down me like a river, a nasty, surging river, a hard river, a
river that starts up high and races down to below falling more
than flowing, falling and breaking, shattering; it’s a river that
goes through me top to bottom; the pain’s intractable and I can
barely stand it; it’s not all jo ie de vivre when a girl goes
dancing; the pain’s a force o f nature beyond my ability to bear
and I can’t take the edge o ff it very easy and I can’t stand
needles and I can’t sit still with it and I can’t rip it out, although
if it was located right precisely in m y heart I would try, I
would take m y fucking hands and I would take m y fucking
fingers and I would rip m y chest open and I would try. It’s
raining and the rain makes me all steamy and damp inside and
out and it ain’t a man I want, it’s a drink, a dozen fucking
drinks to blot out the hard pain and the hard time, each and
every dick I ever sucked, and the bottle ain’t enough because I
can’t stand the quiet, a quiet bottle in a quiet room; I can’t
stand the quiet, lonely bottle in the quiet, lonely room. Lonely
ain’t a state o f mind, it’s a place o f being; a room with no one
else in it, a street with no one else on it; a city abandoned in the
rain; em pty, wet streets; cement that stretches uptown,
downtown, empty, warm, wet, until the sky starts, a
perspiring sky; empty cars parked on empty streets, damp,
deserted streets lined with dark, quiet buildings, civilized,
quiet stone, decorous, a sterile urban formalism; the windows
are closed, they’re sleeping or dead inside, you w on’t know
until morning really, a gas could have seeped in and killed
them in the night; or invaders from outer space; or some lethal
virus. I need noise; real noise; honest, bad noise; not random
sounds or a few loud voices or the electronic drone o f
someone’s television seeping out o f a cracked w indow; not
some dignified singer or some meaningful lyric; not something small or fine or good or right; I need music so loud you
can’t hear it, as when all the trees in the forest fall; and I need
noise so real it eats up the air because it can’t live on nothing; I
need noise that’s like steak, just so thick and just so tough and
ju st so immoral, thick and tough and dead but bloody, on a
plate, for the users, for the fucking killers, to still their hearts,
to numb anything still left churning; a percussive ambience for
the users. It’s got to be brute so it blocks out anything subtle or
nuanced or kind, even, and it’s got to be unceasing so you can’t
hear a human breath and it’s got to stomp on you so your heart
almost stops beating and it’s got to be lunatic, unorganized,
perpetual, and it has to be in a crowded room where there’s
gristle and muscle and cold, mean men and you can’t hear the
timbre o f their voices and you don’t need to see them or touch
them because the noise has you, it’s air, it’s water, you
breathe, you swim; I need noise, and it’s too late to buy a bottle
anyway, even if I had enough money, because it is very dear, it
would be like buying a diamond tiara for a princess or some
fine clothes, a fine jew el, it is out o f m y reach, I have not had
one o f m y own ever and I don’t count the bottles you can’t see
in the paper bags because that is a different thing altogether,
more like gasoline or like someone took matches and lit up
your throat or yo u ’re pouring kerosene down it or some
sharp-edged thing scrapes it raw. I need enough bills to keep,
drinking so no one’s going to chase me aw ay or say I can’t pay
rent on the stool or so I don’t have to smile at no one or so no
bartender don’t have me throwed out; I am fearful about that;
they always treat you so illegitimate but if you can show
enough money they will tolerate you sitting there. There’s not
enough money for me to eat even if they’d let me so I put that
out o f m y mind, I would like lobster o f course with the biggest
amount o f drawn butter, just drenched in it, ju st so much it
drips down and you can feel it spreading out inside your
mouth all rich and glorious, it’s like some divine silky stu ff but
there’s never enough o f it and I have to ask for more and they
act parsimonious and shocked. If you sit at a table you have to
buy dinner, they don’t have some idea that you could just sit
there and be cool and watch or have a little o f this and a little o f
that; they only have the idea that everyone’s lying, you know,
everyone’s pretending, everyone’s trying to rip them off,
everyone’s pretending to be rich so they have to see the money
or everyone’s pretending they’re going to eat so they have to
see the m oney or everyone’s pretending they can pay for the
drinks so they have to see the money and if yo u ’re a woman
you don’t get a table even i f you got money; m y idea is if I have
enough m oney and I put it out in front o f me on the bar and I
keep drinking and drinking I can stay there and then I don’t
have to look to m y right or to m y left at a man for a fucking
thing; I can i f I want but I am not obliged. I’m usually too shy
to push m y w ay in and I’ve never tried it, I ju st know yo u ’re
not supposed to be there alone, but tonight I want to drink, it’s
what I want like some people want to win the Indy 500 or
there’s some that want to walk on the moon; I want to drink;
pure. I want to sit there and have m y ow n stool and I don’t
want to have to be worried about being asked to leave or made
to leave because I’m ju st some impoverished girl or gash that’s
loose. I will stare at the clear liquid, crystal, in the glass, and I
will contemplate it as a beautiful thing and I will feel the pain
that is monumentally a part o f me and I will keep drinking and
I will feel it lessen and I will feel the warmth spread out all over
me inside and I will feel the surging, hard, nasty river go
warmer and smoother and silkier as the Stoli runs with it, as it
falls from top to bottom inside me, first it’s on the surface o f
the river, then it’s deeper down in it, then it’s a silk, burning
stream, a great, warm stream, and it will gentle the terrible
river o f pain. I will think deeply; about art; about life; I will
keep thoughts pouring through me as inside I get warmer and
calmer and it hurts less, the hurt dims and fades or hides under
a fucking rock, I don’t care; and m y brow will curl, you know,
sullen, troubled, melancholy, as if I’m some artist in m y own
right myself; and the noise will be beautiful to me, part o f a
new esthetic I am cultivating, and I will hear in it the tumult o f
bare existence and the fierce resonance o f personal pain as if it’s
a riff from Charlie Parker to God and I will hear in it the
anarchic triumph o f m y own individual soul over the deep evil
that has maimed me. I take the bills and crush them into m y
pocket and I walk, I run, I light down the stairs and out the
>
building, I leave my quiet room, and I hit the streets and I
walk, fast, dedicated, determined, stubborn, filled with fury,
spraying piss and vinegar, to M ax’s, about twelve blocks from
where I live, an artists’ restaurant and bar, because I know it
will be filled with ramrod hard noise and heat, a crush o f hard,
noisy men, artists and poseurs and I don’t know the difference,
poseurs and the famous and I don’t know the difference, it’s a
modern crime but I can’t concentrate on it enough to
remember the ones you’re supposed to know, except Warhol
because he’s so strange and he’d stand out anywhere and I
don’t want to go near him; but the difference mostly is that I
think I am the artist, not them, but you can’t say that and it’s
hard even to keep thinking it though I don’t know w hy it’s so
hard, maybe because girls aren’t ever it; but all the poseurs and
all the famous will be at the tables where I can’t go, even if I
had money to eat they w ouldn’t let me eat there, not alone,
and I w o n ’t be one o f the pleading girls who is begging to be
allowed to go to the tables, I will just get a stool at the bar if the
guy at the door lets me in, he might not and usually I am too
shy to defy him and I hang tight with a man but tonight I want
in myself, I want the noise and the hard edge and the crush and
I want to drink, I want to find a place at the bar for m yself and
it’s got m y name on it even though I don’t got no name for the
purposes o f the man at the door but the stool’s mine and I will
drink and I will stay as long as I have bills in front o f me and it’s
an unwritten law about girls, that they don’t let you sit
anywhere, so you never quite understand w hy you can be
somewhere sometimes and not the same place the next time
and you figure out you got to hang on to a man and you are his
shadow, like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on. It
sure insures a steady flow o f affection wom an to man if you
can’t even sit down without one. Tonight I have a singular
distaste for a man. I’m not starting out with any interest
whatsoever. H e’d have to catch m y eye like starlight or it’d
have to be like fairy dust where you want some and you need a
taste, it’s something that tickles you deep down but you can’t
reach it to scratch, like the cut o f a record you listen to a
thousand times or you got a taste you can’t get rid o f so yo u ’re
like some fucking hamster on one o f them wheels just running
and running or yo u ’re skim ming coke o ff the top o f something or smack o ff the top o f something, you just get smitten,
lightly but completely, stuck in the moment but also riveted
so you can’t shake it loose, infatuated now , freedom now ,
there’s some special charge com ing from him and yo u ’re
plugged in and it’s sparking, it’s not like you want to get laid
and yo u ’re looking for someone w h o ’s going to be good, it’s
more like some trait you can’t identify strikes you wham , it’s
got an obsession lurking under it, it’s a light feeling but under
it is a burning habit, a habit you ain’t got yet but you just want
to play with it once, like skinpopping heroin or something,
you know, it ain’t serious but you want it. I take an energetic
walk with the city all glowing wet, all sparkling, for me, as if
it’s for me, the light’s for me and the rain’s for me and it’s
stoned out o f its fucking mind for me; and the buildings are
just pure glitter and the light’s coming down from heaven
luscious and wet; for me. The boy at the door can’t keep me
out because I stride in and I am aglow; he’s a mandarin
standing there with his little list and his leather jacket and his
pretensions and his snobbish good looks and I mumble words
I know he can’t hear and I never yet met a man who wasn’t
stupider than me and he’s trying to decide am I someone or not
and I am not fucking anyone but I am striding in my
motorcycle boots and I am wet and I am bound for glory at the
bar and I push m y w ay through the crowd and fuck him and
he’s watching me, he sees that I ain’t headed for a table which
would transgress the laws o f the universe, and it ain’t a girl’s
trick to sit somewhere she ain’t entitled because a man didn’t
pick her out already; he sees I want the bar and I suppose it’s
faintly plausible that a girl might want a drink on her own or it
confuses him enough that he hesitates and he who hesitates is
lost. I take out all the bills I have and he’s watching me do it
and I put it down in front o f me, a nice pile, substantial, and I
am firm ly sitting on a stool and I have spread m y elbows out
on the bar to take up enough space to declare I am alone and
here to drink and he don’t know I don’t have more money and
I order m y Stoli on the rocks and I ain’t making no move to
take m y change or m ove m y money so he relaxes as if letting
me there will not do monumental harm to the system that is in
place and that it is his jo b to protect and the bodies close in
around me to protect me from his scrutiny and the noise closes
in around me and I am swallowed up and I disappear and I am
completely cosseted and private and safe and I feel like some
new thing, just new ly alive, and there’s the placenta hugging
me and I’m wet with fucking life and I stare into m y fucking
drink, m y triumphal drink, I stare into it as if it’s tea leaves and
I’m the w orld ’s oldest, wisest gypsy, I got gold earrings down
to m y knees and I got foresight and hindsight and I am a reader
o f history, there’s layers o f history, vulgar and occult, in the
stu ff and if you lit a fire to it yo u ’d burn history up. And shit I
love it; a solitary human being covered all over by noise, a
dense noise that bubbles and burns and cracks all over you like
fire, small fire, a million tiny, exploding fires; or a superhuman embrace by some green, slim y, scaly monster, it’s big and all over you and messy, it’s turbulent and dramatic and
ever so much bigger than a man and its embrace is overwhelming, a descent, an invasion that covers the terrain, a
crush o f locusts but you aren’t repelled, only exhilarated at
how awesome it is, how biblical, how spectacular; like as i f it
took you back to ancient E gypt and you saw something
sublime in the desert and you had to walk across it but you
could; it wraps itself around you like some spectacular excess
o f nature not man, yo u ’re crawling with it but it ain’t bad and
it ain’t loathsome and there’s no fear, it’s just exactly extreme
enough and wild enough and it says it’s nighttime in human
history now in Am erika and Moses has his story and you have
yours and each o f you gets the whole universe to roll around in
because everything was made to converge at the point where
you are amidst all the rest o f life o f whatever kind, com position, or characteristics, it’s a great mass all around you, the blob, a loud blob, Jell-O , loud Jell-O , and yo u
’re some frail,
simple thing at the center and what you are to them doesn’t
matter because the noise protects you from knowing what you
are to them; noise has a beauty and noise has a function and a
quiet girl sometimes needs it because the night is long and life
is hard and pain is real and you stare into the glass and you
drink, darling, you drink, and you contemplate and you
drink; you go slow and you speed up and you drink; and you
are a deep thinker and you drink; and you have some hazy,
romantic thoughts and some vague philosophical leanings and
you drink; and you remember some pictures that flash by in
your mind and you drink; and there’s sad feelings for a fleeting
minute and you drink; and you choreograph an uprising, the
lumpen rise up, and you drink; and there’s Camden reaching
right out for you, it’s taking you back, and you drink; a man
nudges you from the right and you drink; he puts his face right
up close to yours and you drink; he’s talking about something
or other and you drink; you don’t look left or right, you just
drink, it’s worship, it’s celebration, you’d kneel down except
for that you might not be able to synchronize your movements, in your heart you kneel; and you drink; you taste it and
you roll it around your tongue and down on into your throat
and down on into your chest and you get fiery and warm and
you drink it down hard and fast and you sit stone still in
solemn concentration and you drink; the noise holds you
there, it’s almost physical, the noise, it’s a superhuman
embrace, bigger than a man’s, it’s swamp but not swam py, it’s
dry and dark and hot and popping, it’s dense and down and
dirty and you drink; the noise keeps you propped up, your
back upright and your legs bent and your feet firm ly balanced
on the stool, except the stool’s higher now, and you drink; and
yo u ’re like Alice, you’re getting smaller and it’s getting
bigger, and then you remember Humpty Dum pty was a
fucking eggshell and you could fall and break and D orothy got
lost in Oz and Cinderella was made into a pumpkin or nearly
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