how life should be, a magazine picture in my head, you know,
or from television, or from the romances other people say they
want. It ain’t a thought in any sense at all. It’s that I am not her
and I cannot be her, I fucking am not her, I can’t do it, I can’t sit
still and type the shit. It’s just that I want what I want, which is
throughout me, not just my brain, and it’s to feel and move
and fuck. I don’t try to resolve it. I figure you have to be
humble before life. Life tells you, you don’t tell it, and you
can’t argue with what w on’t sit still long enough to be argued
with. I have to break loose one w ay or another, drink or fuck,
find some real noise, you know, a fucking stream o f real noise
and messing around to jum p right in; that’s my way. If it’s
tepid I don’t want it and I don’t do it from habit or just because
it’s there to be done, it’s a big change I made in myself, I have
to feel it bad, I don’t do nothing on automatic; people think if
it’s on the bad side it ain’t bourgeois but I don’t; I think if it’s
tepid it don’t matter what it is class-wise or style-wise. I don’t
solve things in m y mind to impose it on reality, because it ain’t
worth much to do so; for instance, to say you don’t want to be
some fucked thing so don’t fuck. Fucking never feels like you
will end up some fucked thing anyway; it pushes you out so
fast and so far it ain’t a matter o f what you think and it’s stupid
to misidentify it, the problem. Y o u ’re some poor, fragile
person in the middle o f an ocean you never seen the whole of;
you don’t know where it starts or where it stops or how deep
down it goes and what you got to do is swim and hope, hope
and swim; you learn everything you know from it, it don’t
learn a fucking thing from you. Y ou can make promises to
yourself in your mind but your mind is so small up against the
world; you got to have some respect for the world; or so I see it
and that’s m y way; but, then, I ain’t holding out for a pension.
I type m y hours, however many I can make it through,
putting as much pressure on m yself as I can stand, which isn’t
making a lot o f progress, and I keep a time sheet, which I make
as honest as possible but it is hard not because I want to lie but
because I ju st fucking cannot keep track, I can’t pay enough
attention to it to keep track, so I just approximate sort o f
combining what I need with what seems plausible and I come
up with something. I cannot write every fucking thing down
to keep track o f m y time as i f I’m some asshole and I find it
profoundly unbearable to do robot stuff. Sometimes I w ork
for a writer, a poet, and I deliver packages, which at least
means I go on subways and taxis and see places, and I file
papers aw ay alphabetically and I type, except she says you
have to put a space before the colon and a space after it, one
space after it instead o f just no space before it and two spaces
after it as every typist does. In theory I am for defying
convention but typing is something you do automatic like
yo u ’re the machine, not it, and you learn to put two spaces
after the colon and none before it and your hands do that and
your brain ain’t fast enough to stop them and I spend half my
time correcting the stupid thing with white Liquid Paper and
eraser stuff and trying to align it right when I’m typing the
colon back in and I just really want her to drop dead because o f
it. Passions can be monumental. I can barely keep my ass on
the typing chair at her desk; I mean, she owns the desk; she has
her desk, a big desk, and then the desk where I sit, a little desk
and her desk is in her big room and m y desk is in a little
anteroom right o ff her big room so she can always see me but
I’m o ff to the side, relegated to being help in a clear w ay; it has
its own eloquence and I feel it acutely and it gets me mad. I try
to take the typing home with me so I don’t have to sit at the
me to do it there and there’s this tug o f war. She’s real
seductive and I am too fucking bored to care because if I give in
to it then I will have to be there more and if I am there more I
will have to type more and if I have to type more I will die.
There’s apparently some edge she sees; she thinks I’m
turbulent, she says; I think I’m calm and patient in a world o f
endless and chaotic bullshit, which I say but it falls on deaf
ears; I smile and I’m nice and completely calm except for when
I have to bolt but she sees some street tough or something wild
and gets all excited and I don’t have a lot o f respect for it; she
says I’m pure. I just smile because I don’t know what bullshit it
is exactly. Even if I don’t type she keeps me around. I can
barely keep m yself under wraps sometimes, frankly; I want to
bolt. I smile, I’m nice, I’m calm, but she treats me careful, as if
I’m volatile or dangerous somehow, which I am not, because
in m y soul I am a real sweetheart which is the truth, a deep
truth, an honest truth, I don’t yell or shout or think how to
hurt people and I feel dedicated to peace as she is too. I just get
bored so deep it hurts the pits o f me, stomach and groin
precisely, I feel a long pain and I can’t sit still through it; it’s
hit-the-road pain. She tells me how to be a writer and I listen
because as long as I am listening I don’t have to type; I listen,
though often I’m bored, and I haven’t mastered the art o f inner
stillness, though I will, I am sure. Then there’s the lovemaking
part, a moment comes, and I slide out from under, with a
certain newfound grace, I must say, and if I can’t slide, I bolt,
and it’s abrupt. She keeps me on, even though I never exactly
get the typing done or the filing done and she never nails me;
never. It’s a long walk to her place to type and I walk it often,
because I fucking love to walk, even though it’s stupid and not
safe and you have to be a prophet who can look down a street
and know what it’s got in store for you, and I do it happy and
proud and I fucking love the long walks. I go there and back
early and late and sometimes I get there and I just can’t bear to
stay so I leave right away, I take some cup o f coffee or food,
fast, with her, she’ll always make me something as if it’s
natural, and the typing doesn’t get done but I don’t have some
money either. Other times she gives me a cash advance and I
have it burning in m y hand and if I’m feeling slow and
stringent with m yself I get it to the bank and i f I'm feeling
restless, all speeded up, wanting to spit in the eye o f God, out
drink Him, out fuck Him, I keep it on me. I type, I walk long
walks across town, ballets on cement, jum ping and hopping
and then a slow, melancholy step, solemn or arms sw inging,
in the face o f the wind or in drizzle or rain or in sun, in calm,
cool sun. I walk m y sweet and jubilant dog in the neighborhood protecting the pads o f her feet from the stupid glass the winos leave all broken all over and the fucking junkie shit
that’s all over, and then there’s the time each day I sit down in
purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some
sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that
happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it
takes, the difficulty o f this act. It requires an almost perfect
concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no w ay to
learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it
but I have a sense that it’s completely simple, on the order o f
being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you
without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain’t
boredom, it’s fear o f w hat’s possible, how much you can
know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I m ove
around, m y mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and
roll them through m y brain, m ove with them into their
interiors, feel their colors, touch w hat’s under them, where
they come from long ago and w ay back. I get frightened
seeing what’s in m y own mind if words get put to it. T here’s a
light there, it’s bright, it’s wide, it could make you blind if you
look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened
and I run and the only w ay to run is to abandon the process
altogether or com prom ise it beyond recognition. I think about
Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don’t know w hy he
didn’t run, he should’ve. It’s a quality you have to have o f
being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that
you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably
break things with the power in your mind. You got to be able
to stand it, because it’s a powerful and disturbing light, not
something easy and kind, it comes through your head to make
its w ay onto the page and you get fucking scared so your mind
runs away, it wanders, it gets distracted, it buckles, it deserts,
it takes a Goddamn freight train if it can find one, it wants
calming agents and soporifics, and you mask that you are
betraying the brightest and best light you will ever see, you are
betraying the mind that can be host to it; Blake’s light, which
he was not afraid o f and did not betray; Whitman’s light which
he degraded into some fucking singsong song like he was
Dinah Shore or Patti Page, how much is that doggie in the
w indow; the words didn’t rise up from the light, only from a
sentimental wish, he had a shadow life and in words he piled
shadow on shadow so there’s this tumult, a chaos o f dreams
running amok; dreams are only shadows; whereas Blake’s
light is perfect and pure, inside the words, so lucid, so simple,
so plain; never a cartoonish lie. O f course it’s different for me
because I turned tricks and been fucked nearly to death and I
have been made weary with dirt and m y mind’s been buried
alive, really, smashed down right into the ground, pushed
under deep; but something ain’t different if I could conquer the
fear o f seeing and knowing, if I wasn’t so afraid o f the light
burning right through m y stupid brain. Y ou want to smoke a
joint or something to make it calmer and duller; not brighter;
it ain’t brighter; it calms you right down or it frenzies you up
but so you are distracted, mentally m oving here and there,
you want something between you and the light, a shield, a
permeable barrier, you want to defuse it or deflect it, to
m ellow it out, to make it softer, not so deadly to your own
soul, not so likely to blow all your own circuits, you can’t
really stand too much light in a world where you got to get
used to crawling around like an insect in the dark, because it’s
like mining coal in that if you don’t get out o f the mine what
goes through you will collapse you. Y o u r mind does stupid
tricks to mask that you are betraying something o f grave
importance. It wanders so you w o n ’t notice that you are
deserting your own life, abandoning it to triviality and
garbage, how you are too fucking afraid to use your own brain
for what it’s for, which is to be a host to the light, to use it, to
focus it; let it shine and carry the burden o f what is illuminated,
everything buried there; the light’s scarier than anything it
shows, the pure, direct experience o f it in you as if your mind
ain’t the vegetable thing it’s generally conceived to be or the
nightmare thing you know it to be but a capacity you barely
imagined, real; overwhelm ing and real, pushing you out to
the edge o f ecstasy and knowing and then do you fall or do you
jum p or do you fly? Life can concentrate itself right in your head
and you get scared; it is cowardice. I notice that my eyes start to
wander across the wall, back and forth, keep wandering across
nothing, or looking at the fucking paint, I notice that my feet are
moving and I’m shifting on the chair, a straight-back wood chair
you have to sit still on, there’s no license to move but I’m
moving, rattling m y feet, rocking, rocking on m y heels, and
then there’s an urgent sensation in m y thighs and in my hips and
wherever sex is down there, whatever you want to call it, there’s
only bad names for it but it isn’t bad and it is real and it sends you
out, it sends you away, it makes you impatient and distracted,
and I feel like busting out, and some nights I do, I bust out. I take
all the money I got on me, and if it’s ten dollars I’m flush, and I
ju st bolt, I get out and drink, I find a man, sometimes a
woman, sometimes both, I like both at once, I like being
drunk, or I start out just for a drink and I end up with
someone, drunk; fucking happy drunk; no light but everything glistens; no illumination but everything shines. Som etimes I ju st walk, I can walk it off, aimlessly. It’s as dangerous as fucking, takes nearly the same adrenaline, just to take a walk
at night, even if you walk towards the neon and not towards
the dark park; ain’t a woman in Amerika walks towards the
park. If I can calm m yself I go home. But there’s times if I was
a man I’d kill someone. I feel wild and mean and I’m tired o f
being messed with, I got invisible bars all around me and I
have blame in my heart to them that put them there and I want
to fucking tear them apart, I want my insides turned out in
bruising them, I don’t want no skin left on me that ain’t
roughed them up, I want them bloodied, I want to dance in
men’s blood, the cha-cha, the polka, the tango, the rhumba,
hard, fast, angular dances or stomping dances or slow killing
dances, the murder waltz, I want to mix it up with killing right
next to me, on m y side; it’s hot in my heart and cold in my
brain and I ain’t ever going to feel sorry; or I’d take one o f them
boys and I’d turn him inside out and put something up his ass
and I’d hear him howl and I�
��d expect a thank-you and a yes
m a’am; and I would get it. D on’t matter how dangerous you
feel, all the danger’s to you, so it’s best to settle down and end
up back inside your stupid fucking walls that you wanted so
much; alone, inside the walls, a Valium maybe or a ’lude so
you don’t do no damage to yourself; love your walls, citizen. I
want them bruised and bloodied but I don’t get what I want as
m y mama used to tell me but I didn’t believe her; besides I
wanted something different then; her point was that I had to
learn the principle that I wasn’t supposed to get what I wanted;
and m y point was that I wasn’t going to learn it. Y ou don’t
name someone not-cunt and then betray the meaning and
make them fit in cages; I didn’t learn it, fucking bitch o f a
mother. It’s a rainy night. The rain is slick over the cement and
on the buildings like diamonds dripping; a liquid dazzle all soft
and rolling and swelled up, like a teardrop. It’s one o f them
magic nights where the rain glow s and the neon is dull next to
it; like God lit a silver flame in the water, it’s a warm , silver,
glassy shine, it sparkles, it’s a night but it ain’t dark
because it’s a slick light you could skate on and everything
looks translucent and as if it’s m oving, it slides, it shines. It’s
beckoning to me as i f God took a paint brush and covered the
w orld in crystal and champagne. It’s wet diamonds out there,
lush and liquid, I never could pass up the sparkle, it’s a wet,
shimmering night, a wet, dazzling night; but warm, as if it’s
breathing all over you, as if it’s wrapped around you, a
cocoon, that w ispy stuff. If there’s acid in your brain
everything’s fluid and monstrous bright; this is as if the acid’s
out there, spread over the city, the sidewalks are drenched in it
and the buildings are bathed in it and the air is saturated with it,
nothing’s standing still and it is monstrous bright and I love
the fucking city when it’s stoned. Inside it’s dull and dry and
I’m not in a constructive mood and there is a pain that runs