couldn’t breathe so I went to a barber and I got m y hair cut off,
almost shaved like at Dachau so I’d be able to breathe, so m y
hair w ouldn’t m ix with his, so there’d be less hair, I got
dressed, I found some change, I was scared, I didn’t know
what would happen to me, I told the man to take all m y hair
off, keep cutting, keep cutting, shorter, less, keep cutting,
shave it shorter, I just couldn’t stand all the hair in m y face; but
it didn’t get no cooler and I’d lie still, perfectly still, on m y
back, m y eyes open, and he’d fuck me. He didn’t need no
rope. Y ou understand— he didn’t need no rope. Y ou understand the dishonor in that— he didn’t need no rope and God just watched and it was your standard issue porn, just another
stag film with a man fucking a woman too stupid or too near
dead to be somewhere else; a little ripe, a little bruised; eyes
glazed over, open but empty; I would just lie there for him and
he didn’t need no rope. We was married. I don’t think rape
exists. What would it be? D o you count each time separate;
and the blank days, they do count or they don’t?
E IG H T
In March 1973
(Age 26)
I was born in 1946 in Camden, N ew Jersey, down the street
from Walt Whitman’s house, Mickle Street, but m y true point
o f origin, where I came into existence as a sentient being, is
Birkenau, sometimes called Auschwitz II or The W omen’s
Cam p, where we died, m y family and I, I don’t know what
year. I have a sense memory o f the place, I’ve always had it
although o f course when I was young I didn’t know what it
was, where it was, w hy it was in m y mind, the place, the
geography, the real place, the w ay it was, it’s partial in my
mind but solid, the things I see in my mind were there, they’re
pushed back in my mind, hard to get at, behind a wall o f time
and death. Everything that matters about me begins there. I
remember it, not like a dream and it’s not something I made up
out o f books— when I looked at the books I saw what I already
had seen in m y mind, I saw what I already knew was there. It’s
the old neighborhood, familiar, a far-back memory, back
before speech or rationality or self-justification, it’s w ay back
in m y mind but it’s whole, it’s deep down where no one can
touch it or change it, it can’t be altered by information or
events or by wishful thinking on m y part. It’s m y hidden heart
that keeps beating, m y real heart, the invisible one that no
physician can find and death can’t either. N ot everyone was
burned. At first, they didn’t have crematoria. They pushed all
the bodies into huge mass graves and put earth on top o f them
but the bodies exploded from the gases that come when bodies
decompose; the earth actually heaved and pulled apart, it
swelled and rose up and burst open, and the soil turned red. I
read that in a book and I knew right aw ay that it was true, I
recognized it as if I had seen it, I thought, yes, that seems more
familiar to me than the crematoria, it was as i f m y soul had
stayed above and watched and I saw the earth buckle and the
red come up through the soil. I always knew what Birkenau
was like from the parts o f it I have in m y mind. I knew it was
gray and isolated and I knew there were low , gray huts, and I
knew the ground was gray and flat, and it was winter, and I
knew there were pine trees and birch trees, I see them in the
distance, upright, indifferent, a monstrous provocation,
G o d ’s beauty, He spits in your face, and there were huge piles
o f things, so big you thought they were hills o f earth but they
were shoes, you can see from currently published photos that
they were shoes— the piles were higher than the buildings, and
there was a huge, high arch. I have never liked seeing pictures
o f the A rc de Triom phe in Paris, because they always make me
feel sad and scared, because at Birkenau there was a high arch
that looked like a sculpture against that desolate sky. Y o u
think in your mind the yellow star is one thing— you make it
decorous and ornamental, you give it esthetic balance and
refinement, a fineness, a delicacy, maybe in your mind you
model it on silver Stars o f David you have seen— but it was
really a big, ugly thing and you couldn’t make it look nice. I
think I was only waist-high. Y ou don’t know much if yo u ’re a
kid. I remember the women around me, masses o f wom en, I
held someone’s hand but I don’t think it was someone I even
knew, I can’t see any faces really because they are all taller and
they were covered, heavy coats, kerchiefs on their heads,
layers o f clothes fouled by dirt, but if yo u ’re a child yo u ’re like
a little cub, a puppy, and you think yo u ’re safe if yo u ’re
huddled with women. T h ey’re warm . They keep you warm .
Y o u want to be near them and you believe in them without
thinking. I wasn’t there too long. We walked somewhere, we
waited, we walked, it was over. I’ve seen birch trees here in the
United States in the mountains but I have always transposed
them in my mind to a different landscape: that low, flat,
swam py ground past the huts. Birch trees make me feel sad
and lonely and afraid. There’s astrologers who say that if you
were born when Pluto and Saturn were traveling together in
Leo, from 1946 to about the middle o f 1949, you died in one o f
the concentration camps and you came right back because you
had to, you had an urgency stronger than death could ever be,
you had to come back and set it right. Justice pushed you into a
new wom b and outrage, a blind fury, pushed you out o f it
onto this earth, this place, this zoo o f sickies and sadists. Y ou
are an avenging angel; you have a debt to settle; you have a
headstart on suffering. I consider Birkenau my birthplace. I
consider that I am a living remnant. I consider that in 1946 I
emerged, I burst out, I was looking for trouble and ready for
pain, I wanted to kill Nazis, I was born to kill Nazis, I wasn’t
some innocent born to play true love and real romance, the
parlor games that pass for life. I got these fucked-up compassionate parents who believed in law and kindness and blah
blah. I got these fucked-up peaceful Jew s. I got these fucked-
up civilized parents. I was born a girl. I have so many planets in
Libra that I try to be fair to flies and I turn dog shit into an
esthetic experience. Even my mother knew it was wrong. She
named me Andrea for “ manhood” or “ courage. ” It’s a b o y’s
name; the root, andros, means “ man” in Greek. It’s “ man” in
the universal sense, too. Man. She and God joined hands to
tease me almost to death. He put brains, great hearts, great
spirits, into w om en’s bodies, to fuck us up. It’s some kind o f
sick joke. Let’s see them aspire in vain. Let’s see them fucked
into triviality and insignificance. Let’s see them try to lose at
ch
eckers and tic-tac-toe to boys, year in, year out, to boys so
stupid He barely remembered to give them an I. Q. at all, He
forgot their hearts, He forgot their souls, they have no warrior
spirit or sense o f honor, they are bullies and fools; let’s make
each one o f the boys imperial louts, let’s see these girls banged
and bruised and bullied; let’s see them forced to act stupid so
long and so much that they learn to be stupid even when they
sleep and dream. And mother, handmaiden to the Lord, says
wear this, do that, don’t do that, don’t say that, sit, close your
legs, wear white gloves and don’t get them dirty, girls don’t
climb trees, girls don’t run, girls don’t, girls don’t, girls don’t;
w asn’t nothing girls actually did do o f any interest whatsoever. It’s when they get you a doll that pees that you recognize the dimensions o f the conspiracy, its institutional reach, its
metaphysical ambition. Then God caps it all o ff with
Leviticus. I have to say, I was not amused. But the meanest
was m y daddy: be kind, be smart, read, think, care, be
excellent, be serious, be committed, be honest, be someone,
be, be, be; he was the cruelest jo k er alive. There’d be “ Meet
the Press” on television every Sunday and they’d interview the
Secretary o f State or Defense or a labor leader or some foreign
head o f state and w e’d discuss the topic, m y daddy and me:
labor, Suez, integration, law, literacy, racism, poverty; and
I’d try to solve them. We would discuss what the President
should do and what I would do if I were Secretary o f State. He
would listen to me, at eight, at ten, at twelve, attentively, with
respect. The cruelty o f the man knew no bounds. Y ou have a
right to hate liberals; they make promises they cannot keep.
They make you believe certain things are possible: dignity in
the world, and freedom; but especially equality. They make
equality seem as if it’s real. It’s a great sorrow to grow up. The
w orld ain’t liberal. I always wanted excellence. I wanted to
attain it. I didn’t start out with apologies. I thought: I am. I
wanted to m ix with the world, hands on, me and it, and I’d
have courage. I w asn’t born nice necessarily but nurture
triumphed over nature and I wanted to be the good citizen
who could go from my father’s living room out into the
world. I got all fucked up with this peace stuff—how you can
make it better, anything better, if you care, if you try. I didn’t
want to kill Nazis, or anyone. In this sense I knew right from
w rong; it was an immutable sense o f right and wrong; that
killing killed the one doing the killing and that killing killed
something precious and good at the center o f life itself. I knew
it was wrong to take an individual life, mine, and turn it into a
weapon o f destruction; I knew I could and I said no I w on’t; I
could have; I was born with the capacity to kill; but m y father
changed m y heart. I said, it’s Nazism you have to kill, not
Nazis. People die pretty easy but cruelty doesn’t. So you got
to find a w ay to go up against the big thing, the menace; you
have to stop it from being necessary— you have to change the
world so no one needs it. Y ou have to start with the love you
have to give, the love that comes from your own heart; and
you can’t accept any terror o f the body, restrictions or
inhibitions or totalitarian limits set by authoritarian types or
institutions; there’s nothing that can’t be love, there’s nothing
that has to be mean; you take the body, the divine body, that
their hate disfigures and destroys, and you let it triumph over
murder and rage and hate through physical love and it is the
purest democracy, there is no exclusion in it. Anything,
everything, is or can be communion, I-Thou. Anything,
everything, can be transformed, transcended, opened up,
turned from opaque to translucent; everything’s luminous,
lambent, poignant, sweet, filled with nuance and grace,
potentially ecstatic. I thought I had the power and the passion
and the will to transform anything, me, now, with the simple
openness o f m y own heart, a heart pretty free o f fear and
without prejudice against life; a heart loving life. I didn’t have
a fascist heart or a bourgeois heart; I just had this heart that
wanted freedom. I wanted to love. I wanted; to love. I never
grasped the passive part where if you were a girl you were
supposed to be loved; he picks you; you sit, wait, hope, pray,
don’t perspire, pluck your eyebrows, be good meaning you
fucking sit still; then the boy comes along and says give me
that one and you respond to being picked with desire, sort o f
like an apple leaping from the tree into the basket. I was me,
however, not her, whomever; some fragile, impotent,
mentally absent person perpetually on hold, then the boy
presses the button and suddenly the line is alive and you get to
say yes and thank you. In Birkenau it didn’t matter what was
in your gorgeous heart, did it; but I didn’t learn, did I? I
wanted to love past couples and individuals and the phoney
baloney o f neurotic affairs. I didn’t want small personalities
doing fetishized carnal acts. I thought adultery was the
didn’t think adultery could survive one day o f real freedom. I
didn’t think it was bad— I thought it was moronic. I wanted a
grand sensuality that encompassed everyone, didn’t leave
anyone out. I wanted it dense and real and full-blooded and
part o f the fabric o f every day, every single ordinary day, all
the time; I wanted it in all things great and small. I wanted the
world to tremble with sexual feeling, all stirred up, on the
edge o f a thrill, riding a tremor, and I wanted a tender embrace
to dissolve alienation and end war. I wanted the w orld’s colors
to deepen and shine and shimmer and leap out, I didn’t want
limits or boundaries, not on me, not on anyone else either; I
didn’t want life flat and dull, a line drawing done by some
sophomore student at the Art League. I thought w e’d fuck
power to death, because sexual passion was the enemy o f
power, and I thought that every fuck was an act o f passion and
compassion, beauty and faith, empathy and an impersonal
ecstasy; and the cruel ones, the mean ones, were throwbacks,
the old order intransigent and refusing to die, but still, the
fuck, any fuck, brought someone closer to freedom and power
closer to dying. And yes, the edge is harrowing and poverty is
not kind and power ain’t moved around so easy, especially not
by some adolescent girl in heat, and I fell very low over time,
very low, but I had devotion to freedom and I loved life. I
w asn’t brought low in the inner sanctum o f m y belief; until
after being married, when I was destroyed. I remembered
Birkenau. I wished I could find my w ay back to the line, you
wait, you walk, you wait, you walk some more, it’s over. I
know that’s ignorant; I am ignorant. I wanted peace and I had
love in m y heart and being hurt didn’t mean anything except I
wasn't dead yet, still alive, still having to live today and right
now; being hurt didn’t change anything, you can’t let fear
enter in. According to the w ay I saw life, I incarnated peace.
M aybe not so some understand it but in m y heart I was peace;
and I never thought any kind o f making love was war; make
love, not war; and when it was war on me I didn’t see it as such
per se; war was Vietnam. I never thought peace was bland; or I
should be insipid or just wait. Peace has its own drive and its
own sense o f time; you need backbone; and it wants to win—
not to have the last word but to be the last word; it’s fierce,
peace is; not coy, not pure, not simpering or whimpering, and
maybe it’s not always nice either; and I was a real peace girl
who got a lot o f it wrong maybe because staying alive was
hard and I did some bad things and it made me hard and I got
tough and tired, so tired, and nasty, sometimes, mean:
unworthy. W hy’d Gandhi put those young girls in his bed and
make them sleep there so he could prove he wouldn’t touch
them and he could resist? I never got nasty like that, where I
used somebody else up to brag I was someone good. There’s
no purity on this earth from ego or greed and I never set out to
be a saint. I like everything being all mixed up in me; I don’t
have quarrels with life like that; I accept w e’re tangled. In my
heart, I was peace. Once I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker,
maybe I was eighteen. It showed a bunch o f people carrying
picket signs that said “ Peace. ” And it showed one buxom
woman carrying a sign that said “ Piece. ” I hated that. I hated
it. But you cither had to be cowed, give in to the pig shit
behind that cartoon, or you had to disown it, disown the
dumb shit behind it. I disowned it all. I disowned it without
exception. I kept none o f it. I pushed it o ff me. I purged m y
world o f it. I disavowed anyone who tried to put it on me.