Sunday
Good gawrsh, it’s a long time since I wrote in you.
All the plates are stacked up on the hearthstones in front of the fire. The
fresh sardines on the little grill are dripping their juices into the coals.
We have Guests at St. Privat. Ted’s expensive funki – fied shoes stand
beside my sitting troublesome body as he tends the fish. We’ve all been
drinking wine and eating peanuts and wishing that the fucking food would
appear through the far – lit kitchen door, borne over courtyard flagstones by
the feminine shoe – clacks of Jo and Rosemarie, in through the doors which
Paul carpentered with much labor and disgust from the inferior wood
provided by Ted & Jo.
Howlin’ wolf on the record player. The squid has appeared. It smells
good. Here come de food..
12 July
Class 1a. Sleeping boring people. Here comes the ticket man. But he
didn’t collect the tickets. How am I going to get out of saying that he came?
Maybe in class 1a they don’t collect the tickets. They just assume that if you
sit in this refrigerator with these upright cottelettes you know what you’re
doing.
Oops. The ticket man made me go four cars ahead and one back and sit
in another exactly like car with the same people. They are all so fat it will
really put me off my supper. I didn’t have time to get my pack from the
shelf where I stowed it outside the door to the first car, so I’ll have to go
back when the ticketman has ceased his restless rounds.
Nimes
Oops. Heh. This ain’t so bad… out here in desolate Europe, the far gray
smutty towers of Nimes through many – paned train – station glass. I just
sent Paul a postcard. See, I wasn’t supposed to have to get off at Nimes, but
the ticket – man threw me out because it was all first class. Something got
fucked up somewhere. But it seems to be okay now. I felt like crying when
I stepped off the Rapide Express train, not knowing when the hell I might be
able to get a train to Geneve. A young fellow in black and white is walking
1208
up and down the platform shouting “choclat ici!” It makes me shudder
with horror—the addict’s horror. The next rain is at 4:20, which is soon.
How did I leave Paul, you may ask. What was it like. Well, it is too big
to be sad, too happy to be sad, too sad to be known. When I sat in the train
station at Montpellier an hour ago, I was with him. Heads on shoulders, legs
present together, warm forearms close. He may be there when I get back; he
may not. I know it will come to me over and over again that I cannot bear it,
that I will die; or maybe it will be possible to wait, to travel and look (why
do I want to do that?) and then go back in a month (it is not so long) and he
will meet me at Montpellier. On August 11. May it come quickly.
We can’t know what will happen. We feel the same about things.
Across on the other platform a sawed-off lady dwarf swivels on two
different perversions of black boot. Around and back and forth she goes.
The bulge of her bottom ballasts the balloon of her blue dress. I am made
ill. I fear the lord.
I hardly became more conscious of our love just before I left Paul…
some, yes, like a sharpening of focus through a glass which cuts the flesh
around the eye it is held to – because I am so conscious of it all the time, we
are, all over our whole bodies. Two nights before I left we made love and
came within seconds of each other. I write this, I write in you, because I
bleed honey. Oh humans that we are.
It is hot. The wind is still blowing. I do not know why I am going,
except that I decided to go.
I have promised myself that I will not go on a pastry binge until after
I’ve left Rebekah. And I hope to god I will only have one. I doubt if I will
hold out forever, being empty in the afternoons. But when I do it, it will be
high – class stuff, good munchies, real cream and so on. Let god not
translate my loneliness to food. Oh Paul. I am not there to hug you tonight,
sit on your lap while you drink wine and smile at me.
I’m on my way to Zurich to see Joan. I telephoned her last night – got
her postcard two days ago – and she wasn’t in, but I left a message that I’d
arrive tonight. Late.
Through bamboo country, and more stone villages, and curly plants,
like beards on inverted chins of earth.
Broke off and wrote four lyrical pages to Paul. Good fun, gets me
through four o’clock hell. Paul once almost forbade me to use the term hell
1209
for my petty states; it is not hell, it is not hell, he said, don’t use it unless you
mean it. You do not know what hell is.
My pack is really too heavy. It’s a good thing I’m unloading some stuff
on Becka.
A train – man out on the gravel is picking his nose very thoroughly.
Lausanne –
There’s a completely mad fellow muttering and throwing crumpled
pieces of paper across the waiting-room in the gare at Lausanne. Small
balding huge – bearded, he awakes a small sleeping nun from her skull – like
grimace of sleep and imitates to her that she snores. He pretends to cross
himself. He mutters with rage. She mutters too and then leans back into
sleep, all bottom teeth and lopsided cross and crippled legs crossed one over
the other – no, they just look that way. The mad fellow, who wears green,
has found or stolen a cake which is in a plastic dish. He keeps dropping it
angrily on the floor in front of people, but he hasn’t destroyed it yet. He
awoke an ancient sleeping man by pushing the newspaper hard down over
his face.
The sleepers awake, muttering in a different language, and the mad
fellow grunts and growls. Everyone ignores him in annoyance except for a
white – clad adolescent who somehow cheers him on. Whenever anyone
goes out the door of the waiting-room, the mad fellow rushes and opens it
for them, muttering and swooping. I drew a picture of the nun with brown
ink.
A quiet – voiced fellow in a blue suit with a sweet nervous face has
edged up to me and is I think inviting me to go in an automobile or
something, I don’t really know. He’s edged too close. I think he was
fascinated by my drawing of the nun. Damn it, it’s such a drag, always
having to get uptight and put out vibes calculated to wither and discourage.
My Vapona vibes.
I am waiting in Lausanne train station for the train to Zurich at 5:18
a.m. I rang Joan and she was sweet and welcoming. I mailed a long letter to
Paul. I am quite looking forward to going to Zurich. I had coffee, which I
am very unused to, so I’m quite awake. A long, long letter to Paul.
All these really strange people hang out at train stations. The mad
fellow has kept up his restless antics. His favorite game is to shout and
swear at people who are snoring.
1210
I keep being afraid that somehow I will get the wrong train, or miss the
one I want. All night trains go by, great snoring pneumatic beasts dragged
along in their sleep. Two terrifyingly American girls come in, giggle, and
go out.
I am half – planning to leave my luggage and go get Birchermuesli
someplace when I get into Zurich, and then take the train to Thalwil.
I think I saw Sarah Gerard and her Larry in Geneve, going into France. I
went after them, but they didn’t see me, and got away. If it was Sarah, she
has gotten terribly skinny, which is good, since she’s so tiny. She looked
tired. He had a beard, which is good, since he has virtually no chin.
Mail trains seem to be the main thing at night. The American girl next
to me has gotten out a book of pink ruled paper and is making an entry in
round schoolgirlish hand. I’d give anything to be able to read it. I snatch a
glimpse of a sentence – “…. got dressed. Went upstairs to the library where
they had some beautifully preserved old books on display…” “… Medici
chapel… the main hall was made out of different colored marbles and was
one of the most beautiful I have seen.”
It is 4:35 a.m. Time is inching imperceptibly, painfully by. One great
consolation is that, as it will be light, there may be some outtasight scenery
on the way to Zurich. And a sunrise, I wouldn’t be surprised. Christ, I’m
tired of sitting down. I try to keep myself from looking at the clock for as
long as possible, but it takes a physical effort to keep my head from
swiveling around every few seconds or so. The girl with the diary finishes
her July 13 entry, puts the book back into her yellow leatherette case, after
giving a (presumably affectionate) glance at its garishly flowered cover. I
am terribly interested in other people’s business.
So… I guess I’d better say--13 July
14 July
The above entry was devoured by a long, long letter to Paul. I still feel
sleepy, since I had to get up at 5 this morning so that I could catch the 7.02
to Venice. I caught it, but I dare not go to sleep because I have postcards
which must be mailed while I’m still in Switzerland.
1211
It’s really strange – people are crammed into second class, while first
class goes empty. Not altogether empty, especially in Switzerland, but much
emptier.
The scenery is spectacular. We keep going through tunnels, but when
we’re not in tunnels it’s fantastic to stand by the windows looking out.
We’re going through an incredibly long tunnel; it must be a whole Alp. I
may mail some stuff back to France if I can get it together. I’ve got far far
too much. My Swiss Army pack, with its two compartments, is
ridiculously heavy.
15 July
All of yesterday’s outpourings went to my favorite huggable Paul as
could have been predicted. I wept in the nunnery last night all over my letter
to him and sent him the drawing of the nun in Lausanne. I spent last night
and this morning in Venice, which really moved me, because it doesn’t have
any cars and is all canals and decayed grandeur, and I was so sleepy I was
going a bit mad, and the hostel (a dormitory in a grand old marble convent)
was more than full, and the streets were teeming with Americans.
So it’s the gray train to Padua now (names of places out of junior – high
– school geography books, not the real – life “Padova”), on the way to
Firenze, perhaps, to change for Perugia… I feel the feeling of having eaten
too much cheese, I mean unbalanced in respect to carbohydrate, because I
neglected to buy some bread on my hurry to the station after my misguided
boatride, and I was right to hurry. Three plums and some gooey cheese was
breakfast. And now I am sitting in great pleasure because a thoroughly
acceptable – looking American guy, just off the boat from Israel, has sat
down opposite. Dark and bearded.
So I’ll just dig his presence with my body. He’s going to Rome.
Hostel- Venice
These girls who lie sleeping
Who don’t have men
Braids and nunneries, nunneries and braids
Dim Christ flouresced
On the pillared wall
Quiet high windows, pinkened gloom
1212
These girls who lie sleeping
More sweet than their talk
Which clangs giggles and pounds
Boyless troupes of travelling girls
Banded together in braids and nunneries,
Nunneries and braids, clothed breasts
and hairbrushes,
Where do they go
Each in her sleep
The tufted genital
Postponed
Do they dream troupes and giggles
Pasta and nuns
Or of hands soft
as dollar bills
Sinuating
In warm dormant places?
Unbraiding, winning, licking,
Undone?
-----------------------------------------
It is raining in Italy and we are going south. I am having a full time. I
like life. Why is it so poignant? I am almost twenty. I just finished By
Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart, the lady we
stayed with in the country that time. It’s – uh – well, it’s fucking good.
The pavements beyond the speeding train are wet.
I dreamed that Paul was fucking me and his prick was going very deep
and I cried out, because I was afraid he would impale himself on my I.U.D.
Oh, what a lovely rain. Look at the hollyhocks in the rain, all around
the deserted factory.
1213
To my horror I hear flagrant Americana on the seat next to me, where
before was only familial Italian gabble. I grimace – smile at the shiny –
bearded fellow opposite, but he only shrugs.
I feel so happy I wish I could do some acrobatics.
Monday, 17 July
Pizzichina, Perugia, Italia
Dear book, how glad I will be when I am writing 12th of August, and that
means I’ll be back in St. Privat! I don’t think that I really tell anybody how
weak I feel… all the letters I write to people are always going to be read by
other people before I send them.
All the people at Pizzichina seem rather pissed off with me because I
don’t eat zucchero. I have dirt all under my nails from digging potatoes.
Rebekah and I dug them for the stew Rebekah is making for Renard’s
birthday today. He doesn’t seem pleased particularly.
I feel terribly weak; for some reason I have been ferociously hungry all
afternoon, although I had a reasonable lunch. Or maybe I didn’t. It’s
difficult to judge how much one has ingested when it is eaten off one
enormous communal plate by twelve hungry fork – wielders. Don’t much
like sitting on the truck tire toilet seat either. This is a communist commune.
Yesterday we worked most of the day stacking wheat-sheaves. It is
some of the hardest work I’ve ever done, we had five meals yesterday. All
morning I missed Paul terribly and everything felt senseless. I must wait
until after supper to ask Rebekah about the Spanish – speaking Peruvian
lady I am supposed to stay with in Rome; I feel too weak now. I should
write to Mama, but I write to Paul so much that there’s not much left over
for Mama.
This morning was fine and hot and we went to Todi, but this afternoon a
great storm blew up and the wind crashed through the trees and now it’s
raining hard. I hope it’s not raining tomorrow when I go to Rome.
Cuando manjare? I hope soon. I fixed my gold velvet trousers and now
they’re really tight around the top and I dig them. Finally, a worthy
companion to my jeans!
20 July
1214
I seem to have lost all my fucking pens, which makes a necessity of
pleasure – buying rapidograph and fountain pen, one for Paul, one for me,
don’t know which yet. Sitting on the base of the statue at Campo del Fiori,
wondering where to go to eat. There are lots of choices, but I’m ridiculously
indecisive. I almost even crave pasta… but I shouldn’t spend very much.
Sure went to a lot of museums today. A wonderful lunch after tramping
about being a tourist for serious lengths of time: sitting in my jeans-shorts on
the marble steps of a museum, eating a huge fat dripping fuzzy peach, a
piece of cheese, a big chunk of bread. Resting.
24 July
Hello, book! I’m in Greece! Camping in a nice place with cicadas
echoing in the olive trees. Near a cold river, a warm night, a big yellow
moon… Did I tell you I got a letter from Paul? Ha ha ho ho! I went for a
wonderful run. It makes all the difference in the world. I’m with a vanful of
Australians, New Zealanders, and Englishmen.
25 July
16 days left to go. Today is outtasight. I left the rather boring though
kindly vanful here in Patras at about one p.m.; after a gorgeous slow hot
short ferry ride, costing about 35 or 40 cents each including the vans, and
began to walk happily to the train station, whereupon a young Greek driving
a car full of Olympia drinks insisted on giving me a ride. The next train to
Athens is at 5:15. I don’t know if I’ll go all the way there tonight – I doubt
it – or stay on a beach somewhere and go in early tomorrow morning. It will
undoubtedly be a horrible hassle there. I’m going to find a boat to some nice
island and go out and spend five or six days just grooving. And I’ll check
mail there of course. I’m glad to be on my own again, not having to fit my
reality in with anybody else’s. Safe, secluded, sunny.
As there is such a long time until the train goes, I am sitting on a rather
smelly beach just outside of Patras. It is a rocky, littered beach, fronting a
deserted shady place with tables and chairs, obviously a sometime- café. I
share the beach with two thin pale boys of Northern European extraction,
two greek tough fellows, farther down, and a lone thin brown old man, very
tanned and strong – looking. The old man looks interesting. I like old men,
for they are so often very kind, and are not threatening me by wanting to
1215
fuck me. Well – maybe wanting to, but they’d never do it. I can be very
fond to old men.
I will stay on the beach for a while longer and go for a swim or at least a
dunk. And I want to get a good sunburn – or – tan started. Then I will walk
back leisurely, and maybe go into the church I saw. For I like quiet
churches, I like to kneel and pray. Then I will go to the museum which
seems to be on the far side of a city square I saw; it probably opens at 4:00.
Then back to the station. The only thing I don’t like is all the men shouting
at me in my very short jean – shorts and pale legs, which are rough and
hairy, which I am trying to get brown and smooth.
In Greece I am not a tourist. I am just being. In Yugoslavia I will be a
tourist again, go on trains and sleep in youth hostels, but now I am just
sitting on the beach. Sent a letter to Paul today. I’ll probably start another
one too. I don’t believe in sending postcards of things I haven’t seen, so so
far the ones I’ve sent have been of Igoumenitsa, the port town we landed at.
The boat trip over from Italy was really nice, drinking Dominic’s cheap
incredibly bad TWA wine, listening to all the Americans rap, rapping some
myself, climbing all over posts and benches and things like a monkey.
Dominic is a silly nice exuberant genuine San Pedro Los Angeles boy who is
very American and is of direct Italian descent and reminds me of Jim
Chambers.
I am happy here on the dirty beach at Patras. I keep farting – I think
because I so seldom crap. The Mediterranean doesn’t look very clean here.
It’s a great sea for disgorging useless debris – about three yards in front of
me is a ridge which continues all up and down the beach, of figs, which were
dried but which the sea has re-constituted and made salt instead of sweet. I
haven’t tasted one, although I seriously considered taking some away with
me, but I figured they’d most likely made me sick. It seems a shame though.
I wonder how they got there, what ship went down or what crate slid
overboard.
Later. On the train. It’s turned out to be a fabulous ride. Me and these
three freaks, two from Amsterdam, one from Ohio, all on Interrail passes,
have taken over a whole car of the train and the windows are open with the
warm night breathing in. My sunburn is itching. Kid from Ohio, not quite
19, much tougher than just about anybody that age I’ve met, also reminds
me of Jim – stocky, cowboy boots, Midwest accent-- and of somebody else I
can’t place. The sea we have been going alongside all day is so incredibly
1216
beautiful – far, misted mountains beyond it. The full moon is out. We’re
gonna get off someplace and camp.
1 August
Mykonos
My tiny hotel room which I share with two Italian chicks in the little
town of Mykonos, after a sunburned four days camping on and past Super –
paradise beach on the island of Mykonos, which I came to last week some
time, I can’t quite remember when. During which time I’ve gotten burned
and tanned, gone snorkeling, met a groovy Londoner with a house on the
island, turned down a nice-ish fellow who walked me back to my white –
sheet shelter one wilderness night, dodged a motorboating guy who stared at
me where I crouched in my shelter – which – did – not shelter against the
burning sun… read Somerset Maugham in the shallow turquoise warm
water –. Gone beaching every day, ate moussaka, got, in fact, really bad
sunstroke and my ass swelled up so much I could not get my trousers on.
Was living naked… tossed in fever at night, somebody brought me water.
When I finally gave in and came to this hotel I woke up in the morning to a
bed full of shredded skin. There is sun here, but no trees.
I spent some sleepless wretched nights, wrote two long letters to my
nice Pablo (whom I will have to re-acquaint myself with now when I see
him) felt nice mostly, and had a good time. Tomorrow, after a morning
jaunt to the island of Delos to see some recommended ruins, I’m off back to
Athens where I will check mail the 3rd and then split back to France via
Yugoslavia. Have written mostly to Paul, not much to other people.
2 August-- Athens
Damn it, I’m afraid to go out on my nice terrace because of the guy in
the room next door, who when he saw me going into my room summoned at
me with a tone of desperation; somebody later rattled my doorknob, tried my
door to see if it was locked. It was. It is so hot in the room that sweat is
pouring off me, and I’m perturbed because now I don’t feel free about using
my terrace – if I go out there he’ll start something. I went out to hang up
some clothes I managed to sort of wash in the sink, and there stood the guy,
gazing out at the city in his swimming trunks, restless.
1217
I think I must be sleepy, for my eyes are drooping and I keep getting
dizzy spells; I got up at 6:50 this morning to go for a run. I even feel like I
could shit maybe except that there’s no toilet paper and I’m too alert about
this guy. If he weren’t there I could do my stretches on the terrace in the
morning. That would be great! But maybe he won’t get up early anyway.
There is only a spindly fence separating the two terraces, and I am afraid
that he might climb over in the night and go for me with a knife or
something; dare I leave my doors open? It will be impossible to sleep
otherwise. I can complain to the hotel man, whom I’ve got thoroughly
charmed, if anything really arises. I just don’t like that door – rattling
business.
The guy who found this place for me, who’s from New York, is awfully
strange himself. He tried to pick me up, but in the weirdest most uptight
way, by offering that I could crash on his floor, then barging right past the
hotel people with me where they sat harmlessly on their front steps, and
showed me an impossible little room full of bed, identical to mine no doubt,
but god, what a thing, I mean, I absolutely didn’t trust him. Says he’s
studying law.
Athens. Reminds me of New York. Hot and funky. Good chicken at an
outdoor taverna, back street, waiter with a great lump on his nose by his eye
like a turkey.
3 August
Ah, Christ, I’m worried. How can it be that there was nothing at
American Express? What was that trip to Mykonos but a sun and sea wait?
All the while I was trusting, trusting the postman. How could nothing have
arrived in two weeks? I do not taste my lunch; with the frightened place in
my throat it feels like I haven’t eaten. I look at my tanned legs with fear too,
for they are just for Paul to love and praise; how I want his hands on them,
and how my celibate cunt longs for him, and how I want to just talk to him
and be with him and cuddle him and feel good and so complete with him! I
had thought today would be lucky, for I got my sandal fixed so easily, and
was in such a good mood, and dutifully saw the Acropolis. When I started
this book, I was with Paul. Oh god, please let me still be with him when I
end it!
I’m up in my hotel room getting my things together; I’ll take them up to
the train station, find out what time the trains go, and then go back to
1218
American Express, because there is more mail there at 5, and if there’s
nothing then, I’ll go through with the telephone call I’ve booked at the
telephone company. I will find out today somehow what is going on;
otherwise I won’t be able to conduct the rest of my trip with any kind of
coherence.
Later. I feel a bit ill writing in you like this, with my hands shaking and
a cold weak feeling in my wrists and elbows. This phone call I’m trying to
put through is every bit as much hassle as I thought it would be. I’ve been
thinking all day that this trip has been just a lesson is pure survival. I don’t
like it. I’ve got reservations for the train tonight at 9, I hope to god I make
it, that I get this call through groovy in plenty of time.
The horrible certainty of doom which I felt earlier when there wasn’t
any mail for me has lifted to a heavy nervousness; but if I can’t get through
I’ll just probably go fast and fairly wretched through Yugoslavia and call
from Zurich or somewhere again anyway. One place is as good as another;
it is the life and the person I want.
I’ve already hassled in French and English with the French operator
(nice, I’ll give her that) and now all I can do is wait like she tells me, until
she calls back. 2 hours, it’s supposed to take. A nice fellow is grinning at
three American girls including me, I just can’t tell if he’s the same one who
helped me in the train station earlier when I was so discouraged, who saw
me cry. My discouragement lifted when I got the reservation easily and
when I found that the baggage I left there last week, which I thought for a
horrible 5 minutes was in another station all the way across huge sweating
hot hot hot ugly crowded noisy poison – air Athens, was indeed only 5
minutes away across a funny bridge over the train tracks.
If I wanted I could go all the way to Paris on the train tonight. I mean,
on that train, though I doubt tonight. I dream of things that I will wear when
I get back – I’ve really been in the mood to wear gypsy things, and with my
new silver earrings… and today I bought a cotton scarf in a peach- colored
old cotton with a faded border of flowers. It was only 20 drachmas, and I
loved it because it was so faded. The peach is a wonderful color. Paul digs
me in gypsy things.
I tried on some blouses in the place where I got the scarf – the lady was
really nice and spoke English and didn’t hassle me – and I was so pleased
with my body that I hardly know what to do, except what I want to do,
which is to rush back to Paul and be appreciated the way I like.
1219
It is necessary to drink water all the time. I’m always going into these
bars and cafes and asking for nero and getting a lovely cold cold glass of
water which I drain in one long slurping gulp. And walk out into the
populous sauna to steam and truck some more.
The red – faced blonde Canadian sitting across from me here in the
telephone company black plastic chairs looks like she’s fighting off tears.
Later. It’s nice to be on a train again.
August 4
A family of pigs down in a ravine. Two sooty grownups, three pink
babies. This celestial, leafy land. Sprinklings of purple flowers on the rain –
dimmed green. A marketplace with open watermelons in the rain.
I’m reading Coffee Tea or Me, a stupid book about airline stewardesses.
7 August, Trieste
When I reach twenty, I will not be a teenybopper any more. I will have
begun that long march of years still known as adulthood.
I’m dutifully sunbathing, so that I may return from my trip properly
brown. This is super – expensive suntan oil which is spotting the page. This
morning I met a friendly blond high – voiced Italian philosophy student who
read my palm, sitting on the sea – wall inside the gates of Castello
Miramare. Troubles behind me – sexual troubles – I feel that I am
complicated. I will write – I am terribly sensitive – different – strange;
much energy. That’s what he said. He was interesting to talk to. Then I
told him I wanted to be alone, and came down to the beach up the road from
the youth hostel, where I am sunbathing. Until 6 o’clock, when I collect my
pack from the hostel and take the bus 6 k. into Trieste (I walked out here
from there yesterday, in pure gratitude for being off of the train) where I’ll
put my baggage at the station and walk around and find some spaghetti ala
cozze until my train leaves at 10:30. I’ve booked a couchette for about 3
dollars, ulp, so that I can sleep all the boring way from Trieste to Genoa.
Trieste is pretty though. … I think I’ll have to move camp; the sun has
forsaken me.
What a strange, haunted lonely town Trieste is. As if it is at the edge of
the world.
1220
9 August
Boredom is just the procrastination of love or desolation. Yes, I’m in the
mood for a good long train ride – I’m working on a letter to Mama. Oh,
book, you are my friend – at the heart of me, I am afraid.
Supposing Paul isn’t there? I had a dream last night where I lay in his
arms and sobbed, feeling all truth coming into me as I said, “oh, Paul, why
don’t you want me to stay with you forever?” And he held me and held me
and was so good and kind, and he told me a reason, I forget what it was, but
it wasn’t that he didn’t love me – I could feel that utterly. And after he had
told me and had I cried in his arms, I began to see that I agreed with him,
that he was getting older, and I would want to leave. And I felt happy and
full of love.
He will be there. I think. I think so because of the crazy phone call. I
don’t know if I’ll go back tomorrow or the next day. But I notice that it
doesn’t seem to make any sense to try to decide these things even a few
hours ahead.
I’m in the 2nd class waiting room at Genoa station.
About the couchette – it was fun. I went to sleep – there were two other
people in the compartment, could have been 5, which came as something of
a surprise to me. And when I woke up I had just time to wash face and teeth
and do a few strangled stretches even before we got to Genoa. Big funky
soul – less Genoa.
I clutch my stiff bouquet of pens. I catch myself trying, trying to plan
ahead. I’ve been up since half – past six, most of that time walking,
walking. Ugly Genoa. I’m glad I’m in this waiting – room. There’s really
noplace else in the city I’d rather be. Went to Christopher Columbus’
house, but of course it was chiuso – closed. Went to a big museum this
morning. I’m so fucking tired of all this survival… that sounds funny,
coming right after the museum. But it’s true.
15 August
hello, oh happy book, oh book butterflied with decorations, oh singing
book. It is exactly as I predicted it would be, to come back here to Paul and
St. Privat. It is wonderful. Today is rainy and cold, which is a drag in our/
Gunilla’s little stone house, but I feel beautiful, my skin is sun-colored, the
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fountain plashes happily forever, the first two days after coming back were
so, so blissful, my lord, so happy just to be where I am. And now to my
surprise I am feeling almost ready to move on again, as we must do soon, at
the end of the week.
It is lunchtime in St. Privat; the clinks of forks and knives and the
mingled voices ring out with the food – smells over the suddenly – deserted
street.
Anna and Michele arrived in the dead of night, left by a glum and
frightened Maureen and Jub (Maureen smaller than I thought, Jub more buck
– toothed than can be imagined,) to be retrieved tomorrow morning. It is
fine and natural having Anna and Michele here. We all went for a long walk
in the morning with clouds like another layered landscape hanging over us,
with Tina, Gunilla’s daughter, in her little yellow jeans, her eyelids green
with Swedish heredity, her hair pale as cornsilk. We picked blackberries by
the roadside and skipped, and always, in the midst of anything and
everything, Anna and Michele are very much themselves.
It was so nice to get back.
I am (very probably) going back to California. I feel many ways about
it.
Sunday
I like Sundays. I like other peoples’ Sunday dinners, and I like going to
the Unitarian Church when it’s around, and I like the illusion of a proper
day to rest. Not that I ever do anything which needs resting from. Sunday
morning at Paul’s brother’s house, out in the country between Moulin and
Nevers. I would not choose to live in such a place myself – I would choose
an extreme of mountain or seaside, for these endless lowlands can depress
me, make me feel that I am nowhere. But anyplace is a place, is worth
visiting, put the trust of your presence in, if there are good people there. And
they are good people here. Not like Ted and Jo.
Not like Ted, who came slithering (the perfect word; I searched and
searched for it, and finally it came to me unawares – the way his long flat
feet lift of a piece, and his long body and long nose cling reptile –like to
whatever earth or wall or house he’s near) up our dim concrete steps and
then up the step – ladder to our lamp-lit loft the night before our departure,
to ask, first half – politely, then, when that failed, with the unconvinced rage
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of a thwarted little boy, for money which he figured Paul owed him. 150
francs, he wanted.
“I haven’t got it, Ted” said Paul heavily. The air was so thick you could
have cut it with a knife, as they say. It was heavy. The way Ted had it
worked, he would have paid Paul 23 pounds for 3 weeks’ solid work.
Instead of the 35 pounds it came out to, all of which of course Paul spent on
the motorcycle even before leaving England. Paul was totally astonished.
Post – run, post chilly- sunny stretches, pre – breakfast. Paul’s brother
Michael is here, with long hair. So far I like the family. We’ll rest up today
and leave tomorrow – we’re heading for St. Briac Sur Mer, near St. Malo in
Normandy; where Valerie is staying. My plans are formulating themselves
with prehistoric burbles of mud inside me. Cheri Paul is on his way
London- wards; we part at Valerie’s. With adventure in our separate and
together hearts, and knowing we’ll be together again. Pauvre Paul, back to
debts, saying he’s sure he’ll never get his caravan together. He will, I insist
he will! And I? Plane to New York, hitch to California? Maybe.
24 August
“I will be loving you. Anytime, anywhere. Remember that, won’t
you.” He walks back to the bike which is parked ten meters up the road. He
stumbles slightly on a clump of grass. He is wearing his tweed trousers, the
ones I mended for him yesterday afternoon on the sunny veranda of the
house in the picture, (attached) the house of Valerie’s family, where we
spent the last three days. His blue jeans, the ones Gunilla so decently gave
him, are being used, I know, to wrap the big yellow mimosa – scented
candle I gave him, which Gunilla presented to me on my birthday.
We were sitting at the café in Lodeve after doing our marketing. I was
wearing my flowery patchy gypsy dress. I was loving Paul so much as he
sat across from me with his beautiful arms and his kind Paul mien. And he
me. Gunilla plopped a package in my lap – she had just come out of a shop
opposite. I couldn’t imagine what the package was – it was heavy and big
and cylindrical, wrapped in paper, and foam rubber bound by rubber bands.
I with great exclamations of wonder and delight, opened it. A yellow yellow
blobby lovely candle. We used it constantly in our little loft bedroom in
Gunilla’s house.
Paul got onto his bike. I remember the way his bottom looked as he was
walking towards it. Lean, funky, the bottoms of his trousers tousled half- in
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and half – out of his Welly boots, which are melted with holes where they
have been up against the exhaust pipe. My jeans have a square burned patch
on the inside left leg for the same reason.
It was a grueling journey from St. Privat to Paul’s brother’s house near
Nevers. We begged the sun to shine, but it did so only fleetingly, and in the
face of a biting icy wind. We had one cozy tame day with the kind
household (Annie, Mark’s wife, is really fine. Sweet. I will send her a
postcard from Mexico when I go, for she has always wanted to go there.
She refused payment for feeding us deliciously the whole time we were
there.) and then a day’s journey, not so bad, to Valerie’s family’s summer
house, the white house dominating the postcard (bought in the little village
which is within easy walking distance).
Paul and I were allowed to stay for three days in a little cottage on the
grounds. You can’t see the cottage in the picture; it’s under some trees
down on the left – hand side. It was lovely. We had it all to ourselves after
the first night. We pushed two of the beds together and slept comfortably.
And the sea! Beaches nearby. The sloping lawn to the sea – sailboats and
gulls – meals at a little secluded table (there were two such) overlooking the
sea at sunset, when the fat red globe was lowering itself into the far haze,
lighting up the stray clouds. We played Frisbee and went for walks with
Valerie and Thomas (Thomas fat and healthily tan and usually bad –
tempered.) Valerie sweet and good as always, and I no longer afraid of her
at all – she’s just Valerie. She’s not an example to me. She’s still with
James. He had just gone to Paris; he’s doing some article on North Vietnam.
The house was really amazing. It was fun. I went running around the
huge golf course right next door. We had breakfast every morning in the big
diningroom of the big house, and we loved breakfast. The tall windows let
the sun in, and the sailboats bobbed out at sea. The haze lifted from the
nearby islands; the house still threw its shadow onto the flowered lawn, dew
– wet. The long table was covered with oilcloth. On two side – tables were
a toaster with eight slits, two long loaves of crusty bread (a hunk of which I
have in my bag to augment my lunch) and a bread knife, on a board. On the
other table, an electric heating warmer with a pot of tea in a tea – cozy, and
two silver thermos jugs, one with hot coffee, one with hot milk. A big box
of Nestle’s cocoa, and stacks of enormous bowl – like white china cups on
saucers as big as plates.
On the main table, a pitcher of cold milk – a tray of glasses filled with
grapefruit juice – boxes of cornflakes – beautiful thick pottery bowls and
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plates, painted with peasant designs, flowers, trees, peasants. Silver knives
and spoons. A tray of homemade comfitures – apricot, strawberry – honey,
marmalade. Pottery bowls of brown sugar, plates of brown and white lump
sugar. A bowl of the wonderful salty delicious local butter, which, with the
bread, forms the basis of everything in that house, to my mind, and I think to
other people’s. That’s breakfast.
This morning Paul had two bowls of tea, two bowls of cornflakes with
lots of brown sugar, and six pieces of toast with butter and various jams and
honey. And juice.
All the other people at the house were strange. Very English; the sort of
English, Paul said, which makes him ashamed to be English the same way
that most Americans make me ashamed to be American. Old old ladies and
young old ladies, a young Irish father with a high voice and inverted buck
teeth, all quailing and timid at heart. Old uncle Ian who just sails all day.
The cook and maid I recognized from a photograph Valerie keeps on the
mantle above her kitchen table. A little boy with a big dog. Valerie by far
the most fey, the most alive; a bit ironic, a bit curbed in this atmosphere.
She’s gone there every summer of her life, she said.
We saw them all after supper as well, when everybody retired to the
drawing- room for coffee, and Paul and I slid in after our repast overlooking
the sea and had coffee and various liquors from the sideboard if we felt like
it and read the Herald Tribune International Edition and the magazines that
lay about and spoke in friendly tones about nothing in particular and giggled
a bit with Valerie. And it grew darker outside, and then we went down to
our little cottage to sleep.
Paul starts the motorcycle in one try and circles back and stops right
beside me, where I stand beside my dense heavy pack and my bag which
droops atop it on the long unkempt grass by the roadside. I am cheerful and
looking forward to the trip. It won’t be a difficult hitch and I have addresses
and directions for youth hostels and hotels in Paris in my bag. And again
Paul and I kiss a good good kiss and we say goodbye again (we have
already said, “ring me if you get into trouble” and “see you soon” and “it’ll
be okay” and “have a nice lunch and a nice boat journey” and “send me a
card when you get to Paris” and “write to me in Santa Fe” and “goodbye,
baby” and ‘mmm”) and then he starts up with a smile that is half pain and
love and circles back and is off up the sunny road, there’s the turnoff for
Cherbourg, where he is going to catch the 4:30 ferry (and probably run into
one of the groups of people who were at Les Essarts, Valerie’s house.)
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And within five sunny minutes I had a ride in an open jeep with two
agreeable Frenchmen who are going 130 kilometers; they are having lunch
now at a roadside café, and I am sitting in the back seat of the jeep beside
my pack writing in you and growing hungrier for my lunch.
Who knows where I’ll stay tonight! I’ll write in you then.
Saturday
Each person
is not deliberate
He is a product, a product.
People who are well beloved
Have something else.
(as in “that’s something else, man!”)
It’s late. Done writ my heart out to Paul.
Sunday
I read a book called Right On with my lovely breakfast. The book was
full of photographs and graphics concerned with student protests. The
University of California, Riverside was in the study the book was taken
from. Oh Amerika. On the metro I see American girls, some of them
beautiful, and in the windows and mirrors I fancy that I look American. And
the old “identity crisis,” which in the book Right On they said white youth
was looking into passionately, arose – am I merely an American? I know
that the moment I hit American soil I will be in a turmoil. Or, if not a
turmoil, some other state – what, I don’t know. I will be fascinated to see.
Wow, in three days. How peculiar.
I am wearing a jay feather hanging from my ear, the one I found on a
grassy pasture path near Paul’s brother’s house. I sewed it onto a silver earwire. Since there’s only one, I’m wearing the gold star in my other ear. I
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look forward heartily to my silver – and – turquoise splurge. I’ll get to
spend maybe 60 dollars! Rashly!
I have diarrhea. And there’s no decent toilet, only a doorless pissoir.
It’s morning. Michel is coming to take me to the Louvre.
Why, when I think of Brewster’s Drugstore, do I become suddenly,
briefly, almost ill with excitement? And the same when I think of older
men, some older man somewhere in America who will receive my next
ministrations of love. A real person; for I love to love somebody. And Paul
has made it (makes it) possible for me to love.
Brewster’s Drugstore. A lit – up modernized half – basement next to
Stater Bros. in a square near the Plaza. Oh America. What do you have in
store for me.
And I am excited this evening because I have enough money left after
the day to go to a real live restaurant and have a ten – franc meal, if I want.
Not no old couscous. I don’t like that pallid pile of semolina stuff.
The bakeries are closed on Sunday, says Michel, and there is not fresh
bread – though I got some this morning on rue Bretagne. – Anyway, maybe
I’ll get something with frites. Or better yet, maybe I’ll manage to get
something with crab or lobster. Though I doubt it, for 10 francs. Anyway,
something delicious, in a good cozy funky lovely restaurant down in St.
Michel. Where I am just about to walk, after I find someplace to pee I hope.
Michel just left to go back to his parents’ house. He drew this sketch of me
as he sat opposite facing me on the huge stone railing in front of the
museum. I drew a picture too, all colored and Chagall – like, which I loved,
and would have sent to Paul, but as I’d asked Michel for his picture and he
said yes, I couldn’t refuse when he asked for mine. Then I was glad I’d
given it to him – don’t be so selfish, Katy – o, thought I.
Oh book booklet oh bookie book.
Sometime I will fly back into England. Green hills, red roofs, and then
Paul.
Bon soir, book! There is nothing more wonderful than coming back to
one’s own private place at night, all cheerful after a good time, but safe
alone on one’s allowed ground again!
… Dined out on my backless t-shirt again. No strings attached. Met
(via being terribly pissed off and insulted, thinking I was being followed, on
my way to St. Michel along the Seine) a kind Sagittarius Swiss ex-patriate
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Parisian who photographs shoes for a living and has silly clothes and a kind
face and a motorbike. And after an eager friendly drink at one of the cafés
on Boulevard St. Michel, during which I decided he was nice and all right in
his way—I think he’s really quite intelligent, just has a silly job (he knows
it—shoe photographer for Bally) and also doesn’t speak English as well as I
do, nor do I speak French or German as well as he does, and sadly enough it
hinders communication of the delightful wordy sort I love – we had dinner at
a random Chinese restaurant which I thought vastly overpriced, chillily
decorated, mean of serving – size, and mediocre. But he—Robert—says that
as he drinks most of the day, beer and wine (he smelled like it) he doesn’t
get very hungry. I could never love anybody who didn’t love food. All men
will be a disappointment that way after Paul. That legendary appetite, so
satisfying to feed! And as Robert paid for the dinner, and coffees and teas
before and after, I have enough money left that I can say to myself that
tomorrow for lunch I can have anything I want! So maybe I’ll have
something I long for, like salmon mayonnaise, after all. After climbing the
Eiffel tower, disdaining elevators the first two levels, anyway.
Robert complimented me in very sweet ways on the colors of my clothes
(tan velvet trousers, red/ yellow backless t-shirt, then schneepflug, as the
evening wore on), and my face, which he said he wanted to photograph, and
he just terribly obviously likes me. I felt a smug gold – digger, getting a free
meal. Crab salad chinoise, crevettes frites, porc currie. Rose. Riz.
Uninspiring. I wish just now I had a copy of some silly Michelin guidebook
or something, to look up a really outtasight restaurant.
Robert gave me a ride around on his funny big motorcycle and home,
and didn’t maul me whatsoever, and I feel very happy, because Michel
obviously hasn’t the slightest thought in that direction, and I managed to
dispose of Arthur the seven – foot black Washingtonian without undue
discomfort to me, and everything’s okay. It would be nice if I only had to
sleep with people I really wanted to, the way I want to with Paul. But I
guess it’ll be rare to meet a Paul. And lawsy lucky me, I’ve got one already.
So tomorrow I meet Robert at the same café (how exciting! Meeting
somebody at a Paris café! The novelty! What’ll I wear?) and we’ll go to a
cinema and then have dinner. Whoopee! Today Michel came and took me
to the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, and the Museum of Modern Art. I felt a bit
pissed off because I prefer galleries alone or, more rarely, with somebody
super – simpatico, such as Paul or Mama. I got a postcard of a Van Gogh
with a caravan to send to Paul, and a Renior (Les Cliquots) to send to Mama.
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Monday
I’m in a foul, pissed – off mood. Thought I’d go up the old Awfful
Tower, didn’t I? Munny munny munny. Managed to spend 16.70 francs on
the whole thing, including lunch, and where was that gorgeous 10-franc
French cuisine? Somewhere else. Cold hotdogs and cold saltless French
fries, pitifully bolstered by a hunk of lettuce (which should have been where
lettuce belongs – in the salad. The salad was good, though.) I still haven’t
had a good meal in Paris.
The Museum of the Opera, for 50 centimes, was much more interesting
than the Museum d l’Homme at 1.50 student price. I think because it was
located in the old Opera House. Libraries of ancient books, ancient
drawings of long – dead leading ladies with their very Mona Lisa smiles.
(Yesterday I saw the Mona Lisa, gaped at on all sides by her admirers, and I
still don’t know what all the fuss is about. I think it’s a rather mediocre
painting. (Herein I go into a fantasy of myself or somebody else uncovering
this book in years to come and thinking, hmmmph! What a silly little thing!
Couldn’t see the great powerful beauty of the Mona Lisa!))
But these ladies of the Opera, in their ballet shoes and wasp – waists
and total grace, were lovely. I felt very friendly towards them. There in the
glass cases were worn – out dancing slippers of Pavlova and Nijinksy.
There was a little model of the theater, with the King’s box and all the gilt
and scrollwork on the ceiling. It was cut in half so you could view it from
both the audience’s and the actor’s viewpoint. And there was a nice toilet
there, which the old man gave me an enormous key to open the door of. I
love those huge old keys. There wasn’t any toilet paper though, which is a
pity, because I love paving the seat of a strange toilet with toilet paper, and
then sitting trustingly on it. I still have some diarrhea. It is interesting.
So I’m sitting on the second stage of the Eiffel Tower, with no desire
and no 5 francs to go to the top. I should have had bread and cheese down in
the gardens. The gardens where, however, you are not allowed to sit on the
grass, and if you sit on the chairs, little old ladies come along and charge you
money. Bread and cheese which is so cheap and ultimately more satisfying.
Will I ever learn? Some extravagances are worth it, though. Like the lovely
lot of Injun jewelry I’m going to get.
There’s a nice hot sun shining, and all of great boring ridiculous Paris
stretched out around. I don’t want to go to the top because a) it’s expensive
b) you have to wait an hour for the lift, due to the number of people and c)
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because I hate elevators and am terrified of heights. I would have walked up
even it hadn’t been cheaper.
In the Musee d L’Homme they didn’t even have any Navajo jewelry in
the AmerIndian section, though they had jewelry in all the other sections.
How I craved the various earrings from different places though!
I like to write. I love to write. It feels sweet and proper.
Every few moments I have an image of meeting Robert this evening
(why do I feel I should put inverted commas around his name?) and I must
admit I feel pleased. And I know now how this all fits in with Paul, my
sweet Paul, my only ever favorite. It just does. I am just me, I do what I
like. Our agreement, the agreement which scarcely needed to be made, is
perfect or roundabout there. (Nothing nice is perfect – the best jewels in the
anthropological museums are those painstakingly – wrought ones which are
never quite symmetrical, the beads are different sizes, the colors vary, they
are lovely. And houses slightly askance, askew, and potage with real hunks
of vegetable, and the wallpaper, old and of a silenter era, is spotted. I love
it.)
My skin is still the most celestial shade of tan. Paul promises it will last.
When I look at my knee crossed over the other one I think, “clever knee! I
didn’t know you could do that! What a beautiful knee you are after all!
Perhaps I am, after all, of this earth, a worthy chickie, a sweet thang,
desirable even unto under my undergarments, where too the sun has shone!”
People have been treating me more respectfully today. Perhaps I don’t look
such a freak. But hee hee ho I am! I am wearing my dress which I made
from the curtain, with roses on a white background and loose elbow – length
sleeves and a ribbon at the knee-length hem. Paul says it is one of my most
successful flights of fancy. I wanted very much to wear earrings, but for one
reason or another each of my pairs of earrings was defunct. So I was glad I
hadn’t thrown away the ballpoint pen which busted in my bag. I took the
spring out and , while sitting on a bench in the Champ de Mars, managed to
break off two short lengths of wire from it. I twisted one into each earring
(Drawing) of my silver hoops and put it through my ear and twisted it fast.
Yay! They work fine! More secure than the silver earwires. I wrote about
it to Paul, an incidental on the postcard of Van Gogh’s The Caravans. Les
Caravanes, I should have put. Ugh, I hate having to scribble things out. I
think I’ll make designs with the scribble. I hope I feel nice and hungry
tonight, and find a really outtasight funky little place. My god, I keep
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making mistakes in my printing! That scares me for some reason; I feel it’s
not like me.
Robert is Sagittarius and rather weak, though it doesn’t seem to bother
him, and I forgive him; I cannot forgive Arthur because Arthur pretended,
and was terrified, and struck out in nastiness, and mocked me when I told
him he was pretty. Maybe my accent has gotten English, maybe that’s what
he was mocking, I don’t know, but the next second he was gazing up at me
beseechingly, I who stood up to go over my rejected wine in Les Jardins
Tuileries, he seven feet tall, black Washingtonian musician Scorpio; and I’ll
probably never see him again because he’s not for me, though we did some
heavy soul rap. And when I walked away I got big tears in my eyes. Arthur
Robinson of Scorpio Productions. He gave me a piece of the stationery so
I’d have his address. No, it just wouldn’t work. No Scorpios.
Robert isn’t half so glamorous, though he has a very likeable face, but I
can talk to him more easily in bastard French/English than I can to Arthur in
pure American.
I don’t know how, I don’t know how to say the things I want to say, do
I sound, do I sound, do I sound like an article in a ladies’ magazine.
Now I will go and pee in the Awful Tower (probably paying again) and
the pee will go down to Les Egouts.
These people around me, walking round and round the tower, are they
ghosts? I think they are ghosts. Foggy like bathroom window – glass,
creatures against the sky, milling and talking forever and ever, and I am
tired, white page, white dress, brown script, brown leather or my wrist. I
like the taut tight feel of my hip when I bump against it under my dress. I
wonder of course if I will sleep with Roger, because it would be easier than
not doing it (he made it very easy for me not to last night, and I was bowled
over, as Mama says) and hell, why not. Don’t know. He said last night as
we had coffee in a little quiet bar “There, there is nothing about this evening
that you could not tell to your friend!”
… I’d told him some little enthusing bit about Paul. I laughed inside,
and I felt more safe. He is married; hasn’t seen his wife for a month.
…. To find the toilet. Going up the stairs was fun, anyway. People stare
at me as I write. Perhaps I am really peculiar.
Tuesday
1231
Now I’m really in a bad mood. Maybe I’m becoming a culinary snob,
or something. But after another day of tromping desperately around looking
for the right restaurant, and ending up in a plastic – wrapped place where I
had absolutely the worst omelet, allegedly au fromage, that I have ever stuck
a disgusted fork into – this one, too, bordered by fanciful ears of pale lettuce.
Dressed lettuce – a disgrace! The dressing, too vinegary of course, soaks
into the omelet. And such a tiny bitsy one! That’s why they felt they had to
put the lettuce there, I guess. Honestly! I mourned for the days of perfect
cheese omelets a la Katy or Paul or even Ted, who could make a mean
cheese omelet, even if he is a slithering breather of fear. My only
consolation for that revolting mess which called itself (in day – glo; I should
have known) an omelet, is that maybe I’ll be hungry early for dinner, and
that will fit in because I don’t want to stay out late tonight because I have to
pack.
I haven’t been writing down my dreams very faithfully as of late, and
consequently I can’t remember them very well. There was a very celestial
dreamy one about east Indians last night, where an Indian woman was
explaining passionately why expatriate Indians can never go back to take
advantage of the wealth of their families, no matter how wretchedly poor
they are. But I cannot remember the reason; I must have woken up.
My body felt so fine this morning when I woke up in Robert’s
apartment. I got up immediate, and walked about, and felt that I could feel
the sinews going from under my breasts, down and under my hipbones, into
my thighs. I felt like a strong Greek statue, rather than like something which
has a great accidental blump of stomach, like I usually feel. I caught a
glimpse of my arm in motion yesterday in a mirror; lifting the brush to my
hair perhaps, and I saw in my forearms the bones and sinews moving under
the skin; and it frightened me, for I did not know I was so beautiful. All
over it is hard. My neck is hard, and it feels hard to be inside it. My back is
hard, my thighs, my shoulders.
I am sitting in Luxembourg Gardens, which feels like where I should
have been sitting all along. People, plenty of them interesting looking, are
traversing the paths and sitting on chairs and benches. It is a typical
European Palace garden, on several levels; be – flowered and be-statued and
be – fountained, all very orderly, very conducive to strolling, and to
scattering oneself about on the lawns in a leisurely manner, if only one was
allowed. If it weren’t for that despicable omelet I would be in a good mood.
I just seem to have this good mood which doesn’t quit.
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Something in me knows that I will not see Paul again soon, so there is
no use waiting for it, so I proceed to have a good time, secure in loving and
being loved. … I try not to wonder whether he has slept with somebody else
yet either. That hurts a bit, to think about that; and as it is only a fantasy
anyway, I try to remember that it is fantasy.
I had a very good time last night. I should have written in you this
morning, when it was all fresh and wanted to be written. It’s so funny – I
had a good time just because of feeling good anyway, and liking Robert well
enough, feeling fine with him, though we can’t actually converse – well, we
can, I guess we do – but just nice and companionable, and also quite
flattered, because he has a full – page photograph of a shoe and a chick in
Vogue (I saw it) (just opened a Vogue at random on a newsstand and there it
was) and because I understood for the first time maybe why that all doesn’t
matter – because people are just people, and it’s what they can give each
other that counts – and because he says nice things and obviously digs me in
a very likeable acceptable way.
We went and saw Maude and Harold, or Harold and Maude, whichever
one it is, and it started out silly and I got a stomachache like I did in Viva La
Meurte but then it started getting very good and I forgot the stomachache
(also because of a very profound fart, I should think) and really, it was good,
and I cried big old tears in me not just for Harold and Maude, in fact hardly
for them at all, but for a kind of sweet state of love which came over me
utterly unawares, where I thought of Paul and Mama and Becka, I guess like
being in a dream; how everything felt okay, and the fact of these people
being in the world made me weep with something of sadness and joy, I
guess just with life; all these words sound so trite, oh my book my bookie
my booklet, my sweet aioli mayonnaise smile. Ever since I stopped eating
sweets, you know, I have been allowed these states as a matter of astonished
course. Because I don’t consider my doom so much, I guess.
Then, when we came out onto the sidewalk (he hugs me and I hug him,
liking it, to be warm, it is irresistible; and I feel that beneath his jacket his
waist is soft, and in a delirium of joy I think of hard delicious Paul, I have
this secret which is as big as everything, and so it is not a secret at all, but it
is; it is my secret, it gears me, I am permitted—that I love. And even now
the tears sting out all over my eyeballs; “anytime, anywhere, I’ll be loving
you.” I smile full at Robert, blind with my own gift.
When in the dark on the big white fold-out bed, with Abbey Road
playing, and the modernistic cubes and corners and fulsome sheepskins
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surround us in the dim apartment, which I know somehow must be always
dim and feel always uninhabited – the roof on the old house across the street,
where painted wooden cats stalk one another for a weather – rot of time, is
more inhabited than that apartment with its walls like gray moleskin, its
ceiling low gray moleskin, the walls irrevocably new, and the mild clutter,
that, too, new – when in this dim wine – velvet – cushioned pocket Robert
makes love to me (I having removed my sandals, admiring my legs and feet,
golden and muscled and small; removed my knickers, and then, why not, my
dress, and laid myself out in a state of full sinewy admiration for myself
(sometime in the night he said I had a beautiful body, and it was not the first
time I had heard that, no? And I laughed, no.)); and he is slow and not very
big, that prick of his which I scarcely glanced at except to remark that it was
red and maybe slightly awry, like Tony’s, and good, circumcised – and his
back is hairy and his hips not taut like my good Paul’s – and he says nothing
and he breathes more quickly but not in an eclipse of anything, any part of
himself; he is a fairly eclipsed person anyway – and he breathes more and I
am just there, me, doing what comes naturally, swimming with red winey
brain which spreads a slow pleasure in me anyway, not caring for anything,
anything – I am so joyful with love for Paul, who is hard all over, whose
prick is so glad and strong, who talks and laughs and kisses and then
explodes; ah how lovely Paul explodes, I love him when he does that, he
makes a long aaaah, his body and his prick are all brown, brown from
within, and his prick in me is strong and sure and hard and loving, and I can
feel everything of it with the half- melted folds inside me; I can feel the head
of it, where it pushes and parts me and loves. And I want it, to have it, to
feel it, completely.
Because he is so nice, and so wholesome to my flesh, and he is Paul,
who laughs with me every day.
(Some klutz dressed all in aqua has sat down next to me and is hopefully
trying to edge in. I ignore.)
Anyway. We had steak for dinner, and it was not very good, and there
was frites again, which I had for lunch, but the wine was good and the
following cheese delicious and I was happy and Robert gazed at me and
kissed my hair beside the ear and gazed at me; and once before I knew what
had happened the wine stepped in and injected me into the whirling starspace place, a white sweet time like a curling ocean wave climbed me and
unfurled me and spun me hot and dizzied and blind; and then it was past and
maybe I clutched the table for support. Wow, I said. I told Robert and he
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said “zis is the first time zis has happen to you?” and I said no, and he was a
smile on me.
I like his motorscooter; I sit on a funny high seat like an old child’s
tricycle seat behind him, and higher, and the bike bounces and jounces over
the cobbled rues. This morning he took me home (after pleasant coffee and
buns, and I had even been able to do stretches) via the place he’s working,
where he had to drop something off – the 1972 leather exposition, which
begins next week, International. A huge concrete complex of enormous
halls now, filled with signs denoting things which are not yet there. It was a
fun ride, through earlymorning Paris. I dug it hugely.
Last night on our way, my dancing way (I had to pause to execute a
backbend and a handstand on deserted streets) to the restaurant, I was
skipping scottishly and my fey toe caught in sidewalk crack and knee
twisted (even now I wince in the gut) and ever since then it’s hurt and has no
spring; I must go carefully up and down stairs, and I was unable to run this
morning, which made me curse; I tried to, and it just hurt. For walking it
seems to be serviceable enough, though it panics on crowded avenues when
the cars are advancing screechily and I must hurry or dodge.
(The aqua fellow, after breathing and sighing heavily and suggestively
for 10 minutes, finally left. Another one has taken his place. I can see from
the corner of my bored left eye that his trousers are the color I imagine the
Amazon river to be – slimy and green. He has tried saying “how do you
do,” in four languages so far.) (He leaned over and touched you, book. All
in one motion, glad to have something to spring my rage onto, I snatched it
away and gave him a full 30 seconds of the evilest eye I’ve ever given
anybody except a sibling when I was a tiny child. It was so evil it quivered.
Then I turned back and resumed writing. He said something in French and
then “I yam a goood boyy,” and laughed. Then he left.) (It’s fun, being
nasty to strangers.)
So I’m meeting Robert for dinner again tonight. Same café on St.
Michel. And I have to sew a hemlet on my pink cupid blouse, which I have
ripped the bottom off of, and made so that it ties in front; I’m wearing it with
the long skirt. A grey cloud – mass has settled over Luxembourg Gardens,
which is, as Paul would say, a nuisance.
Saturday, September 2
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Nashville, Tennessee
Postcard to Paul, depicting an artificially – colored nighttime streetcorner scene with a label saying – “crowds waiting in line to see W.S. M’s”
‘Grand Ole Opry’ which originates every Saturday night at Grand Ole Opry
House – Nashville, Tenn.”
“Christ – all – obscenity! Got the ugliest postcard I could find; subtract
the nighttime, retain the glare, blow up the sign which says LOANS 300
times, and you’ve got a streetcorner in Nashville. Oh, Paul, America is
everything I feared, and more. It is children playing with firecrackers.
Started from Knoxville this morning, though I had a feeling maybe I
shouldn’t; got a ride with a black fat FBI agent in a Mexican straw hat, who
just talked about his mother, then a pimply antique – dealer (huge cars,
always huge cars moving moving endlessly through the smog like metallic
cockroaches), and what should happen but I get really sick, pains in the gut,
dizzy, nauseous and strengthless. Was left off at a sweltering STUCKEY’S
PECAN SHOPPE where a black guy tried to pick me up in a decidedly evil
way although he knew I was sick.
“You can’t talk like that to somebody who’s sick to their stummick,
man,” I said. I couldn’t eat, begged a ride from a shy Nashville couple, a
Vietnam vet of perhaps 23, all Madras bermudas and college t-shirt and
paunch, and his sweet wife who sat demurely with legs together to one side
like a president’s daughter. They let me phone from their square apt. of
pseudocolonial phurniture oh Pablo it’s incrediable, they immediately
switched on their immaculate TV and watched wrestling.
“Ah cain’t stayund that,” said the lady, “hit’s all so fag it’s pitifiyul.”
Only she meant fake, not fag. Took me a minute to figure out. Then I
laughed inside, and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the tiny china pink
knickknack flamingoes from Florida on their pseudo – wood lamp – table.
And Catie’s friend Nancy picked me up and brought me to this shady
real old quiet lovely house and I’m staying here tonight, traveled 187 miles
today, cain’t do no more. Maybe the reluctance will have lifted by
tomorrow. I miss you so much. Love, love, Katy.
Yep, got all that on a postcard. And that’s the way it is. One ride from
JFK airport to Knoxville, where I met Catie Stone and stayed with her. Oh
Appalachia! Oh foul America! I can hardly wait to get out.
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Dairy #25
Sunday, 3 September
(Drawing)
Me worrying about hitchhiking, trying to overcome my dread, trying to
persuade myself that it is not supernatural, wondering if it’s pure selfindulgent imagined worry which is making me so low and depressed, or if it
really would be totally foolhardy of me to go out there tomorrow and try to
hitch to Santa Fe. I even rang up the local freak FM station and had them
announce my plight on the air, but with no luck so far. It’s because all the
students have already got where they’re going.
Tonight after the giggly beer and spaghetti collegiate feast in the house
opposite, after some nice dope and an intense, long worry by me into me, I
came back to this little house where I’m staying and rang Mama, thinking
that at least I’d notify her that I was coming, even if she couldn’t afford to
send me money, so that if I turned up missing, she’d know.
And she was there, she was not surprised, she was jolly and said she’d
been feeling happy all day and happier as evening approached. She’ll
telegraph the money here first thing tomorrow. Thirty – five dollars, and I
have to pay her back. Book, I feel hurt that I have to pay her back. She is
very glad that I decided not to hitch. She may be in Berkeley when I get to
California, but I want to go see Jacques first anyway.
Now that I am safe, all these new reactions come flooding in, as I knew
they would. I am not so mighty and independent after all. My long won joy
dies without its nurturers, its Parisian Roberts, its London Paul. My head
and stomach go tight when I see that my tan is vanishing. Where will be the
hard, invincible Katy home triumphant to California, liberated by love and
hard times? Will it be a stuttering, demoralized bus – rider that arrives?
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There is anyway the fact that I must hitch between New Mexico and
California. That should be quite enough.
I do not know why I am so filled with dread. I tried to let it take me, and
a mild acid – state ensued – this worry is simply worry, discomfort in the
present, due to your being unloved, my Katy dear, due to your chronic
indecision, due to your big plans, and I guess they really are big plans I’ve
got. But after I check up on California thoroughly, the only thing I’m really
going to want is to get back to England. I’ll have to send out Celeste and
the Landlord as soon as possible.
Dear Paul! My friend.
My tummy is full of spaghetti. These moments are bad moments, these.
I want to sleep and dream. I am a bit stoned.
With the promise of the money – easy now, but which must be paid back
– I think of my friends, regarding my memory easily, loosely. They are not
aware of my tension; or, if they are, they see it as mine, a phenomenon of
Katy, maybe involved in the love and interest of Katy, but nevertheless hers.
I told Mama that I intended to get Indian jewelry. She understood, she
laughed. No matter what I think of, I still firmly definitely intend to get
some, though it puts me in debt to the gunwales. Who knows when I’ll be in
Santa Fe again?
I am worried sick. I don’t know why; I just am. How will I ever earn
money to pay Mama back? I could always still change my mind and
hitchhike, after the money comes in. I am a silly chicken not to hitch. I am
hardy, I am brave. Is it the Nashville air which fills me with this great
reluctance? I want to get out of Nashville, that’s for sure. All these towns
where everybody, including the freaks, drives around in big fast cars, never
walking if they can help it. Oh, yes, sometimes they play volleyball. I hate
volleyball, cards, and dogs.
By the way… Celeste and the Landlord is right on.
I will arrive in California bejeweled and broke.
Thursday, September 7
I stooped down and picked up the packages and torn – open sugar –
envelopes of the type dispensed free at drive – ins and read them on my
walk. I read the leaves. I love the kind that are raspy on one side like a cat’s
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tongue. The air and the sun and the grass, especially and most changeably
the grass, felt wonderful on my feet, and I felt the grass on my feet in the
roof of my mouth.
I feel like I am at last re-entering the world after dark adolescence. The
tunnel, the jungle, the savage bleating sunbright pain of adolescence. I
believe in adolescence. Fuck what Rebekah says. It is a time of inevitable
and elemental hardship. I am gliding back into the world on an even keel,
with colored sails all set to show, and scores more sails, endless softwrapped rows of them, twisted like huge closed tied – up umbrellas, down in
the hold; mute as pupae; I am a sardine – can full of the sardines of them,
and I am a sardine – can with a sail, a faded Levi bluejean sail, flapping
towards California, with the wind leaking through a motorcycle – burn hole
in the lower right-hand corner of the fabric.
I don’t know why I grew up. Why I am no longer passionate about cats,
why I am so full of love for Paul, because it feels so good, and in the way
that is love, the way that doesn’t hurt, not with the gagging hurt of
adolescence. Which is instead like a buoyed sea tingle in the air which
comes to me like a swift puff – cheeked wind on the corner of a map and
bears me and blows me up – just to that point of almost departing which is at
the topmost corner of the page, but never there; it is the upward lilt which is
the treasure. And beyond the corner of the page is where I go when I forget,
and I forget so well when I am in Paul’s arms, and arising with him in the
morning to eat meusli.
Sometimes I think it is a terrible mistake not to be with him when we are
so happy and so many are languishing unloved. But for now I want to – I
must – go to California. And I love him so much that I am happy. The
week in France after I came back from my train trip and before we left will
be forever in me as a sweet sweet time, a time when a smile turns around
and makes a circle and turns into a bubble, and the colors shimmer and swim
all iridescent over it, and then the bubble breaks and you see that it broke
only because inside it was a grin, a grin getting too big for itself, a wide
open mouth happy rolling like laughing gas.
“Anytime, anywhere, I’ll be loving you.” That’s what he said.
The critic has never materialized, and never will. And I would reject
him if he did. I am glad.
------------------------------
1239
Seedy and ugly American people are without a doubt the seediest and
ugliest on this earth. I do not even feel kindly towards them.
8 September
A dream. I am on a landscape of mud. Big trucks and tractors have
been going through it, and it is rutted and banked. Rebekah looks on for the
first part of the dream. I find that I can ski on the mud without skis. I bend
my knees and turn exactly as though I were skiing, and the feeling of perfect
balance and speed control over the uneven mud is exquisite. I laugh. It is
wonderful. Look, Becka, look!
Then she isn’t there anymore. I make a turn and my feet plow into a rut
of very wet soupy mud. I try to right myself, surely my exuberance cannot
betray me? But I sink farther. The mud is forming waves now, and I see
that the trucks and bulldozers have begun to drive around and around in a
kind of evil oblivion, and it is their tires (passing closer each time) which
push the waves of mud to me. I am shoved to my knees, and then a curving
wave hits me shoulder – high.
Suddenly I see the young black construction worker in overalls who
stands immediately above me and beside me. I reach my arm desperately up
out of the mud and grab for what I know will get his attention – the bulge in
the crotch of his zip – up overalls.
“Hey!” he says silently, trying to get my hand away, but I hold on, and
the big trucks slam by closer, their tires higher than my head, and I am trying
to scream, but it is coming out a dry gag, and now the black boy is trying to
scream too, and it is as though we are of one throat, one dry gagging futile
terrified throat.
The picture suddenly narrows and I see it bordered by a white frame –
his lower half standing askew knee – deep in mud, The huge tire absorbing
most of the background, my straining arm and my hand on his crotch, and a
tiny piece of sky up in the top left corner, dotted with stars. It is as though
taken at an angle from below.
------------------------------------------The reason I wrote the dream in you and not in my dream – book is that
the dream – book is packed away in my pack. It is definitely a very good
thing to do, to write down dreams. I usually write a few sentences and then
1240
stop and stare vacantly off into space for an indefinite period of time before
writing again.
I am in the Greyhound station in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have
been waiting since just before 2; it is now almost 6, and my bus for Santa Fe
leaves at 6:30. It’s not too bad, though, since I’ve been getting enough sleep
lately. Last night I had most of a bus to myself, so I just got on the back
seat, which is as big as three seats, and curled up with my head on my bag
and my hat, and my jacket on, and slept from just past Memphis to Fort
Smith, Arkansas.
People aren’t big nonentities of symbolic threat. They are just people. I
watch them here at the bus station at quarter to six a.m.. It’s dark outside;
there is a huge plate glass window in one wall, and I can see the highway
lights, never anything but killingly ugly, shining on the rain – dark
pavement.
The thinnest lady I have ever seen just sat down opposite. Her navy –
blue polyester pantsuit bags and hangs and it looks like there is absolutely
nothing underneath but maybe an old length of floral wire, the kind that’s
wrapped in green paper. There was an old black cowboy in overalls and a
Stetson a while ago, who just stared and stared. Now a large Indian lady
with pink curlers on the ends of some of her hair sits across from me, dully
eating potato chips. I watch as people munch down food that will kill them
and make them grim. It is all there is. Potato chips, cokes, whitebread
sandwiches with a thin strip of processed pimiento cheese – spread. All
chemicals and glue. Chocolate bars to make their eyes glassy. Hostess pies
to coat their teeth.
They do not take any joy in this food. It is munched dully, as though
there were no way out. I still have in my bag two of the celestially sweet
and delicious apples I found under an apple tree in back of a gas station in a
tiny town when the bus stopped to change a flat tire this morning. The
apples were just falling down; nobody wanted them. They are red and crisp
and wild and sweet. Whosever apple tree it is probably prefers apple pie
from the supermarket, filled with cornstarch and BHT to “preserve
freshness.” How do you preserve freshness? If you sealed a baby in plastic,
he wouldn’t stay young. He wouldn’t get old either. He’d just die.
Gonna go into the other waiting room to stare at people. Had a nice
conversation with a group of young English kids. They love the U.S. and
want to stay here.
1241
Sunday- Los Angeles
The palm trees wave in the air like sea anemones on stalks waving in
polluted water.
I didn’t know people had anything resembling gaiety here! I’m on the
plaza at the top of Olvera Street in Los Angeles, California. Fucking hell,
book, here I am! Sitting, after sitting down all day; sitting in the merry dark
air and waiting for Jacques.
“Everysing happens at once,” he said. His mother and his daughter are
arriving tonight.
And I still feel like I’m just on my travels. This is another tourist street
in another desperate funky town. People are passing and sitting and
walking, strolling, jingling change, talking. Nobody is rich, but nobody is
starving. And everybody wants more.
I got one ride from Williams, Arizona to a freeway entrance in Whittier,
12 miles east of L.A., with two women, in fact! I was bowled over and
delighted. They were basically very straight – a mother and daughter – but
they treated me o.k. and bought me a taco. Then I got a ride with a vast
Chicano family in a long low metallic blue car with Janis Joplin on the radio
all the way, to here.
The Chicano chicks are dressing better than they used to. And the guys
all have long hair and soft mustaches. That’s good. One gets more out of
the Chicano chick – bodies as they go by. People trudging through torn – up
newspapers. Now that I am home, or almost home, or something, I feel like
preserving the feeling that I am on the road.
It is about 8:30. I don’t even know what kind of car Jacques is driving.
His mother and daughter are supposed to arrive in the morning about 4 a.m..
My hand which is writing has no strength in it for some reason. There is a
loud phony – touristy Mexican band playing on a grandstand in the square.
There is a couple on the next brick bench over necking. They are very
young and Chicano and extravagant and happy. I feel high in this strange
lucid cool strengthless evening air. It is not as smoggy here as it was in San
Bernardino. And therefore Riverside. Where I suppose I’ll go tomorrow.
I thought much about cars and smog today. And after my clean- air
pine – scented run by a national forest reservoir in Arizona early this
morning. People in America are cars. That is the only conclusion I can
come to.
1242
Where is Jacques, to claim his wandering freak? He said it would take a
while.
The smog is so bad – we moved into it purposely, helplessly, uglily in
our metal dead – beetle capsule – that I am in awe. I wisely refrained from
breathing for the last several hours. The smog came toward us over the
sparkling desert, it loomed against the wind – sparkling sky, it blotted out
the stray shiny clouds, it devoured and obscured the straight sand space from
which it loomed. And we moved into it purposely. The girl Donna drove
with her capable arms this machine which spun out from its anal spinnerets
the same fibers which moved forward to engulf and obscure us. We were
rendered useless, breathless, and actionless; we were our share of lethal; and
still we moved, leaned forward into the gray.
A tiny little old smiling Mexican man came and asked me what I am
writing. First I ignored him.
“Hey – whatcha writing? A story?” he said in a tiny high voice,
assuming I hadn’t heard; considering himself inoffensive, I suppose. I
thought from his voice that he was 19 years old and retarded. I nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. He was satisfied; he nodded and smiled and almost bowed,
and went away.
There is the smell of popcorn in the square. I wonder how Jacques will
park.
The neckers move by felicitously holding hands. The girl has beautiful
long hair. She is wearing a pink dress and has big knees and thighs. Big
laigs.
I let Fritzi read you yesterday in the (strange) car from Albuquerque to
Williams. The one with a huge flocked Buddha statue some off – duty
soldiers were transporting with almost hysterical care.
My muscles want moving.
Monday, 11 September
A warm golden evening in September. I can hear one cricket; it sounds
as though it is in the wall of the house. The wall of this, Jacques’ house, this
house a brown low box built snugly into the hillside and overhung with
vines. This 1930’s house, built by someone knowing, who had this retreat
into a peaceful passionate searching everyday, before there was smog, but
while most people were still straight too. This house which sits honestly,
1243
beloved by the hill. Bougainvillea at one corner, Spanish Bayonet by its
elbow, a garden out beside it, before the cliff drops away down the canyon.
This house which is so permeated with the remarkable Jacques, Jacques
whose joyful integrity cannot be glimpsed by himself; he cannot know how
fully he sets things at ease. My remarkable, incorrigible, indefatigable,
delicious Jacques. A hundred times in the last 24 hours he has smiled into
me from his round – square face and his long Prince Valiant hair; his big
bright face beaming warmth into me. He’s a good guy.
It has gotten dark. Fall must be coming, and I have not longed for it, so I
am surprised. I had thought it would always be summer. It is 8:00 o’clock,
and full dark. The cricket is chirping faster. There are stirrings sometimes in
the walls. The clock on the stand next to the bed is shifting; it sounds like a
creature rustling in a paper bag.
The walls are a dark blue. There is a collage up on the wall, with a lamp
next to it which can be turned on and shone on it. Jacques made it. It is
composed of shapes cut out of photographs, and pieces of colored paper.
There are many from the caravan, and about five of me. All long tousled
hair and a kind of innocent corrupt sensuality. I find them fascinating,
especially one of me regarding myself in the mirror (in some motel room)
and one of me leaning over my pack, a profile view; I’m wearing nothing
but the white Moroccan robe.
Jacques and his thin little Larry with her long straight blonde hair are
taking a nap on the waterbed in the living room. They got almost no sleep
last night and will get little tonight, because the plane date got mixed up and
his mother is coming tonight. Larry is very real and sober and small and
frail. Her face is beautiful. She is very tiny and thin. I feel sturdy and
curvaceous beside her. Jacques said I am thinner than when we were on the
caravan. There are lovely lines which go from my hipbones down to my fur,
like Gillian has. My skin has a good healthy tone to it all over. And it looks
like I’ll get to be in the sun a lot. Jacques wants to go to Catalina this
weekend and take me. And Larry I’m sure.
She is good. She’s Taurus. She works with him at his office. I went
there last night and saw a videotape of somebody having a primal. Because
Jacques is working with Janov now! Of The Primal Scream! He said he had
a few mindblows for me, and then told me that. And it blew my mind.
There are photographs of Janov and various students and team of his, and
Jacques in the office, all in some group thing. Jacques says Janov is very
nice, but he still has the same misgivings about his attitude.
1244
When you come into this house, it hits you with its peace. Its sunabsorbed warmth, its scents, tonight of herbs and incense and coziness. The
soft desert light through the glass wall, the low wide circles of candle
hanging from the ceiling and on the hearth.
I guess I have to give my bicycle up for lost. I talked to Ian on the phone
today, and he said he doesn’t know where Dan is, and doesn’t think Dan
knows. But if I find him I will graciously ask for it back, because I’m really
going to need it if I spend the winter in California. California, California. It
is a special place. It is at the ends of the earth, it is mad.
This Los Angeles I have seen last night and today has been celestial.
The sweet desert plants I had never noticed before; the exotic air. No smog
today. There is never so much up here in the hills and on UCLA campus. It
all blows over to Riverside.
I see it now as a place, another place on my travels, a loving home
place. Instead of a hole I am trapped in. I told Jacques that, and he said,
“you will never feel trapped again. Because now you know you can survive
in ze big world.”
He laughed and came over and hugged me. Then he stepped back and
looked into my eyes. “I do not sink I could have done zat,” he said. “You
must have been scared sometimes.”
He laughed more and rumpled my hair. My papa Jacques, Web-builder
as he wants to be known. Last night after supper I was dancing and he
pulled me down and rumpled my hair and said I was more beautiful than
ever. An electric fondness shoots back and forth between us.
Tomorrow morning I hitch to Riverside. Mama isn’t there yet, but she
will be, tomorrow night or the next.
23 September
My gosh, I haven’t written in you for a long time. Unfortunately it’s
nearby impossible to write with the boat rocking and pitching like this. It’s
Sunday morning. Mama will be going to church this morning. I see
seagulls on jagged rocks. Won’t Jacques and Larry ever wake up? I’m
hungry. I have a sniffle. It’s leftover from the cold I caught from Dan
Napier.
1245
Mother has to ask Kevin to take her to church; Othbug is off being
fixed. Poor brutalized beast. We got it in a collision. A lot has happened
since I wrote in you last.
I have been depressed for days. Full moon? Period? Collision?
Riverside? Love – hunger? Shame? All of these. And I feel like I’m not
doing anything with my life. Everything in America revolves around jobs,
rent, and cars. Even all my friends here.
And Paul has written, saying we might be able to go to the Orkneys in
February. Mike Rambridge might want him to work on old houses there.
And god almighty how I love the idea. And the British Consul says I must
have lots of money to get back into England.
It’s a chilly morning off Santa Catalina Island. There is a thin layer of
clouds covering the sun. I feel lonely and sad. And a little sick at my
stomach. There is a sound of clinking metal from the boats moored in the
harbor which sounds forever and ever like forks clinking on china – endless
meals carrying across the water.
I should have known I shouldn’t have gotten up so early. They always
sleep unbelievably long.
Monday, 25 September, 1972
I have been fretting in my mind about writing in you for days and days.
I have been wandering about, an empty shell of myself, never quite daring or
bothering to sit myself down and turn my warm faucet on all over your
page. I almost don’t know who you are anymore, my booklet, my book – I
write to you as to a lover, a real lover, not like the incidental shrugs of male
trophies I’ve been decorating myself with lately.
You are all I have right now. It is the first day of classes at UCLA, and
all around me, people are buckling down to their studied activity. The huge
prefabricated maze of UCLA rumbles and continues. I am idle and restless.
I do not want to go to school, for credits and all that; but I do want to work
and earn some money and be into lively things with good people, and dress
up and have lovers and not worry about whether it’s safe to walk on the
streets at night, or that I should get a driver’s license. Everybody says I
should. Mike James gave me one lesson, and I did well. But after the
collision, I see starkly just how vulnerable we all are. And I’m scared. I
will never forget the sickening crunch. So much can be destroyed in a few
short man – made seconds.
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And because we are poor, we will perhaps be made poorer. Because
Mama didn’t have insurance, the other guy’s smart insurance man will try to
screw us out of everything, even things we don’t have, just to make more
profit for his company. Mama is appealing to Legal Aid Society today. We
wanted to move up north on the 6th, and she has a citation – failure to yield
right – of – way- which says she must pay bail or appear in court on October
11. I’ll call her today from Jacques’ office and find out what went on. As
Mike James was driving off with me to take me to Marina del Rey and
Jacques’ sailboat, Mama called – “how do you like that! My daughter goes
off yachting, and I go down to the food-stamp office!” She was laughing and
waving. We had just taken some happy snaps; as Paul calls them; Kevin
(plump Kevin) took them with his little camera whilst cuddling Sean. Fat
Sean, whom Kevin resembles more every day.
We have some characteristics of the happy family. It’s true. And mostly
through Mama’s love.
All the air feels right now the way the insides of my cheeks feel
sometimes when I chew on them. Sort of succulent and sharp amid the
dazedness. I am blinking and silly. I do not like the modern design of the
Arr Library where I am sitting.
I knew I needed to write in you. I think constantly about writing stories,
about how I must get Celeste and the Landlord together soon (I am
convinced it is right. I love it. Mama gave a suggestion as to how Celeste’s
transplant into Humus’ home could be made more plausible – the parents
farmed out the kids to different homes when they went on a long trip, from
which they never returned. Humus’s wife was still alive, and when she died,
Celeste stayed on and the carnal relationship happened); when that is done
and sent out maybe I can think of writing more. I know it is all inside me.
And when I have written about the Date Street House enough, maybe
my need to write about it will vanish, and I can get into more pure fiction,
which will be more fun and less dangerous in the long run. It is just that
right now I have this horrible feeling of obligation and duty where writing is
concerned, because I am otherwise so idle. And, since I’ve felt so subdued
and depressed the last week, I can’t give myself the excuse that I am
spreading joy and energy, that I am a worthwhile little sex object, if nothing
else.
I do not know if Dan Napier liked our lovemaking or not. If he’ll want
to come back. Perhaps I, in my smooth protected vigor, said fatuous things.
1247
There is a free film showing exactly now in the next building, but I think
I have already seen it, and I am into writing in you. These days I am feeling
perpetually sleepy. Oh book, oh book, I am somewhat wretched and sad,
and I suspect I am much more so, beneath the surface. I am not fighting it
except for the obsession, which I always fight, for it scares me, unmans me,
and ties my head up in knots so much. It makes me terrified of my mama,
my friends, and my potential friends.
It is later. My hands feel loose and better. Yes, soon I must do
something, anything, something big. I like me now; and I am tired of just
sitting around writing about me. I ran three miles today; it must have been
because of the raw tuna, raw clam, and the steak I had last night. We got
into Redondo Beach just as night fell. We had the raw fish (yum!) on board
the Majarajah, and then went with this peculiar couple who have a huge
sailing – boat and who were moored near us at Catalina, and next to us at
Redondo, to an incredible steak house. Jacques and Larry have been there
often. The bartenders wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and papier – mache
surfers cavort under sinister lighting against a brown wall where a sculpted
pale – blue wave curls. It all spoke hugely of money and a sort of naïve bad
taste. I loved it. But I ate too much, which made me feel bad. My god, the
steaks! So thick it’s like a huge ball of meat. I would have been much
happier with one 1/5 as thick and twice as cooked. Criminal to throw any
away, but not good to eat it all either. I should have asked for a doggy bag.
And baked potato – I now know definitely that I don’t approve of sour
cream on baked potato. It should be soaked with butter, salted and
peppered, and that’s all.
I’m wearing jeans and leather and velvet and silver and turquoise.
Dan Napier had a cold, which he gave me, but he was delicious and he
really has a big prick. I hope we make it again. He went to sleep afterward
on the couch and when he woke up, Mama had come back from the
foodstamp place and she cried on my shoulder while we stood with our arms
around each other in the hallway – which – is – also – the bathroom. She
was scared and lonely and blue – broke, and the collision, and no place to
live up north, and she couldn’t get foodstamps. She felt bad because she felt
she was asking me to be her mother.
She wanted to go back out into the orange grove, to a certain spot where
she and Jack had sat and been “so close,” the last time he was there. It had
been ploughed up though, so we sat on the hot ploughed dirt, all lumpy and
soft, and my feet were brown and hers were pale. By that time my nose was
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running and I was having to blow it all the time, so I took off my white tshirt to blow it on. The orange grove is big and nobody can see in so it
doesn’t matter.
Mama cried some and I checked inside myself and found that I felt
utterly at home and easy with her and her tears. She’s my mama, and she’s a
lady too, and she’s a person who is tuned into, and acts upon, her feelings
much more than most people. She’s groovy. After a few minutes she forgot
about crying, because she was talking about something which made her
laugh. So we talked for a while, she told me about these diverticulitis pains
she gets in her gut, and how her mother had it, and in the end they fixed her
up with one of those horrible bags to be filled with shit from a hole in her
side, just to keep her alive, and Mama said to remember that if they ever
wanted to do that to her, to not let them-- she’d much, much prefer to die.
So I’ll remember.
After while it was going to be lunchtime, so we went in the house again
(airy, good – vibe little house, whose kitchen I cleaned so thoroughly, and
who is so full of colors!) And Dan had awoken when Mama was first
crying, but he must have gone back to sleep again; he was a large square
hulk under the crocheted spread. After while he woke up again.
He sat up, shaking his great head and hair and beard. I went over and
stroked his head, and I detected some resistance. I accused him of giving me
his cold, and he denied that it could be done in five minutes. I had promised
to trim his hair, so I set up a chair on some newspapers in the middle of the
floor, and I trimmed his hair and his beard. Mother went out of the house to
check the mail and Dan turned and looked up at me with those intense
staring eyes and kissed me, and I kissed his shoulder and his neck. When his
hair was done he left; Mama and I had expected that he would invite himself
to lunch, and we were pleased when he left. He had to go see about some
custody hassle with his children. He always looks disturbed nowadays.
He said my bike had been stolen from the Mission Inn. I am sad. I am
very sad. Poor old Zelle Red – Indian. I could be using her so well, now
and up north. Mama and I plan to go stay on the houseboat. We don’t yet
know where Ian will go. The boat’s not big enough for all three of us plus
Ian’s seven cardboard cartons of comic books. Trouble is, the houseboat is
up for sale, Mama owes $200 berth rent, and apartments are virtually
impossible to find. What we’d love, of course, is a nice funky old house…
and I’ll find a bicycle up there somehow. Or learn to drive.
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Oh, book. Fall. Autumn is here. I had not anticipated it. It gets dark
much earlier, which I sort of like, and the evenings are cool. But it makes
me miss Paul the more. I am glad we are moving up north – I want to move
again. I want to go out of southern California, which has only Jacques and
warm skies to recommend it, and into Northern California, which will be
like traveling, like being uprooted, and where it will be so much more
possible to find kindred souls, and people we can mate with, Mama and I.
We promise each other that.
I want to set up housekeeping for the winter, and make trips to Canada
and the Saline Valley (to see the world of the papa who bought me a
Mexican dinner last Wednesday and talked nonstop about Saline Valley and
said tender words to me, but is still not there, will never be there, for me)
and invite friends home and have candles and good times and I hope a work
to do.
I just talked to Mama on the phone in Jacques’ office. She finally got
foodstamps. And another letter from Paul awaits me.
29 September
I’m sitting edgily waiting to be picked up to go to a party at Tony and
Sarah Gerard’s house. I keep wondering if I should wear clogs or sandals.
I’m wearing the incredible black leather pants Larry gave me. I feel like
drinking wine tonight. I read an article called “the Double Standard of
Ageing” in the Saturday Review. It was written by Susan Sontag. It’s
fantastically right – on. She says the things we all knew vaguely and
unformulatedly about the way women are oppressed.
Today I wrote a final explanatory chapter for Celeste, explaining how
she came to live at Humus’ house. I love it. Now all I have to do is work on
a few words and phrases, type it, and try like hell to figure out where to send
it. Maybe I’ll read some aloud in poetry houses in Berkeley if I find any.
Paul writes that he got all his hair cut off. He said it feels like moleskin.
I have a learner’s permit now, and I drove and drove today up to Late
Matthews through the smoggy orange groves and hills with Mike. He says I
do incredibly well.
The trip with Stanley from UCLA, dark curly Jewish guy, was fine.
Two days of Santa Barbara nude beaches, with an overnight stopover with
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nudist friends of his. (He wanted, but I did not.We took a lot of pictures,
which was fun.))
30 September, 1972, Saturday
A preternaturally hot day. The sky directly above is clear, but smog
erases the horizon hills. “Witchy woman” is on, a song I love and ooh
identify with. A tree with large long leaves is waving in the orange grove
behind the house. A sweetness pulls down through my body like a Venetian
blind. There is a humming and tingling in my gums which I now suspect is
an infection, for when I eat corn on the cob the cob comes away bloody, and
my gums feel tender and a bit choice and sorry for themselves. I’m sitting in
the neat colorfilled soft – lighted little kitchen, on a kitchen chair, with my
bare legs propped up on the table. It feels pretty good to be me right now.
Sort of witchy. My wooden bowl from years ago (where did I get it first?)
is sitting in the window corner of the table on a woven Indian mat, and is
comfortably full of the epitomes of red apples, red and golden plums, and
taut curved yellow bananas.
It was a good party; an adequate party. A very Riverside party. I didn’t
drink much because all the drinks were so foul – like Gallo port. Ugh! And
bad beer. I smoked a lot of dope though. And danced, happily, mainly with
a nice cancerian guy with a beard and a short upper lip (or maybe just a long
nose.) I wanted to see his body unclothed; it looked inviting. Thin and
hereditarily good and graceful. His name was Joe, and it happened that we
ended up sitting on the couch (crammed in with four other drunk grinning
half – folded Riversidians, watching whatever show or non – show was
taking place in the middle of the livingroom floor, to J. Giles’ Band or old
Beatles) playing hand games and kissing sometimes and rubbing our legs
together a lot, and he was graceful at all that too. It was funny, he didn’t
invite me home, he didn’t get my phone number, but plainly he wants to see
me again. He’s a dope dealer; maybe that has something to do with it.
Letter from Paul this hot Saturday. Oh Paul. My friend with whom no
strain applies. He said he and I should maybe get married. It’s funny – I am
delighted he said it, but it confirms even more that it is impossible and
wrong. I would rather have my fate be my own, however, than to marry it
with anybody else’s. I will write him of this quickly… . The Orkneys is at
this point still a dream in Mike Rambridge’s mind and pocket. It’s a bit
funny and unnatural to have letters from Paul so quick and accessible – like
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jet travel, it deludes one that the earth is small and distances are short.
They’re not. You always have to recover from them.
Maybe I wanted proof that Paul wants me. Yet in any calmness I have
only to remember, and to read his letters straight, to know how easy things
really are. It is a temptation to read my insecurity into them sometimes.
It hurts me to see Mama unclothed. Her one breast is still beautiful.
Today I feel a great pregnant squish of writing inside me, wanting to be
squeezed voluptuously out. … You know, it’s not entertaining to read my
old journals. It brings it all too close. With no surprise.
… Mama finds that she can get free legal advice from the AAA. Good.
Food stamps are fun. Mama got $64 worth, and we’ve been going
hogwild.
I really need to thrash and twitch and drool and scream for a long time,
and then maybe I’d be a flowing large entity.
4 October
ick, what a gicky day. What an ickygicky repulsive day. I feel horble.
Mike didn’t show up to give me my driving lesson, and I had to hitchhike
home. From UCR. UCR sucks. I hate dreary old nowhere Riverside. Jim
(speedy, neurotic, impervious Jim) lent me a Herman Hesse book called
Knulp, so maybe I can lose myself in it. Also my poor little womb, of which
I dreamed last night, is feeling weird. Oh speech which deteriorates so
readily into southern Californianisms! Oh body which in its tensions leads
me to long for elsewhere!
I walk up dusty smoggy Victoria Avenue, where the deep greens of the
abundant hedges and eucalypti are somehow robbed of their truth by the
smog. I sense two highschoolkid delinquent probably Chicano shapes off to
the right across a leafy divider, overhung by a magnolia tree. One seems
very fat.
“’ey! Gotta cigarette?” one calls.
“Nope!” I say. I don’t know why I reply at all.
“Want one?” they call.
“Nope!” I say.
“What school ya go to?” they call. I walk on.
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“I don’t!” I say. I walk on.
“Don’t be stuck u – up!” they sneer.
Postcard to Paul.
Dear Paul. Impossible to convey the huge suppression quality of this
landscape. Money from Glen frighteningly overdue. I am in the Akin
family. I am becoming silent and grim; even friends do not cheer me, for
I’m scared of how I need them. And Riverside is as empty as a junkie’s
eyes. Jim C. is driving us up north in his van. His endless boasting
imperviousness depresses me. People are again and again incapable of
carrying out plans. Everybody complains all the time. There are
earthquakes every day. It is not a nice place, a faraway romantic place like
people over there might see it, and like I was tempted to see it when I was
(how strange, even now, that it is a ‘was’) there. I am more terrified of
Riverside than of any other place on earth. Best address to write to your
whining friend is probably c/o Phil Dauber – 2301 Ward Street, Berkeley,
California. 94705. I’ll ring him immediately we arrive, which should be the
7th. Writing this makes me feel better already. I feel so responsible for the
family. It’s inevitable. Car still out of commission. (I feel like you walking
barefoot through the French bramples.) Apologies and kisses, Katy.
9 October, 1972
She’s a bright and shiny lady, my mother is. We greet each other well.
We are looking for a house in which to hang our curtains and skip through
the living room on the way to the kitchen and to look at a view. It is
Berkeley; we will live here or San Francisco. I am thinking about my
brother Huck.
13 October, Berkeley
dear book, I am so tired, and my head aches, and my fingers smell of
cunt and onions. Thank god, Mama and Sandy have gone to the
laundromat, and I am left alone for a time. 2707 Fulton Street. People have
put music on downstairs. It is raining; I can hear it drumming on the roofs,
but the sun makes evening glare through Sandy’s rose – colored curtains.
It’s been a harrowing day. Driving through Oakland traffic in Sandy’s
fucked – up old gray station wagon with Mother and Sandy both being
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unbelievably stupid about everything, and my stomach turning
uncontrollably into a pirate’s head with gritted teeth and onion breath inside
me, looking for a potential apartment which we never found.
Oh, how nice it will be to have our own place! When I close my eyes I
see houses, houses, houses. I hate hustling and needing. I want to be secure
in our own place.
Starting tonight, Mama and I will be crashing at Beverly and Igor’s place
in Oakland. They have more room than there is here, and what with
plumbing difficulties and all of our screeching, this place is getting awfully
crowded. We never know from night to night what floor we’ll sleep on, or
how late we’ll have to stay up to find a floor at all.
I’m sure we’ll find a place soon. We must. But until then, it’s an almost
Akin – family style hassle.
Maybe while I’m taking the Moorehouse course this weekend Mama
will find someplace. Steve Obershaw might help her – he’s around the area.
And oh, how I want a good, decent place! A permanent home.
We’ll find a place, we’ll find a place. And, you see, it’s almost certain
that Mama has a job… in San Francisco. 2½ days a week. And Jacques told
me of a place he said I “should work” at. Oh, to have my own room, desk,
kitchen, companions, lovers, silence, driving, job. And I’ve got a savings
account (though not my own yet; I had to open it jointly with Mother
because I don’t have a social security number yet) for my next traveling
dream. And house – hunting is hard work. And fruitless, until it is suddenly
rewarded. I’ve been working the past two days at Moorehouse in Oakland,
working off the $45 fee of the Basic Sensuality course I’m taking this
weekend.
I’m alternately resting and writing.
I hate to have to tell people “I’m a writer.”
I keep falling asleep. Today has been exhausting.
It’ll be good to see Beverly. And she and we have a custom of trading
hospitality. I could stay with Philip, but he’d want to sleep with me.
Last night I went to Sandy’s womens’ group with her. I held forth on
the subject of Europe and my obsession and fat for a long time. It felt good
to talk.
I think I hear the scraping gulching gears of Sandy’s old car.
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My own life. My own life. My own private very life.
16 October
Only three – thirty.
Gray sky over Oakland.
A paralysis of moonbeams, disguised by daylight
Has led me mad.
I am sweet with vengeance
For the death of afternoon.
Something has swindled me
Out of space
Braying between the ladder – rungs
Where I cannot catch the noise
When it cages my feet like a sin.
Something has swung my journey
wide of its forgotten mark.
Wide of its time
Retreat.
The hugging, the embracing wait
Like little hands
Patting and patting under the skin
Little heart-beads and nods
Blinking in soft black innocence
Of my blood
1255
Of space
Shining from me dilated and black of breath
Obey
Obey.
Our house is hanging in the balance. It is up to us to convince the crazy
landlady that we should live there. We are utterly sure ourselves, so we
cannot fail. And if we are afraid, we make that fear into loving
consolidation toward our human goal. This one, this goal of house and hole
and place to go.
Of my attic with its ferns and rafters and its floor which I will sweep
and polish and mend, and my worktable and shelves and desk for the
stacking, arraying and displaying of my toys and tools. And the closet I will
make under the eaves with a rod of wood to hang my bright soft sculptured
clothes upon. And the plants Beverly has promised to give me, to put on the
sideways packing – crates to drink of the daylight which comes through the
window, and the two steps up to my room, and the address which I have
already given to Paul as mine. My attic, my attic, where I will make a bed
and cover it with a bright print and people it with good people to lie on it
with, the first time heart beating, and then more easily.
And the bathroom with the shower I shall re-tile, and the kitchen where
I will put my plates and pans; a house to come home to, to bring my friends
and the adventures I meet along the way in the San Francisco I will walk out
into and meet and be astounded by; the life I will meet. My loft where I will
hide like a ferret underground, and go out to yoga, and have friends.
And Mother’s tiny room across the hall, which she wants to build with
Japanese simplicity; she has a view of fir trees and garden and city and then
a narrow strip of Bay before the sky begins. Her Japanese lantern, the ship –
hatch, Becka’s Chinese chest.
21 October
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Letter to Richard on a dark Oakland night, when Beverly and Igor and
Steve Obershaw sit watching a cops and robbers movie on the box. They
seem to be hugely enjoying it.
Richard, mon cher –
I was waiting to write to you (o sweet indulgence with pen and hands
and blankness and tabletop) until we got a place to live (so seldom do I find
myself living in these temporary places in which I find myself. Do I fool
myself, that the elixir will meet me more completely, in a place called
permanent?). But it will be some days, and your telephone call, which made
me so happy when I arrived ten minutes after it had departed, makes it
irresistible to scribble at least a note as a sort of kiss on the cheek and etc.;
Steve Obershaw, a young ex – Riversider and house – sharer from the
beans and sunshine, apple trees and mad landlord Fortuna days is going to
share rent and space with us, and we are glad. The place on Potrero Hill fell
through. Today we drove quite happily all over San Francisco and we have
several encouragements. We’re at Beverly and Igor’s potted – ferns blue
windowsills old wicker daybed which belonged to Jack London’s daughter
Indian feast at midnight on the floor apartment in quiet Oakland. Beverly is
doing excellently well at being Beverly; definitely. You ring through the air
on fond excited waves.
Tomorrow, more house – hunting. I’ll write again when we get settled.
Due to a double submission (sounds sexual, don’t it?) two places
accepted the same poem. Quandary! I accepted the most prestigious one,
and wrote embarrassedly to the other.
Don’t stop wishing us luck.
I am presently recovering (or have the illusion of recovering) from a
bout of flu, action starvation, and wildcats in the brain. Mama says hi, see
you in San Francisco. The last three days have produced six pumpkin pies
(one with ginger and meringue) in this household. It won’t be long yeah
before you can pay a visit to breathe this inebriating fog. Love, Katy.
22 October
I’m suffering from the absence of a dream – book. I awake in the
morning with this old touch – wealth of true experience tipping me like a
scales. I dreamed of freaks and tough Chicanos who inhabited a small
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nowhere town and derived their energy from exposing their bodies to
passersby on the highway. A bit further on four prostitutes strutted sullenly,
half undressed, and I commented to my companion that they looked as
though they had flown a burning house and had not had time to hook up
their clothes.
I call up Paul on the telephone, and it keeps being busy. Then he
answers, but I am holding the phone away from my ear so as not to get the
full impact of the ringing. And when I suddenly realize he’s answered, I put
the phone back to my ear and he says where were you? And there is playful
seriousness in him, and I dash out of the Date Street House to run the few
blocks to his house, and the Date Street lawn is full of dogshit. I get to
Paul’s house and I am sitting on his lap and deriving immense comfort, the
kind that is a confusion of thirst and bliss, and we are rocking together back
and forth, and I am thinking, “this is how I used to feel when I sat on my
daddy’s lap.”
He has to go away somewhere, but he’s going to come back; we’re at his
flat. Doris appears with some of my old junior high school acquaintances.
Doris’ hair is all ratted up into a 1950’s bouffant style, but I admire it. I ask
her if she’s seen Paul yet since she returned; I am thinking that David turned
into Paul, and has thus changed dramatically. “No,” she says, “not yet.”
And I look forward to having Paul see her, for I know he likes her. A lot of
people are running up to the jungly waterside to see the boats. A huge boat
goes by, hauled by a trailer. It is a patchy old pirate boat. Let’s go, we say,
and run through oaky paths to the rotted dock, and are informed that a boat
has just sunk, so we leave and run back to Paul’s.
Somewhere along the way I am coming through a forest path when I
meet Larri, and she is very brown, with long pale hair, and we embrace
lovingly and I ask her how it was in Catalina, (because you should ask
people about themselves) and she says beautiful, and demands playfully that
I go along next time to cook. She runs off and I meet a beautiful red –
haired fellow – whom I’ve seen twice before, and his hair is in a loose
ponytail, he gazes at me fondly and searchingly and we step towards each
other and kiss and kiss a delightful ecstatic melding of lips. Mmm. We hold
hands, and I am proud to have Larri see him, for he looks good.
In our new house, me and Mama and Steve, we have crunchy red apples
in a big box, and Steve is going to have big gay parties, which will be fun.
-------------------------------------
1258
It is early morning. It is foggy; the housetops across the street are blue
distant mountains. Mama sits crosslegged in the Moroccan colored nightdress reading the Sunday Chronicle. Steve will come in an hour or so to
take us to San Francisco for more house – hunting. Mama drinks the last of
her tea with a small gulp, and goes to the kitchen to fetch more. Before I can
have tea I must do my stretches (o heavy weight until I’ve done them) and
then I’ll have tea and meusli.
I am afraid that Steve’s dividing line between squalor and funk is lower
than mine. Too much order and clean class depresses me. I like a lot of
handmade original funk.
23 October
Tomorrow it will be exactly two months since Paul and I left each other
to fend for ourselves on that roadside in France. Our hearts still ache after
each other.
Last night I dreamed much. I dreamed of houses. That Huck should
share rent with us on this beautiful place we saw which is $275. But that is
impossible; he is always broke. And Kai and Aleshanee would be there too
much. In the dream I suggested it to Mother, and she said “why didn’t I
think of that?”
A dream where Paul drives his motorcycle away from his parents, out
the door of their house, pissed off, and I whine from my crouch by the door
“will you take me for a ride?” and he says no.
------------------------------------------Discouraged house hunters inc.
25 October
We got a house, we got a house! 3rd floor, Potrero Hill, view, 3 bedrooms! Balcony! Scungy and dirty and filthy and needs all kinds of
painting! Needs all kinds of tables and thick wooden counters and beds!
$215 a month, first week free because we’re painting it!
28 October
In my room, in my room. Tomorrow I will begin the painting. Walls
womb – red, trim brown – sand, floor seal – brown, closet regal yellow. Just
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now the walls are landlord green. There are two closets in my room; I’ll
take their doors off, take the doorknobs off the doors, and use the doors to
make a platform to put my bed on. Mother and Steve are really perfect
working – companions.
Last night me, Steve, Beverly and Igor went to a Halloween party in the
Berkeley hills at a big old fabulous house. There was acid punch, of which I
had a few sips, to fairly strong effect. There were tons of people in
costumes and some not. Everybody smashed and wandering. I was dressed
totally extravagantly – dark red high – heel shoes, brown socks, black
leather pants, the bright knit striped shoulderless shirt Beverly made for me
(which kept slipping off my breasts) and there was silver glitter on my
nipples, which all wore off, leaving shards of glue to John’s mouth. A
fabulous collar of guinea feathers belonging to Beverly, and the brown
velvet / straw hat with gold velvet flowers and the red bird on it. Tons of
colored eye – goop. One stupid guy kept telling me I had fangs. (Drawing)
About 1 a.m. I decided suddenly that I like John best (out of the sullen
shave- headed Marcel Marceau, the Chicano wearing nothing but black
tights covered with balloons, the thin – lipped fellow named Steve who was
nice but too pushy, a tall dark – haired writer – on – evolution who got
terribly hurt when I went to pee and stayed an hour smoking more dope with
Igor etc. in an upstairs room, and wouldn’t speak to me anymore except to
say “that was an awfully long pee!”) and I felt full of doubt; how fucked up
am I? Who would I choose if I weren’t? Why did I choose who I did?
Foxy John, pale and tall and trendy and not fatuous like the others; the
things he said were choice and not evil. We wanted each other, and
immediately. All the bedrooms were very occupied. Finally we resorted to
the graveled roof. It was dewy and cold. We got a cushion. It was
tantalizing, like ¼ of the bed we longed for. Every once in a while
somebody would open the screen from the bedroom and step out and say,
“are they?” “Yeah, they really are!” He had a huge gentle healthy prick.
Our genitals liked each other. It was fun. We made love for a long cold
time. It was fun.
Much later, when I discovered that Beverly and Steve and Igor had
split, we got a ride with a little short guy who said that his karma this life
was to be into service, doing things for people. We left John off on College
Ave. where he went to crawl back into bed with his jealous old lady.
“She’s sweet, but she just doesn’t excite me.”
1260
Said he’d see me in a week. “Good,” I said. I remember him with
positive excitement. And apprehension, which I try to dispel – what will he
think of me, for living with two such straight – looking people as Mama and
Steve? (My god. Of course, I never saw him again, either. ’02)
This neighborhood is funky and fine. San Francisco is a magic place, an
it place. It’s here, now, exciting and possible and old.
3 November
Dear book! An exciting new time. (But how jealous I am of Rebekah
on her way to Kabul!)
Here is my room. A big tall room of pale – green; I will paint it Chinese
red (like the inside of a womb, Chinese or otherwise.) A wooden crocheted
blanket hangs heavy bright squares at the door – high window. My two
closets, the only things painted, are regal yellow like eggyolks. Steve has
planted me a plant, a coleus, sitting on an upright orange crate; I love it. I
have a funny old chair I made out of some funny box. My chest, full of my
uncloseted clothes, is open beside the bed. A rug I dyed red is on the brown
floor. Oh, I can’t wait to paint this room. My lovely tall shoes sit in the
closet.
I feel beautiful. I am in green knit and black leather. The red paper bird
on my hat is up on the closet-shelf.
My newly –typed final section of Celeste is by the bed. Oh, I must get
that all together more. My volumes and volumes of writings and letters!
Book, this good – spilling energy invades me from you. It is this same
feeling of some force spilling out of my body forward onto the page.
I am in love, I am many times in love. (I call out – “Mother?” to ask her
that maybe if Huck stays here for a week he could pay a bit of rent and help
us out. She doesn’t hear. My own voice echoing in my body singles me out
as a separate presence in this room which I belong as--)
I am loving in green knit and extravagant zip (of my leather trousers)
and all the horniness of an inorgasmic night of fucking. I am loving
Nicholas who has such hair, such hair. It thicks black and tousled down the
back and sides and front of him before it stops. It shakes back from his face
so beautifully. We cuddled much and liked each other and I relaxed, relaxed
so as not to get hung up on my non-orgasm. He went down on me forever,
but I wished too hard to come.
1261
He lives in the artists’ Goodman building in two tiny rooms full of
easels and big flesh bodies painted on the floor and clothes hung about,
some of his sometimes- old – lady. Taurus he is, and formerly of the
celebrated Cockettes (and I feeling jobless, worthless!) and quiet, and we
met yesterday on the far side of the street from White Front, when an old
grinning man whom I asked for a quarter for 2 dimes and a nickel, wouldn’t
give it to me without a lot of bullshit about how he’d give me $20 for a little
piece of tail, that wouldn’t hurt me none, would it?
If he’d been young and not so grinning, I might have accepted. He’s
probably the Chronicle Question Man in disguise. So then this fellow is
going across the street and we look at each other, I see this navy – blue and
so much hair, and I cry “rescue me!” and he comes gladly and changes my
coins for the bus but suddenly it’s a much better idea, the only right idea, to
say “where are you going?”
“I’m going over to Berkeley to write copy for KPFA. Do you want to
come?”
“I gotta be somewhere at 5, but do you have to be there right… now?”
“No”
“Let’s go sit in the park.”
“Ok.”
So we go up the concrete stairs to flat green Benjamin Franklin Square
where all the surrounding people lived in 1906 when the earthquake and fire
crumbled their houses; a big mural of which is in the Rincon Annex post
office, to be seen at any hour of the day or night.
“I like you”
“I like you”
much kissing in sunnyglinted black hair thick all over
there should never be anything but long hair, I loved all the splitends of
it and everything falling in our face and shoulders.
“Will you come to supper at our house then?”
“I’d love to”
“If you don’t want your apple I’ll take it and incorporate it into the
supper; go to Safeway to buy it some brothers and cousins to share in a
similar fate,”
1262
“Fabulous”
“I think we ought to sleep together,”
“Yes, but now or later?”
“We can stay at your house tonight after supper, Steve will drop us off
because we’re driving down to the all-night post office anyway to mail our
absentee ballots because we’re voting tonight,”
“Fabulous”
2nd generation Italian, pleased that I liked Italy. All as planned; I did
split – pea – and – sausage casserole, Spanish rice, salsa, tomato salad, apple
crisp. It puzzled me that he said nothing about the food; probably he’s no
foodfreak.
“1217 Geary, okay, I’ll tell you when we get our phone, it will be a few
days.”
“I have a phone number too.”
“Good.”
“Mmm”
“mmm”
“See ya later” (schlaff gut!)
Out into the 9a.m. rain, the San Francisco settled – in rain which tips me
off that love is rain outside and a diary to spill into so hard it’s almost
work, and the sweet reek of possibilities-- jobs! Jobs! I want! And future
cooking for lovers and sweet sleep and a good healthy wank maybe tonight
to soothe me out-And meeting the mama in an 11th floor penthouse Montgomery Street
office for employment agency, on and on the jobhunting goes, in stores and
out, in agencies and out, up and down of spirits.
And in love I am with Art, Art who gave me $20 the other day, Art who
is Sagittarius and who gives me a ride home today (I rested up on his
cushiony, high – dark shelf with him and Dan O’Neill who drank coffee, and
later when Dan O’Neill went down Art leaned over and kissed me and I was
happy, and later he said,
“you sure kiss nice!”
and I grin like a fool and he says
1263
“you’re not blushing again”
I say, “I dunno, man!” and he comes up and has tea and he and Mama
and I have a long conversation about fuck movies and I give him a gold
earring and am ridiculously in love with him, something cozy and personal
occurs with us. Oh yummy.
And through it all I am delighted in love with Paul who did much, much
to give me all this. Oh much. My Pablo. Whose wonderful me- seeking
right – on letter came the other day, good Beverly brought it with Stephanie
– letter and Anna – letter and confidences of who she fucked (a life- long
crush from school, now a filmmaker in Colorado) in the front seat of his car
deliciously when she went to L.A..
And tonight when prowling through boxes in our un – together front
room looking for paper on which to write ideas for porny movies, I found
the thing I feared lost, the sketchpad full of fabulous drawings and captions
by me and Becka when we set out on our great adventure. Oh it is fabulous.
It should be published exactly as is. I want to show it to Art.
And now I am getting too sleepy; I must work on some ideas before I
fall asleep.
14 November
Aghhhh! I’ve been needing to get down and write in you for so long!
(Next time I’ll get a book without lines; these lines are like railroad ties – too
close together to walk on each one; but too far apart to walk on every other
one.) Oh baby, oh book, you are such a relief to me; there is nothing that
can take your place. Though fiction is perhaps the best thing of all to be
spinning down on paper. It is so healing to invent lies, it is the natural
progression after the fidelity to close utter truth which leads me here in you.
Sweet book. If I have you I have everything. I have the air outside, the
sweet huge gray of a San Francisco evening. Beloved San Francisco, whose
wharves and small jubilant streets lead me on and coax me, where some
kind of life lives always, and people are not too stuck in ruts, though
outwardly they appear to be irrevocably categorized to my eyes. Sweet
bookling, sweet booklet, sweet book. How I’ve been needing to write in
you. When I don’t, and I know I must (like last weekend when Richard was
here and things kept happening and I recognized that I was putting you off,
and for no reason; a small cruelty to myself. Postponement of things good
because they are too virtuous.)
1264
It is wet outside. I am going to do work in the world. Is anybody’s work
in the world more important or all- encompassing than anybody else’s?
How can I say I’m a writer (small tortured me; I can’t leave it unsaid,
but to say it feels such betrayal.)?
I need to do it all the time. Otherwise my anchors desert me.
Gray outside, and the bridges. The Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge.
Commanding, graceful, beautiful down there in the Bay. Seen from the little
kitchen balcony, perched high above the city. It is wet. Mama has gone off
into the gray (wet, slanting not in drops but in a sheet of wet penetration) to
the Convent of the Good Shepherd to have dinner with the staff and girls.
Dejection has sunk at us, but things keep coming along and getting good
again. How strange to live in teamwork with Mother and Steve. The only
thing that hurts at me is Becka off to India, growing where I may not be,
accumulating prestige. I vow to get eastwards next trip. I consider myself
worthless and second class for not having gone already.
I love it when I see little sparks of humanness in people, people that I see
when I go out looking every day.
I grieve that I haven’t gotten Celeste and the Landlord typed and ready
yet.
Later. I have fallen asleep in the dimness. I think it is time to go start
dinner for me and Steve.
I’m going out with Nicholas tonight.
20 November
Dear book. Neglected book. Almost one week later. I did indeed go
out with Nicholas, for the time of times, making it (“do you like me even if I
don’t come?” “I’d like you better if you came, but I like you anyway.”) then
down to the O’Farrell for the Nickelodeon (sadness in me for my failure)
which was uproarious, far out, outrageous. I’m going to be a Nickelette – I
went to see about it today. Then Nicholas and I went in his old white pickup
(“I got it because it was cheap and sexy”) to a little place called Hamburger
Mary’s and boogied some more. We had seen Behind the Green Door, too.
Black leather pants and batman t-shirt and high red heels, me. Strange
night. I was out until past four, and had my first day of work the next day,
and was totally unfit, and Jose pushed me around. When I found out he was
only 19 I informed him I wouldn’t let him push me around anymore.
1265
I like working at Senor Taco. It’s really fun. Just like I thought working
would be. The bosslady’s name is Gloria. She’s like a happy prosperous
Chagolla. I show up every morning at 9 and help either Juan, Gloria’s old
father (I like him best) or Daniel, Gloria’s little husband, who asked me if I
liked marrricjhuana. And then wanted to know what it was like. He almost
never talks. The food there is decent. Real food. I have it every day for
lunch. Yes, I like working there. It’s a recurring pleasure, like our house.
I’ve really improved my room. A big bed platform, hangings. Even started
painting the woodwork.
Tonight the moon. A brittle brilliant icy moon, faceful as a clock or the
palm of a hand. Thin strong clouds stretched taut around it like a sail. The
sky liquid and painful against the backs of my eyeballs, as though the cold
had traveled through them and pressed against my brain.
I feel strange and old and tired as well as young and apprehensive.
Across from me Mel feels in his pocket for change and, not saying anything,
gets up (sadness and reluctance in it) and goes to the phone – we are down at
the Garden of Earthly Delights because tonight as we were all contemplating
chicken soup Mama got a phone call and went in to my room with it, long
red cork snaking secretively in there, as giveaway as an umbilical, and red as
fear. It was Jack, and I could see the flurry and tizzy leap up in her, and I
said,
“we’ll go out. I’ll just go down to the Garden and take Mel with me and
we’ll get something to eat down there.”
“Yes, okay, why don’t you,” said red – haired Mama, changing her
clothes.
“Wear your Levi skirt, your skirt, Mama! And here, here’s your boots,
I’ll wear something else!”
“Katy, do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen Jack? It was last
May. Last May! And he and I once made an agreement that we wouldn’t
see each other ever with any other people around, it upsets me so much.”
“I know, Mama, I know!”
So when Mel and I went up the steps later to put there the old boards
and dartboard I found on sidewalks and trashcans on our way to and from
the unsatisfying Chinese restaurant full of interesting people and one
cockroach near White Front, I saw up in the half – bay of Mama’s window
the flicker of candlelight behind printed curtains. And it was not a happy
1266
walk to and from, because I have had to tell Mel to lay off, stop bugging me,
and he is sad and ready to cry.
I slept with him last night with some indifference, some affection,
almost no lust, and fear of staining my new flowered sheets with blood, for I
am having a real period. He slept very late and innocent; I made him a
cheese omelet for his breakfast, and then showered and went down to Stage
A to get my contract, which is a very satisfying contract so chock – full of
grammar as to be positively laughable. It was written by somebody with
either enormous respect for something or no respect for anything. I’ll have
to tell Gloria what’s happening so I’ll be able to get the right days off; but
I’ll tell her (hee hee) that I’m going to be in an educational film.
I feel that it is cruel what is happening for Mel, but I feel real and
blameless.
He is suffering across the table from me, and I make no move to
comfort him. It’s fine with me if he crashes at our house, but sheeit, I won’t
be forced into a lover trip.
We just talked some more. I like him a lot. Skinny, frizz – haired, some
pimples and blackheady nose, L.A. flat good shoes.
I keep watching the door, or rather the bar (we are sitting at tables where
people can sit to eat) as people gradually filter in (by midnight it will
probably be too crowded to move) to see if Woody comes in. I boogied with
him about the first time I came down here, and then ran into him again
Friday night. Okay I said, so we went out into the rain, he sarcastic and
sardonic as a Norman Goldstein (Renard—Sarita gave him a romantic name)
until I was so nice and sweet that he melted in bits and pieces.
We went up to his attic red room in a rickety house (entering through
an opened window, stepping over the sleeping body of a girl on a couch) and
immediately smoked some fantastic hash in a hot little metal pipe. And
made it half the night. Three days later when I think of it I go all tingled and
hot and suffused with traveling flushes. God, it was insanely marvelous.
He bit me so hard. He was sadistic, and then soft. I loved it.
He must remember it like I do, if not better (he came). Then he took me
home. No promises except see you soon. Well, I wish. Skinny, rather ugly,
beautiful tumesced in candlelight. He liked me, he liked me. He bruised my
collarbone with his merciless bites. An important thing was that I said that
everything everybody does is just a kind of begging, except for those few
1267
high moments somewhere. He was impressed. He liked that. He teaches
mime at a neighborhood high school. Pisces.
(The following is fiction…)
Antonia in the gathering gloom bit her own hand softly. She was an
enviable girl; she envied herself. Softly the twilight bit her back, with the
sharp teeth of something very like pain, like pain’s unconsummated cousin.
On her own map she was in the state of longing; a raw feeling. Somebody
had made it raw for her a few days before, and it had stayed that way, like a
wound aching in the dark, its red gleaming up through the bandages.
Somewhere music came up through a window and widened on the yard
beside her room and came into her room like steam –damp, fecund,
seductively warm, impossible to live with. It ached on her too much.
Immured. Too faded to write novels, even. Too circular. Like her lips, one
meeting the other on the corners forever. No helpless contractions, no
involuntary pleas, no waves of slain pleasure. She had hid too hard for that.
4 December
Oh book. Such a long time. I’m down at Stage A waiting with
everybody else all dressed up like the 50’s for the filming to begin.
5 December
A letter to Gregory, which I like so much I want to transcribe it here.
Let me first insert a word though – ho ho ho, I sure have lots of boyfriends!
All over the place! I love them! I love the attention!
5 December
My dear Gregory.
I am so exhausted. So weary and worn out. I haven’t had any time to
myself for weeks. Working at the Stage is exhausting and incredibly
revitalizing at the same time. But mostly it’s working at the taco factory
which kills me. Aghhh! I keep telling myself I’ll quit. A light on the
horizon is that my Leo friend Beth may take over 3 days a week, leaving me
4, barely bearable. Less money, but I don’t care. I haven’t had time to sit
around and sew or write – you can’t write on the run – for far too long ; I
begin to fear my powers will leave me. I suffer for it. And, to make things
1268
really sad for this Leo creature, my sister Rebekah writes from Pakistan a
fantastic cosmic far-flung high grooved – out letter, she is so much more
invincible than I ever was, and today I woke up crying inside from it, I feel
I’m not groovy enough for her, that I am at some stable state of adulthood
while she is flying into India with both arms outspread, beautiful like I can
never be, young and strong in the way that hurts me most – strong with real
self – experience, love, feeling herself. She must meet Nicholas, a friend of
mine, a Taurus like Rebekah, same thick hair and white teeth, same bracelets
and bangles and tits (yes, he has tits) and long slow gentleness and earth –
rootedness, same dancer’s self – satisfied flash. It hurts me, I who flicker
and wane and doubt and realize later, after an encounter, how weak and
malleable I was, taking all my cues from the other person. I am jealous
jealous jealous. I can tell you that, my friend, my friend.
My only revenge is to save up and go to India. She wanted to go – I
didn’t. I could have gone with her. Instead I wanted to get back to Paul – to
home. The east held no curiosity for me. But now, reading her letters, I want
to want that earthshaken inner expansion, like her, so I can be like her,
whom I have always been made small by envying. She has moon in Leo – I
have moon in Taurus. We are supernaturally close, but I am afraid, afraid
that all my hurts have been too deep too long, that I can never be as close to
people as she is – or more, that I can’t be so self – strong. She is invincible.
I wish she would come and take Nicholas away from me, because I am
killing myself around his foxy slow smile by becoming agonizedly self –
conscious, bitter, ashamed.
It’s been far too long since I’ve written myself down. The relief is
almost too heavy to take.
Sometime later.
An unsuccessful try at a wank, lackadaisically lying on my bed, the sky
going gray and mottled outside. It is feeble to live only on paper! Yet that
is what I do. I place myself on paper, and then I am saved. I wish
somebody was giving me a massage right now, stomping and walking on my
back. Today down at the Stage I worked with a little girl (my age, but you
know what I mean) named Jackie on a lesbian scene. We had a good time.
Being filmed closely. I love it, it gives energy.
I enclose a little piece of paper on which I began a letter to you while I
was waiting for a strange mad show to begin; I borrowed the hunk of paper
from a fellow sitting next to me. I got your card and letter today. Very very
Gregory and nice. Look, babe – I want you because I think you can give me
1269
something I want. I really do. And I feel a good level of affection for you.
You know, our affinity. It’s a good thing. I would like you to get a place
nearby, I’m sure you can find something here on the Hill (safest place in an
earthquake anyway) and we can be in and out of each other’s houses and
bedrooms and genitals. It would be fun. Yes, I’m busy; yes, as far as I
know, I still want you. I won’t even mind if we fight a lot. If it’s real. I
think we can be good for each other. Cuddles on cold days. You may,
however, encounter some pretty disgusting self – castigation on my part
from time to time.
I like getting into things this way, with every aspect of a relationship
charted out and discussed and kept up – to – date all the time. It’s the Virgo
shining like a little tin heart up through the Leo.
I love how you want me.
I love your unconcern about my
nonorgasmicness. For that, I will wank for you. This is not usual.
You’ve turned into a pretty groovy human being, just by being more and
more Gregory. It’s true. I will always be straight with you, my darling, and
that way I will love you. I will not give you the jive I might give other men,
because you are of my own species.
I may be able to help you get a job in a skinflick in January. It’s good
money. Good fun, and liberating. Besides, you’re horny enough, vain
enough, hung enough – you’ll be great.
Keep writing. Get your chart done. I want to know. See the new one in
with me, yes. My heaviest embraces.
Katy
12 December
Dear book. Once again, a rather pitiful little attempt at a write, when it’s
almost time to split for work, and I’d really rather be writing to Paul.
30 December
oh book late, late in my red room and stoned from mid – afternoon with
the boring freak across the street at Little Red Door Thrift Store, we balled
stoned. Oh book late from seeing Lady Sings the Blues. Late from
Gregory’s unsatisfactory shorthair instead of the great sex mane he had.
Late from a last night of Nickelettehood and Rebekah – writing.
1270
Through the part – opened crick of my window I can hear the seldom
cars on the freeway and the crashing of trains and boats or trucks down in
China Basin or more nearby. My throat is sore. My expectations slightly
apprehensive but much of glory, for tomorrow night we Nickelette in style at
the Intersection.
Is my body still good? Is my body still good? I love how it fucks and
fucks unscathed.
6 January
I’m going to copy into you a letter which I just finished scribble –
writing to Paul. It tells a lot of what’s going on now, and it’ll be simpler to
just copy it. Then I have to finish making the Wenzday and getting my
costumes together for the Nickelettes show tonight.
I do so love our house!… is my gift for description rusting with disuse?
Or is it just mellowing and fertilizing inside?
My dear Paul!
The sweet letter, the fabulous sweet letter from my Paul, and instead of it
seeming like I’m getting farther away from having seen you, I feel like I’m
getting closer to seeing you.
Financially everything is going so well I can hardly believe it; it makes
me want to hold my breath. Tom Karns amiably agreed to pay back my $90
plane ticket and do part of it in his fabulous jewelry if I like. I’ve got 3
modeling jobs for the next 3 days, $50 day. Mama owes me money. I think
I’ll be able to pay back friend Richard who unasked lent $50 in time of
stress. (Hey – could you please write a letter on my behalf stating that I
won’t have to pay rent in the British Isles and that I’ll be visiting you?) My
only expensive habit is vanity; I have to pamper it enough to keep happy but
not so much as to bust myself. I may try to fly from Oakland to London;
what a relief that would be! Or maybe the train across Canada…and fly
from east.
Would that it were possible to be in 3 places at once! Here grooving
with my red room and thousand projects; in London and/ or Scotland with
you, writing and getting stoned and walking on the heaths or rocky island –
places; and in India with Rebekah in the hot and sinister sun blowing my
soul not knowing anymore which way is up.
1271
Tonight the Nickelettes are doing a short show to start off a midnight
showing of Reefer Madness at the Roxie. I wrote some songs which are
meant to by sung by the Nixon women. I may sing one of them, in sort of
corny theatrical style. Here’s Pat’s song –
When I’m feeling tired/from being fashionably attired/and wired from
the rigors of my class/when other folks would guzzle/or do a crossword
puzzle/or even smoke a little bit of grass/I simply/ roll up a Ladies’ Home
Journal/ and shove it up my ass!
And Julie’s:
My generation/is nasty, it’s true/but I have all the virtues that they
lack/so, David, I run to you/when they’re saying unkind things behind my
back/they’re all addicted to things I don’t even understand/ they’re all
smelly/and to blow my country up/they have a plan –
They give each other blow jobs/ and head jobs and toe jobs/ they’re all a
bunch of hairy/ deodorantless slobs/ they smoke marijuana / till they all get
silly traumas/ about what Daddy does in Vietnam/ but I know he’s right/ and
he’s outtasight/ cause he’s -a - man !
I bought for 50c a flowery weird hat with plastic flowers to wear. It
looks like an inverted plastic bucket which grew a chemical garden old
ladies’ erotic dream of Disneyland Woolworth flowers and ballerina
strangle- – net. Made in West Germany.
Also I do a thing (borrowed from Mama borrowed from Boy’s Town) a
red knit sprung – out cap pulled down to my nose, very sullen mien. “I fniff
a lotta glue. Never hurt me none. All my frienz fniff glue.”
I knew you would love the earring. I knew it. And the magic trip is new
to me, I must admit. I do love to picture you in that earring with your newly
short hair.
It must look classy. And your telling of the scene at the Grope and
Wanker brings it back very clearly. I hope I’ll be in time to see Roger play
with Jo – Ann Kelly.
Today was such fun! Terry and Barbara, the two chicks in our traveling
vanful of the 8 sordid trans – European months, and I all got together and
went to Barbara’s old man’s photo gallery and looked at all these far – out
avant garde photos, only one of which, in my intense ignorance, I really
liked –it was of a foggy pasture dotted with cow – troughs, which looked
exactly like bathtubs. I had such a good time just sitting around bullshitting
1272
with Terry and Barbara (who have both turned into very beautiful ladies)
about our adventures and everything; I realize that much of my relating to
people lately has been on the basis of I’m – groovy – you’re – groovy – let’s
– be – groovy – together –but – please, no – farther – than – that!! Sort of
mutually anxious and masturbatory trip. ‘Specially with guys – I am very
compulsively hit – and – run.
Perhaps I can read the recommended books on those long gray
contemplative days, the days in which I trust the writing will surface up out
of the ooze, in the U.K. Any summer spent abroad will be spent in some
country seclusion this time, not traveling! I learned my lesson from Rome,
Paris, etc. etc.
People in Britain are just as mad as people in America, they’re just a lot
quieter about it.
Haven’t seen Nicholas in a long time – I have an idiot terror of him, and
when he gave me his phone number, I managed to write it down leaving a
whole number out, which I didn’t discover till later!
Friday I worked as a porno model for a smiling black photographer
named Nippy who is from Los Angeles, and all his friends are from Los
Angeles, and they all live Los Angelesly in a big “modern” Los Angeles
house in San Mateo, a new horrible suburb. It weird, man. It gave me the
Los Angeles heebie jeebies. I hate being reminded of that hole. They drive
a Cadillac and discuss in okie and somewhat victimized tones their $550
phone bill. Nippy is definitely the coolest of the lot. An English (originally
Scottish) chick was working with me, a blonde super – accent – sophisticate
– with nice tits and a totally flat ass who smoked like a chimney, and she
told me almost superstitiously that I was to get it together and go to the
Orkneys, they were so far out; she spent 6 months on the smallest island
once. We worked pretty well together. I had to wear a fur collar and black
stockings and boots and a gun belt and Stetson hat. I felt a trifle
embarrassed because my cunt was pretty rank I think.
I quit Senor Taco. It was getting absurd to make such peanuts for all
that work when I could do porno. Gloria was very upset and tried to get me
to stay. She’s a vibrant lady and I can’t imagine why she’s married to her
small nerdish husband. No doubt they had relatives in the Managua
earthquake; there are about 20,000 Nicaraguans in S.F.
Ah, baby I’ve got all this lovely unprogrammed time, no need to worry
up my forehead anymore! Mama is quitting her job with the city schools as
a substitute T.A. She’s a substitute instead of full – time because she has a
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B.A. and is over – qualified, which means she makes $2.50 per hour while
the full – timers make $3.29. Alice in Wonderland!
I’m very pleased you sent the Nova. And I like the story.
Thanks for your butterfly – beautiful letter on a good greedy day. More
soon no doubt. Love, Katy
p.s. I’m a total Wenzday addict, but with a problem – dried fruit makes
me fart!!
Off to rehearsal.
7 January
One thing I like best is to look up from a moment and realize that in it I
have been reasonably content.
.
I am trying to avoid looking down at my body in a judging way. Nippy
said I looked fatter than the photographs I showed him – the ones Stanley
took on the beach in Santa Barbara. Plus, a few days before that I suddenly
got this conviction that I was fatter, and I’ve been struggling to keep it from
taking over again as a ruling obsession in my life.
Now – necessary shower (I balled Paul Johnson, my nice gold – toothed
rather shy simple big long – haired Sagittarius photographer, during our
lunch break today) because tomorrow I work for Nippy again.
10 January
Garden of Earthly Delights-- the bar down at the corner – honest,
hardcore funk.
15 January
A beautiful blowy day. The strange sordidities of last night make a good
padding for the late-risen noon.
“I guess you know there’s a lotta people trying to kick habits and shit
down here” says Scorpio Jim with his brown irisless demon – slanted eyes.
“And Dan’s old lady, Patricia. Patricia isn’t a beauty, like you, but she’s one
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of the heaviest soul – women around. She and Dan broke up a few times but
now she’s seven months’ pregnant by another guy. Seven months. And
she’s moved back in here, they got room no. 1 for their livingroom, and
she’s trying to kick her habit ‘fore the baby’s born, see. Dan’s had a little
habit too, I guess you knew that.”
I spin in dark marijuana and the asking of a swollen genital, pulled back
to where it remembered the infantile fevered release, a black soft tongue,
slow fingers, burning it away to death. The fur up around my neck and face
cradles me like the cloud George Washington’s head floats in, in childschool portraits. Protected, desired in fox fur, I stand in black cotton
trousers and nip – waisted jacket, a dark shapely shape in the moving
Garden, not quite here just to dance, here after a long respectable sit at a
movie in Berkeley with Tyler and Mama (Medicine Ball Caravan, three
flashes of dancing me, one with Jacques - --Superfly)-- to extend my
drugged adventural longdrawn horny night –
“no, I didn’t know that. I just know Dan gets me off so good.”
“I know, I know, sister. He’s my brother, he tells me a few things. I
heard you and him just had those two Leo energies going really fine
together. I’m glad, I’m glad he can make your blood feel good. That’s what
there is, heh, that’s a good thing, for sure and certain, sister.”
He has a teachered, singsong fevery, almost maniacal tone. And when I
look into his eyes I decide to fall away from myself and let these brown
things tell me for awhile of a good mystery place to be, he is holding me
round and round with his skinny skinny arms and I feel from us a warmth
like true love, family warmth, and I decide to be wooed.
Superfly is playing on the jukebox, people are dipping and crowd moving, drug air black as voodoo. I stand in the absolute pleasure of who I
am, what body and drapings I’m in, and the mystery asking this brings. I am
thinking, ‘there are many things I know nothing about – have only inklings
of – the most feeling parts of me, the ones I go by, maybe other people live
in them all the time – my ego is unfounded - ”
“After this song is over” says Scorpio Jim, who must be Irish, the tall
ruffian skinny words – way with him, an imp: Ireland did not need snakes,
with the likes of him – “let’s you and me go up and snort some coke, some
co caine! Yeehoo!”
He gets carried away for a second. Slapping his bony knees, arching
his lowbushy brows like an emaciated Santa Claus.
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“Okay” I think. Of course I think I will not ball him. Not that it
matters. Upstairs we go, with the dark crowds whispering “fox!” behind us.
“Hey, hippie, what’s her name?”
I simper and bat my new extravagances of eyelashes over my fox fur.
In his bare tousled junkie room he laughs more and prepares the
apparatus, all the furniture besides a bed, a board, a chair, he has. A large
flat cardboard with seeds rolling around on it, papers, a folded paper which
he unfolds with religious intricacy and there is the white stuff. We spoon –
snort it, he does it, holds it to my nose for me and I don’t hold one nostril the
first several times and he says nothing but smiles and then I hold the nostril
and he is pleased: I lost some before onto my black pants.
“No games, no manipulations,” he says, “this time here for whatever it’s
worth.”
“What sort of manipulations would you think I’d do?”
“I don’t think you would.”
“So I won’t let you do anything I’d think was a manipulation either.”
“Good,” he says. “I want to give you head so bad,” he says after a time,
“you don’t know how bad I want to give you head.”
My needs met with alacrity, think I, thanking god; Dan’s with his old
lady, Scorpio Jim will take care of me instead. I don’t know why but I
supposed he’d have the same junkie forever patience and knowing tongue
and fingers of his black brotheh Dan.
“Let’s get it on for awhile, then we’ll snort some more coke,” says
Scorpio Jim, we are all the while doing with eyes, his crinkle – lashed, he
says he wants to make love to my soul. We roll and closely intertwine and
clasp, still clothed.
“I like to leave my clothes on for a long time,” says Scorpio Jim, “’cause
there’s a big difference between making love and balling. I guess you’re hip
to that.”
“Yeah that’s one thing I do know.”
I feel bad, I still feel bad when I think of it, I involuntarily rest my
forehead against my handWe roll and writhe and bend and acrobat on the flat low bed, drooping
heads off edges, he puts his face in my belly again again-
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We take off clothes slow he says “I want to make love to you good, I
want to get you off so bad.”
I, full of okay, why not, I’m totally in orbit on cocaine, do it, let’s do it.
We roll.
“Do you want some cocaine on your vagina?”
“Mmm, put some on my clit.”
We roll some more. He avoids my hands going to his prick, he wants
to get me off first. I lie on the edge of the bed, legs well apart.
“Hold it open, hold it open. Show me just where you want it.”
I touch the little almost – covered place of my clit, and he dumps a tiny
icy spoon of coke on it, I can feel it, ooh –
“Sister clitoris is really in for it now,” he exults. “Here, get some and
I’ll open my prick and you put it in. You ever seen that done before?”
I hadn’t. We did that, I was occasionally aware of the swimming
flashes of the cocaine poignant numbness taking me big and engulfing the
room.
We lay back to get it on. From there things got harsher, puzzling, worse.
He went down on me but too hard, and his beard dug into the tender flesh
that was still swollen from Tyler’s invading well – meaning love. I desired
with all my body for him to do me slow, gentle fiddling my nipples, both of
them – around between thumb and forefinger the while. I told him, I told
him “there’s only one way I know to get off, and that’s slow and gentle,
doing both my tits at the same time.”
But there was breakdown of communication somehow, he kept
swarming all over me, I felt that he hadn’t taken any speed but he was
restless, nervous, more speedy than any who have ever touched me, and I
began to think ‘he’s fucked, he’s crazy- speedy, starved for love, he’s also
evil so he really doesn’t want to get me off, wants to just pretend and lead
me on and then drop me cold,”
and the frustration, the need to come was all – pervading, I was off on
cocaine, I had forgotten how to be gentle in my words; I said things like
“ I’m going fucking insane! You’re too speedy, my god, you’re so
speedy, can’t you slow down, I like it slow and gentle –“—
But he kept it up, swarming his hands hard all over my body, seeming to
avoid the places that most needed him.
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“Oh my god,” I said, “you’re just too speedy, can’t you slow down?”
Still he ground his face into my vagina, where the swollen flesh
winced; pushed his tongue hard all around the place, but almost never on it;
began to touch my straining nipple, but then moved away from it, pushing
on the thighs and belly that tried to urge him back to the three tiny target –
places.
Things felt wrong. He lifted a hair – clouded thunderous face and said,
“am I doing this, speedy?” and he jumped up and down on all fours
above me, slapping the bed in rage, to indicate a fast fuck. “Am I doing this
? Fuck, and then it’s all over?”
“No, no” I said, “you’re not doing that, I mean you’re just moving too
fast, I don’t have time to concentrate. I just don’tget time to concentrate.”
He went back to it, but still it was all wrong, I wanted to weep in
desperation.
“Maybe we better just fuck,” I said and he raised himself up to me, after
much more swarming and bumping of bones, all wrong, it was all wrong; I
was dry as sandpaper, and he fell limp and could not get into me, and he was
pushing on my nipples and it hurt and I told him not to, that it felt like when
you poke something in your bellybutton, and his prick limpened
immediately more.
He lay on top of me, we had failed, we were miserable and wretched and
afraid. I found myself crooning things at him.
“Oh honey, oh baby, I so much want it to be okay, to be good; I feel so
bad; the most, the most important thing is for you not to feel bad.”
“Do you feel as bad as I do?”
“Oh, at least!” I said. “I want it to be okay, I’m really horny and that
makes me bold, makes me ask you for things. It’s okay, it’s important that
you see that, it’s really all okay!” I laugh.
“What’s so funny” he says.
“Oh the situation I mean the fact that it is a situation, it ceases to be just
you and me, it becomes a situation.”
“g g g rrhh mmn”
“I feel awful, I feel scared. I want…”
“Scared!” he jumps up, crosses the room, kicks something—
1278
“so you’re scared of me! I’m sick of that shit! You hear me, I’m sick
of people being scared of me!”
“I’m not scared of you, I’m just scared from wanting things to be good.”
“You ball – cutter! You think you’re a big woman, don’t you! Why
don’t you just cut it off? Why don’t you? Look, here’s some scissors, cut it
off! I’ve got a knife, cut it off!” He holds out his prick, stomping up and
down the room in rage; he crosses and smashes a bottle, kicks a corner,
“you tell me I’m too speedy! I’m doing my best, trying to do my best to
make you feel like a woman. You ball – cutter! Do you do this to
everybody? Fool’em, love ‘em up, and then cut their balls? You gave up,
you didn’t even give me a chance, you just gave up and said, ‘fuck me, then’
and I knew it was over. I’d done something wrong! And now you’re
scared!” His hair was wild out around his head, he paced and smashed
things and stood clenching and unclenching his fists, gazing at me.
I was scared, I was thinking, “I thought I knew him but I don’t really
know him, he’s one of those junkie hippies in seedy rooms who turns violent
and hates women, what am I doing here, I’d better get out while I still have a
skin to save,”
I looked for my clothes in the candlelight, one pile of them was over
behind the fuming pillar of him,
“I don’t know what he might do, I’ve insulted his manhood totally.”
“Look,” I kept saying, “honey, I’m not trying to cut your balls, my god, I
shouldn’t have asked you for anything, that’s where I made my mistake, in
asking that you do something for me. I should have learned that by now, I
can’t come and ask like that.”
“Yes, you can” he said, “you should, but don’t go!”
I was putting on my clothes, careful , scared but dogged“Don’t go, Kathy.”
“My name’s Katy.”
“Oh”
more ball droop.
“Don’t go. I want to get you off, I want to make you feel like a woman.
You keep saying I was too speedy, you gave up, why did you give up? You
wouldn’t even tell me what you wanted.”
“I thought I did, I’m embarrassed.”
1279
“Don’t be fucking embarrassed.”
“Well I am, and I thought I told you what I wanted, it’s just this
peculiarity I have, I can only get off one way, didn’t you know. I thought
that Dan had told you all these things, since you said he talked to you.”
“Dan told me you were hard to get off. But what do I have to do? Isn’t
my prick big enough?”
“That has nothing to do with it,” I smile.
“Does it take ten hours? What?”
“That’s about it.”
“Well, show me! I want to know! You didn’t give me a fucking
chance.”
“I’m going to go.”
“Don’t go! Don’t go! Stay here with me!” He grabs me with long
spidery arms, they are mottled and strange. He looks up up into my face.
I pull away, embarrassed at how I don’t want him to be angry.
I just want to go.
“Give me a chance, give me a chance! Let me do it right this time, with
you sitting on a chair, so I can get down to it!”
I have chilled, have grown separate, am in my clothes.
“Stay, lady, stay a while. Why won’t you stay? I know you’re horny,
and I’m horny too. Let’s get down to it!”
I allow my cocaine haze to be persuaded, he’s under my foxfur with his
mouth on my nipple, on my stomach, pawing and pressing at me
I am thinking
“This ugly sonofabitch it’s easy for me to get off with this derelict ugly-how lovely to be fucking a seedy junkie, it would give my mama pause-- he
is so seedy I can surely get off with him—because why to be
selfconscious—“”
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and at the same time the old eye – gaze, the intense water- brown of his
eyes now wild with hair – shadow, drugs and conflict.
His skinny body, very long very skinny very white very hard
His tongue which tastes of me
raw and red and darkly fungal
makes me want again to scream with hatred and frustration
why is it on my mouth, which hates it and yet responds, having
a slave’s choice of to go or stay
why does it palaver with my lying
tongue instead of finding immediately the spot, the spot, the place which
Dan (my dead heart, my junkie slowman, whom I love but never loved, who
had just slow magic fingers, and I no illusions, not one
just a swollen
clit to guide me, and it guided me right, the only good place I could go)
My clothes off again, and the rampant elephant in me lifts its head in
hope
He’s put a cushion on the chair. I sit atop it, pelvis pushed out, and he is
on the floor like a naked monkey among the chair – rungs, folded like an
Indian on the cold floor between chair and bed, applying his zealous beard
and face to the spread place, opening out my knees first so my feet are on
the bed then on his shoulders then in my last forgetfulness out like a naked
acrobat on the doctor’s table with its wet wrinkled balloon showing its
baboon’s tushy its blue angel its first of many fingers its old man’s mouth
upon mouth upon mouth like reincarnations of the same senile debt a
bombed asshole a slit wrist from which an orchid blooms and bays at the
moon dogs ears drenched in blood and soured milk sewn together
pincushion for teeth needles her car crash her accident
And all around it this tongue like an ignorant student plays a melody of
german madness a cacophony like the Can and he crawl his long arms
must they not be cold? up my body and takes the tits which send out little
tingles immediately and make me groan.
I take the encouragement tack this time saying crying the while “oh
baby that’s right that’s it just like that you got it gentle baby, just gentle
just like that but gentle it down a bit oooh there ah yes oh yes baby just like
that ooh up a little there, there! Don’t stop oh please don’t quit baby just
keep it just like that do my tits, oh do my tits please baby do em like that
pinch em yes baby that’s right ahh” it’s already started
1281
He slips off course a second, I flail and my legs outstretched feel
suddenly cold but he finds it again and moves his fingers on my nipples
to tingle it right and his tongue has that rapid gentle tick tick on my place
which
brings me brings me heats the dry fevered deliriumatic
brings
out out I think that I will pee or explode something out like come for the
black place has gotten there from its far railroad track around the world and
it shovels me up on the end of its black scoop and the thrust of my grinding
joy throws me up off the chair where his face follows me still working and I
fall
Oh uh oh hoh h oh uuuuh
with mighty jerks of my body in all directions
Suddenly I want no more tongue on me I want to fall bedon and
congratulate and sleep.
I mumble more idiocies like “oh baby you got me off so good
me so good oh baby ah my god.”
you did
We tangle rather clumsily onto the bed. He rubs his prick against my
now – wet cunt, and his excitement stiffens it, he pushes in, pushes, exclaims
groans breathes faster faster collapses over on me, his prick exiting. He
laughs.
“Whatcha laughin’ for?”
“Oh, it just slipped out.”
“Didja get off?”
“That’s a funny question. It’s a Scorpio problem – premature
ejaculation. Comes from Mars in Virgo. I blow hot and cold. I just feel it
coming all along my prick, it’s like it’s already halfway out and I’m saying
uh – oh! It’s the woman’s come – juice that does it. Ya see, there’s the
glands of Bartholemus, and they make it all wet inside with a kind of wet
that sucks the air out of the molecules in my prick. That’s the truth! It’s like
a sucking, and it just blows me away. I could get the taste of a woman’s
come for an hour. That’s the truth. To me, one hour of giving head equals
two minutes of fucking. That’s the truth. One hour of head equals two
minutes of fucking. Because it’s the woman getting off that gets me off.
I could smell your vagina through your pants when you came up here.”
“Mmm sometimes I can smell it too. I love it.”
We both grin.
1282
“So you should.
“Did you get off in the chair?” he asked absurdly.
“Did I!”
He chuckles with satisfaction. Starts going down and trying to get me
off again, but my supersensitised clit isn’t having any, and besides I’m tired
and suddenly private. I still don’t really trust him. For all that. He is too
eager for me to stay, and I was very frightened when he shouted.
“Guess what… ” I say.
“What?”
“I’m gonna go.”
“Why? Aren’t you into spending the night with people?”
“I like to fuck and run…. And I really just like waking up in my own
bed.”
“I grew out of that when I was ten years old,” he says derisively.
Reminds me in his derisive snorts of guys I have known. Several. Guys
I never saw again.
“I guess Dan was something special for you, one of the few people you
ever got off with?”
“One of the few! Only the second one! So I’m a virgin of sorts.”
“Why do you want to go? Stay the night here with me.”
“No, I’m going to go.”
“I’m sorry I came so soon.”
“I don’t care, as long as I got satisfied you can come anytime you want!
And I’m sure… satisfied.”
“Wait, you’d better have the light on to put on your boots.”
I dress and he’s still naked clasping at any part of me he can when I
leave he follows me out into the hall and calls after me
“Hey! Have a good one!”
thinking I hadn’t heard
And follows to the head of the stairs
“have a good one!”
“Thanks!” I half – mutter.
1283
Out the door, no key needed, free! Long past closing time, garden dark
and quiet. In the wind I walk home, feeling hard and good and strong and
free in the dark wind of my city, my San Francisco.
**********************************************
It was much like… last time, when two days previously I had slept with
a Cancer (first Maury; this time Mike the O’Farrel projectionist) then that
day gone over to Tyler’s house, fucked Tyler whom I like a lot, gone to a
terrible movie with Tyler and then alone to the Garden, gotten righteously
ripped and then procured for myself at kind and willing hands an explosive
orgasm.
On my way home and at home in my deliciously gratefully welcome bed
I thought about junk. Junkies. What it is. I felt a kind of unpolluted
compassion I have for very little else. I thought about it. We are all junkies,
that much is so clear.
When I awoke this morning late and flattened and empty – bellied I
thought about it all, let it travel and meander through me, all of last night. It
is a struggle for survival. A dance with death. I guess I could be a junkie. I
thought of what Billie Holliday said, how it never did anybody a bit of good.
I thought of what it is, how it comes about. Its inevitability, its
appurtenances, and by contrast the bright bounce of neurosis the rest of us
affect. I looked around my room at the decorations, the careful hangings,
the upkeep. How it would feel to care so little as to let it all drop off the
walls into a pile of cobwebs around me.
Junk should be free and freely available for those who wish to put
themselves out of commission that way. Either that, or simply it shouldn’t
exist. But it does, and how - it is merely definitive junk. There are so many
kids of junk. You are one, my sweet book my needle.
Took me all this day to write the above. I find that I am starved for
writing. All day I have been in a get – down tingle.
Every day I like to count how many of my men – friends I’ve come into
contact with. Five or six is by no means unusual.
I am loving my fabulous boughten eyelashes more and more. The kind
you put on one at a time, and they last—sort of.
Beverly is going to move in here.
1284
I’m going to wash the dishes. One of the few instances of my standing
up today.
I have been starving for writing in you. I feel that I will never quit.
Paul has moon in Pisces. Doesn’t that make sense?
He does want to come to America.
If I had plenty and plenty of money, enough to ensure we’d both get
back to the Orkneys, I would welcome him here.
It’s really good to know I can get off with any body if I’m horny enough.
Not just that one special person. Even seedy old mangy hippies like Scorpio
Jim. Maybe even especially them.
27 January
Dear book, you fill up slowly, slowly. When last I talked with you, I
was of much the same soul – but today is always more sophisticated than
yesterday.
Jacques just placed a candle beside you so I could see you better as I
love you, my bed - book, my love – object. I don’t know where comes from
the openness to spirit world among us people which enables Jacques to
know of my candle – need. Among people who move in a room there is a
common air, a push – pull of the molasses – quick air among them. Each
squiggle of word that I write has not known its brother or sister before it, or
thought out its successors. That is the way of it.
In the jumble of room objects the air expands and adopts among them.
The music leaps like an object in the air.
The quick pat – pit – rise – fall of Jacques’ hands on the drum – face juts
in the air like successions of canyons and cliffs in the geographical history of
the world. The reach of Jacques’ toe to touch just above my shoulderblade.
Touch – heals, opens, erupts.
When we touch we love whether we like it or not. It is a frighten, a hole
in me to me, a hole into the nugget of obsession pain. But when I touch I am
also sane, with a clear view of my day – day starvation.
Why am I doing this? What virtue? It is the feeling – good of it, like the
eager reaction of cells to leap to music, like how I feel standing as a
Nickelette, one long sex – mask, glittered showgirl, to sing my sing of song
1285
to them, the hunk mass wiggling organism of audience, my judges, whom
tonight I am bound to please, to delight.
Because of my alliance with my sisters, because the audience organism
is really a just me, of my own needle – fine responses and anticipations, I
can hold them and wiggle the long heel – helped column of me like a chord
of sex, I can feel them feel it, and I sing my silly song with my gut in it,
young as a master, as a performer – I don’t dare yet to give them all of it, but
when I do, it will be fine, it will be sexy and fine.
When I have stopped writing in you for a time, because of seeing that I
want fame, I want people to love me through you, and in this present life I
am anyway gulping so many laurels,… when I stop writing in you I see with
a small self – pitying gesture inside that your true worth is in my penning of
you, the slide of my writing-attendant curled hand of you, the slide of my
writing - attendant curled hand across your page.
I go to you now in the extreme horniness of a week without orgasm,
when the clitoris begins to twitch of itself just thinking of the place it wants
to go, the fullness of vulva it wants to evacuate.
All the way in the dark capsule of junk filled car down highway 5 in the
night, as I drove and he drove, the air was filled with sex. We talked it like a
voiceprint on paper, we voiced the convolutions of the air in and out our sex
thoughts. It was a way of caressing one another’s arms, shoulders, faces too
well known to be pictured, the curled self – reliant wildnesses of hair. Every
movement he made penetrated me, and my immediate jab away from incest
took me away to safety then, so that the next hit of him could hit me.
My brotherling Huck; this night we met over half way, we traveled down
the same dark jumbled beam to the mysterious Southland of California,
where the wide unconscious reaches of desert display their mountains like
tipped sleeping faces, of the same skin.
Larry throws back her hair, and the backward time of the moment of air
behind her latches the hair and lets it stand still in the kitchenlight for a
moment. I am impressed with my own sensitivity – another reason to cry
people to love me—I watch the rise and fall like hasty liquid or the shadows
of brick on mortar as the candle shadows it.
1286
How the flames leaped in the water – glass; the fire – flames from the
fireplace, the fireflowers. The wax in the candle’s cavity is like clots, farms,
families of jungle fungi.
Jacques seizes my sturdy upper body with sturdy grip –“ it is uncrredible
to have you here. Gives a feeling of bridges.”
Always I love to say the wind outside, makes the air wild fresh and
ancient; wind does rule, always our souls are mended in its railroad path and
we do not know the glory of our associations. We all know somebody at the
top, we all have connections. I would even go so far as to say that we are all
famous. With the wind, we are all famous. To all it brings the childache of
wind’s mystery in palm trees.
Out the window, the window which warm safens us, the palm trees
move with cold unison music each in the part, as the instrument which its
shape makes it. When the door opens it is a door to the soul in the stomach
and the wind rushes in cool and wild.
The knee of black leather looks like a stretched baldhead of thick black.
The light shines it. The fire scathes my near back. In the well-being of the
stomach room a good dinner remembers itself as peace – or somesuch word,
don’t embarrass me, my words.
I met the Chris of Amsterdam Germany Spain in my kitchen and hugged
his fine steady beauteous body, blue jeaned mustached and always Chrrs,
and beloved by his Lillian. Mother was hit warmly by him.
31 January
Pornography is symbolic intimacy. That is why we crane after it, watch
it, tell it all with our eyes and shortened breaths of how we need closeness, a
mother closeness constant and warm to heal us. Pornography is groping for
money. The exchange of money – symbolic permission, indescribably
precious, difficult to get, and in this world almost as absolutely necessary as
love – frees us to grope. After money has been paid, anything is allowed,
anything possible. It is true.
In every pornographic laugh I give the screen of Deep Throat, I give the
fact of my new profession, there is revenge! Every irony is a delight of new
freedom, new permission, in the face of my broken mother. This is true.
Our childhood forms us irrevocably. The tiniest excitements stay imbedded
in us forever, implanted in that enchanted credulous time.
1287
How I love to write you out, my precious, my love – seed. And maybe
one day you’ll give me back a thousandfold what I am giving you, in the
form of love from quantities and masses of other people. Strokes. Ah love.
Ah permission… maybe I will be glad to get away from Mother again
finally, though will Paul be less ill and whiny? My destiny is still to move.
I don’t have to listen to any of those people who say that things must be one
way or the other.
I am still seeking out the imitators, the stage for my warps and growls.
If it is not childhood that forms us, why then would I have such unbearable
nostalgia for it, the sort of nostalgia which recognizes the fact of a huge
other world reachable but largely ignored, painful with primal vibes?
Let me tell you of my body, how it feels right now. Body on top of
which the head sits rather breathless, afraid to descend stomachwards for
fear of inflating it beyond self – acceptance.
My ass has been feeling all day. There is presence around my asshole.
It could be shit which needs to come out but is as yet held back, or it could
be Tabasco sauce in some shit burning my inside tissue, or it could be ten
orgasms piled up in all the fleshy structures there which want violent release,
want audience, audience with the pope. I would not mind being licked and
sucked by two people in front of a camera until I came. I think it would be
easy. There must be great boring tedious quantities of people who like the
camera. I think I should begin a list of perversions to hand to Jerry Abrams.
Ideas and personal lusts.
A pervert in his perversion is truly in love. He is carressing and gentle
and mad. He is in grief and in pain and in joy.
Other people in the throes of perversion – the being in expression of
ancient pent- up need and pain – must be very boring to someone who is
feeling normal. Ah, ah, whatever that is. Chastising thyself again. I see, my
dear, my little chickadee.
Oh later much later in the world.
I just want Jacques to love me
to tell me that everything I am is marvelous
and how he is onto his own self – discovery, his own fun.
Yet
I am not in love with him
it is something big and ageless, something as common as that.
1288
I masturbated in their sink the bathroom one and had two almost
unpleasant orgasms, not releaseful at all.
Save me, rescue me from the world of Nippy and football and money.
2 February
I want to write my true erotic fantasies. At night I lie and have my own
private thoughts to myself, and nobody can tell me what to think or do. I lie
in gratitude that I am alone.
Two nights ago Jacques and I talked some about sex, and of how Janov
says much energy is misplaced onto sex; so he doesn’t think it’s that
important, and I’m definitely inclined to agree with him. Nevertheless, I
find myself here and now running up against painful places when these boys
want to rub on me, and I do not even really understand what it is they are
doing.
Jacques said that perhaps the situations in which I found myself were not
erotic to me. That what is erotic to one person is something mysterious and
very ill – understood. That got me to thinking.
(He said also that I am too self – centered to experience oblivion. This is
true. It also makes me clutch my selfishness fiercely to me, crying mine!
Mine! In the face of all who approach and criticize.)
I lay and thought and felt redeemed. What is erotic to me? And I
wanted to tell you what things clamor to the top of my mind, wanting to be
told about.
(I sit in a curved low brownbamboo chair on red cushions in clotted –
cream light. Eye – killing light. My turquoise – brass – silver buckle is
undone from its belt of leather stars, and some of the stomach that I have
never understood well is visible as a tiny moon – rise between the pages of
corduroy – my feet in their faithful soft blue socks are crossed on the table,
the table we always eat at. Though when I eat alone here ( which is great
fun, I scout out the delectable leftovers which the heads of state would
reject) I do it on Jacques’ desk, because then I can read, and not squat, and
the cats don’t bother me.
The fire is crackling down softly. The heater comes on and off. Joelle
and Granny (who cooks the brochette, the homemade bread) are asleep.
Jacques and Larry have gone up to school to work. It is ten or so, after
dinner.
1289
I am clitorally loaded from the session today – I worked with an August
8 dark Leo named Gene, and I didn’t know he was Leo until after, but his
genitals and mine slavered for each other with electrical wet eel lust, and we
took all opportunities to push and lick and feel, and the having to interrupt
and change position constantly and bare to the lights (little fat cameraman
Illo ignored) kept it all going very long so that every stolen personal deepfuck was bliss. Sets, makeup, crummy costumes – we made a fuck movie,
and I wonder if the watchers will see how much we really did desire each
other.
It made for a far – out day. $80 to boot. And hitching down there of a
noon is kind of fun. Illo on La Brea. The past days have been Nippy and
Sam at Reb’s Studio on Hollywood Blvd. Nippy took me to Hamburger
Hamlet after the shooting yesterday, and then we went to visit some people
and then to a strange middleclass house and balled. He balled thrice. All in
a day’s work, to me. Though I must say I was surprised at how genuinely
sweet he is. But he sure ain’t my truelove type. Nippy. So I got around to
Nippy. I proposed a ménage – a – trios of him, me, Karen. I hope it doesn’t
come through; probably end up embarrassingly unorgasmic. Though it’s
one of my horny fantasies.
Let me elaborate.
On film – to do these things in front of the camera –
Masturbate in the bathtub. The camera implies both consent and
rationale. Soapy water and me and a man or a chick or both doing my tits.
Lovely soapy bathroom.
Be tied up! And held down, and have a girl and a guy work me over.
One gives me head while the other sucks one nipple and pinches the other.
Forever and ever.
Here is my nighttime fantasy. I am a black girl, and two evil people
have captured me and my big mama. They tie us up in separate pits, so that
we can talk but can’t see each other. I am tied up with my crotch open and
my legs curved at the knee, feet together, arms helplessly above my head. I
am innocent except that I know I’m not supposed to have orgasm. But I
can’t help it – I’m tied up totally and immovably. The water in a perfect
stream is hitting my pussy, it is warm and excruciatingly ecstatic.
Sometimes the men come and watch from above and cackle with sadistic
glee. I am talking to the mama the whole time, saying – “mama, I don’t
know what it is these men are doing to me! I’m all tied up, mama, I can’t
move at all! Oh, mama, they’re doing something funny to me! I’m trying
1290
not to feel it, mama, but there it is, and I don’t know how much longer I can
hold out! Oh, ahh, mama, I don’t know what to do! They come and stare at
me all spread out like this!”
This is terribly exciting.
Another is that two people capture me, tie me up, and spray water on my
cunt. They are intent and breathing hard and utterly, utterly ruthless. There
is nothing I can do.
16 February,
Everyman’s Free Clinic, SF
The pee invades my consciousness. The pee which feels better held
back than going forth; hurts held back and hurts going out. Sad pee which
brings blood out with it.
Freaks sit across the narrow space from me reading New Yorkers.
Invasion of confusion, mixed lust and the usual disappointment and the new
element of hurting pee which must deny it all to me for the nonce.
Free Clinic San Francisco. Rags of hair around my face. Cold knees.
Mistaken clothes. Hunger which can’t be hunger yet.
But at least I got out of “working” for Jerry Abrams today. He, old
Capricorn/Cancer pervert that he is, wants me to lay a sadist trip on a newfound masochist. I think he is a paranoid loss. I gossip like hell about him,
just as he fears. My instinct tells me this man, though slightly winning,
slightly seductive, knows nothing of you.
Oh, the small ins and outs of my pee – pain are terribly interesting to me.
How they treated me first for mere irritation (thought to be brought about by
asshole irritation due to dildo – stuffing at the slavering hands of the
notorious Jerry A.)
There are coughers and silent sitters in here, and readers and bearded
sighers.
The large diamonded social worker ladybehindthedesk talks to me. Why
I am here, do I still live at 285 Missouri; writes down – bleeds – as I tell her
1291
about urinating and then I forget about that and tell her about peeing. It’s
cold in here, not as cozy as Monday, oh which rainy evening the smokers
and gigglers and crowds got quite mellow.
When I pee I have to bend over so that it doesn’t run onto my asshole
and hurt. And I have to clutch my knees and read something really fast to
take my mind off it.
When I was squatted on the outside steps waiting with the other silent
waiters before the clinic opened the diamonded lady came up the gray stairs
and her key didn’t fit the lock. So she stood with the rest of us, waiting but
still acting in charge. I had green organically – grown spinach peeking out
of a brown paper bag.
“Well, well,” said the lady, “looks like you’re going to have spinach
soup or spinach omelet!”
For a minute I just stared, not knowing what to say.
“Spinach something anyway” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I like in both ways.”
“Well” I said, feeling called upon to say something else, “I’m going to
make it with tofu – Japanese soybean stuff – and brown rice.”
“Ooh,” she said, politely interested, “I never had it that way! But it
sounds good.”
I grimaced smilingly, thinking ‘little hippie healthfooder that you are’ to
myself.
“And sautéed food stamps” I added.
“What?” she said, “pardon me?”
“With sautéed foodstamps!” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “mm!”
She didn’t get it. I smiled very amused at myself.
24 February
If I had a past incarnation, it was as a funky demon.
Asymmetry is my forte.
In everything I say I beg for approval, the gratifying mmms of others.
1292
***********************************
What for the mariachis whine and sing
What for they play
A sister gone
a sister not to white pain I understand
but to unfevered joy or fevered pain
linked in a startlement
of white
She always cried white
pure
I sickened and confused
By this plethora of beauty
My chants have forgotten pine trees
a slow weed grows
though she praise me
though she call me
my mother has renounced my holy name
to favor this upstart
doubts that my hurting poetry is king.
Makes live in her
her own plan
Of religion.
I think dollars and planes
And what sweet nature crouches in me alone
at eventide
Beneath Venetian blinds
In our tall house.
**************************************
Evening Blues #36
What sweet unsigned crouching
Taxidermied tiger
I
1293
How tedious the long complaint
of surrogate claws
listless snarl
Patched fur
What for the shinied evening
Lurks and draws
Me
painting
Me in gas station oil
Unsex
Unbrilliant
Unwise
Fear withers me with dreams
Will I be my mother
A bruised pear
One cheek flattened
Will I court her wrinkles
With my pain
Will nonspecific maladies
Keep me from the waterbeds
of my would – be lovers
Those who love me and I feel not
Insisting constantly I feel
I could love a prick, could I feel
Do not protest that I am innocent
It is you you aim redemption for
Do not tell me I am fine the way I am
Insistent, infantile, intense, in pain
Will nightmares do it?
1294
Will they save me? Few are ever saved.
******************************************
Well amazing things are going down. Just now I feel in a turmoil; what
is happening? Rebekah mind love growing in India, I in San Francisco
frolicking or afraid I’m growing old. What does it all come down to? I keep
thinking. The rain and wind press the window – pane. I love that. And
when I write poetry I want to cry. I do not yet see that its purpose is to
publish…
What is the love Paul and I have? Does it fit my higher standards for a
healthy alliance?
Oh Katy, take thy own responsibility to thyself.
Meeting this Steve Shutzman put a pain in my heart. Why do these
Taureans do that to me? And Leos comfort. And is it all true? My
neglected Leo moon, it must be. Nicholas, Steve, Rebekah – all hurt my
heart like a wound. I feel that nothing can live. Nothing – a big black space,
my favorite constant one. Maybe meditation would give it to me more. I am
confused, searching for shoulds.
25 February
13 March
…. Scientology zealot coven
is that what it is, EST? Will I ever know? It’s all pretty weird and
confounding. $200 indeed… why do the authorities, the Jacques and Carls,
spurn and scorn? Do they know more than I do?
Yes it feels good to write. Why don’t I make this pen move over you
more often? I plot and plan to avoid, to sidestep.
Jacques says there is no great buryment of pain. That I am almost fine…
only the orgiastic god above me, and that a product of propaganda. I still
have never told him of the shame. Maybe I’ll write it to him. But he always
insists on discounting, dis-placing my fears.
And Carl today, Carl Levinson of the dream – feast class, says meet it
now, it is fine. Have dialogue with the ghost. That is what I will do-would do it now but for the Nicholas advent. I hope Steve doesn’t come by
too. One Taurus of them or the other, but two would seriously embarrass.
A block rises. I kill it with one half – seen blow.
1295
Faint Aretha Franklin coming small – radioly from the dark kitchen.
“Come to think of it,” says Beverly,” you always have hot mouth.”
Even to have expectations is considered corrosive.
23 March
The secret places of me
I love to have them fill with blood
Red dawn to darkness
The primitive,
To his mother’s own sweet wine
Take time, take time.
Lucid Dream
You have to listen
Way down there
Like a green meteor
In the wake of a folded cloud.
Bring something back with you.
You know the grey cruel forces?
I want to wear them under my fingernails
Like bruises.
******************************************************
17 April
My life is changed. I lie here and look at these words, and hear a fear of
ridicule in my ears. My whole life is governed by fear of ridicule. We are
all ridiculous. We are all assholes. We all hope to think otherwise; there is
no need to.
1296
I am pleased. I start to let the words roll off the pen just as they come
(and they come fast and densely) and my old faithful Obsession comes
butting in, as I have unwittingly created it to do at every gap. You know the
gaps in the rhythm of the orgasmic plateau? I push it in there too, thinking
that I am just lying there and that it is coming to me.
When I write I feel the same way as I did at the EST graduation when
we all did a “personality profile” and I was getting this guy’s mother clear
and strong, we were doing each other, a sort of reading… and she was a
cultured skinny bitch and the little room we were using was full of the
energy of deep buttons being pushed.
I see when I write that many, many seconds in every minute in me are
spent watching over my shoulder for the Other. Ho ho. No longer do I
despair. I am no different from anybody else in this respect. I am free to be
ridiculous, free to make mistakes. Free to have an orgasm? Who knows.
Maybe someday soon. I have always tried to be honest with you, trading
one belief for another or another, or worse yet, hanging on to the same old
ones.
Some of which worked, some of which didn’t.
Remember that week or two in Spain when I took that hashish and
opened everything out? Lay down and figured it all out. And went around
in the present, pain and all, for weeks, and didn’t write in you at all?
I am so into my circuits of thoughtery – observing the pictures which
flash and come and go in my head, with all their accompanying emotionality
and body tightenings or loosenings – that I don’t write in you… and I do
keep procrastinating. Making soup all day, putting away the huge rapidly –
wilting lettuces the Food Conspiracy brought, making phone calls, observing
my personalized version of the sore throat which is going around, making up
my eyes with lots of dark.
Book, I do love you, and I know now that that is not strange. I love,
and you get in the way.
Paul’s boots and Orkney shoes are still under my throne chair. They
look pitiful to me. I am making him wrong to prove that I am right. I am
also concerned, angry, guilty and worried. Also loving and nostalgic. I
believe I have not written in you since he arrived.
Why do I always pick such losers? Beautiful brilliant witty losers, but
losers nevertheless, who due to their shitty compulsive states of mind
couldn’t find anybody else to live with them. Poor Paul. A victim of his
1297
own snobbery, fear, past, and convictions. It’s ridiculous. He’s been taking
all those damned pills for years, and I’m convinced that all he needs to do is
to take EST and then find somewhere to live, maybe… so that he can sit
quietly and observe all the things he’s doing to himself.
Book, beware! You are being made a lie. Book. Defend yourself.
(-This in Paul’s handwriting, orange
ink.)
22 April
What a bunch of shit. Peoples’ small concerns. I’m sick of it. I’m sick
of embarrassment, shame, sex, fear, humiliation, blame, anger, resentment,
lies, accusations, half – truths, expectations, hopes, glories, praises. Sick of
it all. Of the little marching phrases in my brain which self – accuse, self –
accuse.
24 April
Maybe I’ll start being nice… Paul today said something which
astounded me… why didn’t he say it before?
“Well, of course, everybody is selfishly motivated on some level… it’s
just that people have found out that they both get something out of it when
they care about each other.”
My god! That is just what they said in EST (the whole subject of which
disgusts Paul – that I would believe it and not him) – but all this time I
thought that Paul knew of some mysterious love which existed altruistically
and cosmically.
(Drawing)
25 April 1973
I was going to sit and write in you, but I keep staring out into the sun and
also at all the executives who go by. Strange creatures, gotten weirdly
fashionable lately.
I wish I wrote as well as Paul does. Then I could really describe these
things.
People. Running about doing all these perpetual fancy games.
1298
I keep seeing men who look something like Herb, and getting
subliminally excited… I don’t know why, since I see little chance of ever
getting off with him. If he were as good at cunnilingus as he is at fucking,
or as good as Paul is at cunnilingus, (with Paul’s phenomenal patience and
understanding and enthusiasm) then I would really be in delight. But I asked
him about it today, and he said,
“I’m glad you asked me that… I like doing it – sometimes. It is a thing
I reserve for intimacy. Fucking really isn’t intimate anymore, you know.
And I like to have something to save for true intimacy - .”
“I don’t relate to that.”
“I know you don’t, I wouldn’t expect you to. But you know what I
mean.”
And I doubt that we’ll ever have that intimacy. He is ready for it. But I
am too afraid. We will probably flail about for awhile on some boundaries,
and then after some embarrassment on my part, we’ll give it up for a bad
job.
I spent last night with him. Things have been much more peaceful
between Paul and me since I came home today. In fact, I even persuaded
him (with much hiding of face and giggling) to lick me off, which wasn’t
hard to do. Neither the persuading nor the licking.
We’ve been getting awfully good at that lately. And I see how easy it is
getting to just shove orgasming in with my general timorous cynicism.
Upstairs now to my EST body seminar. I’m at the big new modern Jack
Tar Hotel on Geary and Van Ness.
Tonight – a Nicks performance at the O’Farrell.
30 April
I have an idea… maybe I’ll use the rest of you for a scrapbook, and start
in a new writing – journal. Because. I never did much like you, poor old
skinny – line binding, for a journal, and I saw Rebekah’s incredibly beautiful
book she sent back, full of drawings and cosmic journalisms, newspaper
articles and photographs. What fun! I’ll sit and scissors – and – glue for
awhile. Oh poor book. I am glutted with fun and possessions, presents and
trips. I need your simple love again, your emptiness.
I am just finishing an apple; it is noisy in my ear.
1299
***************************************
My lioness
born in a Riverside August
it was my birthday too,
birthday as the mother of a
girl child.
Forgive me.
And love me anyway.
Tu Madre.
The flowering meadow
Hidden waterfall
Far mountains
And love
And love
And love.
You were born
out the loneliness and longing
of my whole life
born to complete me.
Forgive me.
And you were the celebration
of my impassioned secret self
that went about clothed so primly,
was a green dream of growing
of infinite fruitfulness
of hoping
for you.
“Look what she’s got, mother”
the doctor said, holding you up.
1300
My eyes wouldn’t focus
But oh how I loved you
Fruit of my body.
8/7
INTERSECTION
756 UNION, S.F.
397-6061
For immediate Release;
VIRGINS LIBERATE INTERSECTION
On Sunday, April Fool’s Day, the Nickelettes become the Virgins in
Residence of Intersection (756 Union, S.F.) The Nicks will present a
different liberated vaudeville show every Sunday along with the regularly
scheduled programs of film classics. Guest stars will also be included - Freaky Ralph, a comic rock singer, and Al Rand on roller skates are already
scheduled.
Live entertainment will also be included on nights the Nicks are off.
Mime Ralph Dupont will continue to present new acts once a month.
Anthony Delia will join him on stage April 8. Dr. Real, who accompanies
the silent films on Intersection’s mighty 1,947 piece piano, is planning
intermission concerts.
The Nickelettes have been working together in San Francisco for almost
two years. They were loved by the audiences who frequented the midnight
Nickelodeon programs at the O’Farrell, and misunderstood by drinkers at the
Condor and Top of the Mark - - - places they liberated briefly this year. The
Nicks consist of a score of women who range from a formerly bored
housewife and California Girl to several left – over flower children who still
find a lot of love in this world.
The Nickelettes (guaranteed 100% human) begin to sing and dance their
way through the night at 8 p.m. and will repeat their shows at 10 and 11.
Films begin at 6, 8:20 and 10:35. On nights the Nicks are away shows are at
6:00, 8:00 and 10:15 p.m. Producer Karl Cohen brings you these outrageous
evenings of entertainment for a donation of only one thin dollar.
1301
KFC
For further information or photographs of the Nicks call Denise Larson
at 282-4052 or Debbie at 776-6686
******************************************
4 May
Last night I got that it is okay to resist. Werner Erhardt spoke briefly at
our body series seminar, and he spoke of resistance – he said that you have a
bowl of resistance, and when you’ve emptied that bowl out – as
experiencing resistance – then you will empty out the next bowl, and so on.
So I am delighting and glorying in having my resistance to the imaginary
obsession be okay. Oh, I am getting through this thing, I am getting
through this thing, and its related tie to love, sex, Papa, guilt! Why go
around your whole life tormenting yourself with the same old problems,
when you can get new ones, which are much more fun!
I sure do procrastinate. Oh well, thass cool!
A nice bearded dark laughing man named Emam gave me a ride home
last night and invited me out for dinner next week. And Herb is taking me
out tonight, so I’ve saved up some hunger, and now it’s only 3:30, and I’m
starving!
We’re having a party tonight at this house; Richard is instigating it, and
I’ve made a spaghetti sauce, and Beverly and Richard are out buying other
goodies, and thank god I’ll be gone for the organizational part of it. And
Paul (wretched) will be here, and I just hope all the button – pushings don’t
get too embarrassing for any of us.
The man named Emam said he made a list of all the things in himself
he’d like to get through, remove. He said at times he had over 200 items. I
think I’ll do such a list, but first I’m going to go call EST to make Mama’s
reservation for Werner’s talk on May 23rd in which he is going to tell us a
revelation he had about experiencing certainty.
Nah – I don’t feel like it right now. I think I’ll put elastic in the sleeves
of my blue dress, instead.
21 May
1302
Well, book, I was trying to fill you up to kill you, to begin anew. And
now you are enriched with the leafmulch of another tree shedding leaves,
leaves, bark and mold – rich leaves… )Paul had a long rant in you,
unfortunately completely indecipherable--)
I can’t write anymore. I really can’t. I create not being into writing.
I will tell you this – all my books have followed one continuous thread,
that of a sort of search… and now I have found what is. What is, is. To
watch it is most wonderful. I will continue to confuse myself with my
actions, desires, affairs, circumstances, appearances, locations – but I will
not. I the observer, the I who is, knows to be free of the lie that I must do
any one thing. That I must find make, be, right right right. I watch. I can
love. From out of me, the changing, changing humming place which is
simultaneous with its surroundings which watches people with delight and
which vibes out with the whole body what is, is, is…
I have been released. The most nagging of thoughts, torments,
obsessions… become moment – by – moment triggers for profound
affirmation. When I think obsession- whatever boils up to mind – I receive a
pulse or a moment of the physical reaction, that which I used to name
shame. It is now a physical flush of warmth, very deep and not unpleasant.
And then the thought which usually follows – “I must confess to the
man—“ (whoever) follows, and another deep flush of shame – affirmation.
Then, peace and emptiness, open for the next picture, whatever it is,
whatever triggers it. I am slave to jealousy, self – consciousness, blues,
greed – but less, every time I consciously experience it, it becomes less, and
what is, is more of nourishment and less of robbery.
I create the framework EST to play in.
My biggest barrier was shame. Now I am friend to it, and it is simply
depth. I always knew it could be so. I wake up in the mornings light.
I wake up often next to Herb. His big partially – bulky body, warm and
nuzzleable. His man – presence (and he is one who presents himself as a
god – man (the real kind) and has me convinced), his infinite scope and
sensitivity coupled with a pleasing coarseness – leave me open to my basest
terrors. It must be much of what I go to him for. He leaves me no mercy,
really. His humor is a form of seeking out any hiding places and shining
great grinning lights of aha on them. I am placed (place myself) in a state of
constant siege and constant growth. I do what I did not know I could do – I
1303
create comfort and delight in myself in his presence, and not solely from
playing power with my body.
Paul and I created comfort and safe, safe affection. I do not deny my
small sneer. Oh book, I do love you so passionately. My game, you are my
game.
I will speak of Herb, I will no doubt revere him. I can have my
reverence. I let myself be with it. And in the strange tumbled time of in and
out of cars, restaurants, bars and bed which we create, I stand a self next to
his self, and I do not unconsciously drown in his identity. I consciously
watch and laugh and do not have to lay trips on him. He is very high –
This morning I got over – stimulated and created not keeping up with
myself, with him. Some consternation got the better of me. We parted, and
he said I’ll call you someday, and we both knew that meant we’d crossed a
danger line and needed (I need) some time for all the stimulations which
passed uncompleted to disgorge themselves and be re-experienced and
duplicated and vanished.
I allow myself to plan inside – “I want to marry Herb – Herb, that
sadistic cunt – face – what is he doing to me – I am so fucked up – I want to
get fat – he’ll think I’m ugly – he’ll think I’m stupid and unevolved etc.
etc.” on and on, just as life disgorges them to me! Everything which I used
to experience but denied. Now that I’ve found I don’t have to confess, I can
let me be inside.
I do it all by opposites for that is apparently how my game works –
when I am sitting beside Herb on the car – seat, the lights of the bay flashing
past, the low decadent gleam of my turquoise shoes in the bottom of the car
like fish in the bottom of a dark boat – and the panic rises, I think (weirdly,
paradoxically!) “ I chew fish- heads, I fuck mantelpieces and old boats
made of rust and rhinoceros horns! I tear the bones from my chest and beat
my blood and living gore to death!” etc, - anyway, something negative,
whatever comes up – whatever comes up, and the deep affirmation comes,
down deep in my toes and my belly, as nurturing, as satisfaction, as the only
answer, the only question to the silence which follows.
And it occurred to me yesterday that in those moments, the ones which
used to be when I closed and dried and drew away and then turned grinning
pretending and hurting; in the deep tingling times of my shame pictures and
their acceptance, I am certain that I flow love and presence out through my
skin to my companions. So amazing! And every thought which follows
about my worthlessness, etc. echoes in me the same way. And I see that so
1304
many of my friends are so much more beautiful, true and living than I had
known – and that Paul is outside somewhere fleeing as fast as possible
(maybe he’ll come back in a full circle to EST). and Herb will go too, and
nothing is permanent, and all is a fantasy. And I create needing my weekly
injections of EST. (isn’t this all sickening?? ’02)
Yesterday Herb and I drove up to Sonoma (I drove too, on winding road
through hills and golding fields and fruit – trees and weeds and rich, rich
rosebushes) and visited Sandy and Achille. They are very mellow. The air
came in sweet and golden through the open doors and windows.
I am sunning lately. Beverly and I lie naked on broad towels on the back
porch and drink in the sun. We grow brown. Yesterday I lay in the goldy –
weedsy field by Sandy and Achille’s shack (ditches, fences, wild roses and
wild bees and wild weeds) in the strong delicious sun and Herb and I played
a game we both love of pretending that we are prudish, ignorant, innocent,
intolerant, and blind, and we grope each other and say absurd things. He is
very gentle with my body.
He undid the buckle (he gave it to me, a big brass Indianhead) and got
my trousers down halfway and I was brown and taut and I loved the navel of
me and my triangle of black – brown – red hair. And we pretended that this
was all very forbidden and furthermore wasn’t even really happening.
We can keep that game up for hours.
Writing is not quite as exact as thinking, watching – I can’t keep up
with myself.
I can’t wait for tomorrow, for more sun…
And I’m working on getting my book together. I keep creating
procrastinations and diversions (like you right now) but it’s happening, and
it’s fun while I’m doing it.
I am beginning to love seeing associations – where I used to see them as
reality, pain, nostalgia, memory, nuisance, unreachable longing – now I see
them as the machinelike regurgitation of a picture which needs to be reexperienced for that moment – and is thus fulfilled, emptied, leaving room
for Now.
I am glad Paul wrote in you. I experience rage, wonder, detachment,
sweetness, and memory…
Herb teases me about my hip snobbery (which no longer controls me)
and I want to play a trick on him by dressing totally sweet and straight
1305
someday… maybe even a bra and panties, airline – stewardess – off-duty –
type clothes, and practical shoes. He is embarrassed sometimes by the
spectacle he thinks we create.
He just called… now I’m trembling a little inside with unexperienced
stuff because I am fighting getting hung up on him. I must just feel it, let it
come, and never, never ask him for the big answers… whatever the not
asking creates in me, I take it. We traded insults for quite a while. We’re
going out dancing tomorrow night to the Orphanage to hear Mitch Woods
and his Red Hot Mama, and out to dinner, and I’m all excited again… I will
wear my new white oxford bags and white t-shirt. I don’t really want to go
out tomorrow night – I need time to adjust, digest – but I think by tomorrow
night I may be ready.
June 10
Oh comfort comfort of writing in you again-I’m efforting slightly at trying to get things done. The problem with
having projects you want to do is that in the days / moments you’re planning
to do them, other creations idea themselves into you and you get sidetracked.
I just had a lovely snack of crackers and peanut butter and now I’m
settling down to write a little for my book (not much – I think I’ve got
enough shit already) so that I can send it off maybe Monday??? When I go
to work for Zachary.
I want to finish writing you, dearest slowmoving book volume, by the
time (if it happens) Herb and I take off to go to Canada, which should be in
about exactly one month.
I am dedicating today to working at home. I could have gone to the
book fair with the Nicks, but just didn’t feel like it. It is so luxurious to be
at home.
I want to report to you, booklet, what is going on.
EST – marvelous, wonderful, me. Everything. Cosmos, promise & non- promise, frustration – sensation – love and indifference. The best thing I
have created for myself in a thousand lifetimes. And I mean that.
1306
Herb – concomitant somehow to Estness. Fun, safe, only as dangerous
as I want to let it be. Hallelujah. He asked me for the rest of my evenings
between now and September when I go to India, and I said no, and it will
likely be anyway. We go out elegantly. He praises & loves me the way I
like.
A great Ukrainian Sagittarius with too much stomach and long lovely
legs and a huge toothy head and beard and nose and eyes and youthful curly
hair. He’s 39. We met in the dreamwork group at his house. He’s in New
York on business until tomorrow. We plan a 10 – day trip to Canada. I
drive his sharp car. As a charm, a mantra I hiss behind thought –“ you
goddamn lousy motherfuckin’ son of a bitch, you goddamn lousy mother
fuckin’ son of a bitch.” We go to movies, music, dinners, driving. He says
we are both infinite. He loves to take me out. Gave me $40 for clothes. I
have spent $200 in one week on
Clothes – a sudden recurrence of that passion. This time, a thing I’ve
never done before – Joseph Magnin and Macy’s and Papsie’s, new new new
gorgeous soft clothes. Herb praises. Shoes, long cuffed trousers, sweaters
in lime and lilac, gold halter, polka dot dress. Rented a sewing machine, got
material, am feeling guilty even now about procrastinating, about sewing.
Herb told me to sew a lot while he was gone.
Paul – vanished to Ann Arbor. Writes to Mama now, not me. I knew it.
I regret, half – amused, the $200 which I gave him, and the fact that when
he busted my room, my best turquoise ear – studs got lost. It was quite
spectacular, with pot-plant dirt dumped all over the pile of scissored clothes
in the middle of the floor—I found it all when I got home after a dinner in a
fancy chinese restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf, then a night with Herb.
Herb’s comment – Paul was a crutch for me, which is fine, but now I want to
walk alone. Paul and I were both impotent, and made each other safe. Herb
says things about male/female sexuality which puzzle and annoy me.
India – I don’t want to go I don’t want to go I do want to go I will go I
do I don’t want to go I let all that happen and be. Will need money when
the time comes.
Work – slow, occasional, mostly for Zachary.
Hair – cut in funny shag, very short on top, 3 days ago on total impulse.
I love it, Herb loves it, everybody loves it. Elegant, little – boy, fun. City
of Paris.
1307
Friends – reacquaint – André Drukkiez, Steve Schutzman (a kiss after
poetry reading late and awful,) he says I want to take you home with me but
I can’t, I say well then you can enjoy wanting to take me home with you but
not being able to, I kiss him on the dance – salty skin of his vulnerable
Taurus neck, he says oh it’s frustrating I say and I can enjoy making it more
frustrating for you, good night! Chuckling off into the dark.
Body – browning, thinning, happy, ambiguous as always.
Mama – friend, Scorpio – rising lady (that accounts for so much!) She
may have to have an operation for an ovarian mass.
We plan to fly to Riverside for Kevin and Margie’s wedding.
Theater – no AAA for awhile. Nicks, no longer a salvation, just a fun
gig, we got an awful review in City Magazine.
Writing – occasional poem
Teeth – dentist and Herb say must have whole mouth re-done, bite realigned within 2 years or all teeth will go to hell.
It is all me. I watch it all, and delight.
Past life – my clitoris has a special shudder, a memory of razor – blades.
Something clicked the other night when Richard, young Libra English friend
of Mother’s, said that in Victorian times they used to remove women’s
clitorises… I shudder and flinch and burn at the thought, I think that must
have happened to me, or they did something horrible to me when they
burned me as a witch--13 June, Wednesday
hoo haw
(design)
hoo haw
I would write in you, but I want to let the listenings and boredoms and
physicalities wash over me here at Minnie’s Can Do Club at the poetry
reading.
I was kind of counting on Steve being here tonight. Why? Because
maybe he’d go down on me later.
Hi my name Nick I just wanned a tell you, you the cutest little thing I
seen in a long time if I wasn’t on my crutches I’d ask you to dance, but I
got crutches so I can’t, but…
(design)
1308
June 20
I have forgotten how to draw
Book
Bookling
Booklet
Away into a night chamber of room where light crouches and shines like
an authentic beast in its new zoo cage.
Music I have harnessed is having its way with my ears.
Reading some House of Incest , Anais Nin and it is not impossible that it
is Aretha on radio.
Two women whose lives are spent in art: living
I set the book aside
late
it’s hot.
so hot
the intrinsic heat makes my cheeks and underarms sweat
Herb is over on the other side of the Bay.
Tonight I sat on a chair with feet propped on other chair out on the back
balcony and watched the bridge like my own quiet furious diamond necklace
glint out into deepening night
the tiny sure movements of cars across it.
It disappears into dark shape of island, then comes out as a different
quieter bridge
How rich I am to own that bridge
How wealth hung I am, how cloaked with diamonds
to own the peach soft black – ass night.
(design)
Friday, July 13
1309
“The purpose of the EST training is to transform your ability to
experience life so that the situations you have been trying to put up with
clear up just in the process of living itself.” – Werner Erhard
Upon reading the above on a big beautiful poster above the stage at the
Masonic Auditorium last night I heaved such a huge sudden unconscious
sigh of relief that the fellow next to me turned round and smiled and asked
what had been bothering me.
Such a fantastic seminar! 2000 people so together and so high.
I was into re-experiencing a lot of stuff from a conversation with Herb –
he had a very hard time dealing with the fact that I made a porno movie and
what went on with it. So, waiting for the seminar to start, I wrote these
things down –
I am much more concerned with your reaction to it than the thing itself.
The only reason I feel embarrassed about doing it is because you don’t like
it. That is true; and it is also true that I feel deeply embarrassed about my
asshole being in lighted view.
If there is a level where I feel violated by this activity, it is subsurface to
the level where I am feeling now – that of fear of what you are thinking
about me.
It is a more immediate threat, losing the approval of (my) man. So I am
more concerned with my approval of myself than with self – violation,
whatever that is. I suspect it doesn’t mean anything, except doing what you
don’t want to do, and that only to the extent that it observably interferes with
your growth. And what this work does, is call up your disapproval of me,
which frightens me and makes me grow… makes me experience my own
disapproval (of sex). And it makes me grow to listen to your approval and
love – it is a mind/body/self – expanding thing to be able to take your gift-- I
am writing this in defense.
Okay – I can see you, your experience of this – you don’t like it, and,
strangely enough to me, I can accept that. That you change your mind about
it a lot makes me feel pleasantly and also frustratedly righteous. And I can
accept that – to the extent that I don’t demand conclusions from you.
In fact, I move somewhat the way you do about it. Around a lot. And I
am angry – I feel that you are being foolish and more compulsively prudish
1310
than you know. And dumb. About everything except the diseases. And
maybe even that, if the level we function at were deep enough.
I feel many ways about this, and will probably continue to. Unless I
don’t-- unless I start to feel one way all the time.
The actual actions are another thing. “Poor me,” I think, “this is the only
way I know how to make bread.” And “poor me, Herb makes so much
bread and I want to feel self supporting beside him and make his presents
and he forbids the only way I know to make bread.” “ How ironic” I think.
I do so love feeling flush.
And it is an easy loving gift for me to say “okay Herb, I won’t make any
more porny films.” And that is fine until I really feel I need the money, and
somebody calls up and offers me a job, and strangely I don’t feel that I have
retracted the gift – I just feel I want to go make money, and am afraid of
what Herb thinks, and remember what he said two days ago-- “go make the
films!” and wonder if he just said that ‘cause Mother was there.
Another thing – I feel sooo uncomfortable blurting out the day’s story in
its raw language into the naked phone with no prior conversation – I feel (as
though I sound) shallow, loose, coarse, stupid, hard – and like I don’t know
how to convey that I feel soft, warm , me underneath, and what I most am
full of is approval/disapproval – fear.
My experience of myself as judge. And Herb is disappointed.
No conclusions, this: description.
Having dinner tonight with Rolf Cohn, who is editor of some I- don’t –
know- what publishing house. He read Celeste.
Herb wants to not see me until he has dealt with all this in his head.
(drawing of me by resident underground cartoonist)
August 9
I hate to admit it, but I’m very unhappy today. I hate to admit it, and
I’m very unhappy today.
3 days till my birthday. So what? I expect a little love- shower.
I can never be the way I was.
1311
Not for a moment.
Home, to chaos and crash. Horoscope predicted perfectly – I feel torn
apart by many people. Emam, Stephanie, Mother, Herb, Ian, Rebekah, EST,
Glen, Bunny (from a dream.)
Herb says weird things about EST that I don’t understand. That Werner
Erhard is like Hitler. I keep wanting to make Herb wrong or right about that.
I am just writing in you as it comes along.
I forbade Herb to talk about EST. I got too angry and threatened and
also bored.
I compare myself with Rebekah Sarita. India is a pain in my guts. I ask
Herb for statements of solution. What I cannot do here, I cannot do in India.
Be here.
He said I needed to go to India less than anybody he knew.
I keep wanting to feel better.
When I go into truth process and let the past come up it is so full of a
chaotic old force.
I have arranged my future too diligently, and it is now backfiring. I
arranged it to suit happily the degree of growth and expansion I then had.
Something in me does not agree. It wants more, now, all.
Yes, Stephanie Hughes from London. She is delightful. I could easily
be in love with her. She’s going to the EST special event with me tonight as
my guest. We had a big rap about Paul. Wretched old Paul. How he
knocked her unconscious. How we both felt self – righteous. Stephanie
used to worship and envy me as I did Valerie.
(Drawing)
12 August
How I love the funny contrast of being waited on, Mummy and
Stephanie bringing me tea and pillows… and then going out running, of my
own volition. It is my birthday, and I do feel very special. I let everything
wash over me. I take the waves of unpleasant fear whenever they come and
ride them exactly like bodysurfing a wave, and midway they become
delightful and deep and suddenly shallower. And I am more whole, more
full, more of everything.
1312
I remember last year’s birthday very distinctly. Tiny tightnesses as well
as good pervade me at the thought. That Frenchman bringing cakes and
flowers… and I wouldn’t eat the cakes. Not even a taste.
Morris the cat just stalked in, looked ferocious, and tore out with a
screeching of brakes and claws on the wood floor.
Last night Stephanie read all my available books and poems and wanted
more.
Herb thinks it is very nice of me to be excited about her.
I realized that I don’t like the man rat Werner, and that it is okay!!!
I am loving Shirley McClaine’s autobiography. Now she’s speaking of
India.
Mmm yumm umm
now to get up and go running.
Tonight, dinner that the Trident in Sausalito with Mama, Stephanie,
Herb. I think I’ll make a cake today.
(Design)
14 August
Dearest book. I am treating you well lately. The flavor of my love is so
me. I am in love. I am in bliss. I look in my new birthday mirror (the
eternal reference) hanging on my wall and it is a good mirror, an old thick
mirror, and it says sweet soft pearly things. I am there, boyish, and small
female, capable and swift and very, very now – alive. Mostly that. A loving
involved amusement with the moment in my eyes.
… just went in and tended my yogurt. Mama, Richard, Terry, Ian and
Aaron are in the kitchen sitting around the candlelit white – clothed table
drinking champagne to celebrate the cessation of the bombing in Cambodia.
Mama is more Scorpio these days. I, more Virgo, in a wonderful, private
way…
Ian and Aaron are eating garlic sandwiches.
I wish Rebekah wanted me to go to India in December rather than
September. There is a meditation camp she wants me and Mother to go to.
Mother changes her mind a lot about whether to go.
I am loving and drinking in this place, my room, and Herb so thirstily
that I am sad I mean to leave. And still I do mean to leave. But not for so
very long… a three – month trip or so.
1313
Sex with Herb with marijuana is a whole new thing. I feel him for
perhaps the first time as lover, equal, twining companion. Let me tell you
the powerful fantasies which are set free by the drug –
This a minor but powerful one. That Herb is thin. There is something
about the youthful mobility of a thin body which makes me feel more like a
participant and less as though I’m pinned down by an ungainly straining
stranger. It’s funny, I often think of David. There is something similar
about his beard and his love.
I think of Stephanie. She is a direct window for my lesbos, and it is
suddenly more insistent and erotic. I see her in me as I see myself in Herb’s
place making love to me as I see myself in my place making love to her.
This is tremendously exciting. A small place comes alive down there when I
think of it. I really do desire her, and not in any little chickenshit way. I
love and want her entire body.
I have given her clues, and I am delighted to have them exactly where
they are - not quite clear. She mentioned that she thought of having a scene
with Valerie, but that is all. I have a feeling that she would be very
uncomfortable with the whole proposition. For some reason that makes me
chuckle with delight.
I would love to seduce her. I would love to calm and pat her body and
absorb its lines and curves. And then, the ultimate thing, (I always
wondered what lesbians did and I think it must be something like this) to go
down between her legs and bury my face and then draw back and lick and do
whatever she loved. Find out what she loved, and do it. And have her
having an excitation too. And then have her doing it to me. Ah Jesus.
When I think of that I am astonished at my response. She would know what
to do and I would know what to do, woman, and it would be totally new too.
-
Here is the strongest fantasy – we are at my house. Nobody else is
home. But they are expected at any moment. She has persuaded
me on the spur of the moment to lie down in the hall and take my
pants off, and she is going down on me and doing my breasts at
the same time, and maybe somebody is coming home
unsuspecting up the stairs right now, and any minute somebody
will bust in and oh, I’m coming.
Herb called me up and explained the economic situation to me. And
first he told me about the list I gave him of what I wanted for my birthday,
1314
of how it is the most poem of any imaginable thing. Of how fantastic I am
(It was pages long.)
At night (whatever night it is, I am starving for it and drinking it in – at
Herb’s or here, two very different and very wonderful total endless delicious
trips) if I am here and Stephanie sleeps on the foam rubber mattress on the
floor beside my bed I delight myself with small almost sadistic fantasies
about the body creature which is so near. The breadth of her hips… it would
be a real love play, not just a token lesbos – and that is what I have wanted.
Her body is tanned and soft and really very beautiful. Very graceful,
with a mixture of arrogance and humility. Yes, she is a little operator, as
Herb says. Much of an act about her. I was delighted to have him see that.
Right now I’m really into being amazed and sad at how totally fantastic
Herb and I find each other. Sad because there’s something impermanent
about it. That I’m going to go away… and now he says maybe that’s good
because he usually has a pattern of getting tremendously intense and then
getting so intense he feels trapped, and backing out. So it’s okay. I’m really
doing a perfect thing.
(Design)
19 August
Dear book.
Momentous time. I want to tell it all to you now.
I am alternately shrinking and expanding inside myself in a succession
so rapid that I am lost behind it like buildings, like a city behind fog.
Dear book, I must tell you this, that as I write in you now I see that you
compare with sex and truth- process as a whole physical thing to do.
You satisfy me, and leave me sexy and like leaves in a forest with
memory of sun on me.
How much does anyone else know?
Book, my love – writing in you is a sexual celebration, a seeking of that
swelling flood that is my human female self and which will grow and grow.
Oh book.
Statements of surrounding. Does anyone know I am taking a hot shower
in you?
I want to tell you before the long picnic rush passes. A picnic of emotion
rolling along before me. Marzipan roller – coaster.
1315
I am filled with Herb’s balcony. You might say I am horny.
I miss Stephanie, and that is strange to me.
I’m at the Intersection in the Nickelettes dressing room. Nickelettes
laughing and drinking beer and smoking dope. Kathy in green nail polish
and eyeshadow and green glittered lips and I get that she is still low – life
and desperate, as when she stalked in schizophrenic that night. She sits on
the floor with parted legs and her stretch of bare thigh and my Venus mound
gets warm.
The weekend. Began jealous, progressed through sulking, resistance,
action, tenderness, amazement, amusement, delight, craving, lust, peace,
sleepless dazzlement. Playing and droning and jealousy and heat, rage and
boredom and queenliness and Chinese dollism, orgasm and sleep and spry
cheer. Frustration, weeping and tenderness and lust; easy companionship.
Okay. It is established that my descriptions are laughably inadequate.
This book exists only as a purple – bound volume of paper and squiggles. It
is whatever one slurps of it. In making it, I make love, and then I am
finished, and asleep or gone.
Our conversation this weekend consisted mainly, ala Ian, of, “huh?”
“Whut?”
“Huh?”
“Huh?”
“Duuh!”
These comments seemed perfectly perfect, perfectly subtle, in fact, in
most cases, the only reply to make. Weekend of seeing Hot Tuna, then me
and Herb and Stephanie back to Herb’s dark warm smellgood house. I
didn’t want her to get to have that. Mine, mine, nobody else can eat it! I
went to bed. I had been wearing a new haircut (which I had cried over, it is
so short on top; I thought I’d ruined my life) (and in fact, in saying that, I
was copying Herb’s teenaged daughter saying the same thing after her
recent haircut) (which had made him chuckle)--and the pale yellow knit
jumpsuit with little velour self-duckies on it that I made (like a big baby
romper, and incredibly crotch – hugging, backless and sexy on) and a red
star on my facebone and high red – and – yellow platform shoes. Black
velvet jacket.
Stephanie in overalls and workshirt and tennis shoes. Stephanie curled
up on the couch. Herb and I went to bed and began some lovemaking and
1316
kept discussing if we should invite Stephanie in. He knew I had wanted her;
in our analyses of her I kept complaining that she wouldn’t/hadn’t gone to
bed with me. So Herb more or less shoved me out to fetch her. I wanted to
go and my jealousy changed in a strange second to incredible love and
tenderness for her, whatever her act. She comes on sweet, loving, cooing,
sexual, invincible.
I went out to her in the dark with one candle. “Stephanie, how would
you feel about a three – way?”
“Oh, what a lovely invitation!”
She was sleepy and had a burn on her ass from having reared up into a
heat – lamp after a massage. And wasn’t on the pill. And she came in.
After a persuasion, a vulnerable loving declaration from me of how I wanted
her.
Stephanie was born on Mae West’s birthday. Congruent with body,
sexuality, blondness.
It was so much fun. We all played all night. Stephanie had little
orgasms , on and on—she says it is almost a nuisance!!- just from having her
mound pressed lightly. I was impressed. She is lovely. Finally went
somewhat to sleep after it got light, but in Herb’s dark bedroom on the twobeds – as – one, that wasn’t bad. We were stoned and spaced and glistening.
Shades of David and Doris, but this time Katy had Katy.
Herb really does have almost complete control, as he says. Creating his
life.
And me and Stephanie got the goodies. I’m so excited now.
(Design)
Dear book,
I am going to try to get Herb to go to India with me for at least a week.
I think I will leave some money here in the bank for when I come back.
I should have some coming from my book, too. I think I am capable of
making a simple short journey instead of having to travel all over the east for
a couple of years. But who knows. I am completely full of quandary. If I
weren’t going to India I would probably repeat the EST training (which I
just turned down the opportunity to do, because – and this is the truth – I
1317
feared Herb’s ridicule), get my teeth fixed, and enroll in a fashion design
school. And get my license and be Herb’s chauffeur. What a dilemma!
Herb says the time to travel is for a vacation, after you’ve done all those
other things. Je suis tres confused!
And what about Mother’s plan of going? It is all so strange! I can’t take
anybody’s advice – I just have to do what happens. Becka, in a beautiful
letter today, says that I do not need to go – my life has its flow. But Mama
must come.
I attach the letter, and my reply, printed in black ink on chartreuse paper
with blue mushrooms down one side.
Tuesday
Darling Sarita – one,
Today love flows from me. I have caught a still joy from the still air.
People call me on the phone and my voice caresses them; it has gone
low and warm like a stream in summer. I am so always new, and today it is
that I have just discovered love – letting people be utterly what they are,
playing with that, watching in delight my own reactions, as strange and
wonderful alien as if they belonged to another.
I am letting myself know that I am less than you. Then, when it has said
its piece and flowed through me as many times as it wants, this pain too will
slip away and leave my presence, empty and full.
My delight at what I have done for myself is so profound that it is
indistinguishable from life.
I was writing in my velvet book when I remembered something you said
in the fruitbasket you sent today. That I did not need to go to India, but that
Mother should come. The depth of your love quakes me, Ma Sarita. You
know. You have not seen me since I was lost as a little root on a trampled
forest path, but you know. Sarita, suddenly I weep from joy at my red wall.
It is evening. The hems of my consciousness swoop like small curtains at
my vision, gossamer memories of a stage above eye – level.
I am inside a doubleness of choice and pleasure. To go to India, leaving
home and cosmic lover, taking money – or to stay longer, to establish the
delightful career I have chosen, get my teeth fixed, re-do EST training, be
Herb’s chauffeur if he gets his license taken away for his endless tiny
1318
tickets. Like last night when he made an eager u-turn so we could pick up a
gorgeous hitchhiker, and got cop – stopped, and I chuckling and gloating the
whole time. We are into the loving of chickie – creatures, of all creatures,
and of chickie – creatures most physically. We just spent a weekend of easy
debauchery with Stephanie, Paul’s other ex. My funny sideways little sex
got a definite expansion.
This is almost like one of our former long letters, no, my darling? A
pang of nostalgia, mixed with the joyful knowing that we both know now
what all that is about – how the feelings which wash across our bodies are
ripples in the present, to be a savored and gone, and likewise the concerns
and photographs in our minds. Gone, and gone, and gone again, and nothing
lost, and everything lost.
My ambitions are sweet flies to choose among or not. My thorns are
now sweet caterpillars on the fruit of my body, plump with my juice, turning
to pupae and butterflying away with sex and sunshine and death.
Sarita, I hear you. In my dim room the faces shine from my wall and
vanish like time – lapse forests on the earth’s body.
Yes, Mother will go. She mopes and flies in circles. I will put her on
the plane. With or without me.
Love, Katy
From Ian and Aaron’s squalid room at the end of the hall – “I know you
didn’t, you moron!”
Mama - “Hey, I want that phone, you guys!”
Aaron - “Go get another phone.”
Ian – “What phone?”
Mother – “Ian, I’m going to have to ask you to confine yourself to your
quarters or take a shower.”
Ian – “I don’t have any quarters, all I have is a penny.”
Richard, hair newly cut for his visa hearing, brings in a newspaper with a
picture of Nixon shouting on the front page. Fangs are drawn in green ink at
the corners of his mouth.
Richard – “Would you buy a used pint of blood from this man?”
Mama knocks on my door. “Stephanie is on her way.”
1319
I want to tell you something Herb told me on dazed sleepless euphoric
Saturday, as we drove around Berkeley to the co-op to get groceries for the
dinner. (Cornish game hens, stuffed with livers, garlic, bread and parsley;
onions agrodolce, whole mushrooms in butter, zucchini and red peppers,
bread and wine, after big individual salads. Then, cheeses and fruit and
coffee and a chocolate bundt cake with chocolate glaze and fey blue – and –
red designs on top.)
“By the way, I want to get something clear. When you are ready to have
an orgasm you will have one. It won’t matter it if is with a man or a woman,
from intercourse or orally or manually, or by yourself or with a vibrator.
When you are ready to have one you will have one. I am tired of hearing
you say it has to be this or that way.”
My mind was blown. It seems so obvious now.
“That makes it so much easier, and so much harder,” I said. “And I love
it!”
“Uh- huh.”
The dinner was a great success. Later we got stoned and I twirled round
and round in Herb’s white swivel chair, lifting my feet away from the ferns,
flirting with Pete and Herb. Stephanie fell asleep, or we would have maybe
done a four – way. Damn it.
2 September
Your house is just about exactly the opposite of mine, and the contrast is
blowing my mind.
I wish I had a tape – recorder right now… for the first time it occurs to
me how good that could be, just to talk into it instead of getting lost with all
the writing down.
Oh Jesus.
Here I am at home. I have cried and cried.
The contradictions welled up in me in equal measure and I cried.
Oh Herb’s house. Herb who is such a huge part of my life. If he were
gone I would be my funky room again.
I am expecting him to ask me to move in with him.
And it won’t happen. And I would say no if he did.
1320
I lie.
I don’t lie.
We would find our relationship changing for the worse, I think.
He values his creation too much to want it so encroached upon.
But I could drive around Berkeley.
But I want to live in San Francisco.
But it’s all dirty and besides, my life is changing and the things which
are here are no longer the same for me.
I cannot bear to live with Ian. I don’t want to live at Date St. House.
I love the warm funny funky friendliness of this place.
I hate the street and the miserable hostile brats downstairs.
I want to live in a high clean house with a view and a leisurely desk.
If I lived alone maybe I would write.
I doubt it.
How could I go to India when this thing is strong with Herb.
Because I think he has something I don’t have. It will hurt either way.
It will be joyful either way.
Telling the truth is so wonderful.
I am so hooked on Herb. My veins lust for him. His sexuality is to me
like protein – food, like food for belly – hunger – not as provocative and
haunting as Mick Jagger- type beauty, but deep and subtle and lasting, and
not torturing or nagging, like mouth – hunger.
I lie. It is torturing and nagging. I go down on him and we have smoked
some Oaxacan red and he spaces out moaning and I am naughty and wicked
all over him for hours.
And I am dry and my fever is low and bitter. And I am joyful and my
fever is high and sweet. And I would be ironic if I were not so immediate.
I will go get my teeth fixed and I want that. And I do not care if they
ever get fixed, I am me this way in my funky room.
And I will change my room tomorrow. Finish painting neglected
woodwork, find a desk, rearrange things. I am dissatisfied. And I love
things exactly the way they are, so much.
1321
I can’t stand Ian living here. I want to live someplace else.
At Herb’s house I would mope and become too influenced, which is not
his intention.
It is blowing my mind, these transitions. 3 days at his house, I dread
coming home up the long dirty stairs to my dark red funky room with its torn
red velvet light.
I come home and collapse in thankfulness for my own scene where I can
think whatever I want – I cry.
My mind is nothing. It is so easily wooed.
Herb thinks I am too good for everything.
Herb, love me, applaud me.
There is no sense in making my room look like Herb’s. It can’t be done.
And this place is this place.
18 September
Dear book, how sad and awful I feel. Hopeless.
clothes, future. Why in hell am I alive? I really feel sad.
Hopeless house,
This afternoon, nitrous oxide at the dentist.
The last weekend doing EST was totally incredible. Wonderful. Life is
at best a number three incident.
I think I must go into my space and see what’s happening.
26 September
It was a gorgeous evening, the sky horny as hell. I’m still always
expecting somebody else to be the final authority on my life.
Late night window open
Sewing tired neck
plants leaning out.
sleep.
29 September
hmm
inexplicably, feelin’ pretty good today… and knowing that
feeling good is not the be-all and end - all… guess I’ve done a quota of
worrying about what I’m going to do with my life… it seems to go in cycles
1322
- it is the only major problem left right now - that and the orgasms of
course.
Ah I speak in you so surfacely simply these days – brusquely or not at all
– thing with Herb is considered “thing” secondarily and amusedly – he is I
am.
It’s fun.
In my nice new room, lights on in my soft lamps, preparing to sew-maybe play with the vibrator first – am reading Journey to Ixtlan and
procrastinating sewing, as is my wont.
That I always feel sexy after eating amuses Herb. Blood sugar, he says.
Not sex at all.
Worry, worry, what to do with my life. A failure at 21. Same dilemmas
about India. Slightly more advanced. I’m working into them.
I have a few projects working which are precious, feel fragile, make me
not want to discuss them. Like… well, I’ll tell you later.
Stephanie was over, said that her landlord Michael peeks and skulks,
luhks and listens at the gawage wall when she’s in bed with fwend.
Sheeit… up at 6 a.m. to go to the fleamarket with Denise, Debby etc. to
sell stuff for the Nicks. I’m glad I don’t have any cash to take.
Herb bought me Body Shop lotions and creams today.
Fog in the morning at his house.
24 October
Dear book, I feel harried and hassled. I am letting the pressure of my
success drive build up and up; who knows where it will lead? I am glad that
I’m letting it be. It is strong and constant.
I find myself obsessed with clothes. So maybe I should go into some
work with clothes. I spend most of my time dressing, sewing, bathing, to –
ing and fro – ing, making money for clothes. And out wearing them.
It feels so good to write in you. I’ll fill you up and take your new baby
sister to India with me. Yes, I will fill you before I leave – one month. And
1323
to think I used to fill an entire volume of you in a month! I do love to write.
But I am not Jewish enough about it yet.(As Steve Schutzman the poet said
to me—“I am most Jewish when I am writing poetry.” It shocked me.)
I feel that there is some mystery in where I am at. Where will it lead? I
am even a little proud. Of course.
The How – Great- I- Am syndrome, on which Herb and I plan to write a
book.
(Design)
26 October
Dear book, I was feeling really fine until just now I got a hit of
Switzerland – being down at the Minstrels’ house, sinking into the winter –
feeling, the loneliness I bathed in – (I just now, gazing at but not seeing the
laundromat walls, went over a whole incident. In Germany I appropriated a
pair of David’s trousers and ruined them by washing them. They then fit
me. I refused to acknowledge his anger – I simply felt that I had a right to
his trousers – indeed, all his clothes – and that he was foolish and messy for
kicking up a fuss. Besides, I was so utterly guilty anyway that if I looked at
that I would have to look at everything. David, ultimately, was so forgiving!
Did I tell you I saw him last month at the Pointer Sisters concert in
Berkeley—Herb took me-- and the love and charge that passed between us?
I have a history of leaving lovers when I still love them, and not leaving
them when I don’t.
I wonder if there’s anything pathological about that.)
Herb said last night that I really am great, and all I have to do is prove
that to myself.
After I came home from a fruitful EST session last night he called me. I
realized immediately that I had been stereotyping our relationship in my
head. Herb had picked up on my good growing intense vibes before he
called me, and he was right there. I doubt if he was conscious of it the same
way I was – he was just there. It blew me away. We are both growing.
Herb is at a different place now. His satisfaction with the material
universe has been disturbed. He suffered an exhaustion – anxiety attack last
week. He’s now going to Ben, Mama’s sometime – lover, for bio –
energetics treatments. His financial and automobile situations are very
troubled. He says he wants to get out of his enormous responsibilities.
1324
Did I tell you about the Hitachi “magic wand” vibrator recommended to
me by Shell (plump sexual – therapist – porno – star – recent – EST graduate) (nice lady) – Herb paid for it, I trekked all over town until I found
it. It has a rather unlikely shape- kind of like the Seattle Space Needle laid
on its side31 October
Agh. Writing in you is a raw thing, like masturbating. Writing in you
used to be doing; now it is not – doing. In the terms of Don Juan. I’m still
reading Journey to Ixtlan.
Some unpleasant feelings course around in me. These last days I have
been busy busy. This morning I scrubbed the whole bathroom, dragged in
my muscles by anger that nobody else EVER does it.
Last night I had another interested/ bad dream about my teeth.
Oh, the same old, same old shit! When I woke up this morning I started
worrying again immediately about the dinner I’m going to cook tomorrow
night – or rather, all day tomorrow.
Oh, eeh, agh, I’m telling myself that I am tired. Clothes- washing, rug –
beating, floor – sweeping, dish – washing, garbage – disposing.
My thoughts are a prison. I thrash and thrash and of course get nowhere.
What tiny convoluted things I have worried about for years! Clothes and
food, clothes and food. What typical woman – hood!
There is so much I can’t tell you. I close my eyes and see a swamp in
Florida.
I don’t use my EST techniques specifically very much – I mean like
going into truth process. Although the EST technique is with me always
now, thank God.
I’m really going to have fun making the invitations to the party we’re
going to have on November 30. It’s going to be a big bash up at Herb’s
house, catered and everything.
2 November
A wild night; a night in the city, the city.
1325
Will I ever write again? Oh power, oh power. Today I took my driving
test and failed by 3 points.
Will I ever do anything creative again?
I am so horny, and I need so much to dance. Should I call up Steve
Schutzman (if I see him I will do something regrettable) or wait for Mark to
call, and he won’t because his old lady never gives him the messages? To
go out and dance. The horniness must wait for Sunday night. But that is
ridiculous – that’s after the Nickelettes show, and besides the vibrator has
limited powers – so far I create it only giving me the strained – after
orgasms, not the more satisfying elusive deep ones which come on all by
themselves. But it’s significant that since we got the vibrator I haven’t
masturbated once.
On a typical night with Herb we’ll make love in many different ways,
using the vibrator integrally. One of my favorite ways is me lying down
with his penis in my mouth, and I play with the vibrator at the same time.
We are both getting titillated, and I can call the shots, needn’t feel bad that
he’s observing me. So now… I have created having orgasms and learning to
drive. Two of my former grave impotencies. But I’m not yet allowed to do
either by myself, as it were… and on a typical night I’ll get off 2 or 3 or 4
times. By the last time, Herb is snoring at my side, waking up every now
and then to remember his self – assigned function as my other vibrator;
twiddle a nipple for a second, and then fall asleep again – and I’m sleepful,
drained, my body de-charged. It’s nice. Cozy. And I still wish like mad that
he would go down on me. But he won’t. I can still hardly believe it. Shell
is coming back from New York tomorrow. I’d love it get it on with her.
The more I get off, the hornier I get.
I’ll go back on Monday to take the driver’s test again. Or Tuesday.
Can’t use either of Herb’s cars though. The examiner didn’t like the cracked
windshield on one and the woggly front seat on the other.
Oh book, book.
Alan Rabinowitz, who was in my first EST training, is doing some
carpentry for Herb now. Yesterday I drove into the driveway and talked to
him some and he was no longer an intimidating older person, he was just
Alan. And he said that when I took the training I looked like a little girl, but
now I looked like a woman.
I think I’ll finish you, book, well before the month is out. I’ll have to
cover your sister. To think I started you a year and a half ago!
1326
I consider that I am dumb to sit here and write this deedly daily prosaic
stuff.
Today I drove Joy’s busted – up VW, a little stick shift with a bum
brake, through the windy rush – hour, twilight and ensuing darkness from
Herb’s house to my house. The first time I ever drove a stick shift for more
than 2 blocks. And I did it fine! The wind was strong and gave the little car
a hard time. (Drawing)
My dinner last night was an outrageous success. Roger showed up in
rubber horns and pointed ears and lots of face makeup and ruffled shirt and
jewelry. I was delighted. I think Patsy was scandalized.
Herb and I talked long into the night afterward. He told me that I am to
him a living confirmation of what he knows he is. That I am the first person
in his life to really do that.
Just talked to Herb on the phone. Then tried to find somebody to go
boogie with, but everybody was either too tired, or not at home. Sheeit.
Herb’s gonna call back. They’re celebrating his daughter’s birthday right
now.
And I finished cutting out the white cotton plisse nightgown I’m making
for Mother. I think I’ll go climb in bed and read Don Juan. So Terry can
finally read it.
Mama’s gone to Riverside to pick up her money. I’m afraid I miss her,
dumb though she is.
Monday, November 12
My indulgences in you are seldom. My days of minor creations – little
embroidered books, small stitches on ragged clothes, the occasional spate of
drawing, creating gifts and envelopes and letters – are no longer. I long
towards something larger, a more effective expression. Not necessarily more
effective on me, but on other people. In the cessation of these small joys I
have been bouncing gently along the bottom of myself. I am nowhere, I do
nothing. The newspapers hurt me more than almost anything else – every
column, report, advertisement, editorial, just serves to illustrate how people
are out in the world doing things. Society pages are full of people who have
Made It – or at least made something – designers, psychiatrists, chefs.
People who have adopted that identity, who make things, who do. Who
1327
have a thread of purposeful fun activity running through their lives. I have
nothing. I am so frustrated!
And I have this horrible little message in the back of my head which
says that ambition and frustration are lies. That they are the poison myself
has constructed against being. And I look around me and see how human I
am, that I am just one brand of human being, with all these things inside me.
Just one life to be lived. If, like Joy, I had just inherited $12,000 I think I
would be considerably more excited about it all. I would … buy property, a
car, take Mama out for Thanksgiving dinner.
It is dusk, it is gloomy. An empty can of Shasta diet strawberry sits on
the table beside the glass in which cling tiny artificially – reddened droplets
of fizz.
A man gets not what he deserves, but what he resembles.
A man gets not what he reserves, but what he dissembles.
I think I will frame the tiny colored drawing I did of the first saying.
Framing of pictures is wonderful and important. It is like clothes on a naked
body. Like a drama being presented on a stage. Beautiful things. The
caressing of the core.
A letter from Rebekah this morning. She has typhoid, and is being well
cared for. A discussion with Herb on the phone. “She must be quite a
person, your sister… she really has you intimidated, doesn’t she?”
The cars walk tentatively, like cautious dogs down on the freeway. It is
5:10 p.m. I think I will call Minnies’ Can Do and find out what is happening
tonight.
I love you. I keep thinking I want to write fiction. Or non – fiction, or
anything. I class you as something in between. I feel that I am in a
primitive savage kindergarten, not- doing and not- knowing. But I’m not
not – doing in the Don Juanian sense – that is healing. I am doing. I am
doing trivia. I am doing undoing, I am doing effort and frustration.
I have these inklings that nobody else is responsible. Like, the figures
which come up in my head in the judges’ seat are disqualified on sight. But
the judges’ seat remains, austere and cold as ever, all the more powerful for
the invisibility of its folded arms.
Nobody’s playing at Minnie’s tonight.
1328
At least I know what it’s like to go to the bottom, without friends, self –
expression, or influence. I need to know that, so that I will not be afraid of
it.
16 November
A poem is a pretty, simple thing. It is an engaging thing.
After such a long time of not writing, I have written a poem. The world
doesn’t turn out that many good writers… it could use another one. It could
use me.
What is good. Total subjectivity. Total. So I have complete freedom,
complete power. To work with exactly what is there. To do, say, what?
Tell people how great I am, what a sweet yearning beats in my breast?
I love what Carlos Castaneda wrote. Anything to stop the world. I
would like to do that, when my world has been stopped a bit more. Hee hee
haha, oh delight.
I see you read by a thousand eyes. A woman in a rag – rug room reads
you. Her gray hair is falling in her eyes. Upstairs, an important attic.
I sure write a bunch of dumb stuff.
(Design)
25 November
My head participates in a subtle throbbing.
Book, your successor or rather your daughter is too heavy for the
journey, I fear. I may have to take another.
I am in terror of my life. I am going to India.
Steve is very impressed. I am in love with Steve lately. I invited him to
the party, using my best envelope. An envelope so beautiful that I am
convinced it deserves glassed gallery space in an expensive methodical
gallery where millions would view in awe.
I’m going to have a journey horoscope cast.
Lately I am worried about several insoluble imaginationchildren. How I
am sexed up to Steve and would feel compelled to tell Herb about it if acted
upon. Steve is impressed that I didn’t give in to his seductive ardor, too,
which makes me chuckle. He even came to the Nickelette show. Oh who is
1329
that cute guy? cries Debby of whom lately I have had bizarre and violent
dreams.
I write in you like the indiscriminate pourings of cream off the top of a
warm proteinous udderful of milk.
I lost interest in Herb for a week due to Steve and when I saw Herb
again I saw that I had never even begun to be capable of losing interest; that
Herb is the sky. The sky doesn’t care if you lose interest. So I can lose
interest happily and will. The sky does not kiss my Taurus moon neck in a
Taurus love dance and torture me with its young body. The sky rains
Mandarin dinners and an endless humor and for lack of a better word,
wisdom such as I would die for, and will many times. The bull told me of
the recency of its psychic horns. I was pleased.
It will be the longest journey in the world. I leave love and emptiness to
go to emptiness and love. Thank god for Herb’s scoffing and endless tease.
He wants to keep me here and never will. Venus in Capricorn, Venus in
Virgo. Strange match.
Preoccupation with my body worries me. Visits me.
Fear of age.
And will I finish all the things I have to do in time? Sew clothes for Joy,
make my recycled denim flight bag, make some money painting for Herb?
Party Saturday night. Nickelettes invite you to a bon – voyage – for –
Katy- and – Virginia- birthday – for – Kathy party. We shall see.
Herb’s fine birthday yesterday. Silk shirt stitched full of grandeur,
antelope horn buttons wrong side up. Beige pongee.
An astrology book fit for an astrologer, terrible with accuracy.
Herb is just a Herb, a combination of his elements, and I want him to be
the Mountain.
Two placemats of Levi denim complete with ass – type pocket
containing folded bandana napkin. A must for the groovy fondue dinner we
intimates will have.
A chocolate – smelling brown candle wrapped in Hershey’s Kiss.
Herb impressed. Chocolate marble cake. He bought me my journey
sandals yesterday.
Herb weekends. His endless window.
1330
Tomorrow interview with Tom Cuson of San Francisco Gallery. He
wants poems but would like to change some things.
Mama. I am more in pain when I see her lately.
My room is neat and beautiful. A fitting haven in the austere house. I
am sad for it. I want to move.
In two weeks I will be in India. Rebekah fills my mind. I will live/work
through my connection with her.
27 November
After breakfast, and I am thoughtful. It occurred to me last night that my
longings are so predicated on physical beauty that I could conceivably
unconsciously give up Herb in my search for somebody to feel unworthy of.
Cloudy day. I must sew. I procrastinate, though once I begin, I like the
work. It is one of the last remaining tasks before going.
San Francisco Gallery accepted some poems. I may excerpt the long
passage in you about the junkie place and submit it to them. As fiction.
Change names and soften explicitness. That would be fun.
I have to get to work
I have to get to work.
Rebekah writes that we will go to Baroda in the country instead of
Bombay. We are relieved. Herb says he wants me to experience Bombay.
Baroda promises to be cold.
It does not say on List of Things to Do “write in diary.” It says “sew.”
So.
Herb loves small odd things about me which I would have been hard put
to describe. Neatnesses, conservatisms, innocences. The fires are easy to
see, and unquenchable; but these small things bloom in the light of his
delight. He sees me as forever virginal, and he loves that.
Looking back through you, I see that I slept with so many men so many
reluctant unremarkable times, and that somehow throughout I kept expecting
some reward… and they, the poor dumb creatures, went on their ways.
I found a good and cheaper orthodontist. Last night with all my future
imagined out before me like a Thanksgiving table I remembered that it is
1331
likely I will be wearing silver things on my teeth for the next two years.
Strange. (Didn’t happen. ’02)
Tom Cuson, editor of San Francisco Gallery. His house last night.
Jeanne, his old lady, has a first cousin in Benares, India. He had a round –
the – world ticket, got to Nepal, and said, “well, I don’t think I’m going any
further.” After a year he went to India and has been there three years. One
hears such tales.
***********************************************
Dec. 7
In the airplane.
I am flying into the spectre of my own mystery. The moon is an old
woman dancing on the wing. Below, pools of silver flash tropical and go
black.
You are my lover on whom I place kisses and melodies of glance and
nuance. I have suffered without your bound brother, but the he-velvet was
too heavy and I left it behind. I will buy a new you, for it is evident I think I
need you.
I am going to love the endless curries.
There is nobody out there. I am doing all of this. I have sadness, and
sadness is too whored a word for the piano keys of shadows I have. My
world plays me.
I am creating Rebekah/Sarita as the mountain I have come to climb. I
am open to astonishment. I may see easily and immediately that I am my
own journey. Then again, I may hurt with the jealous pain for a long or
short or neverending time, and watch it as it comes up. And I am already
lost. For that brings me present, and I will surrender to suck the breasts of
India, and grow her milk as my own blood, insidious as coconuts or sperm.
****************************
“One foggy day, the postman came and brought them a letter from a
faraway land called “India.” For the littlest, youngest princess, being very
brave and having followed the tuggings in her belly, had hitchhiked alone,
armed with a knife, her hair in dozens of little braids and wearing the gown
made from a bedspread, over the vast and scary continents to get to India.
She too had had many adventures, and flown in the belly of a huge silver
bird over the water; she too had been in love with a prince who was
definitely a little bit confused about his princelingness.
1332
In the letter from the littlest princess there was a miniature portrait, and
it fell out and fluttered to the pavement as the elder princess unfolded the
thin blue paper. She picked it up. It was of a man – but was it a man? No –
it was a spirit – but more than a spirit. He was laughing.
The elder princess felt a strange sensation in her stomach. “He’s
laughing,” she thought, “why – I haven’t laughed in years!” And she was
filled with a terrible regret. And yet, she was afraid to look at the photo
again; for it seemed to be reminding her of something, deep inside her
backbone and deeper, even, than her vitals. Something she already knew,
and yet which it would upset her entire life to remember. ( And yet, what had
she to lose?)
Her mother, the queen – who – did – not – know – it, took one look at the
portrait and said, “I’m going.” For she, too, was brave. And she, too, had
nothing to lose. But she was older, and she knew she had nothing to lose.
The princess her daughter still trembled, and held back.
But as inevitable as the sunrise, they went. Through a great and unusual
accident, they both had exactly enough money to pay the fare in the silver
bird; and so it happened that around noon on a day which smelt, as all days
smell in India, of fransgipani, and spices, and excrement and urine and
damp, like an old wet wash cloth slapped across your face, they got out of
the belly of the silver bird and greeted with glad cries the younger princess.
But the elder princess stood a little aback, for her sister had changed.
Still long- tressed and slender and beautiful of countenance she was,
but lit by a flower of passion and inner sustenance… a maturity had settled
in her, though she was just eighteen; a beauty glowed out of her and
surrounded her, and she smelled of spices and oriental musks.
She took them to a dwelling-place she had found for them all, in an
ancient wooden house with carved window – decorations, where servants
brought strange fruits for them; and there they bathed and changed their
garments.
And then she took them to meet the man in the portrait.
First they went in a rickshaw to a large building; climbed many stairs;
went into an apartment high up in the compound; and there met the fierce
gargoyle, which said it was called “Laxmi,” who guarded him. It gazed at
them in ferocity and said a disparaging thing or two, but it let them pass.
They went down a corridor and, knocking first, opened a door. First
the youngest princess, then the queen – who was, just this moment, stepping
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over the threshold into her queenliness – stepped in; the eldest princess
stepped – and was hit by a wall of bliss so strong she fell to her knees. A
perfume enveloped her, as of pines and intimate, primeval forest mysteries;
but the intensity of the consciousness in that room was so strong that those
primeval smells had been transformed into light. She was blasted by it. She
felt like a bug in a flashlight beam. She could barely breathe, and yet all
there was to breathe was ecstasy. She didn’t know what to do.
As she stepped forward, as if on a stage before a thousand people (but
all were light, and only her own fears were played back to her
instantaneously) one single thought came, and sat startled in her mind:
“Why, he’s not an Indian – he’s an everything!”
And so it started.
Les Diablerets
Switzerland, Oct‘02
1334