Great Expectations

by Kathy Acker

  Oh little door

  I love you so very very much.

  CYNTHIA: Well, everyone wants to fuck me I tell you I’m sick of this life. Who cares if you’re another person waiting at my door? You’re just another man and you don’t mean shit to me.

  PROPERTIUS: Oh please, cunt, I’m cold and I’ll be the best man for you and I know you’re fucking someone else that’s why you won’t let me near you you cheap rags stinking fish who wants anything to do with corpses anyway? (to himself) And thus I tried to drown my mourning.

  CYNTHIA: This is the kind of funeral I want goddamn you

  Now I’m dead. I want:

  One. Well my mother father and grandmother are dead. Fuck that.

  Two. When my mother popped off, afterwards, she lay in this highly polished wood coffin the most expensive funeral house in New York City—where all the society die after they’re dead—FAKE, everything was real but there are times real is fake, flowers, tons of smells, wood halls polished like fingernails; preacher or rabbi asks me “Do you know anything good I can say (I have to say something: SAY SOMETHING!) over your mother’s mutilating body?” (it being understood that all society people are such pigs that …) and I tell him how beautiful she is; no one cries they’re there to stare at me as I make my blind way through the narrow aisle, to number how hysterical I am did I really love her? The beginning of the funeral the family lawyer, having walked over to me, shakes my lapels, “Where are the 800 IBM shares?” “What 800 IBM shares?” “There are 800 missing IBM shares and no one knows how your mother died. I thought she gave them to you.” “She never gave me a penny.”

  Three. I do everything for sexual love. What a life it’s like I no longer exist cause no one loves me. So WHEN I DIE, I’ll die because you’ll know THAT YOU CAUSED ME TO DIE and you’ll be responsible. That’s what my death’ll do to you and you’ll learn to love. I’m teaching you by killing myself.

  Four. You’re gonna have to die too. You’ll be like me. You’ll be where I now am. Your cockbone will be in my cunt-bone.

  Five. This is why life shits: Because you’re gonna love me the second I leave you flat. Our sexuality comes from repression. When you reject me, I’m gonna die in front of you. In the long run nothing’s important. This is the one sentiment that makes me happy.

  Please be nice to me.

  BARBARELLA: You’ve got to get a man who has money.

  DANIELLE: I want money and power.

  CYNTHIA and BARBARELLA (agreeing): Money and sex are definitely the main criteria.

  DANIELLE: Sex?

  CYNTHIA: I think I want a wife who has a cock. You understand what I mean. I don’t understand why men even try to deal with me like I can be a wife, and then bitch at me and hurt me as much as possible cause I’m not a wife. Who’d ever think I’m a wife? Do you think I’m a wife? (Barbarella giggles.) But when I’m sexually open I totally change and this real fem part comes out.

  BARBARELLA: I want a husband. No. I take that back. I want someone who’ll support me.

  CYNTHIA: Good luck.

  BARBARELLA: I’m both the wife and husband. Even though none of us are getting anything right now, except for Danielle who’s getting everything, our desires are totally volatile.

  DANIELLE: I can’t be a wife. I can be a hostess. If I’ve got lots of money.

  BARBARELLA: One-night stands don’t amuse me anymore.

  CYNTHIA: I think if you really worship sex, you don’t fuck around. Danielle fucks around more than any of us, and she’s the one who doesn’t really care about sex.

  BARBARELLA: Most men don’t like sex. They like being powerful and when you have good sex you lose all power.

  CYNTHIA: I need sex to stay alive.

  A street in Rome. The sky’s color is deep dark blue. One star can be seen. Very little can be seen on the street—just different shades of black.

  Inside

  Now we’re fucking:

  I don’t have any finesse I’m all over you like a raging blonde leopard and I want to go more raging I want to go snarling and poisoning and teasing eek eek, curl around your hind leg pee, that twig over there, I want the specific piss shuddering of the specific cock. I want, help me. I need your help.

  Take off your clothes. Clothes bind. Clothes bind our legs and mouths and teeth, still shudder want too much, taking off our clothes

  Why can’t you ever once do something that’s not allowable? I mean goddammit.

  Hit me.

  Do anything.

  Do something.

  Sow this hideousness opposition blood to everyone proud I want to knock Ken over with a green glass I want to hire a punk to beat up Pam I will poison your milk if you don’t leave your girlfriend.

  Sex is public: the streets made themselves for us to walk naked down them take out your cock and piss over me.

  The threshold is here. Commit yourself to not-knowing. Legs lie against legs. Hairs mixing hairs and here, a fingerpad, a lot of space, a hand, a lot of space, hairs mixed with hairs, a real sensation.

  Go over this threshold with me.

  Thumb, your two fingers pinch my nipples while your master bears down on me. Red eyes, stare down on top of my eyes. Cock, my eyes are staring at you, pull out of the brown hairs. Red eyes, now you’re watching your cock pull out of the strange brown hairs. Thumb, your two fingers pinch my nipples while your master bears down on me.

  Now you’ve gone away:

  Joel Fisher whom I thought hated me saw me every other day and Rudy whom I thought the worst that is the meanest of my boyfriends always called me every other day or at least let me call him. Peter who lives with another girl three thousand miles away from me and he adores her phones me at least once a month.

  This guy doesn’t care about me.

  But when he looks at me, I know there’s a hole in him he loves me. No, he doesn’t. I can’t do anything until I know whether he loves me or not. I have to find out whether he loves me or not.

  You might as well accept you’re in love with him because if you give him up just cause he doesn’t adore you enough, you’ll have nothing. In the other case, there’s a 50% (or 30% or 4% or 1%) chance you’ll keep touching his flesh.

  Cynthia, sitting at her dressing-table in her little apartment overlooking the middle-class Roman whores’ section, is dressing her hair:

  That goddamn son-of-a-bitch I hope he goes to hell I hope he gets POISONED wild city DOGS should drive their thousands of TEETH-FANGS through his flesh a twelve-year-old syphilitic teenager named Janey Smith should wrap her cunt around that prick I hate that prick I hate those fingers I hate black hair I want his teeth to rip themselves out in total agony I want his lips to dry up in Grand Canyon gulfs I want him paralyzed never to be able to move again and to be conscious of it:

  Then, louse, you’ll learn. You’ll learn what it is not to know. I want you to learn what it is to be uncertain like I am. I want you to learn what it is to want like fire. The driest and coldest dry ice: the top of your head will burn and the rest of your body will freeze shake muscles will cramp like they do when they’re not yet used to the bedless floor, at night, you will know agony.

  You must learn what it is to want.

  Thus says the whore who’s unable to hold in and repress her emotions.

  Among these women, free yet timorous, addicted to late hours, darkened rooms, gambling, and indolence, sparing of words, all they needed was an allusion.

  I reveled in the admirable quickness of their half-spoken language which resembled more the suppressed diffused violence a teenager feels. These exchanges of threats and promises—as if once the slow-thinking male is banished every message from woman to woman is clear and overwhelming—are few in kind and infallible.

  The first time I dined at her place, three brown tapers dripped waxen tears in tall candlesticks and didn’t dispel the gloom. A low table, from the Orient, offered a pell-mell assortment of les hors-d’oeuvre—strips of raw fish rolled upon glass wands, foie gras, shri
mp, salad seasoned with pepper and cranberry—and there was a well-chosen Piper Heidsieck brut, and very strong Russian Greek and Chinese alcohols. I didn’t believe I’d become friends with this woman who tossed off her drink with the obliviousness a person caught in the depths of opium watches his hand burn.

  This “master” was never referred to by the name of woman. We seemed to be waiting for some catastrophe to project herself into our midst, but she merely kept sending invisible messengers laded with jades, enamels, lacquers, furs … From one marvel to another … Who was the dark origin of all this nonsense?

  “Tell me, Renée. Are you happy?”

  Renée blushed, smiled, then abruptly stiffened.

  “Why, of course, my dear Colette. Why would you want me to be unhappy?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted it,” I retorted.

  “I’m happy,” Renée explained to me, “but the sexual ecstasy is so great, I’m going to be physically sick.”

  Propertius decides he doesn’t want to fuck Cynthia again:

  How can such a stinking fish a cunt who has experienced what it is to be the wish-fulfillment of many men hordes of men more men than serve the Great Caesar be innocent? My fantasy is special. Moreover she’s had such a poverty-regulated life she can’t have any life in her to be elegant with me: to give me the beauty that is female that I deserve. She isn’t female, that elongation of steel triangles and bolts.

  My girlfriend on the other hand, if anyone ever hurts me, is going to have to murder that person. For me. When I’m dying from a worn-out liver punctured guts three punches in the face and dirty track marks, I lived to the physical and mental hilts, my girlfriend will naturally die. On the other hand a whore goes from man to man; she’s no man’s girl. So there’s no possibility I’m going to love you and if I fuck you, it’s just cause you’re a present open cunt. The women’s liberationists are right when they want to get rid of all hookers by imprisoning all of you whores.

  CYNTHIA: I’ve been waiting for you.

  PROPERTIUS: What the he …? (Grabbing the other girl into him.) Oh, hello. I’m busy now.

  CYNTHIA: I just wanted to see you.

  PROPERTIUS: I’m busy with someone now. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.

  CYNTHIA: Please. (There’s nothing she can do.)

  OK. (Propertius and the dark-haired girl walk into the house. One of the dogs on the steet starts barking.)

  The Street of Dogs. Two lines of houses lead to a Renaissance perspective. These lines are seemingly-only-surface connected three-story townhouses. A sun and a three-quarter moon hang over one townhouse. Common household objects such as lamps, a part of a table, half of a torn plastic rose kitchen curtain take up some of the window space. Outside a townhouse a dog leans over her basket of laundry. Two dogs, one leaning farther out of his window than the other, open their mouths to howl. Their teeth are sharp and white and they have long red tongues. One dog over her basket of wash gossips with another dog. Two young dogs are mangling each other next to the curb. On each side of the street the tall thin windows form a long row.

  Cynthia barks like a dog:

  I can’t help myself anymore I really can’t I’m just a girl I didn’t ask god to be born a girl. When I think, I know totally realistically I’m an alien existant. I hate or have nothing to do with everyone. I’m a whore. But I’m not thinking. You’re just so cute. I have to get you out of my body. It’d be good for me to get you out of my body cause then I’d be strong that is single. I don’t want to and why should I? I want to have this sweet thing that is you. I’m going to go after you, aching sore, (I don’t care what your reaction is to me) because why not, darling?

  She walks up to the door where Propertius lives and sits herself in front of it. Even though she doesn’t care anything about him. He’s never bought her a present.

  The door doesn’t move.

  A big baldheaded half-naked man opens the door lays his palms on the doorway. Cynthia goes away.

  You alone born from my most beautiful

   carecure for grief

  Shuts out since your fate

  “COME OFTEN HERE”

  Fiction by my will will become the most

     popular form

  Propertius, your forgiveness, peace,

     Peter, yours.

  to redefine the realms of sex so sex

  I’m crawling up your wall for you.

  I must face facts I’m not a female.

  I must face facts I can’t be loved

  I must face facts I need love to live.

    Hello, walls.

  How’re you doing today?

   Hello, my watch.

  Please watch over Propertius, you are here

  because I will never get near him again.

  He is now forbidden territory.

  Cynthia lays down on the street and sticks razor blades vertically up her arm. The bums ask her if she needs a drink. Madness makes an alcoholic sober, keeps the most raging beast in an invisibly locked invisible cage, turns seething masses of smoke air into calm white, takes a junky off junk as if he’s having a pleasant dream, halts that need FAME that’s impossible.

  I am only an obsession. Don’t talk to me otherwise. Don’t know me. Do you think I exist?

  Watch out. Madness is a reality, not a perversion.

  Propertius On The Nature Of Art

  PROPERTIUS: If you read from end to end of the Greek Anthology, you won’t find a love poem where the character of individuality of the woman who’s loved matters.

  (Goddamn sluts: if only the cunts were unattached; I like them but they’re all crazy. They’ve got emotions. I like the one I slept with last night. She moans hard when I stick my cock in her. Does she have any idea what I think? I know I’m a macho pig why the hell shouldn’t I be why should I be something I’m not I care about Writing. Their emotions and hysterics are all second-class existents.)

  My woman is the black hole of vulnerability and takes everything from me and Not Human. She can take me wherever she wants me. I have to care for someone.

  Women, I’ll use everything I can get: I’ll trample on your passions needs even if they cause you to die, I’ll be as elephant-like as I can, and so the ugly is left as ugly and consciousness’ unavoidable anguish is as it is in me. I am wide enough to let be.

  My writing will cure you of your suffering. Give me five bucks, I come even cheaper I’m cheap, I’ll tell you how to win the love of a person who doesn’t love you. I’ll tell you how to endure your rending when the girl you love spits in your face and fucks another man right in front of you.

  AUGUSTUS (through the lips of his literary counselor Maecenas): You’re not a poet, slime, because all your poems are about is emotion. A man who pays attention to emotions isn’t a real man. We have the world to take care of: we have to make sure people have more than necessary access to food; we have to watch the greedy hawks who get into power and rape.

  We are the teachers. If we teach these champagne emotions are worth noticing, we’re destroying the social bonds people need to live.

  PROPERTIUS: If my writing is going against social bonds, that’s who I am. Shove your Empire and shove society.

  MAECENAS: You’re only dealing with your little obsession.

  PROPERTIUS: You too, Maecenas, one day, are going to have to realize you’re not rational and then in your desperation, ignorant, you’ll turn to my words

  Propertius runs away because he doesn’t like making his privacy public. Public is an image a rigidity, and only as such is fun. He points to a mass of art-world figures, from his shadows, as they’re entering a salon resplendent with gilding and illuminations, on in which they’re instantly being welcomed by the most beautiful Roman bodies.

  One of them has just revealed original talent and with this first portrait of his shows himself the equal of his teacher. A sculptor’s chatting with one of those clever satirists who refuse to recognize merit and think they’re smarter than anyo
ne else. The people talk either about how they earn money or who’s becoming more famous. All are grasping for good reason in these desperate times. Since the only ideas are for sale, none are mentioned. A few women appear to maintain the surface that sex is still possible. Eyes never see the mouths the faces are talking to.

  Well you can say I write stories about sex and violence, with sex and violence, and therefore my writing isn’t worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content and all the middle-ranged people who are moralists say I’m a disgusting violent sadist, Well I tell you this:

  “Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your own hearts with envy, you can’t eat cunt, writing isn’t a viable phenomenon anymore. Everything has been said. These lines aren’t my writing: Philetas’ DEMETER far outweighs his long old woman, and of the two it’s his little pieces of shit I applaud. May the crane-who-delights-in-the-Pygmies’-blood’s flight from Egypt to Thrace be so long, like me in your arms, endless endless grayness, may the death shots the Massagetae’re directing against a Mede be so far: what is here: desire violence will never stop. Go die off, oh destructive race of the Evil Eye, or learn to judge poetic skill by art: art is the elaboratings of violence. Don’t look to me to want to do anything about the world: I’m out of it.”

  “But if there hadn’t been between you two the dark streets, the risks, and the old man you had just abandoned, in short had there been no danger, would you have hurried so eagerly?”

  Conversations To People Who Aren’t Here

  “Darling,” Propertius says to Cynthia who isn’t in front of him, “I know you’ve been going through hell because I‘ve been refusing to speak to you.

  “I know the minute I stopped talking to you, you’d slit your wrist (you did that just cause when you were in your teens you cut your arms with a razor blade regularly to teach yourself you were horror), then more seriously you obtained an ovarian infection because your ovaries had been rejected you tried I know you tried you did avoid me (except when you phoned my girlfriend answered the phone you hung up).