think o f it but I never think, no category means anything, I

can’t think exactly or the thought gets cut short by the

immense excitement o f his presence or a m emory o f anything

about him, any second o f remembering him and I’m flushed

and fevered; in delirium there’s no thought. At night the bars

are cool after the heat o f the African sun; the men are young

and hungry, lithe, they dance together frenetically, their arms

stretched across each other’s bodies as they make virile chorus

lines or drunken circles. M is the bartender. I sit in a dark

corner, a cool and pampered observer, drinking vermouth on

ice, red vermouth, and watching; watching M , watching the

men dance. Then sometimes he dances and they all leave the

floor to watch because he is the great dancer o f Crete, the

magnificent dancer, a legend o f grace and balance and speed.

Usually the young men sing in Greek along with the records

and dance showing off; before I was in love they sent over

drinks but now no one would dare. A great tension falls over

the room when sometimes one o f them tries. There have been

fist fights but I haven’t understood until after what they were

about. There was a tall blond boy, younger than M. M is short

and dark. I couldn’t keep my eyes o ff him and he took my

breath away. I feel what I feel and I do what I want and

everything shows in the heat coming o ff m y skin. There are no

lies in me; no language to be accountable in and also no lies. I

am always in action being alive even if I am sitting quietly in a

dark corner watching men dance. This room is not where I

live but it is my home at night. We usually leave a few hours

before dawn. The nightclub is a dark, square room. There is a

bar, some tables, records; almost never any women, occasional

tourists only. It is called The Dionysus. It is o ff a

small, square-like park in the center o f the city. The park is

overwhelm ingly green in the parched city and the vegetation

casts shadows even in the night so that if I come here alone it is

very dark and once a boy came up behind me and put his hand

between m y legs so fast that I barely understood what he had

done. Then he ran. M and the owner o f the club, N ikko, and

some other man ran out when they saw me standing there, not

coming in. I was so confused. They ran after him but didn’t

find him. I was relieved for him because they would have hit

him. Women don’t go out here but I do. Ma chere goes out.

I’ve never been afraid o f anything and I do what I want; I’m a

free human being, w hy would I apologize? I argue with m yself

about my rights because who else would listen. The few

foreign women who come here to live are all considered

whores because they go out and because they take men as

lovers, one, some, more. This means nothing to me. I’ve

always lived on m y own, in freedom, not bound by people’s

narrow minds or prejudices. It’s not different now. The Greek

women never go out and the Greek men don’t go home until

they are. very old men and ready to die. I would like to be with

a woman but a foreign woman is a mortal enemy here.

Sometimes in the bar M and I dance together. T hey play

Amerikan music for slow dancing— “ House o f the Rising

Sun , ” “ Heartbreak H otel. ” The songs make me want to cry

and we hold each other the w ay fire holds what it burns; and

everyone looks because you don’t often see people who have

to touch each other or they will die. It’s true with us; a simple

fact. I have no sense o f being a spectacle; only a sense o f being

the absolute center o f the world and what I feel is all the feeling

the world has in it, all o f it concentrated in me. Later we drive

into the country to a restaurant for dinner and to dance more,

heart to heart, earth scorched by wind, the African wind that

touches every rock and hidden place on this island. There are

two main streets in this old city. One goes down a steep old

hill to the sea, a sea that seems painted in light and color,

purple and aqua and a shining silver, mercury all bubbling in

an irridescent sunlight, and there is a bright, bright green in

the sea that cools down as night comes becoming somber,

stony, a hard, gem -like surface, m oving jade. The old Nazi

headquarters are down this old hill close to the sea. They keep

the building empty; it is considered foul, obscene. It is all

chained up, the great wrought iron doors with the great

swastika rusting and rotting and inside it is rubble. Piss on you

it says to the Nazis. The other main street crosses the hill at the

top. It crosses the whole city. The other streets in the city are

dirt paths or alleys made o f stones. N ikko owns the club. He

and M are friends. M is lit up from inside, radiant with light;

he is the sea’s only rival for radiance; is it Raphael who could

paint the sensuality o f his face, or is it Titian? The painter o f

this island is El Greco, born here, but there is no nightmare in

M ’s face, only a miracle o f perfect beauty, too much beauty so

that it can hurt to look at him and hurt more to turn away.

Nikko is taller than anyone else on Crete and they tease him in

the bar by saying he cannot be Cretan because he is so tall. The

jokes are told to me by pointing and extravagant hand gestures

and silly faces and laughing and broken syllables o f English.

Y ou can say a lot without words and make many jokes. N ikko

is dark with black hair and black eyes shaped a little like

almonds, an Oriental cast to his face, and a black mustache that

is big and wide and bushy; and his face is like an old

photograph, a sculpted Russian face staring out o f the

nineteenth century, a young Dostoevsky in Siberia, an exotic

Russian saint, without the suffering but with many secrets. I

often wonder if he is a spy but I don’t know why I think that or

who he would spy for. I am sometimes afraid that M is not safe

with him. M is a radical and these are dangerous times here.

There are riots in Athens and on Crete the government is not

popular. Cretans are famous for resistance and insurrection.

The mountains have sheltered native fighters from Nazis,

from Turks, but also from other Greeks. There was a civil war

here;

Greek communists

and leftists

were purged,

slaughtered; in the mountains o f Crete, fascists have never

won. The mountains mean freedom to the Cretans; as

Kazantzakis said, freedom or death. The government is afraid

o f Crete. These mountains have seen blood and death,

slaughter and fear, but also urgent and stubborn resistance, the

human who will not give in. It is the pride o f people here not to

give in. But N ikko is M ’s friend and he drives us to the

country the nights we go or to my room the nights we go right

there. M y room is a tiny shack with a single bed, low,

decrepit, old, and a table and a chair. I have a typewriter at the

table and I write there. I’m writing a novel against the War and

poems and theater pieces that are very avant-garde, more than

Genet. I also have Greek grammar books and in the afternoons

I sit and copy the letters and try to learn the words. I love

drawing the alphabet. The toilet is outside behind the chicken

coops. The chickens are kept by an old man, Pappous, it

means grandpa. There is m y room, thin w ood walls, unfinished wood, big sticks, and a concrete floor, no w indow ,

then the landlady’s room, an old woman, then the old man’s

room, then the chickens, then the toilet. There is one mean,

scrawny, angry rooster who sits on the toilet all the time. The

old woman is a peasant who came to the city after all the men

and boys in her village were lined up and shot by the Nazis.

T w o sons died. She is big and old and in mourning still,

dressed from head to toe in black. One day she burns her hands

using an iron that you fill with hot coals to use. I have never

seen such an accident or such an iron. The only running water

is outside. There is a pump. M ’s fam ily is rich but he lives a

vagabond life. He was a Com m unist w ho left the party. His

fam ily has a trucking business. He went to university for tw o

years but there are so many books he hasn’t read, so many

books you can’t get here. He was the first one on the island to

wear bell-bottom pants, he showed up in them one day all

puffed up with pride but he has never read Freud. He w orks

behind the bar because he likes it and sometimes he carries

bags for tourists down at the harbor. O r maybe it is political, I

don’t know. Crete is a hotbed o f plots and plans. I never know

i f he will come back but not because I am afraid o f him leaving

me. He will never leave me. M aybe he flirts but he couldn’t

leave me; it’d kill him, I truly think. I’m afraid for him. I know

there is intrigue and danger but I can’t follow it or understand

it or appraise it. I put m y fears aside by saying to m yself that he

is vain, which he is; beautiful, smart, vain; he likes carrying the

bags o f the tourists; his beauty is riveting and he loves to see

the effect, the tremor, the shock. He loves the millions o f

flirtations. In the summer there are wom en from everywhere.

In the winter there are rich men from France w ho come on

yachts. I’ve seen the one he is with. I know he gets presents

from him. His best friend is a handsome Frenchman, a pied

noir, born in Algeria and he thinks it’s his, right-wing;

gunrunning from Crete for the outlawed O . A . S. I don’t

understand how they can be friends. O . A . S. is outright

fascist, imperialist, racist. But M says it is a tie beyond politics

and beyond betrayal. He is handsome and cold and keeps his

eyes away from me. I don’t know w hy I think N ikko looks

Russian because all the Russians in the harbor have been blond

and round-faced, bursting with good cheer. The Russians and

the Israelis seem to send blond sailors, ingenues; they are

blond and young and well-mannered and innocent, not

aggressive, eternal virgins with disarming shyness, an

ingenuity for having it seem always like the first time. I do

what I want, I go where I want, in bed with anyone who

catches my eye, a glimmer o f light or a soupcon o f romance.

I’m not inside time or language or rules or society. It’s minute

to minute with a sense o f being able to last forever like Crete

itself. In my mind I am doing what I want and it is private and I

don’t understand that everyone sees, everyone looks, everyone knows, because I am outside the accountability o f

language and family and convention; what I feel is the only

society I have or know; I don’t see the million eyes and more to

the point I don’t hear the million tongues. I think I am alone

living m y life as I want. I think that when I am with someone I

am with him. I don’t understand that everyone sees and tells M

he loves a whore but I would expect him to be above pettiness

and malice and small minds. I’ve met men from all over, N ew

Zealand, Australia, Israel, Nigeria, France, a Russian; only

one Amerikan, not military, a thin, gentle black man who

loved Nancy Wilson, the greatest jazz singer, he loved her and

loved her and loved her and I felt bad after. I’ve met Greeks in

Athens and in Piraeus and on Crete. It’s not a matter o f being

faithful; I don’t have the words or categories. It’s being too

alive to stop and living in the minute absolutely without' a

second thought because now is true. Everything I feel I feel

absolutely. I have no fear, no ambivalence, no yesterday, no

tom orrow; not even a name really. When I am with M there is

nothing else on earth than us, an embrace past anything

mortal, and when he is not with me I am still as alive, no less

so, a rapture with no reason to wait or deny m yself anything I

feel. There are lots o f Amerikans on Crete, military bases filled

with soldiers, the permanent ones for the bases and then the

ones sent here from Vietnam to rest and then sent back to

Vietnam. Sometimes they come to the cafes in the afternoons

to drink. I don’t go near them except to tell them not to go to

Vietnam. I say it quietly to tables full o f them in the blazing

sun that keeps them always a little blind so they hesitate and I

leave fast. The Cretans hate Amerikans; I guess most Greeks

do because the Am erikan government keeps interfering so

there w o n ’t be a left-wing government. The C . I. A. is a strong

and widely known presence. On Crete there are A ir Force

bases and the Amerikans treat the Cretans bad. The Cretans

know the arrogance o f occupying armies, the bilious arrogance. T hey recognize the condescension without speaking

the literal language o f the occupiers. M ost o f the Am erikans

are from the Deep South, white boys, and they call the Cretans

niggers. They laugh at them and shout at them and call them

cunts, treat them like dirt, even the old mountain men whose

faces surely would terrify anyone not a fool, the ones the Nazis

didn’t kill not because they were collaborators but because

they were resisters. The Amerikans are young, eighteen,

nineteen, twenty, and they have the arrogance o f Napoleon,

each and every one o f them; they are the kings o f the w orld all

flatulent with white wealth and the darkies are meant to serve

them. T hey make me ashamed. They hate anything not

Am erikan and anyone with dark skin. They are pale, anemic

boys with crew cuts; slight and tall and banal; filled with foul

language that they fire at the natives instead o f using guns. The

words were dirty when they said them; mean words. I didn’t

believe any words were dirty until I heard the white boys say

cunt. They live on the Amerikan bases and they keep

everything Amerikan as if they aren’t here but there. They

have Amerikan radio and newspapers and food wrapped in

plastic and frozen food and dishwashers and refrigerators and

ranch-type houses for officers and trailers and supermarkets

with Amerikan brands o f everything. The wives and children

never go o ff the bases; afraid o f the darkies, afraid o f food

without plastic wrap, they don’t see the ancient island, only

Amerikan concrete and fences. The Amerikan military is

always here; the bases are always manned and the culturally

impoverished wives and children are always on them; and it is

just convenient to let the Vietnam boys rest here for now, the

white ones. The wives and the children are in the ranch-type

houses and the trailers. They are in Greece, on the island o f

Crete, a place touched by whatever gods there ever were,

anyone can see that, in fact Zeus rests here, one mountain is his

profile, it is Crete, a place o f sublime beauty and ancient

heritage, unique in the world, older than anything they can

imagine including their own God; but the wives and the

children never see it because it is not Amerikan, not the

suburbs, not pale white. The women never leave the bases.

The men come o ff to drink ouzo and to say dirty words to the

Greeks and to call them dirty names and laugh. Every other

word is nigger or cunt or fucking and they pick fights. I know

about the bases because an Amerikan doctor took me to one

where he lived in a ranch-type house with an Amerikan

kitchen with Formica cabinets and General Electric appliances.

The Greeks barely have kitchens. On Crete the people in the

mountains, mostly peasants, use bunsen burners to cook their

food. A huge family will have one bunsen burner. Everything

goes into one pot and it cooks on the one bunsen burner for ten

hours or twelve hours until late night when everyone eats. -

They have olive oil from the olive trees that grow everywhere

and vegetables and fruit and small animals they kill and milk

from goats. The fam ily will sit at a w ood table in the dark with

one oil lamp or candle giving light but the natural light on

Crete doesn’t go aw ay when it becomes night. There is no

electricity in the mountains but the dark is luminous and you

can see perfectly in it as if God is holding a candle above your

head. In the city people use bunsen burners too. When

Pappous makes a feast he takes some eggs from his chickens

and some olive oil and some potatoes bought from the market

for a few drachma and he makes an omelet over a bunsen

burner. It takes a long time, first for the oil to get really hot,

then to fry the potatoes, and the eggs cook slow ly; he invites

me and it is an afternoon’s feast. If people are rich they have

kitchens but the kitchens have nothing in them except running

cold water in a stone sink. The sink is a basin cut out o f a

counter made o f stone, as i f a piece o f hard rock was hauled in

from the mountains. It’s solid stone from top to bottom.

There are no w ood cabinets or shelves, just solid stone. I f there

is running hot water you are in the house o f a millionaire. I f

you are ju st in a rich house, the people heat the water up in a

kettle or pot. In the same w ay, there m ay be a bathtub

somewhere but the woman has to heat up kettle after kettle to

fill it. She will wash clothes and sheets and towels by hand in

the bathtub with the water she has cooked the same w ay the

peasant woman will wash clothes against rocks. There is no

refrigerator ever anywhere and no General Electric but there

m ay be two bunsen burners instead o f one. Y ou get food every

day at open markets in the streets and that is the only time

women get to go out; only married women. The Am erikans

never go anywhere without refrigerators and frozen food and

packaged food; I don’t know how they can stay in Vietnam.

The Am erikan doctor said he was writing a novel about the

Vietnam War like Norman M ailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

He had a crew cut. He had a Deep South accent. He was blond

and very tanned. He had square shoulders and a square jaw .

Military, not civilian. White socks, slacks, a casual shirt. N ot

young. N ot a boy. O ver thirty. Beefy. He is married and has

three children but his wife and children are away he says. He

sought me out and tried to talk to me about the War and

politics and writing; he began by invoking Mailer. It would

have been different if he had said Hem ingway. He was a

Hem ingway kind o f guy. But Mailer was busy being hip and

against the Vietnam War and taking drugs so it didn’t make

much sense to me; I know Hem ingway had leftist politics in

the Spanish Civil War but, really, Mailer was being very loud

against Vietnam and I couldn’t see someone who was happily

military appreciating it much, no matter how good The Naked

and the Dead was, if it was, which I m yself didn’t see. It was my

least favorite o f his books. I said I missed Amerikan coffee so

he took me to his ranch-type house for some. I meant

percolated coffee but he made Nescafe. The Greeks make

Nescafe too but they just use tap water; he boiled the water.

He made me a martini. I have never had one. It sits on the

Formica. It’s pretty but it looks like oily ethyl alcohol to me. I

never sit down. I ask him about his novel but he doesn’t have

anything to say except that it is against the War. I ask to read it

but it isn’t in the house. He asks me all these questions about

how I feel and what I think. I’m perplexed and I’m trying to

figure it out, standing right there; he’s talking and my brain is

pulling in circles, questions; I’m asking m yself if he wants to

fuck or what and what’s wrong with this picture? Is it being in

a ranch-type house on an island o f peasants? Is it Formica on an

ancient island o f stone and sand? Is it the missing wife and

children and how ill at ease he is in this house where he says he

lives and w hy aren’t there any photographs o f the wife and

children? Why is it so empty, so not lived in, with everything

in place and no mess, no piles, no letters or notes or pens or old-

mail? Is it how old he is— he’s a real adult, straight and narrow,

from the 1950s unchanged until now. Is it that it is hard to

believe he is a doctor? When he started talking to me on the

street he said he was near where I live taking care o f a Cretan

child who was sick— with nothing no less, just a sore throat.

He said it was good public relations for the military to help, for

a doctor to help. Is it that he doesn’t know anything about

writing or about novels or about his own novel or even about

The Naked and the Dead or even about Norm an Mailer? Is it

that he is in the military, must be career military, he certainly

w asn’t drafted, and keeps saying he is against the War but he

doesn’t seem to know what’s wrong with it? Is it that he is an

officer and w hy would such a person want to talk with me? O r

is it that no man, ever, asks a woman what she thinks in detail,

with insistence, systematically, concentrating on her answers,

a checklist o f political questions about the War and writing and

what I am doing here on Crete now. Never. N ot ever. Then I

grasp that he is a cop. I was an Amerikan abroad in troubled

times in a country the C . I. A. wanted to run and I’d been in jail

against the War. I talked to soldiers and told them not to go to

Vietnam. I told them it was wrong. I had written letters to the

government telling them to stop. The F . B . I. had bothered me

when they could find me, followed me, harassed me, interfered with me, and that’s the honest truth; they’d threatened me. N o w a tall man with a square face and a red neck and a

crew cut and square shoulders, a quarterback with a Deep

South accent, wants to know what I think. A girl could live

her whole life and never have a man want to know so much. I

love m y country for giving me this unique experience. I try to

leave it but it follows me. I try to disaffiliate but it affiliates.

But I had learned to be quiet, a discipline o f survival. I never

volunteered anything or had any small talk. It was a w ay o f

life. I was never in danger o f accidentally talking too much.

Living outside o f language is freedom and chattering is stupid

and I never talked to Amerikans except to tell them not to go

to Vietnam; from m y heart, I had nothing else to say to them. I

would have liked to talk with a writer, or listen actually; that

was the hook; I would have asked questions and listened and

tried to understand what he was writing and how he was

doing it and w hy and what it made him feel. I was trying to

write m yself and it would have been different from regular

talk to talk with a writer who was trying to do something and

maybe I could learn. But he wasn’t a writer and I hadn’t

gibbered on about anything; perhaps he was surprised. N o w I

was alone with him in a ranch-type house and I couldn’t get

home without his help and I needed him to let me go; not keep

me; not hurt me; not arrest me; not fuck me; and I felt some

fear about how I would get away because it is always best to

sleep with men before they force you; and I was confused,

because it wasn’t sex, it was answers to questions. And I

thought about it, and I looked around the ranch-type house,

and considered how strong he was and it was best not to make

him angry; but I felt honor bound to tell my government not

just about the War but about how they were fucking up the

country, the U . S . A ., and I couldn’t act like I didn’t know or

didn’t care or retreat. M y name is Andrea I told him. It means

manhood or courage. It is a European name but in Europe

only boys are named it. I was born down the street from Walt

Whitman’s house, on Mickle Street in Camden in 1946. I’m

from his street. I’m from his country, the country he wrote

about in his poems, the country o f freedom, the country o f

ecstasy, the country o f jo y o f the body, the country o f

universal love o f every kind o f folk, no one unworthy or too

low, the country o f working men and w orking women with

dignity; I’m from his country, not the Amerika run by war

criminals, not the country that hates and kills anyone not

white. I’m from his country, not yours. Do you know the

map o f his country? “ I will not have a single person slighted or

left away. ” “ I am the poet o f the B ody and I am the poet o f the

So u l. ” “ I am the poet o f the woman the same as the m an. ” “ I

too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / 1 sound m y

barbaric yaw p over the roofs o f the w o rld . ” “ Do I contradict

m yself? /V ery well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I

contain multitudes. )” He nursed soldiers in a different war and

wrote poems to them. It was the war that freed the slaves.

Who does this war free? He couldn’t live in Am erika now; he

would be crushed by how small it is, its mind, its heart. He

would come to this island because it has his passion and his

courage and the nobility o f simple people and a shocking,

brilliant, extreme beauty that keeps the blood boiling and the

heart alive. Am erika is dead and filled with cruel people and

ugly. Am erika is a dangerous country; it sends its police

everywhere; w hy are you policing me? I loved his America; I

hate m y Am erika, I hate it. I was the first generation after the

bomb. D idn’t we kill enough yellow people then? M y father

told me the bomb saved him, his life, him, him; he put his life

against the multitudes and thought it was worth more than all

theirs; and I don’t. Walt stood for the multitudes. Am erika

was the country o f the multitudes before it became a killing

machine. In m y mind I know I am leaving out the Indians;

Am erika always was a killing machine; but this is m y

statement to the secret police and I like having a Golden A ge

rooted in Whitman. I put his patriotism against theirs. The

War is wrong. I will tell anyone the War is w rong and suffer

any consequence and if I could I would stop it right now by

magic or by treason and pay any price. I don’t think he know s

who Walt Whitman is precisely, although Walt goes on the

list, but he is genuinely immobilized by what I have said—

because I say I hate Am erika. I’ve blasphemed and he doesn’t

recover easily though he is trained not to be stupid. He stands

very still, the tension in his shoulders and fists m aking his

body rigid, he needs his full musculature to support the

tension. He asks me if I believe in God. I say I’m Jew ish— a

dangerous thing to say to a Deep South man who will think I

killed Christ the same w ay he thinks I am killing Amerika—

and it’s hard to believe in a God who keeps murdering you. I

want to say: you’re like God, He watches like you do, and He

lies; He says He is one thing but He is another. His eyes are

cold like yours and He lies. He investigates like you do, with

the same bad faith; and He lies. He uses up your trust and He

lies. He wants blind loyalty like you do; and He lies. He kills,

and He lies. He takes the very best in you, the part that wants

to be good and pure and holy and simple, and He twists it with

threats and pain; and He lies about it, He says H e’s not doing

it, it’s someone else somewhere else, evil or Satan or someone,

not Him. I am quiet though, such a polite girl, because I don’t

want him to be able to say I am crazy so I must not say things

about God and because I want to get away from this terrible

place o f his, this sterile, terrible Amerika that can show up

anywhere because its cops can show up anywhere. He has a

very Amerikan kind o f charm— the casual but systematic

ignorance that notes deviance and never forgets or forgives it;

the pragmatic policing that cops learn from the movies—-just

figure out who the bad guys are and nail them; he’s John

Wayne posing as Norman Mailer while Norman Mailer is

posing as Ernest Hem ingway who wanted to be John Wayne.

It’s ridiculous to be an Amerikan. It’s a grief too. He doesn’t

bother me again but a Greek cop does. He wants to see my

passport. First a uniformed cop comes to where I live and then

I have to go in for questioning and the higher-up cop who is

wearing a silk suit asks me lewd questions and knows who I

have been with and I don’t want to have to leave here so I ask

him, straight out, to leave me alone and he leaves it as a threat

that maybe he will and maybe he w on ’t. I tell him he shouldn’t

do what the Amerikans tell him and he flashes rage— at me but

also at them; is this ju st another Am erikan colony, I ask him ,

and who does he work for, and I thought the people here had

pride. He is flashfires o f rage, outbursts o f fury, but it is not

just national pride. He is a dangerous man. His method o f

questioning starts out calm; then, he threatens, he seduces, he

is enraged, all like quicksilver, no warning, no logic. He

makes clear he decides here and unlike other officials I have

seen he is no desk-bound functionary. He is a man o f arbitrary

lust and real power. He is corrupt and he enjoys being cruel.

He says as much. I am straightforward because it is m y only

chance. I tell him I love it here and I want to stay and he plays

with me, he lets me know that I can be punished— arrested,

deported, or ju st jailed if he wants, when he wants, and the

Am erikan governm ent will be distinctly uninterested. I can’t

say I w asn’t afraid but it didn’t show and it w asn’t bad. He

made me afraid on purpose and he knew how. He is intensely

sexual and I can feel him fucking and breaking fingers at the

same time; he is a brilliant communicator. I’m rescued by the

appearance o f a beautiful woman in a fur coat o f all things. He

wants her now and I can go for now but he’ll get back to me if

he remembers; and, he reminds me, he always know s where I

am, day or night, he can tell me better than I can keep track. I

want him to want her for a long time. I’m almost wanting to

kiss the ground. I’ve never loved somewhere before. I’m

living on land that breathes. Even the city, cement and stone

bathed in ancient light, breathes. Even the mountains, more

stone than any man-made stone, breathe. The sea breathes and

the sky breathes and there is light and color that breathe and

the Am erikan governm ent is smaller than this, smaller and

meaner, grayer and deader, and I don’t want them to lift me

o ff it and hurt m y life forever. I came from gray Am erika,

broken, crumbling concrete, poor and stained with blood and

some o f it was m y blood from when I was on m y knees and the

men came from behind and some o f it was knife blood from

when the gangs fought and the houses seemed dipped in

blood, bricks bathed in blood; w hy was there so much blood

and what was it for— who was bleeding and w hy— was there

some real reason or was it, as it seemed to me, just for fun, let’s

play cowboy. The cement desert I had lived on was the

carapace o f a new country, young, rich, all surging, tap-

dancing toward death, doing handstands toward death, the

tricks o f vital young men all hastening to death. Crete is old,

the stone is thousands o f years old, with blood and tears and

dying, invaders and resisters, birth and death, the mountains

are old, the ruins are stone ruins and they are old; but it’s not

poor and dirty and dying and crumbling and broken into dirty

dust and it hasn’t got the pale stains o f adolescent blood, sex

blood, gang blood, on it, the fun blood o f bad boys. It’s living

green and it’s living light and living rock and you can’t see the

blood, old blood generation after generation for thousands o f

years, as old as the stone, because the light heats it up and

burns it away and there is nothing dirty or ratty or stinking or

despondent and the people are proud and you don’t find them

on their knees. Even I’m not on my knees, stupid girl who falls

over for a shadow, who holds her breath excited to feel the

steely ice o f a knife on her breasts; Amerikan born and bred;

even I’m not on my knees. N ot even when entered from

behind, not even bent over and waiting; not on m y knees; not

waiting for bad boys to spill blood; mine. And the light burns

me clean too, the light and the heat, from the sun and from the

sex. Could you fuck the sun? That’s how I feel, like I’m

fucking the sun. I’m right up on it, smashed on it, a great,

brilliant body that is part o f its landscape, the heat melts us

together but it doesn’t burn me away, I’m flat on it and it

burns, m y arms are flat up against it and it burns, I’m flung flat

on it like it’s the ground but it’s the sun and it burns with me up

against it, arms up and out to hold it but there is nothing to

hold, the flames are never solid, never still, I’m solid, I’m still,

and I’m on it, smashed up against it. I think it’s the sun but it’s

M and he’s on top o f me and I’m burning but not to death, past

death, immortal, an eternal burning up against him and there

are waves o f heat that are suffocating but I breathe and I drown

but I don’t die no matter how far I go under. Y o u ’ve seen a fire

but have you ever been one— the red and blue and black and

orange and yellow in waves, great tidal waves o f heat, and if it

comes toward you you run because the heat is in waves that

can stop you from breathing, yo u ’ll suffocate, and you can see

the waves because they come after you and they eat up the air

behind you and it gets heavy and hard and tight and mean and

you can feel the waves coming and they reach out and grab

you and they take the air out o f the air and it’s tides o f pain

from heat, you melt, and the heat is a Frankenstein monster

made by the fire, the fire’s own heartbeat and dream, it’s the

monster the fire makes and sends out after you spreading

bigger than the fire to overcom e you and then burn you up.

But I don’t get burned up no matter how I burn. I’m

indestructible, a new kind o f flesh. Every night, hours before

dawn, we make love until dawn or sunrise or late in the

morning when there’s a bright yellow glaze over everything,

and I drift o ff into a coma o f sleep, a perfect blackness, no fear,

no m em ory, no dream, and when I open m y eyes again he is in

me and it is brute daylight, the naked sun, and I am on fire and

there is nothing else, just this, burning, smashed up against

him, outside time or anything anyone know s or thinks or

wants and it’s never enough. With Michalis before he left the

island, before M , overlapping at the beginning, it was

standing near the bed bent over it, waiting for when he would

begin, barely breathing, living clay waiting for the first touch

o f this new Rodin, Rodin the lover o f wom en. The hotel was

behind stone walls, almost like a convent, the walls covered

with vines and red and purple flowers. There was a double bed

and a basin and a pitcher o f water and tw o wom en sitting

outside the stone wall watching when I walked in with

Michalis and when I left with him a few hours later. The stone

walls hid a courtyard thick with bushes and wild flowers and

illuminated by scarlet lamps and across the courtyard was the

room with the bed and I undressed and waited, a little afraid

because I couldn’t see him, waited the w ay he liked, and then

his hands were under my skin, inside it, inside the skin on my

back and under the muscles o f my shoulders, his hands were

buried in my body, not the orifices but the fleshy parts, the

muscled parts, thighs and buttocks, until he came into me and

I felt the pain. With Michel, before M , half Greek, half French,

I screamed because he pressed me flat on my stomach and kept

m y legs together and came in hard and fast from the back and I

thought he was killing me, murdering me, and he put his hand

over my mouth and said not to scream and I bit into his hand

and tore the skin and there was blood in m y mouth and he bit

into my back so blood ran down my back and he pulled my

hair and gagged me with his fist until the pain itself stopped me

from screaming. With G, a teenage boy, Greek, maybe

fifteen, it was in the ruins under an ancient, cave-like arch, a

tunnel you couldn’t stand up in; it was outside at night on the

old stone, on rubble, on garbage, fast, exuberant, defiant,

thrilled, rough, skirt pulled up and torn on the rocks, skin

ripped on the rocks, semen dripping down m y legs. Y ou

could hear the sea against the old stone walls and the rats

running in the rubble and then we kissed like teenagers and I

walked away. With the Israeli sailor it was on a small bed in a

tiny room with the full moon shining, a moon almost as huge

as the whole sky, and I was mad about him. He was inept and

sincere and I was mad about him, insane for his ignorance and

fumbling and he sat on top o f me, inside me, absolutely still,

touching m y face in long, gentle strokes, and there was a steely

light from the moon, and I was mad for him. I wanted the

moon to stay pinned in the sky forever, full, and the silly boy

never to move. Once M and I went to the Venetian walls high

above the sea. There was no moon and the only light was from

the water underneath, the foam skipping on the waves. There

was a ledge a few feet wide and then a sheer drop down to the

sea. There was wind, fierce wind, lashing wind, angry wind, a

cold wind, foreign, with freezing, cutting water in it from

some other continent, wrathful, wanting to purge the ledge

and own the sea. A ll night we fucked with the wind trying to

push us down to death and I tore m y fingers against the stone

trying to hold on, the skin got stripped o ff m y hands, and

sometimes he was against the wall and m y head fell backwards

going down toward the sea and on the Roman walls we fucked

for who was braver and who was stronger and w ho w asn’t

afraid to die. He wanted to find fear in me so he could leave

me, so he could think I was less than him. He wanted to leave

me. He was desperate for freedom from love. On the Roman

wall we fucked so far past fear that I knew there was only me,

it didn’t matter where he went or what he did, it didn’t matter

who with or how many or how hard he tried. There was just

me, the one they kept telling him was a whore, all his great

friends, all the men who sat around scratching themselves, and

no matter how long he lived there would be me and if he was

dead and buried there would still be me, ju st me. I couldn’t

breathe without him but they expect that from a woman. I’d

have so much pain without him I w ouldn’t live for a minute.

But he w asn’t supposed to need me so bad you could see him

ripped up inside from a mile away. The pain w asn’t supposed

to rip through him; from wanting me; every second; now. He

was supposed to come and go, where he wanted, when he

wanted, get laid when he wanted, do this or that to me, what

he wanted, sex acts, nice and neat, ju icy and dirty but nice and

neat picked from a catalogue o f what men like or what men

pay for, one sex act followed by another sex act and then he

goes aw ay to someone else or to somewhere else, a kiss i f he

condescends, I blow him, a fuck, twice if he has the time and

likes it and feels so inclined; and I’m supposed to wait in

between and when he shows up I’m supposed to suck and I’m

supposed to rub, faster now, harder now, or he can rub, taster

now, harder now, inside me if he wants; and there’s some

chat, or some money, or a cigarette, or maybe sometimes a

fast dinner in a place where no one will see. But he’s burning so

bright it’s no secret he’s on fire; and it’s me. Anyone near him

is blinded, the heat hurts them, their skin melts, more than

they ever feel when they fuck rubbing themselves in and out o f

a woman. H e’s burning but he’s not indestructible. H e’s the

sun; I’m smashed up against him; but the sun burns itself up;

one day it will be cold and dead. He’s burning towards death

and a man’s not supposed to. A dry fuck with a dry heart is

being a man; a dry, heartless fuck with a dry, heartless heart.

He’s the great dancer, the most beautiful; he had all the women

and all the men; and now he is self-immolating; he is torrential

explosions o f fire, pillars o f flame, miles high; he is a force field

o f heat miles wide. The ground burns under him and anything

he touches is seared. The heat spreads, a fever o f discontent.

The men are fevered, an epidemic o f fury; they are hot but

they can’t burn. H e’s dying in front o f them, torched, and I’m

smashed up on him, whole, arms up and outstretched, on

him, flat up against the flames, indestructible. The whore’s

killing him; she’s a whore and she’s killing you. He can’t stay

away but he tries. He enumerates for me m y lovers. He misses

some but I am discreet. He breaks down because I am not

pregnant yet. I show him m y birth control pills, which he has

never seen; I explain that I w on’t be getting pregnant. He

disappears for a day, two days, then suddenly he is in front o f

me, on his knees, his smile stopping m y heart, he stoops with a

dancer’s swift grace, there is a gift in his hands but his hands

don’t touch mine, he drops the gift and I catch it and he is

gone, I catch it before it hits the ground and when I look up he

is gone, I could have dreamed it but I have the flowers or the

bread or the book or the red-painted Easter egg or the

drawing. H e’s gone and time takes his place, a knife slicing me

into pieces; each second is a long, slow cut. Tim e can slow

down so you can’t outlast it. It can have a minute longer than

your life. Tim e can stand still and you can feel yourself dying

in it but you can’t make it go faster and you can’t die any faster

and if it doesn’t m ove you will never die at all and it w o n ’t

move; you are caved in underground with time collapsed in on

top o f you. T im e’s the cruelest lover yo u ’ll ever have,

merciless and thorough, wrapping itself right around your

heart and choking it and never stopping because time is never

over. Tim e turns your bed into a grave and you can’t breathe

because time pushes down on your heart to kill it. Tim e crawls

with its legs spread out all over you. It’s everywhere, a

noxious poison, it’s vapor and gas and air, it seeps, it spreads,

you can’t run aw ay somewhere so it w o n ’t hurt you, it’s there

before you are, waiting. H e’s gone and he’s left time behind to

punish you; but why? W hy isn’t he here yet; or now ; or now;

or now; and not one second has passed yet. He doesn’t want to

burn; but why? Why should he want less, to be less, to feel

less, to know less; w hy shouldn’t he push him self as far as he

can go; w hy shouldn’t he burn until he dies? I have a certain

ruthless objectivity not uncommon among those who live

inside the senses; I love him without restraint, without limit,

without respect to consequences, for me or for him; I am not

sentimental; I want him; this is not dopey, stupid, sentimental

love; nostalgia and lingering romance; this is it; all; everything. I don’t care about his small stupid social life among stupid, mediocre men— I know him, self-im molating,

torched, in me. His phony friends embarrass him, the men all

around on the streets playing cards and drinking and gossiping, the stupid men who lust for how much he feels, can’t imagine anything other than manipulating tourists into bed so

they can brag or sex transactions for money or the duties o f the

marital bed, the roll-over fuck; and he’s burning, consumed,

dying; so what? H e’d show up suddenly and then he’d be gone

and he never touched me; how could he not touch me? He’d

come in a burst and then he’d disappear and he’d never touch

me and sometimes he brought someone with him so he

couldn’t touch me or be with me or stay near me or come near

me to touch me; how could he not touch me? I went into a

white hot rage, a delirium o f rage; if I’d had his children I

would have sliced their necks open. I used razor blades to cut

delicate lines into my hands; physical pain was easy, a

distraction. Keeping the blade on m y hand, away from my

wrist, took all my concentration, a game o f nerves, a lover’s

game. I made fine lines that turned burgundy from blood the

w ay artists etch lines in glass but the glass doesn’t turn red for

them and the red doesn’t smear and drip. There was a man, I

wanted it to be M but it wasn’t M. He tied me up and hurt me

and on m y back there were marks where he used a whip he had

for animals and I wanted M to see but he didn’t come and he

didn’t see. I would have stayed there strung-up against the

wall m y back cut open forever for him to see but he didn’t see.

Then one day he came in the afternoon and knocked on the

door and politely asked me to have dinner with him that night.

Usually we talked in broken words in broken languages,

messy, tripping over each other. This was a quiet, formal,

aloof invitation with barely any words at all. He came in a car

with a driver. We sat in the back. He was elaborately

courteous. He didn’t say anything. I thought he would explain

things and say why. I sat quietly and waited. He was

unfailingly polite. We ate pinner. He said nothing except do

you like your dinner and would you like more wine and I

nodded whatever he said and m y eyes were open looking right

at him asking him to tell me something that would rescue me,

bring me back to being someone human with a human life.

Then he said he would take me home, form ally, politely, and

at m y door he asked i f he could come in and I said he could

only i f we could talk and he nodded his assent and the driver

waited for him and we went in and he touched me to fuck me,

his hands pushing me down on the bed, and I wanted him dead

and I tried to kill him with m y bare hands for touching me, for

not saying one word to me, for pushing me to fuck me, and I

hit his face with m y fist and I hit his neck and I pushed his neck

so hard I twisted it half around and he was stunned to feel the

pain and he was enraged and he pushed me down to fuck me

and he pinned me down with his hands and shoulders and

chest and legs and he kept fucking me and he said now he was

fucking me the w ay he fucked all whores, yes he went to

brothels and fucked whores, what did I think, that he only

fucked me, no man only fucked one wom an, and I would find

out how much he had loved me before because this was how

he fucked whores and this was how he would fuck me from

now on and it went on forever and I stopped fighting because

m y heart died and I lay still and I didn’t m ove and it still kept

going on and I stared at him and I hated him, I kept m y eyes

open and I stared, and it w asn’t over for a long time but I had

died during it so it didn’t matter when it ended or when he

stopped or when he pulled out o f me finally or when he was

gone from inside me and then it was over and there was

numbness close to death throughout me and there was some

man between m y legs. I hadn’t moved and I didn’t move, I

couldn’t m ove, I was on m y back and he had been on top o f me

to fuck me and then he slid down to where his head was

between m y legs and he turned over on his back and he rested

the back o f his head between m y legs where he had fucked me

and he rested there like some sweet, tired baby who had ju st

been born only they put him between m y legs instead o f in m y

arms and he said we would get married now because there was

nothing else left for either o f us; pity the poor lover, it hurt him

too. He was immensely sad and immensely bitter and he said

we would get married now because married people did it like

this and hated each other and felt dead, fucking was like being

dead for them; pity the poor husband, he felt dead. He stayed

between my legs, resting. I didn’t move because there is an

anguish that can stop you from moving and I couldn’t kill him

because there is an anguish that can stop you from killing.

Something awful came, a suffering bigger than my life or your

life or any life or G od ’s life, the crucifixion God; the nails are

hammered in but you don’t get to die. It’s the cross for ladies, a

bed, and you don’t get to die; the lucky boy, the favorite child,

gets to die. Y o u ’ve been mowed down inside, slaughtered

inside, a genocide happened in you, but you don’t get to die.

Y o u ’re not G od ’s son, you’re His daughter, and He leaves you

there nailed because you’re some stupid piece o f shit who

loved someone and you will be there forever, in some bed

somewhere for the rest o f your life and He will make it a long

time, He will make you get old, and He will see to it that you

get fucked, and the skin around where you get fucked will be

calloused and blistered and enraged and there will be someone

climbing on you and getting in you and God your Father will

watch; even when you’re old H e’ll watch. M left at sunrise,

sad boy, poor boy, immensely sad, tired boy, and time was

back on top o f me and I couldn’t move and I waited on the bed

to die but I didn’t die because God hates me; it’s hate. I couldn’t

m ove and I endured all the seconds in the day, every single

second. A second stretches out past hell and when one is over

another comes, longer, worse. It got dark and I dressed

m yself—that night, ten thousand years later, ten million years

later; I dressed m yself and I went to the club and M was

serving drinks and his friend the pied noir was there, the

handsome fascist, the gunrunner for the O. A . S., and this time

he looked at me, now he looked at me, and it was hard to

breathe, and I was transfixed by him; and the noisy room got

quiet with danger and you could feel him and me and you

could see him and me and we couldn’t stop and the fuck we

wanted filled the room even though we didn’t go near each

other and he was absolutely still and completely frightened

because M might kill him or me and I didn’t care but he was

afraid, the great big man was afraid, and I wanted him and I

didn’t care what it cost ju st so I had him, and M said take her, I

give her to you, he shouted, he spit, and I walked out in a rage,

a modern rage that anyone would dare to give me to someone;

me; a free woman. Outside there’s an African wind blow ing

on the island, restless, violent, and there’s perfume in the

wind, a heavy poppy smell, intoxicating, sweet and heavy.

The pied noir is deranged by it and he know s what M did and he

is deranged by that, he wants me with M ’s nasty fuck on me,

fresh like fresh-killed meat. God is the master o f pain and He

made it so you could love someone forever even if someone

cut your heart open. I wait in m y bed, I leave the front door

open. I want the fascist; I want him bad. I am fresh-killed

meat.

S IX

In June 1967

(Age 20)

One night I’m just there, where I live, alone, afraid, the men

have been trying to come in. I’m for using men up as fast as

you can; pulling them, grab, twist, put it here, so they dangle

like twisted dough or you bend them all around like pretzels;

you pull down, the asshole crawls. Y ou need a firm, fast hand,

a steady stare, calm nerve; grab, twist. First, fast; before they

get to throw you down. Y ou surprise them with your stance,

warrior queen, quiet, mean, and once your hands are around

their thing they’re stupid, not tough; still mean but slow and

you can get gone, it takes the edge o ff how mean he’s going to

be. Were you ever so alone as me? It doesn’t matter what they

do to you just so you get them first— it’s your game and you

get money; even if they shit on you it’s your game; as long as

it’s your game you have freedom, you say it’s fun but

whatever you say you’re in charge. Some people think being

poor is the freedom or the game. It’s being the one who says

how and do it to me now; instead o f just waiting until he does

it and he’s gone. Y ou got to be mad at them perpetually and

forever and fierce and you got to know that you got a cunt and

that’s it. Y ou want philosophy and you’re dumb and dead;

you want true love and real romance, the same. Y ou put your

hand between them and your twat and you got a chance; you

use it like it’s a muscle, sinew and grease, a gun, a knife; you

grab and twist and turn and stare him in the eye, smile, he’s

already losing because you got there first, between his legs; his

thing’s in your fist and your fist is closing on him fast and he’s

got a failure o f nerve for one second, a pause, a gulp, one

second, disarmed, unsure, long enough so he doesn’t know ,

can’t remember, how mean he is; and then you have to take

him into you, o f course, yo u ’ve given your word; there on the

cement or in a shadow or some room; a shadow ’s warm and

dark and consoling and no one can close the door on you and

lock you in; you don’t go with him somewhere unless you got

a feeling for him because you never know what they’ll do; you

go for the edge, a feeling, it’s worth the risk; you learn what

they want, early, easy, it’s not hard, you can ride the energy

they give out or see it in how they m ove or read it o ff their

hips; or you can guide them, there’s never enough blow jo b s

they had to make them tired o f it i f worse comes to worse and

you need to, it will make him stupid and weak but sometimes

he’s mean after because he’s sure yo u ’re dirt, anyone w h o ’s

had him in her mouth is dirt, how do they get by, these guys,

so low and mean. It’s you, him, midnight, cement; viscous

dark, slate gray bed, light falling down from tarnished bulbs

above you; neon somewhere rattling, shaking, static shocks to

your eye, flash, zing, zip, winding words, a long poem in

flickering light; what is neon and how did it get into the sky at

night? The great gray poet talked it but he didn’t have to do it.

He was a shithead. I’m the real poet o f everyone; the Am erikan

democrat on cement, with everyone; it wears you down,

Walt; I don’t like poetry anymore; it’s semen, you great gray

clod, not some fraternal wave o f democratic j o y . I was born in

1946 down the street from where Walt Whitman lived; the girl

he never wanted, I can face it now; in Cam den, the great gray

city; on great gray cement, broken, bleeding, the girls

squashed down on it, the fuck weighing down on top,

pushing in behind; blood staining the gravel, mine not his;

bullshitter poet, great gray bullshitter; having all the men in

the world, and all the wom en, hard, real, true, it wears you

down, great gray virgin with fantastic dreams, you great gray

fool. I was born in 1946 down the street from where Walt

Whitman lived, in Camden, Andrea, it means manhood or

courage but it was pink pussy anyway wrapped in a pink fuzzy

blanket with big men’s fingers going coochie coochie coo.

Pappa said don’t believe what’s in books but if it was a poem I

believed it; m y first lyric poem was a street, cement, gray,

lined with monuments, broken brick buildings, archaic,

empty vessels, great, bloodstained walls, a winding road to

nowhere, gray, hard, light falling on it from a tarnished moon

so it was silver and brass in the dark and it went out straight

into the gray sky where the moon was, one road o f cement and

silver and night stained red with real blood, you’re down on

your knees and he’s pushing you from inside, G od’s heartbeat

ramming into you and the skin is scraped loose and you bleed

and stain the stone under you. Here’s the poem you got. It’s

your flesh scraped until it’s rubbed o ff and you got a mark, you

got a burn, you got stains o f blood, you got desolation on you.

It’s his mark on you and you’ve got his smell on you and his

bruise inside you; the houses are monuments, brick, broken

brick, red, blood red. There’s a skyline, five floors high, three

floors high, broken brick, chopped o ff brick, empty inside,

with gravel lots and a winding cement road, Dorothy

tap-dances to Oz, up the yellow brick road, the great gray road,

he’s on you, twisted on top o f you, his arms twisted in your

arms, his legs twisted in your legs, he’s twisted in you, there’s

a great animal in the dark, him twisting draped over you, the

sweat silver and slick; the houses are brick, monuments

around you, you’re laid out dead and they’re the headstones,

nothing written on them, they tower over your body put to

rest. The only signs o f existence are on you, you carry them on

you, the marks, the bruises, the scars, your body gets marked

where you exist, it’s a history book with the signs o f civilized

life, communication, the city, the society, belles lettres, a

primitive alphabet o f blood and pain, the flesh poem, poem o f

the girl, when a girl says yes, what a girl says yes to, what

happens to a girl who is poesy on cement, your body the paper

and the poem, the press and the ink, the singer and the song;

it’s real, it’s literal, this song o f myself, yo u ’re what there is,

the medium, the message, the sign, the signifier; an autistic

poem. Tattooed boys are your friends, they write the words

on their skin; but your skin gets used up, scraped aw ay every

time they push you down, you carry what you got and what

you know, all your belongings, him on you through time, in

the scars— your meanings, your lists, your items, your serial

numbers and identification numbers, social security, registration, which one you are, your name in blood spread thin on

your skin, spread out on porous skin, thin and stretched, a

delicate shade o f fear toughened by callouses o f hate; and you

learn to read your name on your body written in your blood,

the book o f signs, manhood or courage but it’s different when

pussy does it. Y ou don’t set up housekeeping, a room with

things; instead you carry it all on you, not on your back tied

down, or on your head piled up; it’s in you, carved in, the cold

on you, you on cement, sexy abrasions, sexy blood, sexy

black and blue, the heat’s on you, your sw eat’s a wet

membrane between you and the weather, all there is, and you

have burns, scars, there’s gray cement, a silver gray under a

tarnished, brassy moon, there’s a cement graveyard, brick

gravestones, the em pty brick buildings; and yo u ’re laid out,

for the fucking. Walt was a fool, a virgin fool; you would have

been ground down, it’s not love, it’s slaughter, you fucking

fool. I’m the field, they fall on me and bruise the ground, you

don’t hear the earth you fall on crying out but a poet should

know. Prophets are fucking fools. What I figured out is that

writers sit in rooms and make it up. M arx made it up. Walt

made it up. Fucking fools like me believe it; do it; foot soldiers

in hell. Sleep is the worst time, God puts you in a fuck-m e

position, you can’t run, you can’t fight, you can’t stay alive

without luck, you’re in the dark and dead, they can get you,

have you, use you; you manage to disappear, become invisible

in the dark, or it’s like being hung out to dry, you’re under

glass, in a museum, all laid out, on display, waiting fpr

whatever gang passes by to piss on you; it’s inside, they’re not

supposed to come inside but there is no inside where they can’t

come, it’s only doors and windows to keep them out, open

sesame and the doors and windows open or they bash them

open and no one stops them and you’re inside laid out for

them, come, hurt me now, I’m lying flat, helpless, some

fucking innocent naked baby, a sweet, helpless thing all curled

up like a fetus as if I were safe, inside her; but there’s nothing

between you and them; she’s not between you and them. Why

did God make you have to sleep? I was born in Camden; I’m

twenty; I can’t remember the last time I heard my name. M y

name is and will the real one please stand up, do you remember

that game show on television, from when it was easy. Women

will whisper it to you, even dirty street women; even leather

women; even mean women. Y ou have to be careful i f you

want it from the street women; they might be harder than you,

know where you’re soft, see through you, you’re all different

with them because maybe they can see through you. M aybe

you’re not the hardest bitch. Maybe she’s going to take from

you. I don’t give; I take. It’s when she’s on me I hear m y name;

doesn’t matter who she is, I love her to death, women are

generous this way, the meanest o f us, I say her name, she says

mine, kisses brushing inside the ear, she’s wet all over me, it’s

all continuous, you’re not in little pieces, I hear m y name like

the sound o f the ocean in a shell; whether she’s saying it or not.

We’re twisted around each other inside slime and sweat and

tear drops, w e’re the wave and the surf, the undercurrent, the

pounding o f the tidal wave halfway around the world banging

the beach on a bright, sunny day, the tide, high tide, low tide,

under the moon or under a black sky, w e’re the sand wet and

hard deserted by the water, the sand under the water, gravel

and shell and m oving claws crawling. I remember this one

woman because I wanted her so bad but something was

wrong, she was lying to me, telling me m y lie but no woman

lies to me. There’s this woman at night I remember, in a

restaurant I go when I’m taking a break, kosher restaurant

with old men waiters, all night it’s open, big room, plain

tables, high ceilings, ballroom high and wide, big, em pty

feeling, old, old building, in N ew Y o rk , wide dow ntow n

street, gray street, fluorescent lights, a greenish light on green

walls, oil paint, green, the old men have thick Jew ish accents,

they’re slow m oving, you can feel their bones aching, I sit

alone over coffee and soup and she’s there at the next table, the

room ’s em pty but she sits at the table next to me, black leather

pants, she’s got black hair, painted black, like I always wanted,

and I want her but I’m her prey because she wants a bow l o f

fucking soup, she’s picked me, she’s coming for me, how did

that happen, how did it get all fucked up, she sees me as the

mark because I’ve got the food which means I’ve got the

money and I can’t go with her now because she has an

underlying bad motive, she wants to eat, and what I feel for

her is complete sex, so I’m the dope; and I don’t do the dopey

part; it’s m y game and she’s playing it on me; she’s got muscles

and I want to see the insides o f her thighs, I want to feel them, I

want her undressed, I want her legs around m y shoulders, she

smiles, asks me how I am; be a fool, tell her how you are. I

look right through her. I stare right through her while I’m

deciding what to do. I ain’t giving; I take. I want to be with

her, I want to be between her legs and all over her and her

thighs a vise around m y neck; I want m y teeth in her; I want

her muscles squeezing me to death and I want to push dow n on

her shoulders and I want m y thighs crushing down on her, all

m y weight on her hips, m y skin, bluish, on the inside o f m y

thighs feeling her bones; but I'm the mark, that’s how she sees

it, and maybe she’s meaner than me, or crazy, or harder, or

feels less, or needs less, so she’s on top and she takes; how

many times have I done what she’s doing now and did they

want me the w ay I want her; well, they’re stupid and I’m not;

it hurts not to take her with me, I could put m y hand on her

and she’d come, I stare right through her, I look right through

her but I’m devouring her at the same time which means she

knows I’m a fool; she’s acting harmless but maybe it’s a lie, my

instincts say it’s a lie, there’s no harmless women left alive this

time o f night, not on these streets. Y ou risk too much if you go

with a woman who needs less than you do; if you don’t have

to, if you have a choice, you don’t take risks— you could lose

your heart or your money or your speed; fucking fool who has

a choice and doesn’t use it; it’s stupid middle-class girls you

have to find or street women past wanting, past ambition,

they live on bits o f this and pieces o f that, they’re not looking

for any heavy score, they live almost on air, it’s pat, habit, they

don’t need you, but sometimes they like a taste; survival’s an

art, there are nuances, she’s a dangerous piece o f shit, stunning

black eyes, and I’m smitten, and I walk out, look behind me,

she came out, watched me, didn’t follow, made me nervous, I

don’t often pass up what I want, I don’t like doing it, it leaves

an ache, don’t like to ache too long without distracting m yself

by activity, anything to pass the time, and it makes me restless

and careless, to want someone like that; I wanted her, she

wanted food, money, most o f what happens happens for food,

all kinds o f food, deep hungers that rock you in their

everloving arms, rocked to eternal sleep by what you need, the

song o f myself, I need; need her; remember her; need women;

need to hear m y name; wanted her; she wanted food. What’s

inside you gets narrow and mean— it’s an edge, it cuts, it’s a

slice o f sharp, a line at the blade’s end, no surface, no waste, no

tease, a thin line where your meanest edge meets the air; an

edge, no blade you can see. If you could stomp on me, this is

what yo u ’d see— a line, touch it, yo u ’re slivers. I’d be cut

glass, yo u ’d be feet. Y o u ’d dance blood. The edge o f the blade,

no surface, just what cuts, a thin line, touch it, draw blood.

Inside, nothing else is alive. Where’s the love I dream of. I hole

up, like a bug in a rug. There’s women who bore me; wasted

time; the taste o f death; junkie time; a junkie woman comes to

me, long, languid afternoons making love but I didn’t like it,

she got beat up by her boyfriend, she’s sincerely in love, black

and blue, loving you, and he’s her source; pure love; true

romance. D on ’t like m ixing women with obligation— in this

case, the obligation to redeem her from pain. I want to want; I

like wanting, ju st so it gets fulfilled and I don’t have to wait too

long; I like the ache just long enough to make what touches it

appreciated a little more, a little drama, a little pain. I don’t like

no beat-up piece o f shit; junkie stooge. Y ou don’t want the

edge o f the blade to get dull; then you got dullness inside and

this you can’t afford. The w om an’s got to be free; a beast o f

freedom; not a predator needing a bow l o f fucking soup, not a

fool needing a fucking fix; she’s got to give freedom off, exude

it, she’s got to be grand with freedom, all swelled up with it, a

Madame Curie o f freedom, or she’s Garbo, or more likely,

she’s Che, she’s got to be a monster o f freedom, a hero o f

loveless love; Napoleon but they didn’t lock her up or she got

loose, now, for me; no beat up junkie fool; no beautiful piece

looking for a hamburger. There’s magnificent women out

here. These lights light you up. Y ou are on Broadw ay and

there are stars o f a high magnitude. There’s the queen o f them

all who taught me— sweet name, Rebecca; ruthless crusher o f

a dyke; honest to God, she’s wearing a gold lame dress when I

meet her in jail when I’m a kid, eighteen, a political prisoner as

it were, as I saw myself, and she loves poetry and she sends me

a pile o f New Yorker magazines because, she says, I’m a poet;

and I don’t want her on me, not in jail, I’m too scared, too

hurt, but she protects me anyway, and I get out fast enough

that I don’t have to do her, and I see her later out here and I

remember her kindness, which it was, real kindness, taking

care o f me in that place, which was w hy I was treated right by

the other inmates as it were; I see her on the street, gold lame

against a window, I see her shimmering, and I go with her for

thanks and because she is grand, and I find out you can be free

in a gold lame dress, in jail, whoring, in black skin, in hunger,

in pain, in strife, the strife o f the streets, perpetual war, gritty,

gray, she’s the wild one with freedom in her soul, it translates

into how you touch, what’s in your fingers, the silk in your

hands, the freedom you take with who you got under you;

you got your freedom and you take theirs for when you are

with them, you are a caretaker o f the fragile freedom in them,

because most women don’t got much, and you don’t be afraid

to take, you turn their skin to flames, you eat them raw, your

name’s all over them, you wrap them up in you, crush them in

you, and what you give is ambition, the ambition to do it

big, do it great, big gestures, free— girls do it big, girls soar,

girls burn, girls take big not puny; stop giving, child, better

to be stole from than to give— stop giving away the little that

you got. I stay with her until she’s finished with me, she’s

doing her art on me, she’s practicing freedom on me; I’m

shaking from it, her great daring, the audacity o f her body on

mine; she’s free on me and I learn from it on me how to do it

and how to be it; flamboyant lovemaking, no apology, dead

serious, we could die right after this and this is the last thing

we know and it’s enough, the last minute, the last time, the

last touch, God comes down through her on me, the good

God, the divine God; master lovemaker, lightning in a girl,

I’ve got a new theology, She’s a rough Girl; and what’s

between m y legs is a running river, She made it then She

rested; a running river; so deep, so long, clear, bright, smart,

racing, white foam over a cliff and then a dead drop and then it

keeps on going, running, racing, then the smooth, silk calm, the

deep calm, the long, silk body, smooth. I heard some man say I

put it in her smooth, smooth was a noun, and I knew right

away he liked children, he’s after children, there are such men;

but it’s not what I mean; I mean that together w e’re smooth, it’s

smooth, w e’re smooth on each other, it’s a smooth ride; and if I

died right after I wouldn’t feel cheated or sorry and every time

I’m happy I had her one more second and I feel proud she wants

me; and she’ll disappear, she’ll take someone else, but I’ll sit here

like a dumb little shit until she does, a student, sitting, waiting at

her feet, let her touch me once, then once more, I’m happy near

her, her freedom ’s holding me tight, her freedom ’s on me,

around me, climbing inside me, her freedom ’s embracing me;

wild woman; a wild w om an’s pussy that will not die for some

junkie prick; nor songwriter; nor businessman; nor

philosopher. The men are outside, they want to come in, I

hear them rattling around, death threats, destruction isn’t

quiet or subtle, imagine those for whom it is, safe, blessedly

safe; so in m y last minutes on this earth, perhaps, I am

remembering Rebecca who taught me freedom; I would sit

down quiet next to her, wait for her, watch her; did you ever

love a girl? I’ve loved several; loved. N ot just wanted but

loved in thought or action. Wasn’t raped by any o f them. I

mean, rape’s just a word, it doesn’t mean anything, someone

fucks you, so what? I can’t see complaining about it. But I

wasn’t hurt by any o f them. I don’t mean I w asn’t hurt by love;

shit, that’s what love does, it drags your heart over a bed o f

nails, I was hurt by love, lazy, desperate drinks through long

nights o f pain without her, hurting bad. Wasn’t pushed

around. Saw others who were. It’s not that wom en don’t. It’s

just that it had m y name on it, men said pussy or dyke or

whatever stupid distortion but I saw freedom, I heard Andrea,

I found freedom under her, wrapped around her, her lips on

me and her hands on me, in me, her thighs holding on to me;

there’s always men around waiting to break in, throw

themselves on top, pull you down; but wom en’s different, it’s

a fast, gorgeous trip out o f hell, a hundred-mile-an-hour ride

on a different road in the opposite direction, it’s when you see

an attitude that sets you free, the way she moves breaks you

out, or you touch her shoulder and exhilaration shoots

through you like a needle would do hanging from your vein if

it’s got something good in it; it’s a gold rush; your life’s telling

you that if you’re between her legs you’re free— free’s not

peaceful and not always kind, it’s fast, a shooting star you ride,

i f you’re stupid it shakes you loose and hurls you somewhere

in the sky, no gravity, no fall, just eternal drift to nowhere out

past up and down. You can live forever on the curve o f her

hip, attached there in sweat and desire taking the full measure

o f your own human sorrow; you can have this tearing sorrow

with your face pushing on the inside o f her thigh; you can have

her lips on you, her hands pushing on you as if you’re marble

she’s turning into clay, an electricity running all over you

carried in saliva and spit, you’re cosseted in electric shock,

peeing, your hair standing up on end, muscles stretched, lit

up; there’s her around you and in you everywhere, the

rhythm o f your dance and at the same time she’s like the

placenta, you breathe in her, surrounded; it’s something men

don’t know or they’d do it, they could do it, but instead they

want this push, shove, whatever it is they’re doing for

whatever reason, it’s an ignorant meanness, but with a woman

you ’re whole and you’re free, it ain’t pieces o f you flying

around like shit, it ain’t being used up, you got scars bigger

than the freedom you get in everyday life; do it the w ay you ’re

supposed to, you got twenty-four hours a day down on your

knees sucking dick; that’s how girls do hard time. There’s not

many women around who have any freedom in them let alone

some to spare, extravagant, on you, and it’s when they’re on

you you see it best and know it’s real, now and all, there w o n ’t

be anything wilder or finer, it’s pure and true, you see it, you

chase them, they’re on you, you get enraptured in it, once you

got it on you, once you feel it m oving through you, it’s a

contagion o f wanting more than you get being pussy for the

boys, you catch it like a fever, it puts you on a slow bum with

your skin aching and you want it more than you can find it

because most women are beggars and slaves in spirit and in life

and you don’t ever give up wanting it. Otherwise you get

worn down to what they say you are, you get worn down to

pussy, bedraggled; not bewitched, bothered, bewildered; ju st

some wet, ratty, bedraggled thing, semen caked on you, his

piss running down your legs, worn out, old from what yo u ’re

sucking, I’m pretty fucking old and I have been loved by

freedom and I have loved freedom back. Did you ever have a

nightmare? Men coming in’s m y nightmare; entering; I’m in,

knock, knock. There’s writers being assholes about outlaws;

outlaw this, outlaw that, I’m bad, I’m sitting here writing m y

book and I’m bad, I’m typing and I’m bad, m y secretary’s

typing and I’m bad, I got laid, the boys say, like their novels

are letters home to mama, well, hell’s bells, the boys got laid:

more than once. It’s something to write home about, all right;

costs fifty bucks, too; they found dirty wom en they did it to,

dirty women too fucking poor to have a typewriter to stu ff up

bad boy w riter’s ass. Shit. Y ou follow his cock around the big,

bad city: N ew Y ork, Paris, Rom e— same city, same cock.

B ig, bad cock. Wiping themselves on dirty women, then

writing home to mama by w ay o f G rove Press, saying what

trash the dirty women are; how brave the bad boys are,

writing about it, doing it, putting their cocks in the big, bad,

dirty hole where all the other big, brave boys were; oh they say

dirty words about dirty women good. I read the books. I had a

typewriter but it was stolen when the men broke in. The men

broke in before when I w asn’t here and they took everything,

my clothes, my typewriter. I wrote stories. Some were about

life on other planets; I wrote once about a wild woman on a

rock on Mars. I described the rock, the red planet, barren, and

a woman with tangled hair, big, with muscles, sort o f Ursula

Andress on a rock. I couldn’t think o f what happened though.

She was just there alone. I loved it. Never wanted it to end. I

wrote about the country a lot, pastoral stuff, peaceful, I made

up stories about the wind blowing through the trees and leaves

falling and turning red. I wrote stories about teenagers feeling

angst, not the ones I knew but regular ones with stereos. I

couldn’t think o f details though. I wrote about men and

women making love. I made it up; or took it from Nino, a boy

I knew, except I made it real nice; as he said it would be; I left

out the knife. The men writers make it as nasty as they can, it’s

like they’re using a machine gun on her; they type with their

fucking cocks— as Mailer admitted, right? Except he said

balls, always a romancer. I can’t think o f getting a new

typewriter, I need money for just staying alive, orange juice

and coffee and cigarettes and milk, vodka and pills, they’ll just

smash it or take it anyway, I have to just learn to write with a

pen and paper in handwriting so no one can steal it and so it

don’t take money. When I read the big men writers I’m them;

careening around like they do; never paying a fucking price;

days are long, their books are short compared to an hour on

the street; but if you think about a book just saying I’m a prick

and I fuck dirty girls, the books are pretty long; m y cock, m y

cock, three volumes. They should just say: I Can Fuck.

Norm an M ailer’s new novel. I Can Be Fucked. Jean Genet’s

new novel. I ' m Waiting To Be Fucked Or To Fuck, I Don't

Know. Samuel Beckett’s new novel. She Shit. Jam es Jo y c e ’s

masterpiece. Fuck Me, Fuck Her, Fuck It. The Living Theatre’s

new play. Paradise Fucked. The sequel. Mama, I Fucked a Jewish

Girl. The new Philip Roth. Mama, I Fucked a Shiksa. The new,

new Philip Roth. It was a bad day they w ouldn’t let little boys

say that word. I got to tell you, they get laid. T h e y’re up and

down these streets, taking what they want; tw o hundred

million little Henry Millers with hard pricks and a mean prose

style; Pulitzer prizewinning assholes using cash. Looking for

experience, which is what they call pussy afterward when

they’re back in their posh apartments trying to ju stify

themselves. Experience is us, the ones they stick it in.

Experience is when they put down the money, then they turn

you around like yo u ’re a chicken they’re roasting; they stick it

in any hole they can find just to try it or because they’re blind

drunk and it ain’t painted red so they can’t find it; you get to be

lab mice for them; they stick the famous Steel Rod into any

Fleshy Hole they can find and they Ram the Rod In when they

can manage it which thank God often enough they can’t. The

prose gets real purple then. Y ou can’t put it down to

impotence though because they get laid and they had wom en

and they fucked a lot; they just never seem to get over the

miracle that it’s them in a big man’s body doing all the

damage; Look, ma, it’s me. Volum e Tw elve. They don’t act

like human beings and they’re pretty proud o f it so there’s no

point in pretending they are; though you want to— pretend.

Y o u ’d like to think they could feel something— sad; or

remorse; or something ju st simple, a minute o f recognition.

It’s interesting that yo u ’re so dangerous to them but you

fucking can’t hurt them; how can you be dangerous if you

can’t do harm; I’d like to be able to level them, but you can’t

touch them except to be fucked by them; they get to do it and

then they get to say what it is they’re doing— yo u ’re what

they’re afraid o f but the fear just keeps them coming, it doesn’t

shake them loose or get them o ff you; it’s more like the glue

that keeps them on you; sticky stuff, how afraid the pricks are.

I mean, m aybe they’re not afraid. It sounds so stupid to say

they are, so banal, like making them human anyw ay, like

giving them the insides you wish they had. So what do you

say; they’re just so fucking filled with hate they can’t do

anything else or feel anything else or write anything else? I

mean, do they ever look at the fucking moon? I think all the

sperm they’re spilling is going to have an effect; something’s

going to grow. It’s like they’re planting a whole next

generation o f themselves by sympathetic magic; not that

they’re fucking to have babies; it’s more like they’re rubbing

and heaving and pushing and banging and shoving and

ejaculating like some kind o f voodoo rite so all the sperm will

grow into more them, more boys with more books about how

they got themselves into dirt and got out alive. It’s a thrilling

story, says the dirt they got themselves into. It’s bitterness,

being their filth; they don’t even remember right, you’re not

distinct enough, an amoeba’s more distinct, more individuated; they go home and make it up after they did it for real and

suddenly they ain’t parasites, they’re heroes— big dicks in the

big night taming some rich but underneath it all street dirty

whore, some glamorous thing but underneath filth; I think

even i f you were with them all the time they wouldn’t

remember you day-to-day, it’s like being null and void and

fucked at the same time, I am fucked, therefore I am not.

M aybe I’ll write books about history— prior times, the War o f

1812; not here and now, which is a heartbreaking time, place,

situation, for someone. Y o u ’re nothing to them. I don’t think

they’re afraid. Maybe I’m afraid. The men want to come in; I

hear them outside, banging; they’re banging against the door

with metal things, probably knives; the men around here have

knives; they use knives; I’m familiar with knives; I grew up

around knives; Nino used a knife; I’m not afraid o f knives.

Fear’s a funny thing; you get fucked enough you lose it; or

most o f it; I don’t know w hy that should be per se. It’s all

callouses, not fear, a hard heart, and inside a lot o f death as if

they put it there, delivered it in. And then out o f nowhere you

ju st drown in it, it’s a million tons o f water on you. if I was

afraid o f individual things, normal things— today, tom orrow ,

w hat’s next, w h o ’s on top, what already has transpired that

you can’t quite reach down into to remember— I’d have to

surrender; but it drowns you fast, then it’s gone. I’d like to

surrender; but to whom , where, or do you just put up a white

flag and they take you to throw your body on a pile

somewhere? I don’t believe in it. I think you have to make

them come get you, you don’t volunteer, it’s a matter o f pride.

Who do you turn yourself into and on what terms— hey,

fellow, I’m done but that don’t mean you get to hurt me

more, you have to keep the"deal, I made a deal, I get not to feel

more pain, I’m finished, I’m not fighting you fucks anymore,

I’ll be dead if it’s the w ay to accomplish this transformation

from what I am into being nothing with no pain. But if you get

dead and there’s an afterlife and it’s more o f the same but

worse— I would just die from that. Y ou got all these same

mean motherfuckers around after yo u ’re dead and you got the

God who made it all still messing with you but now up

close— H e’s around. Y o u ’re listening to angels and yo u ’re

not allowed to tell God H e’s one m aggoty bastard; or yo u ’re

running around in circles in hell, imprisoned by your fatal

flaw, instead o f being here on a leash with all your flaws, none

fatal enough, making you a m aggoty piece o f meat. I want

dead to mean dead; all done; finished; quiet; insensate;

nothing; I want it to be peaceful, no me being pushed around

or pushing, I don’t want to feel the worm s crawling on me or

eating me or the cold o f the wet ground or suffocating from

being buried or smothering from being under the ground; or

being stone cold from being dead; I don’t want to feel cold; I

don’t want to be in eternal dark forever stone cold. N othing

by which I mean a pure void, true nonexistence, is different; it

isn’t filled with horror or dread or fear or punishment or pain;

it’s ju st an absence o f being, especially so you don’t have to

think or know anything or figure out how yo u ’re going to eat

or w ho’s going to be on you next. It’s not suffering. I don’t

have suffering in mind; not jo y , not pain— no highs, no lows.

Just not being; not being a citizen wandering around the

universe in a body or loose, ethereal and invisible; or just not

being a citizen here, now, under street lights, all illuminated,

the light shining down. I hate the light shining down— display

yourself, dear, show them; smile, spread your legs, make

suggestive gestures, legs wide open— there’s lots o f ways to sit

or stand with your legs wide open. Which day did God make

light? You think He had the street lights in some big

storeroom in the sky to send down to earth when women

started crawling over sidewalks like cockroaches to stay alive?

I think He did. I think it was part o f the big plan— light those

girls up, give them sallow light, covers pox marks, covers

tracks, covers bruises, good light for covering them up and

showing them at the same time, makes them look grotesque,

just inhuman enough, same species but not really, you can

stick it in but these aren’t creatures that get to come home, not

into a home, not home, not quite the same species, sallow

light, makes them green and grotesque, creatures you put it in,

not female ones o f you, even a fucking rib o f you; you got ones

in good light for that. They stick it in boys too; anything under

these lights is here to be used. Y o u ’d think they’d know boys

was real, same species, with fists that work or will someday,

but someday isn’t their problem and they like the feel that the

boy might turn mean on them— some o f them like it, the ones

that use the older ones. I read about this boy that was taken o ff

the street and the man gave him hormones to make him grow

breasts and lose his body hair or not get it, I’m not sure; it

made me really sick because the boy was nothing to him, just

some piece o f something he could mess with, remake to what

he wanted to play with, even something monstrous; I wanted

to kill the guy; and I tried to figure out how to help the kid, but

I just read it in Time or Newsweek so I wondered i f I could find

him or not. I guess it depends on how many boys there are

being fed hormones by pedophiles. Once it’s in Newsweek, I

guess there are thousands. The kid’s around here somewhere;

it said Low er East Side; I hate it, what the man did to him.

These Goddamn men would all be each other’s meat if they

weren’t the butchers. They use fucking to slice you open. It’s

like they’re hollow, there’s nothing there, except they make

big noise, this unbearable static, some screeching, high-

pitched pain, and you can’t see they’re hollow because the

noise diverts you to near madness; big lovemaker with fifty

dollars to spend, seed to spill making mimetic magic, grind,

bang, it’s a boy, a big, bad boy who writes books, big, bad

books. I see the future and it’s a bunch o f pricks making a

literature o f fucking, high art about sticking it in; I did it, ma;

she was filth and I did it. O nly yo u ’ll get a Mailer-Genet beast:

I did it, ma, I did it to her, he did it to me. The cement will

grow them; sympathetic magic w orks; the spilled seed, the

grinding, bang bang, pushes the fuck out past the bounds o f

physical reality; it lurks in the biosphere; it will creep into

weeping wom bs; they’ll be born, the next generation, out o f

what the assholes do to me; I’ve got enough semen dripping in

me for a literary renaissance, an encyclopedia o f novellas, a

generation o f genius; maybe some o f them will paint or write

songs. Mother earth, magic vessel, the altar where they

worship, the sacred place; fifty dollars to burn a candle, or

pills, or a meal and money; bang bang ain’t never without

consequences for the future o f the race. N o reason the race

should be different from the people in it. There’s no tom orrow

I know of. I never seen one that ain’t today. It’s fine to be slut-

mama to a literary movement; the corporeal altar o f sym pathetic motherhood to a generation; his loins; m y ass.

Immortal, anonymous means to his end. It’s what the hippie

girls all glittering, flecked, stardust, want: to be procreatrix

with flowering hips and tea made from plants instead o f

Lipton; they recline, posh and simple, all spread out draped in

flowing cotton and color; they don’t take money; well, they

do, but they don’t say so upfront— from my point o f view

they are mannerless in this regard; mostly they just hang on,

like they have claws, it passes for spiritual, they just sit there

until he comes back from wherever he’s gone after coitus has

made him triste, they say it’s meditating but it’s just waiting

for some guy to show w ho’s left; they ain’t under the light,

they are o f it— luminescent fairy things from on high, just

down for a fast, ethereal screw. I been to bed with them;

usually a man and one o f them, because they don’t do women

alone— too real for the nitrous oxide crowd, not Buddhistic

enough— it’s got an I want right between the legs and it’s got

your genitals leading your heart around or vice versa, who the

hell knows, and it don’t make the boy happy unless he gets to

watch and the hippie girls do not irritate the love-boys by

doing things that might not be directly and specifically for

them. The hippie boys like bringing another woman into bed.

Y ou can shake some coke loose from them if you do it; or

money, which they pretend is like nothing but they hold onto

it pretty tight. Coke and orange juice is my favorite breakfast;

they want you to do the coke with them because it makes them

hard and high and ready but I like to take some o ff with me and

do it alone or with someone I pick, not with someone in bed

with some silly girl who ought to be a housewife but is seeing

the big city and he’s so hip he has to be able to roll over from

one to another, dreaming it’s another housewife, all girls are

housewives to him; peace, flowers, love, clean m y house, bake

m y bread. They try to tell you they see the real you, the

sensitive you, inside, and the real you doesn’t want money—

she wants the good fucking he’s got and to make strings o f

beads for him and sell them in flea markets for him; darling,

it’s sad. Y ou convey to the guy that you’re the real thing, what

he never thought would be near him, street grime he w on ’t be

able to wash off, and he’s so trembling and overw rought his

prick starts shaking. There’s some who do things real, don’t

spend their time posturing or preening; they just pull it out

without philosophy. There’s this one I had once, with a

woman. I was on Demerol because I had an operation; m y

appendix came out but it had got all infected and it was a big

slice in me and then they let me loose with a blood clot because

there w asn’t somewhere for me to stay and I didn’t have

money or no one to take care o f me so they just let me out. M y

side didn’t seem like it would stay sewed, it felt open, and

there was a pain from the clot that was some evil drilling in m y

shoulder that they called reflexive pain which meant the pain

was really somewhere else but I could only feel it in m y

shoulder. It hurt to breathe. Y ou don’t think about your

shoulder or how it moves when you breathe unless some Nazi

is putting a drill in it; I saw God the Nazi pushing His full

weight on the drill and if I breathed it made more pressure

from inside on where the drill was and there w asn’t enough

Demerol in the world. So I’m walking around, desperate and

dreamy, in pain but liking the pills, and I see this shirt, fucking

beautiful shirt, purple and turquoise and shades o f blue all in

flowers, silk, astonishing whirl o f color; and the man’s dark

with long hair and a beard, some prototype, no face, ju st hair;

and I take him back but there’s this girl with him too, and she’s

all hippie, endlessly expressing herself and putting little pats

on m y hand, teeny weeny little pats, her hand to mine:

expressing affection for another woman; heavy shit. I can

barely believe this one’s rubbing her hands on me. And the

guy starts fucking, and he’s some kind o f monster o f fuck, he

lasts forever and a day, it’s night, it’s dark, and hours go by,

and I see the light coming up, and she and me are next to each

other, and he’s in me, then he’s in her, then me, then her, and

m y side is splitting open and I’m not supposed to be m oving

around with the clot but you can’t keep your hips still the

whole time although my interest comes and goes, at some

point the boy takes o ff the shirt and I’m wondering who he is

and w hy he’s here, and I don’t have to w orry about her

sentimentality because the boy isn’t seeking variety and he

don’t want to watch, this is a boy who wants to fuck and he

moves good but he’s boring as hell, the same, the same, and

when the pain hits me I am pretty sure I am really going to die,

that the clot is loose in my blood somewhere and it’s going to

go to m y brain, and I’m trying to think this is real glorious,

dying with some Olympian fuck, but the pain is some vicious,

choked up tangle o f blades in my gut, and I try to

choreograph the pain to his fuck, and I try to rest when he’s

not in me, and I am praying he will stop, and I am at the same

time trying to savor every second o f m y last minutes on earth,

or last hours as it turns out, but intellectual honesty forced me

to acknowledge I was bored, I was spending m y last time

bored to death, I could have been a housewife after all; and the

light comes up and I think, well, dawn will surely stop him;

but he fucks well into daylight, it’s bright morning now with a

disagreeably bright sun, profoundly intrusive, and suddenly

there’s a spasm, thank the Lord, and the boy is spent, it’s the

seventh day and this man who fucks must rest. And I thank

God. I do. I say, thank you, Lord. I say, I owe Y ou one. I say, I

appear still to be alive, I know I was doing something

proscribed and maybe I shouldn’t address Y ou before he even

moves o ff me but I am grateful to Y ou for stopping him, for

making him tired, for wearing him out, for creating him in

Y our image so that, eventually, he had to rest. I can’t move

because m y insides are messed up. M y incision is burning as if

there are lighted coals there and I’m afraid to see i f it is open or

i f it will bleed now and m y shoulder has stones crushed into it

as i f some demolition team was crushing granite, reflexive

pain from some dead spot, I don’t know where, and I truly

think I might not ever move again and I truly think I might

have opened up and I truly think I might still die; and I want to

be alone; die alone or bleed alone or endure the pain alone; and

I’m lying there thinking they will go now when the girl starts

pawing me and says stupid, nice things and starts being all

lovey dovey like w e ’re both Gidget and she wants now to have

the experience, if you will, o f making love with a wom an; this

is in the too-little-too-late category at best; and I am fairly

outraged and astonished because I hurt so much and m y little

sister in sensitivity thinks we should start dating. So I tell them

to go; and she says but he doesn’t like me better, m aybe he

needs you to be there— needs you, can you imagine— and I’m

trying to figure out what it has to do with him, w hy it’s what

he wants when I want them to go; it’s what I want; I never

understand w h y it’s always with these girls what he wants— i f

he’s there and even if he ain’t in sight or in the vicinity; he had

his hours doing what he wants; and she tells me she’s

disappointed with me for not being loving and we could all

share and this is some dream come true, the most amazing

thing that’s ever happened, to her or ever on earth, it’s the

pro o f that everything is possible, and the pain I’m in is keeping

me from m oving because I can’t even sit up but I’m saying

very quiet, get out now. And she’s saying it’s her first time

with a woman and she didn’t really get to do anything—

tourist didn’t get to see the Eiffel T ow er— and I say yes, that’s

right, you didn’t get nothing. So she’s sad like some lover who

was real left her and she’s handling me like she read in some

book, being a tender person, saying everything bland and

stupid, all her ideals about life, everything she’s hoped for, and

she’s preachy with the m orality o f sharing and unity and

harm ony and I expect her to shake her finger at me and hit m y

knuckles with a ruler and make me stand in a corner for not

being some loving bitch. T here’s a code o f love you have to

learn by heart, which I never took to, and I’m thinking that if

she don’t take her treacle to another planet I’m going to stand

up, no matter what the pain, and physically carry her out, a

new little bride, over the threshold to outside. She’s some

sobbing ingenue with a delicate smile perpetually on her face

shining through tears which are probably always with her and

she’s talking about universal love when all the boy did was

fuck us to death as best he could, which in m y case was close

but no cigar and I couldn’t bring m yself to think it was all that

friendly; and I had a short fuse because I needed another pill, I

was a few behind and I was looking forward to making them

up now in the immediate present, I could talk real nice to

Demerol and I didn’t want them there for when I got high

again; so I said, you go, because he really likes you and you

should stay with him and be with him and be good to him, so

the dumb bitch leaves with the prince o f peace over there, the

b o y’s already smoking dope so he’s already on another plane

taking care o f him self which is what he’s really good at; and

she’s uncomprehending and she’s mournful that I couldn’t get

the love part right but they went, I saw the b o y’s turquoise and

purple silk shirt float by me and the drippy, sentimental girl in

cotton floated out still soliciting love. I never understood w hy

she thought you could ask for it. N o one can ask it from me. I

never can remember his face; peculiar, since his head was right

above me for so long, his tongue in my mouth, he kissed the

whole time he fucked, a nice touch, he was in her kissing me or

in me kissing her so no one’d get away from him or decide to

do something else; I just can’t remember his face, as if I never

saw it. He was a Taurus. I stayed away from them after that if I

knew a man was one because they stay too long, slow, steady,

forever. I never saw such longevity. She was Ellen, some

flower child girl; doomed for housework. I’m not. I ain’t

cleaning up after them. I keep things as clean as I can; but you

can’t really stay clean; there’s too much heat and dirt. It’s a

sweltering night. The little nymphs, imps, and pimps o f

summer flitter about like it’s tea time at the Ritz. There’s been

uprisings on the streets, riots, lootings, burning; the air is

crackling with violence, a blue white fire eating up the

oxygen, it’s tiny, sharp explosions that go o ff in the air around

your head, firecrackers you can’t see that go o ff in front o f you

when you walk, in front o f your face, and you don’t know

when the air itself will become some white hot tornado, ju st

enough to crack your head open and boil your brains. T hat’s

outside, the world. Summertime and the living is easy. Y ou

just walk through the fires between the flames or crawl on

your belly under them; rough on your knees and elbows. Y o u

can be in the street and have a steaming mass, hot heat, kinetic,

come at you, a crowd, men at the top o f their energy, men

spinning propelled by butane, and they bear down on you on

the sidewalk, they come at you, martial chaos; they will march

over you, yo u ’ll be crushed, bone m arrow ground into a paste

with your own blood, a smear left on a sidewalk. The crow d ’s

a monster animal, a giant w olf, huge and frantic, tall as the

sky, blood pulsing and rushing through it, one predator,

bearing down, a hairy, freaky, hungry thing, bared teeth,

ugly, hungry thing, it springs through the air, light and lethal,

and you will fucking cringe, hide, run, disappear, to be safe—

you will fucking hide in a hole, like some roachy thing you

will crawl into a crack. Y ou can hear the sound o f them

coming, there’s a buzz coming up from the cement, it vibrates

and kicks up dust, and somewhere a fire starts, somewhere

close, and somewhere police in helmets with nightsticks are

bearing down on the carnivorous beast, somewhere close and

you can hear the skulls cracking open, and the blood comes,

somewhere close there’s blood, and you can hear guns, there’s

guns somewhere close because you smell the burning smell,

it’s heat rising o ff someone’s open chest, the singed skin still

sm oking where the bullet went through; the w o lfs being beat

down— shot over and over, wounded, torn open— it’s big

manly cops doing it, steel faces, lead boots— they ain’t

harassing whores tonight. It looks like foreplay, the w ay the

cops bear down on the undulating mass; I stroke your face

with m y nightstick; the lover tames the beloved; death does

quiet you down. But a pig can’t kill a wolf. The w o lfs the

monster prick, then the pigs come and turn the w o lf into a girl,

then it’s payback time and the w o lf rises again. In the day

when the w o lf sleeps there are still fires; anything can suddenly

go up in flames and you can’t tell the difference at first between

a fire and a summer day, the sun on the garbage, the hot air

making the ghetto buildings swell, the brick bulging,

deformed and in places melting, all the solid brick w avy in the

heat. At night the crowd rises, the w o lf rises, the great

predator starts a long, slow walk toward the bullets waiting

for it. The violence is in the air; not symbol; not metaphor; it’s

thick and tasty; the air’s charged with it; it crackles around

your head; then you stay in or go out, depending on— can you

stand being trapped inside or do you like the open street? I

sleep days. It’s safer. I sleep in daylight. I stay awake nights. I

keep an eye out. I don’t like to be unconscious. I don’t like the

w ay you get limp. I don’ t like how you can’t hear what goes

on around you. I don’t like that you can’t see. I don’t like to be

waiting. I don’t like that you get no warning. I don’t like not to

know where I am. I don’t like not to know m y name. I sleep in

the day because it’s safer; at night, I face the streets, the crowd,

the predator, any predator, head on. I’d rather be there. I want

to see it coming at me, the crowd or anything else or anyone. I

want it to look at me and I want a chance. There’s gangs

everywhere. There’s arson or fires or w o lf packs or packs o f

men; men and gangs. The men outside m y door are banging;

they want to come in; big group fuck; they tear me apart; b oys’

night out. It’s about eight or nine at night and I’m going out

soon, it’s a little too early yet, I hear them banging on the door

with knives and fists, I can’t get out past them, there’s only one

w ay out; I can’t get past them. Once night comes it’s easy to

seal you in. Night comes and you have the rules o f the grave,

different rules from daylight, they can do things at night,

everyone can, they can’t do in the day; they will break the door

down, no one here calls the police, I don’t have a gun, I have

one knife, a pathetic thing, I sleep with it under m y pillow. I

figure if someone’s right on top o f me I can split him apart

with it. I figure if he’s already on top o f me because I didn’t

hear him and didn’t see him because I was unconscious and I

wake up and he’s there I can stick it in him or I can cut his

throat. I figure it gives me time to come to, then I try for his

throat, but if I’m too late, if I can’t get it, i f he’s som ehow so I

can’t get his throat, then I can get his back. O r I can finish

m yself o ff i f there’s no other w ay; I think about it each time I

lie down to sleep, if I can do it, draw the knife across m y

throat, fast, I try to prepare m yself to do it, in m y mind I make

a vo w and I practice the stroke before I sleep. I think it’s better

to kill him but I just can’t bear them no longer, really, and it’s

unknown i f I could do it to me; so fast; but I keep practicing in

m y mind so if the time comes I w o n ’t even think. It would be

the right thing. I don’t really believe in hurting him or anyone.

I have the knife; I can’t stand to think about using it, what it

would be like, or going to jail for hurting him, I never wanted

to kill anybody and I’d do almost anything not to. I know the

men outside, they’re neighborhood, this block, they broke in

before, in daylight, smashed everything, took everything,

they ran riot in here, they tell me they’re coming to fuck me,

they say so out on the street, hanging on the stoop; they say so.

T h ey’ve broken in here before, that’s when I started sleeping

with the knife. Inside there’s too many hours to dawn; too

many hours o f dark to hold them off; they’ll get in; I know this

small world as well as they do, I know what they can do and

what they can’t do and once it’s night they can break the door

down and no one will stop them; and the police don’t come

here; you never see a cop here; there’s no w ay to keep them out

and m y blood’s running cold from the banging, from the noise

o f them, fists, knives, I don’t know what, sticks, I guess,

maybe baseball bats, the arsenal o f the streets. The telephone’s

worthless, they cut the wire when they broke in; but no one

would come. This is the loneliest I ever knew existed; now;

them banging. There’s things you learn, tricks; no one can

hurt me. I’m not some stupid piece o f shit. Y ou got a gang

outside, banging, making threats. They want to come in;

fuck. T h ey’ll kill me; fuck me dead or kill me after. It’s like

anything, you have to face what’s true, you don’t get to say if

you want to handle it or not, you handle it to stay alive. So

what’s it to me; if I can just get through it; minimum damage,

minimum pain, the goal o f all women all the time and it’s not

different now. If you’re ever attacked by a gang you have to

get the leader. If you get him, disable him, pull him away from

the others, kill him, render him harmless, the others are

nothing. If you miss him, attack him but miss, wound him,

irritate him, aggravate him, rile him, humiliate him without

taking him out, you are human waste, excreta. So it’s clear;

there’s one way. There’s him. I have to get him. if I can pull

him away from them, to me, I have a chance; a chance. I open

the door. I think if I grab him between the legs I’m in charge; if

I pull his thing. I learn the limits o f m y philosophy. Every

philosophy’s got them. I ain’t in charge. It’s fast. It’s simple. I

open the door. It’s a negotiation. The agreement is he comes

in, they stay out; he doesn’t bring the big knife he has in with

him; it stays outside; if I mess with him, he will hurt me with it

and turn me over to them; if anything bad happens to him or if

I don’t make him happy, he will turn me over to them. This is

consent, right? I opened the door myself. I picked him. I just

got to survive him; and tom orrow find a w ay out; away from

here. He comes in; he’s Pedro or Jo e or Juan; he swaggers,

touches everything, there’s not much left he notes with

humor; he wants me to cook him dinner; he finds m y knife; he

keeps it; he keeps saying what he’ll do to me with it; I cook; he

drinks; he eats; he keeps talking; he brags; he talks about the

gang, keeps threatening me, what he’ll do to me, what they’ll

do to me, aspects o f lovemaking the gang would also enjoy

and maybe he’ll just let them in now or there’s time after,

they’re waiting, right outside, maybe he’ll call them in but

they can come back tom orrow night too, there’s time, no need

to w orry, nice boys in the gang, a little rough but I’ll enjoy

them, w o n ’t I? Then he’s ready; he’s excited himself; he’s even

fingered him self and rubbed himself. Like the peace boys he

talks with his legs spread wide open, his fingers lightly

caressing his cock, the denim pulled tight, exerting its own

pressure. He goes to the bed and starts to undress and he runs

one hand through the hair on his chest and he holds the knife in

the other hand, he fingers the knife, he rubs his thumb over it

and he caresses it and he keeps talking, seductive talk about

how good he is and how good the knife is and I’m going to like

them both and he’s got a cross on a chain around his neck and it

glistens in his hair, it’s silver and his skin is tawny and his hair

on his chest is black and curly and thick and it shines and I’m

staring at it thinking it shouldn’t be there, the shiny cross, I am

having these highly moral thoughts against the blasphemy o f

the cross on his chest, I think it is w rong and concentrate on

the im m orality o f wearing it now, doing this, w hy does he

wear it, what does it mean, his shirt is o ff and his pants are

coming o ff and he is rapturous with the knife in his hand and I

look at the cross and I look at the knife and I think they are both

for me, he will hold the knife, maybe I can touch the cross, I

will try to touch it all through and maybe it will be something

or mean something or I w o n ’t feel so frightened, so alone in

this life now, and I think I will just touch it, and there’s him,

there’s the cross, there’s the knife, and I’m under them and I

don’t know, I will never remember, the hours are gone, blank,

a tunnel o f nothing, and I’m naked, the bell rings, it’s light

outside so it’s been five hours, six, there’s a knock on the door,

insistent knocking, he says don’t answer it, he says don’t

move, he holds the knife against me, just under m y skin, the

tip just under it, and I try to fight for m y life, I say it’s a friend

who expects me to be here and will not go away and I will have

to answer the door and I w on’t say anything and I w on’t tell or

say anything bad, I will just go to the door to tell m y friend to

go away, to convince him everything’s fine, and someone’s

knocking and he has a deep voice and I don’t know what I will

do when I reach the door or who it is on the outside or what

will happen; but I’m hurt; dizzy; reeling; can’t feel anything

but some obscure pain somewhere next to me or across the

room and I don’t know what he’s done, I don’t look at any part

o f me, I cover m yself a little with a sheet, I pull it over me and I

don’t look down, I have trouble keeping m y head steady on

m y shoulders, I don’t know if I can walk from the bed to the

door, and I think I can open the door maybe and just keep

walking but I am barely covered at all and maybe the gang’s

outside and you can’t walk naked in a sheet, they’ll just hurt

you more; anyone will. I can’t remember and I can barely

carry m y head up and I have this one chance; because I can’t

have him do more; you see? I got up, I put something around

me, over me, a sheet or something, just held it together where

I could, and I took some steps and I kept whispering to the

man with the knife in m y bed that I would just get rid o f the

man at the door because he wouldn’t go away if I didn’t come

to the door and really I would just make him go aw ay and I

kept walking to the door to open it, not knowing if I would fall

or if the man in the bed would stick the knife in me before I got

there, or who was on the other side o f the door and what he

would do; would he run or laugh or walk away; or was it a

member o f the gang, wanting some. It was cool and clear and

light outside and it was a man I didn’t know except a little, a

big man, so tall, so big, such a big man, and I whispered to him

to help me, please help me, and I talked out loud that I couldn’t

come out now for breakfast like we had planned and I

whispered to say that I was hurt and that the man inside was a

leader o f a gang and I indicated the big knife on the w indow

ledge, out o f m y reach, a huge dagger, almost a sword, that I

had got the man to leave outside and I whispered that he was in

m y bed now with a knife and out loud I tried to say normal

things very loud but I was dizzy and I wasn’t sure I could keep

standing and the big man caught on quick and said normal

things loud, questions so I could answer them and didn’t have

to think o f new things because I’m shaking and I say the m an’s

in m y bed with a knife and please help me he was with a gang

and I don’t know where they are and maybe they’re around

and they’ll show up and it’s dangerous but please help me and

the big man strides in, he doesn’t take the big knife, I almost

die from fear but he just does it, I used m y chance and there’s

none left, he has long legs and they cover the distance to the

bed in a second and the man in m y bed is fumbling with the

knife and the big man, so big, with long legs, says I’m his; his

girl; his; this is an insult to him; an outrage to him; and the man

in the bed with the knife says nothing, he grovels, he sweats,

he asks forgiveness, he didn’t mean no harm, you know how it

is man; and hey they agree it’s just a misunderstanding and

they talk and the man in m y bed with the knife is sweating and

the man who saved me is known to be dangerous, he is

known, a known very serious man, a quiet man, a major man,

and he says he’s m y man and I’m his woman and he don’t want

me having no trouble with sniveling assholes and any insult he

throws makes the man in m y bed with the knife sweat more

and grovel more and the big man, the man with the long legs,

he speaks very soft, and he says that now the man in the bed

with the knife w ill leave and the man in the bed with the knife

fumbles to put his pants on and fumbles to put his shirt on and

fumbles to get his shoes on and the big man, the man with the

long legs, says quietly, politely, that nobody had ever better

mess with me anymore and the man who was in m y bed with

the knife says yeah and sure and please and thank you and I am

some kind o f prom queen, bedecked, bejeweled, crowned

princess, because the man with the long legs says I am his, and

Pedro or Juan or Jo e is obsequious and he says he is sorry and

he says he didn’t understand and he says he made a mistake and

they chat and I’m shaking bad, I’m there covered a little, I’m

shaking and I’m not really covered and I’m covered in sweat

and I’m trying not to fall down faint and I’m shaking so much

I’m nearly naked, I’m hurt, my head falls down and I see my

skin, all bruised anywhere you can see as if I turned blue or

someone painted me blue, and there’s blood on me but I can’t

look or keep m y eyes open, I’m just this side o f dead but I’m

holding on, I’m shaking but I got something covering me

somewhere and I’m just not quite dead, I’m keeping something covering me somewhere, and Pedro or Juan or Jo e

leaves, he leaves mumbling an apology to the big man and I’m

saying thank you to the big man with serious formality, quiet

and serious and concentrating, and I’m something that ain’t

fresh and new, I’m something that ain’t clean, and I don’t

know anything except he’s got to go now because I have to

curl up by m yself to die now, it’s time, I’m just going to put

m yself down on the bed, very careful, very slow, on m y side

with m y knees raised a little, curled up a little, and I’m going to

God, I am going to ask God to take me in now, I am going to

forgive Him and I am going to put aside all m y grudges against

Him for all what He did wrong and for all the pain I ever had or

saw and I am going to ask Him to take me away now from

here and to somewhere else where I don’t have to move ever

again, where I can be curled up a little and nothing hurts and

whatever hurts don’t have to m ove and that I don’t have to

wake up no more but the big man ain’t through and I say later

or tom orrow or come back and he says I have to pay m y debts

and he talks and he threatens and he has a deep voice and he is.

big and he has long arms and he isn’t leaving, he says, and he is

strong and he pulls me down and gets on top o f me and says I

owe him and he fucks me and I say God Y ou must stop him

now but God don’t stop him, God don’t have no problem

with this, God rides on the back o f the man and I see Him there

doing it and the man uses his teeth on me where men fuck and

G od ’s for him and I’m wondering w hy He likes people being

hurt and I’m past hating Him and past Him and I can’t beg

Him no more for respite or help or death and the big man has

his teeth between m y legs, inside me and on the flesh all

around, he’s biting, not a little, deep bites, he’s using his teeth

and biting into the lips o f m y labia and I’m thinking this is not

happening and it is not possible and it is not true and I am

thinking it will stop soon because it must stop soon but it does

not stop soon because the man has fucked but it means nothing

to him except he had to do it so he did it but this is w hy he is

here, the real reason, this biting in this place, he is wanting to

do this other awful thing that is not like anything anyone ever

did before and I say this is not happening and even Y ou are not

so cruel to let this man do this and keep doing it and not

making him stop but the man has long arms and he’s driven, a

passionate man, and he holds me down and he has long legs

and he uses his arms and legs to keep me pinned down and he is

so big, so tall, he can have his face down there and still he

covers me to hold me down, m y shoulders, m y breasts; but

m y head twists back and forth, side to side, like some loose

head o f a doll screwed on wrong. He is cutting me open with

his teeth, he looks up at me, he bites more, he says lovers’

things, he is the great lover and he is going slow, with his

mouth, with his teeth, and then watching m y head try to

screw itself o ff m y neck; and he gets in a frenzy and there’s no

words for this because pain is littler and sweeter and someday

it ends but this doesn’t end, will not end, it will never end, it’s

dull, dirty, rusty knives cutting my labial lips or the edge o f a

rusty tin can and it’s inside me, his teeth reaching inside me

turning me inside out, the skin, he is pulling me open and he is

biting inside me and I’m thinking that pain is a river going

through me but there’s no words and pain isn’t a river, there’s

just one great scream past sound and my mind moves over, it

moves out o f m y head, I feel it escape, it runs away, it says no,

not this, no and it says you cannot but the man does and my

mind just fucking falls out o f my brains and I am past being

anything God can help anyway and He’s making the man

stronger, H e’s making the man happy, the man likes this, he is

liking this, and he is proud to be doing it so good like a good

lover, slow, one who lasts, one who takes time; and this is real;

this happened and this will last forever, because I am just

someone like anyone and there’s things too bad for me and I

didn’t know you could be lying flat, blue skin with blood from

the man with the knife, to find love again, someone cutting his

w ay into you; and I’m just someone and it’s just flesh down

there, tender flesh, somewhere you barely touch and you

w ouldn’t cut it or wound it; no one would; and I have pain all

over me but pain ain’t the word because there’s no word, I

have pain on me like it’s my skin but pain ain’t the word and it

isn’t m y skin, blue with red. I’m just some bleeding thing cut

up on the floor, a pile o f something someone left like garbage,

some slaughtered animal that got sliced and sucked and a man

put his dick in it and then it didn’t matter if the thing was still

warm or not because the essential killing had been done and it

was just a matter o f time; the thing would die; the longer it

took the worse it would be; which is true. He had a good time.

He did. He got up. He was friendly. He got dressed. I wasn’t

barely alive. I barely moaned or whispered or cried. I didn’t

move. He left. The gang was somewhere outside. He left the

door open, wide open, and it was going to be a hundred years

before I could crawl enough to close it. There was daylight

streaming in. It was tom orrow. T om orrow had finally come,,

a long tom orrow, an eternal tom orrow , I’m always here, the

girl lying here, can’t run, can’t crawl, where’s freedom now,

can’t move, can’t crawl, dear God, help me, someone, help

me, this is real, help me; please, help me. I hate God; for

making the pain; and making the man; and putting me here;

under them all; anyone that wants.

S E V E N

In 1969, 1970, 1971

(Age 22, 23, 24, 2$)

Yeah, I go somewhere else, a new country, not the fucking

U . S . A ., somewhere I never been, and I’m such a sweet genius

o f a girl that I marry a boy. N ot some trash bourgie; a sweet

boy w ho’d done time; I rescued him from jail once, I took all

my money and I gave it to some uniformed pig for him; a

hostage, they had kidnapped him, taken him out o f his bed and

out o f where he lived in handcuffs in the middle o f the night

and they kept him; I mean, he just fucking disappeared and it

was that he was locked up. They let me in the prison, the great

gray walls that are built so high and so cold you can’t help but

feel anyone in them is a tragic victim buried alive. You

w ouldn’t be right but that’s what you’d feel. Cold stone, a

washed-out gray. I was a child standing there, just a girl,

money in my hand, love in my heart, telling the guard I

wanted m y friend loose and had come to pay for him to go

now, with me; I felt like a child because the prison was so big

and so cold, it was the gray o f the Camden streets, only it was

standing up instead o f all spread out flat to the horizon, it was

the streets I grew up on rising high into the sky, with sharp

right angles, an angry rectangle o f pale gray stone, a washed-

out gray, opaque, hard, solid, cold, except it wasn’t broken or

crumbling— each wall was gray concrete, thick, the thickness

o f your forearm— well, if you see someone’s forearm up

someone’s ass you know how long, how thick it is, and I seen

these things, I traveled a hard road until now; not how a

gentleman’s forearm seems draped in a shirt but what it is i f it’s

in you— a human sense o f size, chilling enough to remember

precisely, a measurement o f space and pain; once the body

testifies, you know. It was cold gray stone, an austere

monument; not a castle or a palace or an old monastery or a

stone w inery in cool hills or archaic remains o f Druids or

Romans or anything like that; it was cold; stone cold; ju st a

stone cold prison outside o f time, high and nasty; and a girl

stands outside it holding all her money that she will ever have

in her cute little clenched fist, she’s giving it to the pigs for a

man; not her man; a man; a hero; a rebel; a resister; a

revolutionary; a boy against authority, against all shit. H e’s all

sweet inside, delicate, a tender one, and on the outside he is a

fighting boy with speed and wit, a street fighting boy, a

subversive; resourceful, ruthless, a paragon, not o f virtue but

o f freedom. Bom bs here and there, which I admire, property

not people; blow ing up sym bols o f oppression, monuments to

greed and exploitation, statues o f imperialists and w armongers; a boy brave enough to strike terror in the heart o f business as usual. I’m Andrea, I say to the guard as if it matters;

I have the money, see, here, I’ve come to get him out, he’s m y

friend, a kind, gentle, and decent boy, I say showing a moral

nature; I am trying to be a human being to the guard, I’m

always a pacifist at war with myself, I want to ignore the

uniform, the gun, inside there’s someone human, I want to act

human, be human, but how? I think about these things and I

find m yself trying; trying at strange times, in strange places,

for reconciliation, for recognition; I decide reciprocity must be

possible now, for instance, now standing at a guard booth at

the outermost concrete wall o f the concrete prison. Later,

when I am waiting for his release, I will be inside the concrete

building and all the guards and police and guns will disappear

as if it’s magic or a hallucination and I will wander the halls,

ju st wander, down in the cell blocks, all painted an oily brazen

white, the bars to the cells painted the same bright white— I

will wander; wander in the halls like a tourist looking around

at the bars, the cells, the men in the cages, the neat bunk beds;

the men will call things out in a language I don’t understand,

grinning and gesticulating, and I will grin back— I’m lost and I

walk around and I walk quite a long w ay in the halls and I

wonder if the police will shoot me if they find me and I hope I

can find my w ay back to the room where they left me and I

think about what strange lapses there are in reality, ellipses

really, or little bumps and grinds, so that there are no police in

the halls anywhere and I can just walk around: loaded down

with anxiety, because in Amerika they would shoot me if I

was wandering through; it’s like a dream but it’s no dream, the

clean white prison without police. N o w , outside, with the

guard, at the first barricade, I act nice with both fear and utopia

in m y heart. Who is the guard? Human, like me. I came for my

friend, I say, and I say his name, many times, in the strange

language as best I can, I spell it, I write it out carefully. I don’t

say: m y friend you Nazis grabbed because he’s political— my

friend who makes bombs, not to hurt anyone but to show

what’s important, people not property— my friend w ho’s

afraid o f nothing and no one and he has a boisterous laugh and

a shy smile— m y friend who disappeared from his home three

nights ago, disappeared, and no one knew where he was,

disappeared, gone, and you had come in the middle o f the

night and handcuffed him and brought him here, you had

hauled him out o f bed and taken him away, you had

kidnapped him from regular life, you had pushed him around,

and you didn’t have a reason, not a lawful one, not one you

knew about, not a real crime with a real indictment, it was

harassment, it was intimidation, but he’s not some timid boy,

he’s not some tepid, tame fool; he’s the real thing. He’s beyond

your law. H e’s past your reach. He’s beyond your understanding. H e’s risk and freedom outside all restraint. I never

quite knew what they arrested him for, a w ay he had o f

disappearing inside a narrative, you never could exactly pin

down a fact but you knew he was innocent. He was the pure

present, a whirling dervish o f innocence, a minute-to-minute

boy incarnating innocence, no burden o f m em ory or law,

untouched by convention. And I came looking for him,

because he was kind. He said Andrea, whispered it; he said

Andrea shy and quiet and just a little giddy and there was a

rush o f whisper across m y ear, a little whirlwind o f whisper,

and a chill up and down m y spine. It was raining; we were

outside, wet, touching just barely, maybe not even that. He

lived with his family, a boarder in a house o f strangers, cold,

acquisitive conformers who wanted money and furniture,

people with rules that passed for manners, robots wanting

things, more things, stupid things. He had to pay them m oney

to live there. I never heard o f such a thing: a son. I couldn’t go

there with him, o f course. I had no place to stay. I was outside

all night. It rained the whole night. I didn’t have anywhere to

go or anywhere to live. I had gone with a few different men,

had places to stay for a few weeks, but now I was alone, didn’t

want no one, didn’t have a bed or a room. He came to find me

and he stayed with me; outside; the long night; in rain; not in a

bed; not for the fuck; not. Rain is so hard. It stops but you stay

wet for so long after and you get cold always no matter what

the weather because you are swathed in wet cloth and time

goes by and you feel like a baby someone left in ice water and

even if it’s warm outside and the air around you heats up you

get colder anyw ay because the w et’s up against you, wrapped

around you and it don’t breathe, it stays heavy, intractable, on

you; and so rain is very hard and when it rains you get sad in a

frightened w ay and you feel a loneliness and a desolation that is

very big. This is always so once you been out there long

enough. I f yo u ’re inside it don’t matter— you still get cold and

lonely; afraid; sad. So when the boy came to stay with me in

the rain I took him to m y heart. I made him m y friend in my

heart. I pledged friendship, a whisper o f intention. I made a

promise. I didn’t say nothing; it was a minute o f honor and

affection. About four in the morning we found a cafe. It’s a

long w ay to dawn when you’re cold and tired. We scraped up

money for coffee, pulled change out o f our pockets, a rush o f

silver and slugs, and we pooled it on the table which is like

running blood together because nothing was held back and so

we were like blood brothers and when m y blood brother

disappeared I went looking for him, I went to the address

where he lived, a cold, awful place, I asked his terrible mother

where he was, I asked, I waited for an answer, I demanded an

answer, I went to the local precinct, I made them tell me,

where he was, how to find him, how much money it took to

spring him, I went to get him, he was far away, hidden away

like Rapunzel or something, a long bus ride followed by

another long bus ride, he was in a real prison, not some funky

little jail, not some county piss hole, a great gray concrete

prison in the middle o f nowhere so they can find you if you

run, nail you, and I took all m y money, m y blood, m y life for

today and tom orrow a n d : he next day and for as long as there

was, as far ahead as I can count, and I gave it like a donor for his

life so he could be free, so the piglets couldn’t put him in a

cage, couldn’t keep him there; so he could be what he was, this

very great thing, a free man, a poor boy who had become a

revolutionary man; he was pure— courage and action, a wild

boy, so wild no one had ever got near him before, I wish I was

so brave as him; he was manic, dizzying, m oving every

second, a frenzy, frenetic and intense with a mask o f joviality,

loud stories, vulgar jokes; and then, with me, quiet, shy, so

shy. I met him when he had just come back from driving an

illegal car two times in the last month into Eastern Europe,

crossing the borders illegally into Stalinist Eastern bloc

countries— I never understood exactly which side he was

on— he said both— he said he took illegal things in and illegal

people out— borders didn’t stop him, armies didn’t stop him, I

crossed borders with him later, he could cross any border; he

wore a red star he said the Soviets had given him, a star o f

honor from the government that only some party insiders ever

got, and then he fucked them over by delivering anarchy in his

forays in and out o f their fortressed imperial possessions. He

had a Russian nickname, his nom de guerre, and since his life was

subversion, an assault on society, war against all shit and all

authority, his nom de guerre was his name, the only name

anyone knew he had; no one could trace him to his fam ily, his

origins, where he slept: a son paying rent. Except me. In fact

the cops arrested him for not paying traffic tickets, thousands

o f dollars, under the conventional birth name; he ended in the

real prison resisting arrest. Even in jail he was still safely

underground, the nom de guerre unconnected to him, the body

in custody. When I married him I got his real name planted on

me by law and I knew his secrets, this one and then others,

slow ly all o f them, the revolutionary ones and the ones that

went with being a boy o f his time, his class, his parents, a boy

raised to conform, a boy given a dull, stupid name so he would

be dull and stupid, a boy named to become a man who would

live to collect a pension. I was M rs. him, the female one o f him

by law, a legal incarnation o f what he fucking hated, an actual

legal entity, because there is no Mrs. nom de guerre and no girl’s

name ever mattered on the streets or underground, not her

own real name anyway, only if she was some fox to him, a

legendary fox. I was one: yeah, a great one. I had m y time. But

it was nasty to become Mrs. his Christian names and his

daddy’s last name, the w ay they say M rs. Edw ard Jam es Fred

Smith, as if she’s not Sally or Jane; the wedding was m y

baptism, m y naming, Mrs. what he hates, the one who needs

furniture and money, the one you come home to which means

you got to be somewhere, a rule, a law, Mrs. the law, the one

who says get the mud o ff your shoes because it’s dirtying the

floor, the one who just cleaned the fucking floor after all. I

never thought about mud in my whole fucking life but when

you clean the floor you want to be showed respect. I lived with

him before we got married; we were great street fighters; we

were great. N o one could follow the chaos we made, the

disruptions, the lightning-fast transgressions o f law; passports, borders, taking people or things here or there; street actions, explosions, provocations, property destruction, sand

in gas tanks, hiding deserters from Vietnam, the occasional

deal. We had a politics o f making well-defined chaos,

strategically brilliant chaos; then we made love. We did the

love because we had run our blood together; it was fraternal

love but between us, a carnal expression o f brotherhood in the

revolutionary sense, a long, fraternal embrace for hours or

days, in hiding, in the hours after when we wanted to

disappear, be gone from the world o f public accountability;

and he whispered Andrea, he whispered it urgently, he was

urgent and frantic, an intense embrace. He taught me to cook;

in rented rooms all over Europe he taught me to cook; a bed, a

hot plate, he taught me to make soup and macaroni and

sausages and cabbage; and I thought it meant he was specially

taking care o f me, he was m y friend, he loved me, w e’d make

love and he’d cook. H e’d learned in the N avy, mass meals

enhanced by his private sense o f humor and freedom, the jokes

he would tell in the private anarchy o f the relatively private

kitchen, more personal freedom than anywhere else, doing

anything else. He got thrown out; they tried to order him

around, especially one vicious officer, he didn’t take shit from

officers, he poured a bowl o f hot soup over the officer’s head,

he was in the brig, you get treated bad and you toughen up

or break and his rebellion took on aspects o f deadly force, he

lost his boyish charm although he always liked to play but

inside it was a life-or-death hate o f authority, he made it look

like fun but it was very dark; a psychiatrist rescued him, got

him discharged. His parents were ashamed. He joined real

young to get aw ay from them; he didn’t have much education

except what he learned there— some about cooking and

explosives; some about how to do hard time. He learned some

about assault and authority; you could assault anyone; rules

said you couldn’t; in real life you could. M om m y and daddy

were ashamed o f him when he came home; they got colder,

more remote. Oh, she was cold. Ignorant and cold. D addy

too, but he hid him self behind a patriarchal lethargy; head o f

the clan’s all tuckered out now from a life o f real work, daily

service, for money, for food, tired for life, too tired to say

anything, too tired to do anything, has to just sit there now on

his special chair only he can sit on, a vinyl chair, and read the

newspaper now, only he gets to read the newspaper, which

seems to take all day and all night because he ponders, he

addresses issues o f state in his head, he’s the daddy. D ay and

night he sits in the chair, all tuckered out. H e’s cold, a cold

man whose wife took the rap for being mean because she did

things— raised the kids, cleaned the floor, said eat now, said

sleep now, said it’s cold so where’s the coal, said we need

money for clothes, terrible bitch o f a woman, a tyrant making

such demands, keeping track o f the details o f shelter; and she

got what she needed i f she had to make it or barter for it or steal

it; she was one o f them evil geniuses o f a mother that kept her

eye open to get what was needed, including when the Nazis

were there, occupying, when some didn’t get fed and

everyone was hungry. Daddy got to sit in the special chair, all

for him. O f course, when he was younger he worked. On

boats. Including for the Nazis. He had no choice, he is quick to

say. Well, not that quick. He says it after a long, rude silence

questioning w hy is it self-evident that there was no choice or

questioning his seeming indifference to anything going on

around him at the time. Well, you see, o f course, I had no

choice. N o, well, they didn’t have to threaten, you see, I

simply did what they asked; yes, they were fine to me; yes, I

had no trouble with them; o f course, I only worked on a boat,

a ship, you know. Oh, no, o f course, I didn’t hurt anyone; no,

we never saw any Jew s; no, o f course not, no. M om m y did, o f

course; saw a Jew ; yes, hid a Je w in a closet for several days,

yes. Out o f the kindness o f her heart. Out o f her goodness.

Yes, they would have killed her but she said what did the Jew s

ever do to me and she hid one, yes. Little Je w girl became his

daughter-in-law— times have changed, he would note and

then he would nod ponderously— but it was the hero,

m om m y-in-law, w ho’d say things like “je w it dow n” because

she did the work o f maintaining the family values: fed the

family materially and spiritually. But m y husband wasn’t one

o f them; the worse they were, the purer, the more miraculous,

he was. He wasn’t o f them; he was o f me; o f what I was and

knew; o f what I thought and hoped; o f the courage I wanted to

have; o f the will I did have; o f the life I was leading, all risk and

no tom orrow; and he was born after the war like me; a child o f

after. So there was this legal thing; the law decrees; it made me

their daughter-in-law more than it made me his wife. There

was it and them on the one hand and then there was us: him in

exile from them— I thought he was as orphaned as I was; and

braver; I thought he was braver. I embraced him, and he

embraced me, and neither o f us knew nothing about

tom orrow and I never had. I didn’t wait for him like some

middle-class girl wanting a date or something in ruffles or

someone wanting a husband; I wasn’t one o f them and I didn’t

want a husband; I wanted a friend through day and night. I

didn’t ask him what he liked so I could bow and scrape and my

idea wasn’t to make him into someone safe, denatured. He

was an anarchist o f spirit and act and I didn’t want no burden

o f law on him. I just wanted to run with him, be his pal in his

game, and hold him; hold him. I indulged an affection for him,

a fraternal affection that was real and warm and robust and sort

o f interesting on its own, always sort o f reaching out towards

him, and I felt tender towards him, tender near him, next to

him, lying next to him; and we were intense, a little on edge,

when we holed up together, carnal; our home was the bed we

were in, a bed, an empty room, the floor, an em pty room,

maybe not a regular home like you see on television but we

wasn’t like them on television, there w asn’t tw o people like us

anywhere, so fragile and so reckless and so strong, we were

with each other and for each other, we didn’t hide where we

had been before, what we had done, we had secrets but not

from each other and there w asn’t anything that made us dirty

to each other and we embraced each other and we were going

to hole up together, kind o f a home, us against them, I guess,

and we didn’t have no money or ideas, you know , pictures in

your head from magazines about how things should be—

plates, detergents, how them crazy wom en smile in advertisements. It’s all around you but you don’t pick it up unless you got some time and money and neither o f us had ever

been a citizen in that sense. We were revolutionaries, not

consumers— not little boy-girl dolls all polished and smiling

with little tea sets playing house. We were us, unto ourselves.

We found a small place without any floor at all, you had to

walk on the beams, and he built the floor so the landlord let us

stay there. We planned the political acts there, the chaos we

delivered to the status quo, the acts o f disruption, rebellion.

We hid out there, kept low , kept out o f sight; you turn where

you are into a friendly darkness that hides you. We embraced

there, a carnal embrace— after an action or during the long

weeks o f planning or in the interstices where we drenched

ourselves in hashish and opium until a paralysis overtook us

and the smoke stopped all the time. I liked that; how

everything slowed down; and I liked fucking after a strike, a

proper climax to the real act— I liked how everything got fast

and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after,

when we was drenched in perspiration from what came

before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made you

supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and

hurt before you touched them, could feel a breeze a mile away,

it hurt, there was this reddish pain, a soreness parallel to your

skin before anything touched you; I liked how you was tired

before you began, a fatigue that came because the danger was

over, a strained, taut fatigue, an ache from discipline and

attentiveness and from the imposition o f a superhuman

quietness on the body; I liked it. I liked it when the embrace

was quiet like the strike itself, a subterranean quiet, disciplined, with exposed nerve endings that hurt but you don’t say

nothing. Then you sleep. Then you fuck more; hardy; rowdy;

long; slow; now side by side or with me on top and then side

by side; I liked to be on top and I moved real slow, real

deliberate, using every muscle in me, so I could feel him

hurting— you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens

into a frisson o f pain? — and I could tease every bone in his

body until it was ready to break open, split and the m arrow ’d

spread like semen. I could split him open inside and he never

had enough. I had an appetite for him; anything, I’d do

anything, hours or days. In my mind, I wasn’t there for him so

much as I was the same as him. I could feel every muscle in his

body as if it were mine and I’d taunt each muscle, I’d make it

bend and ache and stretch and tear, I’d pull it slow, I’d make it

m ove toward me so much it w ould’ve come through his skin

except I’d make him come before his skin’d burst open. I didn’t

have no shyness around him and I didn’t have to act ignorant

or stupid because he wasn’t that kind o f man who wanted you

to overlay everything with the words o f a fool like you don’t

know nothing. Some was perverse according to how these

things are seen but that’s a concept, not a fact, it’s a concept

over people’s eyes so much you wish they would go blind to

get rid o f the concept once and for all. It’s how the law makes

you see things but we were different. We were inside each

other; a fact; wasn’t perverse; couldn’t be. We turned each

other inside out and it binds you and there w asn’t nothing he

did to me that I didn’t do to him and w e’d talk and cook and

roam around and drink and smoke and w e’d visit his friends,

which wasn’t always so good because to them I was this

something, I didn’t understand it but I hated it, I was this

something that came into a room and changed everything.

There were these guys, mostly fighters, anarchists, some

intellectuals, and when I came into the room everything was

different. I was his blood and that’s how we acted, not giggly

or amorous, but I think I was just this monstrous thing, this

girlfriend or wife, that is completely different from them and

cannot talk without making them mad or crazy, that cannot

do anything but ju st must sit quiet, that does not have any

reason to be in the room at all, not this room where they are,

only some other room somewhere else to be fucked, sort o f

kept like a pet animal and the man goes there when he’s done

with the real stuff, the real talk, the real politics, the real w ork,

the real getting high, even the real fucking— they go somewhere together and get women together to do the real

fucking, they hunt down women together or buy wom en

together or pick up women together to do the real fucking;

and then in some one room somewhere hidden aw ay is the

w ife or girlfriend and she’s in this sort o f vacuum, sealed

aw ay, vacuum packed, and when she comes out to be

somewhere or to say something there is an embarrassment and

they avert their eyes— the man failed because she’s outside—

she got out— like his pee’s showing on his pants. We’d go to

these meetings late at night. These guys would be there; they

were famous revolutionaries, famous to their time and place,

criminals according to the law; brilliant, shrewd, tough guys,

detached, with formal politeness to me. One was a junkie, a

flamboyant junkie with long, silken, rolling brown curls,

great pools o f sadness in his moist eyes, small and elegant, a

beauty, soft-spoken, always nodding out or so sick and

wretched that he’d be throwing up a few times a night and

they’d expect me to clean it up and I w ouldn’t, I’d just sit there

waiting for the next thing we were all going to discuss, and

someone would eventually look me in the eye, a rare event,

and say meaningfully, “ he just threw u p , ” and time would

pass and I’d wait and eventually someone would start talking

about something; I didn’t get how the junkie was more real

than me or how his vomit was mine, you know. When the

junkie’d come to where we lived he would vom it and sort o f

challenge me to leave it there, as he had fouled m y very own

nest, and he’d ask for a cup o f tea and I’d clean it up but I

w ouldn’t get him the tea and I tried to convey to my husband

that m y hospitality was being abused, our hospitality, o f

course, that I wasn’t being treated fair, not that some rule was

being broke but that the boy was being rude to me; I told my

husband to clean it up finally but he never did it too good. I

told m y husband who I still thought was m y brother that I

didn’t want the junkie to come anymore because he didn’t

treat me in an honorable w ay and I said I wasn’t born for this.

So there were these fissures coming between us because the

fraternal affection was with him and the junkie from the old

days together, not him and me from now, and I was shocked

by this, I couldn’t grasp it. I went into the rooms with him but

it came down on him how bad it was from the men and it came

down on me that I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near

where they were. I kept going to the rooms because we kept

hitting targets all over the city and w e’d need to get o ff the

streets fast and he’d know some place he wanted to be, one

friend or another, and they’d all be there; it would contradict

the plan but he’d say it was necessary. Some were on the run

for recent crimes but most were burned out, living in times

past, not fighting no more, most stopped long ago and far

away and they were just burned out to hell. Yeah, they were

tired, I respected that; I mean, I fucking loved these heroes; I

knew they were tired, tired from living on their nerves, from

hiding, from jail, from smoke, from fucking, which came first

for some but last for others. Some had children they had

deserted; some lived in the past, remembering stray girls in

cities they were passing through. They were older than me but

not by a lot. I wanted their respect. I hadn’t given up and I did

anything anybody else did and I wasn’t afraid o f nothing so

how come it was like I wasn’t there? I mean, I was too

honorable to be anything other than strong and silent, I tell

you; but I thought silence made its own sound, you count on

revolutionaries to hear the silence, otherwise how can the

oppressed count on them? Every lunatic was someone we

knew that we dropped in on or stayed with while we were

running— or m oving just for the sake o f speed, the fun o f

flight. We went to other cities, hitchhiking; we lived in small

rented rooms, slept on floors. We went to other countries—

we begged, we borrowed, yeah, we stole, me more than him,

stealing’s easy, I been stealing all m y life, not a routine or some

fixed act, just here and there as needed, from stores when I was

a kid, when I was hungry or when there was something I

wanted real bad that I couldn’t have because it cost money I

didn’t have— I never minded putting money out if I had it in

m y pocket— I mean, I remember taking a chocolate Easter egg

when I was a kid or m y proudest, most treasured acquisition, a

blues record by Dave Van Ronk, the first man I ever saw with

a full beard like a beatnik or a prophet; I took money when I

needed it and could get it easy enough; pills; clothes. M o n ey’s

w hat’s useful. He began dealing some shit, it w asn’t too hard

or dangerous compared to running borders with other

contraband but it got so he did it without me more and more;

he spent more and more time with these low life gangster

types, not political revolutionaries at all but these vulgar guys

who packed guns and just did business; he said it’s just for

money, what’s it got to do with you or with us, I’ll just do it

fast, get the money, it’s nothing; and it was nothing, I didn’t

have no interest in money per se, but it got so he did the

running, he was free, freedom and flight were his, he’d pick up

and go, I didn’t know where he was or who with or when I’d

meet them they’d be lowlife I had no interest in, just toadies as

much as some corporate businessmen were and I’d feel very

bored with them and they’d treat me like I was a skirt and I’d

feel superior and because I didn’t want no part o f them I didn’t

challenge it, I’d just put up with it and be relieved when he did

his shit for money elsewhere; he hunted money down, he

hunted dope down, he drove the secret highways o f Europe at

a hundred miles an hour, without me, increasingly without

me, and I stayed home and dusted walls, waiting, I waited,

while I waited I cleaned, I dusted, I washed things, I made

things nice, I put something here or there, little touches, but

especially I washed things— I washed floors, dishes, clothes,

anything could be washed I fucking washed it; and I would o f

course keep thinking; I’d be doing laundry but I’d think I was

thinking— housework wasn’t what I was doing, not me, no, I

was thinking. I shared the fruits o f all this labor with him,

clean clothes, clean dishes, clean floors, my thinking, which

has always been first-rate in some senses, and I saw him put the

thinking I had done into action so I felt like some pretty major

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