in the summer she was so tired that the streets were blurred and she
could not see well enough to read.
in the fall she tried to remember her husband, and her first love,
and the first 4, and the four by fours and the three by threes, in the
fall she tried with all her might to remember.
in the winter the snows came, in the winter she stayed in the city
and she couldnt remember, in the winter she died, she was 29.
some awful facts, recounted by bertha schneider
(for J. S. )
bertha schneider, nearly 31, was too disturbed to have any friends,
she was like all the other schlubs running around out there, loss was
driving her crazy, loss was eating up her heart, loss was defeating her
cell by cell, corpuscle by corpuscle, loss was the desert in which she
was lost, life had finally forced her to shake hands with the great
democratizer—loss, bertha schneider, lost, was at last just like
everyone else—lost.
her cycles of loss traditionally divided into 3 year periods, a double
cycle was 6 years, there were no half cycles, she had had several double cycles sequentially, these she had put behind her. who could remember so much loss, even her loss was lost, except when she slept
and spectres of loss, all flaming and brazen, assailed her. but most
often even sleep was lost, beyond her immediate grasp, remembered
dimly, imagined badly.
it was this current cycle, only in its 2nd year, that had made her old
all over again, too soon, before her time, at 18 she had been 84.
Schneiders Cocktail—drugs, sex, radical politics mixed with a lot of
banana cream pie—had done that, at 25 she had been 100. m arriage, the good old fashioned kind—beatings and cleaning interspersed with the 3Vi minute fuck—had done that. 27, 28, and 29
were the golden years, she was just a normal age, regular, the past
sometimes welling up and breaking like blisters, one wipes up the
ooze and goes on, reading books, watching television, taking walks,
called cunt and pussy, followed home nights, but not once raped or
beaten, she had known she would have to pay for those golden years.
God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and
still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her
30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss,
bertha schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that
pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the
kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin.
so in her 30th year bertha had found herself bereft of milk, fish,
and eggs, and all she could afford was cake wrapped in plastic, her
teeth began to go. her friends had already left, all secularists, when it
was writ they obeyed.
bertha had never had any money to speak of but her friends had
been pure gold, the best of every generation, the ones who stopped
wars, the ones who wrote the poems of their time, the ones who held
hands and treasured single daffodils while decadence raged all
around, the ones who were not waxen and false, the ones all those
others could not destroy, the ones police could not police, corruption
could not corrupt, bitterness could not embitter, the ones on whose
hands dirt was clay, not mud. but in her 30th year, God had struck
again, and she had fallen from grace, which is something like doing
a somersault and missing the floor, she kept falling and falling and
falling until she lost even the memory of solid ground.
bertha had learned a few things in life, exactly 3. 1—every Up is
followed by a Down. 2—every Down is followed by an Up, but you
have to live long enough which, depending on how down the Down
is, can be tough and is not a foregone conclusion. 3—Disembodied
Wisdom is the only lover who doesnt get seasick on the curves and
take the easy way out.
tragic sense of life, bertha had had, to be frank, carnal knowledge,
like light through a window pane, bertha, pregnant from the union,
had given birth in a profane world where dog shit and the urine of
drunks and junkies were the only available sacraments, now,
bloodied from delivering the divine fruits of her unique fuck to a
fairly indifferent world, bertha looked around for that one lover detached enough not to run. gone. Disembodied Wisdom had fled, just as Warren Beatty might have. lost, like light through a window pane.
lovers, friends, dust unto dust, dust clings, bertha sneezes, dust
doesnt take kindly to sneeze, dust scatters, bertha calls after it. dust,
what can it answer?
the others are dust and what is bertha? more dust, but bertha
doesnt trust dust, she knows herself, she knows the others, chaos,
craving, dust has its own laws, dust is inconstant, dust hurts the eyes,
dust can sweep up in huge gusts, suffocate, inside the nostrils, blinding the eyes, choking the throat, dust pretends it will cling forever, but bertha knows, it does or it doesnt. either way, once dust touches
dust, the spot is marked, loving, needing, or wanting dust is a waste
of time, especially for dust, even a legal purist like bertha resents it.
bertha understands dust but wishes she were not of it. she is tired of
dust clinging and she is tired of dust scattering and she is tired of
dust coming at her in terrible storms and she is tired of being made
of a substance so ultimately ridiculous, something so substantial and
so insubstantial at the same time, something that passes through
ones fingers* which are dust, like dust, bertha longs for the only lover
she has ever trusted, Disembodied Wisdom, but it is gone, strongly
reminding her of dust, maybe whatever dust touches turns to dust.
bertha had what was, from her point of view, a reliable com-
monsense perspective, all loss was measured against atrocity, she
was poor but bones she was not. her gums were getting soft and
squooshy from malnutrition but live she would, she had no chair to
sit in which led to constant backache and she slept on the floor
which led to constant colds in her bladder, but she wasnt pressed up
straight shitting in her pants in a cattle car on the way to Dachau,
she had been raped and was still haunted by fear and humiliation
but she had not also had cholera at the same time, she had fucked
for money, been destitute on street comers underdressed in freezing
winter, but hunger had not reduced her to eating rats, she had endured and continued to endure real hardship but she would probably live long enough— 1 more month—to turn 31.
this was not stupid of bertha, in Amerika such measuring was
called paranoia or, by liberal psychiatrists, survivors guilt, but bertha, with her european sensibility, knew that she was a realist with a very cogent understanding of history, she didnt imagine that she
could survive atrocity but she prepared for it by constant concentration on what it would require of her. unlike her contemporaries, she believed that normalcy differed from atrocity in degree, not in kind,
it was possible, bertha knew, that she might not survive normalcy
either, harassed as she was by its unambiguous cruelty, every day of
loss and more loss encouraged bertha to wonder: will I live longer
than this terrible time which is, on the grand scale, not terrible
enough to justify capitulation, tired, she measured her fatigue
against the unspeakable exhaustion of her own relatives who had
survived the Nazi death camps, they had not dropped dead of their
own accord, a fact that provided an eloquent rule of thumb, bertha
saw loss, all loss, from this unyielding perspective, this method of
measurement was the discipline by which she maintained an optimistic belief in the likelihood that she too might endure, for this reason, when despair gnawed, she did not welcome it or romanticize
it or enjoy it. self-pity made her sicker than deprivation, and for this
reason, when lovers left her all the while hurling foul epithets or
when friends fell away like diseased flies, she did not cry. she might
well feel sorrow, but tears had to be reserved for disasters that made
tears run dry. her attitude was unfashionable in a world in which
acne occasioned more sympathy than starvation, her own pimples
and the pimples of others did not move bertha and so others, comfortable in excessive emotional upheaval, saw her as cold and rigid, and she saw them as silly and vain, bertha did not share the common
emotional preoccupations of her time, then this new cycle of loss
came, overabundant, overwhelming, and leveled her out flat, she
could not bear it no matter what comparisons she made, at first she
held on. at first she would have settled for fish and eggs and milk, a
chair to sit on, some money in the bank, and sleep every night in
which loss left her alone, she bartered with God the loanshark, time
went on and bertha was dragged out flatter and flatter until the
nerve that was pure greed was stretched out onto the surface of her
skin, exposed, raw, naked, jagged, ragingly sore, detachment was
lost, discipline was lost, bertha cursed Disembodied Wisdom as the
seducer and abandoner who had passed her on to a terrible new
master, Pure Greed, herself turned inside out. she wanted purple
velvet curtains, a red velvet couch in which she would be happy to lie
forever and die, fresh crab and vulgar lobster, and women, the
bodies of women, pure taste and touch and fingers reaching in and
bellies rubbing wildly against, sweat and goo and no tomorrows, not
like the men, not to prove or to have, but each sensation for its own
sake, each sensation the whole of life, so that greed would wipe out
deprivation, erase it and the memory of it, each time, the impossible,
forever, her heart had become hungry, ravenous, but, cursed with
the love of meaning which she could not lose no matter how hard she
tried, lust made her sad, and her own lust struck her dumb with
grief, because if dust always reduced to lust, loss had triumphed,
bertha was lost, the crime was the punishment, lust was dust, still,
nothing worth a tear.
time passed, seasons changed, lilacs came and went, roses were
bom and died, the leaves turned burgundy and orange, then fell
burying the cement and earth, then froze under the first snow,
bertha stared, bertha stirred, bertha walked, bertha sat. bertha
turned restlessly night after night, bertha buried herself in dust, and
dust herself she covered dust, she sneezed it and snorted it and spit it
out. and dust spit right back, and dust flew by, looking the other
way. sweat made dust sticky, turned it salty or sweet or bitter, the
wind blew it away and the rain washed it away and the snow froze it
into slicing slivers, dust she was and dust she always would be, phi-
losophy aside, sad dust, greedy dust, slightly silly dust, dust enchanted by dust, dust cast into air by a sigh, landing or not landing, depending on weather or whether.
the new womans broken heart
(for E. and L. )
morning broke. I mean, fell right on its goddam ass and broke, no
walking barefoot if you care about yr feet, kid.
I waited and waited, no call came. I cant say, the call didnt come
because it wasnt a question of one really, it was a question of any
one. it was a question of one goddam person calling to say I like this
or that or I want to buy this or that or you moved my heart, my spirit,
or I like yr ass. to clarify, not a man calling to say I like yr ass but one
of those shining new women, luminous, tough, lighting right up from
inside, one of them, or some of the wrecked old women I know, too
late not to be wrecked, too many children tom right out of them, but
still, I like the wrinkles, I like the toughness of the heart, one of
them, not one of those new new new girl children playing soccer on
the boys team for the first time, young is dumb, at least it was when I
was young. I have no patience with the untom, anyone who hasnt
weathered rough weather, fallen apart, been ripped to pieces, put
herself back together, big stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice, then
something shines out. but these ones all shined up on the outside,
the ass wigglers. I’ll be honest, I dont like them, not at all. the
smilers. the soft voices, eyes on the ground or scanning outer space,
its not that I wouldnt give my life for them, I just dont want them to
call me on the telephone.
still, business is business. I needed one of them, the ass wigglers, to
call me on the phone, editors, shits, smiling, cleaned up shits, plasticized turds, everything is too long or too short or too angry or too rude, one even said too urban. Im living on goddam east 5 street, dog
shit, I mean, buried in dog shit, police precinct across the street
sirens blazing day and night, hells angels 2 streets down, toilet in the
hall and of course I have colitis constant diarrhea, and some asshole
smiler says too urban. Id like to be gods editor. I have a few revisions
Id like to make.
so I wait, not quietly, I might add. I sigh and grunt and groan. I
make noise, what can I say. my cat runs to answer and then demands
attention, absolutely demands, not a side glance either but total rapt
absolute attention, my whole body in fact, not a hand, or a touch, or
a little condescending pat on the head. I hiss, why not, I mean I
speak the language so to speak.
which brings me to the heart of the matter, ladies, for instance, a
lady would pretend she did not know exactly what to say to a cat that
demanded her whole life on the spot, she would not hiss, she would
make polite muted gestures, even if she were alone, she would act as
if someone was watching her. or try to. she would push the cat aside
with one hand, pretending gentle, but it would be a goddam rude
push you had better believe it, and she would smile, at the window,
at the wall, at the goddam cat if you can imagine that, me, I hiss,
thus, all my problems in life, the ladies dare not respect hissers. they
wiggle their goddam asses but hissers are pariahs, fem ale hissers.
male hissers are another story altogether.
for example, one morning I go to cover a story. I go 1500 miles to
cover this particular story, now, I need the money, people are very
coy about
money, and the ladies arent just coy, they are sci fi about
money, me, Im a hisser. I hate it but I need it. only I dont want to
find it under the pillow the next morning if you know what I mean. I
dont wear stockings and I want to buy my own hershey bars, or steal
them myself at least. Id really like to give them up altogether, but I
wouldnt really and its the only social lie I tell, anyway I pick my own
health hazards and on my list sperm in situ comes somewhere below
being eaten slowly by a gourmet shark and being spit out half way
through because you dont quite measure up. its an attitude, what
can I say. except to remind the public at large that the Constitution
is supposed to protect it.
so I go to cover the story and the ass wigglers are out in large
numbers. I mean they are fucking hanging from the chandeliers,
and there are chandeliers, ritzy hotel, lots of male journalists,
whither they goest go the ass wigglers.
so its a conference of women, and the point is that this particular
event occurred because a lot of tough shining new women have demanded this and that, like men not going inside them at will, either naked or with instruments, to tear them up, knock them up, beat
them up, fuck them up, etc. and suddenly, the ladies have crawled
out of the woodwork, so I go to pee in the classy lounge where the
toilets are, and one of the ass wigglers doesnt talk to me. I mean, Im
peeing, shes peeing, so who the fuck does she think she is. so the line
is drawn, but its been drawn before, in fact its been drawn right
across my own goddam flesh, its been drawn in high heeled ladies
boots trampling over me to get into print. I mean, I cant make a living. the boys like the ass wigglers.
so I work you know. I mean, I fucking work, but theres work I
wont take on, like certain kinds of ass wiggling at certain specific
moments, the crucial moments, like when the male editor wants that
ass to move back and forth this way and that, as a result, I am what
is euphemistically referred to as a poor person. I am ass breaking