under glass. I f you see what’s in front o f you you see w hat’s
down the road: someday they’ll just take the children, the pied
piper o f rape, they’ll ju st use the children, it’s so much easier,
how it is now is so difficult, so com plex, fun taming the big
ones and seducing them and raping them but the children are
tighter, you know; and hurt more, you know; and are so
confused, you know; and love you anyway, you know. All
the worshippers will be tolerant o f each other; and they’ll pass
the little ones on, down the line, so everyone can pray; and the
courts will let them; because the courts have always let them;
it’s just big daddy in a dress, the appearance o f neutrality. I
been living in Times Square, on the sidewalks, I seen all the
marquees, I studied them, I have two questions all the time,
w hy ain’t she dead is one and w hy would anyone, even a man,
think it’s true— her all strung out, all painted, all glossy,
proclaiming being peed on is what she wants; I do not get how
the lie flies; or ain’t they ever made love; or ever seen no one
real; and maybe she’s dead by now; they must think it’s like
you are born a porn thing; in the hospital they take the baby
and they say take it to the warehouse, it’s a porn thing. They
must think it’s a special species; with purple genitals and skin
made from a pale steel that don’t even feel no pain; or they
think every girl is one, underneath, and they wait, until we
turn purple, from cold, or a thin patina o f blood, dried so it’s
an encasement, like an insect’s carapace. And they get hard
from it, the porn thing, flat and glossy, dead and slick, and
after they find something resembling the specimen from
under the glass and they stick it in; a girl in the rain; five
infants; some girl. It’s like how Plato tried to explain; the thing
pure, ideal, as if you went through some magical fog and came
to a whole world o f perfect ideas and there’s Linda taking it
whole; and they wander through the pure world putting fifty
cents down there to cop a feel and five dollars down there, and
for a hundred you see a little girl buggered, and for fifty you do
something perfect and ideal to a perfect whore or some perfect
blow -up doll with a deep silk throat and a deep silk vagina and
a rough, tight rectum, and you come back through the fog and
there’s the girl, not quite so purple, and you do it to her; yeah,
she cries if you hang her or brand her or maim her or even
probably if you fuck her in the ass, she don’t smile, but you can
hurt her enough to make her smile because she has to smile
because if she don’t she gets hurt more, or she’ll try, and you
can paint her more purple, or do anything really; put things in
her; even glass or broken glass and make her bleed, you can get
the color you want; you strive for the ideal. I fuck it up, I say
the girl’s real, but it don’t stop them; and we got to stop them;
so I take the necessary supplies, some porn magazines where
they laminate the women, and I take the stones for breaking
the glass, I will not have women under glass, and I take signs
that say “ Free the Women, Free O urselves” and “ Porn Hates
W omen” and I take a sign that says “ Free Linda” and I have a
sign that says “ Porn Is Rape” and I take a letter I wrote m yself
that says to m y mama how sorry I am to have failed at dignity
and at freedom both, and I say I am Andrea but I am not
manhood for which, mama, I am glad, because they have gone
to filth, they are maggots on this earth; and I take gasoline, and
I’m nearly old for a girl, I’m hungry and I have sores, and I
smell bad so no one looks at all very much, and I go to outside
Deep Throat where m y friend Linda is in the screen and I put
the gasoline on me, I soak m yself in it in broad daylight and
many go by and no one looks and I am calm, patient, gray on
gray cement like the Buddhist monks, and I light the fire; free
us, I start to scream, and then there’s a giant whoosh, it
explodes more like wind than fire, it’s orange, around me,
near me, I’m whole, then I’m flames. I burn; I die. From this
light, later you will see. Mama, I made some light.
E L E V E N
April 30, 1974
(Age 27)
Sensei is cute but she’s fascist. She makes us bow to the Korean
flag; I bow but I don’t look. We are supposed to be reverent in
our hearts but in m y heart is where I rebel. It is more than a
bow. We bow. We get down on our knees and we bow our
heads. It’s the opening ceremony o f every class. In karate you
get down on your knees in a lightning flash o f perfect
movement so there’s no scramble, no noise; it’s a perfect
silence and everyone moves as one; the movement itself
expresses reverence and your mind is supposed to obey, it
moves with the body, not against it, except for mine, which is
anarchist from a long time ago and I never thought I’d bow
down in front o f any fucking flag but I do, in perfect silence
and sym m etry insofar as my awkward self can manage it; my
mind’s like a muscle that pulls every time; I feel it jerk and I feel
the dislocation and the pain and I keep m oving, until I am on
m y knees in front o f the fucking thing. It’s interesting to think
o f the difference between a flag and a dick, because this is not a
new position; with a dick how you get there doesn’t count
whereas in the dojo all that matters is the elegance, the grace,
o f the movement, the strength o f the muscles that carry you
down; an act o f reverence will eventually, says Sensei, teach
you self-respect, which wasn’t the issue with the dick, as I
remember. There’s an actual altar. It has on it the Korean flag,
a picture o f Sensei, and some dried flowers. When I was a child
I had a huge picture o f Rock Hudson up on the door in m y tiny
bedroom, on the back o f the door so I would see it when I was
alone, as if he was there, physically present with me, because
the picture was so big and real and detailed, o f a real face; I put
it up with Scotch tape and kissed it good-night, a mixture o f
heat and loneliness; not quite as I would kiss m y mother if I
could but with the same intensity I wanted from her, as if she
could hold me enough, or love me enough, or rock me
forever; I never understood w hy you couldn’t just bury
yourself in someone’s arms and kiss until you died; just live
there, embraced, warm and wet and touched all over. Instead
there was this photo I cut out o f a magazine, and a lonely bed in
a lonely house, with mother gone, sick, and father gone, to
pay doctors. I built up all the love there was in the world out o f
those lonely nights and when I left home I wasn’t afraid ever to
touch or be touched and I never abandoned faith that it was
everything and enough, a thousand percent whole, perfect and
sensual and true. I thought we were the same, everyone. I
th
ought Rock could hold me; hold me; as if he were my
mother, against his breast. O f course, I also liked Tab
Hunter’s “ Red Sails in the Sunset” ; and Tab Hunter. I was
indiscriminate even then but it was an optimism and I never
understood that there was a difference with men, they didn’t
take the oceanic view; they didn’t want whole, just pieces. I
thought it would be a small bed like mine, simple, poor, and
w e’d be on our sides facing each other, the same, and w e’d ride
the long waves o f feeling as if we all were one, the waves and
us, w e’d be drenched in heat and sweat, no boundaries, no
time, and w e’d hold on, hold on, through the great convulsions that made you cry out, and time would be obliterated by
feeling, as it is. Facing each other and touching we could get
old and die; then or later; because there’s only now; it didn’t
matter who, only how it felt, and that it was whole and real
past any other high or any other truth; I wanted feeling to
obliterate me and love to annihilate me; don’t ever make a
wish. There weren’t religious icons in a Jew ish house; only
movie stars. Sensei says it’s paying respect to her karate
tradition to kneel down in front o f the Korean flag and her
picture on the altar but I always wonder what the Koreans
would think about it; if they’d like a woman elevating herself
so high. She’s not really a woman, though; and maybe they
saw the difference and gave her permission, because she’s got a
male teacher, a karate master, a blackbelt killer as it were, and
he w ouldn’t brook no vanity. If she were a girl per se she
couldn’t be so square and fixed, so physically dense, as if
there’s more o f her per square inch than any other female on
the planet, because anatomically she’s female, I’m sure,
although it seems impossible. She’s like a thousand pounds o f
iron instead o f a hundred pounds o f some petite, cute girl. You
expect lethal weapons to be big, six feet or more, towering,
overpoweringly high, casting long, terrifying shadows, with
muscles as big as bowling balls; so you notice she’s small and
you can’t figure out how she got the w ay she is except that
once she must have been a real girl, even in dresses, and so
maybe you could stop being so curved and soft and flimsy.
Each inch o f her uses up the space she’s in, introducing weight
where once there was air; she dislocates space, displaces it, it
moves and she takes over, she occupies the ground, as if she
was infantry with a bayonet and the right to kill. She’s nothing
like a girl. For instance, her shoulders are square, they take up
space, they are substantial and she don’t make them round or
underplay them or slump them, they don’t look soft as if you
could just walk up to her or in a conversation put your arm
around her, everything’s an edge or a hammer, not a curve.
She reigns, imperial; butch, m y dear, but transcending the
domain o f a bar stool, it ain’t role playing, or a pretense, or a
masquerade; if she were a girl she’d be a little doll; petite; and
there’d be a bigger male one whose shadow would fall on her
and bury her alive. She’d live small in perpetual darkness next
to him. Instead, she’s a certifiable Korean nationalist with an
altar and a flag who considers a hundred sit-ups an insubstantial beginning, foreplay but, in the male mode, barely
counting, and she don’t care about the pain. I m yself pretend
it’s coming from a man, because I know if he was on top o f me
I w ouldn’t stop; so I try to keep going by turning it into him on
me; you fuck w ay past pain when a man’s fucking you blind. I
can do maybe fifteen; I put him on top o f me and I get near
thirty, maybe twenty-eight; I put him in the corner o f the
room laughing and I get to thirty-five; after that, Sensei just
keeps you m oving and you don’t get to stop even if actually
you think your heart is contracting along with your abdomen
and it will convulse and cease, still you move, and she sees
everything, including if you hesitate for half a second or stay
still for half a second, or try to rest halfw ay between up and
down because you think she can’t see the difference but she
sees the molecules in the air and if they ain’t m oving you ain’t
m oving and her eyes nail you and she’s firm and hard; finally,
she will say your name to humiliate you; or assign you thirty
more; and so you keep m oving, the muscles are cramped, all
twisted up inside, swollen and twisted and convulsing, and
your heart’s collapsed into your stomach or your stomach into
your heart and there’s only a bed o f pain in the middle o f you
that moves, it moves, a half inch o f space over a period o f
minutes while the others have done five whole sit-ups, six,
seven, and you feel stupid and weak and cowardly but you
m ove the teeny, tiny smidgen, you keep m oving, you bounce
yourself, you use your breath, anything you can get to make
you m ove so it looks like yo u ’re m oving, and the muscles are
stuck stiff with pain, swelling in hardened cement, but you
try to see i f she’s getting o ff on it because if she is that lets me
o ff the hook, I can walk out self-righteous because she ain’t no
better than I am, she’s just the other side o f m y coin, m y
decrepitude, and it’s dominion she’s after, tormenting the
likes o f me. But she don’t get o ff on it so I keep m oving even
though I’m barely m oving and you reach a point where if you
shudder you feel the muscles move and a tremor is distance
covered; if you shake, the muscles move; and helplessly you
do shake. Sensei learned to count to a hundred in a school
pioneered by Stalin; she don’t allow for human flaws, which is
mental, as he would have agreed; she fixes defects in the mind
that are expressed as incapacities in the body; it’s right
thinking that makes the abdomen strong enough to shatter a
normal man’s fist should he deliver a punch at the top o f his
form; you can punch Sensei in the gut with everything you got
and she stands still, straight, tall, she don’t feel nothing in her
gut but the hitter is hurt. Push-ups is different because women
can’t do them, because all we get to do in life is carry our
breasts and shopping, and from childhood they make us stay
weak in the shoulders but we don’t even know it; and so
push-ups take forever to learn; and even the best students take
forever to learn them; to do one is an achievement, and you
burn with fury that they incapacitated you so much. Sensei can
do butterfly push-ups, a hundred or a hundred and fifty; it’s
push-ups but you do them on your fingertips instead o f using
your whole hand; your hands don’t hit the ground, only the
tops o f your fingers. I never seen anything like it in m y life. It’s
an unreal as flapping your wings and actually flying. Y et I seen
Sensei do it; a hundred ti
mes; she says she can do fifty more. I
can barely breathe thinking about what it would feel like to do
it or to be so strong or so agile or so fucking brave, because I’d
be afraid o f falling; o f breaking m y fingers; o f slipping; o f pain.
I love it; I live for her to do it; up and down, with the tips o f her
fingers taking all the weight o f her body going down, then
lifting her up. I can raise just the top half o f m y body, about
five times, which is pretty usual and she says that’s how to
build the muscles and we have to have patience to undo the
damage o f being made weak; and I see it ain’t just the penis
they nail you with, they pin you down at both ends, and all the
strength you could have in the upper part o f your body is
atrophied as if you was paralyzed your whole life; except you
w asn’t. I tell m yself that whatever I can take from him,
w hom ever, I can take for me; me; now; and when I get weak
and fall back to m y bad old w ays because I never had a me and
still don’t except by forcing m yself to think so I say I’m doing
it for her; this me is pretty tenuous but I can take anything for
him and a fair amount for her and I play with it in m y mind,
that it’s for her, and I watch m yself with interest, how physical
pain changes when it is in the guise o f sex or love or infatuation
or even just seduction, I will get her attention by m oving,
m oving, ju st a little more, just a little bit more; I pretend this is
sex but I still never get past sixty and it is because I have wrong
thinking and a girl’s stupid life. B y sixty I mean sixty o f barely
m oving; I never got past seventeen actual whole sit-ups and I
never got to one whole push-up; and I still don’t know w hy
her fingers don’t break from the butterfly push-ups; and she
teaches us to make a fist and we practice and m y fingers are too
stupid and weak even to do that right, I try to fold them under
so every joint is folded under every other joint so it’s solid and
hard and not filled with air the w ay girls make fists but my
fingers w o n ’t m ove right and I can’t make the sections tight