or hot or wretched, the windows were open and I walked:
anywhere: no money so there was little rest: few stops: no
bourgeois indulgences: just cement. And each night, I crawled
back home, like a slug, dragging the day’s fatigue behind me,
dreading the cold open exposed night ahead. In my room,
where I worked writing, the windows were never closed because the stench and poison were too thick, too choking. After midnight, I could close two windows in the living room just
so no one went in it and just so they were open again by 6
am when the cooks heated up the grease to begin again.
Sometimes, in my room, writing, my fingers were jammed
stiff from the cold. Sometimes the typewriter rebelled, too
cold to be pushed along. I found a small electric heater, and
if I placed it just right, out of the wind but not so close to
me that my clothes would burn, my fingers would regain
feeling and they would begin to bend subtly and hit the right
keys, clumsy, slow, but moving with deliberation. Less
numbed, they moved, a slow dance of heroic movement:
words on a page.
Each night, until dawn was finally accomplished, fully alive
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and splendid, I wrote, and then I would crawl, broken-hearted
and afraid of dying, to one small distant room, the size of a
large closet, where the fumes were less, and I would sleep on
the floor on an old Salvation Army mattress with springs that
some reformed alcoholic had never quite finished under an
open window. I would dream: oh, Freud, tell me, what could it
mean: of cold, of stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Morbid
violences and morbid defeats: cement, rain, wind, ice. Time
would pass: I would tremble: I would wake up screaming:
driven back to sleep to be warmer, I would dream of cold, of
stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Then, it would be time
to wake up. I would be tired and trembling, so tired. I would
walk, six hours, eight hours. After the first two winters I never
got warm. Even in the hell of tenement heat, I never got warm.
I dreaded cold like other people are afraid of being tortured:
could they stand it, would they tell, would they beg, would
they die first right away, struck down by dread, would they
dirty their pants, would they beg and crawl. I wanted to surrender but no one would accept my confession and finish me off.
He kissed me against my will and then I walked home,
slowly, in the rain, wet.
My love, the boy I lived with, lay sleeping, curled up in a ball,
fetal, six feet, blond, muscled, and yet his knees were drawn
up to his chest and his sweet yellow curls fell like a two-year-
old’s over his pale, drawn face, and his skin was nearly translucent, the color of ice spread out over great expanses of earth.
He was dressed in layers of knitted wool, thermal pants and
shirts, sweatshirts: we always wore all we had inside. The quilt
with a wool blanket on top of it had shifted its place and his
knees and face were brought together, his hands lost somewhere between them. I sat watching him, lost, in this room of his. He was on brown sheets. The radiator clanged and
chugged: the noise it made was almost deafening, only in this
room. There were big windows, and a fire escape splayed out
under them going down to the treacherous street. There was a
big desk buried under piles of papers. There were books,
thrown, strewn, left for months open at one place so that the
binding broke and the page itself seemed pressed to death.
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There were books in all stages of being opened and closed
with passages marked and pages bent and papers wedged into
the seams of the binding with hand-scribbled notes, yellowing.
The books were everywhere in great piles and clusters, under
typewriter paper that simply spread like some wild growth in
moist soil, under heaps of dirty clothes, under old newspapers
that were now documents of an older time, under shoes and
socks, under discarded belts, under old undershirts, under long-
forgotten soda bottles not quite empty, under glasses ringed
with wet, under magazines thrown aside in the second before
sleep. Oh, my love could sleep. In the ice, in wind, in rain, in
fire, my love could sleep. I watched him, content, a goldenhaired child, some golden infant, peaceful, at ease in the world of coma and unremembered dreams. It was Christian sleep, we
both agreed, mostly Protestant, impervious to guilt or worry
or pain, Christ had died for him. To my outsider’s eye it was
grace. It soothed, it was succor, it was an adoring visitor, a
faithful friend, it loved and rested him, and he knew no suffering that withstood its gentle solace. I had seen the same capacity for sleep in persons less kind, one was born to it, the
great and deep and easy sleep reserved for those not meant to
remember.
I sat on the other side of the room where he slept, in a
typing chair bought in the cheapest five and dime, slightly built,
perilous, covered in cat hair. His desk was huge, an old, used
table, big enough to hold the confusion, which, regardless,
simply billowed over its edges and onto the floor. The ground
between the typing chair and his heavy, staid double bed was a
false garden of tangle and weeds, or a minefield in the dark,
but he slept with the light on, even he never quite safe because
it was more like sleeping outside than sleeping inside. He would
never be vagabonded: never desolate and out in the cold. But I
would be, someday, putting on all the old trashy clothes, army
surplus, of these cold years, walking forever, simply settling
outside because inside was ridiculous, too silly, an insupportable idea: the absurd idea that this was a place to live.
Sleep kept him believing he had a home— somewhere, after all,
to sleep. But I spent the nights awake, I had to sit at a desk,
turn on electric lights, refer to many different and highly
important books, pace, sharpen pencils, change typewriter
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ribbons, make drafts, take notes, make phone calls, in meaningful and purposeful ways, with dignity and skill, physically inside, certainly inside. That old woman I would soon be,
always outside, sat right near me, I could smell her savage
skin, the mixture of sweat and ice, fear and filth. I already had
her sores on my feet and her bitterness in my heart. I knew
her: I was her already, carefully concealing it: waiting for the
events between this moment and later when I would be her.