she can do without them. I never ask. These are privacies I
respect. I have my own dignity too. I pretend it is cheaper than
food.
One night N brings home a fuck, a Leo named Leo. He
steals our speed and all our cash. The speed is gone. I go into
emergency gear. I pretend it is a joke. How the fuck, I ask her
repeatedly, can anyone be stupid enough to fuck someone who
says he is a Leo named Leo? I ask this question, tell this joke,
many times. I am scared. We find a trick. She fucks him because
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she lost the pills. It is our code and her own personal sense of
courtesy. We get the pills. A Leo named Leo, I say. How can
anyone be so stupid? We pop the pills. A Leo named Leo. We
sit in our middle room, she is drinking scotch and I am drinking
vodka, we are momentarily flush: and the pills hit. A Leo
named Leo. We laugh until we start to cry. We hold our guts
and shake. A Leo named Leo. She grins from ear to ear. She
has done something incredibly witty: fucked a Leo named Leo.
We are incredibly delighted with her.
*
Walking down St Mark’s Place I run into an old lover, Nikko. He
is Greek. I love Greece. We say hello, how are you in Greek. It is
hot. I take him back with me. N is not there. We have a fight. I am
insulted because he wants to wear a condom. But women are
dirty, he says as a point of fact. I am offended. I won’t allow the
condom. We fight. He hits me hard in the face several times. He
hits me until I fall. He fucks me. He leaves. It is two weeks before
I remember that this is what happened last time. Last winter.
Women carry diseases, he said. No condoms, I said. He hit me
several times, hard in the face, holding me up so he could keep
hitting. He fucked me and left. I had another lover coming, a
woman I had been waiting for weeks to see, married, hard to see.
I picked myself up and forgot about him. She was shameless: she
liked the bruises, the fresh semen. He didn’t use the condom.
Either time.
*
We proceed with our film project. We are intensely committed
to it, for the sake of art. The politics of it is mine, a hidden
smile behind my eyes. We call a famous avant-garde film critic.
He says he will come to see us at midnight. At midnight he
comes. We sit in the front room, huddled on the floor. He is
delicate, soft-spoken, a saintly smile: he likes formal, empty
filmic statements not burdened by content: our film is some
baroque monster in his presence, overgrown with values and
story and plot and drama. It will never have this appearance
again. Despite his differences with us— aesthetic, formal,
ethereal— he will publish an interview with us to help us raise
money. We feel lifted up, overwhelmed with recognition: what
he must see in us to do this for us, a pure fire. We wait for the
other shoe to drop.
43
But he sits there, beatific. We can interview each other and
send it to him along with photographs of us. He drinks our
pathetic iced tea. He smiles. No shoe drops. He leaves.
The next days we spend in a frenzy of aesthetic busywork.
We take pencils in hand and plot out long, interesting conversations about art. We try to document an interesting, convoluted discussion of film. We discuss Godard at some length and write
down for posterity our important criticisms of him. We are
brassy, hip, radical, cool. We haunt the photo machines at
Woolworth’s, taking artistic pictures of ourselves, four poses
for four quarters. We use up all our change. We hustle more.
Excuse me, sir, but someone just stole my money and I don’t
have a subway token to get home with. Excuse me, sir, I am
very hungry and can’t you spare a quarter so I can get some
food. Excuse me, sir, I just lost my wallet and I don’t have bus
fare home.
Then we go back to the machine and pose and look intense
and avant-garde. We mess up our hair and sulk, or we try
grinning, we stare into the hidden camera, looking intense,
We write down some more thoughts on art. We pick the
photos we want. We hustle for money for stamps. Excuse me,
sir, my child is sick and I don’t have any money to buy her
medicine.
The critic prints our interview. He doesn’t print our
photographs. We are famous. Our thoughts on film and
art are in the newspaper. We wait for people to send us
money.
*
We run back and forth from our storefront to Woolworth’s as
we get the money to take more photos. We run back and forth
as we add pages and pages to our interview with each other. I
sit at the typewriter ponderously. This is an important project.
We run back and forth each time we think of something new
to add: a new pose to try, a new sentence to write down, a
new topic to explore, a new intensely artistic sulk or pout. We
make feverish notes in Woolworth’s and run home to type them
up. On one trip a policeman follows us. He walks half a block
behind us, keeping us in sight. We go faster, go slower, he stays
half a block behind us. Girls, he calls finally, girls. We wait.
44
He catches up. There is a silence. Did you know, girls, that
about half an hour ago you crossed the street against a red
light? We are properly stunned, truly stunned, silent and
attentive. I have to write you girls a ticket but listen I don’t
want to be too hard on you, I don’t want to give you a
record or anything so why don’t I write it just for one of
you. The three of us decide he will give the ticket to N since
the apartment is not in her name. He slowly, soberly, prints
her name out in big block letters. Now listen girls you be
careful next time I don’t want to have to do this again you
hear. We stand there, dazed and acquiescent. We walk on
slowly, once we are sure he is really gone. We look over our
shoulders. Is he still there or was he really there? N has a
ticket for jaywalking in her hand. Between us right then we
have a dozen tabs of acid and a bag of marijuana and some
loose joints. We have no money for food so we have been
living on speed and alcohol. We have the speed on us, in a
prescription bottle but you would have to be a fool to believe
it. We are hungry and as soon as we mail off our interview
we know we are going to have to find a fuck. We are stoned
beyond all imagining, and yet of course intensely serious
about art. Still, in the scheme of things, jaywalking is not
a good thing to do. We can see that now, once we think
about it. We think about it now quite a lot, rolling along the
city streets in the burning heat, our sides splitting with
laughter. We are dazzled with the universe and its sense of
humor. We are dazzled too by its generosity: we are left to
pursue art: we are not carted off, dangerous criminals,
drowning in drugs. We are artists, not riffraff. We are scared,
the cop’s breath still hot on our silly necks. Hungry, we find
a fuck, a safe one, N ’s girlfriend, to whom we recount our
uproarious adventure, stressing our triumphant escape. She
feeds us, just barely pretending to be amused. I leave them
alone. N pays for the meal.
*
Poor R ’s apartment is tiny and dark, on the first floor of a
brown brick building in a Mafia neighborhood. Italian rings
out around us: is it apocryphal or are stolen bicycles really
returned? R says it is true. She says she is safe here. Every
window is covered in layers of metal. It is dark, but it is the
45
real Village, not the Lower East Side. It is West. It is not piss-
covered. It is not blood-drenched.
Poor R is refined, ladylike, devoted. She cuts N ’s hair and
sews clothes for her. She makes her meals and feeds her friends.
She is repelled by the company N keeps but she is devoted
anyway, the soul of quiet devotion no matter what the provocation. She wants to be a refuge, a retreat, a nest. She makes sachets of delicate smells. She lights delicate candles to go with
dinner. She cooks delicate souffles and serves many kinds of
cheeses. She goes to auditions and gets jobs off-Broadway in
little theaters. She is small and delicate and refined. She is
quiet and kind. She is genuinely devoted. We come from the
dense torment of our storefront, immersed in the drugs,
smelling of the sex, numb from the violence, nevertheless exhilarated: and she feeds us and lets us sleep: because she is in love and devoted. She is talented, carefully dressed, not pretty,
not handsome, but each feature is distinct so that the face adds
up to an expressive one. She reads books and listens to music,
all in moderation. She loves devotedly, without moderation.
She hangs in for the long haul. She is promising to be there
forever. She wants to be there when N, weary, wants peace.
Given half a chance, she would be the one. But she has no
chance. N is bored. We eat, I leave, N pays for the meal.
*
N is easy to love, devotedly. She is very beautiful, not like a
girl. She is lean and tough. She fucks like a gang of boys. She is
smart and quiet. She doesn’t waste words. She grins from ear
to ear. She is never afraid.
*
Women pursue her. She is aloof, amused. She fucks everyone
eventually, with perfect simplicity and grace. She is a rough
fuck. She grinds her hips in. She pushes her fingers in. She
tears around inside. She is all muscle and jagged bones. She
thrusts her hips so hard you can’t remember who she is or
how many of her there are. The first time she tore me apart. I
bled and bled.
*
Women want her. So do men. She fucks everyone. It is always
easier for her to than not to. She has perfect courtesy and rare
grace. She is marvelously polite, never asking, never taking,
46
until licensed by an urgent request. Then she is a hooligan, all
fuck and balls.
*
She is slightly more reserved with men. When a man fucks me,
she says, I am with him, fucking me. The men ride her like
maniacs. Her eyes roll back but stay open and she grins. She is
always them fucking her, no matter how intensely they ride.
Me I get fucked but she is different, always just slightly outside
and on top: being him, fucking her. The men are ignorant and
entranced.
*
She dresses like a glittering boy, a tough, gorgeous boy.
She is Garbo in Queen Christina but run-down and dirty and
druggy, leaner and tougher: more used: slightly smelling of
decay and death, touched by the smell of the heat and the
smell of the piss and the smell of the men: but untouched
underneath by any human lust not her own.
*
She is ardent and intense, entirely charming, a grimy prince of
the streets, tough and fast: destitute and aloof, drawn to the
needle: edging toward the needle: but she fucks instead most of
the time: she likes the needle though: you can see it in her eyes,
all glazed over: she stops grinning and her lips get thick with
sensuality and dirty with greed: she loses her courtesy: she is
finally taken over: the needle is not her fucking her: it is something outside her fucking her: and she dissolves, finally. I could lose her to this. I never think about losing her or having her,
except around the needle. It is the only thing I am afraid of. I
would do anything for her. I want to shoot up with her: her do
it to me, tie the rubber thing, heat the spoon, fill the needle,
find the vein, shoot it up. She demurs politely. She keeps away
from it: except sometimes: she does not draw me in. She does
it away from me: with other lovers: now and then: glassy-eyed
and elated: not aloof but ecstatic: sated: when no one could
even see, from day to day, that she had been hungry.
Or I couldn’t see.
Or she wasn’t: the needle just gutted her with pleasure: so
afterward, in retrospect, one inferred that there had been a
lack, a need, before the needle: but in fact she had been complete before and now was simply drenched in something extra: 47
something exquisite, heavy and thick like some distilled perfume, sweet to the point of sickness, a nauseating sweetness: something transporting and divine: something that translated
into eyelids weighed down and swollen, lips puffed up, the
cracks in them spreading down, the body suddenly soft and
pliant, ready to curl, to billow, to fold: a fragile body, delicate
bones suddenly soft, eyes hiding behind lush eyelids: the hard
tension of her hips dissolved, finally. The way other women
look when they’ve been fucked hard and long, coming and
coming, is how she looked: the way other women look fucked
out, creamy and swollen, is how she looked. The needle gave
her that, finally: dissolved.
*
The jazz club is on a rough street, darker even than ours. It is
low down in a cellar. It is long and narrow. The walls are
brick. The tables are small, brown covered with a thick shellac,
heavy and hard, ugly. They are lined up against the brick walls
one right next to the other. You have to buy two drinks. There
is a stage at the end of the long, narrow room. Jazz blares,
live, raw: not the cold jazz, but belted-out jazz, all instruments,
all lips and spit. There is no chatter. There is no show. There
is just the music. The musicians are screaming through metal.
Or there is waiting—glasses, ice, cigarette smoke, subdued
mumbling. The music is loud. No one talks when the musicians
are on stage, even when they stop for a minute. Everyone waits
for the next sound. The smoke is dense but the sounds of the
horns punch through it and push it into the brick. We are
listening to the legendary black musician who according to
some stories turned Billie into a junkie. I am wondering if this
is as awful as it seems on the surface and why it is whispered
in a hushed awe. He is a sloppy musician by now, decades
later. He is bent over, blowing. He is sweating like a pig. His
instrument screams. There is not a hint of delicacy or remorse.
The music rouses you, the volume raises hackles on your skin,
the living, breathing sound makes your blood jump, but the
mind is left bored and dazed. Other musicians on the stage try
to engage that lost faculty: they solo with ideas or moods,
some sadness, some comic riffs. But the legend blares on,
interrupts, superimposes his unending screech. We can only
afford two drinks but the legend makes us desperate for more:
48
to take the edge off the blowing, blowing, blowing, the shrill
scream of the instrument, the tin loudness of his empty spasms.
The set ends. We want to stay for more. It is live music, jazz,
real jazz, we want as much as we can get of it. We cannot
come here often. The two required drinks cost a lot. We are at
a small wooden shellacked table against a brick wall. On one
side is a bohemian couple, dating nonetheless. On the other
side, the direction of the stage, is a man. He is huge. His
shoulders are broad. He is dressed very straight, a suit, a tie, a
clean shirt, polished shoes. He is alone. I hate his face on sight.
It has no lines. It is completely cold and cruel. There is nothing
wrong with it on the surface. His features are even handsome.
His skin is a glistening black, rich, luminous. He is lean but
nevertheless big, broad-shouldered, long, long legs. His legs
can barely fit under the small table. He is solitary and self-
contained. He has been watching N. He offers us drinks. She
accepts. They talk quietly between sets. I can’t hear them, don’t
want to. I can see something awful in him but she is fascinated.
I can’t name it. His expression never changes. It shows nothing.
I am instinctively afraid of him and repelled. N listens to him
intently. She looks almost female. Her body softens. Her eyes
are cast down. The music starts. He leaves. The legend sweats
and blares and spits and screams. He is even sloppier now,
more arrogant too, but we are drunker so it evens out. We
leave at dawn. We walk home in the hot haze. Junkies make
jokes at us. Men pee. Someone flashes a knife from a stoop.