much o f a house as any other house. I thought about walls
pretty much all the time. Y ou should be able to just put up
walls, it should be possible. There’s literally no end to the
places walls could go without inconveniencing anyone, except
they would have to walk around. They say a ro of over your
head but it’s walls really that are the issue; you can just think
about them, all their corners touching or all lined up thin like
pancakes, painted a pretty color, a light color because you
don’t want it to look too small, or you can make it more than
one color but you run the risk o f looking busy, somewhat
vulgar, and you don’t want it to look gray or brown like
outside or you could get sad. There’s got to be some place in
heaven where God stores walls, there’s just walls, stacked or
standing up straight like the pages o f a book, miles high and
miles wide running in pale colors above the clouds, a storage
place, and God sees someone lost and He just sends them
down four at a time. Guess He don’t. There’s people take them
for granted and people who dream about them— literally,
dream how nice they would be, pretty and painted, serene. I
w ouldn’t mind living outside all the time if it didn’t get cold or
wet and there wasn’t men. A ro o f over your head is more
conceptual in a sense; it’s sort o f an advanced idea. In life you
can cover your head with a piece o f w ood or with cardboard or
newspapers or a side o f a crate you pull apart, but walls aren’t
really spontaneous in any sense; they need to be built, with
purpose, with intention. Someone has to plan it if you want
them to come together the right w ay, the whole four o f them
with edges so delicate, it has to be balanced and solid and
upright and it’s very delicate because if it’s not right it falls,
you can’t take it for granted; and there’s wind that can knock it
down; and you will feel sad, remorseful, you will feel full o f
grief. Y ou can’t sustain the loss. A ro o f over your head is a sort
o f suburban idea, I think; like that i f you have some long, flat,
big house with furniture in it that’s all matching you surely
also will have a ro o f so they make it a synonym for all the rest
but it’s walls that make the difference between outside and
not. It’s a well-kept secret, arcane knowledge, a m ystery not
often explained. Y o u don’t see it written down but initiates
know. I type and sometimes I steal but I’m stopping as much
as I can. I live inside now. I have an apartment in a building.
It’s a genuine building, a tenement, which is a famous kind o f
building in which many have lived in history. M aybe not
T rotsky but Em m a Goldm an for certain. I don’t go near men
really. Sometimes I do. I get a certain forgetfulness that comes
on me, a dark shadow over m y brain, I get took up in a certain
feeling, a wandering feeling to run from existence, all restless,
perpetual motion. It drives me with an ache and I go find one. I
get a smile on m y face and m y hips m ove a little back and forth
and I turn into a greedy little fool; I want the glass all em pty. I
grab some change and I hit the cement and I get one. I am
writing a certain very serious book about life itself. I go to bars
for food during happy hours when m y nerves aren’t too bad,
too loaded down with pain, but I keep to m yself so I can’t get
enough to eat because bartenders and managers keep watch
and you are supposed to be there for the men which is w hy
they let you in, there ain’t no such thing as a solitary woman
brooding poetically to be left alone, it don’t happen or she
don’t eat, and mostly I don’t want men so I’m hungry most o f
the time, I’m almost always hungry, I eat potatoes, you can
buy a bag o f potatoes that is almost too heavy to carry and you
can just boil them one at a time and you can eat them and they
fill you up for a while. M y book is a very big book about
existence but I can’t find any plot for it. It’s going to be a very
big book once I get past the initial slow beginning. I want to
get it published but you get afraid you will die before it’s
finished, not after when it can be found and it’s testimony and
then they say you were a great one; you don’t want to die
before you wrote it so you have to learn to sustain your
writing, you take it serious, you do it every day and you don’t
fail to write words down and to think sentences. It's hard to
find words. It’s about some woman but I can’t think o f what
happens. I can say where she is. It’s pretty barren. I always see
a woman on a rock, calling out. But that’s not a story per se.
Y ou could have someone dying o f tuberculosis like Mann or
someone who is suffering— for instance, someone who is
lovesick like Mann. O r there’s best-sellers, all these stories
where women do all these things and say all these things but I
don’t think I can write about that because I only seen it in the
movies. There’s marriage stories but it’s so boring, a couple in
the suburbs and the man on the train becoming unfaithful and
how bored she is because she’s too intelligent or something
about how angry she is but I can’t remember why. A love
story’s so stupid in these modern times. I can’t have it be about
m y life because number one I don’t remember very much and
number two it’s against the rules, you’re supposed to make
things up. The best thing that ever happened to me is these
walls and I don’t think you could turn that into a story per se or
even a novel o f ideas that people would grasp as philosophical:
for instance, that you can just sit and they provide a
fram ework o f dignity because no one’s watching and I have
had too many see too much, they see you when they do things
to you that you don’t want, they look, and the problem is
there’s no walls keeping you sacred; nor that if you stand up
they are solid which makes you seem real too, a real figure in a
room with real walls, a touchstone o f authenticity, a standard
for real existence, you are real or you feel real, you don’t have
to touch them to feel real, you just have to be able to touch
them. M y pacifist friend gave me money to live here. She saw
me on the street one day, I guess, after I didn’t go back to her
apartment no more. She said come with me and she got a
newspaper and she found an apartment and she called the
landlord and she put the money in m y hand and she sent me to
the landlord which scared me because I never met one before, a
real one, but also she wasn’t going to let the cash go elsewhere
which there was a fair chance it would, because I would have
liked some coke or something or some dinner or some drinks
and a m ovie and a book or something more real than being
inside which seemed impossible— it seemed not really available and it seemed impossible to sustain so it made more sense
to me to use the cash for something real that I knew I could get,
something I knew how to use. I started sending her money
back as soon as I got some, I’d put some in an envelope and
mail it back even if it was just five dollars but she said I was
stupid because she only said it was a loan but it w asn’t and I
didn’t need to pay it back and everyone knew that which is my
weakness, how everyone got to know things but I don’t know
them. I can’t think o f any stories about pacifists that aren’t
true. There’s nothing imaginary about walls, or eating,
nothing fictive as it were, but more especially there’s nothing
imaginary about them when they’re missing. M y walls are
thin; yeah I wish they were mine. N othing’s yours. God hurts
you if you think they’re yours. In one second o f a bad thought
you can bring evil down on you. The walls are thin. I dream
there’s holes in them and I get scared as if it’s not really inside.
There’s not much food and I know it ain’t mine in any
meaningful sense. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up, not
just write down true things, or sincere things, or some things
that happened. M y mother who you can’t make up either
because there’s nothing so real as one named me Andrea as if I
was someone: distinct, in particular. She made a fiction. I’m
her book, a made-up story written down on a birth certificate.
Y ou could also say she’s a liar on such a deep level she should
be shot by all that’s fair; deep justice. if I was famous and my
name was published all over the world, in Italy and in Israel
and in Africa and in India, on continents and subcontinents, in
deserts, in ancient cities, it would still be cunt to every fucking
asshole drunk on every street in the world; and to them that’s
not drunk too, the sober ones who say it to you like they’re
calling a dog: fetch, cunt. if I won the Nobel Prize and walked
to the corner for milk it would still be cunt. And when you got
someone inside you who is loving you it’s still cunt and the
ones w ho’d die i f they wasn’t in you, you, you in particular, at
least that night, at least then, that time, that place, to them it’s
still cunt and they whisper it up close and chill the blood that’s
burning in you; and if you love them it’s still cunt and you can
love them so strong you’d die for them and it’s still cunt; and
your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heartbeat and
it’s still cunt. It’s behind your back and it’s to your face; the
ones you know, the ones you don’t. It’s like as i f nigger was a
term o f intimate endearment, not just used in lynching and
insult but whispered in lovemaking, the truth under the truth,
the name under the name, love’s name for you and it’s the
same as what hate calls you; he’s in you whispering nigger. It’s
thugs, it’s citizens, it’s cops, it’s strangers, it’s the ones you
want and the ones you deplore, you ain’t allowed indifference,
you have to decide on a relationship then and there on the spot
because each one that passes pisses on you to let you know he’s
there. There’s some few you made love with and yo u ’re still
breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles
swelling through their skin and bearing down on you and you
can still feel their weight on you, an urgent concentration o f
blood and bone, hot muscle, spread over you, the burden o f it
sinking into you, a stone cliff into a wet shore, and yo u ’re still
tangled up in them, good judgm ent aside, and it’s physical, it’s
a physical m em ory, in the body, not just in the brain, barely in
the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part o f your
sweat and their smell’s part o f your smell and you have an ache
for them that’s deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than
your heart and you still feel as if it’s real and current, now: how
his body moves against you in convulsions that are awesome
like mountains m oving, slow, burdensome, big, and how you
m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the
ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s
indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as
you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the
lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and
whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me
Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She
specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,
after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense
that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy
all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f
concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she
probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,
something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with
this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.
She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure
defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was
even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his
fingers and he wrote it down on me and inside me, his fingers
carved it in me with a pain that stayed half buried and there
wasn’t words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt, this
sweet little one who was what’s called a child but a female one
which changes it all. M y mama showed that fiction was
delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to
last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a
pragmatist, a maker o f reality, a shaper o f history, an
orchestrator o f events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink.
The Nazis, o f course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink.
Y ou can’t even say it would solve the problem to have
numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names
unless we are all zero, 0, we could all be 0; Pauline Reage
already suggested it, o f course, but she’s a demagogue and a
utopian, a kind o f Stalinist o f female equality, she wants us all
equal on the bottom o f anything that’s mean enough to be on
top; it has a certain documentary quality. Unlike Reage, my
mother just made it up, and her fiction was a lie, almost
without precedent, not recognized as original or great, a
voyage o f imagination; it was just a fucking lie. I don’t want to
tell lies, not for moral reasons but it’s m y idea o f pride, you
name it, I can take it. I was born in a city where the walls were
falling down; I didn’t see many solid walls. The streets were
right next to you it seemed because you could always hear the
buzz, the hum, the call, as if drums were beckoning you to the
tribal dance; you could see the freedom. Inside was small and
constrained with rules designed to make you some kind o f
trained cockroach and outside was forever, a path straight to
the heart o f the world; there were no limits, it spread out in
front o f you to anywhere, with anyone. Limits were another
lie, a social fiction all the zombies got together to tell. The
destination was always the street because the destination was
always freedom; out from under; no rule on top o f you. Y ou
could almost look through the brick, which was crumbling,
and you had this sense that every building had holes in it, a
transparency, and that no walls were ever finished or ever
lasted; and the cement outside was gray, cracked, streaked
with blood from where they threw you down to have fun with
you on hot nights and cold nights, the boys with their cars and
knives; I knew some o f those boys; I loved Nino who said
“ make love” as if it was something real special and real nice
and so fine, so precious and kind and urgent, his eyes burned
and his voice was low and soft and silk, it wrapped itself
around you, he didn’t reach out, he didn’t m ove towards you,
you had to let him know, you had to; I could still fucking die
for what he promised with his brilliant seduction, a poor,
uneducated boy, but when he did it I got used to being hurt
from behind, he used his knife, he made fine lines o f blood,
delicate, and you didn’t dare m ove except for your ass as he
wanted and you didn’t know if yo u ’d die and you got to love
danger i f you loved the boy and danger never forsakes you; the
boy leaves but danger is faithful. Y ou knew the cement under
you and the brick around you and the sound o f the boys
speeding by in their cars and the sudden silence, which meant
they were stalking you. I was born in Camden down the street
from where Walt Whitman lived, M ickle Street, he was the
great gray poet, the prophetic hero o f oceanic verse; also not-
cunt. Great poet; not-cunt. It’s like a mathematical equation
but no one learns it in school by heart; it ain’t written down
plain on the blackboard. It’s algebra for girls but no one’s
going to teach you. Y ou get brought down or throwed down
and you learn for yourself. There’s no mother on earth can
bear to explain it. I can’t write down what happened and I can’t
tell lies. T here’s no words for what happened and there’s
barely words for the lies. if I was a man I would say something
about fishing and it would be a story, a perfectly fine one too;
the bait, the hook, the lake, the wind, the shore, and then
everything else is the manly stuff. If I was a man at least I’d
know what to say, or I’d say it so grand it wouldn’t matter if it
was true or not; anyone’d recognize it and say it was art. I
could think o f something important, probably; recognizably
so. If I was a man and something happened I could write it
down and probably it would pass as a story even if it was true.
O f course, that’s just speculation. I’d swagger, too, if I was a
man; I’m not proud to say it but I’m sure it’s true. I would take
big steps, loud ones, down the street; I could be the Zen master
o f fuck you. I would spread m yself out and take up all the
space and spread my legs wide open in the subway to take up
three seats with just m y knees like they do. I would be very
bold and very cool. I’d be smarter than I am now, I’m sure,
because what I knew might matter and I’d remember more,
I’m sure. I don’t think I’d go near women though because I
wouldn’t want to hurt them. I know how everything feels. I
think if I was a man m y heart would not hurt so much and I
wouldn’t have this terror I am driven by but cannot name. I
think I could write a poem about it, perhaps. I think it could
probably make a very long poem and I could keep rewriting it
to get every nuance right and chart it as it changed over time;
song o f himself, perhaps, a sequel. Ginsberg says he chased
Whitman through supermarkets; I fucking was him; I
embraced all the generations without distinctions and it failed
because o f this awfulness that there is no name for, this great
meanness at the heart o f what they mean when they stick it in; I
just don’t know a remedy, because it is a sick and hostile thing.
Even if there were no wars I think I could say some
perceptions I had about life, I wouldn’t need the C ivil War or
the Vietnam War to hang m y literary hat on as it were, and I
could be loud, which I would try, I’m sure, I could call
attention to m yself as i f I mattered or what happened did or as
i f I knew something, even about suffering or even about life;
and, frankly, then it might count. I could stop thinking every
minute about where each sound is coming from and where the
shadows are each minute. I can’t even close m y eyes now
frankly but I think it’s because I’m this whatever it is, you can
have sophisticated words for it but the fact is you can be
sleeping inside with everything locked and they get in and do
it to you no matter how bad it hurts. In magazines they say
w om en’s got allure, or so they call it, but it’s more like being
some dumb w riggling thing that God holds out before them
on a stick with a string, a fisher o f men. The allure’s there even
i f you got open sores on you; I know. The formal writing
problem, frankly, is that the bait can’t write the story. The bait
ain’t even barely alive. There’s a weird German tradition that
the fish turned the tables and rewrote the story to punish the
fisherman but you know it’s a lie and it’s some writer o f fiction
being what became known as a modernist but before that was
called outright a smartass; and the fish still ain’t bait unless it’s
eviscerated and bleeding. I just can’t risk it now but if I was a
man I could close m y eyes, I’m sure; at night, I’d close them,
I’m sure. I don’t think m y hands would shake. I don’t think so;
or not so much; or not all the time; or not without reason;
there’s no reason now anyone can see. M y breasts w ouldn’t
bleed as i f God put a sign on me; blessing or curse, it draws
flies. Tears o f blood fall from them; they weep blood for me,
because I’m whatever it is: the girl, as they say politely; the
girl. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up for books but I am
afraid to make things up because in life everything evaporates,
it’s gone in mist, just disappears, there’s no sign left, except on
you, and you are a fucking invisible ghost, they look right
through you, you can have bruises so bad the skin’s pulled o ff
you and they don’t see nothing; you bet women had the
vapors, still fucking do, it means it all goes aw ay in the air,
whatever happened, whatever he did and how ever he did it,
and yo u ’re left feeling sick and weak and no one’s going to say
w hy; it’s ju st wom en, they faint all the time, they’re sick all the
time, fragile things, delicate things, delicate like the best
punching bags you ever seen. They say it’s lies even if they just
did it, or maybe especially then. I don’t know really. There’s
nothing to it, no one ever heard o f it before or ever saw it or
not here or not now; in all history it never happened, or if it
happened it was the Nazis, the exact, particular Nazis in
Germany in the thirties and forties, the literal Nazis in
uniform; when they were out o f uniform they were just guys,
you know, they loved their families, they paid o ff their
whores, just regular guys. N o one else ever did anything,
certainly no one now in this fine world we have here; certainly
not the things I think happened, although I don’t know what
to call them in any serious way. Y ou just crawl into a cave o f
silence and die; w hy are there no great women artists? Some
people got nerve. Blood on cement, which is all we got in my
experience, ain’t esthetic, although I think boys some day will
do very well with it; they’ll put it in museums and get a fine
price. W on’t be their blood. It would be some cunt’s they
whispered to the night before; a girl; and then it’d be art, you
see; or you could put it on walls, make murals, be political, a
democratic art outside the museums for the people, Diego
Rivera without any conscience whatsoever instead o f the very
tenuous one he had with respect to women, and then it’d be
extremely major for all the radicals who would discover the
expressive value o f someone else’s blood and I want to tell you
they’d stop making paint but such things do not happen and
such things cannot occur, any more than the rape so-called can
happen or occur or the being beaten so bad can happen or
occur and there are no words for what cannot happen or occur
and i f you think something happened or occurred and there are
no words for it you are at a dead end. There’s nothing where
they force you; there’s nothing where you hurt so much;
there’s nothing where it matters, there’s nothing like it
anywhere. So it doesn’t feel right to make things up, as you
must do to write fiction, to lie, to elaborate, to elongate, to
exaggerate, to distort, to get tangled up in moderations or
modifications or deviations or compromises o f m ixing this
with that or combining this one with that one because the
problem is finding words for the truth, especially if no one will
believe it, and they will not. I can’t make things up because I
w ouldn’t know after a while w hat’s blood, w hat’s ink. I barely
know any words for what happened to me yesterday, which
doesn’t make tom orrow something I can conceive o f in m y
mind; I mean words I say to m yself in m y ow n head; not social
words you use to explain to someone else. I barely know
anything and if I deviate I am lost; I have to be literal, if I can
remember, which m ostly I cannot. N o one will acknowledge
that some things happen and probably at this point in time
there is no w ay to say they do in a broad sweep; you describe
the man forcing you but you can’t say he forced you. If I was a
man I could probably say it; I could say I did it and everyone
would think I made it up even though I’d just be remembering
what I did last night or twenty minutes ago or once, long ago,
but it probably w ouldn’t matter. The rapist has words, even
though there’s no rapist, he ju st keeps inventing rape; in his
mind; sure. He remembers, even though it never happened;
it’s fine fiction when he writes it down. Whereas m y mind is
getting worn away; it’s being eroded, experience keeps
washing over it and there’s no sea wall o f words to keep it
intact, to keep it from being washed away, carried out to sea,
layer by layer, fine grains washed away, a thin surface washed
away, then some more, washed away. I am fairly worn away
in m y mind, washed out to sea. It probably doesn’t matter
anyway. People lead their little lives. T here’s not much
dignity to go around. T here’s lies in abundance, and silence for
girls who don’t tell them. I don’t want to tell them. A lie’s for
when he’s on top o f you and you got to survive him being
there until he goes; M alcolm X tried to stop saying a certain
lie, and maybe I should change from Andrea because it’s a lie.
It’s just that it’s a precious thing from my mother that she tried
to give me; she didn’t want it to be such an awful lie, I don’t
think. So I have to be the writer she tried to be— Andrea; not-
cunt— only I have to do it so it ain’t a lie. I ain’t fabricating
stories. I’m making a different kind o f story. I’m writing as
truthful as the man with his fingers, if only I can remember
and say; but I ain’t on his side. I’m on some different side. I’m
telling the truth but from a different angle. I’m the one he done
it to. The bait’s talking, honey, if she can find the words and
stay even barely alive, or even just keep the blood running; it
can’t dry up, it can’t rot. The bait’s spilling the beans. The
bait’s going to transcend the material conditions o f her
situation, fuck you very much, Mr. M arx. The bait’s going
w ay past Marx. The bait’s taking her eviscerated, bleeding self
and she ain’t putting it back together, darling, because,
frankly, she don’t know how; the bait’s a realist, babe, the
bait’s no fool, she’s just going to bleed all over you and you are
going to have to find the words to describe the stain, a stain as
big as her real life, boy; a big, nasty stain; a stain all over you,
all the blood you ever spilled; that’s the esthetic dimension,
through art she replicates the others you done it to, gets the
stain to incorporate them too. It’s coming right back on you,
sink or swim; fucking drown your head in it; give in, darling;
go down. That’s the plan, in formal terms. The bait’s got a
theory; the bait’s finding a practice, working it out; the bait’s
going to write it down and she don’t have to use words, she’ll
make signs, in blood, she’s good at bleeding, boys, the vein’s
open, boys, the bait’s got plenty, each month more and more
without dying for a certain long period o f her life, she can lose
it or use it, she works in broad strokes, she makes big gestures,
big signs; oh and honey there’s so much bait around that
there’s going to be a bloodbath in the old town tonight, when
the new art gets its start. Y ou are going to be sitting in it; the
new novel; participation, it’s called; I’m smearing it all over
you. It ain’t going to be made up; it ain’t going to be a lie; and
you are going to pay attention, directly, even though it’s by a
girl, because this time it’s on you. if I find a word, I’ll use it;
but I ain’t waiting, darling, I already waited too long. If you
was raised a boy you don’t know how to get blood off, yo u ’re
shocked, surprised, in Vietnam when you see it for the first
time and I been bleeding since I was nine, I’m used to putting
m y hands in it and I live. Y ou don’t give us no words for
w hat’s true so now there’s signs, a new civilization just
starting now: her name’s not-cunt and she’s just got to express
herself, say some this and that, use w hat’s there, take w hat’s
hers: her blood’s hers; your blood’s hers. Here’s the difference
between us, sweet ass: I’m using blood you already spilled;
mine; hers; cunt’s. I ain’t so dirty as to take yours. I don’t
confuse this new manifesto with being Artaud; he was on the
other side. There are sides. If he spills m y blood, it’s art. if I put
mine on him, it’s deeply not nice or good or, as they say,
interesting; it’s not interesting. There’s a certain— shall we
understate? — distaste. It’s bad manners but not rude in an
artistically valid sense. It’s just not being the right kind o f girl.
It’s deranged but not in the Rimbaud sense. It’s just not being
M arjorie Morningstar, which is the height to which you may
aspire, failed artist but eventually fine homemaker. It’s loony,
yes, it’s got some hate in it somewhere, but it ain’t revolutionary like Sade who spilled blood with style; perhaps they think a girl can’t have style but since a girl can’t really have
anything else I think I can pull it off; me and the other bait;
there’s many styles o f allure around. Huey N ew to n ’s m y
friend and I send ten percent o f any money I have to the Black
Panthers instead o f paying taxes because they’re still bombing
the fucking Vietnamese, if you can believe it. He sends me
poems and letters o f encouragement. I write him letters o f
encouragement. I’m afraid to show him any o f m y pages I
wrote because perhaps he’s not entirely cognizant o f the
problems, esthetic and political, I face. I look for signs in the
press for if he’s decent to women but there’s not too much to
see; except you have to feel some distrust. He’s leading the
revolution right now and I think the bait’s got to have a place
in it. I am saying to him that women too got to be whole; and
old people cared for; and children educated and fed; and
women not raped; I say, not raped; I say it to him, not raped.
H e’s saying the same thing back to me in his letters, except for
the women part. He is very Mao in his poem style, because it
helps him to say what he knows and gives him authority, I can
see that, it makes his simple language look strong and
purposeful, not as if he’s not too educated. It’s brilliant for that
whereas I am more lost; I can’t cover up that I don’t have
words. I can’t tell if raped is a word he knows or not; if he
thinks I am stupid to use it or not; if he thinks it exists or not;
because we are polite and formal and encouraging to each
other and he doesn’t say. I am working m y part out. He is
taking care o f the big, overall picture, the big needs, the great
thrust forward. I am in a fine fit o f rebellion and melancholy
and I think there’s a lot that’s possible so I am in a passion o f
revolutionary fire with a new esthetic boiling in me, except for
m y terrible times. The new esthetic started out in ignorance
and ignominy, in sadness, in forgetting; it pushed past
sadness into an overt rebellion— tear this down, tear this
apart— and it went on to create: it said, w e’ll learn to write
without words and i f it happened we will find a w ay to say so
and i f it happened to us it happened. For instance, i f it
happened to me it happened; but I don’t have enough
confidence for that, really, because maybe I’m wrong, or
maybe it’s not true, or how do you say it, but if it happened to
us, to us, you know, the ones o f us that’s the bait, then it
happened. It happened. And i f it happened, it happened. We
w ill say so. We will find a w ay to say so. We will take the
blood that was spilled and smear it in public w ays so it’s art and
politics and science; the fisherman w o n ’t like the book so
w hat’s new; he’ll say it ain’t art or he’ll say it’s bullshit; but
here’s the startling part; the bait’s got a secret system o f
communication, not because it’s hidden but because the
fisherman’s fucking stupid; so arrogant; so sure o f forever and
a day; so sure he don’t listen and he don’t look and he says it
ain’t anything and he thinks that means it ain’t anything
whereas what it means is that we finally can invent: a new
alphabet first, big letters, proud, new letters from which will
come new words for old things, real things, and the bait says
what they are and what they mean, and then we get new
novels in which the goal is to tell the truth: deep truth. So
make it all up, the whole new thing, to be able to say w hat’s
there; because they are keeping it hidden now. Y o u ’re not
supposed to write something down that happened; yo u ’re
supposed to invent. W e’ll write down what happened and
invent the personhood o f who it happened to; w e’ll make a
language for her so we can tell a story for her in which she will
see what happened and know for sure it happened and it
mattered; and the boys will have to confront a new esthetic
that tells them to go suck eggs. I am for this idea; energized by
it. It’s clear that if you need the fisherman to read the book—
his critical appreciation as it were— this new art ain’t for you. If
he’s got what he did to you written on him or close enough to
him, rude enough near him, is he different, will he know? I say
he’ll have to know; it’s the brilliance o f the medium— he’s it,
the vehicle o f political and cultural transcendence as it were.
It’s a new, forthright communication— they took the words
but they left your arm, your hand, so far at least; it could
change, but for now; he’s the living canvas; he can refuse to
understand but he cannot avoid know ing; it’s your blood, he
spilled it, yo u ’ve used it: on him. It’s a simplicity Artaud
failed, frankly, to achieve. W e’ll make it new; epater the
fuckers. Then he can be human or not; he’s got a choice, which
is more than he ever gave; he can put on the uniform, honest,
literal Nazi, or not. The clue is to see what you don’t have as
the starting place and you look at it straight and you say what
does it give me, not what does it take; you say what do I have
and what don’t I have and am I making certain presumptions
about what I need that are in fact their presumptions, so much
garbage in my way, and if I got rid o f the garbage what then
would I see and could I use it and how; and when. I got hope. I
got faith. I see it falling. I see it ending. I see it bent over and
hitting the ground. And, what’s even better is that because the
fisherman ain’t going to listen as if his life depended on it we
got a system o f secret communication so foolproof no
scoundrel could imagine it, so perfect, so pure; the less we are,
the more we have; the less we matter, the more chance we get;
the less they care, the more freedom is ours; the less, the more,
you see, is the basic principle, it’s like psychological jujitsu
except applied to politics through a shocking esthetic; you use
their fucking ignorance against them; ignorance is a synonym
in such a situation for arrogance and arrogance is tonnage and
in jujitsu you use your opponent’s weight against him and you
do it if yo u ’re weak or poor too, because it’s all you have; and if
someone doesn’t know you’re human they’re a Goddamn fool
and they got a load o f ignorance to tip them over with. Y ou
ain’t got literature but you got a chance; a chance; you
understand— a chance; you got a chance because the bait’s
going to get it, and there’s going to be a lot o f w riggling things
jum ping o ff G o d ’s stick. I live in this real fine, sturdy tenement
building made out o f old stone. They used to have immigrants
sleeping in the hallways for a few pennies a night so all the
toilets are out there in the halls. They had them stacked at
night; men sleeping on top o f each other and women selling it
or not having a choice; tenement prostitution they call it in
books, how the men piled in the halls to sleep but the women
had to keep putting out for money for food. They did it
standing up. N o w you walk through the hall hoping there’s
no motherfucker with a knife waiting for you, especially in the
toilets, and if you have to pee, you are scared, and i f you have
to shit, it is fully frightening. I go with a knife in m y hand
always and I sleep with a knife under m y pillow, always. I
have not had a shit not carrying a knife since I came here. I got
a bank account. I am doing typing for stupid people. I don’t
like to make margins but they want margins. I think it’s better
i f each line’s different, if it flows like a poem, if it’s uneven and
surprising and esthetically nice. But they want it like it’s for
soldiers or zombies, everything lined up, left and right, with
hyphens breaking words open in just the right places, which I
don’t know where they are. I type, I steal but less now, really
as little as possible though I will go to waitress hell for stealing
tips, I know that, I will be a prisoner in a circle o f hell and they
will put the faces o f all the waitresses around me and all their
shabby, hard lives that I made worse, but stealing tips is easy
and I am good at it as I have been since childhood and when I
have any m oney in m y pocket I do truly leave great chunks o f
it and when I am older and rich I will be profligate and if I ever
go broke in m y old days it will be from making it up to every
waitress alive in the world then, but this generation’s getting
fucked unavoidably. Someday I will write a great book with
the lines m oving like waves in the sea, flowing as much as I
want them. I’m Andrea is what I will find a deep w ay to
express in honor o f m y mama who thought it up; a visionary,
though the vision couldn’t withstand what the man did to me
early; or later, the man, in the political sense. I make little
amounts o f m oney and I put them in the bank and each day I
go to the bank for five dollars, except sometimes I go for two
days on seven dollars. I wait in line and the tellers are very
disturbed that I have come for m y money. It’s a long walk to
the bank, it’s far aw ay because there aren’t any banks in the
neighborhood where I live, and it’s a good check on me
because it keeps me from getting money for frivolous things; I
have to make a decision and execute it. When an emergency
occurs, I am in some trouble; but if I have five dollars in my
pocket I feel I can master most situations. M y astrology said
that M ercury was doing some shit and Saturn and things
would break and fall apart and I went to unlock the two locks
on m y door to my apartment and the first lock just crumbled,
little metal pieces fell as if it was spiders giving birth, all the
little ones falling out o f it, it just seemed pulverized into grains
and it just was crushed to sand, the whole cylinder o f the lock
just collapsed almost into molecules; and the second lock just
kept turning around and around but absolutely nothing locked
or unlocked and then there was this sound o f something falling
and it had fallen through the door to the other side, it just fell
out o f the door. It was night, and even putting the chain on
didn’t help. I sat with m y knife and stared at it all night to keep
anyone from breaking in. The crisis o f getting new locks made
me destitute and desperate and on such occasions I had to steal.
I always considered it more honorable to m yself than fucking;
less honorable to who I did it to; it was new to pick me over
them. I just knew I’d live longer stealing than fucking. O f
course I stole from the weak; who doesn’t? I had thought
fucking for money was stealing from the strong but it only
robbed me, although I can’t say o f what, because there’s more
wordlessness there, more what’s never been said; I’m not
formulated enough to get at it. I had a dog someone dumped
on me saying they were going to have it killed. It was so fine;
you can weave affirmation back, there can be a sudden miracle
o f happiness; m y dog was a smiling, happy creature; I thought
o f her as the quintessential all-Amerikan, someone w holly
extroverted with no haunted insides, just this cheerful, big,
brilliant creature filled with licks and bounces; and I loved
what made her happy, a stick, a stone, I mean, things I could
actually provide. I think making her happy was m y happiest
time on earth. She was big, she bounced, she was brown and
black, she was a German shepherd, and she didn’t have any
meanness in her, just play, just jum p, just this jo y . She didn’t
have a streak o f savagery. If there was a cockroach in the
apartment, a small one because we didn’t have the monsters,
she’d stand up over it and she’d study it awhile and then she’d
pick it up in her mouth and she’d carry it to her corner o f the
room and she’d put it down and sit on top o f it. She’d be proud
and she’d sit with her head held high while the awful little
thing would crawl out from under her and get lost in some
crack in the wall. Y ou ever seen a proud dog? They have this
look o f pride that could break your heart like they done
something for you the equivalent o f getting you out from
under an avalanche and they are asking nothing in return, just
that you look at the aquiline dignity o f their snouts. I got to say
I loved her more than m y heart could bear and w e’d go on
walks and to the park but the park near me was full o f broken
glass and winos and junkies and I was afraid for her, that she’d
hurt her feet. Y o u couldn’t really let her run or anything. She
ate a lot, and I didn’t, but I felt she had certain rights, because
she depended on me or someone, she had to; so I felt I had to
feed her and I felt I had to have enough m oney and I felt her life
was in m y hands and I felt her life was important and I felt she
was the nicest, most kind creature I ever knew. She’d sit with
me and watch the door when the locks fell apart but she didn’t
grasp it and I couldn’t count on her sense o f danger, because it
w asn’t attuned to the realities o f a w om an’s life. Someone
might be afraid o f her or not. Someone might hurt her. I’d die
i f they hurted her. I’d probably have throwed m yself on her to
protect her. I ju st couldn’t bear the thought o f someone
hurting her. Her name was Gringo, because the man who had
her and who named her w asn’t a fine, upstanding citizen, he
was degenerate, and I was afraid he would hurt her, and I was
afraid she would die, and I think there is nothing worse than
knowing an animal is being hurt, except for a child, for which
I thank God I don’t have one, even though my husband would
have taken it away from me, I know. If something’s in your
charge and it must love you then for something cruel to
happen to it must shatter your heart into pieces, by which I
mean the pain is real and it is not made better by time because
the creature was innocent and you are not; or I am not. I kept her
fine. I kept her safe. I kept her sleek and beautiful and without
any sores or any illnesses or any bad things on her skin or any
marks; I kept her gleaming and proud and fine and fed; I kept
her healthy and I kept her strong and I kept her happy; and she
loved me, she did. It was a little beyond an ignorant love, I
truly believe. She knew me by my reverence for her; I was the
one that lit up inside every time my eyes beheld her. I never
could train her to do anything but sit; usually I said sit a second
after she had done it, for my own self-respect; and she pulled
me about one hundred miles an hour down the street; I loved
her exuberance and could not condemn it as bad behavior; I
loved that she was sweet and extrovert and unhaunted and I
didn’t want any shadows forming on her mind from me
shouting or pulling or being an asshole in general; I couldn’t
romp but my heart jum ped when she bounced and wagged
and waved and flew like some giant sparrow heading toward
spring; and I counted on the respect pricks have for big dogs to
keep me safe but it didn’t always, there was always ones that
wanted to fight because she was big, because they thought she
was more male than them, bigger than them, stronger than
them, especially drunks or mean men, and there was men in
the park with bigger dogs who wanted their dogs to hurt her
or fight with her or mount her or bite her or scare her or who
made me m ove by threatening to set their dog on her to show
their dog was bigger or meaner or to make me move because I
was gash according to them and they was men. It’s simple and
always the same. I moved with a deep sense o f being wronged.
I shouldn’t have had to m ove but I couldn’t risk them hurting
her— more real life with a girl and her dog who are hurting no
one. The toilet was too small to take her into and I couldn’t
leave her loose in the hall because some man upstairs, a
completely sour person, hated her and kept threatening to call
all these different city agencies with cops for animals that
would take her away; but probably I w ouldn’t have left her
there anyw ay because I’d be afraid something unexpected
would happen and she’d be helpless; so she had to stay in the
apartment when I went to the toilet and I locked the door to
protect her. It’s unimaginable, how much I loved her. She was
so deep in m y heart I w ould’ve died for her, to keep her safe.
E very single piece o f love I had left in me was love for her;
except for revolutionary love. Y o u become the guardian o f a
creature and it becomes your soul and it brings jo y back to
you, as i f you was pure and young and there was nothing
rough or mean and you had tom orrow, really. She made me
happy by being happy and she loved me, a perfect love, and I
was necessary, beyond the impersonal demands o f the revolution per se. I had always admired the Black Panthers, with a
certain amount o f skepticism, because I been on the streets
they walked and there’s no saints there, M ao’s long march
didn’t go through Camden or Oakland or Detroit or Chicago.
I didn’t get close with Huey until I saw a certain picture. I think
it will be in m y brain until I die. I had admired him; how he
created a certain political reality; how he stood up to police
violence, how he faced them down, then the Survival
Program , free food for children, free shoes, some health care,
teaching reading and writing; it was real brilliant; and he ju st
didn’t die, I mean, you fucking could not kill him, and I
admire them that will not die. I knew he had run wom en but I
also been low ; I couldn’t hold it against him; I couldn’t hold
anything against him, really, because it’s rough to stay alive
and reach for dignity at the same time; you can fucking feed
children on top o f that and you got my respect. I stayed aloof,
also because I wasn’t some liberal white girl, middle-class by
skin, I had to take his measure and I couldn’t do it through
public perceptions or media or propaganda or the persona that
floated through the air waves. I saw him do fucking brilliant
things; I mean, you got to know how hard it is to do fucking
anything; and I saw him survive shootings, the police were
trying to assassinate him, no doubt; and I saw him transcend it;
and I saw him build, not just carry a fucking gun. Then there’s
this picture. H e’s been shot by the police and he’s cuffed to a
gum ey in an emergency room at Kaiser Hospital, October
1967. His chest is bare and raised; it’s raised because his arms
are cuffed to the legs o f the gurney, pulled back towards his
head; he’s wounded but they pulled his arms back so his chest
couldn’t rest on the gurney, so he’s stretched by the manacles,
his chest is sticking up because o f the strain caused by how his
arms are pulled back and restrained, it would hurt anyone, I
have been tied that way, it hurts, you don’t need a bullet in you
for it to give you pain, there’s a white cop in front o f him, fully
dressed, fully armed, looking with surprise at the camera, and
there’s this look on H uey’s face, half smile, half pain, defiant,
his eyes are open, he ain’t going to close them and he ain’t
going to die and he ain’t going to beg and he ain’t going to give
in and he ain’t thinking o f cutting his losses and he ain’t no
slobbering, frightened fool, and behind him there’s a white
nurse doing something and a sign that says “ D irty Needles
And Syringes O n ly, ” and she ain’t looking at him at all, even
though he’s right next to her, right against her side almost. I
have been cuffed that way, physically restrained. I have been
lying there. I have memories when I see this picture, I see m y
life in some o f its aspects, I see a hundred thousand porn
magazines too in which the woman, some woman, is cuffed
the same way, and the cop is or isn’t in the photograph, and the
cuffed woman is white or black, and I see on H uey’s face a
defiance I have never seen on her face or on m y own, not that I
have seen mine but I know what the photo would show, a
vapid pain, a blank, hooded stare, eyes that been dead a long,
long time, eyes that never stared back let alone said fuck you. I
see that he is defiant and that the cop is scared and that the cop
has not won. I see that even though H uey’s chest is raised
because his arms are stretched back and he is cuffed there is
pride in that raised chest. I see that his eyes are open and I see
that there is a clearness in his eyes, a willfulness, they are not
fogged or doped or droopy. I see that he is looking directly at
the camera, he’s saying I am here, this is me, I am, and the
camera can’t take his picture without making his statement. I
see that there is no look o f shame or coyness on his face, he
ain’t saying fuck me. I see that his nakedness is different from
mine, that his pride is unknown to me. I see that the cop and
the nurse are barely existing and that Huey is vivid and real and
alive, he’s jum ping o ff the page and they are robots, ciphers,
automatons, functionaries, he’s bursting with defiance, the
raised chest, however painful, is bursting with pride. I wonder
if anyone would ever jerk o ff to the picture; you know, black
boy in chains; but I don’t believe they would, I don’t, he’s
nobody’s piece o f meat, his eyes w ouldn’t let you and yo u ’d
w orry what he’d do when he’s uncuffed later, his eyes would
see you and he’d come to get you and yo u ’d know it in your
heart and in your hand. H e’s oppressed. He didn’t learn to read
really until he was eighteen. H e’s been low ; he knows. H e’s
put together a grassroots organization that’s defying the cops;
he’s made it international in scope, in reach, in importance.
H e’s poor. He was born socially invisible but darling look at
him now; manacled on that gurney he is fully vivid and alive
and the white nurse and the white cop are sim ply factotums o f
power with nothing that is their ow n; the life’s with him.
They got nothing that does express lam\ whereas Huey, shot,
manacled, naked down to his waist, says lam with his strange,
proud smile that shows the pain and his clear, wide-open eyes
that don’t look away but look right through you, they see you
front to back; and I’ve been on that bed, it’s the bed o f the
oppressed, the same cuffs, the same physical pain, as bad, I
think as bad, the same jeopardy, I have been on that bed; and
they want him to give in and fade away and yet he has endured
and in the picture he is declaring that he will endure, it is in
every aspect o f his demeanor and the camera shows it, he’s
wounded but he’s not afraid, he’s manacled but he’s not
surrendering; he ain’t fucked; he just ain’t fucked; there’s no
other w ay to say it. Even if he’s been fucked in his life, by
which I mean literally, because I don’t know what he’s done or
not done and there’s not too many strangers to being fucked
on the street, he ain’t been fucked; it ain’t what he is. I love him
for it. I fucking love him for it. He’s spectacular and there is a
deep humanism in him that expresses itself precisely in
surviving, not going under, standing up; even tied down, he’s
standing up; and he’s gone beyond the first steps, the original
Black Panther idea that had to do with arming against police
violence, now he’s an apostle o f social equality and he is
fucking feeding the children; he’s been physically hurt and he’s
been laid out on the bed o f pain and his idea o f what’s human
has gotten broader and kinder and more inclusive, and that’s
revolutionary love, and I know it, and I got it, and while
there’s many reasons he can’t trust me, nor me him, we have
been on the same bed o f pain, cuffed, and I didn’t have his
pride, and I need him to teach me; I need to learn it— defiance,
the kind a bullet can’t stop. I don’t know i f he’s kind to women
or not and it worries me but I put it aside because there’s what I
know about that bed o f pain he’s cuffed to; I think I’m
annihilated inside by it; I think I’m shot to hell inside, with
nothing but gangrene everywhere there was a wound; I see, I
feel, an inner collapse that comes from the humiliation o f how
they do you on the bed o f pain; bang bang. I tell him I know
the man; but I don’t know if he knows what I mean. I know
the man. He acts to me with respect as if he grasps m y
meaning. I am trying to say, without saying, that the man
fucked me too; but I don’t know how to say I became it and he
didn’t and now I’m refusing to be it or I’m in the process and
that there’s profound injustice in making someone it, in
crushing them down so their insides are fucked in perpetuity. I
die for men to admire, from a stance o f parity; I admire Huey; I
am struggling for parity, what I see as his revolutionary
dignity and self-definition, his bravery— not in defying
authority, I been through that, but in upending the reality that
said what he was and what was on top o f him. He sends me
poems and m axims, and I am thinking whether to send him
some. I love him. I think maybe he could be for women. In
some speeches he says so. He says men have been arrogant
over women and there’s new freedoms women need to have.
During the days I type for four dollars an hour, which means
that if I am prepared to go ape-shit or stir crazy I could
certainly make up to thirty-two dollars a day, on some days;
but I can only stand to do it four hours or maybe three, and I
really couldn’t stand to do it every day, although I have tried to
for the money, I have tried; if I could do three hours every day
I would be fine, unless something happened. It’s just that I do
it and I do it and I do it and not much time has elapsed it turns
out and I get bored and restless as if m y mind is physically
lifting itself out o f m y head and hitting the walls like some
trapped fly. I feel a profound distaste for it, sitting there and
doing this stupid shit. I feel a bitterness, almost guilt or
remorse, it’s unbearable in the minute or at that time as if I’m
betraying being alive, there’s too much m oving in me and I
cannot fucking waste it in this chickenshit way. It’s not a
matter o f having an idea o f a picture o f life, or taking exception
to the idea o f typing or being a secretary or doing something o f
the sort, I don’t have some prior idea o f how I should be or
how life should be, a magazine picture in my head, you know,
or from television, or from the romances other people say they
want. It ain’t a thought in any sense at all. It’s that I am not her
and I cannot be her, I fucking am not her, I can’t do it, I can’t sit
still and type the shit. It’s just that I want what I want, which is
throughout me, not just my brain, and it’s to feel and move
and fuck. I don’t try to resolve it. I figure you have to be
humble before life. Life tells you, you don’t tell it, and you
can’t argue with what w on’t sit still long enough to be argued
with. I have to break loose one w ay or another, drink or fuck,
find some real noise, you know, a fucking stream o f real noise
and messing around to jum p right in; that’s my way. If it’s
tepid I don’t want it and I don’t do it from habit or just because
it’s there to be done, it’s a big change I made in myself, I have
to feel it bad, I don’t do nothing on automatic; people think if
it’s on the bad side it ain’t bourgeois but I don’t; I think if it’s
tepid it don’t matter what it is class-wise or style-wise. I don’t
solve things in m y mind to impose it on reality, because it ain’t
worth much to do so; for instance, to say you don’t want to be
some fucked thing so don’t fuck. Fucking never feels like you
will end up some fucked thing anyway; it pushes you out so
fast and so far it ain’t a matter o f what you think and it’s stupid
to misidentify it, the problem. Y o u ’re some poor, fragile
person in the middle o f an ocean you never seen the whole of;
you don’t know where it starts or where it stops or how deep
down it goes and what you got to do is swim and hope, hope
and swim; you learn everything you know from it, it don’t
learn a fucking thing from you. Y ou can make promises to
yourself in your mind but your mind is so small up against the
world; you got to have some respect for the world; or so I see it
and that’s m y way; but, then, I ain’t holding out for a pension.
I type m y hours, however many I can make it through,
putting as much pressure on m yself as I can stand, which isn’t
making a lot o f progress, and I keep a time sheet, which I make
as honest as possible but it is hard not because I want to lie but
because I ju st fucking cannot keep track, I can’t pay enough
attention to it to keep track, so I just approximate sort o f
combining what I need with what seems plausible and I come
up with something. I cannot write every fucking thing down
to keep track o f m y time as i f I’m some asshole and I find it
profoundly unbearable to do robot stuff. Sometimes I w ork
for a writer, a poet, and I deliver packages, which at least
means I go on subways and taxis and see places, and I file
papers aw ay alphabetically and I type, except she says you
have to put a space before the colon and a space after it, one
space after it instead o f just no space before it and two spaces
after it as every typist does. In theory I am for defying
convention but typing is something you do automatic like
yo u ’re the machine, not it, and you learn to put two spaces
after the colon and none before it and your hands do that and
your brain ain’t fast enough to stop them and I spend half my
time correcting the stupid thing with white Liquid Paper and
eraser stuff and trying to align it right when I’m typing the
colon back in and I just really want her to drop dead because o f
it. Passions can be monumental. I can barely keep my ass on
the typing chair at her desk; I mean, she owns the desk; she has
her desk, a big desk, and then the desk where I sit, a little desk
and her desk is in her big room and m y desk is in a little
anteroom right o ff her big room so she can always see me but
I’m o ff to the side, relegated to being help in a clear w ay; it has
its own eloquence and I feel it acutely and it gets me mad. I try
to take the typing home with me so I don’t have to sit at the
little desk in the little room with her watching but she wants
me to do it there and there’s this tug o f war. She’s real
seductive and I am too fucking bored to care because if I give in
to it then I will have to be there more and if I am there more I
will have to type more and if I have to type more I will die.
There’s apparently some edge she sees; she thinks I’m
turbulent, she says; I think I’m calm and patient in a world o f
endless and chaotic bullshit, which I say but it falls on deaf
ears; I smile and I’m nice and completely calm except for when
I have to bolt but she sees some street tough or something wild
and gets all excited and I don’t have a lot o f respect for it; she
says I’m pure. I just smile because I don’t know what bullshit it
is exactly. Even if I don’t type she keeps me around. I can
barely keep m yself under wraps sometimes, frankly; I want to
bolt. I smile, I’m nice, I’m calm, but she treats me careful, as if
I’m volatile or dangerous somehow, which I am not, because
in m y soul I am a real sweetheart which is the truth, a deep
truth, an honest truth, I don’t yell or shout or think how to
hurt people and I feel dedicated to peace as she is too. I just get
bored so deep it hurts the pits o f me, stomach and groin
precisely, I feel a long pain and I can’t sit still through it; it’s
hit-the-road pain. She tells me how to be a writer and I listen
because as long as I am listening I don’t have to type; I listen,
though often I’m bored, and I haven’t mastered the art o f inner
stillness, though I will, I am sure. Then there’s the lovemaking
part, a moment comes, and I slide out from under, with a
certain newfound grace, I must say, and if I can’t slide, I bolt,
and it’s abrupt. She keeps me on, even though I never exactly
get the typing done or the filing done and she never nails me;
never. It’s a long walk to her place to type and I walk it often,
because I fucking love to walk, even though it’s stupid and not
safe and you have to be a prophet who can look down a street
and know what it’s got in store for you, and I do it happy and
proud and I fucking love the long walks. I go there and back
early and late and sometimes I get there and I just can’t bear to
stay so I leave right away, I take some cup o f coffee or food,
fast, with her, she’ll always make me something as if it’s
natural, and the typing doesn’t get done but I don’t have some
money either. Other times she gives me a cash advance and I
have it burning in m y hand and if I’m feeling slow and
stringent with m yself I get it to the bank and i f I'm feeling
restless, all speeded up, wanting to spit in the eye o f God, out
drink Him, out fuck Him, I keep it on me. I type, I walk long
walks across town, ballets on cement, jum ping and hopping
and then a slow, melancholy step, solemn or arms sw inging,
in the face o f the wind or in drizzle or rain or in sun, in calm,
cool sun. I walk m y sweet and jubilant dog in the neighborhood protecting the pads o f her feet from the stupid glass the winos leave all broken all over and the fucking junkie shit
that’s all over, and then there’s the time each day I sit down in
purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some
sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that
happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it
takes, the difficulty o f this act. It requires an almost perfect
concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no w ay to
learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it
but I have a sense that it’s completely simple, on the order o f
being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you
without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain’t
boredom, it’s fear o f w hat’s possible, how much you can
know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I m ove
around, m y mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and
roll them through m y brain, m ove with them into their
interiors, feel their colors, touch w hat’s under them, where
they come from long ago and w ay back. I get frightened
seeing what’s in m y own mind if words get put to it. T here’s a
light there, it’s bright, it’s wide, it could make you blind if you
look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened
and I run and the only w ay to run is to abandon the process
altogether or com prom ise it beyond recognition. I think about
Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don’t know w hy he
didn’t run, he should’ve. It’s a quality you have to have o f
being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that
you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably
break things with the power in your mind. You got to be able
to stand it, because it’s a powerful and disturbing light, not
something easy and kind, it comes through your head to make
its w ay onto the page and you get fucking scared so your mind
runs away, it wanders, it gets distracted, it buckles, it deserts,
it takes a Goddamn freight train if it can find one, it wants
calming agents and soporifics, and you mask that you are
betraying the brightest and best light you will ever see, you are
betraying the mind that can be host to it; Blake’s light, which
he was not afraid o f and did not betray; Whitman’s light which
he degraded into some fucking singsong song like he was
Dinah Shore or Patti Page, how much is that doggie in the
w indow; the words didn’t rise up from the light, only from a
sentimental wish, he had a shadow life and in words he piled
shadow on shadow so there’s this tumult, a chaos o f dreams
running amok; dreams are only shadows; whereas Blake’s
light is perfect and pure, inside the words, so lucid, so simple,
so plain; never a cartoonish lie. O f course it’s different for me
because I turned tricks and been fucked nearly to death and I
have been made weary with dirt and m y mind’s been buried
alive, really, smashed down right into the ground, pushed
under deep; but something ain’t different if I could conquer the
fear o f seeing and knowing, if I wasn’t so afraid o f the light
burning right through m y stupid brain. Y ou want to smoke a
joint or something to make it calmer and duller; not brighter;
it ain’t brighter; it calms you right down or it frenzies you up
but so you are distracted, mentally m oving here and there,
you want something between you and the light, a shield, a
permeable barrier, you want to defuse it or deflect it, to
m ellow it out, to make it softer, not so deadly to your own
soul, not so likely to blow all your own circuits, you can’t
really stand too much light in a world where you got to get
used to crawling around like an insect in the dark, because it’s
like mining coal in that if you don’t get out o f the mine what
goes through you will collapse you. Y o u r mind does stupid
tricks to mask that you are betraying something o f grave
importance. It wanders so you w o n ’t notice that you are
deserting your own life, abandoning it to triviality and
garbage, how you are too fucking afraid to use your own brain
for what it’s for, which is to be a host to the light, to use it, to
focus it; let it shine and carry the burden o f what is illuminated,
everything buried there; the light’s scarier than anything it
shows, the pure, direct experience o f it in you as if your mind
ain’t the vegetable thing it’s generally conceived to be or the
nightmare thing you know it to be but a capacity you barely
imagined, real; overwhelm ing and real, pushing you out to
the edge o f ecstasy and knowing and then do you fall or do you
jum p or do you fly? Life can concentrate itself right in your head
and you get scared; it is cowardice. I notice that my eyes start to
wander across the wall, back and forth, keep wandering across
nothing, or looking at the fucking paint, I notice that my feet are
moving and I’m shifting on the chair, a straight-back wood chair
you have to sit still on, there’s no license to move but I’m
moving, rattling m y feet, rocking, rocking on m y heels, and
then there’s an urgent sensation in m y thighs and in my hips and
wherever sex is down there, whatever you want to call it, there’s
only bad names for it but it isn’t bad and it is real and it sends you
out, it sends you away, it makes you impatient and distracted,
and I feel like busting out, and some nights I do, I bust out. I take
all the money I got on me, and if it’s ten dollars I’m flush, and I
ju st bolt, I get out and drink, I find a man, sometimes a
woman, sometimes both, I like both at once, I like being
drunk, or I start out just for a drink and I end up with
someone, drunk; fucking happy drunk; no light but everything glistens; no illumination but everything shines. Som etimes I ju st walk, I can walk it off, aimlessly. It’s as dangerous as fucking, takes nearly the same adrenaline, just to take a walk
at night, even if you walk towards the neon and not towards
the dark park; ain’t a woman in Amerika walks towards the
park. If I can calm m yself I go home. But there’s times if I was
a man I’d kill someone. I feel wild and mean and I’m tired o f
being messed with, I got invisible bars all around me and I
have blame in my heart to them that put them there and I want
to fucking tear them apart, I want my insides turned out in
bruising them, I don’t want no skin left on me that ain’t
roughed them up, I want them bloodied, I want to dance in
men’s blood, the cha-cha, the polka, the tango, the rhumba,
hard, fast, angular dances or stomping dances or slow killing
dances, the murder waltz, I want to mix it up with killing right
next to me, on m y side; it’s hot in my heart and cold in my
brain and I ain’t ever going to feel sorry; or I’d take one o f them
boys and I’d turn him inside out and put something up his ass
and I’d hear him howl and I’d expect a thank-you and a yes
m a’am; and I would get it. D on’t matter how dangerous you
feel, all the danger’s to you, so it’s best to settle down and end
up back inside your stupid fucking walls that you wanted so
much; alone, inside the walls, a Valium maybe or a ’lude so
you don’t do no damage to yourself; love your walls, citizen. I
want them bruised and bloodied but I don’t get what I want as
m y mama used to tell me but I didn’t believe her; besides I
wanted something different then; her point was that I had to
learn the principle that I wasn’t supposed to get what I wanted;
and m y point was that I wasn’t going to learn it. Y ou don’t
name someone not-cunt and then betray the meaning and
make them fit in cages; I didn’t learn it, fucking bitch o f a
mother. It’s a rainy night. The rain is slick over the cement and
on the buildings like diamonds dripping; a liquid dazzle all soft
and rolling and swelled up, like a teardrop. It’s one o f them
magic nights where the rain glow s and the neon is dull next to
it; like God lit a silver flame in the water, it’s a warm , silver,
glassy shine, it sparkles, it’s a night but it ain’t dark
because it’s a slick light you could skate on and everything
looks translucent and as if it’s m oving, it slides, it shines. It’s
beckoning to me as i f God took a paint brush and covered the
w orld in crystal and champagne. It’s wet diamonds out there,
lush and liquid, I never could pass up the sparkle, it’s a wet,
shimmering night, a wet, dazzling night; but warm, as if it’s
breathing all over you, as if it’s wrapped around you, a
cocoon, that w ispy stuff. If there’s acid in your brain
everything’s fluid and monstrous bright; this is as if the acid’s
out there, spread over the city, the sidewalks are drenched in it
and the buildings are bathed in it and the air is saturated with it,
nothing’s standing still and it is monstrous bright and I love
the fucking city when it’s stoned. Inside it’s dull and dry and
I’m not in a constructive mood and there is a pain that runs
down me like a river, a nasty, surging river, a hard river, a
river that starts up high and races down to below falling more
than flowing, falling and breaking, shattering; it’s a river that
goes through me top to bottom; the pain’s intractable and I can
barely stand it; it’s not all jo ie de vivre when a girl goes
dancing; the pain’s a force o f nature beyond my ability to bear
and I can’t take the edge o ff it very easy and I can’t stand
needles and I can’t sit still with it and I can’t rip it out, although
if it was located right precisely in m y heart I would try, I
would take m y fucking hands and I would take m y fucking
fingers and I would rip m y chest open and I would try. It’s
raining and the rain makes me all steamy and damp inside and
out and it ain’t a man I want, it’s a drink, a dozen fucking
drinks to blot out the hard pain and the hard time, each and
every dick I ever sucked, and the bottle ain’t enough because I
can’t stand the quiet, a quiet bottle in a quiet room; I can’t
stand the quiet, lonely bottle in the quiet, lonely room. Lonely
ain’t a state o f mind, it’s a place o f being; a room with no one
else in it, a street with no one else on it; a city abandoned in the
rain; em pty, wet streets; cement that stretches uptown,
downtown, empty, warm, wet, until the sky starts, a
perspiring sky; empty cars parked on empty streets, damp,
deserted streets lined with dark, quiet buildings, civilized,
quiet stone, decorous, a sterile urban formalism; the windows
are closed, they’re sleeping or dead inside, you w on’t know
until morning really, a gas could have seeped in and killed
them in the night; or invaders from outer space; or some lethal
virus. I need noise; real noise; honest, bad noise; not random
sounds or a few loud voices or the electronic drone o f
someone’s television seeping out o f a cracked w indow; not
some dignified singer or some meaningful lyric; not something small or fine or good or right; I need music so loud you
can’t hear it, as when all the trees in the forest fall; and I need
noise so real it eats up the air because it can’t live on nothing; I
need noise that’s like steak, just so thick and just so tough and
ju st so immoral, thick and tough and dead but bloody, on a
plate, for the users, for the fucking killers, to still their hearts,
to numb anything still left churning; a percussive ambience for
the users. It’s got to be brute so it blocks out anything subtle or
nuanced or kind, even, and it’s got to be unceasing so you can’t
hear a human breath and it’s got to stomp on you so your heart
almost stops beating and it’s got to be lunatic, unorganized,
perpetual, and it has to be in a crowded room where there’s
gristle and muscle and cold, mean men and you can’t hear the
timbre o f their voices and you don’t need to see them or touch
them because the noise has you, it’s air, it’s water, you
breathe, you swim; I need noise, and it’s too late to buy a bottle
anyway, even if I had enough money, because it is very dear, it
would be like buying a diamond tiara for a princess or some
fine clothes, a fine jew el, it is out o f m y reach, I have not had
one o f m y own ever and I don’t count the bottles you can’t see
in the paper bags because that is a different thing altogether,
more like gasoline or like someone took matches and lit up
your throat or yo u ’re pouring kerosene down it or some
sharp-edged thing scrapes it raw. I need enough bills to keep,
drinking so no one’s going to chase me aw ay or say I can’t pay
rent on the stool or so I don’t have to smile at no one or so no
bartender don’t have me throwed out; I am fearful about that;
they always treat you so illegitimate but if you can show
enough money they will tolerate you sitting there. There’s not
enough money for me to eat even if they’d let me so I put that
out o f m y mind, I would like lobster o f course with the biggest
amount o f drawn butter, just drenched in it, ju st so much it
drips down and you can feel it spreading out inside your
mouth all rich and glorious, it’s like some divine silky stu ff but
there’s never enough o f it and I have to ask for more and they
act parsimonious and shocked. If you sit at a table you have to
buy dinner, they don’t have some idea that you could just sit
there and be cool and watch or have a little o f this and a little o f
that; they only have the idea that everyone’s lying, you know,
everyone’s pretending, everyone’s trying to rip them off,
everyone’s pretending to be rich so they have to see the money
or everyone’s pretending they’re going to eat so they have to
see the m oney or everyone’s pretending they can pay for the
drinks so they have to see the money and if yo u ’re a woman
you don’t get a table even i f you got money; m y idea is if I have
enough m oney and I put it out in front o f me on the bar and I
keep drinking and drinking I can stay there and then I don’t
have to look to m y right or to m y left at a man for a fucking
thing; I can i f I want but I am not obliged. I’m usually too shy
to push m y w ay in and I’ve never tried it, I ju st know yo u ’re
not supposed to be there alone, but tonight I want to drink, it’s
what I want like some people want to win the Indy 500 or
there’s some that want to walk on the moon; I want to drink;
pure. I want to sit there and have m y ow n stool and I don’t
want to have to be worried about being asked to leave or made
to leave because I’m ju st some impoverished girl or gash that’s
loose. I will stare at the clear liquid, crystal, in the glass, and I
will contemplate it as a beautiful thing and I will feel the pain
that is monumentally a part o f me and I will keep drinking and
I will feel it lessen and I will feel the warmth spread out all over
me inside and I will feel the surging, hard, nasty river go
warmer and smoother and silkier as the Stoli runs with it, as it
falls from top to bottom inside me, first it’s on the surface o f
the river, then it’s deeper down in it, then it’s a silk, burning
stream, a great, warm stream, and it will gentle the terrible
river o f pain. I will think deeply; about art; about life; I will
keep thoughts pouring through me as inside I get warmer and
calmer and it hurts less, the hurt dims and fades or hides under
a fucking rock, I don’t care; and m y brow will curl, you know,
sullen, troubled, melancholy, as if I’m some artist in m y own
right myself; and the noise will be beautiful to me, part o f a
new esthetic I am cultivating, and I will hear in it the tumult o f
bare existence and the fierce resonance o f personal pain as if it’s
a riff from Charlie Parker to God and I will hear in it the
anarchic triumph o f m y own individual soul over the deep evil
that has maimed me. I take the bills and crush them into m y
pocket and I walk, I run, I light down the stairs and out the
building, I leave my quiet room, and I hit the streets and I
walk, fast, dedicated, determined, stubborn, filled with fury,
spraying piss and vinegar, to M ax’s, about twelve blocks from
where I live, an artists’ restaurant and bar, because I know it
will be filled with ramrod hard noise and heat, a crush o f hard,
noisy men, artists and poseurs and I don’t know the difference,
poseurs and the famous and I don’t know the difference, it’s a
modern crime but I can’t concentrate on it enough to
remember the ones you’re supposed to know, except Warhol
because he’s so strange and he’d stand out anywhere and I
don’t want to go near him; but the difference mostly is that I
think I am the artist, not them, but you can’t say that and it’s
hard even to keep thinking it though I don’t know w hy it’s so
hard, maybe because girls aren’t ever it; but all the poseurs and
all the famous will be at the tables where I can’t go, even if I
had money to eat they w ouldn’t let me eat there, not alone,
and I w o n ’t be one o f the pleading girls who is begging to be
allowed to go to the tables, I will just get a stool at the bar if the
guy at the door lets me in, he might not and usually I am too
shy to defy him and I hang tight with a man but tonight I want
in myself, I want the noise and the hard edge and the crush and
I want to drink, I want to find a place at the bar for m yself and
it’s got m y name on it even though I don’t got no name for the
purposes o f the man at the door but the stool’s mine and I will
drink and I will stay as long as I have bills in front o f me and it’s
an unwritten law about girls, that they don’t let you sit
anywhere, so you never quite understand w hy you can be
somewhere sometimes and not the same place the next time
and you figure out you got to hang on to a man and you are his
shadow, like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on. It
sure insures a steady flow o f affection wom an to man if you
can’t even sit down without one. Tonight I have a singular
distaste for a man. I’m not starting out with any interest
whatsoever. H e’d have to catch m y eye like starlight or it’d
have to be like fairy dust where you want some and you need a
taste, it’s something that tickles you deep down but you can’t
reach it to scratch, like the cut o f a record you listen to a
thousand times or you got a taste you can’t get rid o f so yo u ’re
like some fucking hamster on one o f them wheels just running
and running or yo u ’re skim ming coke o ff the top o f something or smack o ff the top o f something, you just get smitten,
lightly but completely, stuck in the moment but also riveted
so you can’t shake it loose, infatuated now , freedom now ,
there’s some special charge com ing from him and yo u ’re
plugged in and it’s sparking, it’s not like you want to get laid
and yo u ’re looking for someone w h o ’s going to be good, it’s
more like some trait you can’t identify strikes you wham , it’s
got an obsession lurking under it, it’s a light feeling but under
it is a burning habit, a habit you ain’t got yet but you just want
to play with it once, like skinpopping heroin or something,
you know, it ain’t serious but you want it. I take an energetic
walk with the city all glowing wet, all sparkling, for me, as if
it’s for me, the light’s for me and the rain’s for me and it’s
stoned out o f its fucking mind for me; and the buildings are
just pure glitter and the light’s coming down from heaven
luscious and wet; for me. The boy at the door can’t keep me
out because I stride in and I am aglow; he’s a mandarin
standing there with his little list and his leather jacket and his
pretensions and his snobbish good looks and I mumble words
I know he can’t hear and I never yet met a man who wasn’t
stupider than me and he’s trying to decide am I someone or not
and I am not fucking anyone but I am striding in my
motorcycle boots and I am wet and I am bound for glory at the
bar and I push m y w ay through the crowd and fuck him and
he’s watching me, he sees that I ain’t headed for a table which
would transgress the laws o f the universe, and it ain’t a girl’s
trick to sit somewhere she ain’t entitled because a man didn’t
pick her out already; he sees I want the bar and I suppose it’s
faintly plausible that a girl might want a drink on her own or it
confuses him enough that he hesitates and he who hesitates is
lost. I take out all the bills I have and he’s watching me do it
and I put it down in front o f me, a nice pile, substantial, and I
am firm ly sitting on a stool and I have spread m y elbows out
on the bar to take up enough space to declare I am alone and
here to drink and he don’t know I don’t have more money and
I order m y Stoli on the rocks and I ain’t making no move to
take m y change or m ove m y money so he relaxes as if letting
me there will not do monumental harm to the system that is in
place and that it is his jo b to protect and the bodies close in
around me to protect me from his scrutiny and the noise closes
in around me and I am swallowed up and I disappear and I am
completely cosseted and private and safe and I feel like some
new thing, just new ly alive, and there’s the placenta hugging
me and I’m wet with fucking life and I stare into m y fucking
drink, m y triumphal drink, I stare into it as if it’s tea leaves and
I’m the w orld ’s oldest, wisest gypsy, I got gold earrings down
to m y knees and I got foresight and hindsight and I am a reader
o f history, there’s layers o f history, vulgar and occult, in the
stu ff and if you lit a fire to it yo u ’d burn history up. And shit I
love it; a solitary human being covered all over by noise, a
dense noise that bubbles and burns and cracks all over you like
fire, small fire, a million tiny, exploding fires; or a superhuman embrace by some green, slim y, scaly monster, it’s big and all over you and messy, it’s turbulent and dramatic and
ever so much bigger than a man and its embrace is overwhelming, a descent, an invasion that covers the terrain, a
crush o f locusts but you aren’t repelled, only exhilarated at
how awesome it is, how biblical, how spectacular; like as i f it
took you back to ancient E gypt and you saw something
sublime in the desert and you had to walk across it but you
could; it wraps itself around you like some spectacular excess
o f nature not man, yo u ’re crawling with it but it ain’t bad and
it ain’t loathsome and there’s no fear, it’s just exactly extreme
enough and wild enough and it says it’s nighttime in human
history now in Am erika and Moses has his story and you have
yours and each o f you gets the whole universe to roll around in
because everything was made to converge at the point where
you are amidst all the rest o f life o f whatever kind, com position, or characteristics, it’s a great mass all around you, the blob, a loud blob, Jell-O , loud Jell-O , and yo u ’re some frail,
simple thing at the center and what you are to them doesn’t
matter because the noise protects you from knowing what you
are to them; noise has a beauty and noise has a function and a
quiet girl sometimes needs it because the night is long and life
is hard and pain is real and you stare into the glass and you
drink, darling, you drink, and you contemplate and you
drink; you go slow and you speed up and you drink; and you
are a deep thinker and you drink; and you have some hazy,
romantic thoughts and some vague philosophical leanings and
you drink; and you remember some pictures that flash by in
your mind and you drink; and there’s sad feelings for a fleeting
minute and you drink; and you choreograph an uprising, the
lumpen rise up, and you drink; and there’s Camden reaching
right out for you, it’s taking you back, and you drink; a man
nudges you from the right and you drink; he puts his face right
up close to yours and you drink; he’s talking about something
or other and you drink; you don’t look left or right, you just
drink, it’s worship, it’s celebration, you’d kneel down except
for that you might not be able to synchronize your movements, in your heart you kneel; and you drink; you taste it and
you roll it around your tongue and down on into your throat
and down on into your chest and you get fiery and warm and
you drink it down hard and fast and you sit stone still in
solemn concentration and you drink; the noise holds you
there, it’s almost physical, the noise, it’s a superhuman
embrace, bigger than a man’s, it’s swamp but not swam py, it’s
dry and dark and hot and popping, it’s dense and down and
dirty and you drink; the noise keeps you propped up, your
back upright and your legs bent and your feet firm ly balanced
on the stool, except the stool’s higher now, and you drink; and
yo u ’re like Alice, you’re getting smaller and it’s getting
bigger, and then you remember Humpty Dum pty was a
fucking eggshell and you could fall and break and D orothy got
lost in Oz and Cinderella was made into a pumpkin or nearly
such and there’s a terrible decline and fall awaiting you, fear
and travail, because the m oney’s gone, you been handing it
over to the big man behind the bar and you been drinking and
you been contemplating and the pile’s gone and there’s terrible
challenges ahead, like physically getting o ff the stool and
physically getting out o f the room and physically getting
home; it hardly seems possible that you could actually have so
many legs and none o f them have any bones that stand up
straight and you break it down into smaller parts; pay up so the
bartender don’t break your fingers; get o ff the stool; stand up;
walk, try not to lean on anyone, you can’t use the men as
leaning posts, you can’t volley yourself to the front sort o f
springing o ff one after the other, because one or another will
consider it affection; get to the door; don’t fall on the mandarin
with the list, don’t trip in front o f him, don’t throw up; open
the door on your own steam; get out the door fully clothed,
jacket, T-shirt, keys; once outside, you make another plan.
These are hard things; some o f them may actually be
impossible. It may be impossible to pay the bartender because
you may have drunk too much and it may be impossible to get
o ff the stool and it may be impossible to walk and it may be
impossible to stand up and it may be impossible to find the
door. It’s sad, yo u ’re an orphan and it’s hard to concentrate,
what with poor nutrition and a bad education; but sociology
w ill not save your ass if you drank more money than you got
because a citizen has to pay their bar bills. There’s tw o dollars
sitting on the bar in front o f you, the remains o f your pile like
old bones, fragments o f an archaic skeleton, little remnants o f
a big civilization dug up and yo u ’re eyeing it like it’s the grail
but with dishonorable intent and profane desire. It’s rightly
the bartender’s. H e’s been taking the money as it’s been due
with righteous discipline, which is w hy you ain’t overdrawn
on the account; you asked him in a tiny mouse voice afraid o f
the answer, you squeaked in the male din, a frightened
whisper, you asked him if you owed, you got up the nerve,
and yo u ’re straight with him as far as it goes but these extra
bills are rightly his; or you could have another drink; but you
had wanted to end it well, with some honor; and also he ain’t a
waitress, dear, and the m oney’s got his mark on it; and he ain’t
cracked a smile or said a tender word all night, which a girl
ain’t used to, he don’t like girl drinkers as a matter o f principle
you assume, he’s fast, he’s quiet, he’s got a hard, cold face with
a square ja w and long, oily hair and a shirt half open and a long
earring and bad teeth and he’s aloof and cold to you; and then
suddenly, so fast it didn’t happen, there’s a big, warm hand on
your hand, a big, hairy hand, and he’s squeezing your fingers
around the two dollars and he’s half smiling, one half o f his
face is smiling, and he says darling take a fucking cab. Y ou
stare at him but you can’t exactly see him; his face ain’t all in
one piece; it’s sort o f split and moving; and before you exactly
see his mouth move and hook it up with his words he’s gone,
w ay to a foreign country, the other end o f the bar where
they’re having bourbon, some cowboys with beards and hats.
Life’s always kind in a pinch. The universe opens up with a
gift. There’s generosity, someone gives you something special
you need; two dollars and you don’t have to suck nothing, you
are saved and the man in his generosity stirs you deeply.
Y o u ’re inspired to succeed with the rest o f the plan— move,
stand, walk, execute each detail o f the plan with a military
precision, although you wish you could take o ff your T-shirt
because it’s very hot but you follow the plan you made in your
mind and although your legs buckle and the ground isn’t solid,
it’s swelling and heaving, you make it past the strange, w avy
creatures with the deep baritone voices and the erections and
you get out, you get out the door even though it’s hard and
yo u ’re afraid because you can see outside that it’s raining, it’s
raining very hard, it’s pouring down, it’s so wet, you really
have an aversion to it because all your clothes will be drenched
and soaking and your lungs will be wet and your bones will
get all damp and wet and you can’t really see very well and the
rain’s too heavy and everything looks different from before
and you can’t really see through the rain and it’s getting in
your eyes as if your eyes are under water and burning, all
drowned in water, they hurt, and everything’s blurred and
your hair’s all wet as if it w o n ’t ever be dry again and there’s
water in your ears deep down and it hurts and everything's
chilly and wet. The w o rld ’s wet and watery and without
definition and without any fixed places o f reference or fixed
signs and it’s as if the city’s floating by you, like some flood
uprooted everything and it’s loose on the rapids and everywhere you step you are in a flood o f racing cold water. Y ou r feet are all wet and your legs are all wet and you squoosh in
your boots and all your clothes are soaked through and you are
dripping so much that it is as if you yourself are raining,
w ater’s flooding o ff you and it’s useless to be a person with
legs who counts on solid ground because here you have to
walk through water, which isn’t easy, yo u ’re supposed to
sw im through it but there’s not enough to swim through and
there’s too much to walk through, it’s as if yo u ’re glued and
gum m y and loose and the ground’s loose and the water’s loose
and yo u ’re breathing in water as much as air and you feel like
some fucking turkey that’s going to drow n in the rain; which
probably you will. Y o u ’re trying to walk home and it’s been a
long time, the old trick o f putting one foot in front o f the other
doesn’t seem to be working and you don’t seem to have got
very far but it’s hard to tell since nothing looks right or
familiar and everything’s under water and blurry and yo u ’re
cold and sort o f fixed in place because the w ater’s weighing
you down, kind o f making you so heavy you can’t really m ove
as i f yo u ’re an earthbound person m oving effortlessly through
air as is the case with normal people on normal days because it
ain’t air, it’s water. Y o u ’re all wet as if you was naked and your
clothes are wet and heavy as if they was lead and your breasts
are sore from the wet and the cold and your pubic hair’s all
wet and rubbing up against the wet stu ff all bunched up in
your crotch and there’s rain rolling down your legs and
com ing out the bottom o f your pants and yo u ’d be happier
naked, wet and naked, because the clothes feel very bad on
you, wet and bad. T h ey’re heavy and nasty and cold. The
m oney’s in your hand and it’s all wet, all rained out, soaking
wet, and your hand’s clutched, and you try proceeding
through the wet blur, you need to stay on the sidewalks and
you need to avoid oncoming cars and turning cars and crazy
cars that can’t see any better than you and you need to see the
traffic lights and you need to see what’s in front o f you and
w hat’s on the side o f you and what’s behind you, just as on any
regular day, and at night even more; but you can’t see and the
rain keeps you from hearing as well and you proceed slow ly
and you don’t get too far; it’s been a long time you been out
here and you haven’t gone but half a block and you are
drenched in water and breathing too fast and breathing too
hard and your legs aren’t carrying you right and the ground’s
not staying still and the water’s pushing you from behind and
it’d like to flatten you out and roll over you, and it ain’t nice
lapping against the calves o f your legs; and a cab stops; which
you have barely ever ridden in before, not on your own; it
stops; you’ve been in them when someone’s given you money
to deliver packages and said where to go and exactly what to
do and how much it would cost and still you were scared it
would cost too much and you wouldn’t have it and something
terrible would happen; a cab stops and you don’t know if two
dollars is enough or if he thinks you’re turning tricks, a dumb
wet whore, or if he just wants to fuck or if you could get inside
and he’d just take you home, a passenger; a cab stops and
yo u ’re afraid to get in because you’re not a person who rides in
cabs even in extremis even though you have two dollars and
it’s for taking a cab as the bartender said if you didn’t dream it
and probably he knows how much everything costs; a cab
stops; and yo u ’re wet; and you want to go home; and if you
got in the cab you could be home almost right away, very
close to right away, you could be home in just some few
minutes instead o f a very long time, because if you walk you
don’t know how long it will take or how tired yo u ’ll be and
you could get so tired you just stop somewhere to give up, a
doorw ay, an abandoned car, or even if you keep going it will
take a long time; and i f you got in the cab you could sit still for
a few minutes in perfect dignity and it would be dry and quiet
and you would be in the back, a passenger, and you could
ju m p if he pulled shit, if he started driving wild or going
somewhere strange, and yo u ’d give him the tw o dollars and
he’d take you home, and you get in the cab, it’s dark and
leather and yo u ’re scared about the m oney so you say upfront
that you only got two dollars and he asks where yo u ’re going
and you say and he says fine, it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s no
problem, and he says it’s raining and you say yeah, it is; and he
says some quiet, simple things, like sometimes it rains too
hard, and you say yes; he’s quiet and softspoken and there’s
long, curly hair cascading down his back and he says that I’m
wet with some sym pathy and I say yes I am; and he asks me
what I do in a quiet and sympathetic w ay and I say I’m a writer;
and he says he’s a musician, very quiet, nice; and I say I drank
too much, I was writing and I got restless and I got drunk and
he says yes he knows what that’s like, very quiet, very nice,
he’s done it too, everyone does it sometimes, but he doesn’t
keep talking, he’s very quiet, he talks soft, not a lot, and there’s
quiet moments and I think he’s pretty nice and I’m trying to
watch the streets to see where we are and w e’re going towards
where I live but up and down blocks, it doesn’t seem direct but
I don’t know because I don’t drive and I don’t know if there’s
one-w ay streets and the meter’s o ff anyw ay and he’s English
like in films with a distinguished accent, sort o f tough like
Albert Finney but he talks quiet and nice, a little dissonant; he’s
sort o f slim and delicate, you know how pretty a man can be
when he’s got fine features, chiseled, and curls, and he’s sort o f
waif-like, kind o f like a child in Dickens, appealing with a pull
to the heart, street pretty but softspoken, not quite hard, not
apparently cynical, not a regular N ew Y ork taxi driver as I’ve
seen them, all squat and old, but graceful, lithe, slight, young,
younger than me probably, new, not quite used but not
untouched, virginal but available, you can have him but it isn’t
quite right to touch him, he’s withdrawn and aloof and it
appears as a form o f refinement, he’s delicate and finely made,
you wonder what it would be like to touch him or if he’d be
charmed enough to touch you back, it’s a beauty without
prettiness except this one’s pretty too, too pretty for me, I
think, I never had such a pretty, delicate boy put together so
fine, pale, the face o f an old, inbred race, now decadent,
fragile, bloodless, with the heartrending beauty o f fine old
bones put together delicately, reconstructed under glass, it
w ouldn’t really be right to touch it but still you want to, just
touch it; and you couldn’t really stop looking at him in the
m irror o f the taxi, all the parts o f his face barely hang together,
all the parts are fragile and thin, it’s delicate features and an
attitude, charm and insouciance but with reserve, he puts out
and he holds back, he decides, he’s used to being wanted, he’s
aloof, or is it polite, or is it gentle? He turns around and smiles
and it’s like angel dust; I’m dusted. I get all girlish and
embarrassed and I think, really, he’s too pretty, he doesn’t
mean it, and there’s a real tense quiet and we drive and then he
stops and w e’re there and I hand him the two dollars because
we agreed and he says real quiet, maybe I could come in, and I
say yes, and I’m thinking he’s so pretty, it’s like being in a
m ovie with some movie star you have a crush on only he’s
coming with you and it’s not in a movie but you know how a
crush on someone in a film makes you crazy, so weird, as if
you could really touch him even though he’s flat and on film
and the strange need you think you have for him and the things
you think you would do with him, those are the feelings,
because I have a stupid crush, an insane crush, a boy-crazy
crush, and I am thinking this is a gorgeous night with the
visitation o f this fine boy but I am so fucking drunk I can
barely get up the steps and I think he’ll turn around and go
because it can’t be nice for him and now he can see how drunk;
smashed; as if I got Stoli pumping through m y heart and it’s
fumes I’m inhaling, fumes rising out o f m y ow n veins or rising
from m y chest, like a fog rising out o f m y chest, and I am
falling down drunk and such a fool, in m y heart I am romantic
for him, all desire and affection verging on an impolite
hunger, raw, greedy, now, now, but there’s m y beautiful
dog, m y very gorgeous and fine dog, m y heart, m y beast o f
jo y and love, m y heart and soul, m y friend on romps and good
times around the block, and she’s jum ping up and down and
she’s licking me and she’s jum ping all over me and it makes me
fall and I say I have to walk her because I do, I must, she’s got
rights, I explain, I have this idea she’s got rights, and I think he
will leave now but he says, very quiet and nice, oh I’ll walk
her, you ju st lie here, and I am flat out drunk, laid out drunk,
flat and drunk on m y bed, a mattress on the floor, barely a
mattress, a cut piece o f foam rubber, hard and flat, it’s an
austere bed for serious solitude or serious sex and I am fucking
stretched out and the walls move, a fast circle dance, and he
takes her leash and they leave and I’m smiling but time goes by
and I get scared, I start waiting, I start feeling time brushing by
me, I start thinking I will never see m y dog again and I think
what have I done and I think I will die from losing her if he
doesn’t bring her back and I think I have to call the police or I
have to follow him and find him or I have to get up and get out
and call to her and I think about life without her if she were
gone and I’d die and I try to m ove an arm but I can’t m ove it
and there’s a pain coming into m y heart which says I am a pale
shadow o f what you will feel the rest o f your life if she’s gone,
it says yo u ’ll mourn the rest o f your life and there’s a grief that
will burn up your insides and leave them just bare and burned
and em pty, burned ugly and barren, obliterated; and I know
that if she’s gone I’m going to pull m yself to pieces, pull my
mind apart, tear m yself open, rend my breast, turn m y heart to
sackcloth, make ashes out o f m y heart; if she’s gone I’m lost; a
wanderer in madness and pain; despondent; a vagabond
turned loose one last time, sad enough to turn the world to
hell; I’ll touch it, anything before me, and make it hell. I will
rage on these streets a lifetime and I will build fires from
garbage in buildings and I will hurt men; for the rest o f my
time here on earth, I will hurt them. I will wander and I will
wail and I will break bottles to have shards o f glass I can hold in
m y hand so they cut both ways, instead o f knives, I’ll bleed
they will bleed both at the same time, the famous two-edged
sword, I will use them on curly-haired boys and I will keep on
after death and I will never stop because the pain will never
stop and you w on’t be able to erase me from these streets, I
will sweep down like lightning except it will be a streak o f
blood from the shard o f glass that cuts both ways, and I will
find one and he will bleed. I’ve got this living brain but my
body’s dead, w on’t move, it’s inert, paralyzed, couldn’t move
to save me or her but once I can move I will begin the search, I
will find her, my dog; without her, there’s no love. It’s as if I
drank some poison that’s killed my muscles so they can’t
m ove and time’s going by and I’m counting it, the minutes,
and I’m waiting, and m y heart is filling up with pain, suffering
is coming upon me; and remorse; because I did it, this awful
thing that made this awful loss. Then they’re there, him and
her, and she’s laughing and playing with her leash and he’s
smiling and happy and I’m thinking he’s beautiful, inside too,
in spirit, and I am near dying to touch him, I want to make real
love, arduous, infatuated love touched by his grace, and I’m
wondering what he will be like, naked and fine, intense, first
slow, now; and I reach for him and he pulls me up so I’m on
m y knees in front o f him and he’s standing on the mattress and
he takes his cock out and I’m thinking I’ll hold it and he wants
it in m y mouth and I’m thinking I will kiss it and lick it and
hold it in m y mouth and undress him as I do it and I’m
thinking how happy and fine this will be, slow, how stopped
in time and tender, he holds m y head still by m y hair and he
pushes his cock to the bottom o f m y throat, rams it in, past m y
throat, under it, deeper than the bottom, I feel this fracturing
pain as if m y neck shattered from inside and m y muscles were
torn apart ragged and fast, an explosion that ripped them like a
bomb went o ff or someone pushed a fist down m y throat but
fast, just rammed it down, and I feel surprise, this one second
o f complete surprise in which, without words, I want to know
the meaning o f this, his intention; there’s one second o f
awesome, shocking surprise and then I go under, it’s black,
there’s nothing, coma, death, complete black under the
ground or past life altogether in a region o f nothing without
shadows o f life or m em ory or dreams or fear or time, there’s
nothing, it’s perfect, cold, absolute nothing. When I wake up I
think I am dead. I begin to see the walls, barely, I barely see
them, and I see I’m in a room like the room I was in when I was
alive and I think this is what death is like, the same but yo u ’re
dead, the same but you stay here forever alone, the same walls
but you barely see them and the same place where you died,
the same body, but it’s not real, it’s not alive, it doesn’t feel
real, it’s cold and shadowy and yo u ’re there alone for all the
rest o f time cut o ff from the living and it’s empty, your d o g’s
not here in the room in death, in the cold, shaky, shadowy
room, it’s an imitation in shadows o f where you were but it’s
em pty o f her and you will be here alone forever, lonely for her,
there’s no puppies with the dead, no solace; you wake up and
you know yo u ’re dead; and alone. O nly m y eyes m ove but
they barely see, the walls look the same but I barely see them;
tim e’s nothing here; it stands still; it’s not changing, never;
yo u ’re like a m um m y but with m oving eyes scanning the
shadowy walls, but barely seeing them; and then the pain
comes; the astonishing pain, like someone skinned the inside
o f your throat, took a knife and lifted the skin o ff inside so it’s
raw, all blood, all torn, the muscles are ripped open, ragged,
stretched and pulled, you’re all ripped up inside as if you had
been torn apart inside and under your throat there’s a deep pain
as if it’s been deep cut, deep sliced, as if there’s some deadly
sickness down there, a contagion o f long-suffering death, an
awful illness, a soreness that verges on having all the nerves in
your body up under your throat and someone’s crushed
broken glass into them and there’s a physical anguish as if
someone poured gasoline down your throat and lit it; an
eternal fire; deep fire; deep pain. I felt the pain, and as the pain
got sharper and deeper and stronger and meaner, the walls got
clearer, I saw them clearer and they stayed still, and as the pain
got worse, crueler, I could feel the bed under me and m y old
drunk body and I figured out that I was probably alive and
time had passed and I must o f been out, in a coma,
unconscious, suspended in nothing except whatever’s cold
and black past actual life, and I couldn’t move and I wanted my
dog but I couldn’t call out for her or make any sound, even a
rasping sound, and I couldn’t raise m yself up to see where she
was although in m y mind I could see her all curled up in her
corner o f the room at the foot o f the mattress, being good,
being quiet, how she curled her head around to her tail and the
sweet, sad look on her face, how she’d just sit thinking with
her sweet, melancholy look and I hoped she’d come and lick
me and I wondered if she needed to be walked again yet but if
she did she’d be around me and I’d manage it, I swear I would,
and I wondered if she was hungry yet and I made a promise in
m y heart never to put her in danger with a stranger again, with
an unknown person, never to take a chance with her again, I
couldn’t understand what kind o f a man it was because it
wasn’t on m y map o f the world and I ain’t got a child’s map, did
he like it, to ram it down to kill me, a half second brutality o f
something o ff the map that didn’t even exist anywhere even
between men and wom en or with Nazis; and I don’t know if
he did other things, I can’t feel nothing or smell nothing, he
could have done anything, I don’t feel nothing near m y
vagina, I try to feel with m y fingers, if it’s wet, if it’s dirty, i f it
hurts, but everything’s numb except m y throat, the hurt o f it,
I’m thinking he could have done anything, fucked me or
masturbated on me or peed on me, I w ouldn’t know , I’m
feeling for semen or wet places with m y fingers but I can’t
m ove because m y throat can’t m ove or the pain implodes,
there can’t be a single tremor even, I can’t lift m yself up and I
know I’ll never know and I push it out o f m y mind, that I will
never know; I push it out and I am pulled under by the pain
because m y throat’s crushed into broken bits and it’s lit with
kerosene and the fire’s spreading up m y neck to m y brain, a
spreading field o f fire going up into m y cranial cavity and it’s
real fire, and probably the pain’s seeping out onto the floor and
spreading, it’s red and bloody or it’s orange and hot; penis
smashed me up; I fall back into the cold, black nothing,
grateful; and later I wake up, it’s night but I don’t know o f
what day except m y dog would’ve come by me, I’d remember
her by me, but I wake up and it’s hollow, m y life’s hollow, I
got an em pty life, I’m alive and it’s empty, she’s gone, I raise
m yself up on m y elbow and I look, I keep looking, there’s a
desolation beyond the burdens o f history, a sadness deeper
than any shame. I’ll take the physical pain, Lord, I deserve it,
double it, triple it, make it more, but bring her back, don’t let
him hurt her, don’t make her gone. I look, I keep looking, I
keep expecting her, that she will be there if I look hard enough
or God will hear me and the boy will walk through the door
saying he ju st walked her and I pray to just let him bring her
back, ju st let him walk in the door; ju st this; days could go by
and I w ouldn’t know ; he’ll be innocent in m y eyes, I swear. I
hallucinate her and I think she’s with me and I reach out and
she’s not real and then I fall back into the deep blackness and
when I wake up I look for her, I wait for her; I’m waiting for
her now. M y throat’s like some small animal nearly killed,
maimed for religious slaughter, a small, nearly killed beast, a
poor warm-blooded thing hurt by some ritual but I never
heard o f the religion, there’s deep sacrifice, deep pain. I can’t
move because the poor thing’d shake near to torture; it’s got to
stay still, the maimed thing. I couldn’t shout and I couldn’t cry
and I couldn’t whisper or moan or call her name, in sighs, I
couldn’t whisper to m yself in sighs. I couldn’t swallow or
breathe. I sat still in m y own shit for some long time, many,
many days, some months o f days, and I rocked, I rocked back
and forth on m y heels, I rocked and I held m yself in m y arms, I
didn’t move more than to rock and I didn’t wash and I didn’t
say nothing. I swallowed down some water as I could stand it,
I breathed when I could, not too much, not too soon, not too
hard. If he put semen on me it’s still there, I wear it, whatever
he did, if he did it I carry it whatever it is, I don’t know, I w on’t
ever know, whatever he did stays done, anything he tore stays
torn, anything he took stays gone. I look for her; I scan the
walls; I stare; I see; I know; I will make m yself into a weapon; I
will turn m yself into a new kind o f death, for them; I got a new
revolutionary love filling my heart; the real passion; the real
thing. Che didn’t know nothing, he was ruling class. Huey killed
a girl, a young prostitute, seventeen; he was pimping but she
wasn’t one o f his. He was cruising, slow, in a car. Baby, she
called out, baby, oh babe. He shot her; no one calls me baby. She
said baby; he said cunt. Some o f them whisper, a term o f
endearment; some o f them shout. There’s gestures more
eloquent than words. She said something, he said something,
she died. Sister child, lost heart, poor girl, I’ll avenge you, sister
o f m y heart. Did it hurt or was death the easy part? I don’t know
what m y one did, except for taking her; but it don’t matter,
really, does it? N ot what; nor why; nor who; nor how.
T E N
April 30, 1974
(Age 27)
Ma. Ssa. Da. Ma. Ssa. Da. Ma. Ssa. Da. Hear m y heart beat.
Massada. I was born there and I died there. There was time;
seventy years. The Je w s were there, the last ones, the last free
ones, seventy years. The zealots, they were called; m y folks,
m y tribe; how I love them in m y heart. N ever give in. N ever
surrender. Slavery is obscene. Die first. B y your ow n hand; if
that’s what it takes; rather than be conquered; die free. N o
shame for the women, they used to say; conquered women;
shame. Massada. I used to see this picture in m y mind, a
wom an on a rock. I wrote about her all the time. Every time I
tried to write a story I wrote there is a woman on a rock, even
in the eighth grade, there’s a woman, a strong woman, a fierce
wom an, on a rock. I didn’t know what happened in the story. I
couldn’t think o f a plot. I just saw her. She was proud. She was
strong. She was wild by our standards or so it seemed, as if
there was no other word; but she didn’t seem wild; because she
was calm; upright; with square shoulders, muscled; her eyes
were big and fearless and looked straight ahead; not like
wom en today, looking down. She was ancient, from an old
time, simple and stark, dirty and dark, austere, a proud,
unconquerable wom an on a rock. The rock towers. The rock
is barren; nothing grow s, nothing erodes, nothing changes; it
is hard and old and massive. The rock is vast. The rock is
majestic, high and bare and alone; so alone the sun nearly
weeps for it; isolated from man and God; unbreachable; a
towering wall o f bare rock, alone in a desert where the sun
makes the sand bleed. The sun is hot, pure, unmediated by
clouds or sky, a white sun; blinding white; no yellow; there’s a
naked rock under a steaming, naked sun, surrounded by
molten, naked sand. It’s a rock made to outlast the desert, a
bare and brazen rock; and the Dead Sea spreads out near it,
below it, touching the edge o f the desert that touches the edge
o f the rock. Dead rock; dead water; a hard land; for a hard
people; God kept killing us, o f course, to make us hard
enough; genocide and slavery and rape were paternal kindnesses designed to build character, to rip pity out o f you, to destroy sentimentality, your heart will be as barren as this rock
when I’m done with you, He said; stern Father, a nasty
Daddy, He made history an incest on His children, slow,
continuous, generation after generation, a sadistic pedagogy,
love and pain, what recourse does a child have? He loves you
with pain, by inflicting it on you, a slow, ardent lover, and you
love back with suffering because you are helpless and human,
an imprisoned child o f Him caged in the world o f His making;
it’s a worshipful response, filled with awe and fear and dread,
bewildered, w hy me, w hy now, w hy this, w hy aren’t Y ou
merciful, w hy aren’t Y ou kind; and because it’s all there is, this
love o f His, it’s the only love He made, the only love He lets us
know, ignorant children shut up in D addy’s house, we yearn
for Him and adore Him and wait for Him, awake, afraid,
shivering; we submit to Him, part fear, part infatuation,
helpless against Him, and we thank Him for the punishment
and the pain and say how it shows He loves us, we say Daddy,
Daddy, please, begging Him to stop but He takes it as
seduction, it eggs Him on, He sticks it in; please, Daddy. He
didn’t rest on the seventh day but He didn’t write it down
either, He made love, annihilation is how I will love them.
Y ou might say He had this thought. It was outside the plan.
The six days were the plan. On the seventh He stretched
H im self out to take a big snooze and a picture flashed through
His mind, a dirty picture, annihilation is how I will love them,
and it made everything w ork, it made everything hang
together: everything moved. It was like putting the tide in the
ocean. Instead o f a stagnant mass, a big puddle, there was this
monstrous, ruthless thing gliding backwards and forwards at
the same time and underneath the planet broke, there were
fissures and hurricanes and tornadoes and storms o f wind,
great, carnivorous storms; everything moved; moved and
died; moved, killed, and died. On the seventh day He made
love; annihilation is how I will love them; it was perfect and
Creation came alive animated by the nightmare o f His perfect
love; and He loved us best; o f all His children, we were the
chosen; D addy liked fucking us best. That Christ boy found
out; where are Y ou , w hy have Y o u forsaken me; common
questions asked by all the fucked children loved to death by
Daddy. At Massada we already knew what He wanted and
how He wanted it, He gloried in blood. We were His perfect
children; we made our hearts as bare and hard and empty as the
rock itself; good students, emblematic Jew s; pride was
prophecy. N early two thousand years later w e’d take Palestine
back, our hearts burned bare, a collective heart chastened by
the fire o f the crematoria; empty, hard. Pride, the euphemism
for the emotions that drove us to kill ourselves in a mass
suicide at Massada, the nationalist euphemism, was simple
obedience. We knew the meaning o f the H oly Books, the
stories o f His love, the narrative details o f His omnipresent
embrace; His wrath, orgasmic, a graphic, calculating
treachery. Freedom meant escape from Him; bolting into
death; a desperate, determined run from His tormenting love;
the Romans were His surrogates, the agents o f slavery and
rape, puppets on the divine string. It was the play within the
play; they too suffered; He loved them too; they too were
children o f God; He toyed with them too; but we were
D addy’s favorite girl. We had the holy scrolls; and a
synagogue that faced towards Jerusalem, His city, cruel as is
befitting; perpetual murder, as is befitting. The suicide at
Massada was us, His best children, formed by His perfect
love, surrendering: to Him. Annihilation is how I will love
them; He loved loving; the freedom for us was the end o f the
affair, finally dead. Yeah, we defied the Romans, a righteous
suicide it seemed; but that was barely the point; we weren’t
prepared to have them on top, we belonged to Him.
Everything was hidden under the floor o f a cell that we had
sealed off; to protect the holy scrolls from Roman desecration;
to protect the synagogue from Roman desecration; we kept
His artifacts pure and hidden, the signs and symbols o f His
love; we died, staying faithful; only Daddy gets to hurt us bad;
only Daddy gets to put His thing there. First we burned
everything we had, food, clothes, everything; we gathered it
all and we burned it. Then ten men were picked by lot and they
slit the throats o f everyone else. Then one man was chosen by
lot and he slit the throats o f the other nine, then his own. I have
no doubt that he did. There were nearly a thousand o f us; nine
hundred and sixty; men, women, children; proud; obedient to
God. There was discipline and calm, a sadness, a quiet
patience, a tense but quiet waiting for slaughter, like at night,
how a child stays awake, waiting, there is a stunning courage,
she does not run, she does not die o f fear. Some were afraid
and they were held down and forced, o f course; it had to be. It
was by family, mostly. A husband lay with his wife and
children, restrained them, their throats were slit first, then his,
he held them down, tenderly or not, and then he bared his
throat, deluded, thinking it was manly, and there was blood,
the w ay God likes it. There were some w idow s, some
orphans, some lone folks you didn’t especially notice on a
regular day; but that night they stood out; the men with the
swords did them first. It took a long time, it’s hard to kill nearly
a thousand people one by one, by hand, and they had to hurry
because it had to be done before dawn, you can do anything in
the dark but dawn comes and it’s hard to look at love in the
light. We loved God and we loved freedom, we were all G o d ’s
girls you might say and freedom, then as now, was in getting
sliced; a perfect penetration, then death; a voluptuous compliance, blood, death. I f yo u ’re G o d ’s girl you do it the w ay He likes it and H e’s got special tastes; the naked throat and the
thing that tears it open, He likes one clean cut, a sharp, clean
blade; you lay yourself down and the blade cuts into you and
there’s blood and pain; and the eyes, there’s a naked terror in
the eyes and death freezes it there, yo u ’ve seen the eyes. The
blood is warm and it spreads down over you and you feel its
heat, you feel the heat spreading. Freedom isn’t abstract, an
idea, it’s concrete, in life, a sliced throat, a clean blade,
freedom now. G o d ’s girl surrenders and finds freedom where
the men always bragged it was; in blood and death; only they
didn’t expect it to be this w ay, them on their backs too, supine,
girlish; G o d ’s the man here. There’s an esthetic to it too, o f
course: the bodies in voluntary repose, waiting; the big knife,
slicing; the rich, textured beauty o f the anguish against the
amorphous simplicity o f the blood; the emotions disciplined
to submission as murder comes nearer, the blood o f someone
covers your arm or your shoulder or your hand and the glint o f
the blade passes in front o f your eyes and you push your head
back to bare your throat, slow ly so that you will live longer
but it looks sensual and lewd and filled with longing, and he
cuts and you feel the heat spreading, your body cools fast,
before you die, and you feel the heat o f your own blood
spreading. Was Sade God? M aybe I was just seventy; I was
born on the rock but the adults who raised me were new to it
and awkward, not native to the rock, still with roots down
below, on softer ground; I died there, a tough one, old, tough
skin from the awful sun, thick and leathery, with deep furrow s
like dried up streams going up my legs and up my arms and
creasing m y face, scarified you might say from the sun eating
up m y skin, cutting into it with white hot light, ritual scars or a
surgeon’s knife, terrible, deep rivers in my skin, dried out
rivers; and maybe I’d had all the men, religion notwithstanding, men are always the same, filled with God and Law but still
sticking it in so long as it’s dark and fast; no place on earth
darker than Massada at night; no boys on earth faster than the
Jew s; nice boys they were, too, scholars with the hearts o f
assassins. Beware o f religious scholars who learn to fight.
T h ey’ve been studying the morals o f a genocidal God. Shrewd
and ruthless, smart and cruel, they will win; tell me, did
Massada ever die and where are the Romans now; profiles on
coins in museums. A scholar who kills considers the long
view; will the dead survive in every tear the living shed? A
scholar knows how it will look in writing; beyond the death
count o f the moment. Regular soldiers who fight to kill don’t
stand a chance. The corpses o f all sides get maggots and turn to
dust; but some stories live forever, pristine, in the hidden
heart. They prayed, the Jew ish boys, they made forays down
the rock to fight the Romans until the military strength o f the
Romans around the rock was unassailable, they took a little
extra on the side when they could get it, like all men. I
probably had m y eye on the younger ones, twenty, virile,
new, they had no m emory o f being Jew s down on the low
ground, they had only this austere existence, they were born
here o f parents who were born here o f parents who either were
born here or came here young and lived their adult years on
this rock. Sometimes Jew s escaped the Romans and got here,
made it to the top; but they didn’t bring profane ideas; they
stripped themselves o f the foreign culture, the habits o f the
invaders; they told us stories o f Roman barbarism, which
convinced us even more; down below the Romans were pigs
rolling in shit, above we were the people o f God. N o one here
doubted it, especially not the young men; they were pure,
glow ing, vibrant animals lit up by a nationalism that enhanced
their physical beauty, it was a single-minded strength. There
were no distracting, tantalizing memories o f before, below.
We lived without the tumult o f social heterodoxy, there was
no cultural relativism as it were. The young men were hard,
cold animals, full o f self-referential pride; they had no
ambivalence, no doubt; they had true grit and were incapable
o f remorse; they lived in a small, contained world, geographically limited, flat, all the same, barren, culturally
dogmatic, they had a few facts, they learned dogma by rote, it
was a closed system, they had no need for introspection, there
were no moral dilemmas that confronted them, troubled
them, pulled them apart inside; they were strong, they fought,
they prayed but it was a form o f nationalism, they learned
racial pride, they had the thighs o f warriors, not scholars, and
they used them on women, not Romans, it was the common
kind o f killing, man on girl, as i f by being Jew s alone on this
desolate rock, isolated here, they were, finally, like everyone
else, all the other men, ordinary, like Romans, for instance;
making war on us, brutal and quick if not violent, but they
beat women too, the truth, finally, they did. The sacred was
remote from them except as a source o f national pride; pure
Je w s on a purely Jew ish rock they had a pure God o f the Jew s,
His laws, H oly Books, the artifacts o f a pure and superior
nation. The rock was barren and empty and soon it would be a
cemetery and the bloodletting would become a story; nearly
fiction, nearly a lie; abridged, condensed, cleaned up; as if
killing nine hundred and sixty people, men, women, and
children, by slicing their throats was an easy thing, neat and
clean, simple and quiet; as if there was no sex in it and no
meanness; as if no one was forced, held down, shut up; well,
frankly, murdered; as i f no one was murdered; as if it was
noble and perfect, a bloodless death, a murderless murder, a
mass suicide with universal consent, except for the women
and the children; except for them. Y ou get sad, if you
understand. The men were purely male, noble and perfect, in
behalf o f all the Jew s; the young ones especially, strong
animals, real men, prideful men, physically perfect specimens
dark and icy with glistening thighs, ideologically pure,
racially proud, idealists with racial pride; pure, perfect,
uncorrupted nationalists; beautiful fascists; cold killing boys;
until God, ever wise, ever vicious, turned them into girls. I
was probably an old woman making a fool o f herself with
memories and desires, all the natural grace and learned artifice
o f young women burned away by wear and tear and the awful,
hot sun. Still, sometimes you’d like to feel one o f the young
ones against you, a last time, one last time; nasty, brutish,
short. It’s a dumb nostalgia. They never were very good, not
the fathers, not the sons. O r maybe I was some sentimental old
fool w h o ’d always been a faithful wife, except once, I was
lonely and he was urgent, and I had a dozen grandchildren so
this rock knew m y blood already, I had labored here, and now
I sat, old, under the sun, and m y brain got heated with
foresight and grief and I saw them as they soon would be,
corpses with their throats slit, and maybe I howled in pain, an
animal sound, or I denounced them in real words, and the
young men said she’s an old fool, she’s an old idiot, she’s
loony, ignore her, it’s nonsense, and I tried to tell the girls and
the children how they’d be killed soon, with the awful slice
across the throat; these are fanatic boys, I said, driven by an
idea, I said, it is murder, not suicide, what they will do to you;
and they asked if it was the will o f God and o f course now I see
w hy you must lie but I said yes, it’s His will, always, that we
should suffer and die, the will o f God is wrong, I said, we have
to defy the will o f God, we have to defy the Romans and the
Je w s and the will o f God, we have to find a w ay to live, us, you
see, us; she’s loony, they said; you’ll be stretched out, I said,
beautiful and young, too soon, dressed and ornamented, and
your throats will be naked as if your husbands are going to use
your mouths but it will be a sword this time, a real one, not his
obscene bragging, one clean cut, and there will be blood, the
w ay God likes. I didn’t want to see the children die and I was
tired o f God. Enough, I said to Him; enough. I didn’t want to
see the wom en die either, the girls who came after me, you get
old and you see them different, you see how sad their
obedience is, how pitiful; you see them whole and human,
how they could be; you see them chipped aw ay at, broken bit
by bit, slowed down, constrained; tamed; docile; bearing the
weight o f invisible chains; you see it is terrible that they obey
these men, love these men, serve these men, who, like their
God, ruin whatever they touch; don’t believe, I say, don’t
obey, don’t love, let him put the sword in your hand, little
sister, let Him put the sword in your hand; then see. Let him
bare his throat to you; then see. The day before it happened I
quieted down, I didn’t howl, I didn’t rant or rave, I didn’t
want them to lock me up, I wanted to stay out on the rock,
under the hot sun, the hot, white sun; m y companion, the
burning sun. I was an old woman, wild, tough, proud, strong,
illiterate, ah, yes, the people o f the Book, except for the
women and girls, God says it’s forbidden for us, the Book,
illiterate but I wanted to write it down today, quiet, in silence,
not to have to howl but to curl up and make the signs on the
page, to say this is what I know, this is what has happened
here, but I couldn’t write, or read; I was an old woman, tough,
proud, strong, fierce, quiet now as if dumb, a thick quiet, an
intense, disciplined quiet; I was an old woman, wild, tough,
proud, with square shoulders muscled from carrying, from
hard labor, sitting on a rock, a hard, barren rock, a terrible
rock; there was a wom an sitting on a rock, she was strong, she
was fierce, she was wild, she wasn’t afraid, she looked straight
ahead, not down like wom en now , she was dark and dirty,
maybe mad, maybe just old, near naked with rags covering
her, her hair was long and shining and dirty, a gleaming silver
under the hot, white sun; but wild is perhaps not the right
word because she was calm, upright, quiet, in intentional
solitude, her eyes were big and fearless and she faced the world
head-on not averting her eyes the w ay women do now; she
could see; she didn’t turn her eyes away. She was sitting on a
hard, barren rock under a hot, white sun, and then the sun
went down, got lower in the sky, lower and lower yet, a little
lower; the sun got lower and the light got paler, then duller;
the sun got low and she took a piece o f rock, a sharp piece o f
rock, and she cut her throat; I cut my throat. N o Romans; no
fascist Jew ish boys however splendid their thighs or pristine
their ideals; no. Mine was a righteous suicide; a political refusal
to sanction the current order; to say black was white. Theirs
was mass murder. A child can’t commit suicide. You have to
murder a child. I couldn’t watch the children killed; I couldn’t
watch the women taken one last time; throats bared; heads
thrown back, or pushed back, or pulled back; a man gets on
top, who knows what happens next, any time can be the last
time, slow murder or fast, slow rape or fast, eventual death, a
surprise or you are waiting with a welcome, an open
invitation; rape leading, inexorably, to death; on a bare rock,
invasion, blood, and death. Massada; hear my heart beat; hear
me; the women and children were murdered, except me, I was
not, when you say Massada you say m y name, I discovered
pride there, I outlined freedom, out from under, Him and him
and him; let him put the sword in your hand, little sister, then
see; don’t love them; don’t obey. It wasn’t delirium; or fear; I
saw freedom. Does Massada thrill you, do you weep with
pride and sorrow for the honor o f the heroes, the so-called
suicides? Then you weep for me, I make you proud, the
woman on the rock; a pioneer o f freedom; a beginning; for
those who had no say but their throats were ripped open; for
the illiterate in invisible chains; a righteous suicide; a resistance
suicide; mad woman; mad-dog suicide; this girl here’s got a
ripped throat, Andrea, the zealot, freedom is the theory,
suicide the practice; m y story begins at Massada, I begin there,
I see a woman on a rock and I was born in blood, the blood
from her throat carried by time; I was born in blood, the slit
between the legs, the one God did H im self so it bleeds forever,
one clean cut, a perfect penetration, the m emory o f Massada
marked on me, my covenant with her; God sliced me, a
perfect penetration, then left me like carrion for the others, the
ones He made like Him, in His own image as they always say,
as they claim with pride, or vanity I would say, or greed; pride
is me, deciding at Massada, not Him or him or him. Y o u ’re
born in blood, washed in it, you swim out in it, immersed in
it, it’s your first skin, warm , hot on fragile, wrinkled,
discolored flesh; w e’re born to bleed, the ones He sliced
Himself; when the boys come out, the toy boys, tiny figurines
made like Him, He has it done to them, sym bolically, the
penis is sliced so they’re girls to Him; and the toy b o y’ll grow
up pushing the cut thing in girls who are born cut open big,
he’ll need to stick it in and stick it in and stick it in, he doesn’t
like being one o f G o d ’s girls even a little; and it’s a m em ory,
isn’t it, you were girls to M e at Massada; a humiliation; think
o f the last ten, nine o f them on their big knees, throats bared,
one slice, the tenth sticks it up himself, there’s a woman I saw
in a porn magazine, she did that to herself, she smiled; did
number ten, the big hero, smile, a coy look at God, heavy
mascara around the eyes, a wide smile, the sword going in and
som ehow he fingers his crotch at the same time? The
Christians w ouldn’t stand for it; they said C hrist’s the last one,
he died for us so we don’t need to be cut but God wants them
sliced and they know it so they do it for health or sanitation as
if it’s secular garbage removal but in their hearts they know ,
God wants them cut, you don’t get aw ay with not being a girl
for Him except you w on’t be His favorite girl. They take it out
on us, all o f them, sliced or threatened, sliced or evading it,
enlisted or the equivalent o f draft dodgers; manly men;
fucking the hole God already made; He was there first; there
are no virgin girls; the toy boys always get used goods. Their
thing, little next to His, aspires to omnipresence; and Daddy
watches; a perpetual pornography; blood-and-guts scenes o f
pushing and hitting and humiliation, the girl on the bed, the
girl on the floor, the girl in the kitchen, the girl in the car, the
girl down by the river, the girl in the woods, the girls in cities
and towns, prairies and deserts, mountains and plains, all
colors, a rainbow o f suffering, rich and poor, sick and well,
young and old, infants even, a man sticks it in the mouths o f
infants, I know such a man; oh, he’s real; an uncle o f mine; an
adult; look up to him, listen to him, obey him, love him, he’s
your uncle; he was born in Camden but he left, smart, a big
man, he got rich and prominent, an outstanding citizen; five
infants, in the throat, men like the throat, his own children, it
was a daddy’s love, he did that, a loving daddy in the dark, and
God watched, they like the throat, the smooth cavity o f an
infant’s mouth and the tiny throat, a tight passage, men like it
tight, so tiny; and the suction, because an infant sucks, it pulls
and it sucks, it wants food but this food’s too big, too
monstrous, it sucks, it pulls it in, and daddy says to him self it
wouldn’t suck if it didn’t like it; and Daddy watches; and the
infant gags, and the infant retches, and the infant chokes; and
daddy comes; and Daddy comes; the child vomits, chokes,
panics, can’t breathe, forever, a lifetime on the verge o f
suffocation. I don’t have much o f a family, I prefer the streets
frankly to various pieties but sometimes there are these shrieks
in the night, a child quaking from a crime against humanity,
and she calls out, sister she says, he sliced m y throat with a
sword, I remember it but I don’t, it happened but it didn’t, he’s
there in the dark all the time, watching, waiting, he’s a ghost
but he isn’t, it’s a secret but w hy doesn’t everyone know? H ow
does an infant get out from under, Him and him; him; oh, he
does it for a long time, it begins in the crib, then she crawls, a
baby girl and all the relatives go ooh and ah and the proud papa
beams, every night, for years, until the next one is born, two
years, three years, four years, he abandons the child for the
next infant, he likes infants, tiny throat, tight suction,
helpless, tiny, cute thing that seems to spasm whole, you
know how infants crinkle all up, their tiny arms and their tiny
legs, they just all bunch up, one m oving sex part in spasm with
a tight, smooth, warm cavity for his penis, it’s a tiny throat,
and the infant sucks hard, pulls the thing in. Years later there
are small suicides, a long, desperate series o f small suicides,
she’s empty inside except for shadows and dread, sick with
debilitating illnesses, no one knows the cause or the cure, she
chokes, she gags, she vom its, she can’t sw allow; there’s
asthma, anxiety, the nights are saturated with a menace that
feels real, specific, concrete, but you can’t find it when you
turn on the light; and eventually, one day or some day, none o f
us can sw allow ; we choke; we gag; we can’t stop them; they
get in the throat, deep enough in, artists o f torment; a manly
invasion; taking a part God didn’t use first. If yo u ’re adult
before they rape you there yo u ’ve got all the luck; all the luck
there is. The infants; are haunted; by familiar rapists; someone
close; someone known; but who; and there’s the disquieting
certainty that one loves him; loves him. There are these
wom en— such fine women— such beautiful women— smart
women, fine women, quiet, compassionate wom en— and
they want to die; all their lives they have wanted to die; death
would solve it; numb the pain that comes from nowhere but
somewhere; they live in rooms; haunted; by a familiar rapist;
they whisper daddy; daddy, daddy, please; asleep or awake
they want to die, there’s a rapist in the room, the figure o f a
man invading, spectral, supernatural, real but not real, present
but not there; he’s invading; he’s a crushing, smothering
adversary; it’s some fucking middle-class bedroom in some
fucking suburb, there aren’t invading armies here but there’s
invasion, a man advancing on sleeping children, his own;
annihilation is how I will love them; they die in pieces inside;
usually their bodies survive; not always, o f course; you want
God to help them but God w on’t help them, He’s on the other
side; there are sides; the suicides are long and slow, not
righteous, not mass but so lonely, so alone; could we gather up
all the women who were the little girls who were the infants
and say do it now, end it now, one time, here; say it was you;
say it happened to you; name names; say his name; we will
have a Massada for girls, a righteous mass suicide, we could
have it on any street corner, cement, bare, hard, empty; but
they’re alone, prisoners in the room with the rapist even after
he’s gone; five infants, uncle; it makes Auschwitz look small,
uncle; deep throat, my uncle invented deep throat, a fine,
upstanding man. I can do the arithmetic; five equals six
million; uncle pig; uncle good Jew ; uncle upstanding citizen;
uncle killer fucking pig; but we have a heroic tradition o f
slaughtering children in the throat; feel the pride. I’ll gather
them up and show you a righteous suicide; in Camden; home;
bare, hard, empty cement, hard, gray cement, cement spread
out like desert rock, cement under a darker sun, a brooding
sun, a bloody sun, covered over, burgundy melting, a wash o f
blood over it; even the sun can’t watch anymore. There were
brick houses the color o f blood; on hard, gray rock; we come
from there, uncle, you and I, you before me, the adult; you
raped your babies in pretty houses, rich rooms; escaped the
cement; they threw me down on the cement and took me from
behind; but I’ll bet you never touched a girl when you were a
homeboy, slob; too big for you, even then, near your own
size; w e’ll have Massada in Camden, a desolate city, empty
and bare and hard as a rock; and I will have the sword in m y
hand and I will kill you myself; you will get down on your big
knees and you will bare your throat and I will slice it; a suicide;
he killed himself, the w ay they did at Massada; only this time a
girl had the sword; and it was against God, not to placate Him.
Every bare, empty, hard place spawns a you, uncle, and a me;
homeboy, there’s me and you. The shit escaped; into death;
the shit ran away; died; escaped to the safe place for bandits,
the final hideaway where God the Father protects His gang;
they watch together now, Father and His boy, a prodigal son,
known in the world o f business for being inventive, a genius
o f sorts, known among infants as a genius; o f torment;
destruction; and I’m the avenging angel, they picked me, the
infants grew up and they picked me; they knew it would take a
Camden girl to beat a homeboy; you had to know the cement,
the bare, em pty rock; he was a skeleton when he died, illness
devoured him but it w asn’t enough, how could it be enough,
w hat’s enough for the Him mler o f the throat? I know how to
kill them; I think them dead for a long time; I make them waste
away; for a long time; I don’t have to touch them; I ju st have to
know who they are; uncle, the infants told me; I knew. I was
born in Camden in 1946 down the street from Walt Whitman,
an innocent boy, a dreamer, one o f G o d ’s sillier creatures, put
on earth as a diversion, a kind o f decoy, kind o f a lyrical phony
front in a covert war, a clever trick by rape’s best strategist, he
had G od-given talent for G od-given propaganda; the poet
says love; as command; the w ay others say sit to a dog; love,
children, love; or love children; the poet advocates universal
passion; as command; no limits; no rightful disdain; humanity
itself surges, there is a sweep o f humanity, we are waves o f
ecstasy, the common man, and woman, when he remembers
to add her; embrace the common man; we are a human fam ily
consecrated to love, each individual an imperial presence in the
climactic collective, a sovereign unto himself; touch each
other, without fear, and he, Walt, w ill touch everyone; every
one o f us; we all get loved by him, rolled up in him, rolled over
by him; his thighs embrace us; he births us and he fucks us, a
patriarch’s vision, we take him in our mouths, grateful; he
used words to paint great dreams, visionary wet dreams,
dem ocracy’s wet dreams; for the worker and the whore; each
and all loved by him; and in his stead, as he’s busy writing
poems, all these others, the common men, push it in and
come; I loved him, the words, the dreams; don’t believe them,
don’t love them, don’t obey the program written into the
poem, a series o f orders from the high commander o f pain;
bare the throat, spread the legs, suck the thing; only he was
shy, a nineteenth-century man, they didn’t say it outright
then; he said he wanted everyone, to have them, in the poems;
he wanted to stick it in everywhere; and be held too, the lover
who needs you, your compassion, a hint o f recognition from
you, a tenderness from your heart, personal and singular; the
pitiful readers celebrate the lyric and practice the program, the
underlying communication, the orders couched in language as
orgasmic as the acts he didn’t specifically say; he was lover,
demanding lover, and father; he spread his seed everywhere,
over continents; as i f his ejaculation were the essence o f love; as
i f he reproduced him self each time; with his hand he made
giants; as if we all were his creatures; as i f his sperm had
washed over the whole world and he begat us, and now he’d
take us; another maniac patriarch, a chip o ff the old block; the
epic drama o f a vast possession as i f it were an orgy o f
brotherly love, kind, tender, fraternite; as if taking everyone
were gentle, virile but magnanimous, a charity from body to
body, soul to soul; none were exempt, he was the poet o f
inclusion; you could learn there were no limits, though you
might not know the meaning until after they had touched you,
all o f them, his magnificent masses, each one; you could stay
as innocent, or nearly, as the great, gray poet himself, until
yo u ’d done the program; then you’d be garbage somewhere,
your body literal trash, without the dignity o f a body bag,
something thrown out, dumped somewhere, sticky from
sperm, ripped inside, a torn anus, vaginal bruises and tears, a
ripped throat; the tissue is torn; there’s trauma to the tissue,
says the doctor, detached, not particularly interested; but the
tissue is flesh, o f a human, and the trauma is injury, o f a
human, the delicate lining o f the vagina is flesh, the interior
lining o f the throat is flesh, not meant for invasion, assault;
flesh lines the anus; it’s already limned with cracks and
bleeding sores; mortal fools bleed there, we are dying all the
time; lo ve’s intense and there will be great, jagged rips, a
searing pain, it burns, it bleeds, there are fistfuls o f blood,
valleys o f injury too wide and too deep to heal, and the shit
comes out, like a child, bathed in blood, and there’s fire, the
penis pushed in hard all at once for the sake o f the pain, because
the lover, he likes it; annihilation is how I will love them.
Y o u ’ll just be loved to death, tears, like cuts, and tears, the
w atery things; it wasn’t called the C ivil War, or Vietnam; it
w asn’t a w ar poets decried in lyrics apocalyptic or austere,
they couldn’t ever see the death, or the wounded soldier, or
the evil o f invasion, a genocidal policy if I remember right, it’s
hard to remember; love’s celebrated; it’s party time; hang
them from the rafters, the loved ones, pieces o f meat, nice and
raw, after the dogs have had them, clawed them to pieces,
chewed on their bones; bloody, dirty pieces strung out on
street corners or locked up in the rapist’s house. One whole
human being was never lost in all o f history or all o f time; or
not so a poet could see it or use fine words to say it. Walt sings;
to cover up the crimes; say it’s love enough; enough. And art’s
an alibi; I didn’t do it, I’m an artist; or I did do it but it’s art,
because I’m an artist, we do art, not rape, I did it beautiful, I
arranged the pieces so esthetic, so divine; and them that love
art also did not do it; I support art. Walt could sing, all right;
obscuring a formal truth; as if a wom an had an analogous
throat; for song; then they stuff it down; sing then darling.
The poems were formal lies; lies o f form; bedrock lies; as if the
throat, pure but incarnate, was for singing in this universal
humanity we have here, this democracy o f love, for one and
all; but they stuff it down; then try singing; sing, Amerika,
sing. I saw this Lovelace girl. I’m walking in Times Square,
going through the trash cans for food; I roam now, every day,
all the time, days, nights, I don’t need sleep, I don’t ever sleep;
I’m there, digging through the slop for some edible things but
not vegetables because I never liked vegetables and there’s
standards you have to keep, as to your own particular tastes. I
am searching for my dog, my precious friend, on every city
street, in every alley, in every hole they got here where usually
there’s people, in every shooting gallery, in every pim p’s
hallway, in every abandoned building in this city, I am
searching, because she is my precious friend; but so far I have
not found her; it’s a quest I am on, like in fables and stories,
seeking her; and if m y heart is pure I will find her; I remember
Gawain and Galahad and I try to survive the many trials
necessary before finding her and I am hoping she wasn’t taken
to wicked, evil ones; that she’s protected by some good magic
so she w on ’t be hurt or malnourished or used bad, treated
mean, locked up or starved or kicked; I’m hoping there’s a
person, half magic, who will have regard for her; and after I’ve
done all the trials and tribulations she will come to me in a dark
wood. I’ve got pain, in m y throat, some boy tore it up, I rasp, I
barely talk, it’s an ugly sound, some boy killed it, as if it were
some small animal he had to maim to death, an enemy he had
to kill by a special method, you rip it up and it bleeds and the
small thing dies slow. It’s a small, tight passage, good for fun,
they like it because it’s tight, it hugs the penis, there’s no give,
the muscles don’t stretch, at some point the muscles tear, and
it must be spectacular, when they rip; then he’d come; then
he’d run. Y ou couldn’t push a baby through, like with the
vagina; though they’d probably think it’d be good for a laugh;
have some slasher do a cesarean; like with this Lovelace girl,
where they made a jo k e with her, as if the clit is in her throat
and they keep pushing penises in to find it so she can have an
orgasm; it’s for her, o f course; always for her; a joke; but a
friendly one; for her; so she can have a good time; I went in,
and I saw them ram it down; big men; banging; you know,
mean shoving; I don’t know w hy she ain’t dead. They kept her
smiling; i f it’s a film you have to smile; I wanted to see if it
hurt, like with me; she smiled; but with film they edit, you
know, like in H ollyw ood. She had black and blue marks all
over her legs and her thighs, big ones, and she smiled; I don’t
know w hy we always smile; I m yself smile; I can remember
smiling, like the smile on a skeleton; you don’t ever want them
to think they did nothing wrong so you smile or you don’t