He was hard and nasty and arrogant but politically he was a
pacifist. He looked like a bum but he was rich. He ordered
everyone around and wrote poems. He was an anarchist. M y
old room had to stay empty for him, even though he had his
own apartment, or studio as he called it, and never told her
when he was showing up. A friend o f hers gave me a room for
a few months in a brownstone on West 14th Street— pretty
place, civilized, Italian neighborhood, old, with Greenwich
Village charm. The room belonged to some man in a mental
institution in Massachusetts. It was a nutty room all right.
T w o rooms really. The first w asn’t wider than both your arms
outstretched. There was a cot, a hot plate, a tiny toilet, a teeny
tiny table that tipped over i f you put too much on it. The
second was bigger and had windows but he filled it up so there
wasn’t any room left at all: a baby grand piano and
humongous plants taller than me, as tall as some trees, with
great wide thick leaves stretched out in the air. It was pure
menace, especially how the plants seemed to stretch out over
everything at night. They got bigger and they seemed to
move. Y ou could believe they were coming toward you and
sometimes you had to check. The difference between people
who have something and me is in how long a night is. I have
listened to every beat o f m y heart waiting for a night to end; I
have heard every second tick on by; I’ve heard the long pauses
between the seconds, enough time to die in, and I’ve waited,
barely able to breathe, for them to end. D aylight’s safer. The
big brown bugs disappear; they only come out at night and at
night yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so you can’t help but
see them, you don’t really always know whether they’re real
or not, you see them in your mind or out o f the corner o f your
eye, yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so if you see one slip
past the corner o f your eye in the dark you will start waiting in
fear for morning, for the light, because it chases them away
and you can’t; nothing you can do will. Same for burglars;
same for the ones who come in to get you; daylight; you wait
for daylight; you sit in the night, you light up the room with
phony light, it’s fake and dim and there’s never enough, the
glare only underlines the menace, you can see you’re beseiged
but there’s not enough light to vaporize the danger, make it
dissolve, the way sunlight does when finally it comes. Y ou can
sleep for a minute or two, or maybe twenty. Y ou don’t want
to be out any longer than that. You don’t get undressed. Y ou
stay dressed always, all the time, your boots on and a knife
right near you or in your hand. Y ou get boots with metal
reinforced tips, no matter what. Y ou don’t get under the
covers. Y ou don’t do all those silly things— milk and cookies,
Johnny Carson, now I lay me down to sleep. Y ou sit
