and the owners would point me to something, and I'd be up
and they’d point me to something else. It was a whole world
of books that I never dreamed could be so close to me, to
where I was physical y on the planet: this horrible, awful, stupid
suburb. The store was owned and run by two adults, Stan and
Phyl is Pogran, who were not trying to get between you and
the books; they brought you right to the trough and let you
drink. You could read the books in the store (there were no
chairs in bookstores back then); you didn’t have to buy and I
rarely could, although any money I had went to buy books or
music, which is stil the case. I had never met adults like Stan
32
The Bookstore
and Phyllis. Later they separated and divorced, but I swear
they kept me alive and kicking: I never had a mood I couldn’t
find on their shelves.
There was never a book they tried to hide from you. At the
same time, they weren’t trying to use you - you weren’t the
day’s kick for them; they were the opposite of the pedophilic
teacher. They let me talk to them about books and about
being a writer and they talked right back about books and
writing. Amid the vulgarity of the shopping mall, with its
caged birds and fountains, its gushing-over department stores
and restaurants, there was this one island of insanity, since the
rest passed for normal. You could get close to any poet you
wanted and they, the booksellers, didn’t enforce the law on
you: they didn’t bayonet your guts until al the poetry had
spilled out, al the desire for poetry had been bled to death, al
the music in your heart had been lanced, al your dreams
trounced on and ripped to pieces. I found James Baldwin there
and read everything he had writ en; I breathed with him. I
found Mailer and Gore Vidal. I found Tennessee Williams and
Edward Albee. I’d walk over from my house in any spare time
I had - “I’m going to the mall, Ma” had its own legitimacy, a
reassuring, implicit conformity - and I’d haunt the shelves and
I’d find the world outside the world in which I was living.
I’d find a world of beauty and ideas. Corso liked Shel ey, so
I read Shelley and from him Byron and Keats. I read Joyce
and Miller and Homer and Euripides and Hemingway and
33
Heartbreak
Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. They were al there, in this one
tiny bookstore, and my love af air with books became a wild
and long ride, bucking bronco after bucking bronco; I found
Genet and Burroughs; I read The Blacks and Naked Lunch.
Literature exploded. I found and read the early pirated edition
of The Story of O.
The only bad part was that I couldn’t live there, sleep in a
corner resting my head on a messed-up coat; the store would
close and I had to go home. By the next day I’d barely be able
to breathe from the thrill of knowing I was going to find a
way to get back to the bookstore and find another book and
one after that, another author and one after that.
It would be a few years before the feminist ferment would
begin to produce a renaissance of luminous and groundbreaking books; and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett did change my life. I was one of the ones it was writ en for, because I had
absorbed the writers she exposed, I had believed in them; in
the euphoria of finding what I thought were truth-tellers, I
had forgotten my father’s warning that some writers lie. But
stil , one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know, even Mailer,
even Albee. It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can
see and so one can say, “There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten
by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone wil fil
in the empty patch and I’l find what I need, what I must
know in order to lead a ful and honorable life. ” These writers,
Stein excepted, did not acknowledge women as other than
34
The Bookstore
chutzpah made me a fellow traveler. Al one can do is to fight
illegitimate authority, expressed in my world by adults, and
find a church. Books were my church but even more my native
land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on,
but exile welcomed me; it was where I belonged.
35
The Fight
I loved Al en Ginsberg with the passion that only a teenager
knows, but that passion did not end when adolescence did. I
sent him poems when I was in high school and barely
breathed until I heard back from him. He critiqued the poems
I sent on a postcard that I got about three weeks later, though
it seemed like ten years. I thought I would die - he acknowledged me as if I were a writer and we lived in the same world.
In col ege I went to every reading of his that I could. My heart
breathed with his, or so I thought, but I was too shy ever to
introduce myself to him or hang around him until the one
reading after which I did introduce myself. “Call me, ” he said
to me a half dozen times as I was walking backward out of the
large room, backward so that he could keep talking to me.
“Cal me, ” he had said, “but don’t come to New York just to
cal me or you’l drive me mad. ” He had scribbled his phone
number on a piece of paper. “Call me, ” he repeated over and
over. I could have happily died then and there.
I did go to New York just to see him, but when I got to
New York I was too shy to cal him. I'd spend every waking
hour worrying about how to make the cal . I picked a rainy
36
The Fight
night. He answered the phone. “Come on over now, ” he said.
I told him that he was much too busy. I told him that it was
raining. I went anyway, shaking on the wet sidewalks, shaking
on the bus, so nervous on the five flights up to his apartment
that I could barely keep my balance. As always when I was
nervous, I broke into a cold sweat.
He had warned me that he was working on proofs for a
new book of poems and would have very little time for me,
but we spent the whole night talking - well, okay, not al of it
but many hours of it. He then walked me down to the bus
in the rain and told me he loved me. I counted. He told me
eleven times.
I called him one more time many months later. I had a
standing invitation to see him, but I never went back. I stayed
infatuated but I stayed out of his way. I did not know that this
was a shrewd move on my part for the writer I wanted to be.
Being in thrall to an icon keeps you from becoming yourself.
When Woman Hating was published in 1974, I met the
photographer Elsa Dorfman. She was a close friend of Allen’s
and had photographed him and other writers over years, not
days. She photographed me for the first time as a writer. When
Elsa had a baby I was asked to be his godmother and Ginsberg
was his godfather. We were now, metaphysically speaking,
joined i
n unholy matrimony. And still I stayed away from
him. I did not see him again, since that time in college, until
my godson was bar mitzvahed. By this time I had published
37
Heartbreak
many books, including my work attacking pornography - the
artifacts, the philosophy, the politics.
On the day of the bar mitzvah newspapers reported in huge
headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornography il egal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be.
I did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a
pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man-
Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction
that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from
what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I
made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck
children and his constant pursuit of underage boys.
I did everything I could to avoid Allen and to avoid
conflict. This was my godson’s day. He did not need a political struggle to the death breaking out al over.
Ginsberg would not leave me alone. He followed me everywhere I went from the lobby of the hotel through the whole reception, then during the dinner. He photographed me constantly with a vicious little camera he wore around his neck. He sat next to me and wanted to know details of sexual abuse I
had suf ered. A lovely woman, not knowing that his interest was
entirely pornographic, told a terrible story of being molested
by a neighbor. He ignored her. She had thought, “This is
Al en Ginsberg, the great beat poet and a prince of empathy. ”
Wrong. Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent
person who had the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get
38
The Fight
around enough. He pointed to the friends of my godson and
said they were old enough to fuck. They were twelve and
thirteen. He said that al sex was good, including forced sex.
I am good at get ing rid of men, strictly in the above-board
sense. I couldn’t get rid of Allen. Finally I had had it. Referring
back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child pornography he said, “The right wants to put me in jail. ” I said, “Yes, they’re very sentimental; I’d kil you. ” The next day he’d point
at me in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in
jail. ” I’d say, “No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants
to put you in jail. I want you dead. ”
He told everyone his fucked-up version of the story (“You
want to put me in jail”) for years. When he died he stopped.
39
The Bomb
There is one reason for the 1960s generation, virtually al of
its attitudes and behaviors: the bomb. From kindergarten
through the twelfth grade, every U. S. child born in 1946 or
the decade or so after had to hide from the nuclear bomb.
None of us knew life without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In
K-3 we hid under our school desks, elbows covering our ears.
From grades four or five through graduation, we were lined
up three- or four- or five-thick against wal s without windows,
elbows over our ears. We were supposed to believe that these
poses would save us from the bomb the Soviets were going to
drop on us sometime after the warning bel rang. In the later
grades, our teachers herded us, then stood around and talked.
They didn’t seem to think that they were going to die, let
alone melt, any minute. They seemed more as if they were
going to chat until the bel rang and the next class began. In
the earlier grades the teachers would walk up and down the
aisles and tel us an elbow was outside the boundary of a desk
or we should stop giggling. Any child too big to get under the
desk wholly and ful y might wish the Soviets would nuke us;
after al , who wanted to be in school, in rotten school with
40
The Bomb
rot en teachers and rot en classmates? By the time I was being
herded in the seventh or eighth grade, I simply refused to go.
Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in
the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain
why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a
wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly
down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic
way. “I'd rather take a walk,” I would say, “if I'm about to die
now. ” My father was called in, a scene he described to me
shortly before he died at eighty-five: “I asked them what the
hell they expected me to do. ” The real question was, What
was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves
of time and life - my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they
expect us to be so dim and dull?
They were helped by the saturation propaganda about both
the Soviets and the bomb. On the Beach was a really scary
novel by Nevil Shute about the last survivors down in
Australia. I remember just computing that it wasn’t going to
be me and maintaining an at itude of anger and disgust at the
adults. There were endless television discussions and debates
about whether or not one should build a bomb shelter and
fil it with canned food and water. The moral question was
whether or not one should let the neighbors in, had they
been obtuse enough not to build a shelter. Everything was
41
Heartbreak
calculated to make one afraid enough to conform. I can
remember times wanting my father to build a bomb shelter
for the family. Of course that’s hard to do in the cement of the
city, and by the time we had soil in the suburbs I had decided
it was al a scam. Maybe al the students except me and a few
others rested wearily against wal s and kept quiet, but most of
us knew we were being lied to, being scared on purpose, and
being treated like chumps, just stupid children. Those boys
who didn’t know ended up in Vietnam.
I’d read in newspapers and magazines about the people in
cities like New York who would not take shelter when the
alarms were sounded. Following on the model of the London
blitz, sirens would scream and everyone was expected to find
hiding in an underground shelter. But some people refused,
and they were arrested. I remember writing to Judith Malina
of the Living Theatre when she was in the Women’s House of
Detention in New York City for refusing to take shelter and I
was a junior in high school. The thrilling thing was that she
wrote me back. This letter back from her was absolute proof
that there was a different world and in it were different people
than the ones around me. Her let er was a lot of different
colors, and she drew some of the nouns so that her sentences
were delightful and fil ed with imagination. Since I had already
made myself into a resister, she affirmed for me that resistance
was real outside the bounds of my tiny real world. Her letter
was mailed from a boat. She wa
s crossing the ocean to
42
The Bomb
Europe. She wouldn’t stay in the United States, where she
was expected to hide underground from a nuke. She was part
of what she called “the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution, ” and I was going to be part of it, too. I'd follow her to the Women’s House of Detention, though my protest was
against the Vietnam War, and then to Europe, because I could
not stay in the United States any more than she could. She
probably didn’t have my relatives, who were so ashamed that
I went to jail; and she probably didn’t have my mother, who
said I needed to be caged up like an animal - bad politics twice
over. I would not meet Judith for another fifteen years, but
she remained an icon to me, the opposite of the loathsome Miss
Fox, and I knew whose side I was on, where my bread was
but ered, and which one I would rather be. I did not care what
it cost: I liked the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution,
and so did most of my generation - even if “anarchist” was a
hard word and “nonviolent” was an even harder discipline.
There was another kind of bomb scare. Someone would
phone the school and claim to have hidden a bomb in it. The
students would be evacuated and, when the teachers got tired
of keeping us in lines, left to roam on the grass. There never
was a bomb, and there was no context of terrorism, and the
threats seemed only to come in nice weather - otherwise we
might al have got en cranky. We discussed whether or not the
grass under our feet felt pain, which teachers had infatuations
with each other, how we were going to thrive on poetry and
43
Heartbreak
revolution. These were the good bomb scares, after which
we’d be remilitarized into study hal s and classes and time
would pass slowly and then more slowly. There was never anything good about the nuclear-bomb scares, and even the conformists with elbows over ears did not like them. I was appalled that the United States had used nuclear weapons and
was now both stockpiling and testing them. My father said