cookies all wrapped up and bottles o f vinegar and kinds o f oil
and millions o f things; I couldn’t get used to it and I got dizzy
and upset and I ran out. I lived with the woman who helped
me when I was just a kid out o f jail— she still had the same
apartment and she fed me but I couldn’t sleep in m y old room,
her husband slept in it now, a new husband, so I slept on a sofa
in the room right outside the kitchen and there were no doors.
There was the old sofa, foam rubber covered with plaid cloth,
and books, and the door to the apartment was a few feet away.
When you came in you could turn right or left. I f you turned
left you went to the bathroom or the living room. The living
room had a big double bed in it where she slept, m y friend. If
you turned right you came to the small room that was the
husband’s and past that you came to the open space where I
slept and you came to the kitchen. The husband didn’t like me
being there but he didn’t come home enough for it to matter.
He was hard and nasty and arrogant but politically he was a
pacifist. He looked like a bum but he was rich. He ordered
everyone around and wrote poems. He was an anarchist. M y
old room had to stay empty for him, even though he had his
own apartment, or studio as he called it, and never told her
when he was showing up. A friend o f hers gave me a room for
a few months in a brownstone on West 14th Street— pretty
place, civilized, Italian neighborhood, old, with Greenwich
Village charm. The room belonged to some man in a mental
institution in Massachusetts. It was a nutty room all right.
T w o rooms really. The first w asn’t wider than both your arms
outstretched. There was a cot, a hot plate, a tiny toilet, a teeny
tiny table that tipped over i f you put too much on it. The
second was bigger and had windows but he filled it up so there
wasn’t any room left at all: a baby grand piano and
humongous plants taller than me, as tall as some trees, with
great wide thick leaves stretched out in the air. It was pure
menace, especially how the plants seemed to stretch out over
everything at night. They got bigger and they seemed to
move. Y ou could believe they were coming toward you and
sometimes you had to check. The difference between people
who have something and me is in how long a night is. I have
listened to every beat o f m y heart waiting for a night to end; I
have heard every second tick on by; I’ve heard the long pauses
between the seconds, enough time to die in, and I’ve waited,
barely able to breathe, for them to end. D aylight’s safer. The
big brown bugs disappear; they only come out at night and at
night yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so you can’t help but
see them, you don’t really always know whether they’re real
or not, you see them in your mind or out o f the corner o f your
eye, yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so if you see one slip
past the corner o f your eye in the dark you will start waiting in
fear for morning, for the light, because it chases them away
and you can’t; nothing you can do will. Same for burglars;
same for the ones who come in to get you; daylight; you wait
for daylight; you sit in the night, you light up the room with
phony light, it’s fake and dim and there’s never enough, the
glare only underlines the menace, you can see you’re beseiged
but there’s not enough light to vaporize the danger, make it
dissolve, the way sunlight does when finally it comes. Y ou can
sleep for a minute or two, or maybe twenty. Y ou don’t want
to be out any longer than that. You don’t get undressed. Y ou
stay dressed always, all the time, your boots on and a knife
right near you or in your hand. Y ou get boots with metal
reinforced tips, no matter what. Y ou don’t get under the
covers. Y ou don’t do all those silly things— milk and cookies,
Johnny Carson, now I lay me down to sleep. Y ou sit
absolutely still or lie down rigid and ready for attack and you
listen to the night m oving over the earth and you understand
that you are buried alive in it and by the grace o f random luck
you will be alive in the morning— or w on’t be— you will die or
you w on ’t and you wait to find out, you wait for the light and
when it comes you know you made it. Y ou hear things break
outside— windows, you can hear sheets o f glass collapsing, or
windows being broke on a smaller scale, or bottles dashed on
cement, thrown hard, or trash cans emptied out and hurled
against a cement wall, or you hear yelling, a man’s voice,
threat, a wom an’s voice, pain, or you hear screams, and you
hear sirens, there are explosions, maybe they are gun shots,
maybe not— and you hope it’s not coming after you or too
near you but you don’t know and so you wait, you just wait,
through every second o f the night, you wait for the night to
end. I spend the change I can find on cigarettes and orange
juice. I think as long as I am drinking orange juice I am
healthy. I think orange juice is the key to life. I drink a quart at
a time. It has all these millions o f vitamins. I like vodka in my
orange juice but I can’t get it; only a drink at a time from a man
here and there, but then I leave out the orange juice because I
can do that myself, I just get the vodka straight up, nothing
else in the glass taking up room but it’s greed because I like
rocks. I never had enough money at one time to buy a bottle. I
love looking at vodka bottles, especially the foreign ones— I
feel excited and distinguished and sophisticated and part o f a
real big world when I have the bottle near me. I think the
bottles are really beautiful, and the liquid is so clear, so
transparent, to me it’s like liquid diamonds, I think it’s
beautiful. I feel it connects me with Russia and all the Russians
and there is a dark melancholy as well as absolute jo y when I
drink it. It brings me near Chekhov and D ostoevsky. I like
how it burns the first drink and after that it’s just this splendid
warmth, as i f hot coals were silk sliding down inside me and I
get warm, m y throat, m y chest, m y lungs, the skin inside my
skin, whatever the inside o f m y skin is; it clings inside me. M y
grandparents came from Russia, m y daddy’s parents, and I try
to think they drank it but I’m pretty sure they w ouldn’t have,
they were just ghetto Jew s, it was probably the drink o f the
ones who persecuted them and drove them into running
away, but I don’t mind that anyw ay, because now I’m in
Am erika and I can drink the drink o f Cossacks and peasants if I
want; it soothes me, I feel triumphant and warm , happy too. I
have this idea about vodka, that it is perfect. I think it is
perfect. I think it is beautiful and pure and filled with absolute
power— the power o f something absolutely pure. It’s com pletely rare, this perfection. It’s more than that the pain dies or
it makes you
magic; yeah, you soar on it and you get wise and
strong by drinking it and it’s a magnificent lover, taking you
whole. But I love ju st being near it in any w ay, shape, or form.
I would like to be pure like it is and I’d like to have only pure
things around me; I wish everything I’m near or I, touch could
be as perfect. I feel it’s very beautiful and if I ever die I wouldn’t
mind having a bottle o f it buried with me, if someone would
spring for it: one bottle o f Stoli hundred proof in honor o f me
and m y times, forever. I’d drink it slow, over time. It’d make
the maggots easier to take, that’s for sure. It does that now.
They ain’t all maggots, o f course. I been with people who
matter. I been with people who achieved something in life. I
want excellence myself. I want to attain it. There’s this woman
married to a movie star, they are damned nice and damned
rich, they take me places, to parties and dinners, and I eat
dinner with them at their house sometimes and she calls me
and gets me in a cab and I go with her. I met her because I was
w orking against the Vietnam War some more. I got back to
N ew Y ork in Novem ber 1972. It was a cold winter. I had
nothing; was nothing; I had some stories I was writing; I slept
on the floor near someone’s bed in a rented room. Nixon
bombed a hospital in North Vietnam. All these civilians died. I
couldn’t really stand it. I went to my old peace friends and I
started helping out: demonstrations, phone calls, leaflets,
newspaper ads, the tricks o f the trade don’t change. I had this
idea that important Amerikans— artists, writers, movie stars,
all the glitz against the War— should go to North Vietnam sort
o f as voluntary hostages so either N ixon would have to stop
the bombing or risk killing all them. It would show how venal
the bombings were; and that they killed Vietnamese because
Vietnamese were nothing to them, just nothing; and it was
morally right to put yourself with the people being hurt.
Inside yourself you felt you had to stop the War. Inside
yourself you felt the War turned you into a murderer. Inside
yourself you couldn’t stand the Vietnamese dying because this
government was so fucking arrogant and out o f control.
There was a lot o f us who never stopped thinking about the
War, despite our personal troubles; sometimes it was hard not
to have it drive you completely out o f your mind— if you let it
sink in, how horrible it was, you really could go mad and do
terrible things. So I got hooked up with some famous people
who wanted to stop the War; some had been in the peace
movement before, some just came because o f the bombings.
We wanted to stop the bombing; we wanted to pay for the
hospital; we wanted to be innocent o f the murders. The U . S.
government was an outlaw to us. The famous people gave
press conferences, signed ads, signed petitions, and some even
did civil disobedience; I typed, made phone calls, the usual;
shit work; but I also tried to push m y ideas in. The idea was to
use their fame to get out anti-War messages and to get more
mainstream opposition to the War. Hey, I was home; only in
Amerika. One day this woman came in to where we were
w orking— to help, she said; was there anything she could do
to help, she asked— and she was as disreputable looking as me
or more so— she looked sort o f like a gypsy boy or some street
w a if—and they treated her like dirt, so condescending, which
was how they treated me, exactly, and it turned out she was
the wife o f this mega-star, so they got all humble and started
sucking. I had just talked to her like a person from the
beginning so she invited me to their house that night for
dinner— it turned out it was her birthday party but she didn’t
tell me that. I got there on time and no one else came for an
hour so her and me and her husband talked a lot and they were
nice even though it was clear I didn’t understand I w asn’t
supposed to show up yet. She took me places, all over, and we
caroused and talked and drank and once when he w asn’t home
she let me take this elaborate bath and she brought me a
beautiful glass o f champagne in the tub, then he came in, and I
don’t know if he was mad or not, but he was always real nice
to me, and nothing was going on, and there wasn’t no bath or
shower where I lived, though I was ashamed to say so, I had to
make an appointment with someone in the building to use
theirs. They kept me alive for a while, though they couldn’t
have known it. I ate when I was with them; otherwise I didn’t.
M y world got so big: parties, clubs, people; it was like a tour
o f a hidden world. Once she even took me to the opera. I never
was there before. She bought me a glass o f champagne and we
stood among ladies in gowns on red velvet carpets. But then
they left. And I knew some painters, real rich and famous.
One o f them was the lover o f a girl I knew. He befriended me,
like a chum, like a sort o f brother in some ways. He just acted
nice and invited me places where he was where there were a lot
o f people. He didn’t mind that I was shy. He talked to me a lot.
He seemed to see that I was overwhelmed and he didn’t take it
out. I sort o f wanted to stay away from places but he just tried
to get me to come forward a little. In some ways he seemed
like a camp counselor organizing events: now we hike, now
we make purses. I’d go drinking with all these painters in their
downtown bars and they had plenty o f money and it wasn’t a
matter o f tit for tat, they just kept the drinks coming, never
seemed to occur to them to stop drinking. I knew his girlfriend
who was a painter. At first when I met him I had just got back.
I was sleeping on floors. I slept on her floor some nights when
he wasn’t there. She was all tortured about him, she was just
all twisted up inside, but I never understood why, she was
pretty incoherent. We drank, we talked about him, or she did;
she didn’t have any other subject. There wasn’t no sexual
feeling between him and me and he acted cordial and
agreeable. We went on a bus with some other people they
knew to N ew Hampshire for Thanksgiving. I think he paid
but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any money to go but they
wanted me to go; they had friends there. We went on the
Greyhound bus and it let us o ff somewhere in Verm ont and
someone, another painter from up there, was supposed to pick
us up, but he didn’t come all night, so we were in the parking
lot o f the bus station, locked out o f the depot, deserted and
freezing through the whole night; and in the morning we got a
bus the rest o f the w ay. It was like being on a camping trip in
the Arctic without any provisions— w e’d pass around the ugly
coffee from the machine outside. We got cold and hungry and
angry and people’s tempe
rs flared, but he sort o f held it all
together. His name was Paul, she was Jill. They fought a lot
that night but hell it was cold and awful. He was gregarious
but sort o f opaque, at least to me; I couldn’t figure out
anything about him really. He w asn’t interesting, he w asn’t
real intelligent, and then suddenly, mentally, he’d be right on
top o f you, staring past your eyes into you, then he’d see
whatever he saw and he’d m ove on. He had a cold streak right
down the middle o f him. He w asn’t someone you wanted to
get close with and at the same time he held you on his margin,
he kept you in sight, he had this sort o f peripheral vision so he
always knew where you were and what you needed. He kept
you as near as he wanted you. He had a strong w ill and a lot o f
insistence that you were going to be in his scout troop sitting
around the fire toasting m arshmallows. He had opinions on
everything, including who took too many drugs and who was
really gay. We got to N ew Hampshire and there was this big
house a wom an built with a tree right up the center o f it going
out the ro o f and all the walls were w indow s and it was in the
middle o f the woods and I never saw anything so imposing, so
grand. It w asn’t rich so much as handsome from hard w ork
and talent. The two wom en w ho lived there had built it
themselves. One was a painter, one a filmmaker; and it was
real beautiful. There was a lot o f people around. Then the food
came, a real Thanksgiving, with everything, including things
I never saw before and I didn’t know what they were, it was
ju st beyond anything I had ever seen, and it was warm and fine
and it was just people saying this and that. I’d been aw ay a long
time. I didn’t know what mostly they were talking about.
Someone tried to explain who Archie Bunker was to me but I
couldn’t understand what was funny about it or how such a
thing could be on television and I don’t like jokes against
faggots. I sat quiet and drank Stoli all I wanted, day and night.
We all bunked down in different parts o f the huge room. I
made love with a real young guy who reminded me o f a girl I