lost his boyish charm although he always liked to play but
inside it was a life-or-death hate o f authority, he made it look
like fun but it was very dark; a psychiatrist rescued him, got
him discharged. His parents were ashamed. He joined real
young to get aw ay from them; he didn’t have much education
except what he learned there— some about cooking and
explosives; some about how to do hard time. He learned some
about assault and authority; you could assault anyone; rules
said you couldn’t; in real life you could. M om m y and daddy
were ashamed o f him when he came home; they got colder,
more remote. Oh, she was cold. Ignorant and cold. D addy
too, but he hid him self behind a patriarchal lethargy; head o f
the clan’s all tuckered out now from a life o f real work, daily
service, for money, for food, tired for life, too tired to say
anything, too tired to do anything, has to just sit there now on
his special chair only he can sit on, a vinyl chair, and read the
newspaper now, only he gets to read the newspaper, which
seems to take all day and all night because he ponders, he
addresses issues o f state in his head, he’s the daddy. D ay and
night he sits in the chair, all tuckered out. H e’s cold, a cold
man whose wife took the rap for being mean because she did
things— raised the kids, cleaned the floor, said eat now, said
sleep now, said it’s cold so where’s the coal, said we need
money for clothes, terrible bitch o f a woman, a tyrant making
such demands, keeping track o f the details o f shelter; and she
got what she needed i f she had to make it or barter for it or steal
it; she was one o f them evil geniuses o f a mother that kept her
eye open to get what was needed, including when the Nazis
were there, occupying, when some didn’t get fed and
everyone was hungry. Daddy got to sit in the special chair, all
for him. O f course, when he was younger he worked. On
boats. Including for the Nazis. He had no choice, he is quick to
say. Well, not that quick. He says it after a long, rude silence
questioning w hy is it self-evident that there was no choice or
questioning his seeming indifference to anything going on
around him at the time. Well, you see, o f course, I had no
choice. N o, well, they didn’t have to threaten, you see, I
simply did what they asked; yes, they were fine to me; yes, I
had no trouble with them; o f course, I only worked on a boat,
a ship, you know. Oh, no, o f course, I didn’t hurt anyone; no,
we never saw any Jew s; no, o f course not, no. M om m y did, o f
course; saw a Jew ; yes, hid a Je w in a closet for several days,
yes. Out o f the kindness o f her heart. Out o f her goodness.
Yes, they would have killed her but she said what did the Jew s
ever do to me and she hid one, yes. Little Je w girl became his
daughter-in-law— times have changed, he would note and
then he would nod ponderously— but it was the hero,
m om m y-in-law, w ho’d say things like “je w it dow n” because
she did the work o f maintaining the family values: fed the
family materially and spiritually. But m y husband wasn’t one
o f them; the worse they were, the purer, the more miraculous,
he was. He wasn’t o f them; he was o f me; o f what I was and
knew; o f what I thought and hoped; o f the courage I wanted to
have; o f the will I did have; o f the life I was leading, all risk and
no tom orrow; and he was born after the war like me; a child o f
after. So there was this legal thing; the law decrees; it made me
their daughter-in-law more than it made me his wife. There
was it and them on the one hand and then there was us: him in
exile from them— I thought he was as orphaned as I was; and
braver; I thought he was braver. I embraced him, and he
embraced me, and neither o f us knew nothing about
tom orrow and I never had. I didn’t wait for him like some
middle-class girl wanting a date or something in ruffles or
someone wanting a husband; I wasn’t one o f them and I didn’t
want a husband; I wanted a friend through day and night. I
didn’t ask him what he liked so I could bow and scrape and my
idea wasn’t to make him into someone safe, denatured. He
was an anarchist o f spirit and act and I didn’t want no burden
o f law on him. I just wanted to run with him, be his pal in his
game, and hold him; hold him. I indulged an affection for him,
a fraternal affection that was real and warm and robust and sort
o f interesting on its own, always sort o f reaching out towards
him, and I felt tender towards him, tender near him, next to
him, lying next to him; and we were intense, a little on edge,
when we holed up together, carnal; our home was the bed we
were in, a bed, an empty room, the floor, an em pty room,
maybe not a regular home like you see on television but we
wasn’t like them on television, there w asn’t tw o people like us
anywhere, so fragile and so reckless and so strong, we were
with each other and for each other, we didn’t hide where we
had been before, what we had done, we had secrets but not
from each other and there w asn’t anything that made us dirty
to each other and we embraced each other and we were going
to hole up together, kind o f a home, us against them, I guess,
and we didn’t have no money or ideas, you know , pictures in
your head from magazines about how things should be—
plates, detergents, how them crazy wom en smile in advertisements. It’s all around you but you don’t pick it up unless you got some time and money and neither o f us had ever
been a citizen in that sense. We were revolutionaries, not
consumers— not little boy-girl dolls all polished and smiling
with little tea sets playing house. We were us, unto ourselves.
We found a small place without any floor at all, you had to
walk on the beams, and he built the floor so the landlord let us
stay there. We planned the political acts there, the chaos we
delivered to the status quo, the acts o f disruption, rebellion.
We hid out there, kept low , kept out o f sight; you turn where
you are into a friendly darkness that hides you. We embraced
there, a carnal embrace— after an action or during the long
weeks o f planning or in the interstices where we drenched
ourselves in hashish and opium until a paralysis overtook us
and the smoke stopped all the time. I liked that; how
everything slowed down; and I liked fucking after a strike, a
proper climax to the real act— I liked how everything got fast
and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after,
when we was drenched in perspiration from what came
before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made you
supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and
hurt before you touched them, could feel a breeze a mile away,
it hurt, there was this reddish pain, a soreness parallel to your
skin before anything touched you; I liked how you was tired
before you began, a fatigue
that came because the danger was
over, a strained, taut fatigue, an ache from discipline and
attentiveness and from the imposition o f a superhuman
quietness on the body; I liked it. I liked it when the embrace
was quiet like the strike itself, a subterranean quiet, disciplined, with exposed nerve endings that hurt but you don’t say
nothing. Then you sleep. Then you fuck more; hardy; rowdy;
long; slow; now side by side or with me on top and then side
by side; I liked to be on top and I moved real slow, real
deliberate, using every muscle in me, so I could feel him
hurting— you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens
into a frisson o f pain? — and I could tease every bone in his
body until it was ready to break open, split and the m arrow ’d
spread like semen. I could split him open inside and he never
had enough. I had an appetite for him; anything, I’d do
anything, hours or days. In my mind, I wasn’t there for him so
much as I was the same as him. I could feel every muscle in his
body as if it were mine and I’d taunt each muscle, I’d make it
bend and ache and stretch and tear, I’d pull it slow, I’d make it
m ove toward me so much it w ould’ve come through his skin
except I’d make him come before his skin’d burst open. I didn’t
have no shyness around him and I didn’t have to act ignorant
or stupid because he wasn’t that kind o f man who wanted you
to overlay everything with the words o f a fool like you don’t
know nothing. Some was perverse according to how these
things are seen but that’s a concept, not a fact, it’s a concept
over people’s eyes so much you wish they would go blind to
get rid o f the concept once and for all. It’s how the law makes
you see things but we were different. We were inside each
other; a fact; wasn’t perverse; couldn’t be. We turned each
other inside out and it binds you and there w asn’t nothing he
did to me that I didn’t do to him and w e’d talk and cook and
roam around and drink and smoke and w e’d visit his friends,
which wasn’t always so good because to them I was this
something, I didn’t understand it but I hated it, I was this
something that came into a room and changed everything.
There were these guys, mostly fighters, anarchists, some
intellectuals, and when I came into the room everything was
different. I was his blood and that’s how we acted, not giggly
or amorous, but I think I was just this monstrous thing, this
girlfriend or wife, that is completely different from them and
cannot talk without making them mad or crazy, that cannot
do anything but ju st must sit quiet, that does not have any
reason to be in the room at all, not this room where they are,
only some other room somewhere else to be fucked, sort o f
kept like a pet animal and the man goes there when he’s done
with the real stuff, the real talk, the real politics, the real w ork,
the real getting high, even the real fucking— they go somewhere together and get women together to do the real
fucking, they hunt down women together or buy wom en
together or pick up women together to do the real fucking;
and then in some one room somewhere hidden aw ay is the
w ife or girlfriend and she’s in this sort o f vacuum, sealed
aw ay, vacuum packed, and when she comes out to be
somewhere or to say something there is an embarrassment and
they avert their eyes— the man failed because she’s outside—
she got out— like his pee’s showing on his pants. We’d go to
these meetings late at night. These guys would be there; they
were famous revolutionaries, famous to their time and place,
criminals according to the law; brilliant, shrewd, tough guys,
detached, with formal politeness to me. One was a junkie, a
flamboyant junkie with long, silken, rolling brown curls,
great pools o f sadness in his moist eyes, small and elegant, a
beauty, soft-spoken, always nodding out or so sick and
wretched that he’d be throwing up a few times a night and
they’d expect me to clean it up and I w ouldn’t, I’d just sit there
waiting for the next thing we were all going to discuss, and
someone would eventually look me in the eye, a rare event,
and say meaningfully, “ he just threw u p , ” and time would
pass and I’d wait and eventually someone would start talking
about something; I didn’t get how the junkie was more real
than me or how his vomit was mine, you know. When the
junkie’d come to where we lived he would vom it and sort o f
challenge me to leave it there, as he had fouled m y very own
nest, and he’d ask for a cup o f tea and I’d clean it up but I
w ouldn’t get him the tea and I tried to convey to my husband
that m y hospitality was being abused, our hospitality, o f
course, that I wasn’t being treated fair, not that some rule was
being broke but that the boy was being rude to me; I told my
husband to clean it up finally but he never did it too good. I
told m y husband who I still thought was m y brother that I
didn’t want the junkie to come anymore because he didn’t
treat me in an honorable w ay and I said I wasn’t born for this.
So there were these fissures coming between us because the
fraternal affection was with him and the junkie from the old
days together, not him and me from now, and I was shocked
by this, I couldn’t grasp it. I went into the rooms with him but
it came down on him how bad it was from the men and it came
down on me that I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near
where they were. I kept going to the rooms because we kept
hitting targets all over the city and w e’d need to get o ff the
streets fast and he’d know some place he wanted to be, one
friend or another, and they’d all be there; it would contradict
the plan but he’d say it was necessary. Some were on the run
for recent crimes but most were burned out, living in times
past, not fighting no more, most stopped long ago and far
away and they were just burned out to hell. Yeah, they were
tired, I respected that; I mean, I fucking loved these heroes; I
knew they were tired, tired from living on their nerves, from
hiding, from jail, from smoke, from fucking, which came first
for some but last for others. Some had children they had
deserted; some lived in the past, remembering stray girls in
cities they were passing through. They were older than me but
not by a lot. I wanted their respect. I hadn’t given up and I did
anything anybody else did and I wasn’t afraid o f nothing so
how come it was like I wasn’t there? I mean, I was too
honorable to be anything other than strong and silent, I tell
you; but I thought silence made its own sound, you count on
revolutionaries to hear the silence, otherwise how can the
oppressed count on them? Every lunatic was someone we
knew that we dropped in on or stayed with while we were
running— or m oving just for the sake o f speed, the fun o f
flight. We went to other cities, hitchhi
king; we lived in small
rented rooms, slept on floors. We went to other countries—
we begged, we borrowed, yeah, we stole, me more than him,
stealing’s easy, I been stealing all m y life, not a routine or some
fixed act, just here and there as needed, from stores when I was
a kid, when I was hungry or when there was something I
wanted real bad that I couldn’t have because it cost money I
didn’t have— I never minded putting money out if I had it in
m y pocket— I mean, I remember taking a chocolate Easter egg
when I was a kid or m y proudest, most treasured acquisition, a
blues record by Dave Van Ronk, the first man I ever saw with
a full beard like a beatnik or a prophet; I took money when I
needed it and could get it easy enough; pills; clothes. M o n ey’s
w hat’s useful. He began dealing some shit, it w asn’t too hard
or dangerous compared to running borders with other
contraband but it got so he did it without me more and more;
he spent more and more time with these low life gangster
types, not political revolutionaries at all but these vulgar guys
who packed guns and just did business; he said it’s just for
money, what’s it got to do with you or with us, I’ll just do it
fast, get the money, it’s nothing; and it was nothing, I didn’t
have no interest in money per se, but it got so he did the
running, he was free, freedom and flight were his, he’d pick up
and go, I didn’t know where he was or who with or when I’d
meet them they’d be lowlife I had no interest in, just toadies as
much as some corporate businessmen were and I’d feel very
bored with them and they’d treat me like I was a skirt and I’d
feel superior and because I didn’t want no part o f them I didn’t
challenge it, I’d just put up with it and be relieved when he did
his shit for money elsewhere; he hunted money down, he
hunted dope down, he drove the secret highways o f Europe at
a hundred miles an hour, without me, increasingly without
me, and I stayed home and dusted walls, waiting, I waited,
while I waited I cleaned, I dusted, I washed things, I made
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