Mercy

nearly awed. The men had this vitality, they were sort o f

glowing. I never knew such a thing could happen. Y ou

listened to them, because they might say something about art.

One talked to me about death. He was a real famous painter.

He said that both him and me were artists. He said artists were

the only people who faced death without lying. He said that

was the reason to make love— because you had looked death in

the face and then you defied it. He said the others didn’t

understand that but he did and I did and so would I come with

him. And I laughed. I didn’t go with him but I laughed, he

made me happy, I laughed, I felt it was such beautiful bullshit

and I laughed. I thought it was a real nice thing for him to say.

It was a new year. I was drinking champagne. I w asn’t alone. I

wasn’t outside. I was safe. It was so much— beauty and life and

gracious ease; it was so surprising, so completely wonderful

and new; it was glittering and sparkling, it was small and

warm, it was new and scary and exciting and real fine. I started

having this dream over and over. It was N ew Y ork, streets I

knew, usually down in the Village, around Washington

Square, sometimes on Fifth Avenue above the Square. It was

very dark. The dark was almost a person, a character in the

dream. The dark had a kind o f depth, almost a smell, and it

was scary and dense and it was over everything, you almost

couldn’t see anything through it. The dream was somewhere

in the Village, sometimes near those big impersonal buildings

on Fifth Avenue, but even i f it’s deeper in the Village the

buildings are stone, big, impersonal, not the town houses or

brownstones o f the Village, but the impersonal Fifth Avenue

buildings, a cold rich city made o f cold stone. Som ehow I go

into one and it opens into this huge feast, this giant party in this

giant ballroom, physically it’s almost underground as if you

are going down inside the ground but there is this grand

ballroom and the women have gow ns and jew els and the men

are shiny and pretty in black suits and ruffled silk shirts but no

one makes me leave, at first I’m afraid but no one makes me

leave, there’s lots o f noise and there’s music and there’s food,

all sorts o f weird kinds o f food, cocktail food and real food and

drinks and it’s warm and friendly and in the dream I say yes,

I’ve been here before, it’s waiting, it’s always here, it’s just part

o f N ew Y ork , you don’t have to ever be afraid, hidden aw ay

there’s always something like this, you ju st have to find it, and

it fades, the dream fades, and I wake up feeling flushed and

tired and happy and I think it’s out there if only I can

remember where it is and it’s not until I’m out on the streets

that I understand I just dreamed it, I wasn’t really there, not

just last night but ever, but still I think N ew Y ork is full o f

such places, only I don’t know where they are. But after N ew

Year it just was colder and harder; there’s not a lot o f magic in

the world, no beautiful fairy godmother to wave her wand so

you can stop sifting through ashes and go to the ball. I slept

outside the kitchen in m y old friend’s apartment; I wrote

stories, slow, real slow, over and over, a sentence again and

again, I did peace stuff against the War, I got food from bars

mostly. Y ou go during happy hour and you only need one

drink. Y ou can get a man to get it for you or if you have the

change you can do it and then there’s warm food and you can

eat; they make it real fatty usually but it’s good, heavy and

warm and they bring out more and more until happy hour’s

over. I met the actor and his wife and she took me everywhere,

all around. Sometime I moved into the loony’s room with the

carnivorous plants and I wrote stories, slow, real slow, word

by word, then starting over. I had nothing and I was nothing

and I couldn’t tell no one how I was hurt from being married.

And I kept drinking with the painters. I liked the noisy bars

and the people all excited with drinking and art and all the love

affairs going on all around, with all the torment, because it

wasn’t m y torment, it didn’t come near m y torment. It was

distracting, a kind o f static that interrupted the pain I was

carrying. I got the peace group to give me seventy-five dollars

a week and I worked every morning for them, making phone

calls, writing leaflets, mimeographing, typing, doing shit. I

said I was a writer i f someone asked. I worked on m y stories,

slow; I stayed alive as best I could; I waited through long

nights, I waited. N o w it’s bitter cold; a bitter cold night;

unusual in N ew Y ork; with the temperature under zero; with

the wind blowing about fifteen miles an hour, trying to kill

you, cutting you in half and then in half again, you can’t

withstand it, there’s nothing can keep it from running through

you like a knife. I’m in m y little room, the loon y’s room; I’m

staying calm; I don’t like being alone, it’s hard, but I’ m

thinking I’m okay, I’m inside, I’m okay; I’m thinking I will

take out m y notebook and w ork, sit with the words, make

sentences, cross words out, you hear a kind o f music in your

head and you transpose it into words but the words sit there,

block letters, just words, they don’t sing back, so you have to

keep making them better until they do, until they sing back to

you, you look at it and it moves like a song. Y ou hear it

m oving, there’s a buzz on it and the buzz is music, not noise; it

can be percussive but it’s still lyrical, it sings. It’s a delicate

thing, knowing when it’s right. At the same time it’s like

being in first grade where you had to write the words down

careful in block letters and you had to make them perfect;

because you keep trying like some six-year-old to make the

words perfect so they look back at you and they are right, as if

there’s this one right w ay and it sits there, pure and clear, when

yo u ’re smart enough, finally, to put it on the page in front o f

you. I always want to run away from it: putting the words

down, because they’re always w rong at first and for a long

time they stay wrong, but now the cold night keeps me in, the

wind, the killer wind, I sit on the cot, I m ove m y papers to the

tiny table, I get out a pencil and I find some em pty paper, and I

start again, I begin again, I have started again over and over

and tonight I start again, and I hear the words in m y heart. I

came back with two laundry bags, like canvas shopping bags.