Eventually she would tel me that the worst mistake she had
made in raising me was in teaching me how to read; she had a
mordant sense of humor that she rarely exercised. The public
library in the newly hatched suburb of Delaware Township,
later to become Cherry Hill, was in the police station or next
door to it; and my mother found herself writing notes giving
me permission to take out Lolita or Peyton Place. To her credit
she did write those notes each and every time I wanted to read
a book that was forbidden for children. Or I think it’s to her
credit. I don’t know why later she would not let me see the
film A Summer Place with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue (the
two are teenaged lovers and Sandra gets pregnant) when I had
20
“Silent Night”
already read the book. We had a screaming match that lasted
several days. She won, of course. It was the sheer exercise of
parental authority that gave her the victory, and I despised her
for not being able to win the argument on the merits. She’d
blow up at my curiosity or precociousness, and it seemed to
come out of nowhere to me. What she hated wasn’t what I
read or the movies I saw but what I started writing, because
sixth grade was the beginning of writing my own poems.
They’d be small and imitative, but they were piss-perfect,
in-your-face acts of rebellion. The adults could keep lying, but
I wouldn’t. My mother’s real failure was in telling me not to
lie. I had a literalist sense of the meaning of the admonition.
I was a “kike” and would continue to be one: never once have
I sung “Silent Night” nor will I. I recognized that there were
a lot of ways of lying, and pretending that Christmas and Easter
were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one. Whether
the issue was segregation or abortion, I, the sixth-grader, was
going to deal with it, and my vehicle was going to be truth:
not a global, self-deluded truth, not a truth that only I knew
and that I wanted other people to follow, but the truth that
came from not lying. Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one,
a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken
for self-righteousness. If put ing my body there when it ought
to be here was required but to do so was to lie, I wasn’t going
to do it. I’d write and I wouldn’t lie. So when self-help writers
tel one to find the child within, I assume they don’t mean me.
21
Plato
A girl is faced with hard decisions. What is writ en inside
those decisions is inscrutable to her; by necessity - her age,
time, place, sex discrimination in general - she sees or knows
only the surfaces. So in junior high school I was thrilled when
I was allowed to wear lipstick for the first time, a rite of passage that has nothing to do with sexuality but everything to do with maturity, becoming an adult fast and easy. My first
lipstick was cal ed Tangerine, and like other girls I spent hours
thinking about what it went with, what it meant, and how my
life was final y beginning to cohere. It was also the first recognition from my mother - al -important, the whole deal has little to do with men or boys at al - that I was nearly adult
but certainly no child.
I'd wear Tangerine, along with a favorite dress that let me
see my own breasts, a deep V-neck, a cut I stil like, and I’d
be making my way through Plato’s Symposium. It had been
communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of
women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in
famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick
without the requisite face powder. On my own I added my
22
Plato
own favorite, Erase, which went over the powder (or was it
under? ) and got the lines under your eyes to disappear. In this
way I could hide my late-night reading from my parents -
circles under the eyes were a dead giveaway. I would pretend
to go to sleep; I'd wait for them to go to sleep; I'd turn on my
reading light, read, and simultaneously listen for any movement at their end of the house, at which point I'd get rid of any light in my room, hide the book, and wait until I heard
my mother or father return to their bed.
I was taunted by this problem: how could someone write
something like the Symposium and make sure that her nose did
not shine at the same time? It didn’t mat er to me that I was
reading a translation. I'd read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and
not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose
shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either
one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi
Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose.
It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any
way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough
time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.
Plato was my idea of a paperback writer: the Beatles were not
yet on the horizon, and anyway I’m sure that John would have
agreed with me. There was nothing I wanted so much in life
as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words,
the calzone approach at enuated with Bach. I'd look at my
cheap Modigliani reproductions or the reproduced females by
23
Heartbreak
Rodin or Manet, and I didn’t see the shine, except for that of
the paper itself; but more to the point, in no book about the
artists themselves that I could find was the problem of the
shine addressed. These were the kind of girl-things that preoccupied me.
Or, for instance, when it came to lying: in elementary
school one would play checkers with the boys. My mother
had said don’t lie and had also told me that I had to lose at
games to the boys if I wanted them to like me. These were
irreconcilable opposites. It was, first of al , virtually impossible to lose to the boys in an honest game of checkers. Second, who wanted to? Third, how would I ever respect him or them
in the morning? It did strike me that the boys you had to lose
to weren’t worth having, but my argument made no impression on my mother nor on anyone else I was ever to meet until the women’s movement. And it was damned hard to lose
at checkers to the pimply or prepimply dolts. I now think of
the having-to-lose part as SWAT-team training in strategy,
how to lose being harder than how to win. It was hideous for
a girl to be brazenly out for the kil or to enjoy the status of
victor or to enjoy her own intelligence and its application in
real time.
I stil remember how in the eighth or ninth grade Miss Fox,
one of my nemeses among English teachers, made us skip the
first three pages of Romeo and Juliet - the part about the maidenheads - only to read aloud Juliet herself throughout the rest of
24
Plato
the play, partnered with the captain of the footbal team as
Romeo. Stereotypes aside, his reading was not delightful. And
yet we al had to sit there and wait while he tried manfully, as
it were, to sound out words. Her pedagogy was to encourage
him while let ing the rest of us rot.
I, true to form, wanted to know what a maidenhead was,
and to say that I was relentless on the subject would be to understate. Miss Fox’s retaliation was authoritarian and extreme. I had been out of class sick and had to take a makeup vocabulary test, multiple choice. I failed. I did not just fail: I got a zero. I was pained but respectful on my first five or ten trips
up to her desk to ask her how it was possible to get a zero on
a multiple-choice test, even if one did not know the meaning
of one word on the test. Final y, exhausted, I just asked her to
regrade the test. Since she was sure of her rightness in al things
English, we struck a deal: she’d regrade the test and whatever
the outcome I’d shut up. She glistened with superiority, Eve
the second after biting into the apple; I was tense now that the
challenge had been taken up. It turned out that she had used
the wrong key in grading the test; the answers she wanted me to
give were for some other test. I was good but not that good.
I wanted out, Tangerine lipstick notwithstanding. I wanted
smart people whether or not their noses shined enough to
illuminate a room or a house or a city. I wanted someone who
cared about me in particular, as an individual, enough to
notice that I could not get a zero on a vocabulary test because
25
Heartbreak
I had too big a vocabulary. I was so worn out by Miss Fox that
when she graded an essay on contemporary education a B
because, as she said to me, some commas were wrong and it
wasn’t anything personal, after a halfhearted and utterly futile
argument I accepted the B. She even put her arm around me,
genuinely adding insult to injury. I knew I’d get her someday
and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was
easy.
26
The High School
Library
Nowadays librarians actively try to get students Internet access
to pornography, at least in the United States. Organized as a
First Amendment lobby group, librarians go to court - or their
professional organizations do - to defend pornographers and
pornography. Truly, this does not happen because James Joyce
and Henry Miller were banned as obscene a hundred years
ago; I once wrote an affidavit for a court on the differences
between Nabokov’s Lolita and a pimp’s pictorial with words,
“Lolita Pissing. ” These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I
used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography
could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual
pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they
weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to
stock Ulysses. If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest
of us. Instead, the idea seems to be that keeping a child -
someone underaged - away from anything is akin to treason.
One is violating sacred constitutional rights and assassinating
Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (for the second time).
27
Heartbreak
In my high school days, librarians were the militia, the first
line of defense in keeping the underaged away from books, al
sorts of books in every field.
My high school library was tall, I remember, as if piles of
books held up the ceiling; it was dense with books organized
according to the Dewey decimal system. I liked to look at and
to touch the books. I believed I could feel the heat emanating
from them, and no heat meant no light. My father had told
me I had to read everything, that to read books of only one
view was the equivalent of a moral wrong. When I asked why,
he uttered the incomprehensible words: “Sometimes writers
lie.” In my early years, my parents made up for the latitude
they gave me in reading by seeing to it that I read on a continuum, both political and literary. When I went weak in the knees for Dostoyevsky, my dad gave me some Mark Twain or
my mother one of Eric Bentley’s books on the theater. I just
wanted to read everything; there was never enough. It wasn’t
quite as simple as it sounds. My mother was more tense about
what I read than my father, but then, she was in the thick of
it: my bad attitudes, bad habits, and bad behavior. I did get
ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished
by the pro-pornography argument that people are not influenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films? One wants to persuade. One wants to knock
the reader senseless with the shock of the new or the old
reconceived. Rimbaud articulated the writing ambition when
28
The High School Library
he wanted to derange the senses, though he meant his own.
Sometimes it’s the rawness of the writing that makes everything inside shake and break; sometimes it’s the delicacy of the writing that makes everything inside simply recognize a reality
different from the known one or experience a lyricism heretofore unknown. For me, subtle writing was almost always anti-urban; it took me to the steppes of Russia or Huck Finn*s
South.
The library brought the world to me: I went with Darwin
on the HMS Beagle and I dived with Freud into the mind and
most of Freud, al of Darwin, and most of Marx before I graduated from high school. This was not with the help of the high school librarians.
Instead, I learned their work schedules, because we were not
allowed to take out more than two books a day and I needed
a bigger fix than that. Al records were kept by hand. So if I
went into the library during a new shift, I could get two more
books, then two more, then two more. The librarians treated
the books like contraband, and so did I. My friends and I had
a commitment to Catcher in the Rye, which was not allowed
in the library. We bought a lot of copies over time. We shelved
them. Each time it would be a different one of us who had
the responsibility for get ing the book into the library, on the
shelves. Sometimes we catalogued the book - what was gained
if no one knew it was there? - and other times we shelved it
29
Heartbreak
as if it were plastique. Eventually the head librarian would
find it; we’d know by the dirty looks we got from her long
before we got to check on the book itself.
Catcher was a rallying point for our high school intelligentsia. I remember going to my parents for help: I asked if they would fight with the school board to get the book in the
library. They would not. I found this refusal confusing, an
abrogation of everything they had taught me. Actually it
outraged me. One of my friends had his editorial removed
from the school paper because it was about the wrongness of
banning Catcher from the high school library. So we fought
on, invisible guardians of one orphan book.
Then one day it happened: the school board took things
in hand themselves. They went through the library to get rid
of al soc
ialistic, communistic, anti-God books. Surveying the
damage when they had finished, I saw no Eugene V Debs or
Norman Thomas, certainly no Darwin, Freud, or Marx; but
one slim volume cal ed Guerril a Warfare by a person named
Che Guevara had escaped the purge. I was bound for life to
the man. I studied that book the way the Chinese were forced
to study Chairman Mao. I planned revolutionary attacks on
the local shopping mall. We had a paucity of mountains in
the suburbs, so it was hard to apply many of Che’s strategic
points; the land was flat, flat, flat; the mall - the first in the
country - was boring, boring, boring, emphatical y not Havana.
I studied Che’s principles of revolution day in and day out,
30
The High School Library
and the school board was none the wiser. The shelves in the
library now were roomy, and the room itself seemed lower.
There weren’t books in piles to hold up the ceiling, nor were
there books that emanated heat and with the heat enough
light to be a candle in the darkness. It was as if anything the
school board recognized it did away with. I was almost out.
My term of imprisonment was almost up. My own hard time
was coming to an end. The pedophilic teacher had a lot of
anger and despair to fool around with, and he didn’t let any
of it go to waste. He’d tell you any story you wanted to hear,
give you the narrative of any book gone missing; Anna
Karenina went from being Tolstoy’s to being his.
31
The Bookstore
Sometime during high school the very best thing happened:
at the mal a bookstore opened. This was a spectacular bookstore, independent, few hardcover books but they were out of my socioeconomic league anyway; and there was a whole rack
of City Lights books, yes, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and
Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn and Gregory Corso and
Yevteshenko - anything City Lights published would show up
on that rack. It was al contemporary, al poetry, al incendiary,
al revolutionary, each book a Molotov cocktail. I'd be down