Goodbye to all you cunts, my sisters, fighting for the right to be humiliated, for the right to walk the streets, for the right to be tied up and proud, for the right to be hurt, for the right to masturbate with rubber duckies, for the right to kiss ass, for the right to call blacks “niggers” and Jews “kikes,” for the right to use the swastika as a sex toy and the plantation as a game, for the right to be called “nigger” and “kike,” for the right to be what this society already says women, Jews, and blacks are. Brave. Smart. Radical. Goodbye to all this. Stay militant. Tie those knots tight. Watch the patriarchy crumble when confronted with your demands. That’s it! You want it to collapse laughing! Goodbye, winners, enjoy the victory. It’s nice to see girls get what they want. It’s astonishing to see girls want what they get. Goodbye comedians. Give the rapists, pornographers, and pimps a good laugh. An army of baaad girls cannot fail.
Goodbye to stupid feminist academics who romanticize prostitution and to stupid feminist magazine editors who romanticize pornography and fetishism and sadomasochism. And especially goodbye to stupid feminist writers who romanticize rituals of degradation and symbols of inferiority. Oh, and incidentally, goodbye to all you feminists who go to bars and concerts but won’t buy books. Goodbye to all this, all them, all you.
Goodbye Women’s movement, hello girls. Goodbye to the great women who have done really brave things but are quiet now. Goodbye to the great women who are not quiet now. Goodbye to the organizers—blessed be. Goodbye to poor Women Against Pornography, which committed the crime of trying to fight the pornography industry, misogyny, the buying and selling of women, the use of women as objects—tried to stop all those good things—I mean all those baaad things—I mean all those erotic things. Goodbye Dorchen—you really are the worst: skinny, pretty, smart, employed, well-dressed, and still wanting what?—freedom? justice? equality? Still identifying with whom? Women? Still what? A feminist? Sister, it’s a girls’ movement now. Goodbye, Kathy the Incorrigible—come on, why shouldn’t women be locked up in brothels and fucked and beaten until they die? Moralist. Goodbye, Robin. You had a dream. Dummy. You were supposed to have a fantasy. Goodbye Adrienne. The poems were supposed to be baaad, not good. Bye bye, Florence. Don’t you know by now that children eat candy so as to be fucked by grown men? Goodbye all you born-again virgins, all you timid fragile creatures, all you conforming, ladylike Victorians with your puritanical aversions to suffering. Goodbye women. Goodbye to all this.
Goodbye to the silly women who went to jail fighting Snuff and goodbye to the fools who fought Playboy and Hustler and all the rest of it. Goodbye to all you Gidget-types breaking laws, risking beatings, organizing against criminal misogynists, picketing, demonstrating, marching, so you can stay chaste for and faithful to the beach-bum-who-is-really-going-to-be-a-doctor of your choice. There are easier ways, but goodbye to you naive rightwing humorless fanatics who won’t use them. Goodbye, Linda, held captive, repeatedly beaten and raped, forced to make Deep Throat, forced to be fucked by a dog. The girls say it’s just fantasy not violence. Goodbye to all them.
Goodbye to the dummies who thought sex could express reciprocity and equality and still be sexy. Goodbye to the dummies who thought this movement could change the world. Goodbye to those precious Madonna-types who shouted “Free Our Sisters Free Ourselves” in the streets and at rallies, at pimps and at police. Free Pat Free Ellen Free Gayle Free Amber Free Me. Goodbye to all this. Free the women. Give the girls what they want.
ICE AND FIRE
1986
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 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 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 thes
e 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 she can do without them. I never ask. These are privacies I respect. I have my own dignity too. I pretend it is cheaper than food.
One night N brings home a fuck, a Leo named Leo. He steals our speed and all our cash. The speed is gone. I go into emergency gear. I pretend it is a joke. How the fuck, I ask her repeatedly, can anyone be stupid enough to fuck someone who says he is a Leo named Leo? I ask this question, tell this joke, many times. I am scared. We find a trick. She fucks him because she lost the pills. It is our code and her own personal sense of courtesy. We get the pills. A Leo named Leo, I say. How can anyone be so stupid? We pop the pills. A Leo named Leo. We sit in our middle room, she is drinking scotch and I am drinking vodka, we are momentarily flush: and the pills hit. A Leo named Leo. We laugh until we start to cry. We hold our guts and shake. A Leo named Leo. She grins from ear to ear. She has done something incredibly witty: fucked a Leo named Leo. We are incredibly delighted with her.
_____
Walking down St Mark’s Place I run into an old lover, Nikko. He is Greek. I love Greece. We say hello, how are you in Greek. It is hot. I take him back with me. N is not there. We have a fight. I am insulted because he wants to wear a condom. But women are dirty, he says as a point of fact. I am offended. I won’t allow the condom. We fight. He hits me hard in the face several times. He hits me until I fall. He fucks me. He leaves. It is two weeks before I remember that this is what happened last time. Last winter. Women carry diseases, he said. No condoms, I said. He hit me several times, hard in the face, holding me up so he could keep hitting. He fucked me and left. I had another lover coming, a woman I had been waiting for weeks to see, married, hard to see. I picked myself up and forgot about him. She was shameless: she liked the bruises, the fresh semen. He didn’t use the condom. Either time.
_____
We proceed with our film project. We are intensely committed to it, for the sake of art. The politics of it is mine, a hidden smile behind my eyes. We call a famous avant-garde film critic. He says he will come to see us at midnight. At midnight he comes. We sit in the front room, huddled on the floor. He is delicate, soft-spoken, a saintly smile: he likes formal, empty filmic statements not burdened by content: our film is some baroque monster in his presence, overgrown with values and story and plot and drama. It will never have this appearance again. Despite his differences with us—aesthetic, formal, ethereal—he will publish an interview with us to help us raise money. We feel lifted up, overwhelmed with recognition: what he must see in us to do this for us, a pure fire. We wait for the other shoe to drop.
But he sits there, beatific. We can interview each other and send it to him along with photographs of us. He drinks our pathetic iced tea. He smiles. No shoe drops. He leaves. The next days we spend in a frenzy of aesthetic busywork. We take pencils in hand and plot out long, interesting conversations about art. We try to document an interesting, convoluted discussion of film. We discuss Godard at some length and write down for posterity our important criticisms of him. We are brassy, hip, radical, cool. We haunt the photo machines at Woolworth’s, taking artistic pictures of ourselves, four poses for four quarters. We use up all our change. We hustle more. Excuse me, sir, but someone just stole my money and I don’t have a subway token to get home with. Excuse me, sir, I am very hungry and can’t you spare a quarter so I can get some food. Excuse me, sir, I just lost my wallet and I don’t have bus fare home.
Then we go back to the machine and pose and look intense and avant-garde. We mess up our hair and sulk, or we try grinning, we stare into the hidden camera, looking intense, looking deep, looking sulky and sultry and on drugs. We write down some more thoughts on art. We pick the photos we want. We hustle for money for stamps. Excuse me, sir, my child is sick and I don’t have any money to buy her medicine.
The critic prints our interview. He doesn’t print our photographs. We are famous. Our thoughts on film and art are in the newspaper. We wait for people to send us money.
INTERCOURSE
1987–1995
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
1995
When I finished writing Intercourse one colleague advised me to add an introduction to explain what the book said. That way, readers would not be shocked, afraid, or angry, because the ideas would be familiar—prechewed, easier to digest; I would be protected from bad or malicious readings and purposeful distortions; and my eagerness to explain myself would show that I wanted people to like me and my book, the quintessential feminine pose. At least one knee would be visibly bent.
Other colleagues—probably more to the point—told me straight-out to publish it under a pseudonym. I would not; and Intercourse became—socially speaking—a Rorschach inkblot in which people saw their fantasy caricatures of me and what they presumed to know about me. First published in the United States in 1987—simultaneously with my novel Ice and Fire—Intercourse is still being reviled in print by people who have not read it, reduced to slogans by journalists posing as critics or sages or deep thinkers, treated as if it were odious and hateful by every asshole who thinks that what will heal this violent world is more respect for dead white men.
My colleagues, of course, had been right; but their advice offended me. I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers—overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call “the street” at cocktail parties. “I heard it on the street,” they say, meaning a penthouse closer to heaven. It is no accident that most of the books published in the last few years about the decline and fall of Anglo-European culture because of the polluting effect of women of all races and some men of color—and there are a slew of such books—have been written by white-boy journalists. Abandoning the J-school ethic of “who, what, where, when, how” and the discipline of Hemingway’s lean, masculine prose, they now try to answer “why.” That decline and fall, they say, is because talentless, uppity women infest literature; or because militant feminists are an obstacle to the prorape, prodominance art of talented living or dead men; or because the multicultural reader—likely to be female and/or not white—values Alice Walker and Toni Morrison above Aristotle and the Marquis de Sade. Hallelujah, I say.
Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante’s Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging.
The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we l
ower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.
Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no.
Can a man read Intercourse? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation—such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her? Can a man read a woman’s work if it does not say what he already knows? Can a man let in a challenge not just to his dominance but to his cognition? And, specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user.
Intercourse does not narrate my experience to measure it against Norman Mailer’s or D. H. Lawrence’s. The first-person is embedded in the way the book is built. I use Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flaubert not as authorities but as examples: I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them ; but the authority behind the book—behind each and every choice—is mine. In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl; you will be looking at them. In Intercourse I created an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them. The very fact that I usurp their place—make them my characters—lessens the unexamined authority that goes not with their art but with their gender. I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves. And I do not believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits of deference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them. Submission can be refused; and I refuse it.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 18
