lover, slow, one who lasts, one who takes time; and this is real;
this happened and this will last forever, because I am just
someone like anyone and there’s things too bad for me and I
didn’t know you could be lying flat, blue skin with blood from
the man with the knife, to find love again, someone cutting his
w ay into you; and I’m just someone and it’s just flesh down
there, tender flesh, somewhere you barely touch and you
w ouldn’t cut it or wound it; no one would; and I have pain all
over me but pain ain’t the word because there’s no word, I
have pain on me like it’s my skin but pain ain’t the word and it
isn’t m y skin, blue with red. I’m just some bleeding thing cut
up on the floor, a pile o f something someone left like garbage,
some slaughtered animal that got sliced and sucked and a man
put his dick in it and then it didn’t matter if the thing was still
warm or not because the essential killing had been done and it
was just a matter o f time; the thing would die; the longer it
took the worse it would be; which is true. He had a good time.
He did. He got up. He was friendly. He got dressed. I wasn’t
barely alive. I barely moaned or whispered or cried. I didn’t
move. He left. The gang was somewhere outside. He left the
door open, wide open, and it was going to be a hundred years
before I could crawl enough to close it. There was daylight
streaming in. It was tom orrow. T om orrow had finally come,,
a long tom orrow, an eternal tom orrow , I’m always here, the
girl lying here, can’t run, can’t crawl, where’s freedom now,
can’t move, can’t crawl, dear God, help me, someone, help
me, this is real, help me; please, help me. I hate God; for
making the pain; and making the man; and putting me here;
under them all; anyone that wants.
S E V E N
In 1969, 1970, 1971
(Age 22, 23, 24, 2$)
Yeah, I go somewhere else, a new country, not the fucking
U . S . A ., somewhere I never been, and I’m such a sweet genius
o f a girl that I marry a boy. N ot some trash bourgie; a sweet
boy w ho’d done time; I rescued him from jail once, I took all
my money and I gave it to some uniformed pig for him; a
hostage, they had kidnapped him, taken him out o f his bed and
out o f where he lived in handcuffs in the middle o f the night
and they kept him; I mean, he just fucking disappeared and it
was that he was locked up. They let me in the prison, the great
gray walls that are built so high and so cold you can’t help but
feel anyone in them is a tragic victim buried alive. You
w ouldn’t be right but that’s what you’d feel. Cold stone, a
washed-out gray. I was a child standing there, just a girl,
money in my hand, love in my heart, telling the guard I
wanted m y friend loose and had come to pay for him to go
now, with me; I felt like a child because the prison was so big
and so cold, it was the gray o f the Camden streets, only it was
standing up instead o f all spread out flat to the horizon, it was
the streets I grew up on rising high into the sky, with sharp
right angles, an angry rectangle o f pale gray stone, a washed-
out gray, opaque, hard, solid, cold, except it wasn’t broken or
crumbling— each wall was gray concrete, thick, the thickness
o f your forearm— well, if you see someone’s forearm up
someone’s ass you know how long, how thick it is, and I seen
these things, I traveled a hard road until now; not how a
gentleman’s forearm seems draped in a shirt but what it is i f it’s
in you— a human sense o f size, chilling enough to remember
precisely, a measurement o f space and pain; once the body
testifies, you know. It was cold gray stone, an austere
monument; not a castle or a palace or an old monastery or a
stone w inery in cool hills or archaic remains o f Druids or
Romans or anything like that; it was cold; stone cold; ju st a
stands outside it holding all her money that she will ever have
in her cute little clenched fist, she’s giving it to the pigs for a
man; not her man; a man; a hero; a rebel; a resister; a
revolutionary; a boy against authority, against all shit. H e’s all
sweet inside, delicate, a tender one, and on the outside he is a
fighting boy with speed and wit, a street fighting boy, a
subversive; resourceful, ruthless, a paragon, not o f virtue but
o f freedom. Bom bs here and there, which I admire, property
not people; blow ing up sym bols o f oppression, monuments to
greed and exploitation, statues o f imperialists and w armongers; a boy brave enough to strike terror in the heart o f business as usual. I’m Andrea, I say to the guard as if it matters;
I have the money, see, here, I’ve come to get him out, he’s m y
friend, a kind, gentle, and decent boy, I say showing a moral
nature; I am trying to be a human being to the guard, I’m
always a pacifist at war with myself, I want to ignore the
uniform, the gun, inside there’s someone human, I want to act
human, be human, but how? I think about these things and I
find m yself trying; trying at strange times, in strange places,
for reconciliation, for recognition; I decide reciprocity must be
possible now, for instance, now standing at a guard booth at
the outermost concrete wall o f the concrete prison. Later,
when I am waiting for his release, I will be inside the concrete
building and all the guards and police and guns will disappear
as if it’s magic or a hallucination and I will wander the halls,
ju st wander, down in the cell blocks, all painted an oily brazen
white, the bars to the cells painted the same bright white— I
will wander; wander in the halls like a tourist looking around
at the bars, the cells, the men in the cages, the neat bunk beds;
the men will call things out in a language I don’t understand,
grinning and gesticulating, and I will grin back— I’m lost and I
walk around and I walk quite a long w ay in the halls and I
wonder if the police will shoot me if they find me and I hope I
can find my w ay back to the room where they left me and I
think about what strange lapses there are in reality, ellipses
really, or little bumps and grinds, so that there are no police in
the halls anywhere and I can just walk around: loaded down
with anxiety, because in Amerika they would shoot me if I
was wandering through; it’s like a dream but it’s no dream, the
clean white prison without police. N o w , outside, with the
guard, at the first barricade, I act nice with both fear and utopia
in m y heart. Who is the guard? Human, like me. I came for my
friend, I say, and I say his name, many times, in the strange
language as best I can, I spell it, I write it out carefully. I don’t
say: m y friend you Nazis grabbed because he’s political— my
friend who makes bombs, not to hurt anyone but to show
what’s important, people not property— my friend w ho’s
a
fraid o f nothing and no one and he has a boisterous laugh and
a shy smile— m y friend who disappeared from his home three
nights ago, disappeared, and no one knew where he was,
disappeared, gone, and you had come in the middle o f the
night and handcuffed him and brought him here, you had
hauled him out o f bed and taken him away, you had
kidnapped him from regular life, you had pushed him around,
and you didn’t have a reason, not a lawful one, not one you
knew about, not a real crime with a real indictment, it was
harassment, it was intimidation, but he’s not some timid boy,
he’s not some tepid, tame fool; he’s the real thing. He’s beyond
your law. H e’s past your reach. He’s beyond your understanding. H e’s risk and freedom outside all restraint. I never
quite knew what they arrested him for, a w ay he had o f
disappearing inside a narrative, you never could exactly pin
down a fact but you knew he was innocent. He was the pure
present, a whirling dervish o f innocence, a minute-to-minute
boy incarnating innocence, no burden o f m em ory or law,
untouched by convention. And I came looking for him,
because he was kind. He said Andrea, whispered it; he said
Andrea shy and quiet and just a little giddy and there was a
rush o f whisper across m y ear, a little whirlwind o f whisper,
and a chill up and down m y spine. It was raining; we were
outside, wet, touching just barely, maybe not even that. He
lived with his family, a boarder in a house o f strangers, cold,
acquisitive conformers who wanted money and furniture,
people with rules that passed for manners, robots wanting
things, more things, stupid things. He had to pay them m oney
to live there. I never heard o f such a thing: a son. I couldn’t go
there with him, o f course. I had no place to stay. I was outside
all night. It rained the whole night. I didn’t have anywhere to
go or anywhere to live. I had gone with a few different men,
had places to stay for a few weeks, but now I was alone, didn’t
want no one, didn’t have a bed or a room. He came to find me
and he stayed with me; outside; the long night; in rain; not in a
bed; not for the fuck; not. Rain is so hard. It stops but you stay
wet for so long after and you get cold always no matter what
the weather because you are swathed in wet cloth and time
goes by and you feel like a baby someone left in ice water and
even if it’s warm outside and the air around you heats up you
get colder anyw ay because the w et’s up against you, wrapped
around you and it don’t breathe, it stays heavy, intractable, on
you; and so rain is very hard and when it rains you get sad in a
frightened w ay and you feel a loneliness and a desolation that is
very big. This is always so once you been out there long
enough. I f yo u ’re inside it don’t matter— you still get cold and
lonely; afraid; sad. So when the boy came to stay with me in
the rain I took him to m y heart. I made him m y friend in my
heart. I pledged friendship, a whisper o f intention. I made a
promise. I didn’t say nothing; it was a minute o f honor and
affection. About four in the morning we found a cafe. It’s a
long w ay to dawn when you’re cold and tired. We scraped up
money for coffee, pulled change out o f our pockets, a rush o f
silver and slugs, and we pooled it on the table which is like
running blood together because nothing was held back and so
we were like blood brothers and when m y blood brother
disappeared I went looking for him, I went to the address
where he lived, a cold, awful place, I asked his terrible mother
where he was, I asked, I waited for an answer, I demanded an
answer, I went to the local precinct, I made them tell me,
where he was, how to find him, how much money it took to
spring him, I went to get him, he was far away, hidden away
like Rapunzel or something, a long bus ride followed by
another long bus ride, he was in a real prison, not some funky
little jail, not some county piss hole, a great gray concrete
prison in the middle o f nowhere so they can find you if you
run, nail you, and I took all m y money, m y blood, m y life for
today and tom orrow a n d : he next day and for as long as there
was, as far ahead as I can count, and I gave it like a donor for his
life so he could be free, so the piglets couldn’t put him in a
cage, couldn’t keep him there; so he could be what he was, this
very great thing, a free man, a poor boy who had become a
revolutionary man; he was pure— courage and action, a wild
boy, so wild no one had ever got near him before, I wish I was
so brave as him; he was manic, dizzying, m oving every
second, a frenzy, frenetic and intense with a mask o f joviality,
loud stories, vulgar jokes; and then, with me, quiet, shy, so
shy. I met him when he had just come back from driving an
illegal car two times in the last month into Eastern Europe,
crossing the borders illegally into Stalinist Eastern bloc
countries— I never understood exactly which side he was
on— he said both— he said he took illegal things in and illegal
people out— borders didn’t stop him, armies didn’t stop him, I
crossed borders with him later, he could cross any border; he
wore a red star he said the Soviets had given him, a star o f
honor from the government that only some party insiders ever
got, and then he fucked them over by delivering anarchy in his
forays in and out o f their fortressed imperial possessions. He
had a Russian nickname, his nom de guerre, and since his life was
subversion, an assault on society, war against all shit and all
authority, his nom de guerre was his name, the only name
anyone knew he had; no one could trace him to his fam ily, his
origins, where he slept: a son paying rent. Except me. In fact
the cops arrested him for not paying traffic tickets, thousands
o f dollars, under the conventional birth name; he ended in the
real prison resisting arrest. Even in jail he was still safely
underground, the nom de guerre unconnected to him, the body
in custody. When I married him I got his real name planted on
me by law and I knew his secrets, this one and then others,
slow ly all o f them, the revolutionary ones and the ones that
went with being a boy o f his time, his class, his parents, a boy
raised to conform, a boy given a dull, stupid name so he would
be dull and stupid, a boy named to become a man who would
live to collect a pension. I was M rs. him, the female one o f him
by law, a legal incarnation o f what he fucking hated, an actual
legal entity, because there is no Mrs. nom de guerre and no girl’s
name ever mattered on the streets or underground, not her
own real name anyway, only if she was some fox to him, a
legendary fox. I was one: yeah, a great one. I had m y time. But
it was nasty to become Mrs. his Christian names and his
daddy’s last name, the w ay they say M rs. Edw ard Jam es Fred
Smith, as if she’s not Sally
or Jane; the wedding was m y
baptism, m y naming, Mrs. what he hates, the one who needs
furniture and money, the one you come home to which means
you got to be somewhere, a rule, a law, Mrs. the law, the one
who says get the mud o ff your shoes because it’s dirtying the
floor, the one who just cleaned the fucking floor after all. I
never thought about mud in my whole fucking life but when
you clean the floor you want to be showed respect. I lived with
him before we got married; we were great street fighters; we
were great. N o one could follow the chaos we made, the
disruptions, the lightning-fast transgressions o f law; passports, borders, taking people or things here or there; street actions, explosions, provocations, property destruction, sand
in gas tanks, hiding deserters from Vietnam, the occasional
deal. We had a politics o f making well-defined chaos,
strategically brilliant chaos; then we made love. We did the
love because we had run our blood together; it was fraternal
love but between us, a carnal expression o f brotherhood in the
revolutionary sense, a long, fraternal embrace for hours or
days, in hiding, in the hours after when we wanted to
disappear, be gone from the world o f public accountability;
and he whispered Andrea, he whispered it urgently, he was
urgent and frantic, an intense embrace. He taught me to cook;
in rented rooms all over Europe he taught me to cook; a bed, a
hot plate, he taught me to make soup and macaroni and
sausages and cabbage; and I thought it meant he was specially
taking care o f me, he was m y friend, he loved me, w e’d make
love and he’d cook. H e’d learned in the N avy, mass meals
enhanced by his private sense o f humor and freedom, the jokes
he would tell in the private anarchy o f the relatively private
kitchen, more personal freedom than anywhere else, doing
anything else. He got thrown out; they tried to order him
around, especially one vicious officer, he didn’t take shit from
officers, he poured a bowl o f hot soup over the officer’s head,
he was in the brig, you get treated bad and you toughen up
or break and his rebellion took on aspects o f deadly force, he