several times, hard in the face, holding me up so he could keep
hitting. He fucked me and left. I had another lover coming, a
woman I had been waiting for weeks to see, married, hard to see.
I picked myself up and forgot about him. She was shameless: she
liked the bruises, the fresh semen. He didn’t use the condom.
Either time.
*
We proceed with our film project. We are intensely committed
to it, for the sake of art. The politics of it is mine, a hidden
smile behind my eyes. We call a famous avant-garde film critic.
He says he will come to see us at midnight. At midnight he
comes. We sit in the front room, huddled on the floor. He is
delicate, soft-spoken, a saintly smile: he likes formal, empty
filmic statements not burdened by content: our film is some
baroque monster in his presence, overgrown with values and
story and plot and drama. It will never have this appearance
again. Despite his differences with us— aesthetic, formal,
ethereal— he will publish an interview with us to help us raise
money. We feel lifted up, overwhelmed with recognition: what
he must see in us to do this for us, a pure fire. We wait for the
other shoe to drop.
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But he sits there, beatific. We can interview each other and
send it to him along with photographs of us. He drinks our
pathetic iced tea. He smiles. No shoe drops. He leaves.
The next days we spend in a frenzy of aesthetic busywork.
We take pencils in hand and plot out long, interesting conversations about art. We try to document an interesting, convoluted discussion of film. We discuss Godard at some length and write
down for posterity our important criticisms of him. We are
brassy, hip, radical, cool. We haunt the photo machines at
Woolworth’s, taking artistic pictures of ourselves, four poses
for four quarters. We use up all our change. We hustle more.
Excuse me, sir, but someone just stole my money and I don’t
have a subway token to get home with. Excuse me, sir, I am
very hungry and can’t you spare a quarter so I can get some
food. Excuse me, sir, I just lost my wallet and I don’t have bus
fare home.
Then we go back to the machine and pose and look intense
and avant-garde. We mess up our hair and sulk, or we try
grinning, we stare into the hidden camera, looking intense,
looking deep, looking sulky and sultry and on drugs.
We write down some more thoughts on art. We pick the
photos we want. We hustle for money for stamps. Excuse me,
sir, my child is sick and I don’t have any money to buy her
medicine.
The critic prints our interview. He doesn’t print our
photographs. We are famous. Our thoughts on film and
art are in the newspaper. We wait for people to send us
