I told him that he was much too busy. I told him that it was
raining. I went anyway, shaking on the wet sidewalks, shaking
on the bus, so nervous on the five flights up to his apartment
that I could barely keep my balance. As always when I was
nervous, I broke into a cold sweat.
He had warned me that he was working on proofs for a
new book of poems and would have very little time for me,
but we spent the whole night talking - well, okay, not al of it
but many hours of it. He then walked me down to the bus
in the rain and told me he loved me. I counted. He told me
eleven times.
I called him one more time many months later. I had a
standing invitation to see him, but I never went back. I stayed
infatuated but I stayed out of his way. I did not know that this
was a shrewd move on my part for the writer I wanted to be.
Being in thrall to an icon keeps you from becoming yourself.
When Woman Hating was published in 1974, I met the
photographer Elsa Dorfman. She was a close friend of Allen’s
and had photographed him and other writers over years, not
days. She photographed me for the first time as a writer. When
Elsa had a baby I was asked to be his godmother and Ginsberg
was his godfather. We were now, metaphysically speaking,
joined in unholy matrimony. And still I stayed away from
him. I did not see him again, since that time in college, until
my godson was bar mitzvahed. By this time I had published
37
Heartbreak
many books, including my work attacking pornography - the
artifacts, the philosophy, the politics.
On the day of the bar mitzvah newspapers reported in huge
headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornography il egal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be.
I did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a
pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man-
Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction
that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from
what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I
made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck
children and his constant pursuit of underage boys.
I did everything I could to avoid Allen and to avoid
conflict. This was my godson’s day. He did not need a political struggle to the death breaking out al over.
Ginsberg would not leave me alone. He followed me everywhere I went from the lobby of the hotel through the whole reception, then during the dinner. He photographed me constantly with a vicious little camera he wore around his neck. He sat next to me and wanted to know details of sexual abuse I
had suf ered. A lovely woman, not knowing that his interest was
entirely pornographic, told a terrible story of being molested
by a neighbor. He ignored her. She had thought, “This is
Al en Ginsberg, the great beat poet and a prince of empathy. ”
Wrong. Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent
person who had the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get
38
The Fight
around enough. He pointed to the friends of my godson and
said they were old enough to fuck. They were twelve and
thirteen. He said that al sex was good, including forced sex.
I am good at get ing rid of men, strictly in the above-board
sense. I couldn’t get rid of Allen. Finally I had had it. Referring
back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child pornography he said, “The right wants to put me in jail. ” I said, “Yes, they’re very sentimental; I’d kil you. ” The next day he’d point
at me in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in
jail. ” I’d say, “No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants
to put you in jail. I want you dead. ”
He told everyone his fucked-up version of the story (“You
want to put me in jail”) for years. When he died he stopped.
39
The Bomb
There is one reason for the 1960s generation, virtually al of
its attitudes and behaviors: the bomb. From kindergarten
through the twelfth grade, every U. S. child born in 1946 or
the decade or so after had to hide from the nuclear bomb.
None of us knew life without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In
K-3 we hid under our school desks, elbows covering our ears.
From grades four or five through graduation, we were lined
up three- or four- or five-thick against wal s without windows,
elbows over our ears. We were supposed to believe that these
poses would save us from the bomb the Soviets were going to
drop on us sometime after the warning bel rang. In the later
grades, our teachers herded us, then stood around and talked.
They didn’t seem to think that they were going to die, let
alone melt, any minute. They seemed more as if they were
going to chat until the bel rang and the next class began. In
the earlier grades the teachers would walk up and down the
aisles and tel us an elbow was outside the boundary of a desk
or we should stop giggling. Any child too big to get under the
desk wholly and ful y might wish the Soviets would nuke us;
after al , who wanted to be in school, in rotten school with
40
The Bomb
rot en teachers and rot en classmates? By the time I was being
herded in the seventh or eighth grade, I simply refused to go.
Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in
the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain
why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a
wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly
down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic
way. “I'd rather take a walk,” I would say, “if I'm about to die
now. ” My father was called in, a scene he described to me
shortly before he died at eighty-five: “I asked them what the
hell they expected me to do. ” The real question was, What
was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves
of time and life - my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they
expect us to be so dim and dull?
They were helped by the saturation propaganda about both
the Soviets and the bomb. On the Beach was a really scary
novel by Nevil Shute about the last survivors down in
Australia. I remember just computing that it wasn’t going to
be me and maintaining an at itude of anger and disgust at the
adults. There were endless television discussions and debates
about whether or not one should build a bomb shelter and
fil it with canned food and water. The moral question was
whether or not one should let the neighbors in, had they
been obtuse enough not to build a shelter. Everything was
41