Mercy (15 page)

made a documentary showing the real shit, some intrepid

filmmaker, some hero. It never happened. N o one ever

showed the real shit because it isn’t photogenic, it doesn’t

stand still, people just live it, they don’t know it or conceptualize it or pose for it or pretend it and you don’t get to do it over i f you make a mistake. Y ou just get nailed. Fucked or hit

or hurt or ripped o ff or poisoned with bad shit or yo u ’re just

dead; there’s no art to it. There’s more o f me stuck in that old

night than anywhere. Y o u don’t just remember it; it remem

bers you; Andrea, it says, I know you. Y ou do enough in it and

it takes you with it and I’m there in it, every night on every

street. When the dark comes, I come, every night, on every

street, until N ew Y ork is gone; I’m alive there in the dark

rubbing up against anything flesh-and-blood, not a poor,

homeless girl but a brazen girl-for-peace, hungry, tired,

waiting for you, to rub up against you, take what you have,

get what you got; peace, freedom, love, a fuck, a shy smile,

some quarters or dimes or dollars. The dark’s got a little anger

in it m oving right up against you. You can feel it pushing right

up against you now and then, a burning flash across your

thing; that’s me, I’m there, Andrea, a charred hallucination,

you know the w ay the dark melts in front o f you, I’m the

charred thing in the melting dark, the dark fire, dark ash

burned black; and you walk on, agitated, to find a living one,

not a shade stuck in midnight but some poor, trembling, real

girl, hungry enough even to smile at you. That’s m y home

you’re misbehaving in with your mischievous little indulgences, your secret little purchases o f girls and acts, because I was on every street, in every alley, fucked there, slept there,

got drugs there, found a bed for my weary head; oh, it got

weary; curled up under something, a little awake. C an’t be.

N o one can live that way. C an’t be. Isn’t true. C an’t be. Was.

Was. I wasn’t raped really until I was eighteen, pretty old.

Well, I wasn’t really raped. Rape is just some awful word. It’s a

w ay to say it was real bad; worse than anything. I was a pacifist

and I didn’t believe in hurting anyone and I wouldn’t hurt

anyone. I had been eighteen for a couple o f months; o f legal

age. It was winter. Cold. Y ou don’t forget winter. I was

w orking for peace groups and for nonviolence. It wouldn’t be

fair to call it rape; to him; it wouldn’t be fair to him. I wasn’t a

virgin or anything; he forced me but it was m y own fault. I

was working at the Student Peace Union then and at the War

Resisters League. I typed and I answered phones and I tried to

be in the meetings but they didn’t really ever let me talk and I

helped to organize demonstrations by calling people on the

phones and I helped to write leaflets. They didn’t really believe

in rape, I think. I couldn’t ask anyone or tell anyone because

they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this

word they used all the time. Women were it more than

anybody. They were hip or cool or hipsters or bohemians or

all those words you could see in newspapers on the Low er East

Side but anytime a woman said something she was bourgeois.

I knew what it meant but I didn’t know how to say it w asn’t

right. They believed in nonviolence and so did I, one hundred

percent. I w ouldn’t hurt anybody even if he did rape me but he

probably didn’t. Men were supposed to go crazy and kill

someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn’t hurt him for raping

me because they didn’t believe in hurting anyone and because I

was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the

people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you

were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and

needed to be fucked more or to begin with. At the Student Peace

Union there were boys m y age but they were treated like grown

men by everyone around there and they bossed me around and

didn’t listen to anything I said except to make fun o f it and no one

treated me as if I knew anything, which maybe I didn’t, but the

boys were pretty ignorant pieces o f shit, I can tell you that. I was

confused by it but I kept working for peace. These boys all called

momma at home; I heard them. I didn’t. There were adults,

some really old, at the War Resisters League but to me they

weren’t anything like the adults from school. They were heroes

to me. They had gone to jail for things they believed in. They

weren’t afraid and they didn’t follow laws and they didn’t act

dead and they had sex and they didn’t lie about it and they didn’t

act like there was all the time in the world because they knew

there wasn’t. They stood up to the government. They weren’t

afraid. One had been a freedom rider in the South and he got

beaten up so many times he was like a punched-out prizefighter.

He could barely talk he had been beaten up so much. I didn’t try

to talk to him or around him because I held him in awe. I thought

I would be awfully proud if I was him but he wasn’t proud at all,

just quiet and shy. Sometimes I wondered if he could remember

anything; but maybe he knew everything and was just humble

and brave. I have chosen to think so. He did things like I did,

typed and put out mailings and put postage on envelopes and ran

errands and got coffee; he didn’t order anyone around. They

were all brave and smart. One wrote poems and lots o f them

wrote articles and edited newsletters and magazines. One wrote

a book I had read in high school, not in class o f course, about

freedom and utopia, but when I asked him to read a poem I

wrote— I asked a secretary who knew him to ask him because I

was too shy— he wouldn’t and the secretary said he hated

women. He had a wife and there was a birthday party for him

one day and his wife brought a birthday cake and he wouldn’t

speak to her. Everyone said he had boys. His wife was

embarrassed and just kept talking, just on and on, and everyone

was embarrassed but no one made him talk to her or thank her

and I stayed on the outside o f the circle that was around him to

think if it was possible that he hated women, even his wife, and

w hy he would be mean to her as if she didn’t exist. Y o u ’d thank

anyone for a birthday cake. From his book I thought he was

wise. I thought he loved everyone. And if he hated women and

everyone knew it how come they were so nice to him because

hate wasn’t nonviolence. When he died a few years later I felt

relieved. I wondered if his wife was sad or if she felt relieved. I

suppose she was sad but why? I thought he was this one hateful

man but the others were the great I-Thous, the real I-Thous;

fighting militarism; wanting peace; writing; I wanted to be the

same. The I-Its were the regular people on the streets dressed in

suits all the same like robots busy going to business and women

with lacquered hair in outfits. But when the boys who wanted to