didn’t need to pay it back and everyone knew that which is my
weakness, how everyone got to know things but I don’t know
them. I can’t think o f any stories about pacifists that aren’t
true. There’s nothing imaginary about walls, or eating,
nothing fictive as it were, but more especially there’s nothing
imaginary about them when they’re missing. M y walls are
thin; yeah I wish they were mine. N othing’s yours. God hurts
you if you think they’re yours. In one second o f a bad thought
you can bring evil down on you. The walls are thin. I dream
there’s holes in them and I get scared as if it’s not really inside.
There’s not much food and I know it ain’t mine in any
meaningful sense. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up, not
just write down true things, or sincere things, or some things
that happened. M y mother who you can’t make up either
because there’s nothing so real as one named me Andrea as if I
was someone: distinct, in particular. She made a fiction. I’m
her book, a made-up story written down on a birth certificate.
Y ou could also say she’s a liar on such a deep level she should
be shot by all that’s fair; deep justice. if I was famous and my
name was published all over the world, in Italy and in Israel
and in Africa and in India, on continents and subcontinents, in
deserts, in ancient cities, it would still be cunt to every fucking
asshole drunk on every street in the world; and to them that’s
not drunk too, the sober ones who say it to you like they’re
calling a dog: fetch, cunt. if I won the Nobel Prize and walked
to the corner for milk it would still be cunt. And when you got
someone inside you who is loving you it’s still cunt and the
ones w ho’d die i f they wasn’t in you, you, you in particular, at
least that night, at least then, that time, that place, to them it’s
still cunt and they whisper it up close and chill the blood that’s
burning in you; and if you love them it’s still cunt and you can
love them so strong you’d die for them and it’s still cunt; and
your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heartbeat and
it’s still cunt. It’s behind your back and it’s to your face; the
ones you know, the ones you don’t. It’s like as i f nigger was a
term o f intimate endearment, not just used in lynching and
insult but whispered in lovemaking, the truth under the truth,
the name under the name, love’s name for you and it’s the
same as what hate calls you; he’s in you whispering nigger. It’s
thugs, it’s citizens, it’s cops, it’s strangers, it’s the ones you
want and the ones you deplore, you ain’t allowed indifference,
you have to decide on a relationship then and there on the spot
because each one that passes pisses on you to let you know he’s
there. There’s some few you made love with and yo u ’re still
breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles
swelling through their skin and bearing down on you and you
can still feel their weight on you, an urgent concentration o f
blood and bone, hot muscle, spread over you, the burden o f it
sinking into you, a stone cliff into a wet shore, and yo u ’re still
tangled up in them, good judgm ent aside, and it’s physical, it’s
a physical m em ory, in the body, not just in the brain, barely in
the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part o f your
sweat and their smell’s part o f your smell and you have an ache
for them that’s deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than
your heart and you still feel as if it’s real and current, now: how
his body moves against you in convulsions that are awesome
like mountains m oving, slow, burdensome, big, and how you
m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the
ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s
indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as
you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the
lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and
whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me
Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She
specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,
after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense
that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy
all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f
concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she
probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,
something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with
this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.
She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure
defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was
even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his
fingers and he wrote it down on me and inside me, his fingers
carved it in me with a pain that stayed half buried and there
wasn’t words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt, this
sweet little one who was what’s called a child but a female one
which changes it all. M y mama showed that fiction was
delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to
last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a
pragmatist, a maker o f reality, a shaper o f history, an
orchestrator o f events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink.
The Nazis, o f course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink.
Y ou can’t even say it would solve the problem to have
numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names
unless we are all zero, 0, we could all be 0; Pauline Reage
already suggested it, o f course, but she’s a demagogue and a
utopian, a kind o f Stalinist o f female equality, she wants us all
equal on the bottom o f anything that’s mean enough to be on
top; it has a certain documentary quality. Unlike Reage, my
mother just made it up, and her fiction was a lie, almost
without precedent, not recognized as original or great, a
voyage o f imagination; it was just a fucking lie. I don’t want to
tell lies, not for moral reasons but it’s m y idea o f pride, you
name it, I can take it. I was born in a city where the walls were
falling down; I didn’t see many solid walls. The streets were
right next to you it seemed because you could always hear the
buzz, the hum, the call, as if drums were beckoning you to the
tribal dance; you could see the freedom. Inside was small and
constrained with rules designed to make you some kind o f
trained cockroach and outside was forever, a path straight to
the heart o f the world; there were no limits, it spread out in
front o f you to anywhere, with anyone. Limits were another
lie, a social fiction all the zombies got together to tell. The
destination was always the street because the destination was
always freedom; out from under; no rule on top o f you. Y ou
could almost look thr
ough the brick, which was crumbling,
and you had this sense that every building had holes in it, a
transparency, and that no walls were ever finished or ever
lasted; and the cement outside was gray, cracked, streaked
with blood from where they threw you down to have fun with
you on hot nights and cold nights, the boys with their cars and
knives; I knew some o f those boys; I loved Nino who said
“ make love” as if it was something real special and real nice
and so fine, so precious and kind and urgent, his eyes burned
and his voice was low and soft and silk, it wrapped itself
around you, he didn’t reach out, he didn’t m ove towards you,
you had to let him know, you had to; I could still fucking die
for what he promised with his brilliant seduction, a poor,
uneducated boy, but when he did it I got used to being hurt
from behind, he used his knife, he made fine lines o f blood,
delicate, and you didn’t dare m ove except for your ass as he
wanted and you didn’t know if yo u ’d die and you got to love
danger i f you loved the boy and danger never forsakes you; the
boy leaves but danger is faithful. Y ou knew the cement under
you and the brick around you and the sound o f the boys
speeding by in their cars and the sudden silence, which meant
they were stalking you. I was born in Camden down the street
from where Walt Whitman lived, M ickle Street, he was the
great gray poet, the prophetic hero o f oceanic verse; also not-
cunt. Great poet; not-cunt. It’s like a mathematical equation
but no one learns it in school by heart; it ain’t written down
plain on the blackboard. It’s algebra for girls but no one’s
going to teach you. Y ou get brought down or throwed down
and you learn for yourself. There’s no mother on earth can
bear to explain it. I can’t write down what happened and I can’t
tell lies. T here’s no words for what happened and there’s
barely words for the lies. if I was a man I would say something
about fishing and it would be a story, a perfectly fine one too;
the bait, the hook, the lake, the wind, the shore, and then
everything else is the manly stuff. If I was a man at least I’d
know what to say, or I’d say it so grand it wouldn’t matter if it
was true or not; anyone’d recognize it and say it was art. I
could think o f something important, probably; recognizably
so. If I was a man and something happened I could write it
down and probably it would pass as a story even if it was true.
O f course, that’s just speculation. I’d swagger, too, if I was a
man; I’m not proud to say it but I’m sure it’s true. I would take
big steps, loud ones, down the street; I could be the Zen master
o f fuck you. I would spread m yself out and take up all the
space and spread my legs wide open in the subway to take up
three seats with just m y knees like they do. I would be very
bold and very cool. I’d be smarter than I am now, I’m sure,
because what I knew might matter and I’d remember more,
I’m sure. I don’t think I’d go near women though because I
wouldn’t want to hurt them. I know how everything feels. I
think if I was a man m y heart would not hurt so much and I
wouldn’t have this terror I am driven by but cannot name. I
think I could write a poem about it, perhaps. I think it could
probably make a very long poem and I could keep rewriting it
to get every nuance right and chart it as it changed over time;
song o f himself, perhaps, a sequel. Ginsberg says he chased
Whitman through supermarkets; I fucking was him; I
embraced all the generations without distinctions and it failed
because o f this awfulness that there is no name for, this great
meanness at the heart o f what they mean when they stick it in; I
just don’t know a remedy, because it is a sick and hostile thing.
Even if there were no wars I think I could say some
perceptions I had about life, I wouldn’t need the C ivil War or
the Vietnam War to hang m y literary hat on as it were, and I
could be loud, which I would try, I’m sure, I could call
attention to m yself as i f I mattered or what happened did or as
i f I knew something, even about suffering or even about life;
and, frankly, then it might count. I could stop thinking every
minute about where each sound is coming from and where the
shadows are each minute. I can’t even close m y eyes now
frankly but I think it’s because I’m this whatever it is, you can
have sophisticated words for it but the fact is you can be
sleeping inside with everything locked and they get in and do
it to you no matter how bad it hurts. In magazines they say
w om en’s got allure, or so they call it, but it’s more like being
some dumb w riggling thing that God holds out before them
on a stick with a string, a fisher o f men. The allure’s there even
i f you got open sores on you; I know. The formal writing
problem, frankly, is that the bait can’t write the story. The bait
ain’t even barely alive. There’s a weird German tradition that
the fish turned the tables and rewrote the story to punish the
fisherman but you know it’s a lie and it’s some writer o f fiction
being what became known as a modernist but before that was
called outright a smartass; and the fish still ain’t bait unless it’s
eviscerated and bleeding. I just can’t risk it now but if I was a
man I could close m y eyes, I’m sure; at night, I’d close them,
I’m sure. I don’t think m y hands would shake. I don’t think so;
or not so much; or not all the time; or not without reason;
there’s no reason now anyone can see. M y breasts w ouldn’t
bleed as i f God put a sign on me; blessing or curse, it draws
flies. Tears o f blood fall from them; they weep blood for me,
because I’m whatever it is: the girl, as they say politely; the
girl. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up for books but I am
afraid to make things up because in life everything evaporates,
it’s gone in mist, just disappears, there’s no sign left, except on
you, and you are a fucking invisible ghost, they look right
through you, you can have bruises so bad the skin’s pulled o ff
you and they don’t see nothing; you bet women had the
vapors, still fucking do, it means it all goes aw ay in the air,
whatever happened, whatever he did and how ever he did it,
and yo u ’re left feeling sick and weak and no one’s going to say
w hy; it’s ju st wom en, they faint all the time, they’re sick all the
time, fragile things, delicate things, delicate like the best
punching bags you ever seen. They say it’s lies even if they just
did it, or maybe especially then. I don’t know really. There’s
nothing to it, no one ever heard o f it before or ever saw it or
not here or not now; in all history it never happened, or if it
happened it was the Nazis, the exact, particular Nazis in
Germany in the thirties and forties, the literal Nazis in
uniform; when they were out o f uniform they were just guys,
you know, they loved their families, they paid o ff their
whores, just regular guys. N o one else ever did anything,
certainly no one now in this fine world we have here; certainly
not the things I think happened, although I don’t know what
to call them in any serious way. Y ou just crawl into a cave o f
silence and die; w hy are there no great women artists? Some
people got nerve. Blood on cement, which is all we got in my
experience, ain’t esthetic, although I think boys some day will
do very well with it; they’ll put it in museums and get a fine
price. W on’t be their blood. It would be some cunt’s they
whispered to the night before; a girl; and then it’d be art, you
see; or you could put it on walls, make murals, be political, a
democratic art outside the museums for the people, Diego
Rivera without any conscience whatsoever instead o f the very
tenuous one he had with respect to women, and then it’d be
extremely major for all the radicals who would discover the
expressive value o f someone else’s blood and I want to tell you
they’d stop making paint but such things do not happen and
such things cannot occur, any more than the rape so-called can
happen or occur or the being beaten so bad can happen or
occur and there are no words for what cannot happen or occur
and i f you think something happened or occurred and there are
no words for it you are at a dead end. There’s nothing where
they force you; there’s nothing where you hurt so much;
there’s nothing where it matters, there’s nothing like it
anywhere. So it doesn’t feel right to make things up, as you
must do to write fiction, to lie, to elaborate, to elongate, to
exaggerate, to distort, to get tangled up in moderations or
modifications or deviations or compromises o f m ixing this
with that or combining this one with that one because the
problem is finding words for the truth, especially if no one will
believe it, and they will not. I can’t make things up because I
w ouldn’t know after a while w hat’s blood, w hat’s ink. I barely
know any words for what happened to me yesterday, which
Mercy Page 30
