w o lf couldn’t blow them down, the big bad bomb. I thought
maybe we had a chance but if we lived in some other kind o f
house we wouldn’t have a chance. I tried to think o f the bomb
hitting and the brick turned into blood and dust, red dust
covering the cement, wet with real blood, but the cement
would be dust too, gray dust, red dust on gray dust, just dust
and sky, everything gone, the ground just level everywhere
there was. I could see it in my mind, with me sitting in the
dust, playing with it, but I wouldn’t be there, it would be red
dust on gray dust and nothing else and I wouldn’t even be a
speck. I thought it would be beautiful, real pure, not ugly and
poor like it was now, but so sad, a million years o f nothing,
and tidal waves o f wind would come and kill the quiet o f the
dust, kill it. I went away to N ew Y ork C ity for freedom and it
meant I went away from the red dust, a picture bigger than the
edges o f m y mind, it was a red landscape o f nothing that was in
me and that I put on everything I saw like it was burned on my
eyes, and I always saw Camden that way; in m y inner-mind it
was the landscape o f where I lived. It didn’t matter that I went
to Point Zero. It would just be faster and I hadn’t been hiding
there under the desk afraid. I hate being afraid. I hadn’t grown
up there waiting for it to happen and making pictures o f it in
m y mind seeing the terrible dust, the awful nothing, and I
hadn’t died there during the Bay o f Pigs. The red dust was
Camden. Y ou can’t forgive them when you’re a child and they
make you afraid. So you go away from where you were afraid.
Some stay; some go; it’s a big difference, leaving the
humiliations o f childhood, the morbid fear. We didn’t have
much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that
stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can’t tell the
adults that; they don’t care. They make children into dead
things like they are. If there’s something left alive in you, you
run. Y ou run from the poor little child on her knees; fear
burned the skin o ff all right; she’s still on her knees, dead and
raw and tender. N ew Y o rk ’s nothing, a piece o f cake; you
never get afraid like that again; not ever. I live where I can find
a bed. Men roll on top, fuck, roll off, shoot up, sleep, roll on
top again. In between you sleep. It’s how it is and it’s fine. I
never did feel more at home. It’s as i f I was always there. It’s
familiar. The streets are the same gray, home. Fucking is
nothing really. Hiding from the law and dumb adults is
ordinary life; yo u ’re always hiding from them anyw ay unless
yo u ’re one o f their robots. I hate authority and it’s no jo k e and
it’s no game; I want them dead all right, all the order givers.
N ew Y o r k ’s home because there’s other people the same; we
know each other as much as you have to, not much. The only
other w ay is the slow time o f mothers; facing a wall, staring at
a blank wall, for life, one man, forever, marriage, the living
dead. I don’t want to be like them. I never will be. I’m not
afraid o f dying and I’m not standing quiet at some wall; the
bomb comes at me, I’m going to hurl m yself into it; flashfly
into its fucking face. I’m fine on the streets. I’m not afraid; o f
fucking or anyone; and there’s nothing I’m afraid of. I have
ideals about peace and freedom and it doesn’t matter what the
adults think, because they lie and they’re stupid. I’m sincere
and smarter than them. I believe in universal love. I want to
love everybody even if I don’t know them and not to have
small minds like the adults. I don’t mind if people are strangers
or how they look and no matter how raw som ebody is they’re
human; it’s the plastic ones that aren’t human. I don’t need a
lot, a place to sleep, some money, almost none, cigarettes.
Everyone in this place knows something, jazz or poems or
anarchism or dope or books I never heard o f before, and they
don’t like the bomb. T h ey’ve lived and they don’t hide from
knowing things and sex is the main w ay you live— adults say it
isn’t but they never told the truth yet. N ew Y o rk ’s the whole
world, it’s like living inside a heartbeat, you know, like a
puppy you can put your head up against the ticking when
you’re lonely and when you want to move the beat’s behind
you. I don’t need things. I’m not an American consumer. I’m
on the peace side and I have ideals about freedom and I don’t
want anyone telling me what to do, I’ve had enough o f it, I’m
against war, I go to demonstrations, I’m a pacifist, I have been
since I can remember. I read books and I go to places in N ew
Y ork, churches and bare rooms even, and I hear people read
poems and in m y mind I am with Sartre or Camus or Rimbaud
and I want to show love to everyone and not be confined and
sex is honest, it’s not a lie, and I like to feel things, strong
things. In N ew Y ork there’s people like me everywhere,
hiding where regular people don’t look, in every shadow
there’s the secret people. There are pockets o f dark in the dark
and the people like me are in them, poor, with nothing, not
afraid, I’m never afraid. It’s as if every crack in the sidewalk is
an open door to somewhere; you can go between the cracks to
the hidden world but regular people never even see the cracks.
People the same as you go through the cracks because they’re
not afraid and you meet them there, in the magic places, real
old from other generations even, hidden, some great underground city, dirty, hard, dark, free. There’s always sex and dope and you can get pretty hungry but you can get things if
you have to; there’s always someone. I never doubted it was
home from the start; where I was meant to come. I’m known
and invisible at the same time; fitting in but always going m y
own way, a shy girl alone in a dark corner o f the dark, the
dark’s familiar to me and so are the men in it, no rules can ever
stop night from putting its arms around a lonely girl. I like
doing what I want no matter what it is and I like drifting and I
run i f I have to; someone’s always there, kind or otherwise,
you decide quick. I love the dark, it’s got no rough edges for
me. I hear every sound without trying. I feel as if I was born
knowing every signal. I’m an animal on instinct lucky to be in
the right jungle, a magic animal charged with everything
intense and sacred, and I hate cages. I’m the night, the same.
Y ou have to hurt it to hurt me. I am one half o f everything
lawless the night brings, every lawless embrace. I can smell
where to turn in the dark, it’s not something you can know in
your head. It’s a whisper so quiet not even the dead could hear
it. It’s touching fire so fast you don’t burn your hand but the
fire’s real. I don’t know much, not what things are called or
how to do them right or ho
w people act all the regular times.
Everything is ju st what it is to me with nothing to measure it
against and no w ay to check and I don’t have any tom orrow
and I don’t have a yesterday that I can remember because the
days and nights just go on and on and never stop and never
slow down and never turn regular; nothing makes time
normal. I have nineteen cents, I buy a big purple thing, it’s
with the vegetables, a sign says eggplant, it’s the cheapest
thing there is, I never saw one before, I try to cook it in m y one
pan in a little water, I eat it, you bet I do, it’s an awful thing, I
see w hy momma always used vegetables in cans but they cost
more. I buy rice in big unmarked bags, I think it’s good for
you because Asian people eat it and they have lived for
centuries no matter how poor they are and they have an old
civilization so it must be good but then someone says it has
starch and starch is bad so I stop buying it because the man’s very
disapproving as if I should know better because it makes you fat
he says. I just boil what there is. I buy whatever costs what I have
in m y pocket. I don’t know what people are talking about
sometimes but I stay quiet because I don’t want to appear so
ignorant to them, for instance, there are funny words that I
can’t even try to say because I think they will laugh at me but I
heard them once like zucchini, and if someone makes something and hands it to me I eat it. Sometimes someone asks me if
I like this or that but I don’t know what they mean and I stare
blankly but I smile and I don’t know what they think but I try
to be polite. I worked at the Student Peace Union and the War
Resisters League to stop the bomb and I was a receptionist at a
place that taught reading and I was a waitress at a coffee shop
that poured coffee-to-go and I typed and carried packages and
I went with men and they had smoke or food or music or a
place to sleep. I didn’t get much money and I didn’t keep any
jobs because mostly I lived in pretty bad places or on the streets
or in different places night to night and I guess the regular
people didn’t like it or wanted to stay away but I didn’t care or
think about it and I never thought about being regular or
looking regular or acting regular; I did what I wanted from
what there was and I liked working for peace and the rest was
for cigarettes. I slept in living rooms, on cots, on floors, on
soiled mattresses, in beds with other people I didn’t know who
fucked while I slept, in Brooklyn, in Spanish Harlem, near
Tompkins Square Park, in abandoned buildings, in parks, in
hallways, curled up in corners. Y ou can build your own walls.
Even the peace people had apartments and pretty things and
warm food, it seemed regular and abundant but I don’t know,
I never asked them for anything but sometimes someone took
me home and I could see. I didn’t know where it came from; it
was just like some play with scenery. They had plants or
pretty rugs or wool things or pots; posters; furniture; heat;
food; things around. I tried to live in a collective on Avenue B
and I was supposed to have a bed and we were going to cook
and all but that was where the junkies kept rolling on top o f me
because the collective would never tell anyone they couldn’t
sleep there and I never was there early enough so there wasn’t
someone asleep where I thought was mine. I never did really
sleep very well, it’s sort o f a lie to say I could sleep with junkies
rolling over on top o f me, a little bravado on m y part, except I
fell o ff to sleep, or some state o f less awake, and then it’d
happen. Y ou are always awake a little. I lived in a living room
o f a woman for peace who lived with her brother. He slept in
the living room, she slept in the bedroom, but she put me in
the living room with him. He breathed heavy and stayed up
watching me and I had to move out because she said he
couldn’t sleep. I stayed anywhere I could for as long as I could
but it w asn’t too long usually. I slept on benches and in
doorways. D oorw ays can be like palaces in the cold, in the
dark, when it’s wet; doorways are strong; you feel sheltered,
like in the arms o f God, unless the wind changes and comes
right at you and drives through you; then you wake up already
shivering, sleep pulling you down because you want to believe
you are only dreaming the wind is driving through you, but
you started to shake unconscious and the cold permeates your
body before you can bring your mind to facing it. Y ou can’t
find any place in N ew Y ork that doesn’t have me in it. I’m
stuck in the dark, m y remembrance, a shadow, a shade, an
old, dark scar that keeps tearing, dark edges ripping, dark
blood spilling out, there’s a piece left o f me, faded, pasted onto
every night, the girl who wanted peace. Later I found out it
was Needle Park or Bed-Stuy or there were whores there or it
was some kind o f sociological phenomenon and someone had
made a documentary showing the real shit, some intrepid
filmmaker, some hero. It never happened. N o one ever
showed the real shit because it isn’t photogenic, it doesn’t
stand still, people just live it, they don’t know it or conceptualize it or pose for it or pretend it and you don’t get to do it over i f you make a mistake. Y ou just get nailed. Fucked or hit
or hurt or ripped o ff or poisoned with bad shit or yo u ’re just
dead; there’s no art to it. There’s more o f me stuck in that old
night than anywhere. Y o u don’t just remember it; it remem
bers you; Andrea, it says, I know you. Y ou do enough in it and
it takes you with it and I’m there in it, every night on every
street. When the dark comes, I come, every night, on every
street, until N ew Y ork is gone; I’m alive there in the dark
rubbing up against anything flesh-and-blood, not a poor,
homeless girl but a brazen girl-for-peace, hungry, tired,
waiting for you, to rub up against you, take what you have,
get what you got; peace, freedom, love, a fuck, a shy smile,
some quarters or dimes or dollars. The dark’s got a little anger
in it m oving right up against you. You can feel it pushing right
up against you now and then, a burning flash across your
thing; that’s me, I’m there, Andrea, a charred hallucination,
you know the w ay the dark melts in front o f you, I’m the
charred thing in the melting dark, the dark fire, dark ash
burned black; and you walk on, agitated, to find a living one,
not a shade stuck in midnight but some poor, trembling, real
girl, hungry enough even to smile at you. That’s m y home
you’re misbehaving in with your mischievous little indulgences, your secret little purchases o f girls and acts, because I was on every street, in every alley, fucked there, slept there,
got drugs there, found a bed for my weary head; oh, it got
weary; curled up under something, a little awake. C an’t be.
N o one can live that way. C an’t be. Isn’t true. C an’t be. Was.
<
br /> Was. I wasn’t raped really until I was eighteen, pretty old.
Well, I wasn’t really raped. Rape is just some awful word. It’s a
w ay to say it was real bad; worse than anything. I was a pacifist
and I didn’t believe in hurting anyone and I wouldn’t hurt
anyone. I had been eighteen for a couple o f months; o f legal
age. It was winter. Cold. Y ou don’t forget winter. I was
w orking for peace groups and for nonviolence. It wouldn’t be
fair to call it rape; to him; it wouldn’t be fair to him. I wasn’t a
virgin or anything; he forced me but it was m y own fault. I
was working at the Student Peace Union then and at the War
Resisters League. I typed and I answered phones and I tried to
be in the meetings but they didn’t really ever let me talk and I
helped to organize demonstrations by calling people on the
phones and I helped to write leaflets. They didn’t really believe
in rape, I think. I couldn’t ask anyone or tell anyone because
they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this
word they used all the time. Women were it more than
anybody. They were hip or cool or hipsters or bohemians or
all those words you could see in newspapers on the Low er East
Side but anytime a woman said something she was bourgeois.
I knew what it meant but I didn’t know how to say it w asn’t
right. They believed in nonviolence and so did I, one hundred
percent. I w ouldn’t hurt anybody even if he did rape me but he
probably didn’t. Men were supposed to go crazy and kill
someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn’t hurt him for raping
me because they didn’t believe in hurting anyone and because I
was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the
people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you
were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and
needed to be fucked more or to begin with. At the Student Peace
Union there were boys m y age but they were treated like grown
men by everyone around there and they bossed me around and
didn’t listen to anything I said except to make fun o f it and no one
Mercy Page 6
