sleep very much at all.
*
I am staggeringly hurt: body and mind.
*
N and I are inside, sitting on the mattress. She is writing in her
notebook. I am staring at the wall. I can walk now. There is a
knock on the door. It is W. He is invited in. I don’t talk. I sit.
N sits. He stands, very tall, then sits. He brings out some grass.
He is soft-spoken and courteous. He rolls a joint. We smoke.
He and N exchange pleasantries. We smoke. I don’t talk. He
speaks directly to me. I stare. I haven’t been talking much but now
I don’t talk at all. He saved me. I can’t think of anything to
say. I think I say thank you. We smoke. My body is slowly
getting numb, hard to move, nearly immobile. Each arm, each
70
leg, is very heavy, like a ton of wet sand. I can’t move. I don’t
talk. We smoke. They talk. They talk about witchcraft, the
occult, drugs. I don’t follow it. He talks to her. I hear it. He
excludes me but refers to me. He talks only to her. You young
women need my protection. I could come here once or twice a
week, get you young women a real bed, you shouldn’t be
sleeping on this mattress on the floor, so you really both sleep
here do you? and you and I could have some real fun with
her, we can do things of real depth, different things, unusual
things that call on deep energies, there are many things you
and I could do with her. I don’t look at him but I know I am
her. I can’t talk. I can’t move. My brain is some dead slug.
Everything is heavy, like a ton of wet sand. My muscles don’t
move. My legs don’t work. I remember crawling after he
chewed me up, and the pain. We could do many things with
her, he says, and there are mysteries we could discover together,
she is the perfect instrument for us to discover these mysteries,
she is so pliant, there are so many subtleties. He talks about a
big bed, and I think he wants to watch N hurt me: he is saying
they will do it to me, he is saying he will give us regular money
every week, he is talking about a big bed and tying me up, I
can’t feel anything but the pain between my legs hanging somewhere in the center of my dead brain: telling me to run, run: but I can barely move: I concentrate every living ounce of will
and energy on moving, one leg at a time, the other leg, slowly,
to get up. It takes nearly forever. I stand up. My mouth moves.
A sound comes out, loud. No. It sounds like a whisper. I walk,
a ton of wet sand inching along a desert, into the kitchen,
collapsing on the table. N says: you heard her. He says he will
leave the grass and come back some other time. The offer still
holds. N can call him anytime. But he will come back anyway.
She should think about it.
All night we talk about a ring of occultists N has heard
about and all the women they have tortured to death and their
witchcraft rites and the way they use sex and drugs ending in
death. She is sure this is true. We are afraid: we think it is a
paranoid fantasy but we believe it anyway: we know somewhere there are these dead women. We do not move all night.
The smoke has nearly paralyzed us. We fall asleep sitting up.
In the morning N examines the grass to see why we couldn’t
7 1
move. She sniffs it and rubs it between her fingers, scrutinizes
it. There are tiny fragments of glass in the weed: pieces of
glass vials. The grass has been soaked in morphine.
I am scared. So is she, I think. I want to disappear. There is
no money. I am too afraid for the streets. We are running out
of speed. I cower on the mattress. She writes in her notebook.
*
I go to a junkie doctor in the Village for a prescription. I can’t
do the streets. He rubs his hands all over me. He is sweaty
despite the air conditioning and old and pale yellow and fat.
He rubs his hands up and down my arms and all over my
breasts and my neck and up and down my legs, between my
thighs. He rubs his hands all over my bare skin and all over my
clothes. I sit still. He stares at me. He watches me as he rubs
his hands all over. I am going to give you the prescription, he
says, but the next time you come you understand what I want
don’t you? I stare at him. In the office there is a desk with a
chair behind it and an examining table, the one I am sitting
on. Here, I suppose, right where I am now. Do you understand
what I want, he asks me again. I nod. I don’t know exactly
what he wants. I think in precise acts. I am going to write this
prescription now, he says, and give it to you now, he says, but
the next time you come, he says, you be sure you remember
what I want from you. I nod. I am surprised, a little confused.
I thought because he was a junkie he would want money. He
doesn’t ask for any money. I have in my pocket all the dollars
we have. He gives me the script. He kisses my hand. I don’t
want to have to go back.
*
N has on her most flamboyant scarf, like a headband. She is
carefully dressed: flare pants, a silk blouse A has bought for
her, a belt fastidiously buckled. She has gone over the details
of her appearance a hundred times. She is tired. Her face is
drawn and dirty. Her eyes are lined with black, there are deep,
dark circles under them. She is very thin. She is in constant
movement, mostly examining herself, much motion to little
purpose. She twitches with nerves on edge. A is in his usual
dark coat. It is a hot night. I am going to stay with R, not to
be alone and to be near a phone. A has thought of a way to
help us. He and N are going to rob a store: a boutique to be
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precise. N has some tools in a bag embossed with her last
name. I tell her not to use the bag. I say perhaps they should
not do this. It has been decided. N will call me when it is
done. Our phone is still dead. No one stays there alone. I will
be with poor R who does not know this is happening.
They go, I go. The hours pass. The night is long. A call
comes about 4 am. N is on her way to the Women’s House of
Detention. She will be arraigned in night court.
Night court is interminably dreary and hopeless. The halls
of justice are wide and dreary, the benches are wooden and
hard: after an hour or so, a group of women is brought out:
hookers and N, her scarf too high on her forehead, marking
how many times she has rubbed her hand across her head,
rubbed it back and forth, rubbing off sweat or as a nervous
gesture. She is exhausted by now, but she can’t sit still, even at
the head of this awful room where she waits with the others.
The others are mostly black with bouffant hairdos and vinyl
miniskirts and bare shoulders and nearly bare chests. The
others wear heavy, shiny makeup and high-heeled shoes. A
Legal-Aid lawyer comes over to me, N has pointed me out:
don’t worry, he says, she will only do six months. I am like a
demon possessed. She will not have to go to that prison, not
this night, not ever, I will not have her there. Bail is set at $500
and there are two hours before she will arrive there, go through
the maze of jails and holding cells and end up there, to be
strip-searched and raped by hands, by speculums, by doctors,
by police, by prisoners. I am in a frenzy. Bail bondsmen galore:
I go to them one after another: I call up everyone for money: I
get her out: I take her home. I go to an old friend who helped
me when I was in jail: she calls a lawyer who used to be a
prosecutor: he demands $2, 000 but she won’t do six months,
she won’t do shit. All this happens before I give a thought to
A. He eventually gets two years. He protects her. He was a
friend. Let’s hear it for that sweet pimp. We have a lot of
money to raise: have to get back to business. Can’t afford to
be squeamish.
*
The boutique, it turns out, belonged to a former lover of his,
and she is pissed. She wants him prosecuted, won’t budge. N
could have gotten away, she chatted with the police for a while
73
before they realized anything was wrong: but didn’t: wouldn’t
leave A there alone. He does two years, doesn’t implicate her
at all. We need money.
*
No more squeamishness about the streets. No more timidities.
*
Especially we try to borrow money, because we need it fast:
from old school chums: it brings rich women back near us:
near us: but we are too used, too disreputable now, for them
to want to be that close: they help a little: they eat while we
beg for coffee with hungry eyes: sometimes we get coffee. It is
bitter: school chums: rich school chums: keep N out of jail.
*
A is gone from this time on. We don’t raise bail for him. We
don’t go to court. We owe him. N is free. But we don’t think
about it now. We forget about him altogether.
*
We never sleep at the same time: one of us always has a knife.
We eat speed. We pick up tricks as fast as we can find them.
We drink as much as we can as often as we can: shot at a time
now, can’t buy our own bottles. The pace is fast. The fucks
are fast. There is no time for style or pretense. We don’t look
around, ahead, behind.
We have been going four days straight: drink, speed, fuck,
hustle, no sleep: the last night we took acid for R & R : we
walked a hundred miles in the city and rolled in the sewers:
the sun burns: we walk: we pick up what we can: bodies are
giving out, tired: we are on our way home: we get home: she
sprawls out on the mattress, I sit across the room: suddenly
she says, I see something big and black crawling on you: I say,
shit N it’s the acid you just aren’t down yet: she is quiet: she
says, I fucking see them all over: and she is right: they are all
over: huge water bugs the size of small fists: crawling
everywhere: crawling all over us, all over the room, all over
the walls. We run out into the night screaming, trying to rub
them off us, feeling them all over us, inside our clothes,
up our legs, in our hair: we keep shaking ourselves not knowing
where they are on us, can’t get clean, we are exhausted, we
must sleep, no matter how much we tell each other they aren’t
on us we can’t believe it, we keep inspecting each other but
74
can’t stand still long enough to really look, we keep hopping
down the streets kicking and scratching and twisting and
turning, we feel them creeping and crawling, we bang on poor
R ’s door, she lets us in, we vibrate from the acid for days.
*
An exterminator has put a pink powder all around the storefront. The water bugs now crawl around all pink. It is a spectacular effect. Eventually they die but nothing keeps them
out. Especially they drown in coffee cups. The neighbors say
they are coming back. Hey puta we coming. There is no money.
The phone is dead. The walls crawl with pink water bugs. The
heat hangs in the air like fire. In the bright glare of the day we
pick up Jimmy. He is a masseur. He is thick and squat with
muscles, black. He has no teeth. He comes to live with us, to
protect us. N says I have to fuck him because I found him. I
say I will because the neighbors are going to kill us: Jimmy
brings his cat: sometimes she kills water bugs: other times they
die in the coffee: I have to fuck Jimmy several times a day: it is
not fun: N goes in and out: one night Jimmy disappears, N
and I go out, we come back and everything has been smashed
like maniacs have been through with axes: I say they are going
to kill us, we have to get out of here: N says we have no
money: I say we get it from one of our rich school chums, I say
we call her and stick it to her: N is mortified by the implied or
actual rudeness in this but I don’t care: I call her: I make her
come down to where we are: I say we are going to die here
unless she puts us up in a hotel until the end of the summer: I
make her take us to the hotel and pay for a room. We move
in. I think we sleep for days. *
The room has one window that opens on an air shaft. It is hot
and stuffy. It has one closet. It has a sink. It has a very large
in the brown. The bed has a bedspread, brown with a lot of
yellow. There are two shabby chairs, a small desk, a telephone
extension. Down the hall is the bathroom, the showers. The
halls are grand: not plush but wide, marble floors, huge
window at one end. We are off in a far distant end, narrow, as far
away from the huge window as one could be. The woman next
door asks us if we are on the circuit. I ask what circuit. The junkie
75
circuit, you know, she says, Tangier, Morocco, Marseilles,
New York, Hong Kong. I say, no, we are not on that circuit.
Our door stays open, for air.
The hotel is famous. Thomas Wolfe lived there. There are
many kinds of rooms, suites for the rich and famous: rock
groups stay there: and the maid tells us that down this very
hall an old movie actor wrote his autobiography.
There is a rug on the floor too, brown with a lot of yellow
in it.
Everything is dingy in our room: but the hall is grand. So is
the elevator. So is the traffic: money and drugs.
N is bleeding again: it stops and it starts. We use our school
chums more. They come here more. We are cleaner, calmer.
We get dinners and various dates from them: they set things
up: N needs a camera to shoot some footage, we are broke,
the store requires a huge deposit, an old school chum finds a
woman friend of hers for N to have dinner with. They pretend
it is just regular life, like they lead: except they breathe faster.
There are things we have learned: principles we have discerned: now we let the men know we want each other, they can watch. We hold each other on the huge bed, we make love
with each other: the men watch, the men pay: sometimes the
men fuck but we can o
verwhelm them and they go soft, impotent: we have learned certain principles: we kiss each other, we tease, we hold out the possibility, we get dinner first, we
get cash first, we get breakfast after: they are content to sit in
the same room: sleep in the same bed: to be able to say they were
there, it happened to them. N bleeds. We touch each other. A
man watches. A man pays. It is easier on us. We use the women
for money more and more: it is more artful: there is less sex.
When a man is not there, or another woman, we just sleep.
We make love, the man pays, the man watches, or there is
just the hint that we will and he pays.
The footage gets shot.
We fuck less: N still bleeds: some nights we can’t tell what
the man will do: it is always a game of nerves: we play him: it
is a game of skill: we do what’s necessary: we start out playing
our game not his: he still gets in, still gets the fuck if he wants
it bad enough: N bleeds. Anyone we know we use for money.
We find their weakness. We use them for what we need. We
76
fuck their minds. We play with them any way we can: we take
what we can get: but now we are selling something different,
not the fuck but the idea of two women together, the promise,
the suggestion. It turns out even more men are buyers.
We take acid, take mescaline, drink vodka. The camera
breaks. We sit in a bar, 10 am, and start drinking with the
$200 we have managed to collect. By 4 pm there is almost no
money left. We are writing a letter to the Beatles to ask for
money. We are drinking vodka martinis. We spill them all
over the letter we have just finished and watch the liquid wash
away the ink.
We go to an artists’ colony. I am going to read poems. N is
going to talk about the film. We want them to give us money.
It is in upstate New York, rural, trees, air, the moon. We get
there but instead of reading and talking we drop acid. We
spend the next two days driving all over with two school
chums, one of whom is not tripping, one of whom is having a
bad trip, climbs under the van we have, won’t come out, we
drive to hayfields to sleep, we drive to the ocean, we undress,
we swim, N raises herself out of the roof that opens in the van