and turning brown and greasy, and a shovel to dig out the cars
and clear the sidewalks, and playing in the snow dressed in
snowsuits and trying to make a snowman: but especially,
trying to get back and forth from school without getting hurt
by a snowball. My snow had nothing to do with solitude or
beauty and it fell on a flat place, not a hill or mountain, with
the cement under it less solid than this New England earth,
less trustworthy, ready to break and split, ready to loosen and
turn into jagged pieces of stone big enough to throw instead of
snowballs or inside them. We were endlessly strange together,
not rich, foreign to this cool, elegant, simple, beautiful winter.
I didn’t touch her, but I touched him. Her best friend since
childhood, both in Kenya, little kids together and now here,
preparing, preparing for some adult future back home. She
took me with her and delivered me to him and I took him
instead of her, because he was as close as I could get. She was
delighted he liked me, and sullen. It happened in a beautiful
room, an elegant room, at elegant Harvard, friends of theirs
from home, their room, all students studying to be the future
of their country, and I was bleeding anyway and so I spread
my legs for him, not knowing of course that it was because I
loved her. I stayed with him over and over, for months, a night
here, an afternoon there, though I came to hate him, a purely
physical aversion to his clumsy, boring fuck: I didn’t want
him to touch me but I had him fuck me anyway, too polite to
say no for one thing, not knowing how to get out of it, and
wanting her, not knowing it. I got pregnant and had an
35
abortion and she went home. Nothing like pregnancy to make
the man disappear. It decided her. The years of exiled youth
ended. She went home. Like everyone else in the world I was
terrified, it would have been easier right then to be an outcast
hero and have a little black baby whom I could love to death
without having to say why and I would have felt brave, brave:
and no one would have hurt that child: but Emmy looked at
me a certain way all the time now, hate, simple, pure, and I
had the abortion, the hate was hard as a rock, diamond,
shredding the light. She got so quiet I could have died. She left,
but I was the deserter. I didn’t care too much. By the time
mother died everyone was a stranger anyway, and after that I
was a too-cold child with a too-cold heart. I have stayed that
way. Everything gets taken away and everyone eventually
weeps and laughs and understands. Why lie?
36
The great thing is to be saturated with
something— that is, in one way or another,
with life; and I chose the form of my
saturation.
Henry James
*
Have you ever seen the Lower East Side of New York in the
summer? The sidewalks are boiling cement, almost molten,
steaming, a spread of heat scorching human feet, the heat like
the pure blue of the pure flame, pure heat saddled with city
dirt and city smell and especially the old urine of the hundreds
of near-dead junkies hanging nearly skeletal in the shadows of
doorways and crouched under the stinking stairwells of
tenements in which the hot, dead air never moves.
The sun burns. It burns like in Africa. It is in the center of
the sky, huge and burning. No clouds can cover it. It comes
through them, a haze of heat. It gets bigger every day. It is a
foul yellow fire, sulfur at the edges. It hangs and burns. It
spreads out. It reaches down like the giant hand of some monster. The buildings burn.
The air is saturated with the hot sun, thick with it. The air
is a fog of fire and steam. The lungs burn and sweat. The skin
drowns in its own boiling water, erupting. The air lies still,
layers of itself, all in place like the bodies filed in a morgue,
in the air, an old smell in the old air, the air that has never
moved off these city streets, the air that has been waiting
through the killer winter to burn, to torment, to smother: to
burn: the air that has been there year after year, never moving,
but burning more and more summer after summer, aged air,
old smell: immortal, while humans die.
There is never any wind. There is never a cool breeze. The sun
absorbs the wind. The cement absorbs the wind. The wind
evaporates between earth and sky. There is never any air to
breathe. There is only heat. Rain disappears in the heat, making
the air hotter. Rain hangs in the air, in the thick, hot air: bullets
of wet heat stopped in motion. Rain gets hot: water boiled that
37
never cools. Rain becomes steam, hanging in midair: it burns
inside the nose, singes the hairs in the nose, scorches the throat:
leaves scars on the skin. The air gets wetter and hotter and when
the rain stops the air is heavier, thicker, harder to breathe. Rain
refreshes only the smell, giving it wings.
The smell is blood on piss. The blood coagulates on the
cement, then rots. Knives cut and figures track through the
blood making burgundy and scarlet footprints. Cats lap up its
edges. It never gets scrubbed out. The rain does not wash it
away. Dust mixes in with it. Garbage floats on top of it. Candy
bar wrappers get stuck in it. Empty, broken hypodermic
needles float. It is a sickening smell, fouling up the street,
twisting the stomach into knots of despair and revulsion: still,
the blood stays there: old blood followed by new: knives especially: sometimes the sharp shots of gunfire: sometimes the exploding shots of gunfire: the acrid smoke hanging above the
blood: sometimes the body is there, smeared, alone, red seeping
out or bubbling or spurting: sometimes the body is there, the
blood comes out hissing with steam, you can see the steam just
above the blood running with it, the blood is hot, it hits the
pavement, it hisses, hot on hot: sometimes the person moves,
walks, runs, staggers, crawls, the blood trailing behind: it stains
the cement: flies dance on it in a horrible, pulsating mass: it
coagulates: it rots: it stinks: the smell gets old and never dies.
Sometimes the next day or the day after people walk through
it and track it around step after step until it is just a faint
splash of faded, eerie pink: and the smell is on their shoes and
they go home: it gets inside, thrown near a pile of clothes or
under the bed: it clings to the floor, crawls along it, vile and
faint.
There is other blood. Cats and dogs die bleeding, smashed
under cars. Rats and mice die bleeding, poison opening up
their insides and the blood splattering out. The carcasses decompose. They are thrown in trash cans or kicked in dark corners or swept under parked cars. Chickens are sacrificed in
secret religious rites, sometimes cats. Their necks are slashed
and they are found, bloodless. The blood has been drained
out. There is no trace of it. Chi
ldren fall and bleed. Their
parents beat them. Women bleed inside or sweating on street-
corners. Blood spurts out when junkies shoot up.
38
The piss sits like a blessing on the neighborhood. It is the
holy seal, the sacramental splendid presence, like God omnipresent. The men piss night and day, against the cars, against the buildings, against the steps, against the doors, against the
garbage cans, against the cement, against the window ledges
and drainpipes and bicycles: against anything standing still:
outside or inside: against the walls of foyers and the walls of
halls and on the staircases inside buildings and behind the
stairwells. Mixed with the smell of the piss is the scent of
human shit, deposited in broken-down parks or in foyers or
behind stairwells and the casual smell of dog shit, spread
everywhere outside, in heaps. The rat shit is hard and dry,
huge droppings in infested buildings, the turds almost as big as
dog turds, but harder, finer, rounder.
The heat beats down on the piss and shit and the coagulated
blood: the heat absorbs the smell and carries it: the heat turns
wet on human skin and the smell sinks in: an urban perfume: a
cosmopolitan stench: the poor on the Lower East Side of New
York.
*
On this block, there is nothing special. It is hot. It stinks. The
men congregate in packs on the hot stoops. It is no cooler at
night. Inside the crowded tenements it is burning, harder to
find air to breathe, so the men live outside, drinking, shooting
up, fights break out like brush fires, radios blare in Spanish,
knives flash, money changes hands, empty bottles are hurled
against walls or steps or cars or into the gutters of the street,
broken glass is underfoot, dazzling, destructive: the men go
inside to fuck or eat at whim: outside they are young, dramatic,
striking, frenetic until the long periods of lethargy set in and
one sees the yellow sallowness of the skin, the swollen eyes
bloodshot and hazed over, the veins icy blue and used up. “ I
got me everything, ” says Juan, my pretty, wired-up lover,
junkie snorting cocaine come to fuck while N and R are in the
kitchen. He shows up wired. I hesitate. Perhaps she wants him.
We are polite this way. “ He wants you, ” N says with her
exquisite courtesy, a formal, passionless, gentle courtesy, graceful and courtly, our code, we have seriously beautiful manners.
There are no doors but we don’t know what they are for
anyway. We have one single mattress on the floor where we
39
sleep. He fucks good, Juan, I like him, he keeps his junk to
himself, he can’t live long, the coke makes him intense, pulsating, deep thrusts, incredible tension in his hips, hard, muscled hips, not usual for a junkie, I can’t feel the smack in his body,
no languor anywhere, intense crazed coke fucking, intensely
devoted fucking for a junkie. N and R walk by, going out. N
gives an appreciative look. She smiles her broad grin. I am
groaning under him. She laughs her comradely, amused laugh,
grinning from ear to ear.
The apartment is a storefront. You walk down a few steps to
get to the door. Anyone can hide down where you have to
walk. The whole front of the apartment is a store window.
There is no way to open it. It is level with the street. It has
nothing to keep anyone out, no bars, no grating. It is just a
solid sheet of glass. The front room is right there, on the street.
We keep it empty except for some clothes in our one closet.
The middle room is right behind the front room, no door, just
a half wall dividing the two rooms. No window. We have one
single mattress, old, a sheet or two, a pillow or two, N ’s record
player and her great jazz and blues and classical records, her
clarinet, her saxophone, my typewriter, an Olivetti portable, a
telephone. Behind the middle room is a large kitchen, no door
between the rooms. There is a big wooden table with chairs.
There are old, dirty appliances: old refrigerator, old stove.
We don’t cook much or eat much. We make buckets of iced
tea. We have vodka in the refrigerator, sometimes whiskey
too. Sometimes we buy orange juice. There are cigarettes on
the table, butts piled up in muddy ashtrays or dirty, wet cups.
There are some books and some paper and some pencils. There
is a door and a window leading out back. The door has
heavy metal grating over it, iron, weaved, so that no one can
break in. The window is covered in the same heavy metal. The
door is bolted with a heavy metal bolt and locked with a heavy
metal police lock.
The floors are wooden and painted. The apartment is
painted garish red and garish blue. It is insufferably dark,
except for the front room on the street. We have to cover the
window. It is insufferably hot with virtually no ventilation. It
is a palace for us, a wealth of space. Off the kitchen is a thin
40
wooden door, no lock, just a wooden latch. Through it is- a
toilet, shared with the next door apartment, also a storefront
but vacant.
Before Juan comes, we are in the kitchen talking about our
movie. We are going to make a movie, a tough, unsentimental
avant-garde little number about women in a New York City
prison. I have written it. It strangely resembles my own story:
jailed over Vietnam the woman is endlessly strip-searched and
then mangled inside by jail doctors. N will make it— direct it,
shoot it, edit it. It is her film. R is the star. She is N ’s lover for
years, plans on forever, it is on the skids but she hangs on,
pretending not to know. She is movingly loyal and underneath
pathetically desperate. N and I are not allowed to be lovers so
we never are, alone. We evade the spirit of the law. N refuses
to make a political film. Politics, she argues, is boring and
temporary. Vietnam will be over and forgotten. A work of art
must outlast politics. She uses words sparingly. Her language
is almost austere, never ornate. We are artists, she says. I am
liberal with her. She always brings out my generosity. I take
no hard line on politics. I too want art. We need money. Most
of ours goes for cigarettes, after which there isn’t any left. We
fuck for drugs. Speed is cheaper than food. We fuck for pills.
We fuck for prescriptions. We fuck for meals when we have
to. We fuck for drinks in bars. We fuck for tabs of acid. We
fuck for capsules of mescaline. We fuck for loose change. We
fuck for fun. We fuck for adventure. We fuck when we are hot
from the weather. We fuck for big bucks to produce our movie.
In between, we discuss art and politics. We listen to music and
read books. She plays sax and clarinet and I write short stories.
We are poor but educated.
*
The day we moved in the men, our neighbors, paid us a visit.
We will get you, they said. We will come when we are ready.
We will fuck you when we are ready. We will come one
night when we decide. Maybe we will sell you. N is worth a
lot of money in Puerto Rico, they say. I am worth not so
much but still a little something. They are relaxed, sober.
Some have knives. They take their time. How will you keep
us out, one man asks logically. What can you do to keep us
out. One night we will come. There are six or seven of them
4i
there. Two speak, alternating promises. One night we will
come.
Our friend M shows up then, cool cool pacifist hippie type,
white, long hair in a ponytail. Hey man, he says, hey man,
hey man, let’s talk peace not war, let’s be friends man, let’s have
some smoke. He invites them into our storefront. The men sit
in a circle in the front room, the front door wide open. Hey,
man, come on, these chicks are cool. Hey, man, come on, these
chicks are cool. Hey, man, come on, I got some good smoke, let’s
just cool this out man smoke some smoke man together man
these are cool chicks man. He passes a pipe, passes joints: it is
a solemn ceremony. We gonna come in and get these chicks
when we want them man. Hey man, come on, man, these
chicks are real cool, man, you don’t wanna mess with these
chicks man they are cool man. The pipe goes round and round.
The neighbors become quiet. The threats cease. M gloats with
his hip, his cool, his ponytail accomplishment as peacemaker.
Hey man any time you want some smoke you just come to me
man just leave these chicks alone man smoke and peace man,
you know, man.
They file out, quiet and stoned. M is elated. He has forged a
treaty, man. M is piss-proud, man. We get stoned. Smoke,
man. The front door stays wide open as we sit in the front
room and smoke. Night comes, the dark. M points to the open
door. Just stay cool with those guys, man. Those guys come
back you just invite them in for a little smoke. It’s cool, man.
*
I have a habit, not nice. I am two years into it this time. I have
had it before. Black beauties. I take a lot of pills. The pills cost
a lot of money. N takes them too. I don’t know if it is addiction
or pleasure for her or how long she has been taking them or if