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and pedestrian day is nearly here: we sit watching the dark
becoming lighter and lighter: we sit watching a dead rat at the
curb: it is indisputably a rat, not God: poor R is sleeping inside,
she won’t let us in, she won’t make us breakfast, we are excommunicated, we are happy, we are turned loose to look for breakfast elsewhere: we sit there, buddies, and chat in the dark:
we walk around: we touch fingers and briefly hold hands.
*
N and I sit on a stoop in St M ark’s Place. Hey mister. We are
hungry. The acid is wearing off. The smoke has given us
ravenous appetites. We are tired. Hey mister. Some misters
pass. This one mister takes us to breakfast. He is silent,
watchful, not easy to disarm. Mister turns out to be not such
an easy fuck. N fucks him and falls asleep. Mister doesn’t
sleep. Mister probably hasn’t slept in months. Mister is nuts. I
get Mister for hours. N sleeps like a log.
*
Mister is white, lean, wiry, crew-cut, muscled, tense, wired to
go off. A coil ready to spring. Full of inexplicable rushes of
violence. He fucks like he hates it. It never gets him anywhere.
He concentrates, he fucks. You can’t feel much except his concentration. He is doing some martial art of the thighs, over and over, trying to make it perfect, get it right: it doesn’t touch
him: then the violence pours through him, impersonal, and he
is in a frenzy of fuck: then, more tense but calmer, he concentrates, he fucks. Eventually I sleep. I don’t know how or why.
When I wake up it is nearly night again. He is taking us to
the beach. The heat here in the storefront is scalding; treacherous, wet steam. Our skin is raw and burning. Our clothes are wet. Our eyes are almost swollen shut. It is hard to breathe.
Heat hurts our lungs. Mister has a car. He is giving us dinner.
We are going with him to the beach.
He drives like a maniac, but we only feel the breeze. The car
barely touches the road. It swerves. We leave the city behind.
The air gets less hot. We see the city lights trailing behind us
as we swerve and curve in the airborne car. We cool down
enough to be afraid.
The car stops, and there is a beach and an ocean. It is endlessly deserted. There are no cars. There are no people. There is a full moon and it is nearly light on the beach. The water
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shines. It advances up against the beach. The waves are small
and delicate. The ocean is tame but it goes on forever. It goes
out as far as we can see, way past the moon. We are on the
beach. Mister wants some sex. N whispers to me that she can’t
fuck, she is bleeding again. All summer she has had this mysterious bleeding. I tease her that she wants to get out of fucking this creep. But still: she is bleeding, not menstruation, hemorrhaging: she can’t be fucked. She and I make love for him on the beach. It is not enough. He is wired, tense, has spasms of
violence, shows us his knife. N holds me down from behind,
both arms. He turns away one minute, a modest gesture unzipping his fly. She grins ear to ear. I try to get loose watching her grin. She is strong and I can’t. She holds me down. He
pulls down his pants. He fucks me. I get dressed. N and I sit
and watch the ocean. N and I sit and watch the moon. He
