Mercy

institution in Massachusetts. It was a nutty room all right.

T w o rooms really. The first w asn’t wider than both your arms

outstretched. There was a cot, a hot plate, a tiny toilet, a teeny

tiny table that tipped over i f you put too much on it. The

second was bigger and had windows but he filled it up so there

wasn’t any room left at alclass="underline" a baby grand piano and

humongous plants taller than me, as tall as some trees, with

great wide thick leaves stretched out in the air. It was pure

menace, especially how the plants seemed to stretch out over

everything at night. They got bigger and they seemed to

move. Y ou could believe they were coming toward you and

sometimes you had to check. The difference between people

who have something and me is in how long a night is. I have

listened to every beat o f m y heart waiting for a night to end; I

have heard every second tick on by; I’ve heard the long pauses

between the seconds, enough time to die in, and I’ve waited,

barely able to breathe, for them to end. D aylight’s safer. The

big brown bugs disappear; they only come out at night and at

night yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so you can’t help but

see them, you don’t really always know whether they’re real

or not, you see them in your mind or out o f the corner o f your

eye, yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so if you see one slip

past the corner o f your eye in the dark you will start waiting in

fear for morning, for the light, because it chases them away

and you can’t; nothing you can do will. Same for burglars;

same for the ones who come in to get you; daylight; you wait

for daylight; you sit in the night, you light up the room with

phony light, it’s fake and dim and there’s never enough, the

glare only underlines the menace, you can see you’re beseiged

but there’s not enough light to vaporize the danger, make it

dissolve, the way sunlight does when finally it comes. Y ou can

sleep for a minute or two, or maybe twenty. Y ou don’t want

to be out any longer than that. You don’t get undressed. Y ou

stay dressed always, all the time, your boots on and a knife

right near you or in your hand. Y ou get boots with metal

reinforced tips, no matter what. Y ou don’t get under the

covers. Y ou don’t do all those silly things— milk and cookies,

Johnny Carson, now I lay me down to sleep. Y ou sit

absolutely still or lie down rigid and ready for attack and you

listen to the night m oving over the earth and you understand

that you are buried alive in it and by the grace o f random luck

you will be alive in the morning— or w on’t be— you will die or

you w on ’t and you wait to find out, you wait for the light and

when it comes you know you made it. Y ou hear things break

outside— windows, you can hear sheets o f glass collapsing, or

windows being broke on a smaller scale, or bottles dashed on

cement, thrown hard, or trash cans emptied out and hurled

against a cement wall, or you hear yelling, a man’s voice,

threat, a wom an’s voice, pain, or you hear screams, and you

hear sirens, there are explosions, maybe they are gun shots,

maybe not— and you hope it’s not coming after you or too

near you but you don’t know and so you wait, you just wait,

through every second o f the night, you wait for the night to

end. I spend the change I can find on cigarettes and orange

juice. I think as long as I am drinking orange juice I am

healthy. I think orange juice is the key to life. I drink a quart at

a time. It has all these millions o f vitamins. I like vodka in my

orange juice but I can’t get it; only a drink at a time from a man

here and there, but then I leave out the orange juice because I

can do that myself, I just get the vodka straight up, nothing

else in the glass taking up room but it’s greed because I like

rocks. I never had enough money at one time to buy a bottle. I

love looking at vodka bottles, especially the foreign ones— I

feel excited and distinguished and sophisticated and part o f a

real big world when I have the bottle near me. I think the

bottles are really beautiful, and the liquid is so clear, so

transparent, to me it’s like liquid diamonds, I think it’s

beautiful. I feel it connects me with Russia and all the Russians

and there is a dark melancholy as well as absolute jo y when I

drink it. It brings me near Chekhov and D ostoevsky. I like

how it burns the first drink and after that it’s just this splendid

warmth, as i f hot coals were silk sliding down inside me and I

get warm, m y throat, m y chest, m y lungs, the skin inside my

skin, whatever the inside o f m y skin is; it clings inside me. M y

grandparents came from Russia, m y daddy’s parents, and I try

to think they drank it but I’m pretty sure they w ouldn’t have,

they were just ghetto Jew s, it was probably the drink o f the

ones who persecuted them and drove them into running

away, but I don’t mind that anyw ay, because now I’m in

Am erika and I can drink the drink o f Cossacks and peasants if I

want; it soothes me, I feel triumphant and warm , happy too. I

have this idea about vodka, that it is perfect. I think it is

perfect. I think it is beautiful and pure and filled with absolute

power— the power o f something absolutely pure. It’s com pletely rare, this perfection. It’s more than that the pain dies or

it makes you magic; yeah, you soar on it and you get wise and

strong by drinking it and it’s a magnificent lover, taking you

whole. But I love ju st being near it in any w ay, shape, or form.

I would like to be pure like it is and I’d like to have only pure

things around me; I wish everything I’m near or I, touch could

be as perfect. I feel it’s very beautiful and if I ever die I wouldn’t

mind having a bottle o f it buried with me, if someone would

spring for it: one bottle o f Stoli hundred proof in honor o f me

and m y times, forever. I’d drink it slow, over time. It’d make

the maggots easier to take, that’s for sure. It does that now.

They ain’t all maggots, o f course. I been with people who

matter. I been with people who achieved something in life. I

want excellence myself. I want to attain it. There’s this woman

married to a movie star, they are damned nice and damned

rich, they take me places, to parties and dinners, and I eat

dinner with them at their house sometimes and she calls me

and gets me in a cab and I go with her. I met her because I was

w orking against the Vietnam War some more. I got back to

N ew Y ork in Novem ber 1972. It was a cold winter. I had

nothing; was nothing; I had some stories I was writing; I slept