and dispossession, a place barricaded from weather and wind
and wet.
Each day— each and every day— I walked, six hours, eight
hours, so as not to be poisoned and die. Each day there was no
way to stay inside and also to breathe because the wind did
not move the fumes any more than it moved the cold: both
were permanent and penetrating, staining the lungs, bruising
the eyes. Each day, no matter how cold or wet or ugly or dusty
or hot or wretched, the windows were open and I walked:
anywhere: no money so there was little rest: few stops: no
bourgeois indulgences: just cement. And each night, I crawled
back home, like a slug, dragging the day’s fatigue behind me,
dreading the cold open exposed night ahead. In my room,
where I worked writing, the windows were never closed because the stench and poison were too thick, too choking. After midnight, I could close two windows in the living room just
so no one went in it and just so they were open again by 6
am when the cooks heated up the grease to begin again.
Sometimes, in my room, writing, my fingers were jammed
stiff from the cold. Sometimes the typewriter rebelled, too
cold to be pushed along. I found a small electric heater, and
if I placed it just right, out of the wind but not so close to
me that my clothes would burn, my fingers would regain
feeling and they would begin to bend subtly and hit the right
keys, clumsy, slow, but moving with deliberation. Less
numbed, they moved, a slow dance of heroic movement:
words on a page.
Each night, until dawn was finally accomplished, fully alive
101
and splendid, I wrote, and then I would crawl, broken-hearted
and afraid of dying, to one small distant room, the size of a
large closet, where the fumes were less, and I would sleep on
the floor on an old Salvation Army mattress with springs that
some reformed alcoholic had never quite finished under an
open window. I would dream: oh, Freud, tell me, what could it
mean: of cold, of stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Morbid
violences and morbid defeats: cement, rain, wind, ice. Time
would pass: I would tremble: I would wake up screaming:
driven back to sleep to be warmer, I would dream of cold, of
stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Then, it would be time
to wake up. I would be tired and trembling, so tired. I would
walk, six hours, eight hours. After the first two winters I never
got warm. Even in the hell of tenement heat, I never got warm.
I dreaded cold like other people are afraid of being tortured:
could they stand it, would they tell, would they beg, would
they die first right away, struck down by dread, would they
dirty their pants, would they beg and crawl. I wanted to surrender but no one would accept my confession and finish me off.
He kissed me against my will and then I walked home,
