Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  NARRATOR: Did you?

  VALERIE: Is it you or I who’s going to die?

  NARRATOR: Did you?

  VALERIE: Is it you or I who’s narrating this?

  NARRATOR: I’m the narrator.

  VALERIE: And I’m the subject of this muddleheaded, fucked-up text. You’re not a proper narrator, baby.

  NARRATOR: I’m just a sentimental fool, I know. But since I’m the only narrator present and interested, maybe you could answer my questions.

  (Silence.)

  NARRATOR: Did you screw up your doctorate?

  VALERIE: It’s probably more the case that I always had great difficulty grasping what was in the script. I always forgot my lines.

  April proceeds toward doom, and every time you fall asleep in the Tenderloin you think you will never wake again, but you always do and it is still the cruelest month. You dream of huge television sets with giant monsters inside and their arms sticking out into the room; and when you wake up, you cannot remember any names, you cannot remember if they are female mammals or male mammals, but they all had face powder for TV and wolf makeup. In your dreams you fight your way through fields of murdered prostitute girls. She was covered in leaves and earth. She lay strangled behind the church. The john fled on a woman’s bicycle. She was discovered murdered in the cellar. She was found strangled in Madison Square Park. She was the victim of rape and murder in September 1982. She was discovered on a demolition site. She disappeared from the street in June. She was suffocated in her hotel room at the Pink Flamingo Hotel.

  But just a breath away is the boy who looked like your sister, a dog-eared Polaroid of ragged clouds moving unhurriedly above the sands and the pulse of the giant waves under your surfboard.

  SILK BOY: Hello, Valerie.

  VALERIE: What are you doing over there?

  SILK BOY: The freaks are aristocrats, they say. It was the cold white shark. That icy breath sweeping over the beach. It was nighttime and everything was quiet. Just the white shark farthest in on the shore. Do you remember the dead orca? It had huge black wounds on its body. The smell of blood on the beach. Mr. Biondi drove over animals on the roads on purpose.

  VALERIE: You cried into your little powder compact afterward. Sharks aren’t personal. They never seek personal revenge. They kill indiscriminately. There’s no reason to be sad about it.

  SILK BOY: I wish I could help you.

  VALERIE: Little crybaby. Little shark …

  SILK BOY: You’ve ruined your life.

  VALERIE: I liked being on drugs. I never accepted the paradigm.

  SILK BOY: But it all went down the tube, Valerie.

  VALERIE (opens her silver coat, the room is hot and clammy, the stench of illness rises from the coat): You can have sex with me, if you like. Five for a fuck, three for a blow job, one for a hand job.

  SILK BOY: You’ve got the stink of death on you, Valerie. The stink of dead orcas and dead shark dolls. I’ll help you close that coat.

  VALERIE: Nasty little nancy boy …

  ALLIGATOR REEF, AUTUMN 1956

  AN AMERICAN SATELLITE HAS EXPLODED OVER FLORIDA

  When you return to Alligator Reef, the trailer is deserted. You have been away too long, arranging accommodation, course documents, registration—everything and nothing. Classes have already begun, time has passed in the student dorm, and all along you meant to go back and fetch him. In the end Mrs. Cox sent a postcard from the campsite. The boy was full of water and drugs when he was found. A drowning accident or drug-related. I identified him at the morgue. They said he had been raped by some customers and he was not your little brother at all. Silk Boy or little brother, it doesn’t matter. He was as pleased as Punch about your college acceptances. Happy with that little bag in his hand all the time. He kept reading the books from cover to cover until they fell apart. He sat at the bus stop day after day, waiting for you to come back. Why didn’t you come back?

  Mrs. Cox holds your hands when you try to smash everything around you. She sorts out ice cream and hamburgers for you, gives you money and joints. The campsite smells of grilled meat and sweaty old men and the clouds hang absurdly low over the shore. Your things have gone, notes, clothes, and photographs, and Biondi’s villa is empty. There are strangers sleeping in his garden and the solarium no longer has windows. The doors slam in the wind. No one knows where Mr. Biondi has gone. You stay at the campsite, waiting for him to return, but he does not come. You are down on the beach, shouting at the sea, kicking at seabirds rotting on the sand, no one to bury them now; bedraggled white feathers, eyes pecked away, forlorn corpses, the waves crushing everything around you. One more time you take the bus to Jacksonville alone, your bag full of your shared college savings, and inform them you will definitively be one instead of two; you move back in to the student room with his little duffel bag, place a tiny dried-up male seahorse in the window and a sunset photograph of Dorothy, and you start reading.

  Days and nights at the desk with a view of the park. Frosty windows, candles instead of lamps, but it is still warmer than in the trailer in winter. No ocean, no beach, just page after page of American history, the presidents, the world wars, and Silk Boy’s tremulous underwater voice trailing you through the books. Valerie Jean Solanas will be president of America. Valerie Jean Solanas, you are my dog against the night.

  JACKSONVILLE COLLEGE, JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, EARLY SUMMER 1958, TWO YEARS LATER

  Sun in all the trees, white dresses and fireworks, popping corks, hamburgers. In your hand your college diploma from Jacksonville, in your bag the scholarship to Maryland. Students walking joyfully through the park, everything drowning in light, parents arriving in family cars. You sit under the huge oak trees and lecture the other girls. Always students. Never housewives. Never wipe up a man’s shit or wash his wacked-off underpants. Always study. Always read and write. Don’t let boys have the last word, don’t let any strange men force their way into your thoughts. Do research, become professors and writers. Keep on your toes all the time. Never take drugs. They laugh at your jokes and your card tricks, laugh when you win their money off them, blink back when you flirt with them. Everyone is impressed with your awards. All the girls want to invite you to their graduation dinners with their families. You are the poorest, and the most parentless, and have been awarded more scholarships at Jacksonville than anyone else. You have eclipsed everyone with your scintillating mind and quick wit. The principal, Sister Hyacinth, has stroked your hair and foretold a brilliant future for you in the American education system.

  Later you walk in the park with your diploma and your scholarships. You are filled with happiness and possibilities. The park is dark and deserted, champagne bottles and sandwich wrappers littering the grass, and walking around with all that optimism under your dress makes you giddy. You lie beneath the starry sky all night, imagining the future, that Silk Boy is there with you, that he is such a happy student beside you on the grass, a carefree scholarship recipient and ruler of the universe, not drowned by Mr. Biondi and Alligator Reef. It wasn’t hard, Silky. There was no competition, chicken. You would have made it too, Silly Boy.

  JACKSONVILLE COLLEGE, LATE SUMMER 1958

  The whole night under a tree, smoking, looking at the grass, the buildings, the sky, and you cannot stop reading the welcome letter, twisting it, squeezing it, wondering if it is real. Valerie Jean Solanas, born 1936 in Ventor, Georgia, is accepted into the graduate program at University of Maryland, Department of Psychology. The phone booth is lined with condensation again, the student park transformed into a lake of rain and desolation. The other students have been taken back to the suburbs by their daddies, and there is only the rain, falling onto your hair while you attempt to call home to Dorothy.

  Remote, soot-black ringing tones across the landscape of sand; you remember them so well, slicing through the kitchen and the heat, while Dorothy proudly flew through the house to answer, but the desert does not answer now, only a little desert fox scampering across the yard at h
ome in Ventor. And when the signals drop and the rain outside falls, you see Dorothy in Red Moran’s arms, immersed in a deep and dreamless sleep. Dorothy in bed under the rose wallpaper, a chubby hand protectively round her head, her nightgown drawn up to her waist. Her pubic hair is dark, matted, coarse, newly fucked, and around the two of them hangs that wretched underwear smell. And no one in Ventor answers, and the words on the welcome letter from Maryland drain away in a pale blue mist, a river of loneliness to drown in.

  It is like trying to call the ocean, trying to call Silk Boy to say that you are burning with pride and prospects. No answer, no matter how long you wait, just the mass of water, the submerged sounds and the oceans of time without him. Outside the phone booth, only gray curtains of rain and in the distance people walking under their umbrellas. The student town is dark and windy and you take your bicycle down to the sandy blue beach and address all that water and the heartless skies: There are only happy endings. There are only opportunities. There are only Silk Boys, flimflam boys, toy boys, university places, poverty scholarships. The dashing of birds, of hopes, of power systems. Only Valerie Jean Solanas will be president of America. The sound of rain, waves, and underwaters, the cold, translucent weight on your chest and the taste of salt in your mouth, the cold breath of the white shark sweeping over the beaches.

  VALERIE: I got into graduate school.

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: I’m going to study psychology. I’m going to be a psychologist and find out why everything’s made up of sharks … Congratulations, Valerie, I knew you’d make it … Thank you very much, but it’s no big deal … Congrats, congrats, congrats, my little psychologist … Thank you humbly, Silky, but it’s no big deal … Hooray for Valerie Solanas! Thanks, thanks, but enough now.

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: You always said I should apply to school. You said I would be president of America. Where are you now?

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: You’re in the ocean, because you want to be in the ocean.

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: You said I had that crystal gaze … And I can see you now … swirls of light in the green-black density … your underwater laugh … your childlike smile … You never came to Jacksonville …

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: I’m going to hang up now. I have to get ready for school. I’m going to read Mr. Freud and everything else I can find. Do you think I’ll have to wear glasses there?

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: Nah, I don’t suppose you could know that, you little seahorse scientist. Seahorse scientists only work in the ocean and not on land, and none of you need glasses in the sea, just a cyclops’s eye, and you all work in the ocean because you don’t like living on land … Goodbye …

  —(ring-ring)—

  VALERIE: Wet kisses from Valerie …

  —(ring-ring)—

  ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, SEPTEMBER 8, 1968

  THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN DEMONSTRATES AGAINST MISS AMERICA CONTESTS IN ATLANTIC CITY, OLYMPIA PRESS PUBLISHES SCUM MANIFESTO

  Patients are no longer permitted to use the telephones, but everyone, other than new arrivals, is entitled to receive one call a week. You accept one from Maurice; it is unthinkable that you chose his call, as he took everything you had away from you, but all the other calls are from journalists, and there is still no call from Ventor and absolutely nothing from Cosmogirl and the netherworld.

  The staff, or more precisely Dr. Ruth Cooper, got ahold of the Olympia Press version of SCUM and for a couple of afternoons has let you look through it. A study in violence, Maurice calls the book in the foreword, and in the afterword Paul Krassner has written something about his ass and many more irrelevancies. You said you liked what I wrote. You said the manifesto was a brilliant analysis of the state of the world. You said that I spoke like an artist, that I was ingenious, that I was entertaining, but all that does not matter now. It must have been the walls you were talking to, and not me.

  Maurice has chosen a photograph of you for the front cover and on the back the headlines after the shooting: Andy Warhol Fights for His Life.

  MAURICE: Valerie, hello. How are you feeling?

  VALERIE: Never felt better.

  MAURICE: I’ve been thinking about you.

  VALERIE: I’ve been thinking about you.

  MAURICE: Whereabouts are you?

  VALERIE: In the White House. Washington, D.C.

  MAURICE: I mean which hospital. Is it a hospital in New York?

  VALERIE: Washington, D.C., United States of pimps and balls.

  MAURICE: Can I help you?

  VALERIE: You can recall your copies of the manifesto and cut out the whole foreword, afterword, fake analysis, and sham commentary. I recommend that you cut all superfluous words, which in this case in plain language means all the words that aren’t mine. That is more or less exactly how you can help me.

  MAURICE: Everybody’s buying the manifesto. You’re becoming famous, Valerie.

  VALERIE: And I waited in the lobby at the Chelsea for a whole fucking day and you didn’t come.

  MAURICE: It’s lucky for you he woke up.

  VALERIE: You’ll be famous, Maurice. Your little asshole is going to gleam in the spotlight. You and Andy and your so-called highbrow culture. Books about sucking cocks. Films about showing your ass. Great art. It’s fantastic. I can only congratulate you.

  MAURICE: I believe in your manifesto. I believe in you. The problem is that you’re too intelligent for your own good.

  VALERIE: Do you have a medical license too? Are you a psychiatrist as well? Everyone seems to be a doctor here. Very practical, very pleasant. Diagnoses morning, noon, and night. Thank you ever so much, it’s nice to hear someone has all his marbles. Anyway, Maurice. Things are going to be much better for you, now that I’m out of the way.

  MAURICE: Sales are going well. Now, at last, there are people reading your text. We’re going to be moving to a larger office. I want to help you. I don’t want to see you go under.

  VALERIE: Got to go now. Have to hang up. I have an afternoon meeting with the president. Twenty for a fuck, ten for a blow job, two for a hand job.

  MAURICE: You’re confused, Valerie.

  VALERIE: I’ve never been clearer. I’ve never felt better. Mind your ass next time you’re out whoring, Maurice. It was you I was waiting for. A whole afternoon. When you didn’t turn up at the Chelsea, I went to the Factory. I was tired of waiting by then. But it doesn’t matter who the intended target was and who actually played the target’s part. When SCUM comes after your asses, you’ll have to shape up fast.

  MAURICE: Do I take that as a threat, Valerie?

  VALERIE: You can take it how the hell you want. I suppose I’ll stay here until I die. I suppose you’ll get rich, Maurice. Thanks very much for nothing.

  (line cut—)

  UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK, WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 1958

  On your first day at Maryland, death is still at an unspecified number of nautical and land miles away from you. The campus has been invaded by new students. You sit a short distance from the Psychology Institute, outside the Shiver Laboratory, waiting until it is time to go in, smoking cigarettes, assuming that, whatever happens, you are wearing the wrong attire, you have the wrong equipment, and you are made of the wrong stuff. There is a smell of war about you, a state of emergency, a siege, and something else, something wetter, more dangerous: prostitution, dead ocean birds, and spiraling loneliness. It does not matter how many times you wash yourself, it does not matter how many times you scrub your crotch, the scent of iron gloves and sun-cracked car seats will remain on your skin forever. But there are flashes of sky through the trees and you have already read all you could find by Sigmund Freud, Brücke, Mahler, Adler, Horney, and Stekel. Sister Hyacinth from Jacksonville at her severest and most starry-eyed would be pleased if she could see you now, on a campus, neatly pressed and groomed. She would glow w
ith pride if she could see the University Park. Remember they are only buildings, Valerie, only buildings, books, and people made of blood and tears. There is no reason to be afraid. Read all the books they tell you to read at least twice. Don’t question the professors. Never show them you are scared. Never behave like an outsider. Don’t let anyone know more than they need to about you. Find yourself a confidante, a girl to be your friend.

  Professor Robert Brush loves lecturing to freshmen. He struts back and forth by the lectern in his dazzling white shirt and his fashionable black-framed spectacles, his face a high-voltage lamp of joy and goodwill, his faith in the American education system boundless.

  I am proud to welcome the psychology students of 1958 to the University of Maryland. Intrepid young intellects from all over America. And I extend an especially warm welcome to a small number of girls as well. You are particularly welcome in our department and you must have no hesitation in taking up your place here and making use of all you need to improve your minds. Today the American education system is open to all and together we are part of something new. A new age. The future. I want you to feel welcome. And I want to offer those of you with state scholarships a very special, heartfelt welcome here at the University of Maryland. I would like to express what an honor it is for us to have you here and say that it represents a step forward for civilization, for which we should all, regardless of background, be thankful.

  Outside the window the trees appear to be decked in gold paper. In your bag you have some extremely expensive psychology literature, covered in brown wrapping paper, and all you can think about is that the university has made a disastrous mistake that will be revealed at any moment; your body is an escape plan on permanent war alert. Miss Solanas, obviously you realize this is an administrative error. You couldn’t have imagined the place was yours. Please understand that something has clearly gone wrong in the mail room. And the plan of escape: when all the students whose names begin with S are called, you will sneak out of the building—you have taken a seat right at the back of the room closest to the emergency exit—and never look back, exit blue-collar girl, exit Valerie Solanas.