VALERIE (on her way in to see Dr. Cooper): Now you have to get your asses in gear. You over there with the bird’s-nest hairdo, stop humping the decor. Yes, I understand it’s more exciting than screwing one of these guys, but stop it anyway if you ever want to get out. And you over there, you have to stop stinking of piss and puke, it’s a goddamn awful strategy if you want to get out of here. Get yourself some soap and some self-respect. Remember, girls, sex is just a hang-up and we don’t have time to waste on meaningless sex. Remember that SCUM is the future. Remember the future’s already here.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Hello, Valerie.
VALERIE: Giving up isn’t the answer, fucking up is.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Take a seat.
VALERIE: I congratulate you on wangling a lovely room, Dr. Ruth Cooper. But you don’t seem totally abreast of the situation outside in the waiting area. I don’t know if you’ve been out there—I assume you take the back exit, or you prefer to lower yourself down by the curtains rather than be confronted with the wreckage out there. All they want is to come in here and receive your blessing and forgiveness and your permission to go on being ill. I don’t know how you define clinically dead, it’s something you must have considered in detail during your training. Living dead, apparently dead, brain-dead, et cetera, et cetera.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Take a seat, Valerie.
VALERIE: Have you been out and looked at the patients? Perhaps you ought to schedule a study visit into your calendar.
DR. RUTH COOPER: My name is Dr. Ruth Cooper and I will be responsible for you here at this hospital.
VALERIE: Thanks very much for nothing. Up Your Ass makes them laugh, anyway.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Up Your Ass?
VALERIE: My play.
DR. RUTH COOPER: I understand. What’s it about?
VALERIE: It’s about Bongi, a man-hating panhandler.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Is the play about you, Valerie?
VALERIE: Is the medical report about me?
DR. RUTH COOPER: Tell me about your play.
VALERIE: It’s not bad art, it’s just my brain bleeding. I don’t think she’ll ever come back.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Who?
VALERIE: Bongi. My text. My play. My life.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Okay, Valerie. Let’s talk about why you’re here. You know that Andy Warhol is still unconscious at Mother Cabrini Hospital. It’s still not clear whether he will survive. As far as I understand, you hit his chest, stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, and lungs.
VALERIE: I’m sorry I missed. It was immoral to miss. I should have done more target practice.
DR. RUTH COOPER: We’re talking about a person. We’re talking about a person who’s dying. Why did you do it? Why did you try to murder Andy Warhol?
VALERIE: We’re all dying. Mortality in this country is one hundred percent. We’re all sentenced to death, the only lasting thing is annihilation, we’re all going to disappear, death is the end of every story. Death will triumph over you too, Doctor.
ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, JULY 13, 1968
There are new meetings with Dr. Cooper all the time to get the Diagnosis the court in Manhattan is awaiting. I don’t want any diagnosis, I have my own qualifications from Maryland. I apply my own diagnoses. This is my diagnosis: Goddamn pissed off. Fucking angry. Hustler. Panhandler. Man hater. It’s a nightmare to wake up in hell every day.
DR. RUTH COOPER: Why did you try to murder Andy Warhol?
VALERIE: Is Andy still in the hospital playing dead?
DR. RUTH COOPER: His condition is still critical, which makes your own situation critical, to say the least. It doesn’t look good for you, Valerie.
VALERIE: I was a pretty child. I was the prettiest nine-year-old in America. The fastest surfer at Alligator Reef. I was the star student from Maryland.
DR. RUTH COOPER: And why did you shoot Andy Warhol?
VALERIE: Have you never shot anyone, Dr. Cooper?
DR. RUTH COOPER: No.
VALERIE: Never wanted to shoot anyone?
(Silence.)
DR. RUTH COOPER: No, never.
VALERIE: I don’t believe you.
DR. RUTH COOPER: This conversation is not about me. Why did you shoot Andy Warhol?
VALERIE: And they continue to ask her: Why doesn’t she just go right away when he has repeatedly crushed her hopes and cut up her favorite dresses? A more appropriate question is: Why is she going? If there are women who step out of their shredded dresses instead of trying to mend them, they are the ones you should study. Study the refugee species. Study the laboratory mice who time after time fall outside the scope of the experiment. The laboratory animal that leaves its species owing to a belief in non-affinity or alternative affinity as a matter of choice. The mammal transformed into alien. Creature of the future. The possibilities for transcendence are endless.
DR. RUTH COOPER: I think we are getting off topic. We were talking about Andy Warhol. We were talking about why you shot him. I’d like us to keep to that for now. Later there will be a chance for you to tell me about yourself and your childhood.
VALERIE: I’m talking about Andy Warhol and his way of pretending he has gunshot wounds to attract yet more attention. It’s the wrong question. It ought to be: Why doesn’t she shoot? Why in hell’s name doesn’t she shoot? All her rights were under attack. A state of raped she-babies and raped she-animals. And why don’t they shoot? I don’t actually know, Dr. Cooper. If I knew, we wouldn’t be sitting here. Half a civilization on its knees and an arms industry that turns over more every month to the corrupt world than the third world’s combined debt. And that’s not including the porn industry.
BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 13, 1988
NARRATOR: What sort of material do we have?
VALERIE: Motorways. Trucks. America.
NARRATOR: And what else?
VALERIE: Ocean material.
NARRATOR: Tell me about the ocean.
VALERIE: Alligator Reef. The Atlantic. White sand, white stones. The all-bright water surface of steel and brume. Bladder wrack. Beach umbrellas. Tourists. Mine and Dorothy’s beach. Later, Dorothy in the desert. She never finishes the book.
NARRATOR: And then?
VALERIE: The little male seahorse roaming across the beaches with his flashing camera. There’s him and me and the pounding of the waves.
NARRATOR: Tell me more about the material.
VALERIE: The material is called SHE’S NOT COMING.
VENTOR, JUNE 1951
Dorothy and Moran lie exhausted in the flowery bedroom. Dorothy sleeps her deep, wine-induced slumber, chewing her way through the nights as though her dreams were always about food; her nightdress has ridden up to expose her private parts, which are dark and swollen. Moran has placed his hamburger-hand on her stomach like a stone. Her liver-spotted skin is a curtain across the sky and the trees. You take all the money you can find, a few clothes and some photographs, a bottle of wine, a packet of cigarettes, your notebooks, a dress that belongs to Dorothy, the transistor radio. And your Royal 100.
The wallpaper is yellow with age and sun, with desperate, joyful days of dirty windows and bad food, with all the years, all the flies. Dorothy’s warm hands on your face. Dorothy’s face between the huge shadows of the trees. Dorothy, full of sweet wine, lying in your bed in the afternoons when you come home from school. Dorothy with the flypapers and soap and desperado voice: I don’t want to choose, Valerie. I don’t want All or Nothing. If I have to choose, I choose All. I choose you, Valerie. And I choose Moran, Valerie.
The stink of wine and sweat and their horror-film love, pounding with passion, is like a foul-smelling wall around them when you take your things and flee. The sky outside is flaming pink, faint stars in the garden everywhere. Glasses and bottles by the porch seat, the veranda drenched in morning sun. You slam the door to the house one last time for a final walk across the desert. The desert where Louis cleared off, where the river was poisoned and Dorothy chased around and burned the sleeves of
her dresses, where you both meandered hand in hand beneath the heavens. You tell Sister White about it later:
I ran away in the desert. I never found my way home. Everything was cold blue sharks. I was a sick child. I missed Louis. Missed the electricity, the tingling sensation in my legs and arms. I was impossible to love. I walked through the desert. It was bright and white and lonely and I took my things and left. Everything inside me screamed, my heart, Dorothy, the light flickering. The soup bowls and bottles from the night before were still on the table, wine stains, a filthy cloth, Dorothy’s pink letters, insects chasing each other across the plastic tablecloth. There was a smell of rain and water and gasoline and old wine. A lizard was standing in Moran’s old whisky glass, looking at me. It was windy that day. I put the lizard inside my jumper and ran.
AMERICA, ROAD MOVIE
MAY 1951–OCTOBER 1952
The sky is a skin-colored curtain descending over you and Georgia.
You are on your way to nowhere in particular, just away. Motorways, deserts, trucks, and forests. After Georgia there is Alabama, Virginia, Florida, and Philadelphia and you walk between the trucks begging for a lift and money and hamburgers. Exhaust-fume flowers dance along at the side of the roads and sometimes Ventor flickers past with its shacks, its car wrecks and dirt roads and the reek of gasoline and motorway. Outside, the winds spiral, your jeans are dirty and you try to concentrate on the typewriter instead of America passing by with its blacked-out towns, housewives and churchgoers all behind their lace curtains. Atlantic City. Baltimore. Washington. Richmond. Norfolk. Portsmouth. Wilmington. Charleston. Jacksonville. Key West.
In the White House new wars are planned, new family programs, the president sitting at his great desk, musing about America. Dorothy continues to send him fan letters from the desert. The sky is cold and flashing and when you wake in the mornings at filling stations, service areas, and motels someone has always placed a soda or a sandwich in your hand. The drivers want nothing special from you, they like your company and do not care where you come from. They let you sleep and work in peace for hundreds of miles and hundreds of versions of America. Sometimes you jerk someone off, sometimes you let someone jerk off onto your panties or on your jeans. It never goes further than that and so it is of no account. The best time is when you are waiting in roadside cafés, before you are thrown out. There you can organize your papers and use your wash machine, which is a can with detergent and hot tea-water, and you make sure your hair is always clean. And when you fall asleep in the cargo space at night, your dreams are full of sand and rose wallpaper. Dorothy is carrying you through the desert, Dorothy in tears chasing you across America, Dorothy finding you and taking you home. The most beautiful dream of all is where Dorothy has tattooed her old surname on her arm like a bumper sticker and your name on her left breast like a cry for help inside her dress. Valerie. Ocean bird. Solanas.
THE ARCHITECTS
A. The body is a part of the building. Buildings create people. The body, the surface, America.
B. You cannot imagine a text without people. A building does not exist before the building is inhabited. The apparel, lower forms of art, the architect’s genesis. The architects. The narrators. I fix my attention on the surface. On the text. All text is fiction.
C. Surface, clothes, femininity. Flocks of girls moving through the cities. Public women, public relations. Street love. Happy, sunny streets. Regulated prostitution.
D. Don’t hang about in windows. Don’t wander up and down a street. Don’t walk around in a group of girls. Don’t address strange men in the street. When can a woman spend time outdoors? Never. The winds of rape are blowing across America.
E. Heterosexual neurosis. Postmodern parasites. You have to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks to the darkness. The Black Panthers sit and wait. In his last speech he is mild and tender and he is no longer afraid. You will not miss me when I am gone. It will be better for you when I am no longer here. An Amazon’s odyssey.
F. The interior consists of femininity and sexuality. Roses and pussies. Embellishment is removed from the male. He is the black suit. He is black cars in the city.
G. She was dressed in a fantastic white fur. She wanted to take part in a beauty contest. She wanted to look like a sculpture. Miss America. The history of the blonde. Of the whore. The world’s finest, oldest profession.
H. Miss America contests were introduced the same year as electoral reform. In 1952 Colleen Hutchins from Salt Lake City was the tallest, heaviest, blondest girl in the history of Miss America. Electoral reform was implemented, men returned to the factories, new world wars began, the first wave was swallowed up by the oceans.
I. The mythical essence of drives and instincts, the monumentality of their indeterminateness. Neurosis, culture, apathy, linguistic style, perversion, immensely infantile child sexuality. Many degenerate phenomena and pathological perversions have their basis in childhood. It is no longer possible to record and catalogue sexual phenomena without the need to create an overarching theory. The life-threatening bond between children and mothers, between babies and breastfeeders. Amendment to the theory of sexuality. Hey, wait, mister.
J. There is no sun in the house. No light. I have an artificial body, an artificial longing. The doctors say to me: It is a physical disorder, not a condition. Your hatred of men is going to destroy you. You have no reflexes, you are malnourished and in trouble. Hatred of men equals trouble.
K. The ocean’s influence on your plans for the future. He became obsessed with her and wanted to paint her and photograph her all the time. It was a struggle, an ongoing contract. He was there, pawing at her house. Discreet battles. He dreamed of dying of a heart attack in the ocean. Or a shark attack. Like a warrior.
L. She has so much time in her eyes. An army of men in black. How many has she screwed? I don’t know. How many have you screwed? One thousand and one nights.
M. My sexiest quality is that I’m always game. I never tire. I love semen. I love dicks. It does not matter who it is, what it is, where, or how. I just love it. My sexiest quality is that I’m always game. I never tire.
N. The evil structure of language. It was an illness, a deranged, totally inappropriate grief response. I laughed and flew straight into the light. There was nothing to respond appropriately to. Everything but her voice was sucked into a black hole and vanished. What difference does it make if you have regrets?
O. Call me what you will. You are never going to know my real name. Theatricality. Setting the stage. Annihilation.
P. You want a ride? I am a death machine. There is a group of people in the city who are neutral. I don’t want to come out of the closet. I am discreet. It is nice in here in the dark. Lampshades, walls, houses, roads, the state. I work with the surface. The street is a metaphor and also quite real. Like the ocean. The deep blue yonder is always present. Death is always present. I wake at night. Alone.
Q. It was a house full of secrets. A sky full of stars. Mothers with their stars and smiles.
R. White interior. Who created it? What does the white stand for? Blond woman, women’s building, World’s Fair. The White House. It’s the white color, the clear white thoughts.
S. The American woman. History of the beauty contest. Freak show. Angel snake girl. Come (CUM) and see her beautiful body and her ugly face. Snake face. A white circus, white presidents. America is governed by white presidents. Men trapped between being humans and apes. Fuckiefuckie.
T. Daddy’s Girls and Rulers of the Universe. They were not all alike. They were not all white. Not one of them was genuine. They all ruled and destroyed things. They all loved sucking cocks.
U. Cock sucking is a fantastic thing as well. Sucking dicks all day long is something real. It tastes of salt and shit and human being and black water. You can think about something else, you can’t think about nothing. Ten dollars. Nothing. White houses in your mouth. Clear white thoughts.
V. Death is blac
k. Sleep is black. Night is black. When it’s black you might as well be dead. I want to know that they will not burn my body. I want to be buried as I am. I don’t want any man to touch me when I’m dead. I want to know: How many times can my heart break?
W. Some experiences are significant. Who you are screwing is significant. If you have a house is significant. If you are white if you are a woman if you are alone. Your feather fingers, please caress me with your feather fingers. Harder with your fingers. That smooth tongue you have in your mouth.
X. It just happened to be like that. Everyone has a background. Everything has a beginning. Everything reaches its end.
Y. A vision of the city. Reproduction. Machines. Now artificial reproduction is possible. Reproduction of history. Artificial historiography. Artificial bodies.
Z. It shaped an entire upbringing. It was overrun with weeds around the house in Ventor. Textile. Surface. Text. Theater. Stage sets. Fabric. It wasn’t architecture; it was pure white thoughts. It wasn’t real life; it was an experience. The textile character of the text. They were just fictional characters, a fictional girl, fictional figurants. It was fictional architecture and a fictional narrator. She asked me to embroider her life. I choose to believe in the one who embroiders.
ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, JULY 29, 1968
In a summer of never-ceasing rain, the doctors do not halt their diagnoses. Heavy curtains of tears and time and therapy sessions outside Dr. Ruth’s window. Vicious explosions of sunlight inside your hospital gown amid the summer downpours, invasions of insects into the depths of the hospital and hospital food, and all the time you light new cigarettes and leave them to balance on the edge of the desk.
Valerie Page 6
