city in the inevitability of history. Another had M ao’s red book
and did exegesis on the text while joints were handed to him
by enthralled cadres. Another knew about the role of the
tobacco industry in upholding Western imperialism: he
denounced the smokers as political hypocrites and bourgeois
fools. Meanwhile, the music was loud, the porno movies played
on the walls as Santa fucked a blond woman in black lace, the
hash was smoked pound after pound.
The women stood out. Mostly there were men but the women
did not fade into the background. There was M, who later
became a famous dominatrix near Atlantic City. She was over six
feet tall and she wore a short leather skirt, about crotch level. Her
thighs were covered with thick scars. She had long, straight,
blonde hair. She wanted to know if I had carried guns for the
Black Panthers. Since I had been too young then, she wouldn’t
have anything to do with me. There was E, an emaciated, catty
little thief: girlfriend of a major ideologist of the counterculture
revolution, a small, wiry, cunning, nervous, bespectacled man:
she wore government surplus, guerilla style: they were arrested
for stealing money from parking meters. You can’t make a
great plan on an empty stomach, he told me. There was a
bright, beautiful woman who looked like the Dutch Boy boy,
only she lit up from inside and her smile was like sunlight. Her
boyfriend was dour, officious, a functionary in the huge,
government-run building that housed the radical youth and the
hashish, he made sure the porno movies were on the right
walls at the right times. There was Frau B, a dowager administrator, suburban, having an affair with the head honcho, an ex-colonel in an occupying army: they kept the lid on for the
government. And then I too became a fixture: the girlfriend,
then the wife. The American. The only brunette. The innocent
by virtue of Americanism. They kept Europe’s feudal sex
secrets hidden. I thought I invented everything. Smoking dope
in their great painted rooms they seemed innocent: I thought
I was the old one.
In these rooms, he looked up, his face all questioning and
tender and sad: and I kissed him.
*
Once you want to be together in Northern Europe it is the
same all over. There is nowhere to go.
81
In the South there are beaches and old ruins. Boys sneak girls
somewhere, some flat place, and other boys hide behind rocks
or pieces of ancient walls and watch. In the North it is cold.
There are the streets, too civilized for sex. There are no rooms,
no apartments, even adult men live with their parents. One is
sneaked into a tiny bedroom in the parents’ house: hands are
