curled up to sleep and I’d drink whatever there was that
someone give me because there’s generous men too; I see
saliva; I see it close up; i f I was an artist I would paint it except I
don’t know how you make it glisten, the brown and the gold
in it; I saw many a face close up and I saw many a man close up
and I’d lift my skirt and it was dirty, my legs, and there was
dried blood. I was pretty dirty. I didn’t w orry too much. Then
I got money because my friend thought I should go inside. I
had this friend. I knew her when I was young. She was a
pacifist. She hated war and she held signs against the Vietnam
War and I did too. She let me sleep in her apartment but
enough’s enough; there’s places you don’t go back to. So now
I was too dirty and she gave me money to go inside
definitively; which I had wanted, except it was hard to
express. I thought about walls all the time. I thought about
how easy they should be, really, to have; how you could fit
them almost anywhere, on a street corner, in an alley, on a
patch o f dirt, you must make walls and a person can go inside
with a bed, a small cot, just to lie down and it’s a house, as
much o f a house as any other house. I thought about walls
pretty much all the time. Y ou should be able to just put up
walls, it should be possible. There’s literally no end to the
places walls could go without inconveniencing anyone, except
they would have to walk around. They say a ro of over your
head but it’s walls really that are the issue; you can just think
about them, all their corners touching or all lined up thin like
pancakes, painted a pretty color, a light color because you
don’t want it to look too small, or you can make it more than
one color but you run the risk o f looking busy, somewhat
vulgar, and you don’t want it to look gray or brown like
outside or you could get sad. There’s got to be some place in
heaven where God stores walls, there’s just walls, stacked or
standing up straight like the pages o f a book, miles high and
miles wide running in pale colors above the clouds, a storage
place, and God sees someone lost and He just sends them
down four at a time. Guess He don’t. There’s people take them
for granted and people who dream about them— literally,
dream how nice they would be, pretty and painted, serene. I
w ouldn’t mind living outside all the time if it didn’t get cold or
wet and there wasn’t men. A ro o f over your head is more
conceptual in a sense; it’s sort o f an advanced idea. In life you
can cover your head with a piece o f w ood or with cardboard or
newspapers or a side o f a crate you pull apart, but walls aren’t
really spontaneous in any sense; they need to be built, with
purpose, with intention. Someone has to plan it if you want
them to come together the right w ay, the whole four o f them
with edges so delicate, it has to be balanced and solid and
upright and it’s very delicate because if it’s not right it falls,
you can’t take it for granted; and there’s wind that can knock it
down; and you will feel sad, remorseful, you will feel full o f
grief. Y ou can’t sustain the loss. A ro o f over your head is a sort
o f suburban idea, I think; like that i f you have some long, flat,
big house with furniture in it that’s all matching you surely
also will have a ro o f so they make it a synonym for all the rest
but it’s walls that make the difference between outside and
not. It’s a well-kept secret, arcane knowledge, a m ystery not
often explained. Y o u don’t see it written down but initiates
know. I type and sometimes I steal but I’m stopping as much
as I can. I live inside now. I have an apartment in a building.
It’s a genuine building, a tenement, which is a famous kind o f
building in which many have lived in history. M aybe not
T rotsky but Em m a Goldm an for certain. I don’t go near men
really. Sometimes I do. I get a certain forgetfulness that comes
on me, a dark shadow over m y brain, I get took up in a certain
feeling, a wandering feeling to run from existence, all restless,
perpetual motion. It drives me with an ache and I go find one. I
get a smile on m y face and m y hips m ove a little back and forth
and I turn into a greedy little fool; I want the glass all em pty. I
grab some change and I hit the cement and I get one. I am
writing a certain very serious book about life itself. I go to bars
for food during happy hours when m y nerves aren’t too bad,
too loaded down with pain, but I keep to m yself so I can’t get
enough to eat because bartenders and managers keep watch
and you are supposed to be there for the men which is w hy
they let you in, there ain’t no such thing as a solitary woman
brooding poetically to be left alone, it don’t happen or she
don’t eat, and mostly I don’t want men so I’m hungry most o f
the time, I’m almost always hungry, I eat potatoes, you can
buy a bag o f potatoes that is almost too heavy to carry and you
can just boil them one at a time and you can eat them and they
fill you up for a while. M y book is a very big book about
existence but I can’t find any plot for it. It’s going to be a very
big book once I get past the initial slow beginning. I want to
get it published but you get afraid you will die before it’s
finished, not after when it can be found and it’s testimony and
then they say you were a great one; you don’t want to die
before you wrote it so you have to learn to sustain your
writing, you take it serious, you do it every day and you don’t
fail to write words down and to think sentences. It's hard to
find words. It’s about some woman but I can’t think o f what
happens. I can say where she is. It’s pretty barren. I always see
a woman on a rock, calling out. But that’s not a story per se.
Y ou could have someone dying o f tuberculosis like Mann or
someone who is suffering— for instance, someone who is
lovesick like Mann. O r there’s best-sellers, all these stories
where women do all these things and say all these things but I
don’t think I can write about that because I only seen it in the
movies. There’s marriage stories but it’s so boring, a couple in
the suburbs and the man on the train becoming unfaithful and
how bored she is because she’s too intelligent or something
about how angry she is but I can’t remember why. A love
story’s so stupid in these modern times. I can’t have it be about
m y life because number one I don’t remember very much and
number two it’s against the rules, you’re supposed to make
things up. The best thing that ever happened to me is these