by Kathy Acker
YOU let the WHORE BURN UP my picture the GOLD
frames so YOU TWO could MAKE some DOUGH out of my FUNERAL.’
My thoughts hurt me all the time. They’re the truth.
‘Not nevertheless I pursue, although you deserve it Slave Trader:
for long my in reigns were you.
I swear I, by the Fates by-no-one-able-to-be-reversed,
may Death-Dog thus to be gently bark,
that I was true to you. If I’m lying, that most-fearful-in-the-world snake my
will hiss at tomb and on top of bones lie.’
The realm of death:
‘There are two filthy homes obtained-by-lottery across the river
The crowd turned one way or the other rows across the water.
One way: Clytemestra’s addiction draws, or Cressa’s:
counterfeit wood monster bull cock fuck sex.’
THIS IS DEATH
(something else besides horror exists):
‘Lo: the other: wreathed part carried away and by light ships seized,
running quick in the water, flying, caresses where paradise’s breeze
is your breath bursting into flames music the blood veins eyes
faster, like an orgasm growing and growing, burst abyss to endless size, I lie
in a witch’s trance.
Just from your glance,
your breath is my breath.
‘Andromeda and Hypermestre who could love
tell us their stories:
‘I was an innocent girl. ’Cause my mother was jealous of me she pinned my arms
against these sharp ice-bound crags, bruised me, and left me still alive.’
‘My father told me and my sisters to kill our husbands. I couldn’t ’cause something in me shrivelled and vomitted then my father placed heavy chains around
my thin knees.’:
thus by tears of death we heal the loves of life.
‘I’ve wept enough tears now. I can no longer see of your crimes the treachery.
I’m just asking you one last thing
(if you have any love at all left for me
(if Chlorid’s coke hasn’t made you mean),
‘(1) Nurse in her trembling, no more desires, years are claws
Partheni: she was competent and not avaricious,
please give her pleasure, and my Nanny who loved her work
let her mirror not reflect a strange mistress.
‘(2.) Whatever songs you made in my name
burn them up: fame can no longer be mine.
(3.) Just put on my tomb some ivy ripe with berries gently intertwining with vines,
and branchy the East River where garbage spreads on cement
never, thanks to Rockefeller, will money grow stale,
(4.) this epitaph scribble on the middle of some wall
SCRIBBLE it so that even the dumbest coked-up businessman can read:
HERE LIES GOLDEN JANEY GOLDEN CITY
WHOSE DEAD BODY YOUR GOLD FEEDS
DO NOT EVER TURN AWAY FROM LOVE’S DREAMS
ALL EXISTENCE HAS A GOLDEN SHEEN
‘This is what we call life:
by an unstable night we are carried, night is freeing from
our self’s prison all Shades
Who wander, for Cerberus casts the bolt away.
‘This is what we call death:
At lights’ rise all of us must to Death’s swamp return.
No escape: we are conveyed: the boatman counts his load.
No matter what love what joy what agony you know alive, soon alone
you will be dead with me, and I will rub bones love with mingled bones.’
After all these fits of anger and jealousy and craving had finished, she died: between our kisses slipped away that shade of mine.
Cancer
The Persian slave trader finally decided Janey was ready to hit the streets. She had demonstrated that she knew how to make impotent men hard, give blow and rim jobs, tease, figure out exactly what each man wants without asking him, make a man feel secure, desirable, and wild. Now she was beautiful. There was only one thing wrong, at least according to the Persian slave trader. At this moment he found out that she had cancer.
Having cancer is like having a baby. If you’re a woman and you can’t have a baby ’cause you’re starving poor or ’cause no man wants anything to do with you or ’cause you’re lonely and miserable and frightened and totally insane, you might as well get cancer. You can feel your lump, and you nurse, knowing it will always get bigger. It eats you, and, gradually, you learn, as all good mothers learn, to love yourself.
Janey was learning to love herself. Everything was shooting out of her body like an orgasming volcano. All the pain and misery she had been feeling, crime and terror on the streets had come out. She was no longer totally impotent and passive about her lousy situation. Now she could do something about the pain in the world: she could die.
Janey had always been the first in her group to explore whatever frontier presented itself. She had been the first one in her family to hate her family. She had been the first one in her family to hate her family. She had been the first girl in her class to fuck. She had been the first in her class to say No and run away. Now she had cancer.
The slave trader abandoned Janey. ‘Oh please, Slave Trader, come back. I want you. I need you. I want to marry you.’
She wandered frantically around the apartment.
By accident, he dialled the wrong number and called her up on the phone.
‘I want to marry you.’
‘Don’t be silly. That’s so foolish. Anyway I’d have to come back to the apartment to marry you and I’m not coming back.’
She took up her pencil stub for the last time and wrote down ‘I need love’. She lay down on her stomach on the floor. Dusty late afternoon sun was flooding through the western window. She fantasized that she would kill herself by sticking a razor blade through her wrist.
She decided there’s no need to kill yourself if you’ve got cancer. As she slowly walked down the open back stairs of the Sutton Avenue apartment building, she saw a passport and a paid ticket to that place of magic, Tangier.
A journey to the end of the night
Tangier
(Excerpts from Janey’s diary while she’s in Tangier.)
This time when I run after a man who doesn’t want me, I’m really going to run after him.
I’m sitting in the Café Tangier and smoking a cigarette.
‘Look,’ my friend Michal says to me, ‘that’s Jean Genet!’
Jean Genet walks slowly, his hands are in his pockets, he stares as if he’s not seeing anything, eyes fixed, at this café.
He stops. He stands still for a few moments. He looks like I always imagined he’d look. Then he swivels half-way around and looks at Café Fuentes’ canape. He chooses the Café Central.
I have to meet him.
I tell Michal. He tells me not to meet him.
‘Why? Is he horrible?’
‘He doesn’t like to meet people and he won’t talk to you. He lives like a hermit. Everyone’s told me that.’
I have to meet Genet. It’s that simple. It’s not often something’s simple. If Genet refuses to talk to me I’ll walk away so I won’t be hurt. I watch him sit down in the Café Central and start talking to a young boy.
An hour has passed. Conversations, whispered at the edges of my ears, go on and on. One of my eyes is on the human goats and dogs milling around in the square; one on Genet’s bald head. The minute he moves, I move.
I ask someone the time.
‘Three o’clock.’
I say to my friend, ‘I’m going.’
He cries, ‘You’re out of your mind.’
As I’m walking towards Genet I hear: ‘You can’t throw yourself on a famous writer like Genet, on a man who’ll reject you. You have to learn to control y
ourself.
Genet wrote: ‘Loneliness and poverty made me not walk but fly. For I was so poor, and I have already been accused of so many thefts, that when I leave a room too quietly on tiptoe, holding my breath, I am not sure, even now, that I’m not carrying off with me the holes in the curtains or hangings.’
Genet’s walking. I walk slowly towards him. He stops, about three feet in front of me, his hands in his pockets, swaying slightly and leaning forward.
I know I’m looking too hard at him. I say, ‘You’re Monsieur Genet, aren’t you?’
He hesitates for a minute. He notices me but he doesn’t want to. ‘Who are you?’
For a second I can’t speak. ‘I’m a writer.’
He holds out his right hand to me. ‘Enchanté.’
I take it. As we walk up the Siaghines I ask him if he likes Tangier.
‘Ça va,’ he murmurs.
‘Do you think it’s beautiful, the most beautiful city in the world?’
‘Certainly not. What gave you that idea?’
‘Everyone says so.’
‘In Asia there are many more beautiful cities.’
During the twenty minutes it takes us, me and Jean Genet, to walk from the square of cafés to the Hotel Minzah, we talk about writers, writing, and some of the problems of publication. ‘I don’t like institutions,’ he says. We’re standing in front of the Minzah, he gives me his hand and adds, ‘I always take a nap around now. Tomorrow, if you like, we can meet at the Café el Menara. Around two in the afternoon?’
Today is a day like any other day. I don’t know any reason I should feel differently. I’m sitting in the Café el Menara. Will he come or not? For me it’s the previous day because what I want to happen hasn’t yet happened.
He walks along the white dust, slowly, like he did yesterday. I lift my hand. His eyes light up and he smiles. I stand up. We shake hands for a long time.
He’s warmer to me than he was yesterday. He sits down. He orders a glass of mint tea and I do the same. Some people walk by me and disappear. Some walk back and forth as if they’re looking for someone. These are mainly young beggars looking for tourists.
‘I don’t understand why they haven’t translated any of your books into Arabic,’ I say.
‘I don’t know. No one has asked me to do it. Maybe some day they will, maybe not. It depends on whether my things interest them at that point. Personally, I think the Arabs are extremely sensitive when it comes to questions of morality.’
‘Did you have a hard time writing your first novel?’
‘No, not very. I wrote the first fifty pages of Nôtre Dame des Fleurs in prison. And when I was transferred to another gaol they somehow got left behind. I did everything I could to get them back, but it was hopeless. And so I wrapped myself in my blanket and rewrote the fifty pages straight off.’
‘I know you didn’t start to write until you were thirty,’ I say. ‘Thirty-two or thirty-three.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You haven’t written anything for several years, have you? Do you consider your literary silence and your assumption of a political position part of your writing?’
‘Literally I’ve said what I’ve had to say. Even if there was anything more to add, I’d keep it to myself. That’s how things are. There’s no absolute yes and there’s no absolute no. I’m sitting here, with you now, but I might easily not be.”
Later he tells me a story about Tangier. ‘I knew a young sailor who was working on a ship in France. The maritime court of Toulon had exiled to Tangier an ensign who had turned over to the enemy the plans of some weapon or battle strategy or boat. Treason, at its best, is that act which defies the whole populace, their pride, their morality, their leaders and slogans. The newspaper said the ensign acted “… out of a taste for treason.” Next to this article was the picture of a young, very handsome officer. The young sailor was taken with this picture and still carries it with him. He was so carried away that he decided to share the exile’s fate. “I shall go to Tangier,” he said to himself, “and perhaps I may be summoned among the traitors and become one of them.”
We’re sitting in the Café el Menara and I tell Genet some of the things that happened in my last weeks in New York City:
‘President Carter is the pillar of American society. He’s almost fifty-three years old. WORN OUT by DECAying practices, he looks like a SKELETON. He’s HAIRY as a RAT, flat-backed, his ASS looks like TWO DIRTY RAGS FLAPPING OVER A PISS-STAINED WALL. Because he gets whipped so much the SKIN of his ASS is DEAD and you can KNEAD it and SLICE it. He will never FEEL a thing. President Carter’s centre is an enormous HOLE. This HOLE’S DIAMETER, COLOUR, and ODOUR resemble a NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY TOILET that hasn’t been CLEANED for THREE weeks. It DOESN’T resemble any ASSHOLE I’ve ever seen. PRESIDENT CARTER because HE’S a QUEER LITTLE PIG leaves a THREE-INCH WALL of SHIT around his ASSHOLE. And below his BELLY, WRINKLED as it is LIVID and GUMMY, he has a shrivelled little thing, a dried apricot pit that Richard Nixon VOMITED up, a COCK. A BRIGHT RED HEAD sticks out of this apricot pit because at age thirty the President CIRCUMSIZED himself. All MEN who FUCK ought to circumsize themselves and CUT their COCKS OFF. MEN get CIRCUMSIZED so their COCKS will stay CLEAN when they FUCK; PRESIDENT CARTER’S CIRCUMSIZED so he can make his COCK even FILTHIER by COVERING IT with a layer of SCUM, DRIED GREEN PISS, and SHIT. PRESIDENT CARTER is DISGUSTING in his HEAD and in his BODY. His TASTES are MORE DISGUSTING and his SMELL does not PLEASE everybody. As a POLITICIAN HE HAS many PROBLEMS.
‘President Carter needs THREE HOURS OF STIMULATION TO ORGASM. This STIMULATION has to consist of PERVERTED CRUEL SADISTIC and endlessly PROLONGED EVENTS. EVEN THEN it DOESN’T usually WORK because the agents of these events run away, faint, and die TOO SOON. When that HAPPENS, PRESIDENT CARTER gets VERY ANGRY; foam SPURTS FROM his mouth; he becomes epileptic. When he’s EPILEPTIC, he can ORGASM.
‘You see our President is a man of many MOODS. These MOODS change from second-to-second and he has NO CONTROL over them. When the President’s in a MOOD, he CAN’T think or feel anything else. This MENTAL DISORDER and his ALCOHOLISM have turned HIM at this point into an IMBECILE. HE is fond of saying to the dignitaries of other countries that he would rather BE AN IMBECILE THAN ANYTHING ELSE.
‘President Carter is a DECADENT man. Those who know him personally are convinced that he owes his present political POWER to TWO or THREE INEXCUSABLE MURDERS.
‘I was wandering around the streets with cancer.
‘I didn’t have any money or know anybody. Although I didn’t feel like a bum, I was hanging out on the Bowery with leftover humans.
‘One night I wandered into a rock-n-roll club named CBGB’s. The lights went boomp boomp boomp the drum went boomp boomp boomp the floor went boomp boomp boomp. Boomp boomp boomp entered my feet. Boomp boomp boomp entered my head. My body split into two bodies. I was the new world. I was pounding. Then there was these worms of bodies, white, covered by second-hand stinking guttered-up rags and knife-torn leather bands, moving sideways HORIZONTAL wriggling like worms who never made it to the snake-evolution stage, we only reproduce, we say, if you cut us apart with a knife, the slimy saxophone and the singer who’s too burned out to stick a banana in his cock flows away all was gooky amorphous ambiguous nauseous undefined spystory no reality existed so why bother to do anything? BOOM BOOM was reality, slimy slimy BOOM BOOM slimy slimy.
‘WE DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU IT’S NOT THAT WE WANT YOUR MONEY, YOU HAVE MORE MONEY THAN US, YOU HAVE MORE EVERYTHING THAN US, YOU THINK WE WANT YOUR MONEY AND WE WANT TO KILL YOU, WE DON’T
‘WE DON’T WANT YOUR MONEY IT’S SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING WE’RE TOO SCREWED UP WE LIVE ON THE EDGE WE LIVE ON EVERY EDGE CONCEIVABLE AND ADD A FEW WE ARE SHIT
‘THIS’S NOT ANGER
‘THIS IS NOT ANY EMOTION IT IS LIVING AT THE EDGE, AT EVERY EDGE, MIGHT AS WELL HATE EVERYBODY. WE DON’T WANT YOUR MONEY WE WANT
(1) TO BE SCREWED NOW AND THEN
(2) TO
GET SOME LOVE IN OUR LIVES
(3) TO HAVE FREE HOSPITALS
(4) TO HAVE THE CONSTANT OPTION OF ONE UNPOISONED MEAL A DAY WE ARE ALL SCREWED-UP AND WE HAVE WANTS. WE HAVE OTHER WANTS. LOVE LOVE LOVE. THAT’S WHY WE ARE SCREWED-UP.
OH YES
LOVE LEADS TO DEATH.
‘YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THIS BECAUSE YOU DON’T LIVE HOW WE LIVE. ACTUALLY YOU DO, BUT YOUR DIET PILLS, AND ADULTEROUS SNEAKY ONE-MINUTE GENITAL DRIBBLES, AND MONEY-FRANTICNESS AND LOVE OF MEDIA AND PSYCHIATRISTS AND EVERYTHING THAT IS ANYTHING HAVE SO TAKEN OVER YOUR MINDS THAT YOU CAN’T SEE AROUND THEM, SEE THAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY SCUM, TYPICAL NOTHINGS WHO CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW EVEN TO ALLOW BEING LOVED WITHOUT TOTALLY FREAKING AND GETTING HYSTERICAL AND DESTROYING BUILT-UP ROOMS, SCREWED ’CAUSE WE CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO BE ALWAYS DIFFERENT (WITHOUT HABITS) – JUST LIKE YOU. WE ARE ALL ALIKE WE ARE ALL IMMACULATELY CRAZY.
‘NOW THAT THIS IS THE NATURE OF REALITY THIS IS WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN:
(1) I NEED LOTS OF LOVE
(2) YOU’RE GOING TO GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY ’CAUSE YOU HATE YOURSELVES AND ’CAUSE YOU KNOW
(3) ALL POWER SYSTEMS SELF-DESTRUCT WITH THE ADVENT OF ROBOT CANASTA PLAYERS WHO SHOW THE GIRLS WHAT THEY’RE REALLY LIKE. I’M GOING TO SLEEP. GOODNIGHT.’
THIS MESSAGE IS A PUBLIC SERVICE PAID FOR BY THE CHASE MANHATTAN BANK OF NORTH AMERICA
‘I didn’t want anyone to notice me ’cause I was blind so I crawled under the splinters of the bar. The music stopped. A lot of feet passed by. Some of them by accident kicked me. One kicked me too hard.
‘ “Do you want to fuck me, scumbag?” President Carter said to me.
‘ “I can’t fuck.”
‘ “You’ve got syphilis?”
‘ “I’ve got cancer.”
‘ “Gee.” He put his arms around me and kissed me.
I USED TO BE UNHAPPY
OH YES
I LIVED IN THE CORNER OF A ROOM
THEN YOU CAME ALONG AND FUCKED THE SHIT
OUT OF ME
I WON’T BE UNHAPPY AGAIN
SPRING IS A COCK THAT’S HARD
OH YES
I KNOW YOU’RE A SECRET TERRORIST