Mercy

I take the bills and crush them into my pocket and I walk, I run, I light down the stairs and out the building, I leave my quiet room, and I hit the streets and I walk, fast, dedicated, determined, stubborn, filled with fury, spraying piss and vinegar, to Max’s, about twelve blocks from where I live, an artists’ restaurant and bar, because I know it will be filled with ramrod hard noise and heat, a crush of hard, noisy men, artists and poseurs and I don’t know the difference, poseurs and the famous and I don’t know the difference, it’s a modern crime but I can’t concentrate on it enough to remember the ones you’re supposed to know, except Warhol because he’s so strange and he’d stand out anywhere and I don’t want to go near him; but the difference mostly is that I think I am the artist, not them, but you can’t say that and it’s hard even to keep thinking it though I don’t know why it’s so hard, maybe because girls aren’t ever it; but all the poseurs and all the famous will be at the tables where I can’t go, even if I had money to eat they wouldn’t let me eat there, not alone, and I won’t be one of the pleading girls who is begging to be allowed to go to the tables, I will just get a stool at the bar if the guy at the door lets me in, he might not and usually I am too shy to defy him and I hang tight with a man but tonight I want in myself, I want the noise and the hard edge and the crush and I want to drink, I want to find a place at the bar for myself and it’s got my name on it even though I don’t got no name for the purposes of the man at the door but the stool’s mine and I will drink and I will stay as long as I have bills in front of me and it’s an unwritten law about girls, that they don’t let you sit anywhere, so you never quite understand why you can be somewhere sometimes and not the same place the next time and you figure out you got to hang on to a man and you are his shadow, like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on. It sure insures a steady flow of affection woman to man if you can’t even sit down without one.

The bait’s got a theory; the bait’s finding a practice, working it out; the bait’s going to write it down and she don’t have to use words, she’ll make signs, in blood, she’s good at bleeding, boys, the vein’s open, boys, the bait’s got plenty, each month more and more without dying for a certain long period of her life, she can lose it or use it, she works in broad strokes, she makes big gestures, big signs; oh and honey there’s so much bait around that there’s going to be a bloodbath in the old town tonight, when the new art gets its start.

My mama showed that fiction was delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a pragmatist, a maker of reality, a shaper of history, an orchestrator of events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink. The Nazis, of course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink. You can’t even say it would solve the problem to have numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names unless we are all zero, 0, we could all be 0; Pauline Reage already suggested it, of course, but she’s a demagogue and a utopian, a kind of Stalinist of female equality, she wants us all equal on the bottom of anything that’s mean enough to be on top; it has a certain documentary quality.

I thought about walls pretty much all the time. You should be able to just put up walls, it should be possible. There’s literally no end to the places walls could go without inconveniencing anyone, except they would have to walk around. They say a roof over your head but it’s walls really that are the issue; you can just think about them, all their corners touching or all lined up thin like pancakes, painted a pretty color, a light color because you don’t want it to look too small, or you can make it more than one color but you run the risk of looking busy, somewhat vulgar, and you don’t want it to look gray or brown like outside or you could get sad. There’s got to be some place in heaven where God stores walls, there’s just walls, stacked or standing up straight like the pages of a book, miles high and miles wide running in pale colors above the clouds, a storage place, and God sees someone lost and He just sends them down four at a time.

There’s a special freedom for girls; it doesn’t get written down in constitutions; there’s this freedom where they use you how they want and you say I am, I choose, I decide, I want—after or before, when you’re young or when you’re a hundred—it’s the liturgy of the free woman—I choose, I decide, I want, I am—and you have to be a devout follower of the faith, a fanatic of freedom, to be able to say the words and remember the acts at the same time; devout. You really have to love freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the chain of being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud couldn’t even find you under a microscope.

...and I went to the peace office and instead of typing letters for the peace boys I wrote to newspapers saying I had been hurt and it was bad and not all right and because I didn’t know sophisticated words I used the words I knew and they were very shocked to death; and the peace boys were in the office and I refused to type a letter for one of them because I was doing this and he read my letter out loud to everyone in the room over my shoulder and they all laughed at me, and I had spelled America with a “k” because I knew I was in Kafka’s world, not Jefferson’s, and I knew Amerika was the real country I lived in, and they laughed that I couldn’t spell it right.