Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

  and turning brown and greasy, and a shovel to dig out the cars

  and clear the sidewalks, and playing in the snow dressed in

  snowsuits and trying to make a snowman: but especially,

  trying to get back and forth from school without getting hurt

  by a snowball. My snow had nothing to do with solitude or

  beauty and it fell on a flat place, not a hill or mountain, with

  the cement under it less solid than this New England earth,

  less trustworthy, ready to break and split, ready to loosen and

  turn into jagged pieces of stone big enough to throw instead of

  snowballs or inside them. We were endlessly strange together,

  not rich, foreign to this cool, elegant, simple, beautiful winter.

  I didn’t touch her, but I touched him. Her best friend since

  childhood, both in Kenya, little kids together and now here,

  preparing, preparing for some adult future back home. She

  took me with her and delivered me to him and I took him

  instead of her, because he was as close as I could get. She was

  delighted he liked me, and sullen. It happened in a beautiful

  room, an elegant room, at elegant Harvard, friends of theirs

  from home, their room, all students studying to be the future

  of their country, and I was bleeding anyway and so I spread

  my legs for him, not knowing of course that it was because I

  loved her. I stayed with him over and over, for months, a night

  here, an afternoon there, though I came to hate him, a purely

  physical aversion to his clumsy, boring fuck: I didn’t want

  him to touch me but I had him fuck me anyway, too polite to

  say no for one thing, not knowing how to get out of it, and

  wanting her, not knowing it. I got pregnant and had an

  35

  abortion and she went home. Nothing like pregnancy to make

  the man disappear. It decided her. The years of exiled youth

  ended. She went home. Like everyone else in the world I was

  terrified, it would have been easier right then to be an outcast

  hero and have a little black baby whom I could love to death

  without having to say why and I would have felt brave, brave:

  and no one would have hurt that child: but Emmy looked at

  me a certain way all the time now, hate, simple, pure, and I

  had the abortion, the hate was hard as a rock, diamond,

  shredding the light. She got so quiet I could have died. She left,

  but I was the deserter. I didn’t care too much. By the time

  mother died everyone was a stranger anyway, and after that I

  was a too-cold child with a too-cold heart. I have stayed that

  way. Everything gets taken away and everyone eventually

  weeps and laughs and understands. Why lie?

  36

  The great thing is to be saturated with

  something— that is, in one way or another,

  with life; and I chose the form of my

  saturation.

  Henry James

  *

  Have you ever seen the Lower East Side of New York in the

  summer? The sidewalks are boiling cement, almost molten,

  steaming, a spread of heat scorching human feet, the heat like

  the pure blue of the pure flame, pure heat saddled with city

  dirt and city smell and especially the old urine of the hundreds

  of near-dead junkies hanging nearly skeletal in the shadows of

  doorways and crouched under the stinking stairwells of

  tenements in which the hot, dead air never moves.

  The sun burns. It burns like in Africa. It is in the center of

  the sky, huge and burning. No clouds can cover it. It comes

  through them, a haze of heat. It gets bigger every day. It is a

  foul yellow fire, sulfur at the edges. It hangs and burns. It

  spreads out. It reaches down like the giant hand of some monster. The buildings burn.

  The air is saturated with the hot sun, thick with it. The air

  is a fog of fire and steam. The lungs burn and sweat. The skin

  drowns in its own boiling water, erupting. The air lies still,

  layers of itself, all in place like the bodies filed in a morgue,

  corpses grotesquely shelved. Somewhere corpses and rot hang

  in the air, an old smell in the old air, the air that has never

  moved off these city streets, the air that has been waiting

  through the killer winter to burn, to torment, to smother: to

  burn: the air that has been there year after year, never moving,

  but burning more and more summer after summer, aged air,

  old smell: immortal, while humans die.

  There is never any wind. There is never a cool breeze. The sun

  absorbs the wind. The cement absorbs the wind. The wind

  evaporates between earth and sky. There is never any air to

  breathe. There is only heat. Rain disappears in the heat, making

  the air hotter. Rain hangs in the air, in the thick, hot air: bullets

  of wet heat stopped in motion. Rain gets hot: water boiled that

  37

  never cools. Rain becomes steam, hanging in midair: it burns

  inside the nose, singes the hairs in the nose, scorches the throat:

  leaves scars on the skin. The air gets wetter and hotter and when

  the rain stops the air is heavier, thicker, harder to breathe. Rain

  refreshes only the smell, giving it wings.

  The smell is blood on piss. The blood coagulates on the

  cement, then rots. Knives cut and figures track through the

  blood making burgundy and scarlet footprints. Cats lap up its

  edges. It never gets scrubbed out. The rain does not wash it

  away. Dust mixes in with it. Garbage floats on top of it. Candy

  bar wrappers get stuck in it. Empty, broken hypodermic

  needles float. It is a sickening smell, fouling up the street,

  twisting the stomach into knots of despair and revulsion: still,

  the blood stays there: old blood followed by new: knives especially: sometimes the sharp shots of gunfire: sometimes the exploding shots of gunfire: the acrid smoke hanging above the

  blood: sometimes the body is there, smeared, alone, red seeping

  out or bubbling or spurting: sometimes the body is there, the

  blood comes out hissing with steam, you can see the steam just

  above the blood running with it, the blood is hot, it hits the

  pavement, it hisses, hot on hot: sometimes the person moves,

  walks, runs, staggers, crawls, the blood trailing behind: it stains

  the cement: flies dance on it in a horrible, pulsating mass: it

  coagulates: it rots: it stinks: the smell gets old and never dies.

  Sometimes the next day or the day after people walk through

  it and track it around step after step until it is just a faint

  splash of faded, eerie pink: and the smell is on their shoes and

  they go home: it gets inside, thrown near a pile of clothes or

  under the bed: it clings to the floor, crawls along it, vile and

  faint.

  There is other blood. Cats and dogs die bleeding, smashed

  under cars. Rats and mice die bleeding, poison opening up

  their insides and the blood splattering out. The carcasses decompose. They are thrown in trash cans or kicked in dark corners or swept under parked cars. Chickens are sacrificed in

  secret religious rites, sometimes cats. Their necks are slashed

  and they are found, bloodless. The blood has been drained

  out. There is no trace of it. Chi
ldren fall and bleed. Their

  parents beat them. Women bleed inside or sweating on street-

  corners. Blood spurts out when junkies shoot up.

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  The piss sits like a blessing on the neighborhood. It is the

  holy seal, the sacramental splendid presence, like God omnipresent. The men piss night and day, against the cars, against the buildings, against the steps, against the doors, against the

  garbage cans, against the cement, against the window ledges

  and drainpipes and bicycles: against anything standing still:

  outside or inside: against the walls of foyers and the walls of

  halls and on the staircases inside buildings and behind the

  stairwells. Mixed with the smell of the piss is the scent of

  human shit, deposited in broken-down parks or in foyers or

  behind stairwells and the casual smell of dog shit, spread

  everywhere outside, in heaps. The rat shit is hard and dry,

  huge droppings in infested buildings, the turds almost as big as

  dog turds, but harder, finer, rounder.

  The heat beats down on the piss and shit and the coagulated

  blood: the heat absorbs the smell and carries it: the heat turns

  wet on human skin and the smell sinks in: an urban perfume: a

  cosmopolitan stench: the poor on the Lower East Side of New

  York.

  *

  On this block, there is nothing special. It is hot. It stinks. The

  men congregate in packs on the hot stoops. It is no cooler at

  night. Inside the crowded tenements it is burning, harder to

  find air to breathe, so the men live outside, drinking, shooting

  up, fights break out like brush fires, radios blare in Spanish,

  knives flash, money changes hands, empty bottles are hurled

  against walls or steps or cars or into the gutters of the street,

  broken glass is underfoot, dazzling, destructive: the men go

  inside to fuck or eat at whim: outside they are young, dramatic,

  striking, frenetic until the long periods of lethargy set in and

  one sees the yellow sallowness of the skin, the swollen eyes

  bloodshot and hazed over, the veins icy blue and used up. “ I

  got me everything, ” says Juan, my pretty, wired-up lover,

  junkie snorting cocaine come to fuck while N and R are in the

  kitchen. He shows up wired. I hesitate. Perhaps she wants him.

  We are polite this way. “ He wants you, ” N says with her

  exquisite courtesy, a formal, passionless, gentle courtesy, graceful and courtly, our code, we have seriously beautiful manners.

  There are no doors but we don’t know what they are for

  anyway. We have one single mattress on the floor where we

  39

  sleep. He fucks good, Juan, I like him, he keeps his junk to

  himself, he can’t live long, the coke makes him intense, pulsating, deep thrusts, incredible tension in his hips, hard, muscled hips, not usual for a junkie, I can’t feel the smack in his body,

  no languor anywhere, intense crazed coke fucking, intensely

  devoted fucking for a junkie. N and R walk by, going out. N

  gives an appreciative look. She smiles her broad grin. I am

  groaning under him. She laughs her comradely, amused laugh,

  grinning from ear to ear.

  The apartment is a storefront. You walk down a few steps to

  get to the door. Anyone can hide down where you have to

  walk. The whole front of the apartment is a store window.

  There is no way to open it. It is level with the street. It has

  nothing to keep anyone out, no bars, no grating. It is just a

  solid sheet of glass. The front room is right there, on the street.

  We keep it empty except for some clothes in our one closet.

  The middle room is right behind the front room, no door, just

  a half wall dividing the two rooms. No window. We have one

  single mattress, old, a sheet or two, a pillow or two, N ’s record

  player and her great jazz and blues and classical records, her

  clarinet, her saxophone, my typewriter, an Olivetti portable, a

  telephone. Behind the middle room is a large kitchen, no door

  between the rooms. There is a big wooden table with chairs.

  There are old, dirty appliances: old refrigerator, old stove.

  We don’t cook much or eat much. We make buckets of iced

  tea. We have vodka in the refrigerator, sometimes whiskey

  too. Sometimes we buy orange juice. There are cigarettes on

  the table, butts piled up in muddy ashtrays or dirty, wet cups.

  There are some books and some paper and some pencils. There

  is a door and a window leading out back. The door has

  heavy metal grating over it, iron, weaved, so that no one can

  break in. The window is covered in the same heavy metal. The

  door is bolted with a heavy metal bolt and locked with a heavy

  metal police lock.

  The floors are wooden and painted. The apartment is

  painted garish red and garish blue. It is insufferably dark,

  except for the front room on the street. We have to cover the

  window. It is insufferably hot with virtually no ventilation. It

  is a palace for us, a wealth of space. Off the kitchen is a thin

  40

  wooden door, no lock, just a wooden latch. Through it is- a

  toilet, shared with the next door apartment, also a storefront

  but vacant.

  Before Juan comes, we are in the kitchen talking about our

  movie. We are going to make a movie, a tough, unsentimental

  avant-garde little number about women in a New York City

  prison. I have written it. It strangely resembles my own story:

  jailed over Vietnam the woman is endlessly strip-searched and

  then mangled inside by jail doctors. N will make it— direct it,

  shoot it, edit it. It is her film. R is the star. She is N ’s lover for

  years, plans on forever, it is on the skids but she hangs on,

  pretending not to know. She is movingly loyal and underneath

  pathetically desperate. N and I are not allowed to be lovers so

  we never are, alone. We evade the spirit of the law. N refuses

  to make a political film. Politics, she argues, is boring and

  temporary. Vietnam will be over and forgotten. A work of art

  must outlast politics. She uses words sparingly. Her language

  is almost austere, never ornate. We are artists, she says. I am

  liberal with her. She always brings out my generosity. I take

  no hard line on politics. I too want art. We need money. Most

  of ours goes for cigarettes, after which there isn’t any left. We

  fuck for drugs. Speed is cheaper than food. We fuck for pills.

  We fuck for prescriptions. We fuck for meals when we have

  to. We fuck for drinks in bars. We fuck for tabs of acid. We

  fuck for capsules of mescaline. We fuck for loose change. We

  fuck for fun. We fuck for adventure. We fuck when we are hot

  from the weather. We fuck for big bucks to produce our movie.

  In between, we discuss art and politics. We listen to music and

  read books. She plays sax and clarinet and I write short stories.

  We are poor but educated.

  *

  The day we moved in the men, our neighbors, paid us a visit.

  We will get you, they said. We will come when we are ready.

  We will fuck you when we are ready. We will come one

  night when we decide. Maybe we will sell you. N is worth a


  lot of money in Puerto Rico, they say. I am worth not so

  much but still a little something. They are relaxed, sober.

  Some have knives. They take their time. How will you keep

  us out, one man asks logically. What can you do to keep us

  out. One night we will come. There are six or seven of them

  4i

  there. Two speak, alternating promises. One night we will

  come.

  Our friend M shows up then, cool cool pacifist hippie type,

  white, long hair in a ponytail. Hey man, he says, hey man,

  hey man, let’s talk peace not war, let’s be friends man, let’s have

  some smoke. He invites them into our storefront. The men sit

  in a circle in the front room, the front door wide open. Hey,

  man, come on, these chicks are cool. Hey, man, come on, these

  chicks are cool. Hey, man, come on, I got some good smoke, let’s

  just cool this out man smoke some smoke man together man

  these are cool chicks man. He passes a pipe, passes joints: it is

  a solemn ceremony. We gonna come in and get these chicks

  when we want them man. Hey man, come on, man, these

  chicks are real cool, man, you don’t wanna mess with these

  chicks man they are cool man. The pipe goes round and round.

  The neighbors become quiet. The threats cease. M gloats with

  his hip, his cool, his ponytail accomplishment as peacemaker.

  Hey man any time you want some smoke you just come to me

  man just leave these chicks alone man smoke and peace man,

  you know, man.

  They file out, quiet and stoned. M is elated. He has forged a

  treaty, man. M is piss-proud, man. We get stoned. Smoke,

  man. The front door stays wide open as we sit in the front

  room and smoke. Night comes, the dark. M points to the open

  door. Just stay cool with those guys, man. Those guys come

  back you just invite them in for a little smoke. It’s cool, man.

  *

  I have a habit, not nice. I am two years into it this time. I have

  had it before. Black beauties. I take a lot of pills. The pills cost

  a lot of money. N takes them too. I don’t know if it is addiction

  or pleasure for her or how long she has been taking them or if