The world is divided that way now: the straight adults, old
people; and us. It is that way.
*
On St Mark’s Place the police are always out in large numbers,
57
hassling the hippies. Where we live there are never any police,
no matter who gets hurt or how bad. It takes a riot to bring
them out. Then they shoot.
The flower girls and boys abound in other parts of the
neighborhood, not near us.
We are not them and not not them. N grew up in a swamp
in the South, oldest child, four boys under her, father abandoned family, became a religious fanatic after running whores for a while, came back, moved the family North, sent her to a
girls’ school to get a proper upbringing, then ran off again:
like me, poor and half orphaned. Like me she gets a scholarship
to a rich girls’ college. We meet there, the outcast poor, exiled
among the pathetic rich. We don’t have money hidden away
somewhere, if only we would behave. Her mother, my father,
have nothing to give. She has other children to feed. He is sick,
says nothing, does nothing, languishes, a sad old man with a
son killed in Vietnam and a dirty daughter on dirty streets. N
and I are poor now: poorer even than when we were children:
nothing but what we get however we get it. But also we are
white and smart and well-educated. Do we have to be here or
not?
We can’t be lacquer-haired secretaries. There is no place else
for us. The flower children are like distant cousins, the affluent
part of the family: you hear about them but it doesn’t mean
you can have what they have. They wear pretty colors and
have good drugs, especially hallucinogens, and they decorate
the streets with paint and scents: incense, glitter: fucking them
is fun sometimes but often too solemn, they bore with their
lovey pieties: but we didn’t leave anything behind and we got
nothing to go back to.
*
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty: those years. The men numbered in
the thousands. At first I was alone, then, with her, I wasn’t.
This was one summer. We also had a winter and a spring
before.
*
Every time we needed petty cash: and when we didn’t.
*
We took women for money too, but with more drama, more
plot, more plan. They had to be in love or infatuated. You had
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to remember their names and details of their childhood. They
