wall had become an illusion, a mere hallucination of the solid,
a phantom, a chimera, an oasis born of delirium for the poor
fool who thirsted for a home, shelter, a place inside not outside,
a place distinctly different from the cold streets of displacement
and dispossession, a place barricaded from weather and wind
and wet.
Each day— each and every day— I walked, six hours, eight
hours, so as not to be poisoned and die. Each day there was no
way to stay inside and also to breathe because the wind did
not move the fumes any more than it moved the cold: both
were permanent and penetrating, staining the lungs, bruising
the eyes. Each day, no matter how cold or wet or ugly or dusty
or hot or wretched, the windows were open and I walked:
anywhere: no money so there was little rest: few stops: no
bourgeois indulgences: just cement. And each night, I crawled
back home, like a slug, dragging the day’s fatigue behind me,
dreading the cold open exposed night ahead. In my room,
where I worked writing, the windows were never closed because the stench and poison were too thick, too choking. After midnight, I could close two windows in the living room just
so no one went in it and just so they were open again by 6
am when the cooks heated up the grease to begin again.
Sometimes, in my room, writing, my fingers were jammed
stiff from the cold. Sometimes the typewriter rebelled, too
cold to be pushed along. I found a small electric heater, and
if I placed it just right, out of the wind but not so close to
me that my clothes would burn, my fingers would regain
feeling and they would begin to bend subtly and hit the right
keys, clumsy, slow, but moving with deliberation. Less
numbed, they moved, a slow dance of heroic movement:
words on a page.
Each night, until dawn was finally accomplished, fully alive
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and splendid, I wrote, and then I would crawl, broken-hearted
and afraid of dying, to one small distant room, the size of a
large closet, where the fumes were less, and I would sleep on
the floor on an old Salvation Army mattress with springs that
some reformed alcoholic had never quite finished under an
open window. I would dream: oh, Freud, tell me, what could it
mean: of cold, of stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Morbid
violences and morbid defeats: cement, rain, wind, ice. Time
would pass: I would tremble: I would wake up screaming:
driven back to sleep to be warmer, I would dream of cold, of
stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Then, it would be time
to wake up. I would be tired and trembling, so tired. I would
walk, six hours, eight hours. After the first two winters I never
got warm. Even in the hell of tenement heat, I never got warm.
I dreaded cold like other people are afraid of being tortured:
could they stand it, would they tell, would they beg, would
they die first right away, struck down by dread, would they
dirty their pants, would they beg and crawl. I wanted to surrender but no one would accept my confession and finish me off.
He kissed me against my will and then I walked home,
slowly, in the rain, wet.
My love, the boy I lived with, lay sleeping, curled up in a ball,
fetal, six feet, blond, muscled, and yet his knees were drawn
up to his chest and his sweet yellow curls fell like a two-year-
old’s over his pale, drawn face, and his skin was nearly translucent, the color of ice spread out over great expanses of earth.
He was dressed in layers of knitted wool, thermal pants and
shirts, sweatshirts: we always wore all we had inside. The quilt
with a wool blanket on top of it had shifted its place and his
knees and face were brought together, his hands lost somewhere between them. I sat watching him, lost, in this room of his. He was on brown sheets. The radiator clanged and
chugged: the noise it made was almost deafening, only in this
room. There were big windows, and a fire escape splayed out
under them going down to the treacherous street. There was a
big desk buried under piles of papers. There were books,
thrown, strewn, left for months open at one place so that the
binding broke and the page itself seemed pressed to death.
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There were books in all stages of being opened and closed
the seams of the binding with hand-scribbled notes, yellowing.
The books were everywhere in great piles and clusters, under
typewriter paper that simply spread like some wild growth in
moist soil, under heaps of dirty clothes, under old newspapers
that were now documents of an older time, under shoes and
socks, under discarded belts, under old undershirts, under long-
forgotten soda bottles not quite empty, under glasses ringed
with wet, under magazines thrown aside in the second before
sleep. Oh, my love could sleep. In the ice, in wind, in rain, in
fire, my love could sleep. I watched him, content, a goldenhaired child, some golden infant, peaceful, at ease in the world of coma and unremembered dreams. It was Christian sleep, we
both agreed, mostly Protestant, impervious to guilt or worry
or pain, Christ had died for him. To my outsider’s eye it was
grace. It soothed, it was succor, it was an adoring visitor, a
faithful friend, it loved and rested him, and he knew no suffering that withstood its gentle solace. I had seen the same capacity for sleep in persons less kind, one was born to it, the
great and deep and easy sleep reserved for those not meant to
remember.
I sat on the other side of the room where he slept, in a
typing chair bought in the cheapest five and dime, slightly built,
perilous, covered in cat hair. His desk was huge, an old, used
table, big enough to hold the confusion, which, regardless,
simply billowed over its edges and onto the floor. The ground
between the typing chair and his heavy, staid double bed was a
false garden of tangle and weeds, or a minefield in the dark,
but he slept with the light on, even he never quite safe because
it was more like sleeping outside than sleeping inside. He would
never be vagabonded: never desolate and out in the cold. But I
would be, someday, putting on all the old trashy clothes, army
surplus, of these cold years, walking forever, simply settling
outside because inside was ridiculous, too silly, an insupportable idea: the absurd idea that this was a place to live.
Sleep kept him believing he had a home— somewhere, after all,
to sleep. But I spent the nights awake, I had to sit at a desk,
turn on electric lights, refer to many different and highly
important books, pace, sharpen pencils, change typewriter
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ribbons, make drafts, take notes, make phone calls, in meaningful and purposeful ways, with dignity and skill, physically inside, certainly inside. That old woman I would soon be,
always outside, sat right near me, I could smell her savage
skin, the mixture of sweat and ice, fear and filth. I already had
her sores on my feet and her bitterness in my heart. I knew
her: I was her already, carefully concealing it:
waiting for the
events between this moment and later when I would be her.
My gray hair would hang from the dirty saliva in my mouth
and I would push along some silly belongings: books no doubt,
and some writings, and maybe a frazzled cat on a leash, because
otherwise I would be desperately lonely. Between us, this old
woman and me, there was just this sweet sleeping boy, a giant
of pale beauty and barely conceivable kindness. He was at
least slightly between her and me, and all my rush to despair
was moderated by this small quiet miracle of our time together
on earth. There was nothing perfect in it: but it was gentle: for
me, the kindest love in a life of being loved too much. I sat in
the typing chair, warmed by watching him sleep that foreign
sleep of peace, I watched him and I believed in his peace and
his rest: what was impossible he made real: and then his eyes
fluttered open, and with so many different sounds in his voice,
the whole range of calling and wanting, he called me: said my
name, reached out, and I walked over and touched his hand:
and he said, you’re home, and he asked what was wrong.
And I raged. I bellowed. I howled. I was delirious with pain.
I was shrill with humiliation. I was desperate with accusation
and paranoid but defensible prophecy and acrid recrimination
against what would happen to me. To me. The insufferable
editor, the arrogance, the terms of the agreement: my fury, my
rage, my memory of my life as a woman. Nearly keening in
anguish, I told him about the cafe, the literature, the obsessed
man, the kiss.
“ You’ve done it before, ” he said quietly. And went back to
sleep.
*
You know what I meant. This is the world you live in. You’ve
done it before, he said. Oh, yes.
Shit you know what I meant.
You know what I meant.
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I am trying to pace, windows open, under the weight-of
blankets. He is sitting up on his bed, under blankets.
You know what I meant.
Oh, I do.
Some things are true. What he meant is true. I know what, I
know how, I know where, I know when, I even know why.
Oh, I do.
*
But I don’t want to.
He says my name. Please, he says, wanting me to stop.
But really, I don’t want to.
He says my name, pleading. Please, he says, please, I know,
I know, but what can you do?
But I don’t want to. I want, I say, I want, I say, to be this
human being, and I want, I say, I want, to have somebody
publish my book, I say, this simple thing, I say, I want, I want,
I say, to be treated just like a human being, I say, and I don’t
want, I say, I don’t want, I say, to have to do this. I have
nowhere else to go, no one else who will do this simple thing,
publish my book, but I don’t want to have to do this.
He says my name, softly. Please, he says, please, stop, you
must, he says, stop, because, he says, this is making me crazy,
he says, softly he calls my name, please, he says, there is
nothing to do, he says, calling my name softly and weeping,
what is there to do, what can you do?
I want, I say, I want to be treated a certain way, I say. I
want, I say, to be treated like a human being, I say, and he,
weeping, calls my name, and says please, begging me in the
silence not to say another word because his heart is tearing
open, please, he says, calling my name. I want, I say, to be
treated, I say, I want, I say, to be treated with respect, I say, as
if, I say, I have, I say, a right, I say, to do what I want to do, I
say, because, I say, I am smart, and I have written, and I am
good, and I do good work, and I am a good writer, and I have
published, and I want, I say, to be treated, I say, like someone,
I say, like a human being, I say, who has done something, I
say, like that, I say, not like a whore, not like a whore, I say,
not any more, I say, and he says, calling my name, his tongue
whispering my name, he says, calling my name and weeping,
please, I know, I know. And I say to him, seriously, someday I
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will die from this, just from this, just from being treated like a
whore, nothing else, I will die from it. And he says dryly, with
a certain self-evident truth on his side: you will probably die
from pneumonia actually. Ice hangs, ready to cut each chest. I
hesitate, then crack up. We collapse, laughing. The blankets
bury us alive.
*
He sleeps curled up blond, like a pale infant, in a room five
floors above a desperate street corner. The windows are open,
of course, and he sleeps, pale and dreamless, curled up and
calm. The stairs outside his windows, rusty and fragile, go
from our tenement heaven down to the grimmest cement. The
sirens passing that corner blast the brick building, so that we
might be in a war zone, each siren blast meaning we must get
up and run to a shelter to hide. But there is no shelter. There is
the occasional bomb by terrorist groups. Arson. Prostitutes.
Pimps. Junkies. Old men, vagabonded, drunk with running
sores, abscesses running obscene with green pus, curled up like
my love, but blocking our doorway, on the front step, on the
sidewalk under the step, behind the garbage cans, curled up
just in the middle of the cement anywhere, just wherever they
stopped. The blasts of the sirens go all day and all night and in
between them huge buses make the building shake and wild
taxis careen with screeching brakes. Cars rocket by, men with
guns and clubs sounding their sirens, flashing lights that spread
a fierce red glare into our little home: red flashing lights that
climb five flights in the space of a second and illuminate us
whatever we are doing, wherever we stand, in one second a
whorish red, turn us and everything we see and touch into a
grotesque special effect. Sirens that blare and blast and make
the brick shake, announcing fire or murder or rape or a simple
beating. Screams sometimes that come from over there, or
behind that building, or in the courtyard, or some other apartment, or the nice man with the nice dog ranting at his mother over eighty and her screaming for help. Across the street there
is a disco: parties for hire and music that makes the light
fixtures quake between the siren blasts. Sometimes a flight
above us, right near the roof, the filthy vagabonds sneak
in and hide, piss and shit, urine runs down the hall stairs
from the roof and a stench befouls even the awful air, and so
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cautiously the police are called, because the drunken, ruthless
men might be armed, might hit, might rape: might kill.
The sirens blast the air, wind runs wild like plague through
the rooms: and outside on the street men are curled up in fetal
position, all hair and scabs and running sores, feet bandaged
in newspaper and dirty torn cloth, eyes running pus, a bottle,
sometimes broken to be used as a weapon, hel
d close to the
chest. The women on the great spiked heels, almost as cold as
we are, can barely stand. They wobble from the fix, their
shoulders hang down, their eyes hang down, their skin gets
yellow or ochre, their faces are broken out in blotches, their
hair is dry and dead and dirty, their knees buckle: they are too
undressed for the cold: they can barely walk from the fix: they
have broken teeth: they have bruises and scars and great
running tracks: and all this they try to balance on four-inch,
six-inch, heels; toe-dancers in the dance of death. On this
corner mostly they are thin, too thin, hungered-away thin,
smacked-away thin: thin and yellow.
In the park down at the end of the block, not far away, the
drugs change hands. The police patrol the park: giving tickets
to those who take their dogs off the leash. In the daylight, four
boys steal money from an old man and run away, not too fast,
why bother. The dealers sit and watch. The police stroll by as
the deals are being made. Any dog off a leash is in for serious
trouble.
Ambulances drag by. Cars hopped up sounding like a great
wall falling flash by, sometimes crashing past a streetlight
and bending it forever. Buses trudge with their normal
human traffic. The cops coast by, sometimes with sirens,
sometimes flashing red, just to get past the stoplight. Fire
engines pass often, fast, serious, all siren and flashing light:
this is serious. Arson. Bad electrical wiring. Old tenements,
like flint. Building code violations. Whole buildings flame up.
We see the fires, the smoke, the red lights. First we hear the
sirens, see the flashing light with its crimson brilliance, then
we ask, is it here, is it us? We make jokes: that would warm
us up. Where are the cats? Can we get them out in time? We
have a plan, a cage we can pull down from a storage place
(we have no closets, only planks scattered above our heads,
hanging on to the edges of walls), and then we can rush
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them all in and rush out and get away: to where? He sleeps.
How?
On TV news we see that in New York City where we live