on the floor near someone’s bed in a rented room. Nixon
bombed a hospital in North Vietnam. All these civilians died. I
couldn’t really stand it. I went to my old peace friends and I
started helping out: demonstrations, phone calls, leaflets,
newspaper ads, the tricks o f the trade don’t change. I had this
idea that important Amerikans— artists, writers, movie stars,
all the glitz against the War— should go to North Vietnam sort
o f as voluntary hostages so either N ixon would have to stop
the bombing or risk killing all them. It would show how venal
the bombings were; and that they killed Vietnamese because
Vietnamese were nothing to them, just nothing; and it was
morally right to put yourself with the people being hurt.
Inside yourself you felt you had to stop the War. Inside
yourself you felt the War turned you into a murderer. Inside
yourself you couldn’t stand the Vietnamese dying because this
government was so fucking arrogant and out o f control.
There was a lot o f us who never stopped thinking about the
War, despite our personal troubles; sometimes it was hard not
to have it drive you completely out o f your mind— if you let it
sink in, how horrible it was, you really could go mad and do
terrible things. So I got hooked up with some famous people
who wanted to stop the War; some had been in the peace
movement before, some just came because o f the bombings.
We wanted to stop the bombing; we wanted to pay for the
hospital; we wanted to be innocent o f the murders. The U . S.
government was an outlaw to us. The famous people gave
press conferences, signed ads, signed petitions, and some even
did civil disobedience; I typed, made phone calls, the usual;
shit work; but I also tried to push m y ideas in. The idea was to
use their fame to get out anti-War messages and to get more
mainstream opposition to the War. Hey, I was home; only in
Amerika. One day this woman came in to where we were
w orking— to help, she said; was there anything she could do
to help, she asked— and she was as disreputable looking as me
or more so— she looked sort o f like a gypsy boy or some street
w a if—and they treated her like dirt, so condescending, which
was how they treated me, exactly, and it turned out she was
the wife o f this mega-star, so they got all humble and started
sucking. I had just talked to her like a person from the
beginning so she invited me to their house that night for
dinner— it turned out it was her birthday party but she didn’t
tell me that. I got there on time and no one else came for an
hour so her and me and her husband talked a lot and they were
nice even though it was clear I didn’t understand I w asn’t
supposed to show up yet. She took me places, all over, and we
caroused and talked and drank and once when he w asn’t home
she let me take this elaborate bath and she brought me a
beautiful glass o f champagne in the tub, then he came in, and I
don’t know if he was mad or not, but he was always real nice
to me, and nothing was going on, and there wasn’t no bath or
shower where I lived, though I was ashamed to say so, I had to
make an appointment with someone in the building to use
theirs. They kept me alive for a while, though they couldn’t
have known it. I ate when I was with them; otherwise I didn’t.
M y world got so big: parties, clubs, people; it was like a tour
o f a hidden world. Once she even took me to the opera. I never
was there before. She bought me a glass o f champagne and we
stood among ladies in gowns on red velvet carpets. But then
they left. And I knew some painters, real rich and famous.
One o f them was the lover o f a girl I knew. He befriended me,
like a chum, like a sort o f brother in some ways. He just acted
nice and invited me places where he was where there were a lot
o f people. He didn’t mind that I was shy. He talked to me a lot.
He seemed to see that I was overwhelmed and he didn’t take it
wrong. He tried to make me feel at ease. He tried to draw me
out. I sort o f wanted to stay away from places but he just tried
to get me to come forward a little. In some ways he seemed
like a camp counselor organizing events: now we hike, now
we make purses. I’d go drinking with all these painters in their
downtown bars and they had plenty o f money and it wasn’t a
matter o f tit for tat, they just kept the drinks coming, never
seemed to occur to them to stop drinking. I knew his girlfriend
who was a painter. At first when I met him I had just got back.
I was sleeping on floors. I slept on her floor some nights when
he wasn’t there. She was all tortured about him, she was just
all twisted up inside, but I never understood why, she was
pretty incoherent. We drank, we talked about him, or she did;
she didn’t have any other subject. There wasn’t no sexual
feeling between him and me and he acted cordial and
agreeable. We went on a bus with some other people they
knew to N ew Hampshire for Thanksgiving. I think he paid
but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any money to go but they
wanted me to go; they had friends there. We went on the
Greyhound bus and it let us o ff somewhere in Verm ont and
someone, another painter from up there, was supposed to pick
us up, but he didn’t come all night, so we were in the parking
lot o f the bus station, locked out o f the depot, deserted and
freezing through the whole night; and in the morning we got a
bus the rest o f the w ay. It was like being on a camping trip in
the Arctic without any provisions— w e’d pass around the ugly
coffee from the machine outside. We got cold and hungry and
angry and people’s tempers flared, but he sort o f held it all
together. His name was Paul, she was Jill. They fought a lot
that night but hell it was cold and awful. He was gregarious
but sort o f opaque, at least to me; I couldn’t figure out
anything about him really. He w asn’t interesting, he w asn’t
real intelligent, and then suddenly, mentally, he’d be right on
top o f you, staring past your eyes into you, then he’d see
whatever he saw and he’d m ove on. He had a cold streak right
down the middle o f him. He w asn’t someone you wanted to
get close with and at the same time he held you on his margin,
he kept you in sight, he had this sort o f peripheral vision so he
always knew where you were and what you needed. He kept
you as near as he wanted you. He had a strong w ill and a lot o f
insistence that you were going to be in his scout troop sitting
around the fire toasting m arshmallows. He had opinions on
everything, including who took too many drugs and who was
really gay. We got to N ew Hampshire and there was this big