are fast. There is no time for style or pretense. We don’t look
around, ahead, behind.
We have been going four days straight: drink, speed, fuck,
hustle, no sleep: the last night we took acid for R & R : we
walked a hundred miles in the city and rolled in the sewers:
the sun burns: we walk: we pick up what we can: bodies are
giving out, tired: we are on our way home: we get home: she
sprawls out on the mattress, I sit across the room: suddenly
she says, I see something big and black crawling on you: I say,
shit N it’s the acid you just aren’t down yet: she is quiet: she
says, I fucking see them all over: and she is right: they are all
over: huge water bugs the size of small fists: crawling
everywhere: crawling all over us, all over the room, all over
the walls. We run out into the night screaming, trying to rub
them off us, feeling them all over us, inside our clothes,
up our legs, in our hair: we keep shaking ourselves not knowing
where they are on us, can’t get clean, we are exhausted, we
must sleep, no matter how much we tell each other they aren’t
on us we can’t believe it, we keep inspecting each other but
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can’t stand still long enough to really look, we keep hopping
down the streets kicking and scratching and twisting and
turning, we feel them creeping and crawling, we bang on poor
R ’s door, she lets us in, we vibrate from the acid for days.
*
An exterminator has put a pink powder all around the storefront. The water bugs now crawl around all pink. It is a spectacular effect. Eventually they die but nothing keeps them
out. Especially they drown in coffee cups. The neighbors say
they are coming back. Hey puta we coming. There is no money.
The phone is dead. The walls crawl with pink water bugs. The
heat hangs in the air like fire. In the bright glare of the day we
pick up Jimmy. He is a masseur. He is thick and squat with
muscles, black. He has no teeth. He comes to live with us, to
protect us. N says I have to fuck him because I found him. I
say I will because the neighbors are going to kill us: Jimmy
brings his cat: sometimes she kills water bugs: other times they
die in the coffee: I have to fuck Jimmy several times a day: it is
not fun: N goes in and out: one night Jimmy disappears, N
and I go out, we come back and everything has been smashed
like maniacs have been through with axes: I say they are going
to kill us, we have to get out of here: N says we have no
money: I say we get it from one of our rich school chums, I say
we call her and stick it to her: N is mortified by the implied or
actual rudeness in this but I don’t care: I call her: I make her
come down to where we are: I say we are going to die here
unless she puts us up in a hotel until the end of the summer: I
make her take us to the hotel and pay for a room. We move
in. I think we sleep for days. *
The room has one window that opens on an air shaft. It is hot
and stuffy. It has one closet. It has a sink. It has a very large
double bed, for three at least. It is brown, with a lot of yellow
in the brown. The bed has a bedspread, brown with a lot of
yellow. There are two shabby chairs, a small desk, a telephone
extension. Down the hall is the bathroom, the showers. The
halls are grand: not plush but wide, marble floors, huge
window at one end. We are off in a far distant end, narrow, as far
away from the huge window as one could be. The woman next
door asks us if we are on the circuit. I ask what circuit. The junkie
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circuit, you know, she says, Tangier, Morocco, Marseilles,
New York, Hong Kong. I say, no, we are not on that circuit.
Our door stays open, for air.
The hotel is famous. Thomas Wolfe lived there. There are
many kinds of rooms, suites for the rich and famous: rock
groups stay there: and the maid tells us that down this very
hall an old movie actor wrote his autobiography.
There is a rug on the floor too, brown with a lot of yellow
in it.
Everything is dingy in our room: but the hall is grand. So is
the elevator. So is the traffic: money and drugs.
N is bleeding again: it stops and it starts. We use our school
chums more. They come here more. We are cleaner, calmer.
We get dinners and various dates from them: they set things
up: N needs a camera to shoot some footage, we are broke,
the store requires a huge deposit, an old school chum finds a
woman friend of hers for N to have dinner with. They pretend
it is just regular life, like they lead: except they breathe faster.
There are things we have learned: principles we have discerned: now we let the men know we want each other, they can watch. We hold each other on the huge bed, we make love
with each other: the men watch, the men pay: sometimes the
men fuck but we can overwhelm them and they go soft, impotent: we have learned certain principles: we kiss each other, we tease, we hold out the possibility, we get dinner first, we
get cash first, we get breakfast after: they are content to sit in
the same room: sleep in the same bed: to be able to say they were
there, it happened to them. N bleeds. We touch each other. A
man watches. A man pays. It is easier on us. We use the women
for money more and more: it is more artfuclass="underline" there is less sex.
When a man is not there, or another woman, we just sleep.
We make love, the man pays, the man watches, or there is
just the hint that we will and he pays.
The footage gets shot.
We fuck less: N still bleeds: some nights we can’t tell what
the man will do: it is always a game of nerves: we play him: it
is a game of skilclass="underline" we do what’s necessary: we start out playing
our game not his: he still gets in, still gets the fuck if he wants
it bad enough: N bleeds. Anyone we know we use for money.
We find their weakness. We use them for what we need. We
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fuck their minds. We play with them any way we can: we take
what we can get: but now we are selling something different,
not the fuck but the idea of two women together, the promise,
the suggestion. It turns out even more men are buyers.
We take acid, take mescaline, drink vodka. The camera
breaks. We sit in a bar, 10 am, and start drinking with the
$200 we have managed to collect. By 4 pm there is almost no
money left. We are writing a letter to the Beatles to ask for