you could never look at before, a huge roach, a dead rat, and
you are awed by its monstrous beauty.
Your sweat simply melts you and you take off your clothes
somewhere with someone and you come and come and come:
and laugh: and fuck: and smoke: and drink: and run, run, run:
and smile: and the music is everywhere, in the traffic, in the
rumbling of the heavy trucks, in the sirens, in the screeching
wheels of police cars, in nasty motorcycles and in the sucking
sounds of the dirty men who whisper cunt when you walk by.
And you talk, intensely. The universe. Reality. Light. Truth.
Time. Dawn comes and you are hungry. You are coming down.
You smoke. You sit on a stoop, tired and content. A man
walks by. You ask him for breakfast. He takes you to one of
the all-night restaurants run for the likes of you on the Lower
East Side. The rabble are eating, all tired, all fucked out, all
drugged out. It is beautiful, serene. You get orange juice and
blintzes and sour cream and eggs and toast and coffee. The
man waits. Hey mister, you say laughing, wanna buy us
breakfast? He nods. Now you sit and eat and he watches. Now
you are full. Now he pays the bill. Now you say, hey, mister,
wanna fuck? You are still zinging on the acid a little but mostly
it is over: back to business: of course mister wants to fuck.
*
N and I sit on the stoop in front of poor R ’s apartment. The
light is just beginning. The dark is lit up from inside. The acid
is beginning to soften, to lose its grip. We are still wavy, still
floating, still charged, still porous, bodies floating in light and
air: but personality is beginning to creep back in: we know
who we are and where we are: we know that dawn is on its
way: we know that we are hungry and have to eat: we know
the acid is going: we know the night is over and the trip is over
52
and pedestrian day is nearly here: we sit watching the dark
becoming lighter and lighter: we sit watching a dead rat at the
curb: it is indisputably a rat, not God: poor R is sleeping inside,
she won’t let us in, she won’t make us breakfast, we are excommunicated, we are happy, we are turned loose to look for breakfast elsewhere: we sit there, buddies, and chat in the dark:
we walk around: we touch fingers and briefly hold hands.
*
N and I sit on a stoop in St M ark’s Place. Hey mister. We are
hungry. The acid is wearing off. The smoke has given us
ravenous appetites. We are tired. Hey mister. Some misters
pass. This one mister takes us to breakfast. He is silent,
watchful, not easy to disarm. Mister turns out to be not such
an easy fuck. N fucks him and falls asleep. Mister doesn’t
sleep. Mister probably hasn’t slept in months. Mister is nuts. I
get Mister for hours. N sleeps like a log.
*
Mister is white, lean, wiry, crew-cut, muscled, tense, wired to
go off. A coil ready to spring. Full of inexplicable rushes of
violence. He fucks like he hates it. It never gets him anywhere.
He concentrates, he fucks. You can’t feel much except his concentration. He is doing some martial art of the thighs, over and over, trying to make it perfect, get it right: it doesn’t touch
him: then the violence pours through him, impersonal, and he
is in a frenzy of fuck: then, more tense but calmer, he concentrates, he fucks. Eventually I sleep. I don’t know how or why.
When I wake up it is nearly night again. He is taking us to
the beach. The heat here in the storefront is scalding; treacherous, wet steam. Our skin is raw and burning. Our clothes are wet. Our eyes are almost swollen shut. It is hard to breathe.
Heat hurts our lungs. Mister has a car. He is giving us dinner.
We are going with him to the beach.
He drives like a maniac, but we only feel the breeze. The car
barely touches the road. It swerves. We leave the city behind.
The air gets less hot. We see the city lights trailing behind us
as we swerve and curve in the airborne car. We cool down
enough to be afraid.
The car stops, and there is a beach and an ocean. It is endlessly deserted. There are no cars. There are no people. There is a full moon and it is nearly light on the beach. The water
53
shines. It advances up against the beach. The waves are small
and delicate. The ocean is tame but it goes on forever. It goes
out as far as we can see, way past the moon. We are on the
beach. Mister wants some sex. N whispers to me that she can’t
fuck, she is bleeding again. All summer she has had this mysterious bleeding. I tease her that she wants to get out of fucking this creep. But stilclass="underline" she is bleeding, not menstruation, hemorrhaging: she can’t be fucked. She and I make love for him on the beach. It is not enough. He is wired, tense, has spasms of
violence, shows us his knife. N holds me down from behind,
both arms. He turns away one minute, a modest gesture unzipping his fly. She grins ear to ear. I try to get loose watching her grin. She is strong and I can’t. She holds me down. He
pulls down his pants. He fucks me. I get dressed. N and I sit
and watch the ocean. N and I sit and watch the moon. He
goes off by himself. A cop comes along. What are you doing
here? Watching the ocean officer. It’s dangerous here at night
girls. Thanks officer. We walk up to the car. The cop moves
on. Mister jumps up from behind the car, plays with his knife.
Mister takes us for lobster, he is silent and watchful, he doesn’t
eat, then Mister drives us home.
*
We get out of the car. The beach is there. The ocean is there.
The moon is full. We see the ocean with the moon hanging
over it. Mister is wired. Mister tells us he has a gun in the car
under the front seat. Mister tells us he hates his wife. Mister
tells us he is going to kill the bitch. Mister tells us his wife has
tried to get away from him. Mister tells us his wife was walking
down a street and he beat the bitch to pieces and pulled a
knife on her. How could his wife do that, we say, not knowing
what she did. We go on to the beach.
*
The beach is a little scummy, empty cans and empty bottles,
paper, trash. The sand is a little dirty. N and I undress each
other. We kiss. We make love standing up. He wants us in the
sand. We make love in the sand. She dresses. He shows a knife.
She holds me down. I am flat on my back naked on the beach.
She is behind me. I look up into her face. She grins. It is her
comradely grin. But I try to get loose and can’t. She is strong.
She is holding me down. It is our charade, but I can’t get