between your fingers until there was a nice, thick layer of it
over the tobacco, and you sort of mixed them together gently
with your fingers, and then you rolled it up, so that it was
narrow on the end with the filter and wider at the bottom, and
with a match, usually burnt, you packed the mixture in the
papers at the bottom, and brought the papers together and
closed it up. Then you lit it and smoked. It went round and
round.
The boys had long, long hair. There were only a few junkies,
a little hard dope, not a lot of stealing, very congeniaclass="underline" music:
paint: philosophy. There were philosophers everywhere and
artistes. One was going to destroy the museum system by
putting his paintings out on the sidewalk free for people to see.
I met him my first afternoon in the strange new place. He was
cheerful about destroying the museum system. They were all
cheerful, these energetic talkers of revolution. One spent hours
discussing the history of failed youth movements in Europe: he
had been in them all, never aged, a foot soldier from city to
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city in the inevitability of history. Another had M ao’s red book
and did exegesis on the text while joints were handed to him
by enthralled cadres. Another knew about the role of the
tobacco industry in upholding Western imperialism: he
denounced the smokers as political hypocrites and bourgeois
fools. Meanwhile, the music was loud, the porno movies played
on the walls as Santa fucked a blond woman in black lace, the
hash was smoked pound after pound.
The women stood out. Mostly there were men but the women
did not fade into the background. There was M, who later
became a famous dominatrix near Atlantic City. She was over six
feet tall and she wore a short leather skirt, about crotch level. Her
thighs were covered with thick scars. She had long, straight,
blonde hair. She wanted to know if I had carried guns for the
Black Panthers. Since I had been too young then, she wouldn’t
have anything to do with me. There was E, an emaciated, catty
little thief: girlfriend of a major ideologist of the counterculture
revolution, a small, wiry, cunning, nervous, bespectacled man:
she wore government surplus, guerilla style: they were arrested
for stealing money from parking meters. You can’t make a
great plan on an empty stomach, he told me. There was a
bright, beautiful woman who looked like the Dutch Boy boy,
only she lit up from inside and her smile was like sunlight. Her
boyfriend was dour, officious, a functionary in the huge,
government-run building that housed the radical youth and the
hashish, he made sure the porno movies were on the right
walls at the right times. There was Frau B, a dowager administrator, suburban, having an affair with the head honcho, an ex-colonel in an occupying army: they kept the lid on for the
government. And then I too became a fixture: the girlfriend,
then the wife. The American. The only brunette. The innocent
by virtue of Americanism. They kept Europe’s feudal sex
secrets hidden. I thought I invented everything. Smoking dope
in their great painted rooms they seemed innocent: I thought
I was the old one.
In these rooms, he looked up, his face all questioning and
tender and sad: and I kissed him.
*
Once you want to be together in Northern Europe it is the
same all over. There is nowhere to go.
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In the South there are beaches and old ruins. Boys sneak girls
somewhere, some flat place, and other boys hide behind rocks
or pieces of ancient walls and watch. In the North it is cold.
There are the streets, too civilized for sex. There are no rooms,
no apartments, even adult men live with their parents. One is
sneaked into a tiny bedroom in the parents’ house: hands are
held over one’s mouth: no noise can be made: and sneaked out
before dawn, giggling silently and left in the cold, unless one’s
lover is sentimentaclass="underline" then he covers you in his coat and buries
you in his arms and you wait for dawn together. In Northern
European cities, dawn comes late but parents wake up early.
The young men have no privacy: they stay strange little bad
boys who get taller and older. They get married too young.
They sneak forever.
But it doesn’t matter: where or why or how.
There were plenty before him in gray Europe. It was his
sadness: saturating his comic face, his comic stance, his great
comic stories, his extravagant gestures. It made him different:
sad: more like me, but so fragile compared to me, so unused.
When he looked up, so innocent, I must have decided. I became
his friend, thinking that he too must love life fiercely, desperately: my gift to him: it costs me nothing and there is an abundance of it, without limits: the physical facts of life. There
is not a lot I can do. I can do this.
*
Darker, grayer: no buildings filled with hash: another European
city: to get an apartment: we had spent nights together out on
the street, in the rain, in the cold, he was my friend, I had
nowhere to go and he had nowhere to take me so he stayed
with me in the wet nights, bitter cold. So we went somewhere
else, Northern, gray, he came a few days a week, every week,
he taught me how to cook, he was my friend. There was a big
bed, one room, a huge skylight in the middle of the room, one
large table in a corner: I put the bed under the skylight, water
condenses and drips on it, but there I teach him, slowly. I have
understood. He has too much respect for women. I teach him
disrespect, systematically. I teach him how to tie knots, how to
use rope, scarves, how to bite breasts: I teach him not to be
afraid: of causing pain. It goes slowly. I teach him step by step.
I invent sex therapy in this one room somewhere in the middle
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of Europe. I am an American innocent, in my fashion. I forbid
intercourse. I teach him how to play games. You be this and I
will be that. Rape, virgin, Queen Victoria. The games go on
and on. There are some we do over and over. I teach him to
penetrate with his fingers, not to be afraid of causing pain. I
fellate him. I teach him not to worry about erection. I tie him
up. Dungeon, brothel, little girl, da-da. I ask him what he
wants to do and we do it. I teach him not to be afraid of
causing pain. Not to be afraid of hurting me. I am the one
there: don’t be afraid of hurting me, see, this is how. I teach
him not to be afraid of piss and shit, human dirt. I teach him