New York is snowy, sweltering, skittish. November is a remarkable month and the skyscrapers reach for the heavens and you do not yearn for Maryland, for Alligator Reef or Ventor; for the first time you yearn for nowhere and your nights are dreamless, snow-white. At the Chelsea Hotel a male artist pays you a visit with a dildo and pays the rent for the rest of the month; your groin does not stop bleeding afterward and the killing machine keeps operating in Florida, Arkansas, Nevada, Texas, California.
Cosmogirl has stopped writing threatening letters to the state that murdered her mother. Instead she calls you in New York, rapid drowning breaths, the pounding of the sea in the background, her voice wandering and thick with smoke and too much unfamiliar skin, as if her words have spent too long underwater. The smell of car and ocean forces its way into the hotel room, her deepest, wildest doe-eyed look, a scientific rhetoric crumbling more and more. Everywhere signs of Cosmo infiltrate, inside your dirty underclothes and into the hotel room, blinding white with sunshine and promises. But increasingly Bongi from Up Your Ass takes over; mounds of drafts pile up around you. The typewriter, the pace, the loneliness, the conviction. The moment you replace the receiver, you forget her.
COSMO: It’s me, Valerie.
VALERIE: Hello, my treasure, what are the rabbits doing?
COSMO: Larking about in the park.
VALERIE: Have they written any new novels?
COSMO: The black-and-white pudgy one did.
VALERIE: What happened?
COSMO: She finished it and then she read it through and said it was the best novel she’d ever read. Then she left it under a tree and forgot she’d written it.
VALERIE: And the mice?
COSMO: Revolution in the cages.
VALERIE: Have you wiped out the male mice yet?
COSMO: Soon.
YOUR LONG SILENCES WITH COSMO
Cosmo loves twirling the telephone cord around her while she talks. You can see her in your mind, making the cord into a dress in a student dorm that is moving further and further away from you. You cannot concentrate, her voice is a foreign, murky pool, and as she speaks, you read through the last sheet of paper in the typewriter, put in a new one, and light a cigarette. You know, Cosmo, it’s like having a lucky engine in my body when I write. I’m so tired of stuffed animals and professors. You know, Cosmo, when I write, the trees outside look as though they’re clad in gold paper. She takes long, uneven breaths, and sometimes it sounds as though she is asleep. You have time to write another page before the conversation carries on, and then she might suddenly be wide awake, electric.
COSMO: What are you doing? Do you miss me? When are you going to come? When are we going to get married?
VALERIE: Working. Soon. Already married. In our hearts. Any news?
COSMO: A New York artist was here and he planted a wish tree in the park. Visitors could fasten their wishes onto the tree on little slips of pink paper. I’ve been there several times and made a wish.
VALERIE: What did you wish for?
COSMO: Elizabeth. You. Most of all that she’ll come back. That you’ll come back. How’s New York?
VALERIE: Cold. I’ve invited myself to various hot parties with various hotshots. I’ve been to Andy Warhol’s at the Factory a few times. I’ve drunk expensive champagne and looked at his ridiculous pop art.
COSMO: Has he said anything about your play?
VALERIE: Soon. Everything’s on the turn now. I know it. Soon Andy will decide he’s going to produce it.
COSMO: The mice miss you. And the rabbits. All their novels are about you now.
VALERIE: And the Lab Rat. Do you see him?
COSMO: Sometimes.
VALERIE: Do you suck his cock?
COSMO: I’d rather be with you. You know that.
VALERIE: Sex is a hang-up. You know that.
COSMO: I’ll be back soon. Are you keeping me a place in the Chelsea bar?
VALERIE: Sure.
COSMO: He thinks you’re the most talented one in the university, Valerie.
VALERIE: I think he’s an asshole. He’s the supervisor of a load of incarcerated mice, that’s all. If he’d been smart, he’d have given me money for the project. Smart lab directors don’t stop smart projects. Smart lab directors don’t shit their pants because male mice turn out to be superfluous, self-destructive, and a danger to the species. He shouldn’t have taken it personally, he should have kept on riding the waves to his own demise.
COSMO: It was because you didn’t want me.
VALERIE: Kiss my ass.
COSMO: You know I’d love to kiss your ass. I dream about it at night. Why don’t you let me do it?
VALERIE: I don’t have time for sex. I don’t have time to talk any longer. There’s a publisher in my sights. They advertised for new writers and it’s me they’re looking for. They just don’t know it yet.
COSMO: Will you call?
VALERIE: I’ll call.
BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 20, 1988
NARRATOR: Shall I light a cigarette for you?
VALERIE: I’m writing. And I can’t smoke anymore because of my lungs.
NARRATOR: What are you writing?
VALERIE: It’s about mice and language and loneliness.
NARRATOR: And why did you stop writing?
VALERIE: Silence of the mammal.
NARRATOR: You’re a girl, not an animal.
VALERIE: A she-mammal or a female child. I was on the borderline between human being and chaos. Cosmo dreamed about filming captive animals in America and Europe and she planned to visit every zoological institution open to visitors. She loved animals, dead and living. One summer we traveled around filming stuffed animals in museums.
NARRATOR: And why did you stop writing?
VALERIE: Up to now the history of all societies has been the history of silence. Rebel, psychoanalyst, experimental writer, woman’s potential as dissident. Language has become increasingly a physical substance whose only function is to underline my loneliness.
THE FACTORY, DECEMBER 1967
NEW WHITE INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS ON UNION SQUARE
Andy’s pockmarked face opens to the spotlight. A gently droning, drowsy sound from his film camera, only you and the silver wig and your wooden chairs in an orb of light, the rest of the Factory in compact darkness. Andy has red patches on his cheeks, his eyes are infected, and he has invited you for pink champagne and fried chicken. A light breeze in the room from an open window somewhere in the dark and a bouquet of flowers under your chair. Strangers move around in the blackness, it does not matter who listens, the light shines only on you and Andy Warhol.
VALERIE: May I say whatever I want in the film?
ANDY: Say what you want. We’re improvising.
VALERIE: Aren’t there any lines we have to use?
ANDY: You’re talented enough not to need lines.
VALERIE: I’ve never been in a film before.
ANDY: I’m not interested in actors; I’m interested in people.
VALERIE: I don’t like them.
ANDY: Who?
VALERIE: People.
ANDY: Why?
VALERIE: Because they fuck me in my face as soon as they get a chance.
ANDY (laughs): The camera’s rolling.
VALERIE: What sort of film is it?
ANDY: Is it true you went to grad school?
VALERIE: Grad school was shitty.
ANDY: What did you study?
VALERIE: Can’t remember. It was a shitty faculty.
ANDY: And your upbringing?
VALERIE: I was raised all over.
ANDY: Where?
VALERIE: In the desert. Blue-collar America.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: You know, I like being in the Factory.
ANDY: It’s great having you here.
VALERIE: I didn’t think you liked women.
ANDY: I like you.
VALERIE: Do you sleep with men?
ANDY: I suppose so.
&n
bsp; VALERIE: I don’t know what to do with my arms. Shall I look into the camera?
ANDY: It’s good when you look into the camera while you’re speaking. You have intense eyes; you’re observing your surroundings like an artist.
VALERIE: I mean—do you sleep with men?
ANDY: If I slept with anyone it would be with men. Now tell me where you come from. Tell me about your father.
VALERIE: I have no father. Politically I’m a lesbian, politically I’m fatherless, and politically I’m a woman.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: I still have his name. It’s incredible.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: Louis Solanas.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: Dorothy loved him, she wept a river of tears when he left. Dorothy has always had extremely bad taste.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: Sex is a refuge for the mindless.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: The nicest women in our society are raving sex maniacs.
ANDY: Tell me more, Valerie. I like it when you tell me about your childhood. You describe it like an artist.
VALERIE: There was a darkness that descended just before my seventh birthday. The darkness was called Louis Solanas and I behaved like an idiot. There was always one picnic or another by the river. Dorothy was there every time and the light was so strong and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I fell asleep and dreamed I was flying over snowcapped mountains and that people were standing underneath, applauding. When I woke, Louis was lying beside me and I’m still called Solanas. It’s unbelievable. My dress was snow-white, I never had a white dress after that.
ANDY: Don’t stop.
VALERIE: It was the way things always are, I suppose. He had his hands inside my white dress, the desert animals were screeching in the distance, there was a smell of sausage, a smell of water. There was little more to it than me letting him. And then a darkness like any other, and then the light coming out of the trees onto his hands.
ANDY: Tell me more about Louis.
VALERIE: When it’s black outside you might as well be dead.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: Why should I tell you about all this?
ANDY: I like listening. I have no memories myself. I like other people’s memories. It connects me to other people. It makes me real. Just tell me, I’ll listen, we’re the only ones here.
VALERIE: It was nothing special, really. Louis used to screw me in the porch seat after Dorothy had gone into town. The fabric on the seat cover was covered with roses and I counted the roses and the stars while I rented out my little pussy for no money. And I don’t know why, but some chewing gum got stuck in my hair every time. It must have fallen out of my mouth. We used to cut out the stickiest snarls afterward and he would chain-smoke. The strange thing is, I sometimes miss the electricity and that tingling sensation in my legs and arms.
ANDY: I just want to cry when you talk about it.
VALERIE: There’s really nothing to cry about. All fathers want to fuck their daughters. Most of them do. A minority refrain, for some unknown reason. I’ve been fucked by America. It’s absolutely all right and absolutely all wrong. The world is one long yearning to go back.
ANDY: Being born is like being kidnapped and then being sold as a slave.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: What do you look like without the wig?
ANDY: I never take it off, ever.
VALERIE: Why is it silvery gray?
ANDY: I want to fend off aging and death.
VALERIE: And how well do you think you’re succeeding?
ANDY (laughs): So-so.
(Silence.)
ANDY: I agree with you that sex is vile.
VALERIE: The intimacy factory. Fucked to death in every country in the world. Alienated and aliens.
(Andy stops filming and lets the camera slowly drop to his knee. You reach for it and continue filming.)
ANDY: I love all that in the manifesto about sex.
VALERIE: The whole manifesto is about sex.
ANDY: About the peter pier and the pussy pier.
VALERIE: I know. Sex is a hang-up. We don’t have time to waste on pointless sex. We have to make art now, little Andy.
ANDY: You have to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex.
VALERIE: I see you’ve been reading your SCUM.
ANDY (holds his hand motionless over the wig): I daren’t show myself without it anymore.
VALERIE: Take it off.
ANDY: I look awful.
VALERIE: It’s okay. All men do.
ANDY (laughs and takes off the wig): My face looks like an ulcer without it. I look like an evil doll.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: Why are you crying?
ANDY: I don’t know.
VALERIE: It’s okay not to know. What are you thinking about?
ANDY: I’m thinking that I don’t have any memories. I have nothing. I’m just a blank. The wig emphasizes the anonymity in my character.
VALERIE: I think you’re quite cute without the wig.
ANDY: I don’t want to be Andy Warhol.
(Silence.)
VALERIE: I’ve seen your other films.
ANDY: Do you like them?
VALERIE: No.
ANDY (laughs): Why don’t you like them?
VALERIE: Because they suck. Because they’re bad art. They’re just screwing art and voyeur art and nothing art.
ANDY (laughs and cries): I don’t like being Andy Warhol.
VALERIE: It’s okay to make bad art. There’s no price on your head for doing it.
ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, JUNE 1969
THE AMERICAN FLAG WAVES FROM THE MOON
The television room is hot and sticky and it is deadly to linger in there. In the ward, summer increasingly holds sway. The patients are permitted to sunbathe in the hospital grounds wearing only their underwear. On the television are further reports of the murder attempt on Andy Warhol. It has nothing to do with you. You have always been in the hospital and here you will stay, letting the trees bleed to death outside your window.
Everything is in a torpor and your sheets smell of doom and nether realms, but time still evidently goes by outside. The ban on going farther than the flagpole is suddenly lifted and you are allowed to roam freely around the hospital grounds. Dorothy flickers past on the television screen and the picture sends lightning flashes of pain through your brain. And Sister White is there with her sweet voice in her persuasive nurse’s uniform, circling round you like one of Dorothy’s bluebottles and changing the channel every time Andy Warhol appears on the screen.
A reporter has been snooping around in Ventor with a camera team, this much you gather. Pets? Sexual assault? Blue-collar or white-collar? Issues around impulse control as a child? Dorothy is ravishing in sunglasses and polka dot blouse. Her eyes cut to the camera and she uses difficult words that sound foreign in her mouth, as if dealing with a massive lump of foul-tasting chewing gum. The desert rises like a wild animal behind her face as she concentrates intently on the camera. Carried away by the attention or simply desperate? Probably carried away—the reporter is very good-looking—and it is a long time since you heard anything from Ventor.
VALERIE: Where’s my doctor?
SISTER WHITE: Who is your doctor?
VALERIE: Dr. Ruth Cooper.
SISTER WHITE: She’s not here just now. She could be on vacation, could be leave of absence.
VALERIE: Oh.
SISTER WHITE: Would you like to go out in the park for a while?
VALERIE: No thanks. I’m going to watch a show.
SISTER WHITE: Walking in the park is good for the mind.
VALERIE: Television shows are good for the mind. Do you have Daddy Knows Best here?
SISTER WHITE: Of course. Shall I help you tune to the right channel?
VALERIE: Tell Dr. Cooper I’m glad she’s not here anymore.
SISTER WHITE: She’s probably only on vacation. Don’t take
it personally.
VALERIE: I definitely won’t do that. I’ll ring Andy and tell him it wasn’t personal. Sharks are never personal. They’re never after personal revenge.
Dr. Ruth Cooper does not come back. The flowers behind her curtains are left to die; her coat hangs white and abandoned somewhere in the darkness; no longer does she sit at her window, closing her eyes, smoking cigarettes, and laughing at your jokes. The sun moves back and forth across the hospital grounds and she is there no more to show you the attic and the cellar and all the formaldehyde embryos, deformed and iridescent pink, and the stuffed birds. No more of her little questions, nor the cigarette lighter always at the ready in her coat pocket. Dr. Ruth Cooper’s white coat disappears from Elmhurst, her jacket drowns in sunshine as she hurries across the hospital park, and, like all the rest, she forgets to say goodbye.
Dr. Ruth Cooper liked letting you hold forth about different subjects, letting you wander at random between the stuffed animals, letting you join in the diagnoses; it did not matter that she wanted to talk about Dorothy the whole time. Sunshine streamed through the formaldehyde and all you wanted to speak about was male destructiveness, the way embryo boys swallow their girl twins, fetus in fetu, about the experiments in Maryland’s yellow laboratories. You found an old lectern and there you stood, giving a lecture in her white coat while she sat by the window making a note of everything you said. Without her glasses she looked like a little boy.
… I only want to speak to Dr. Ruth Cooper …
VALERIE: Will someone be so kind as to fetch Dr. Ruth Cooper?
PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC: Dr. Ruth Cooper is no longer here. Today you’re talking to me.
VALERIE: I can help you with your diagnoses. Dr. Ruth and I collaborated. I wore her white coat when we worked on diagnoses. Dr. Ruth Cooper let me give lectures in the attic on all sorts of subjects.
PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC: Thank you, Miss Solanas. You just need to answer my questions. You’ve said that Dorothy was away for entire nights. Did she hit you? Were you an unloved child?
Valerie Page 15
