Blood and Guts in High School

by Kathy Acker

  A three-room apartment; a fourteen by nine room, two seven by nine rooms, and one more fourteen by nine room which contains toilet, bathtub, and stove. Usually no hot water or heat, costs two hundred dollars a month. Many of the people who live in these neighbourhoods are too poor to pay their rents.

  One of the landlords burned down his building so he could collect the insurance money. Two families and one pimp were sleeping in this building when it burned down. The landlord sold the charred lot for lots of money to McDonald’s, a multinational fast food concern. This is how poor people become transformed into hamburger meat.

  The slum where she chooses to live. The East Village stinks. Garbage covers every inch of the streets. The few inches garbage doesn’t cover reek of dog and rat piss. All of the buildings are either burnt down, half-burnt down, or falling down. None of the landlords who own the slum live in their disgusting buildings.

  In the winter when temperature averages 0°, these buildings have no hot water or heat, and in the summer at 100° average, roaches and rats cover the inside walls and ceilings.

  Only one hospital serves these people, a hospital which dares to exist a few blocks from the northern border of this slum. The hospital contains lights, needles, drugs which cause brain disturbances, utensils, and almost no beds. Whenever there’s a holiday, for instance, when Con Ed breaks down or when a landlord burns down one of his buildings to collect the insurance money, the poor people loot this hospital to amuse themselves.

  The only supermarket in this neighbourhood buys the rotting food the other supermarkets in the city are unable to sell and sells this food at double-price.

  The local police station contains men who, unlike the people in the market, want nothing to do with the neighbourhood. They’re scared of the dangerous streets, the alleyways, and they’re paid to be scared.

  There are no out-front local crime coalitions because the crime bosses don’t consider themselves part of the neighbourhood. These gangsters who run the city have taken a building, no one knows which building it is, in the northern part of the slum. They have torn out its centre, and behind the rat-infested plaster walls that look like the walls of the Chinese laundries, behind closed pet stores, antique furniture stores, tenements, within steel walls, within standard CIA protection systems, built a palace. The poor people don’t know if this palace exists. They know there’s one expensive Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood which is always empty and two expresso joints where the cops sit around and talk to men who wear big guns.

  How Janey and the rest of the people in the East Village feel. Poor people generally don’t feel different from rich people.

  Poor people get real happy and run around jumping and screaming their lips off and then they get so down they know everyone hates them and they know everything stinks and they’re going to kill themselves just like rich people do. Poor people are just like rich people except a general, not mood-to-mood ’cause everyone’s got one mood after another mood and everyone thinks whatever mood is present is the only one that will ever exist I mean if you’re sad then the world must be rotten, a general day-to-day depression. Depression meaning the poor person perceives fewer and fewer possibilities.

  Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous noise, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it’s not horrible, it’s just …

  Who they are. Janey, now thirteen years old, lives in a tenement on the corner of Fourth Street and First Avenue. She lives in three rooms. The first room measures six feet by ten feet and has a window. The second room is six feet by ten feet and has the advantage of being divided into two rooms six feet by five feet for each room. The third room is the same as the first room. The third room contains the following luxuries: one bathtub which covered by a metal slat becomes a dining room table or a couch; one toilet; one sink; one refrigerator usually in partial working condition; and one stove. The gas pipes may or may not be working depending on the time of year. Janey lives in the first room. She doesn’t do anything.

  Arnold lives in the other two rooms of this apartment. He has the most varied life of anyone Janey knows and he has a lot of money. He plays music in the circus and rehearses his own rock-n-roll band.

  Janey sees Arnold every day because she has to. He’s her source of human contact. Sometimes she hates him; sometimes she doesn’t think he exists; sometimes she likes him; sometimes she depends on him.

  When Janey thinks she has to see people because she’s going crazy and/or it’s not good for her to be alone all the time even though she loves being alone and doing nothing, when night strikes and only at night she goes out of her room and walks the streets.

  She walks up and down the same streets the hookers walk only the hookers make some money. The junkies, petty gangsters, bums, and pimps occasionally say hello to her.

  After a night or two Janey hates walking the streets doing nothing so she goes back to her room and does nothing.

  (excerpts from Janey’s diary)

  29/7/77

  I get distracted real easily. I’m getting very distracted by sex these days. I want to fuck around as much as possible. When I fantasize fucking, the encounters are always cold wild and free.

  Yesterday I remembered three times when my former boyfriend fucked me. Maybe he’s still my boyfriend. I never knew if he was my boyfriend. I’ve been fucking him for eight months on and off since I was twelve. Mostly off. He doesn’t fuck so well ’cause he’s eighty years old and ’cause he’s a writer. I think most writers are crazy ’cause they sit in their rooms all the time and scribble down stuff no one wants to read and they don’t fuck. Anyway this guy can fuck me when he beats me up and then he can only fuck me once for five minutes. Yesterday I was remembering: I’m in this tiny monastic room. My ass is sticking in his face. He’s got a real bed in his room, but he’ll never let me stay there for a night ’cause he’s scared he might like me. I told him to get a belt. I think I shocked him. He took a heavy leather belt and whipped me across the back as he fucked me in the ass. It hurt almost too much and I liked it. That’s only in my memory and it doesn’t help this aching cunt except it helps me feel I can do whatever I like and I’m going to do that: I’ve been so repressed in this crummy room like a prison every day doing less and less and thinking more and more until something’s gonna break probably my body. Now I’m going to do everything.

  First I’m going to fuck a lot though I don’t care about fucking anymore. I’m not sure what I care about and if I’m a real person. I’m going to travel to Scotland ’cause there are lots of men in Scotland and no one’ll tell me what to do there.

  As Janey was lying on her mat, writing this, two teenage hoods, one black and one white, came into the apartment. The white hood had a lot of slicked-backed black hair and the black hood had big biceps. Janey didn’t hear these two hoods come in because they broke into Arnold’s side of the apartment. They ripped off a cassette recorder and broke all the other equipment. While Janey was still lightly masturbating and fantasizing about young black men breaking in and raping her, they broke into her room and laughed at her. Before she could scream, the white one clapped his hand over her mouth. She tried to bite him, but she couldn’t. She tried to kick her legs. The black man was holding her legs down and experimentally running his nails up the inner sides of her legs. The black hands came up to hold her arms; the huge body covered her. She felt enclosed.

  The white punk stuck one of her scarves in her mouth and knotted another around her wrists and another around her ankles. She still couldn’t move ’cause the black man was sitting on her ankles. She expected they were going to kill her. She wasn’t thinking. Then the white one trashed her room. He threw her pictures on the ground and tore up her clothes and threw her books o
n the floor and stamped on them. He kicked her a few times. He found the razor, took out a razor blade, started slicing stuff up. As he did this, he smiled. ‘C’mon,’ said the black guy, ‘you’re not in high school anymore.’

  The white boy looked abashed and held up the razor blade like he didn’t know what to do with it.

  The black guy hit Janey across the face a few times with the back of his hand for the hell of it. ‘Maybe I’ll kill you now; maybe I won’t. Or maybe I’ll keep you alive, maimed, and maybe I won’t.’ He looked at the expression on her face.

  She felt like that thing – whatever it was – of which she was most scared, the most terrifying thing in the world was happening to her. The thing – whatever it was – she didn’t know. The thing – what she most didn’t want to happen – she was now right in the middle of. This was the most awful thing that could happen to her. She had to get away.

  It just wasn’t possible that she couldn’t get away. The human imagination couldn’t conceive of such a thing. Her mind wouldn’t admit defeat. It kept flying and flying.

  The black man hit her face with the back of his hand a few more times for good measure. One side of her face was bleeding, but she didn’t know it. ‘You’re gonna spoil her looks,’ the white boy said smiling, every now and then stroking his tongue with the razor blade, ‘if you spoil her looks, you won’t get any money out of her.’

  The huge black guy hit her even harder. Suddenly her mind stopped and she realized where she was. She looked up at the black guy with tears in her eyes and smiled. ‘OK,’ said the black guy. ‘Let’s go.’

  They threw some clothes on her and carried her downstairs. When she had been a tiny child, the night after a tonsillitis operation, in the hospital, her father had yelled at the doctor there was no need to keep such a young child in the hospital and had carried her off, through the night, all the lights and people and cars like clouds passing through her, she in a haze of drugs swung over his huge shoulder, running from the creeps through the night. That’s exactly how she felt now.

  As if she was a doll, they were walking her up past Fourth Street. Past the local cop station. The cops were lolling around in front of the station. Past the staircase on which the cops’ Ukrainian blonde groupies hung out. Past the Kosher meat deli. The cops said hello to the white and black boys and they said hello back. ‘Hey, I know you. I was up at your apartment last year. How are you?’ a cop said to her. She just looked at him.

  Flying. She was beginning to fly.

  They stuffed her into an old black Chevy.

  ‘He won’t hurt you none,’ said the white boy. ‘Why doncha stop crying? I don’t like it when girls cry. It reminds me of my mother. He’s a nice man. He treated me real good. He picked me up in front of the Blimpies last year and he’s taught me how to be a man. I was just a kid before that. I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought it was big stuff to take dope, ya know? I was stupid like every other kid. All I wanted to do was take dope. I didn’t even know what real dope was. I would’a ended up being some punk who spends his time rotting in jail if he hadn’t taught me …’

  ‘Shut up,’ the black boy says. ‘She’ll learn herself.’

  The black car proceeded up First Avenue, slowly ’cause it was still the rush hour, the sun was yellow grey and turning yellower and the air was hospital air – it was the time that the sun was getting old and sick and vomity; the air was killing off the old and the sick that Con Ed and poisoned tap water hadn’t already killed off – it was one of Mayor Koch’s plans to save New York – the black car made its way past the empty neighbourhood hospital, out of the slum into a section anyone not from New York would think a slum, a semi-ritzy section, past the UN, the preserver of world peace, surrounded by green parks and Indian restaurants. A few blocks further, the car took a right, dove under a bridge, entered a small area hidden deep in parks right on the East River. Garbage was slowly replacing the water of the East River, only the garbage couldn’t manage to live. ‘We’re going to sell you into white slavery,’ the black boy told Janey. ‘First we’ll train you, then we’ll sell you.’

  They bundled her out of the car.

  ‘That way we’ll get a higher price for you.’

  Janey fainted. When she came to, she thought she saw a skinny gnome with lots of wrinkles. The room was almost pitch-black. There was no one else in the room.

  ‘You are going to remain in this room until you have become a whore. You have no other choice except to die. When you are ready to be a real whore, I will let you out of this room and you will bring all of the money you have earned back to me.

  ‘You have no choice. If you do not do every single thing I tell you to, I will kill you.’

  ‘Wha …,’ said Janey. ‘Uh. What’s going on? Who are you?’

  He hit her hard, much harder than the black boy or the white boy had hit her, across her nipples. Then he left the room and locked the door ….

  The mysterious Mr Linker

  ‘Most of all,’ Mr Linker told some of his young hoodlums, ‘I admire healthy young people. You can buy anything but health. If a person isn’t healthy, even if he is very famous and rich, he has nothing.’ Mr Linker was fond of teaching.

  ‘ “A healthy body in a healthy mind.” There is nothing more beautiful than a voluptuous healthy young girl. When I see a beautiful young girl, when I see someone who is young and voluptuous walking with a man who isn’t her equal – you know what I’m talking about – a man who wears glasses or is deformed, I tell you it disgusts me. I think such people ought to be shot.’

  ‘Yeah,’ one of the hoodlums mumbled.

  ‘ “A healthy mind in a healthy body.” ’ He returned to what he had been saying. ‘You probably can’t understand this. That was a saying of the Athenian state, the first great state in history. All of our culture comes from ancient Greece. Did you know that?

  GIRLS WILL DO ANYTHING FOR LOVE

  ODE TO A GRECIAN URN

  ‘What makes a healthy state?’ he asked his boys.

  The hoodlums didn’t say anything.

  ‘It will surprise you. Disease and mental instability cause health. The men who have taken the most extreme risks, who have done what may have disgusted other people or what other people have condemned are the men who have advanced our civilization.’

  Mr Linker had seen evidence of disease and mental instability before he was able to speak. Born on the Iranian streets, poverty had made him envy all those who had money. He had to do anything to get money.

  Poverty is bad for humans because it makes them perpetuate all that is oppressing them and good for humans because it helps them to be willing to do anything – the weirdest acts possible, suicidal – to stop the poverty. Mr Linker, having been a beggar’s child, saw how society worked. He made himself clever and relentless, relentlessly determined to get rich. If he had remained poverty-stricken, he might have turned this glimmering of intelligence on himself and become a saint. As it turned out, Allah be praised, at age seven he escaped with a travelling magician, stopped off in Vienna and, at fifteen years of age, talked his way into the University to study with Carl Jung. His cleverness and his interest in the mechanics of human social behaviour led him into the new science – philosophy of psychology. Then into neurology, for he was above all a materialist. And so Mr Linker became a lobotomist.

  In his later life his cleverness which he called intelligence grew to enormous proportions. The more people turned to him for help and the more he indulged in his own eccentricities, the more he believed he was God. By his middle age there was no longer any chance he could ever be intelligent, i.e. adaptable. He had become a real image, a fake.

  ‘The only thing we have,’ Mr Linker continued telling his hoodlums, ‘which separates us from the beasts is Culture. Culture is our highest form of life. And it is literature more than any other art which enables us to grasp this higher life, for literature is the most abstract of the arts. It is the only art which is not sensual. You know m
ost people do not read. These days they read only trash. They do not SEE. They do not appreciate nature. They do not have the artist’s eye and they know nothing:

  Out, out, brief candle.

  Life’s but a walking shadow,

  A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  And then is heard no more …

  Shakespeare said that in Hamlet. He said we are nothing without our culture.

  ‘Where does culture come from? I will tell you. It comes from disease. All the great artists, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean-Paul Sartre – you must read Nausea in the French, in English it is nothing – have said this. They are aware how evil they are. They are aware this life is truly evil; due to this awareness, they are able to go beyond. You know that medically, I am a doctor, a body cannot live without disease.’

  Mr Linker gave an example of his own disease. ‘Isn’t this rug beautiful?’ he said. ‘I will tell you the story of this rug. It is not an agreeable story. My wife worked on this rug for five years.’ Tiny birds silver and white and pale blue clustered around bunches of grapes and the pale grey moon. ‘Every day she stitched.’ Mr Linker had married a young upper-middle class Viennese girl and brought her to the United States. He bought a resort in the Catskills, his first resort, and she cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, vacuumed, kept the accounts, washed, nursed the hotel guests, and waited on her husband. ‘Soon her eyes began to fail her. She kept on making the rug. She began to have trouble breathing. One day she could no longer stand and she could no longer do the housework. The doctor told me she was very sick and she would have to stop working on the rug because the wool was affecting her lungs. I don’t understand exactly how. While she was coughing up blood, she kept on working on this rug. The very moment she died, it was in her hand.’