There couldn’t be this garbage between me and life; like some
huge smelly dump you had to trudge through or crawl
through to slide up against someone else who was also real.
And by the time you got to them you smelled like the garbage.
I said no. I said I will not. I said it is not on me. I said I may be
poor but I am not afraid. I said I want. I said I am not afraid to
pay. I said I will not shield myself. I said I will not pretend to
live life; I will live it. I said I will not apologize and I will not
lie. I said, if I die, I die. I was never afraid to die. I got tough in
some ways but I stayed soft inside the core o f m y belief where
there was tenderness for others, sometimes. I kept a caring
eye. I kept a caring heart. O ver the injury I still believed there
was love; not the love o f two but the love o f many. I still
believed in us, all o f us, us, if we could get free from rules and
obedience and being robots. I liked doing sabotage, I’m not
saying I had a pretty heart, I wasn’t a nice girl and I’m not
claiming it. I had some ruthlessness. I wasn’t easy to kill. I
could keep going. I wanted to live. I’m just saying I cared.
Why didn’t I kill him? Why didn’t I? I’m the most ardent
pacifist the world ever saw. And fuck meant all kinds o f
making love— it was a new word. It was fucking if you got
inside each other, or so near you couldn’t be pulled apart. It
was jo y and risk and fun and orgasm; not faking it; I never
have. It didn’t have to do with who put what where. It was all
kinds o f wet and all kinds o f urgent and all kinds o f here and
now, with him or her. It was you tangled up with someone,
raw. It wasn’t this one genital act, in out in out, that someone
could package and sell or that there was an etiquette for. It
wasn’t some imitation o f something you saw somewhere, in
porn or your favorite movie star saying how he did it. It was
something vast, filled with risk and feeling; feeling; personal
love ain’t the only feeling— there’s feelings o f adventure and
newness and excitement and Goddamn pure happiness—
there’s need and sorrow and loneliness and certain kinds o f
grief that turn easy into touching someone, wild, agitated,
everywhere— there’s just liking whoever it is and wanting to
pull them down right on you, they make you giddy, their
mere existence tickles you to death, you giggle and cheer them
on and you touch them— and there’s sensation, just that, no
morality, no higher good, no justification, just how it feels.
There’s uncharted waters, you ain’t acting out a script and
there’s no w ay past the present, you are right there in the
middle o f your own real life riding a wave a mile high with
speed and grace and then you are pulled under to the bottom o f
the world. The whole w orld’s alive, everything moves and
wants and loves, the whole w orld’s alive with promise, with
possibility; and I wanted to live, I said yes I want to live.
There’s not something new about wanting love in spite o f
knowing terror; or feeling love and having it push against
your thighs from inside and then those thighs carry you out
past safety into hell. There’s nothing new about wanting to
love a multitude. I was born on Mickle Street in Camden in
1946, down the street from Walt Whitman’s house. I grew up
an orphan sheltered by the passion o f his great heart. He
wanted everyone. He wanted them, to touch. He was forced,
by his time and place, into metaphor. He put it in poems, this
physicalized love that was universal, he named the kinds and
categories he wanted, men and women, he said they were
worthy, all, without exception, he said he wanted to be on
them and in them and he wanted them in him, he said it was
love, he said lam , he said lam and then he enumerated the ones
he wanted, he made lam synonymous with you are and we are.
Leaves of Grass is his lists o f lovers, us, the people, all o f us; he
used grandiose language but it was also common, vulgar; he
says I ant you and you and you, you exist, I touch you, I know
you, I see you, I recognize you, I want you, I love you, I am. In
the C ivil War he was devoted to wounded soldiers. He faced
the maiming and the mutilation, and he loved those boys:
“ (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d
and rested, /M any a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded
lips. )” It was before surgeons washed their hands, before
Lister, and legs were sawed off, sutures were moistened with
saliva, gangrene was commonplace. He visited the wounded
soldiers day in and day out. He didn’t eroticize suffering, no; it
was the communion o f being near, o f touching, o f a tender
intimacy inside a vale o f tears. He saw them suffer and he saw
them die and he wrote: “ (Come sweet death! be persuaded O
beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly. )” I got to say, I don’t
think a three-minute fuck was his meaning. I don’t. It’s an
oceanic feeling inside and you push it outward and once you
start loving humanity there is no reason to make distinctions
o f beauty or kind, there’s something basic in everyone that
asks love, forgiveness, an honorable tenderness, a manly
tenderness, you know, strong. He was generous. Call him a
slut. I f a war happens, it marks you for life, it’s your war.
Walt’s was the C ivil War, North against South, feuding
brothers, a terrible slaughter, no one remembers how bloody
and murderous it was. Mine was Vietnam; I didn’t love the
soldiers but I loved the boys who didn’t go. M y daddy’s war
was World War II. Everyone had their own piece o f that war.
There’s Iwo Jim a, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima; Vichy and the
French Resistance; sadists, soldier boys, S . S., in Europe. M y
daddy was in the Army. M y daddy was being sent to the Pacific
when Truman dropped the bomb; the bomb. He says it saved
his life. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved his life. I never saw
him wish anyone harm, except maybe Strom Thurm an and
Jesse Helms and Bull Connor, but he thought it was okay,
hell, necessary, for all those Japanese to die so he could live. He
thought he was worth it, even if it was just a chance he would
die. I felt otherwise. He had an unreasonable anger against me.
I would have died, he said, I would have died. He was peace-
loving but nothing could shake his faith that Hiroshima was
right, not the mass death, not the radiation, not the pollution,
not the suffering later, not the people burned, their skin
burned right o ff them; not the children, then or later. The
mushroom cloud didn’t make him afraid. To him it always
meant he wasn’t dead. I was ashamed o f him for not caring, or
for caring so much about himself, but I found what I thought
was common ground. I said it was proved Truman didn’t have
to do it. In other words, I could think it was wrong to drop the
bomb and still love m y father but he thought I had insufficient
his life was worth more than all those millions. I couldn’t
reconcile it, how this very patient, very kind, quite meek guy
could think he was more important than all the people. It
wasn’t that he thought the bomb would stop Jew s from being
massacred in Europe; it was that he, from N ew Jersey, would
live. He didn’t understand that I was born in the shadow o f the
crime, a shadow that covered the whole earth every day from
then on. We just were born into knowing w e’d be totally
erased; someday; inevitably. M y daddy used to be beat up by
other boys at school when he was grow ing up. He was a
bookworm , a Je w , and the other boys beat the shit out o f him;
he didn’t want to fight; he got called a sissie and a kike and a
faggot, sheenie, all the names; they beat the shit out o f him,
and yes, one did become the chief o f police in the Amerikan
way; and then, somehow, an adult man, he knows he’s worth
all the Japanese who died; and I wondered how he learned it,
because I have never learned anything like it yet. He was
humble and patient and I learned a kind o f personal pacifism
from him; he went into the A rm y, he was a soldier, but all his.
life he hated fighting and conflict and he would not fight with
arms or support any violence in w ord or deed, he tried
persuasion and listening and he’d avoid conflict even i f it made
him look weak and he was gentle, even with fools; and I
learned from him that you are supposed to take it, as a person,
and not give back what you got; give back something kinder,
better, subtler, more elevated, something deeper and kinder
and more human. So when he didn’t mind the bomb, when he
liked it because it saved his life, his, I was dumb with surprise
and a kind o f fascinated revulsion. Was it just wanting to stay
alive at any cost or was it something inside that said me, la m ; it
got sort o f big and said me. It got angry, beyond his apparent
personality, a humble, patient person, tender and sensitive; it
went me, I am, and it said that whatever stood between him
and existence had to be annihilated. I would have died. I might
have died. As a child I was horrified but later I tried to
understand w hy I didn’t have it— I was blank there, it was as if
the tape was erased or something was just missing. If someone
stood between me and existence, how come I didn’t think I
mattered more; w h y didn’t I kill them; I never would put me
above someone else; I never did; I never thought that because
they were doing something to annihilate me I could annihilate
them; I figured I would just be wounded or killed or whatever,
because life and death were random events; like I tried to tell
m y father, maybe he would have lived. When someone pushes
you down on the ground and puts him self in you, he pushes
him self between you and existence— you do die or you will die
or you can die, it’s the luck o f the draw really, not unlike
maybe yo u ’ll get killed or maybe you w o n ’t in a war; except
you don’t get to be proud o f it i f you don’t die. I never thought
anyone should be killed ju st because he endangered m y
existence or corrupted it altogether or just because I was left a
shadow haunting m y own life; I mean really killed. I never
thought anyone should really die just because one day he was
actually going to kill me, fucking render me dead: inevitably,
absolutely; no doubt. I didn’t think any one o f them should
really die. It was outside what I could think of. Is there
anything in me, any I am, anything that says I will stop you or
anything that says I am too valuable and this bad thing you are
doing to me will cost you too much or anything that says you
cannot destroy me; cannot; me. If someone tortures you and
you will die from it eventually, someday, for sure, one w ay or
another, and you can’t make the day come soon enough
because the suffering is immense, then maybe he should die
because he pushed him self between you and existence; maybe
you should kill him to push him out o f the way. Do you think
Truman would have bought it? M y daddy wouldn’t have
either. At best he’d say w hy did this tragic thing happen to
you— it would never be possible to pin down which tragic
thing he meant— and he’d be bitter and mad, not at the bad one
but at me; I’d be the bad one for him. At worst I’d be plain filth
in his eyes. I don’t know w hy I can’t think all the Japanese
should die so I can stay alive or w hy I can’t think some man
should die. I’ll never be a Christian, that’s for sure. I can’t
stand thinking Christ died for me; it makes me sick. I got some
idea o f how much it hurt. I can’t stand the thought. I am; but so
what? I’ve actually been willing to die so none o f them would
get hurt, even if they’re inside me against what I want. N o w I
started thinking they’re the Nazis, the real Nazis o f our time
and place, the brownshirts, they don’t put you on a train, they
come to where you are, they get you one by one but they do
get you, most o f you, nearly all, and they destroy your heart
and the sovereignty o f your body and they kill your freedom
and they make you ashen and humiliate you and they tear you
apart and it ain’t metaphor and they injure you beyond repair
or redemption, they injure your body past any known
suffering, and you die, not them, you; they kill you some-
times, slow or fast, with mutilation or not; and you are more
likely to murder yourself than them; and that’s wrong, child o f
God, that’s wrong. I can never think someone should die
instead o f me; but they should if they came to do the harm in
the first place; objectively speaking, they should. I think
perhaps they should. M y reason says so; but I can’t face it. I
run instead; run or give in; run or open m y legs; run or get hit;
run, hide, do it, do it for them, do whatever they want, do it
before they can hurt me more, anticipate what they want, do
it, keep them cooled out, keep them okay, keep them quiet or
more quiet than they would be if I made them mad; give in or
run; capitulate or run; hide or run; hide; run; escape; do what
they say; I used to say I wanted to do it, what they wanted,
whatever it was, I used to say it was me, I was deciding, I
wanted, I was ready, it was m y idea, I did the taking, I
decided, I initiated, hey I was as tough as them; but it was fuck
before they get mad— it was low er the risk o f making them
mad; you use your will to make less pain for yourself; you say /
am as if there is an I and then you do what pleases them, girl,
what they like, what you already learned they like, and there
ain’t no I, because i f there was it w ouldn’t have accepted the
destruction or annihilation, it w ouldn’t have accepted all the
little Hitler fiends, all the little Goering fiends, all the little
Him mler
fiends, being right on you and turning you inside
out and leaving injury on you and liking it, they liked seeing
you hurt, and then you say it’s me, I chose it, I want it, it’s
fine— you say it for pride so you can stay alive through the
hours after and so it w o n ’t hit you in the face that yo u ’re just
some piece o f trash who ain’t worth nothing on this earth. N o
one can’t kill someone; h o w ’d I become no one; and w h y ’s he
someone; and how come there’s no I inside me; how come I
can’t think he should die i f that’s what it takes to blow him
loose? I’m a pilgrim searching for understanding; because
there’s nothing left, I’m empty and there’s nothing and it takes
a lot o f pride to lie. I wanted; what did I want? I wanted:
freedom. So they are ripping me apart and I smile I say I have
freedom. Freedom is semen all over you and some kinky
bruises, a lot o f men in you and the certainty o f more, there’s
always more; freedom and abundance— m y cup ran over.
There’s a special freedom for girls; it doesn’t get written down
in constitutions; there’s this freedom where they use you how
they want and you say I am, I choose, I decide, I want— after or
before, when you ’re young or when you’re a hundred— it’s
the liturgy o f the free woman— I choose, I decide, I want, I
am— and you have to be a devout follower o f the faith, a
fanatic o f freedom, to be able to say the words and remember
the acts at the same time; devout. Y ou really have to love
freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the
chain o f being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud
couldn’t even find you under a microscope. It’s a cold night,
one o f them unusual ones in N ew Y ork, under zero with a
piercing wind about fifteen miles an hour. There’s no coat
warm enough. I lived in someone’s room, slept on the floor. It
was Christmas and she said to meet her at M acy’s. I followed
the directions she gave me and went to the right floor. I never
saw anything so big or so much. There’s hundreds o f kinds o f
sausages all wrapped up and millions o f different boxes o f
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