Mercy

by Andrea Dworkin

  cookies all wrapped up and bottles o f vinegar and kinds o f oil

  and millions o f things; I couldn’t get used to it and I got dizzy

  and upset and I ran out. I lived with the woman who helped

  me when I was just a kid out o f jail— she still had the same

  apartment and she fed me but I couldn’t sleep in m y old room,

  her husband slept in it now, a new husband, so I slept on a sofa

  in the room right outside the kitchen and there were no doors.

  There was the old sofa, foam rubber covered with plaid cloth,

  and books, and the door to the apartment was a few feet away.

  When you came in you could turn right or left. I f you turned

  left you went to the bathroom or the living room. The living

  room had a big double bed in it where she slept, m y friend. If

  you turned right you came to the small room that was the

  husband’s and past that you came to the open space where I

  slept and you came to the kitchen. The husband didn’t like me

  being there but he didn’t come home enough for it to matter.

  He was hard and nasty and arrogant but politically he was a

  pacifist. He looked like a bum but he was rich. He ordered

  everyone around and wrote poems. He was an anarchist. M y

  old room had to stay empty for him, even though he had his

  own apartment, or studio as he called it, and never told her

  when he was showing up. A friend o f hers gave me a room for

  a few months in a brownstone on West 14th Street— pretty

  place, civilized, Italian neighborhood, old, with Greenwich

  Village charm. The room belonged to some man in a mental

  institution in Massachusetts. It was a nutty room all right.

  T w o rooms really. The first w asn’t wider than both your arms

  outstretched. There was a cot, a hot plate, a tiny toilet, a teeny

  tiny table that tipped over i f you put too much on it. The

  second was bigger and had windows but he filled it up so there

  wasn’t any room left at all: a baby grand piano and

  humongous plants taller than me, as tall as some trees, with

  great wide thick leaves stretched out in the air. It was pure

  menace, especially how the plants seemed to stretch out over

  everything at night. They got bigger and they seemed to

  move. Y ou could believe they were coming toward you and

  sometimes you had to check. The difference between people

  who have something and me is in how long a night is. I have

  listened to every beat o f m y heart waiting for a night to end; I

  have heard every second tick on by; I’ve heard the long pauses

  between the seconds, enough time to die in, and I’ve waited,

  barely able to breathe, for them to end. D aylight’s safer. The

  big brown bugs disappear; they only come out at night and at

  night yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so you can’t help but

  see them, you don’t really always know whether they’re real

  or not, you see them in your mind or out o f the corner o f your

  eye, yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so if you see one slip

  past the corner o f your eye in the dark you will start waiting in

  fear for morning, for the light, because it chases them away

  and you can’t; nothing you can do will. Same for burglars;

  same for the ones who come in to get you; daylight; you wait

  for daylight; you sit in the night, you light up the room with

  phony light, it’s fake and dim and there’s never enough, the

  glare only underlines the menace, you can see you’re beseiged

  but there’s not enough light to vaporize the danger, make it

  dissolve, the way sunlight does when finally it comes. Y ou can

  sleep for a minute or two, or maybe twenty. Y ou don’t want

  to be out any longer than that. You don’t get undressed. Y ou

  stay dressed always, all the time, your boots on and a knife

  right near you or in your hand. Y ou get boots with metal

  reinforced tips, no matter what. Y ou don’t get under the

  covers. Y ou don’t do all those silly things— milk and cookies,

  Johnny Carson, now I lay me down to sleep. Y ou sit

  absolutely still or lie down rigid and ready for attack and you

  listen to the night m oving over the earth and you understand

  that you are buried alive in it and by the grace o f random luck

  you will be alive in the morning— or w on’t be— you will die or

  you w on ’t and you wait to find out, you wait for the light and

  when it comes you know you made it. Y ou hear things break

  outside— windows, you can hear sheets o f glass collapsing, or

  windows being broke on a smaller scale, or bottles dashed on

  cement, thrown hard, or trash cans emptied out and hurled

  against a cement wall, or you hear yelling, a man’s voice,

  threat, a wom an’s voice, pain, or you hear screams, and you

  hear sirens, there are explosions, maybe they are gun shots,

  maybe not— and you hope it’s not coming after you or too

  near you but you don’t know and so you wait, you just wait,

  through every second o f the night, you wait for the night to

  end. I spend the change I can find on cigarettes and orange

  juice. I think as long as I am drinking orange juice I am

  healthy. I think orange juice is the key to life. I drink a quart at

  a time. It has all these millions o f vitamins. I like vodka in my

  orange juice but I can’t get it; only a drink at a time from a man

  here and there, but then I leave out the orange juice because I

  can do that myself, I just get the vodka straight up, nothing

  else in the glass taking up room but it’s greed because I like

  rocks. I never had enough money at one time to buy a bottle. I

  love looking at vodka bottles, especially the foreign ones— I

  feel excited and distinguished and sophisticated and part o f a

  real big world when I have the bottle near me. I think the

  bottles are really beautiful, and the liquid is so clear, so

  transparent, to me it’s like liquid diamonds, I think it’s

  beautiful. I feel it connects me with Russia and all the Russians

  and there is a dark melancholy as well as absolute jo y when I

  drink it. It brings me near Chekhov and D ostoevsky. I like

  how it burns the first drink and after that it’s just this splendid

  warmth, as i f hot coals were silk sliding down inside me and I

  get warm, m y throat, m y chest, m y lungs, the skin inside my

  skin, whatever the inside o f m y skin is; it clings inside me. M y

  grandparents came from Russia, m y daddy’s parents, and I try

  to think they drank it but I’m pretty sure they w ouldn’t have,

  they were just ghetto Jew s, it was probably the drink o f the

  ones who persecuted them and drove them into running

  away, but I don’t mind that anyw ay, because now I’m in

  Am erika and I can drink the drink o f Cossacks and peasants if I

  want; it soothes me, I feel triumphant and warm , happy too. I

  have this idea about vodka, that it is perfect. I think it is

  perfect. I think it is beautiful and pure and filled with absolute

  power— the power o f something absolutely pure. It’s com pletely rare, this perfection. It’s more than that the pain dies or

  it makes you
magic; yeah, you soar on it and you get wise and

  strong by drinking it and it’s a magnificent lover, taking you

  whole. But I love ju st being near it in any w ay, shape, or form.

  I would like to be pure like it is and I’d like to have only pure

  things around me; I wish everything I’m near or I, touch could

  be as perfect. I feel it’s very beautiful and if I ever die I wouldn’t

  mind having a bottle o f it buried with me, if someone would

  spring for it: one bottle o f Stoli hundred proof in honor o f me

  and m y times, forever. I’d drink it slow, over time. It’d make

  the maggots easier to take, that’s for sure. It does that now.

  They ain’t all maggots, o f course. I been with people who

  matter. I been with people who achieved something in life. I

  want excellence myself. I want to attain it. There’s this woman

  married to a movie star, they are damned nice and damned

  rich, they take me places, to parties and dinners, and I eat

  dinner with them at their house sometimes and she calls me

  and gets me in a cab and I go with her. I met her because I was

  w orking against the Vietnam War some more. I got back to

  N ew Y ork in Novem ber 1972. It was a cold winter. I had

  nothing; was nothing; I had some stories I was writing; I slept

  on the floor near someone’s bed in a rented room. Nixon

  bombed a hospital in North Vietnam. All these civilians died. I

  couldn’t really stand it. I went to my old peace friends and I

  started helping out: demonstrations, phone calls, leaflets,

  newspaper ads, the tricks o f the trade don’t change. I had this

  idea that important Amerikans— artists, writers, movie stars,

  all the glitz against the War— should go to North Vietnam sort

  o f as voluntary hostages so either N ixon would have to stop

  the bombing or risk killing all them. It would show how venal

  the bombings were; and that they killed Vietnamese because

  Vietnamese were nothing to them, just nothing; and it was

  morally right to put yourself with the people being hurt.

  Inside yourself you felt you had to stop the War. Inside

  yourself you felt the War turned you into a murderer. Inside

  yourself you couldn’t stand the Vietnamese dying because this

  government was so fucking arrogant and out o f control.

  There was a lot o f us who never stopped thinking about the

  War, despite our personal troubles; sometimes it was hard not

  to have it drive you completely out o f your mind— if you let it

  sink in, how horrible it was, you really could go mad and do

  terrible things. So I got hooked up with some famous people

  who wanted to stop the War; some had been in the peace

  movement before, some just came because o f the bombings.

  We wanted to stop the bombing; we wanted to pay for the

  hospital; we wanted to be innocent o f the murders. The U . S.

  government was an outlaw to us. The famous people gave

  press conferences, signed ads, signed petitions, and some even

  did civil disobedience; I typed, made phone calls, the usual;

  shit work; but I also tried to push m y ideas in. The idea was to

  use their fame to get out anti-War messages and to get more

  mainstream opposition to the War. Hey, I was home; only in

  Amerika. One day this woman came in to where we were

  w orking— to help, she said; was there anything she could do

  to help, she asked— and she was as disreputable looking as me

  or more so— she looked sort o f like a gypsy boy or some street

  w a if—and they treated her like dirt, so condescending, which

  was how they treated me, exactly, and it turned out she was

  the wife o f this mega-star, so they got all humble and started

  sucking. I had just talked to her like a person from the

  beginning so she invited me to their house that night for

  dinner— it turned out it was her birthday party but she didn’t

  tell me that. I got there on time and no one else came for an

  hour so her and me and her husband talked a lot and they were

  nice even though it was clear I didn’t understand I w asn’t

  supposed to show up yet. She took me places, all over, and we

  caroused and talked and drank and once when he w asn’t home

  she let me take this elaborate bath and she brought me a

  beautiful glass o f champagne in the tub, then he came in, and I

  don’t know if he was mad or not, but he was always real nice

  to me, and nothing was going on, and there wasn’t no bath or

  shower where I lived, though I was ashamed to say so, I had to

  make an appointment with someone in the building to use

  theirs. They kept me alive for a while, though they couldn’t

  have known it. I ate when I was with them; otherwise I didn’t.

  M y world got so big: parties, clubs, people; it was like a tour

  o f a hidden world. Once she even took me to the opera. I never

  was there before. She bought me a glass o f champagne and we

  stood among ladies in gowns on red velvet carpets. But then

  they left. And I knew some painters, real rich and famous.

  One o f them was the lover o f a girl I knew. He befriended me,

  like a chum, like a sort o f brother in some ways. He just acted

  nice and invited me places where he was where there were a lot

  o f people. He didn’t mind that I was shy. He talked to me a lot.

  He seemed to see that I was overwhelmed and he didn’t take it

  wrong. He tried to make me feel at ease. He tried to draw me

  out. I sort o f wanted to stay away from places but he just tried

  to get me to come forward a little. In some ways he seemed

  like a camp counselor organizing events: now we hike, now

  we make purses. I’d go drinking with all these painters in their

  downtown bars and they had plenty o f money and it wasn’t a

  matter o f tit for tat, they just kept the drinks coming, never

  seemed to occur to them to stop drinking. I knew his girlfriend

  who was a painter. At first when I met him I had just got back.

  I was sleeping on floors. I slept on her floor some nights when

  he wasn’t there. She was all tortured about him, she was just

  all twisted up inside, but I never understood why, she was

  pretty incoherent. We drank, we talked about him, or she did;

  she didn’t have any other subject. There wasn’t no sexual

  feeling between him and me and he acted cordial and

  agreeable. We went on a bus with some other people they

  knew to N ew Hampshire for Thanksgiving. I think he paid

  but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any money to go but they

  wanted me to go; they had friends there. We went on the

  Greyhound bus and it let us o ff somewhere in Verm ont and

  someone, another painter from up there, was supposed to pick

  us up, but he didn’t come all night, so we were in the parking

  lot o f the bus station, locked out o f the depot, deserted and

  freezing through the whole night; and in the morning we got a

  bus the rest o f the w ay. It was like being on a camping trip in

  the Arctic without any provisions— w e’d pass around the ugly

  coffee from the machine outside. We got cold and hungry and

  angry and people’s tempe
rs flared, but he sort o f held it all

  together. His name was Paul, she was Jill. They fought a lot

  that night but hell it was cold and awful. He was gregarious

  but sort o f opaque, at least to me; I couldn’t figure out

  anything about him really. He w asn’t interesting, he w asn’t

  real intelligent, and then suddenly, mentally, he’d be right on

  top o f you, staring past your eyes into you, then he’d see

  whatever he saw and he’d m ove on. He had a cold streak right

  down the middle o f him. He w asn’t someone you wanted to

  get close with and at the same time he held you on his margin,

  he kept you in sight, he had this sort o f peripheral vision so he

  always knew where you were and what you needed. He kept

  you as near as he wanted you. He had a strong w ill and a lot o f

  insistence that you were going to be in his scout troop sitting

  around the fire toasting m arshmallows. He had opinions on

  everything, including who took too many drugs and who was

  really gay. We got to N ew Hampshire and there was this big

  house a wom an built with a tree right up the center o f it going

  out the ro o f and all the walls were w indow s and it was in the

  middle o f the woods and I never saw anything so imposing, so

  grand. It w asn’t rich so much as handsome from hard w ork

  and talent. The two wom en w ho lived there had built it

  themselves. One was a painter, one a filmmaker; and it was

  real beautiful. There was a lot o f people around. Then the food

  came, a real Thanksgiving, with everything, including things

  I never saw before and I didn’t know what they were, it was

  ju st beyond anything I had ever seen, and it was warm and fine

  and it was just people saying this and that. I’d been aw ay a long

  time. I didn’t know what mostly they were talking about.

  Someone tried to explain who Archie Bunker was to me but I

  couldn’t understand what was funny about it or how such a

  thing could be on television and I don’t like jokes against

  faggots. I sat quiet and drank Stoli all I wanted, day and night.

  We all bunked down in different parts o f the huge room. I

  made love with a real young guy who reminded me o f a girl I