street, until N ew Y ork is gone; I’m alive there in the dark
rubbing up against anything flesh-and-blood, not a poor,
homeless girl but a brazen girl-for-peace, hungry, tired,
waiting for you, to rub up against you, take what you have,
get what you got; peace, freedom, love, a fuck, a shy smile,
some quarters or dimes or dollars. The dark’s got a little anger
in it m oving right up against you. You can feel it pushing right
up against you now and then, a burning flash across your
thing; that’s me, I’m there, Andrea, a charred hallucination,
you know the w ay the dark melts in front o f you, I’m the
charred thing in the melting dark, the dark fire, dark ash
burned black; and you walk on, agitated, to find a living one,
not a shade stuck in midnight but some poor, trembling, real
girl, hungry enough even to smile at you. That’s m y home
you’re misbehaving in with your mischievous little indulgences, your secret little purchases o f girls and acts, because I was on every street, in every alley, fucked there, slept there,
got drugs there, found a bed for my weary head; oh, it got
weary; curled up under something, a little awake. C an’t be.
N o one can live that way. C an’t be. Isn’t true. C an’t be. Was.
Was. I wasn’t raped really until I was eighteen, pretty old.
Well, I wasn’t really raped. Rape is just some awful word. It’s a
w ay to say it was real bad; worse than anything. I was a pacifist
and I didn’t believe in hurting anyone and I wouldn’t hurt
anyone. I had been eighteen for a couple o f months; o f legal
age. It was winter. Cold. Y ou don’t forget winter. I was
w orking for peace groups and for nonviolence. It wouldn’t be
fair to call it rape; to him; it wouldn’t be fair to him. I wasn’t a
virgin or anything; he forced me but it was m y own fault. I
was working at the Student Peace Union then and at the War
Resisters League. I typed and I answered phones and I tried to
be in the meetings but they didn’t really ever let me talk and I
helped to organize demonstrations by calling people on the
phones and I helped to write leaflets. They didn’t really believe
in rape, I think. I couldn’t ask anyone or tell anyone because
they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this
word they used all the time. Women were it more than
anybody. They were hip or cool or hipsters or bohemians or
all those words you could see in newspapers on the Low er East
Side but anytime a woman said something she was bourgeois.
I knew what it meant but I didn’t know how to say it w asn’t
right. They believed in nonviolence and so did I, one hundred
percent. I w ouldn’t hurt anybody even if he did rape me but he
probably didn’t. Men were supposed to go crazy and kill
someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn’t hurt him for raping
me because they didn’t believe in hurting anyone and because I
was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the
people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you
were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and
needed to be fucked more or to begin with. At the Student Peace
Union there were boys m y age but they were treated like grown
men by everyone around there and they bossed me around and
didn’t listen to anything I said except to make fun o f it and no one
treated me as if I knew anything, which maybe I didn’t, but the
boys were pretty ignorant pieces o f shit, I can tell you that. I was
confused by it but I kept working for peace. These boys all called
momma at home; I heard them. I didn’t. There were adults,
some really old, at the War Resisters League but to me they
weren’t anything like the adults from school. They were heroes
to me. They had gone to jail for things they believed in. They
weren’t afraid and they didn’t follow laws and they didn’t act
dead and they had sex and they didn’t lie about it and they didn’t
act like there was all the time in the world because they knew
there wasn’t. They stood up to the government. They weren’t
afraid. One had been a freedom rider in the South and he got
beaten up so many times he was like a punched-out prizefighter.
He could barely talk he had been beaten up so much. I didn’t try
to talk to him or around him because I held him in awe. I thought
I would be awfully proud if I was him but he wasn’t proud at all,
just quiet and shy. Sometimes I wondered if he could remember
anything; but maybe he knew everything and was just humble
and brave. I have chosen to think so. He did things like I did,
typed and put out mailings and put postage on envelopes and ran
errands and got coffee; he didn’t order anyone around. They
were all brave and smart. One wrote poems and lots o f them
wrote articles and edited newsletters and magazines. One wrote
a book I had read in high school, not in class o f course, about
freedom and utopia, but when I asked him to read a poem I
wrote— I asked a secretary who knew him to ask him because I
was too shy— he wouldn’t and the secretary said he hated
women. He had a wife and there was a birthday party for him
one day and his wife brought a birthday cake and he wouldn’t
speak to her. Everyone said he had boys. His wife was
embarrassed and just kept talking, just on and on, and everyone
was embarrassed but no one made him talk to her or thank her
and I stayed on the outside o f the circle that was around him to
think if it was possible that he hated women, even his wife, and
w hy he would be mean to her as if she didn’t exist. Y o u ’d thank
anyone for a birthday cake. From his book I thought he was
wise. I thought he loved everyone. And if he hated women and
everyone knew it how come they were so nice to him because
hate wasn’t nonviolence. When he died a few years later I felt
relieved. I wondered if his wife was sad or if she felt relieved. I
suppose she was sad but why? I thought he was this one hateful
man but the others were the great I-Thous, the real I-Thous;
fighting militarism; wanting peace; writing; I wanted to be the
same. The I-Its were the regular people on the streets dressed in
suits all the same like robots busy going to business and women
with lacquered hair in outfits. But when the boys who wanted to
be conscientious objectors came in for help there were always
a lot o f jokes about rape. I didn’t see how you could make
jokes about rape i f you were against violence; maybe rape
barely existed at all but it was pretty awful. The pacifists and
w ar resisters would counsel the conscientious objectors about
what to say to the draft boards. Vietnam was pulling all these
boys to be killers. The draft board always asked what the c. o. ’s