need, tired of the repetition, you learn by rote, slowly, like in
the third grade, not tone deaf but no genius of your own: the
notes, one by one, so you can get hard. You get hard. Now
85
you’re not pretending. I don’t know how it will end. I am
waiting for it to end. I know what I want: to get to the end:
you will tell me when the game is finished: is it over? are you
hard?
*
He is normal now, not impotent and suicidal, but in a rage:
my normal, human husband who gets hard: he is in a rage,
like a mad dog. This isn’t what I meant. I love life so fiercely,
so desperately: I thought only good could come of it: sex is so
easy: there is an abundance of it, without limits: I teach him
what I know: he needed a little more confidence, so reader, I
married him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Believe me, not
them: the normal, human husband with normal, human rage:
little girl saints of sex with your philosophy, little darlings,
when what’s inside comes out, be somewhere hidden, chaste,
out of reach: it spilled over: it was rage: it was hate: it was sex:
he got hard: he beat me until I couldn’t even crawl: it costs me
nothing, and there is an endless abundance of it, with no limits:
I try to get away: how it will end, I don’t know. Until now I
devoured, devoured, I loved life so fiercely: now I think nothing
good can come of it: why didn’t someone say— oh, girl, it isn’t
so easy as it seems, be gone when what’s inside comes out:
impotence and suicide aren’t the worst things. His face isn’t
sad now: he is flowering outside, to others, they have never
seen him fatter, cockier, no grief, no little boy: the human
husband, all hard fuck and fists: and I cower: reader, I married
him: I saved him: how it will end, I don’t know.
*
You can see what he needed, you can see what I did. It’s no
secret now, not me alone. I got inside it when it was still a
secret. It is everywhere now. Watch the men at the films. Sneak
in. Watch them. See how they learn to tie the knots from the
pictures in the magazines. Impotent and suicidal. I taught him
not to be afraid to hurt: me. What’s inside comes out. I love
life so fiercely, so desperately, and I devour, devour, and how
it will end, I don’t know. Sex is so easy, and it costs me nothing,
and there is an endless abundance of it, with no limits: and I
devour, devour. I saved him. How it will end, I don’t know.
There will be a film called Snuff.
86
I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that
nothing good can come of it: I mean the
physical facts of life, the sun, the grass,
youth. It’s a much more terrible vice than
cocaine, it costs me nothing, and there is an
endless abundance of it, with no limits: and
I devour, devour. How it will end, I don’t know.
Pasolini
*
Sad, gentle face, comic. Unconsummated. My virgin. My little
boy. My innocent. Suicidal and impotent. I want you to know
what I know, being ground under: hard thighs: hard sweat:
hard cock: kisses to the marrow of the bone. I love life so
fiercely, so desperately. It costs me nothing, and there is an
endless abundance of it, with no limits, and I devour, devour. I
teach you. You get hard. You pulverize human bones. Finally I
know how it will end. Oh, I run, I run, little boy.
87
Coitus as punishment for the happiness of
being together.
Kafka
*
I lived another year in that Northern city of Old Europe. Terror
wipes you clean if you don’t die. I took everyone I liked: with
good cheer, a simple equanimity. There were houseboats,
saunas, old cobbled streets, huge mattresses on floors with
incense burning: long-haired boys and short-haired girls: I
knew their names: something about them: there was nothing
coming from me or I did nothing: it was different: I had many
of them, whoever I wanted. I read books and took drugs. I
was happy.
I started to write, sentences, paragraphs, nothing whole. But
I started to write.
Slowly I saw: coitus is the punishment for being a writer
afraid of the cold passion of the task. There is no being together, just the slow learning of solitude. It is the discipline, the art. I began to learn it.
*
I lived in the present, slowly, except for tremors of terror,
physical memories of the beatings, the blood. I took drugs. I
took who I wanted, male or female. I was alert. I read books. I
listened to music. I was near the water. I had no money. I
watched everyone. I kept going. I would be alone and feel
happy. It frightened me. Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being alone. One can’t face being happy. It is too extreme.
*
I had to be with others, compulsion. I was afraid to be alone.
Coitus is the punishment for the fear of being alone. I took
who I liked, whatever moved me, I felt it in my gut. It was
fine. But only solitude matters. Coitus is the punishment for cowardice: afraid of being alone, in a room, in a bed, on this earth: coitus is the punishment for being a woman: afraid to be alone.
*
88
I couldn’t be alone. I took whoever made me feel something, -a
funny longing in the gut or crotch. I liked it. I took hashish,
acid. Not all the time, on special days, or on long afternoons. I
took long saunas. I was happy. I read books. I started to write.
I began to need solitude. It started like a funny longing in the
gut or crotch. Coitus was the punishment for not being able to
stand wanting solitude so much.
*
I gave up other lovers. I wanted solitude. It took a few years to
get faithful. Coitus was the punishment for a breach of faith.
*
I came back to New York City, the Lower East Side. I lived
alone, poor, writing. I was raped once. It punished me for the
happiness of being myself.
*
I am alone, in solitude. I can almost run my fingers through it.
It takes on the rhythmic brilliance of any passion. It is like
holy music, a Te Deum. Coitus is the punishment for not
daring to be happy.
*
I learn the texture of minutes, how hours weave themselves
through the tangled mind: I am silent. Coitus is the punishment
for running from time: hating quiet: fearing life.
*
I betray solitude. I get drunk, pick up a cab driver. Coitus is
the punishment.
*
I write day in and day out, night after night, alone, in the quiet
of this exquisite concentration, this exquisite aloneness, this
extreme new disordering of the senses: solitude, my beloved.
Coitus is the punishment for not daring to be extreme enough,
for compromising, for conforming, for giving in. Coitus is the
punishment for not daring to disorder the senses enough: by
knowing them wi
thout mediation. Coitus is the punishment
for not daring to be original, unique, discrete.
*
I am not distracted, I am alone, I love solitude, this is passion
too. I am intensely happy. When I see people, I am no less
alone: and I am not lonely. I concentrate when I write: pure
concentration, like life at the moment of dying. I dream the
89
answers to my own questions when I sleep. I am not tranquil,
it is not my nature, but I am intensely happy. Coitus is the
punishment for adulterating solitude.
*
I forget the lovers of Europe. They don’t matter. The terror
still comes, it envelops me, solitude fights it tooth and nail,
solitude wins. I forget what I have done on these streets here.
It doesn’t matter. I concentrate. I am alone. The solitude is
disruption, extremity, extreme sensation in dense isolation.
This is a private passion, not for exhibit. Coitus is the
punishment for exhibiting oneself: for being afraid to be happy
in private, alone. Coitus is the punishment for needing a human
witness. I write. Solitude is my witness.
*
Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being. Solitude is
the end of punishment.
I write. I publish.
*
Coitus is punishment. I write down everything I know, over
some years. I publish. I have become a feminist, not the fun
kind. Coitus is punishment, I say. It is hard to publish. I am a
feminist, not the fun kind. Life gets hard. Coitus is not the
only punishment. I write. I love solitude: or slowly, I would
die. I do not die.
Coitus is punishment. I am a feminist, not the fun kind.
90
Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les betes
l'ont mange.
(Don’t look for my heart anymore; the beasts*
have eaten it. )
Baudelaire
*
He was a subtle piece of slime, big open pores, hair hanging
over his thick lip onto his teeth, faintly green. He smiled. I
sat. Oh yes, and I smiled. Tentatively. Quietly. Eyes slanted
down, then up quickly, then away, then down, nothing elaborate. Just a series of sorrowful gestures that scream female.
Gray was in the air, a thick paste. It was a filter over
everything or just under my eyelids. The small table was too
dirty, rings of wet stuck to it, and the floor had wet mud on it
that all the people had dragged in before they sat down to
chatter. I picked this place because I had thought it was clean.
I went there almost every day, escaping the cold of my desolate
apartment. Now the tabletop was sordid and I could smell
decay, a faint acrid cadaver smell.
The rain outside was subtle and strange, not pouring down
in sheets but just hanging, solid, in thin static veils of wet
suspended in the air, soaking through without the distracting
noise of falling hard. The air seemed empty, and then another
sliver of wet that went from the cement on the sidewalk right
up into the sky would hit your whole body, at once, and one
walked or died.
I had nothing to keep the rain off me, just regular cotton
clothes, the gnarled old denim of my time and age, with holes,
frayed not for effect but because they were old and tired, and
what he saw when he saw me registered in those ugly eyes
hanging over those open pores. Her, It, She, in color, 3-D,
fearsome feminista, ballbuster, woman who talks mean, queer
arrogant piece. But also: something from Fellini, precisely a
mountain of thigh, precisely. I could see the mountain of thigh
hanging in the dead center of his eyes, and the slight drip of
saliva. Of course, he was very nice.
* the stupids
91
Coffee came, and cigarettes piled up, ashtray after ashtray,
two waitresses with huge red lips and short skirts running back
and forth emptying them, and the smell of the smoke got into
my fingers and into my hair and on my clothes and the rain
outside even began to carry it off when it was too much for
the room we were in. The empty packs were crumpled, and I
began pulling apart the filters, strand by strand, and rolling
the matchbooks into tight little wads and then opening them
up all softened and tearing them into little pieces, and then I
began to tear the fetid butts into pieces by tearing off the paper
and rolling the burnt tobacco between my palms which were
tight and wretched with strain and perspiration and I was
making little piles of torn papers and torn matchbooks and
torn cigarette packs but not touching the cellophane (he was
talking), and making the little piles as high as I could and
watching them intently, staring, as if their construction were a
matter of symmetry and perfection and indisputable necessity
and it required concentration and this was my job. During this
we talked, of course mostly he talked, because I was there to
be talked to, and have certain things explained, and to be
corrected, especially to be set right, because I had gone all
wrong, gotten all Dostoyevsky-like in the land of such writing
as “ Ten New Ways to Put on Lipstick” and “ The Truth About
How to be Intimate with Strangers. ” Coitus was what?
In the rain we walked to another restaurant, to dinner. Oh,
he had liked me. I had done all right.
*
When I walked into the coffeehouse, he knew me right away.
The mountain of thigh, not any other kind of fame. The place
was wet, smelly, crowded, and I had picked it, it resembled me,
not modest, dank, a certain smell of decay. The other women
huddled themselves in, bent shoulders, suddenly, treacherously lowered heads that threatened to fall off their necks, tight little legs wrapped together like Christmas packages,
slumping down, twisting in, even the big ones didn’t dare
spread out but instead held their breath, pulled in their
tummies, scrunched their mouths, used their shoulders to cover
their chests, crossed their ankles, crossed their feet, crossed
their legs, kept their hands lying quietly under the tabletops,
didn’t show teeth, moved noiselessly, melted in with the gray
9Z
and the mud and the wet, except for some flaming lips: and no
monumental laughs, no sonorous discourse, no loud epis-
temology, no boom boom boom: the truth. I wanted to
whimper and contract, fold up, shrivel to some version of
pleasing nothing, sound the call: it’s all finished, she gives up, no
one’s here, out to lunch, empty, smelly, noiseless, folded up.
But I would have had to prepare, study, start earlier in the
day, come from a warmer apartment into a cleaner coffeehouse, be dry, not wear the ancient denim articles of an old faith, witnesses, remembrances, proofs, evidences of times without such silly rules. He stood, nodded, smiled, pointed to the seat, I sat, he gave me a cigarette, I smoked, I drank coffee, he
talked, I listened, he talked, I built castles out of paper on
tabletops, he talked, oh, I was so quiet, so soft, all brazen
thigh to the naked eye, to his dead and ugly eye, but i
nside I
wanted him to see inside I was all aquiver, all tremble and
dainty, all worried and afraid, nervy and a pale invalid, all
pathetic need contaminated by intellect that was like wild
weeds, wild weeds massively killing the gentle little flower
garden inside, those pruned and fragile little flowers. This I
conveyed by being quiet and tender and oh so quiet, and I
could see my insides all running with blood, all running with
knife cuts and big fuck bruises, and he saw it too. So he took
me to dinner in the rain.
*
The bathroom was in the back, painted a pink that looked
brown and fungoid, and I got to it by heaving myself over the
wet boots strewn like dead bodies in my way, sliding along the
wet puddles, touching strange shoulders delicately like God
just for a hint of balance. The smoke heralded me, shrouded
me, trailed behind me: in front, around, behind, a column of
fire hiding me. The walls in the little room were mud and the
floor was mud and the seat of the toilet had some bright red
dots and green splotches and the mirror had a face looking
out, destitute. I was bleeding. The rain and bleeding. The
muscles in my back caved in toward each other furiously and
then shot out, repelled. A small island under my stomach beat,
a drum, a pulse, spurting blood. Oh, mother. I took thick paper
towels meant for drying big wet hands and covered the toilet
seat and pushed my old denim down to the slobbering floor. I
93
waited for life to pass, for the man to go away, for the blood
to stop, to grow old and die. Four beige-stained walls, enough
naked flesh hitting the cold edge of the cold air to keep me
awake and alive, and time passing. Then I went out because I
had to, because I wasn’t going to die there, past the kitchen, a
hole in the wall, burning oil hurled in the air by a cook who
bounced from pot to pot, singing, sauteing, stirring, draining,
humming. I walked through all the same tables, this time my
hands straight down by my side like other people, and I sat
down again. The piles of matchbook paper covered the table-
top, and he was slumped and disbelieving.