital man with a conscience pick his fights, and they

were always policy fights, in his school as a teacher, as a guidance counselor, in the post of ice where he worked unloading trucks. For instance, in the post of ice where he was relatively

powerless, he’d work on Christian holidays so that his fellow

laborers could have those days with their families. I saw

someone with principles who had no need to cal at ention to

himself.

The ocean isn’t real y very different, though it can be more

flamboyant. It simply is; it doesn’t require one’s at ention;

there is no arrogance however fierce it can become. I took a

The Freighter

freighter from Heraklion to Savannah to New York City. In

the two and a half weeks on the ocean, I mainly listened: to

the narrative of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I read some of

every day; to the earth buried miles under the ocean; to the

astonishing stil ness of the water, potentially so wild and deadly,

on most nights blanketed by an impenetrable darkness; to the

things living under and around me; to the crew and captain of

the ship; to the one family also making the trek, the sullenness

of the teen, the creativity of a younger child, the brightness of

the adults’ optimism.

It seems a false analogy - my father and the ocean - because

my father was a humble man and the ocean is overwhelming

until one sees that it simply is what it is. From my father and

from the ocean, I learned to listen with concentration and poise

to the women who would talk to me years later: the women

who had been raped and prostituted; the women who had

been bat ered; the women who had been incested as children.

I think that sometimes they spoke to me because they had an

intuition that the difficulty in saying the words would not be

in vain; and in this sense my father and the ocean gave me the

one great tool of my life - an ability to listen so closely that

I could find meaning in the sounds of suf ering and pain,

anger and hate, sorrow and grief. I could listen to a barely

executed whisper and I could listen to the shrill rant. I knew

never to shut down inside; I learned to defer my own reactions

and to consider listening an honor and a holy act. I learned

Heartbreak

patience, too, from my father and from that ocean that never

ends but goes round again circling the earth with no meaning,

nothing outside itself. One need not go to the moon to see the

cascading roundness of our globe because the ocean shows

it and says it; there are a million little sounds, tiny noises,

the same as in a human heart. Had I never been on the

freighter I think I would never have learned anything except

the tangled ways of humans fighting - ego or war. The words

on Kazantzakis’s grave say, “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free. ” On the freighter and from my father I learned the final lesson of Crete, and it would stand me in good stead

years later in fighting for the rights of women, especially

sexual y abused women: I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I

am free.

Strategy

After I lived on Crete, I went back to Bennington for two

long, highly psychedelic years. There I fought for on-campus

contraception - a no-no when colleges and universities functioned in loco parentis - and legal abortion. I fought against the Vietnam War. I tried to open up an antiwar counseling

center to keep the rural-poor men in the towns around the

college from signing up to be soldiers. Most of these were white

men, and Vietnam was the equivalent of welfare for them. But

the burning issue was boys in rooms. Bennington, an all-girls'

school with a few male students in dance and drama, had

parietal hours: from 2 a. m. to 6 a. m. the houses in which the

students lived were girls only. One could have sex with another

girl, and many of us did, myself certainly included. But the

male lovers had to disappear: be driven out like beasts into the

cold mountain night, hide behind trees during the hour of the

wolf, and reemerge after dawn. The elimination of parietal

hours was a huge issue, in some ways as big as the war. In

colleges across the country girls were required to be in their

gender-segregated dormitories by 10. Girls who went to Bennington in the main valued personal freedom; at least this girl

Heartbreak

did. As one watched male faculty sneak in and out of student

bedrooms, one could think about lies, lies, lies. As one saw the

pregnancies that led to il egal abortions from these liaisons,

one could think about the secret but not subtle cruelty of ful y

adult men to young women. Everyone knew the Bennington

guard who was deaf, and one prayed he would be on the 2-

to-6 shift so one could have sex with a man one’s own age

without facing suspension or expulsion. When a student would

go with a boy to a motel, she could expect a cal at the motel

from a particular administrator, a lesbian in hiding who tried

to defend law and order. It was law and order versus personal freedom, and I was on the side of personal freedom.

The college had a new president, Edward J. Bloustein, a

constitutional lawyer, or so he said. The U. S. Constitution is

amazingly malleable. Regardless, he was a law-and-order guy,

and he didn’t belong at Bennington. You might say it was him

or me. He wanted a more conventional Bennington with a more

conventional student body and a fully conventional liberal-

arts curriculum. He wanted to expand the student body, which

would make classes bigger. He wanted al the hippies gone

and al the druggies gone and al the lesbian lovers gone. He

was for abstinence at a time when virginity before marriage

was highly prized; he was against abortion and once told me

in a confrontation we had in his of ice that Jewish girls tried to

get pregnant - thus the problem with pregnancy on campus.

That was a new one. He considered the faculty blameless.

Strategy

Feeling under siege by this gray, gray man, students elected

me to the Judicial Commit ee of the college. It was clear that

he was looking for a scapegoat, someone to expel for defying

parietal hours especially but also for smoking dope and

having girl-girl sex. The students knew I could stand up to

him, and I could. The scapegoat he wanted to punish was my

best friend, and he just fucking was not going to get the

chance to do it.

She had been seen kissing another girl on the steps inside

the house in which she lived. I’ve rarely met a Bennington

woman from that time who does not think that she herself

was the girl being kissed. Someone reported my friend for

shooting up heroin in the living room. I recently asked her if

she had, and she said no. In the thirty-five years that I've known

her, I've never known her to lie - which was the problem back

then. The college president confronted her on marijuana use,

and she told him the truth - that she only had a joint or two

on her right then. Knowing her, I’d bet she offered to share.

The house where I lived, Franklin House, was a hotbed of

treason, so first we had her move there. She could not quite

grasp the notion of turning down music while people were

sleeping, and in our house that was a crime. One could shoot up

heroin or kiss girls, but one could not be a nuisance. Nevertheless, everyone knew a lot was at stake and so the music blared. To protect the personal freedom of each person living

in Franklin we seceded from the school. We declared ourselves

Heartbreak

entirely independent and we voted down parietal hours. So

stringy, hairy boys were in the bathrooms at 4 a. m., as one of

the few female professors noted in outrage at one of the many

public meetings. If they weren’t bothering anyone, it was no

crime. If they were, it could be bright and sunny and midafternoon and it was a crime. We elected an empress, an oracle, and other high of icials. (I was the oracle, though I

preferred the tide “seer. ”) This was a pleasant anarchy. No one

had to live there who didn’t want to, but my best friend was

not going to be homeless because some rat as was upset by

some deep kissing.

The secession heightened the conflict between students and

the administration. It was just another version of adults lying,

having a pretense of order, as the foxes on the faculty sneaked

into the henhouse with impunity. They impregnated with

impunity. They paid for criminal abortions with impunity.

The apocalypse was coming. Each day the class warfare

between students on the one side and faculty and administration on the other intensified. The lying, cheating faculty began to piss a lot of us of . They always presented themselves as being

on our side against the administration because this was how

they got laid, but slowly the truth emerged - they wanted the

appearance of professorship during the day and randy acces to

the students at night, between 2 and 6 being hours that carried

a lot of traf ic. As the tension grew, my best friend was closer

and closer to being tied down on the altar and split in half.

8 6

Strategy

I worked out a plan. The school was governed by a constitution. The Judicial Commit ee had the right to expel students.

My plan was to cal a school meeting, ask everyone to submit

a signed piece of paper saying that she had broken the parietal

hours, and then expel everyone, as we had the right to do. Out

of a student body of a few hundred students, only about six

refused. The Judicial Commit ee expelled everyone else. In

effect the school ceased to exist.

It’s always the law-and-order guys who turn to tyranny

when they’ve been legally beat. In this case Bloustein exercised

raw power. He waited until graduation before reacting; he

sent a let er to al the expelled students' parents that said they

could not come back to school unless they signed a loyalty

oath to obey the school’s rules. I didn’t go back to school. I

would never sign any such oath. But I thought his tactic was

disgusting: it’s bad to break the spirit of the young, and that’s

what he did. In order to go back to school, students had to

betray themselves and each other, and most did. I learned

never to ignore the reality of power pure and simple. I also

learned that one could get a bunch of people to do something

brave or new or rebellious, but if it didn’t come from their

deepest hearts they could not maintain the honor of their

commitment. I learned that one does not overwhelm people

by persuading them to do something basically antagonistic

to their own sense of self; nor can rhetoric create in people a

sustained determination to win. I thought Bloustein did

Heartbreak

something evil by making students sign that oath; how dare

he? But he dared, they did, and I left sickened.

8 8

Suf er the Lit le

Children

In Amsterdam I knew a hippie man whose children from an

early mar iage were coming to stay with him. They were thirteen and eleven, I think. The older girl had been incested by her stepfather. This came into the open because the older girl

tried to kill herself. This she did at least in part valiantly

because she saw the stepfather beginning to make moves on

the younger girl in exactly the same way he had gradually

forced himself on her. The stepfather had started to wash and

shower with the younger girl. The mother, in despair, wrote

the hippie man, who had abandoned al of them, for help. She

wanted to mend the relationship with the second husband

while keeping her children safe. The hippie man made clear

to those of us who knew him that he considered his older

daughter responsible for the sex; you know how girls flirt and

al that. His woman friend made clear to him that he was

wrong and also that she was not going to take care of the children. She wouldn’t have to, he said; he would be the nurturer.

When the girls arrived in Amsterdam, one recently raped, the

Heartbreak

other exceptionally nervous and upset by temperament or

contagion or molestation, the hippie man forgot his vows of

responsibility, as he had always forgotten al the vows he had

ever made, and let al the work, emotional and physical, devolve

on his woman friend. She wasn’t having any and simply

refused to take care of them. Eventually she left.

One night I got a cal from her: the hippie man had given

each kid 100 guilders, set them loose, and told them to take

care of themselves. He just could not be with them without

fucking them, he told her (and them). In a noble and compassionate alternative gesture, he put them out on the streets. His woman friend made clear to me that this was a mess she was

not going to clean up. I asked where they were.

They had taken shelter in the frame of an abandoned building, squatters without a room that had walls. They lived up toward the wooden frame for the ceiling. Their light came from

burning candles. I found them and took them home with me,

although “home” would be stretching it a bit. At that moment

I lived in an emptied apartment, the one I had lived in with

my husband, a batterer. I had married him after I left Bennington for the second time (the first was Crete, the second Amsterdam). After I had played hide-and-seek with the brute

for a number of months, he decided I could live in the apartment he had cleaned out. By then I was grateful even if it meant that he knew where I was. A woman’s life is ful of

such trade-offs. So when the girls came with me, it wasn’t to

Suf er the Lit le Children

safety or luxury or even just enough. The apartment, however,

did have walls, and one does learn to be grateful.

The older girl thought that she was probably pregnant. Her

father, the hippie man, did light shows, many for rock bands;

he had the habit of sending musicians into the older girl’s bed

to have sex with her; the younger daughter slept next to the

older girl, both on a mattress on the floor. They were wonderful and delightful girls, scared to death; each put up the best front she could: I'm not afraid, I don’t care, none of it hurts me.

The first order of business, after get ing them down from

the wood rafters il uminated by the burning candles, was getting the older one a pregnancy test. If she was pregnant, she was going to have an abortion, I said. I’m not proud now of

using my authority that way, but she was a child, a real child;

anyway, for bet er or worse, I would have forced one on her.

In Amsterdam the procedure was not so clandestine nor so

stigmatized. It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant.

One day she was suddenly very happy. One of the adult

rockers sent into her bed by her father was going to Spain and

he wanted to take her. This was proof that he loved her. I knew

from the hippie father that he had paid the rocker to take the

girl. Finally I was the adult and someone else was the child.

I told her. I told her carefully and slowly and with love but

I told her the truth, al of it, about the rot en father and the

rot en rocker. Her mother now wanted her and her sister

back. I sent them back. Nothing would ever be simple for me

Heartbreak

again. A strain of melancholy entered my life; it was the

fusion of responsibility with loss in a world of bruised and

bullied strangers.

Theory

I went to Amsterdam to interview the Provos - not the blood-

soaked Irish Provos but the hashish-soaked Dutch ones. They

served as the prototype for the U. S. yippies, though their

theory was more sophisticated; as one said to me, “Make an

action that puts crowds of ordinary people in direct conflict

with the police, then disappear. This will undermine police

authority and politicize those they beat up. ” The man I eventually married said that he envisaged social change as circles on a canvas; the idea was to destabilize the circles by adding

ones that didn’t fit - the canvas would inevitably lose its

integrity and some circles would fal off, a paradigm for social

chaos that would topple social hierarchies.

What I found infinitely more valuable, however, were three

books: Sexual Politics by Kate Millet ; The Dialectic of Sex by

Shulamith Firestone; and Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology

edited by Robin Morgan. These were the classic, basic texts of

radical feminism; what happened when women moved to the

left of the left. I was hardheaded though; I defended Norman

Mailer even though his attacks on Mil et were philistine; I

stil liked D. H. Lawrence, though now I find him unbearable

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to read, such a prissy and intolerant hee-haw; and I again

learned the power of listening, this time because of someone

who listened to me.

Her name was Dr. Frankel-Teitz. I had found out that when

you told people your husband was beating you, they turned

their backs on you. Mostly they blamed you. They said it

wouldn’t be happening if you didn’t want it and like it. You

could be, as I was, carrying al you could hold in an effort to

escape or you could be, as I was, badly hurt and bleeding, and

they stil told you that you wanted it. You could be running

away fast and furious, but it was still your will, not his, that

controlled the scenario of violence: you liked it. You could ask

for help and they’d deny you help and it was still your fault

and you liked it. I’d like to wipe out every person on earth

who ever said that to or about an abused woman.

I had a lot of physical problems from having been beaten

so much and from the tough months of running and hiding,

including terrible open sores on my breasts from where he

burned me with a cigarette. The sores would open up without

warning like stigmata and my breasts would bleed. Finally

women helping me found me a doctor. “Al the lesbians go to

her, ” they said, and in those days that was a damned good

recommendation. I went to her but was determined not to say

I had been beaten or I was running; I couldn’t bear one more

time of being told it was my fault. Stil , I said it; it fel out of

me when she saw the open sores. “That’s hor ible, ” she said -

Theory

about the beatings, not the sores. I'l never forget it. “That’s

horrible. ” Was she on my side; did she believe me; was it

horrible? “No one’s ever said that, ” I told her. No one had.

A few years later, back in the United States, I sent Dr.

Frankel-Teitz a copy of Woman Hating and a let er thanking

her for her help and kindness. She replied with a fairly cranky

letter saying that she didn’t see what the big deal was; she had

only said and done the obvious. The obvious had included

get ing me medicine I couldn’t afford. I thought that she was

the most remarkable person I had ever met. “That’s hor ible. ”

Can saving someone really be that simple? “That’s hor ible. ”

Horrible, that’s hor ible. What does it take? What’s so hard

about it? How can the women who don’t say those words live

with themselves? How can the women who do say those

words now, thirty years later, worry more about how they

dress and which parties they go to? In between the early days

and now someone must have meant what she said enough so

that it could not be erased. How much can it cost? Horrible,

that’s hor ible.

The Vow

It was a tender conversation. The woman who had helped me

most in Amsterdam, Ricki Abrams, sat with me and we held

hands. I was going to go back to New York. I talked with

Ricki about how she had saved my life; I thanked her. I talked

with Ricki about having prostituted and having been homeles . Back then I never talked about these parts of my own life.

I talked with her about bringing what I had learned into the

fight for women’s freedom. I talked with her about my fierce

commitment to the women’s movement and feminism. I

talked to her about how grateful I was to the women’s movement - to the women who had been organizing and talking and shouting and writing, making women both visible and

loved by each other. I talked with her about the book she and

I had started together and that I was going to finish alone,

Woman Hating. We had shown a draft of the chapter on Suck,

a counterculture pornography magazine, to those who ran the

magazine, ex-pats like ourselves, from the same generation,

with the same commitment to civil rights and, we thought,

human dignity. They cut us cold. Ricki could not stand it. I

could. There’s one thing about surviving prostitution - it takes

The Vow

a hell of a lot to scare you. My husband was a hel of a lot, and

he taught me real fear; the idiots at Suck were not much of

anything. Writing had become more important to me than the

ir itability of wannabe pimps.

Sit ing with Ricki, talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her:

that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women’s movement stronger and bet er; that I'd give my life to the movement and for the movement.

I promised to be honor-bound to the well-being of women,

to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to

live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some

thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.

I took two laundry bags fil ed with manuscripts, books, and

some clothes, the Afghan sheepskin coat I had as a legacy

from my marriage, an airplane ticket given me by a junkie,

and some money I had stolen, and I went back to New York

City. Living hand to mouth, sleeping on floors or in closetsized rooms, I began working on Woman Hating. I had up to four jobs at a time. Every other day I would take $7 out of

a checking account. I ate at happy hours in bars. Any money

I had I would first tithe to the Black Panther Party in Oakland,

California. Huey Newton sent me his poems before he shot

and killed a teenage prostitute, the event that caused him to

flee the United States. Since I didn’t believe that the police

had framed him, one might say that a rift had opened

between him and me. But I still kept sending money for

Heartbreak

the breakfast and literacy programs sponsored by the Black

Panthers.

I went to demonstrations as often as I could. The Three

Marias of Portugal had written a feminist book that got them

jailed. I demonstrated in their behalf. I went to prolesbian and

antiapartheid demonstrations.

One of my part-time jobs was organizing against the

Vietnam War, the backdrop to most of my life as a young

adult. In Amsterdam my husband and I had helped deserters

from the U. S. military hide on their way to Sweden. Vietnam

had been shaping my life since I was eighteen and was sent to

the Women’s House of Detention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser,

who also worked against the war, hired me as her assistant.

Muriel had a long and distinguished life of rebellion, including the birth of a son out of wedlock in an age darker than any I had experienced. He was now a draft resister in Canada.

With another woman, Garland Har is, I organized a conference that brought together artists and intellectuals against the war. Robert Lifton, Susan Sontag, and Daniel Ellsberg

participated. With director Andre Gregory I helped organize

a special night on which al the theaters and theater companies

in Manhattan would donate their money to help rebuild a

hospital in North Vietnam that U. S. bombs had leveled. I was

not real y able to face the chasm between the left and feminism even though I gloried in the essays in Sisterhood Is Powerful that exposed the sexism of the left. I couldn’t stop

The Vow

working against the war or, for instance, apartheid just because

the men on the left: were pigs. I became part of a consciousness-

raising group, but even that had its roots in the Speaking

Bitterness sessions in communist China. I worked hard. One

of my mentors, the writer Grace Paley, who had helped me

when I got out of the Women’s House of Detention, helped

me again - this time to get an apartment. It was on the Lower

East Side, in an old tenement building. The toilet was in the

hall and the bathtub was in the kitchen. I had a desk, a chair,

and a $12 foam-rubber mattress. I bought one fork, one spoon,

one knife, one plate, one bowl. I was determined to learn to

live without men.

My Last Leftist

Meeting

There were only seven of us. I was the menial, a part-time

of ice worker. The movie director Emile D’Antonio seemed to

lead the meeting by sheer force of personality. There were

three women, including myself. That translated into six

eminents, two of whom were women. Our goal was to find

the next project for celebrities organized against the war in a

group cal ed Redress. The idea of the group was 100 percent

Amerikan: famous people organized to fight the war, their

names having more pull than those of professional politicians

or ordinary citizens. It was a time when fame was not dissociated from accomplishment: most of our members had earned through achievement whatever fame they had. But the

hierarchy of fame always favored those in the movies; intellectuals per se were low on the list. As an of ice worker, I was not expected to have ideas, but I had them anyway. In the larger

meetings when we had a whole roomful of the famous or

somewhat famous, I would be cut in two for put ing an idea

forward. I remember being torn to pieces by some famous

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My Last Leftist Meeting

divinity professor. Whoever he is, I hate him now as much as

I did then. Another noneminent and I apparently called his

moral purity into question. I have no idea how or why; I

didn’t then and I don’t now.

In this smaller meeting in a tiny room around a nondescript

table there was more congeniality. Cora Weiss was there, I

remember - her family owns or owned Revlon. A man named

Carl from Vietnam Veterans Against the War headed the

meeting in the official sense; he was famous in the antiwar

movement, prominent, in no way a servant, instead a rather

cunning leader. The women’s movement was going full tilt but

never seemed to penetrate the antiwar movement (and hasn’t,

in my opinion, to this day). No one appeared wil ing to

rethink the status quo. In fact, no one was prepared to understand that the women’s movement had outclassed the peace movement with both its originality and its vision of equality.

I had once been at a meeting at Carl’s apartment, shared with

a woman. He proudly showed me the self-hating graffiti her

consciousness-raising group had etched and drawn and painted

onto a canvas on the wall. He enjoyed it a lot and especial y,

as he made clear to me, that the women had done it themselves.

See, he seemed to be saying, this is what they think of themselves so I don’t have to think more of them. I remember being very troubled - why was this woman-hating graffiti what

they thought of themselves? I remember noting in my mind

that this was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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Heartbreak

We took a break in the middle of our little meeting - someone had to make a phone cal - but returned to the table wel before the break was over. None of the women, including

myself, talked. Our col eagues of the male persuasion did talk:

about Marilyn Chambers, the pornography star who had

sold Ivory soap in television commercials until she was booted

out by a morals clause in her Ivory contract. The conversation

came from out of nowhere; nothing logically led to it and

nothing explained the fact that the men al liked the conversation and participated happily. They talked in particular about how much they would like to fuck her in the as . This seemed

to derive from her most famous movie, Behind the Green Door,

which they al seemed to have seen.

I sat there in dismay and confusion. Weren’t we trying to

stop exploitation? Weren’t we the love children, not the hate

children? Didn’t we believe in the dignity of al persons?

Wasn’t it clear - surely it didn’t have to be pointed out - that

pornography defamed women? Even if Carl’s woman friend

and her friends debased themselves, commercial pornography

required male consumption and brought the defamation to

a new level. What the men said was so vile that I was real y

wounded by it. I seemed unable to learn the lesson that pornography trumped political principle and honor. (I may have learned it by now)

I found myself nauseated and in my mind debated whether

or not I would give a little exit speech or simply get up and

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My Last Leftist Meeting

leave. The exit speech would have the advantage of let ing

them know how they had let down me and mine, others

like me, women. Were these men worth it - were they worth

fighting for the right words, which was always so hard? Were

they worth overcoming the nausea, or should I just puke on

the table (and I was damned close to it)? I noted that the men

were having a good time and that the women not only did not

raise their eyes but had their heads lowered as if trying to

pretend they didn’t hear or weren’t there. I noticed that the

men did not notice that the women had suddenly become

absent, at the table yes but not present, not verbal - there was

a quiet resembling social or political death; in ef ect, the women

were erased. I got up and walked out. I never went back to the

group and stopped get ing my $75-a-week paycheck, which

was the mainstay of my existence. Everything else I earned

was chump change.

103

Petra Kel y

Some twenty years after my last leftist meeting, I went to a

memorial service at the United Nations Chapel for Petra Kel y

Petra Kel y was the daughter of an Amerikan father and a

German mother; she was a pacifist and a feminist. Living in

Germany she founded the Green Party, which was devoted to

ecofeminism, nonviolence, and anti pornography politics. She

brought one of the first lawsuits against a pornographer for

slander, libel, and hate. She put up a hell of a fight but lost

the case. The lefties within the Green Party didn’t support her.

Before her death she was doing antiwar work in the Balkans.

The memorial service was organized and at ended by my

old pacifist friends from the anti-Vietnam War days. Petra had

been shot to death by her male companion-lover who then

shot and killed himself. The companion-lover had been a

general with NATO in Germany; Petra had been responsible

for his transformation into a pacifist.

Cora Weiss was the emcee of the event. There were seven

or eight invited speakers, most of them male or maybe al of

them but Bel a Abzug. Many of the speakers, touched by the

conversion of the NATO general to nonviolence, spoke at

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Petra Kelly

length about his courage and honor; his stunning contributions

to pacifism and world peace (through renouncing NATO).

Some of them mentioned Petra in passing. One or two did

not mention her at al but called him “brother” and nearly

dissolved in tears. (And we thought that boys couldn’t cry. )

The sentimentality on behalf of the male convert to pacifism

was astonishing. Many of the speakers appeared to accept that

Petra and her companion-lover were the victims of a plot,

probably CIA, because the CIA saw him as a turncoat and

wanted to kil him - she was, as monsters say, collateral damage.

Others thought that there had been a mutual suicide pact,

that Petra had agreed - ladies first - to be killed by the former

NATO general. I waited for Bella Abzug, one of my heroes,

to speak. She spoke last, I think, but nothing she said challenged the notion of Petra as a helpmate who wanted to be kil ed. She even managed to say something nice about the boy,

though she nearly choked on the words. I was devastated.

I got up to go to the front to speak. I was not on the agenda.

Cora motioned me back to my seat and said in a loud whisper

that there wasn’t time for anyone else to say anything. She

gestured in a way that implied she couldn’t be more sor y.

I forced myself through the ropes that marked the speaking

area and kept it sacrosanct. I turned to face the audience of

mourners. Here were men I had known since I was eighteen

- from my earliest days in fighting against the war in Vietnam.

I couldn’t believe that nothing had changed - peace, peace,

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Heartbreak

peace, love, love, love; they did not understand nor would

they even consider that a man had murdered a woman.

I said that while Petra’s life had been extraordinary her

death was not; it was an ordinary death for a woman. Petra

had been kil ed by her lover, her intimate, her mate. She was

kil ed in her bed wearing a nightgown. (I knew but didn’t say

that Petra would never commit suicide by any means while

unclothed or even partly exposed - the pornography of it

would have been repellent to her. She also would never have

used a gun or allowed its use. ) She had probably been asleep.

Nothing could be more commonplace or cowardly. The audience of pacifists started hissing and some started shouting.

I said that there was probably no conspiracy and certainly no

acquiescence on the part of Petra; everything in her life and

politics argued against any such complicity. It had to be faced,

I said, that pacifists had not taken a stand against violence

against women; it was stil invisible to them, even when the

woman was Petra Kel y, a world-class activist. I said that the

male’s life meant more to them than hers did. By this time the

pacifists were in various stages of rage.

No pacifist woman stood up to support me, though Petra

would have. I said that, hard as it was, one had to understand

that Petra had died like millions of other women around the

world: prematurely, violently, and at the hands of someone

who was presumed to love her. I said that nonviolence was

not possible if the ordinary, violent deaths of women went

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Petra Kelly

unremarked, unnoticed. However extraordinary Petra had been

in her life, I repeated, her death could not have been more

commonplace.

The mourners were angry Some were shouting nasty names

at me. I said that I had to speak because not to do so would

be to betray Petra’s work and the work we had done together,

in concert. I ran from the room. One woman grabbed my arm

on my way out. “Thank you, ” she said. That’s enough; it has

to be enough - one on-site person during a conflict showing

respect.

I felt that I had stood up for Petra. I knew she would have

stood up for me.

107

Capitalist Pig

I started speaking and lecturing as a feminist because I had a

lot of trouble getting my work published. I spoke on violence

against women. In the early years of the women’s movement,

this subject was marginal, violence itself considered an anomaly,

not intrinsic to the low status of women. I accepted that

valuation; I just thought that this was work I could do and

therefore had to do. When something’s got your name on it,

you’re the one responsible for finding a way to create an

awareness, a stand, a set of strategies. It’s yours to do. There

can be 100, 000 others with their names on it, too, but that

doesn’t get you off the hook.

I spoke in small rooms fil ed with women, and afterward

someone would pass a hat. I remember a crowd of about fifty

in Woodstock, New York, that chipped in about $60. I slept

on the floor of whoever had asked me or organized the event,

and I ate whatever I was given - bad tabbouleh stands out

in my mind. I needed money to live on but didn’t believe in

asking for it from women, because women were poor. Women’s

centers in towns and on college campuses were poor.

Sometimes a woman would pass me a note that had a check

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Capitalist Pig

in it for $25 or some such sum; the highest I remember was

$150, and that was a fortune in my eyes.

I had to travel to wherever the speech was in the hope that

I'd be able to collect enough money to pay for my expenses.

Flo Kennedy often talked about how if you did not demand

money people would treat you badly. I did not believe that

could be true, but for the most part it was. I can remember

the gut-wrenching decision to ask for a fee up front, first $200,

then $500. A few years later I got a speaking agent, Phyllis

Langer, who had been an editor at Ms. She took a 25 percent

commission, whereas most speaking or lecture agents took a

full 33 percent. By the time I hired her, I was making in the

$ l, 500-$3, 000 range. She made sure that I got paid, that the

event was handled okay, with publicity, and that expenses were

reimbursed. She was kind and also provided perspective.

When she went to work at an agency that I didn’t particularly like, I decided to represent myself. By this time my nervousness about money had disappeared, a Darwinian adaptation, although my stage fright - which has run me ragged over the

years - never did.

I would cal whoever wanted me to speak on the phone. I'd

get an idea of how much money they could raise. I stil wanted

them to be comfortable, and it was a horror to me that anyone

would think I was ripping them off. By the time I took over

making al the ar angements myself, I had developed a fixed

set of necessities: a good hotel room in a good hotel, enough

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Heartbreak

money for meals and ground transportation (taxis, not buses

or subways). Eventually I graduated to the best hotel I could

find, and I'd also buy myself a first-class ticket.

Representing myself, I would fold an estimate of expenses

into a fee so that the sponsor had to pay me only one amount,

after I spoke on the night that I spoke. I had developed an

aversion to having organizers vet my expenses, even though I

was scrupulous. If I watched an in-room movie, I paid for it

myself.

In the first years, I was so poor that if I spoke at a conference I usually could not afford a ticket for the inevitable concert scheduled as part of the conference. I didn’t know that I could get one for free. If I wanted a T-shirt from the conference, I couldn’t buy it. My favorite women’s movement button - “Don’t Suck. Bite” - cost too much for me to have one.

I was scraping by, and the skin was pret y torn from my

fingers.

Even during the early years, I got letters from women

telling me that I was a capitalist pig; yeah, they did begrudge

me the $60. It wasn’t personal. It was just that any money I

earned came from someone else who also didn’t have enough

money for a T-shirt. Or did she? I guess I’l never know. I

couldn’t embrace being a capitalist pig; I couldn’t accept the

fact - and it was a fact - that the more money I was paid, the

nicer people were. I couldn’t even accept the good fallout -

that charging a fee for a lecture enabled me to do benefits as

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Capitalist Pig

wel . After a while I got the hang of it and when work fel of ,

when the speaking events dried up, when someone was nasty

to me, I just raised my price. It was bad for the karma but

good for this life.

I remember that saying I was poor got me contempt, not

empathy or a few more dol ars. I remember that begging

for money especially brought out the cruelty in people. I

remember that trying to talk about poverty - you show me

yours and I'l show you mine - never brought forth anything

other than insult. Competitive poverty was the lowest negotiation, a fight to the moral death.

In hindsight it is clear to me that I never would have been

able to put in more than a quarter of a century on the road

had I not figured out what I needed. Everyone doesn’t need

what I need, but I do need what I need. Money is a hard

discipline, not easy to learn, especially for the lumpen like me.

111

One Woman

I was walking down the street on a bright, sunny day in New

York City sometime in 1975. A woman almost as bright and

sunny was walking toward me. I recognized her, an acquaintance in the world of books. She had been up at my Woodstock speech, which had been about rape. I had started writing out

my speeches because of my frustration at not being able to

find venues for publication. This was cal ed “The Rape Atrocity

and the Boy Next Door, ” subsequently published in 1976 in

a collection of speeches called Our Blood: Prophecies and

Discourses on Sexual Politics. We greeted each other, and then

she started talking: she had been raped on a particular night

in a particular city years before. She had left the window open

just a little for the breeze. The guy climbed in and when she

awoke he had already restrained her wrists and was inside her.

We stood in that one place for an hour or so because she told

me every detail of the rape. Most of them I still remember.

I gave the same speech at a smal community col ege. At the

reception after, the host pulled me aside. She had been gang-

raped some fifteen years before. The rapists were just about to

be released from prison. She was in ter or. One key element in

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One Woman

their convictions was that they had taken photographs of the

rape. The prosecutor was able to use the photographs to show

the jury the brutal fact of the rape.

Some eight years later a founder of one of the early rape

crisis centers told me that she and her colleagues were seeing

increasing numbers of rapes that were photographed; the

photography was part of the rape. The photographs themselves

no longer proved that a rape had taken place. For the rapists,

they intensified pleasure during the rape and after it they were

tokens, happy reminders; but the perception of what the photograph meant had changed. No mat er how violent the rape, the photograph of it seemed to be proof of the victim’s complicity to increasing numbers of jurors.

Everywhere that I traveled, starting from my poorest days

in New York and its environs to my more lucrative days flying

around the country to my sometimes-rich - sometimes-poor

days on the international level, I had women talking to me

about having been raped; then about having been raped and

photographed. One simply cannot imagine the pain. Each

woman told the story in the same way: no detail was left out;

the clock was running and the whole story had to be told to

me, then, there, wherever we were. Six months or a year or

several years could have passed since they had come to hear

me speak; six months or fifteen years could have passed since

the rape or the rape and the photographs.

Women did not stand up after the speech and speak about

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Heartbreak

a personal experience of rape; the questions were socially

acceptable and usually abstract. It was when they saw me

somewhere, anywhere real y, but alone, that they told me,

sometimes in whispers, what had happened to them. I had to

live with what I was being told.

Like death, rape happens to one woman, an individual, a

singular person. Even in circumstances of war when there is

mass rape, each rape happens to one woman. That one woman

can be raped many times by one man or by many. I’ve spent

the larger part of my adult life listening to stories of rape. At

first I listened naively, surprised that a woman walking down

the street on a bright and sunny day, someone I real y did not

know, could, after a greeting, launch into a sickening, detailed

story of a rape that had happened to her. The element of surprise never entirely went away, but later I would be certain to steel myself, balance my body, try to calm my mind. I couldn’t

move, I could barely breathe - I was afraid of hurting her, the

one woman, by a gesture that seemed dismissive or by a look

on my face that might be mistaken for incredulity.

Most of the rapes were unreported; some were inside families; each rape was in some sense a secret; one woman and then one woman and then one woman did not think she would be

believed. The political ground in society as a whole was not

welcoming. The genius of the New York Radical Feminists

was that they organized a speak-out on rape in the early 1970s

before anyone was prepared to listen. They paved the way.

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One Woman

The genius of Susan Brownmil er’s book Against Our Will:

Men, Women and Rape was that it gave rape a history. The

genius of the women’s movement was in demanding that rape

be addressed as a social policy issue. A consequence of that

demand was legal reform, some but not enough. The rules of

evidence shamelessly favor the accused rapist(s) and destroy the

dignity of the rape victim. The rape victim is stil suspect - this

is a prejudice against women as deep as any antiblack prejudice. She lied, she lied, she lied: women lie. The bite marks on her back show that she liked rough sex, not that a sexual predator had chewed up her back. That she went with her school chum to Central Park and her death - she was strangled with

her bra - proved that she liked rough sex. One woman was

tortured and raped by her husband; he was so arrogant that

he videotaped a half hour, including his use of a knife on her

breasts. The jury, which had eight women on it, acquit ed -

they thought that he needed help. He. Needed. Help.

In the old days - or, to use the beautiful black expression,

“back in the day” - it was presumed that the woman was

sexually provocative or was trying to destroy the man with a

phony charge of rape. Now in the United States the question

is repeated ad nauseam: is she credible? For this question to

have any meaning, one would have to believe that rapists

pick their victims based on the victims' credibility. “Oh, she’s

credible; I'l rape her. ” Or, “No, she’s not credible; I’l wait

until a credible one comes by. ”

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Heartbreak

The raped woman stil stands accused in the media, especial y if she has named the rapist. For one woman to say "I was raped" is easier than for one woman, Juanita Broderick,

to say “I was raped by William Jefferson Clinton. " Ms.

Broderick told us that she was raped and by whom; no one

has held him accountable in any way that matters.

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