money. We are drinking vodka martinis. We spill them all
over the letter we have just finished and watch the liquid wash
away the ink.
We go to an artists’ colony. I am going to read poems. N is
going to talk about the film. We want them to give us money.
It is in upstate New York, rural, trees, air, the moon. We get
there but instead of reading and talking we drop acid. We
spend the next two days driving all over with two school
chums, one of whom is not tripping, one of whom is having a
bad trip, climbs under the van we have, won’t come out, we
drive to hayfields to sleep, we drive to the ocean, we undress,
we swim, N raises herself out of the roof that opens in the van
bare-breasted on a turnpike, we go a hundred miles an hour:
she and I are happy: our school chums feel bad: we laugh: we
watch every particle of light: we are happy: they don’t forgive
us.
We get the men: we make love: they watch: they pay. Or we
promise, we touch, we flirt, they pay.
The hotel tries twice to throw us out for prostitution. I am
indignant beyond belief. I scream at them about the First
Amendment and the Bill of Rights. They desist, confused. What
do whores know about the Bill of Rights?
We hustle day and night: we are busy: we have hit our stride:
we get money: we hold each other tight and we kiss and we
fuck and the man watches and sometimes he fucks one or the
other of us if there is no way around it and the man pays. We
anticipate them. We know them better than they know themselves. N bleeds.
She goes to the hospital. Her cervix is cauterized.
The time is running out in the hotel. Our school chum won’t
pay for it anymore. There is not enough guilt in the world to
make her pay. N bleeds. She has acute pain in her side. She
needs quiet, a place to rest. We need a place to live. We go to
Staten Island to look for a house. The film is not yet finished.
We find a house. It is raining. There are hundreds of steps up
to it. It is up a steep hill. N is hurting very bad in her side. We
want to move there, we have the money in hand, but how will
we get more for next month and the month after? She is very
sick. We have to leave the hotel. I take her to the Lower East
Side apartment of a woman who has always wanted her. I
deliver her. The building is a piss-hole, a stagnant sewer. The
apartment is five flights up. In the hall there are caverns in the
wall, the plaster broken away, with screen and wire covering
them. Behind the screen and wire, as if they are built into the
wall and caged there on display, are live rats, big ones, almost
hissing, fierce. N is in acute pain. N bleeds. I take the money I
need. I leave her there. I arrange to have pills waiting for me in
Europe. The film isn’t finished. N can’t stand up. I leave her
there on a soiled mattress, curled up in pain. I make her
promise to finish the film. I don’t think about her again. I
don’t feel anything. I take the money and leave on a boat for
Europe. The great thing is to be saturated with something—
that is, in one way or another, with life; or is it?
78
I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that
nothing good can come of it: I mean the
physical facts of life, the sun, the grass,
youth. It’s a much more terrible vice than
cocaine, it costs me nothing, and there is an
endless abundance of it, with no limits: and
I devour, devour. How it will end, I don’t know.
Pasolini
*
I can’t remember much of what anything was like, only how
it started. No light, no weather. From now on everything is
in a room somewhere in Europe, a room. A series of rooms,
a series of cities: cold, ancient cities: Northern European
cities: gray, with old light: somber but the gray dances: old
beauty, muted grandeur, monumental grace. Rembrandt,
Breughel. Mid-European and Northern winters, light. Old
cruelties, not nouveau.
He was impotent and wanted to die.
On the surface he was a clown. He had the face of a great
comic actor. It moved in parts, in sections, the scalp in one
direction, the nose forward, the chin somewhere else, the
features bigger than life. A unique face, completely distinct, in
no way handsome, outside that realm of discourse altogether.
Someday he would be beautiful or ugly, depending on his life.
Now he was alternately filled with light or sadness, with great
jokes and huge gestures or his body seemingly shrivelled down
to a heap of bones by inexplicable grief, the skin around the
bones sagging loose or gone. He was a wild man: long, stringy
blond hair; afghan coat making him into some wild mountain
creature; prominent, pointed, narrow, but graceful nose; a
laugh that went the distance from deep chuckle to shrill hysteria, and back each calibrated niche of possibility, and walls shivered.
It was amidst hashish and rock ’n’ roll.
The youth gathered in huge buildings set aside for dissipation. Inside we were indulged. The huge rooms were painted garish colors. There were garish murals. Political and cultural
79
radicals were kept inside, tamed, self-important, it was the
revolution: big black balls of hashish and rock ’n’ roll.
Inside there was this figure of a man, all brassy on the outside, and inside impotent and ready to die.
I took his life in my hands to save him. I took his face in my
hands, I kissed him. I took his body to save him from despair.
A suffering man: a compassionate woman: the impersonal love
of one human for another, sex the vehicle of redemption: you
hear about it all the time. Isn’t that what we are supposed to
do?
*
It doesn’t matter where it was, but it was there, in a huge mass
of rooms painted in glaring colors: rock music blaring, often
live, old-time porno films— Santa coming down a chimney—
projected on the walls, boys throwing huge balls of hashish
across the room, playing catch. Cigarettes were rolled from
loose tobacco in papers: so was grass: so was a potent mixture
of hashish and tobacco, what I liked. I got good at it. You put
together three cigarette papers with spit and rolled a little filter
from a match cover, just a piece of it, and put down a layer of
loose tobacco, and then you heated the hash over a lit match
until it got all soft and crumbly, and then you crumbled it