by Kathy Acker
Actually Mr Linker’s wife had been driven crazy and then locked up for life in a New York State Sanatorium.
After Mr Linker’s wife landed in the sanatorium, he added the white slavery business to his lobotomy and summer resort operations. He didn’t need the money: at age seventy-five he was a very wealthy man. He wanted to be able to indulge in his other peculiarities. He was very powerful and intelligent.
Janey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing.
One day she found a pencil stub and scrap paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life …
A book report
We all live in prison. Most of us don’t know we live in prison.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments, were assembled in front of a gaol. They were waiting for a woman named Hester Prynne to walk out of the gaol.
All of them even the hippies hated Hester Prynne because she was a freak and because she couldn’t be anything else and because she wouldn’t be quiet and hide her freakiness like a bloody Kotex and because she was as wild and insane as they come.
Long ago, when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he was living in a society that was more socially repressive and less materialistic than ours. He wrote about a wild woman. This woman challenged the society by fucking a guy who wasn’t her husband and having his kid. The society punished her by sending her to gaol, making her wear a red ‘A’ for adultery right on her tits, and excommunicating her.
Nowadays most women fuck around ’cause fucking doesn’t mean anything. All anybody cares about today is money. The woman who lives her life according to nonmaterialistic ideals is the wild antisocial monster; the more openly she does so, the more everyone hates her. Women today don’t get put in gaol for being bloody pieces of Kotex – only streetwalkers and junkies land up in gaol, gaol-and-law now being a business like any other business – they just starve to death and everyone hates them. Physical and mental murder help each other out.
The society in which I’m living is totally fucked-up. I don’t know what to do. I’m just one person and I’m not very good at anything. I don’t want to live in hell my whole life. If I knew how this society got so fucked-up, if we all knew, maybe we’d have a way of destroying hell. I think that’s what Hawthorne thought. He set his story in the time of the first Puritans: the first people who came to the northern North American shore and created the society Hawthorne lived in, the society that created the one we live in today.
Another reason Hawthorne set his story in the past (in lies) was ’cause he couldn’t say directly all the wild things he wanted to say. He was living in a society to which ideas and writing still mattered. In ‘The Custom House’, the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne makes sure he tells us the story of The Scarlet Letter occurred long ago and has nothing to do with anyone who’s now living. After all, Hawthorne had to protect himself so he could keep writing. Right now I can speak as directly as I want ’cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money. Even if one person in Boise, Idaho, gave half-a-shit, the only book Mr Idaho can get his hands on is a book the publishers, or rather the advertisers (’cause all businessmen are now advertisers) have decided will net half-a-million in movie and/or TV rights. A book that can be advertised. Define culture that way.
You see, things are much better nowadays than in those old dark repressed Puritan days: anybody can say anything today; progress does occur.
It’s possible to hate and despise and detest yourself ’cause you’ve been in prison so long. It’s possible to get angrier and angrier. It’s possible to hate everything that isn’t wild and free. A girl is wild who likes sensual things: doesn’t want to give up things being alive: rolling in black fur on top of skin ice-cold water iron crinkly leaves seeing three brown branches against branches full of leaves against dark green leaves through this the misty grey wanders in garbage on the streets up to your knees and unshaven men lying under cocaine piled on top of cocaine colours colours everything happening! one thing after another thing! … you keep on going, there are really no rules: it doesn’t matter to you whether you live or die, but every now and then there’s a kind of territory and you might get stuck; if you get stuck that’s OK too if you really don’t give a shit, but who doesn’t give a shit! Loving everything and rolling in it like it’s all gooky shit goddamnit make a living grow up no you don’t want to do that.
The Massachusetts seacoast in the middle of the seventeenth century looked the same as it does now: WILD. Trees and bushes and weeds and wind and water. Trees and bushes and weeds and winds and water are always moving every moment the whole world is a totally different world air rides over shivering water so those water areas shiver harder grow darker below the water hit the sharper rocks harder splash! foam appears. And disappears.
My father told me the day after he tried to rape me that security is the most important thing in the world. I told him sex is the most important thing in the world and asked him why he didn’t fuck my mother. In Hawthorne’s and our materialistic society the acquisition of money is the main goal ’cause money gives the power to make change stop, to make the universe die; so everything in the materialistic society is the opposite of what it really is. Good is bad. Crime is the only possible behaviour.
Hester Prynne, Hawthorne tells us, had wanted to be a good girl. I remember I wanted to be a good girl for my father. Her loving husband sent her to the New World to prepare a way for him. Travelling in those days was dangerous – there were no roads – and her husband never showed up. Two years passed. Hester was being a good dead girl. Suddenly a little unsuspected ecstatic crazy-making overtaking wildness like a big King Viper spreading his hood, rising up and spreading overtaking everything, that’s what love’s like, snake-insane rose up in Hester she fucked. Pregnancy made her wildness or evil (that’s the religious word for wildness) public. The child was the sign of her nastiness and disintegration and general insanity.
Hawthorne gives us a description of motherhood in the fucked-up society: All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she’s a total freak. The kid’s beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you’re worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you. You sense the people around you aren’t right: what you did, your need, you weren’t defying them to defy them, it was your need, was OK. You don’t know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You being to go crazy.
Hester’s just stepping out of prison, out of prison, out of prison, but this is worse: huge staring eyes, whispers, her child laughed at, mocked, she’s a woman, this isn’t reality, the eyes turn around and around she can’t be who she is, when suddenly she sees her long-lost husband.
This husband is now called Roger Chillingworth.
The top cops are screaming at Hester: ‘You hideous woman.’ ‘Look at the hideous woman.’ ‘Who did the hideous woman fuck?’ ‘You’re such a nice hideous woman, we know you didn’t mean to do the tremendously horrible thing you did, just pretty please tell us who you fucked. We know what’ll make you feel better.’
Hester’s husband’s a scholar. A scholar is a top cop ’cause he defines the roads by which people live so they won’t get in trouble and so society will survive. A scholar is a teacher. Teachers replace living dangerous creatings with dead ideas and teach these ideas as the history and meaning of the world. Teachers torture kids. Teachers teach you intricate ways of saying one thing and doing something else.
The top cops start laughing at and mocking Hester and telling the crowd to laugh at and mock Hester ’cause she won’t tell them who her baby’s father is. Hester’s acting out of love.
This husband, being a teacher, is a zombie and a ghoul. He s
ees his wife being tortured by lots of people, he sees his wife in pain in agony, he sees his wife nursing a strange kid, and he doesn’t feel anything. He just wonders, intellectually wonders, who the kid’s father is.
A final scene focuses this swirling horror. The young handsome Reverend who everyone thinks is gentle, honest, and kind takes up the spreading mockery and hatred and vomiting and says to Hester: ‘You are the worst piece of trash-cunt whoever lived, no one will ever ever love you, there will be no more love in your life because, mainly because, you won’t tell us who your bastard’s father is.’ Hester can’t reply ’cause the guy who’s screaming at her is the guy who fucked her. How can HE scream at her? All that she has left of the world: her memories disappear. Do you understand what reality is? She begins to go crazy …
Boppy doppy doppy wah yahyah mm. Is that what you think craziness is? Are you scared you’re going crazy? Do people who go crazy freak you? Look sweetheart.
I woke up in my attic that the winds swept through and all the world was grey and black. I saw pine trees covering the grey sky and sea, tall trees, boats, tall trees, boats.
I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for hours. All the land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it’s becoming harder to get off the roads.
I live on a desert island. It’s a nice desert island. I like it here. This is what I do: I eat; I sleep; when it rains and gets cold, I hide under some rocks. I like it here. But I’m getting bored … What can I do? I can repeat what I see. I can draw this old grey trunk lying flat across a valley of sand. I can draw the rotten trunk and make it look different. People got cures for polio and syphilis by imagining. People have and can change the world. In the beginning, on the desert island, the world was totally beautiful. Today in my room in New York City the world is horrible and disgusting. What the hell happened?
I don’t want to be a slave, I don’t want to be a whore, I don’t want to be lonely and without love for the rest of my long life. I’ve got to find out how I got so fucked up.
Hester and her husband are sitting, after the torture, in her prison cell. Her husband has come inside to make her well again. He’s a doctor.
‘Fucking’s the most wonderful thing in the world.’ Hester is crazy.
‘I want to fuck you right now,’ her husband replies.
‘Ugh. I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last man on earth. You make me sick to my stomach.’
A slight grimace crosses his face, but he manages to suppress it. ‘Remember when we used to fuck? By the fireside in Amsterdam.’ Tears appear in his thin eyes. ‘You’d lay your head on my lap and we’d look into the fire.’
Hester’s thinking the most wonderful thing in the world is to fuck a man you love. God she wishes she had it right now. Loving a man and being right next to him: naked against him naked there’s no need to talk: naked wet warm his face his skin naked wet warm his thick lips glazed eyes you’re on top of him naked wet warm never let you go the peace of the world never never never.
‘I’m the guilty one,’ the husband says. ‘If I hadn’t sent you alone to America, you never would’ve done this horrible inhuman thing.’
‘Oh, I’m the guilty one.’
‘I hate you now. I don’t even hate you. I just want nothing to do with you. You’re not to reveal that you have ever known me or had anything to do with me. Whatever love and affection occurred between us is now dead. We’re dead people.’
Fucking with love must be the gift of God. His eyes his nose his hot breath the shadow under his neck his thick arms the fat around his sides the bones sticking out of his thighs his cock waving in that mess of hair I want him so much I’m going crazy. I want his eyes I want his nose I want his hot breath reeking all over my body I want to stick my tongue in neck I want his arms around me I’ve forgotten what it’s like to want a man I roll my hands in his fat and bite it and rub my dying-to-come hips against the bones sticking out of his thighs so maybe maybe I’ll come that way his cock, if I could just touch his cock just for a second, I don’t want to touch it more than that, a quick kiss, wet and slimy, don’t take me away from it, don’t take me away from it you creep meanie: this is my home.
‘Who’s your brat’s father?’
‘I love him. I’m not going to tell you who he is.’
‘I’m going to find out who he is. I’m simply interested who he is. I am one of the most brilliant men in America and Europe and can learn anything. I’m going to find out who he is!’
She shivers before this example of the divorcement of body and mind. She’s seeing terror and hatred and hypocrisy beginning to spread over the earth.
‘Don’t you tell anyone who I am.’
WHEN SOMEONE’S IN PAIN, HE CRIES OUT.
One day Janey finds a Persian grammar book. She begins to teach herself Persian:
‘I go crazy when I want to fuck a guy,’ Hester thinks to herself. ‘How will any man ever love me? How can I be happy if a man doesn’t fuck and love me? But look at Pearl. She’s happy and she doesn’t fuck.’
Pearl’s four years old. She’s as wild as they come. Wild in the Puritan New England society Hawthorne writes about means evil anti-society criminal. Wild. Wild. Wild. Going wherever you want to go and doing whatever you want to do and not even thinking about it. ‘Why did you get stoned?’ the Persian slave trader asked me this morning. In ‘primitive’ ‘wild’ societies like Haiti the word ‘why’ doesn’t exist. Pearl, according to Mr Hawthorne, wears hippy clothes and runs around in the forest and makes no distinction between what’s outside her and her dreams. On the whole she doesn’t make many distinctions. She doesn’t know human beings exist. Sometimes she senses human beings exist. She senses a black vertical mist that’s a wall pressing into her as if on top of her. She wants to scream. She feels helpless.
She doesn’t like people much.
She notices Hester her mother. Once she notices someone she’ll stick by that person she’ll open herself up she is soft and totally hurtable that’s what being wild is. (Secretly.) (Privately.) ’Cause once you’re open like that you’re a real person ’cause you’re no longer separated from other people. It’s dangerous. Whatever happens to you happens to the ones you’re connected with. Whatever happens to them happens to you. It’s scary and dangerous to open yourself to someone. Not that you ever have any choice.
The townspeople think Pearl’s evil because she lives off the roads. ‘No man will ever love a woman like you when you grow up,’ say the townspeople. ‘The roads are our civilization. They’re the order men have impressed on chaos so that men’s lives can be safer and more secure and, thus, so that we can all progress. Human life gets better and better.’
The roads are getting so super-paved and big and light and loaded with BIG MACS and HOWARD JOHNSONS that the only time people are forced into danger or reality is when they die. Death is the only reality we’ve got left in our nicey-nicey-clean-ice-cream-TV society so we’d better worship it. S & M sex. Punk rock. Don’t you know, you can step into the snow, the raging ocean and the freezing snow, you can step into danger …
anytime you please …
step into me …
The government, the big multinational businessmen, the scholars and teachers, and the cops are the people who maintain the roads. The scientists, philosophers, and artists are the people who build the roads. Everyone’s a slave.
‘Who can I talk to?’ Hester screams.
These most important men in the world decide it’s their duty to tear the mother away from her child. They want to keep the child so they can train the child to suck their cocks. That’s what’s known as education. ‘Who can I talk to?’ Hester screams.
The Reverend Di
mwit (the young handsome Reverend) raises his hand. Reverend Dimwit is the best student in the school. ‘Let Hester keep her child.’ The cops ask him why. He thinks up a phoney excuse: ‘The child is the visible sign of the woman’s sin and so will keep reminding the woman of her sin. That way we can be assured of the woman’s continuing and deepening punishment.’ The top cops, who don’t have any feelings, accept this lousy logic. (Anything’s acceptable as long as it’s logical.) But evil Chillingworth, the builder of the logic road, wonders why the Reverend is helping Hester. Nothing in the world, Chillingworth thinks, will be unknown to me. I am totally self-sufficient. I never ask anyone’s advice. My plots and manipulations are all-potent. Chillingworth sneaks his way into the Reverend’s heart, but he doesn’t give his own heart away. This is friendship and love in the fucked-up society.
A couple is one who loves plus one who lets love. Couples make up the townspeople world. If you’re not part of a couple, you don’t exist and no one will speak to you you outcast. Go to hell outcast. Outside the road. Don’t you know there’s nowhere to walk anymore unless you’re walking to somewhere? Now if you shut up and stay nonexistent and don’t act like the freak you are, maybe in two years we’ll notice you and tell you our neurotic problems ’cause we have lots of neurotic problems, but don’t ever expect to be invited to one of our parties.
I, Hester, am a red house lost in the thickening mist. One of my sides is clearly visible. The red one. The other side is hazy. I’m not sure if it’s real. There’s a little light I don’t know anymore where it’s coming from. Everything that isn’t touching my eyes is gone. Not blacked out, just gone into the dark mist that’s blotting out everything. The mist goes back and back …
Everyone I know lives on the roads. They’re creepy crawling snivelling things. I don’t want anything to do with them. Ugh. I hate people. I can be alone. I can close myself up. I won’t let anyone get near me. I think I’m off the road, but I’m dominated by fear and hatred. I’m as closed-up and fucked-up as everybody else. I am hell. The world is hell. ‘No it isn’t!’ I scream, but I know it is. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Help. Help me. Help me. Love me.