The air conditioning always helps.
The offices are strange places.
The people in them seem dead.
It is the straight world of regular USA.
We abhor it.
We go back to our world of slime and sex tired and bored:
to be alive as we understand living. Not like them.
*
The world is divided that way now: the straight adults, old
people; and us. It is that way.
*
On St Mark’s Place the police are always out in large numbers,
57
hassling the hippies. Where we live there are never any police,
no matter who gets hurt or how bad. It takes a riot to bring
them out. Then they shoot.
The flower girls and boys abound in other parts of the
neighborhood, not near us.
We are not them and not not them. N grew up in a swamp
in the South, oldest child, four boys under her, father abandoned family, became a religious fanatic after running whores for a while, came back, moved the family North, sent her to a
girls’ school to get a proper upbringing, then ran off again:
like me, poor and half orphaned. Like me she gets a scholarship
to a rich girls’ college. We meet there, the outcast poor, exiled
among the pathetic rich. We don’t have money hidden away
somewhere, if only we would behave. Her mother, my father,
have nothing to give. She has other children to feed. He is sick,
says nothing, does nothing, languishes, a sad old man with a
son killed in Vietnam and a dirty daughter on dirty streets. N
and I are poor now: poorer even than when we were children:
nothing but what we get however we get it. But also we are
white and smart and well-educated. Do we have to be here or
not?
We can’t be lacquer-haired secretaries. There is no place else
for us. The flower children are like distant cousins, the affluent
part of the family: you hear about them but it doesn’t mean
you can have what they have. They wear pretty colors and
have good drugs, especially hallucinogens, and they decorate
the streets with paint and scents: incense, glitter: fucking them
is fun sometimes but often too solemn, they bore with their
lovey pieties: but we didn’t leave anything behind and we got
nothing to go back to.
*
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty: those years. The men numbered in
the thousands. At first I was alone, then, with her, I wasn’t.
This was one summer. We also had a winter and a spring
before.
*
Every time we needed petty cash: and when we didn’t.
*
We took women for money too, but with more drama, more
plot, more plan. They had to be in love or infatuated. You had
58
to remember their names and details of their childhood. They
gave you what you needed gingerly: the seduction had to
continue past sex: sometimes they would get both of us: other
times only one of us could get near enough: or sometimes we
would both be there, each one picking up the slack when the
other got bored, and take turns before drifting off to sleep. Or
N would do it one night, me another. I liked another woman’s
body there between us, and I liked when N fucked me then her
and then I kept kissing her between the legs, though N would
have fallen asleep by then. I liked those nights. I didn’t like
that we never got enough out of it: enough money: enough
food: enough: and I didn’t like it that the women got clingy or
all pathetic or that not one could bear to remember how she
had come, wanting to be courted, and stayed.
*
And then there was just having the women: because you
wanted them: because it was a piece of heaven right in the
middle of helclass="underline" because they knew your name too: because you
went mad with them in your mouth: and you went crazy thigh
to thigh: and it was earth, sublime: and the skin, pearclass="underline" and the
breasts: and coming, coming, coming.
*
Especially the hairs that stayed in your mouth, and the bites
they left.
*
The men fucked or did whatever: but the women came close
to dying, with this quiet surprise.
*
And you did too, because you were the same, only harder, not
new. They were enough like you. As close as could be. Every
slight tremble shot through both bodies. Even when she knew
nothing and you knew everything: even when you did it alclass="underline"
your fingers on her, her taste all over you, pushed you so far
over the edge you needed drugs to bring you back. The small
of her back, trembling: how small they were, how delicate, the
tiny bones, how they almost disappeared: and then the more
ecstatic exertions of a lover with her beloved.
*
The sex could go on until exhaustion defeated the prosaic
body: these were not the short, abrupt times of men with their
59
push and shove: these were long, hot, humid times, whole
seasons: but once over, life went on: she was on her own,
desolate: unhappy: ready to shell out what you needed so as
not to be alone forever: so as to be able to come back: and you
must never take too much, she must not be humiliated too
much: and you must make sure she knows that you know her
name and her uniqueness: and you must stay aloof but not be
cold: and she gives you something, money is best: and she is
just unhappy enough when she leaves. Her body still trembles
and she is as pale as death, washed out, delicate and desperate,
she has never done anything like this before, not wanting her
own life, wanting ours: which we hold for ransom. She can get
near it again, if we let her: if she has something we need. We
are tired of her and want her gone. We are both cold and
detached and ready for someone new.
*
The coffeehouse has a jukebox N likes. The music blares. She
knows how to turn them up. In any bar she can reach behind,
wink at the bartender, and turn up the music. In this
coffeehouse, all painted pink, there is no resistance. It is in the
Village, a dumpy one surrounded by plusher places for tourists
and rich hippies and old-time bohemians who have learned how
to make a living from art.
There is nightlife here, and money, and N and I hang out
for the air conditioning and to pick up men. It is easy pickings.
She roams around the room, a girl James Dean, toward the
jukebox, away from the jukebox, toward it, away from it, her
cigarette hanging out of her slightly dirty mouth, her hips tough
and lean, her legs bent at the knees, a little bowlegged, opened