strong by drinking it and it’s a magnificent lover, taking you
whole. But I love ju st being near it in any w ay, shape, or form.
I would like to be pure like it is and I’d like to have only pure
things around me; I wish everything I’m near or I, touch could
be as perfect. I feel it’s very beautiful and if I ever die I wouldn’t
mind having a bottle o f it buried with me, if someone would
spring for it: one bottle o f Stoli hundred proof in honor o f me
and m y times, forever. I’d drink it slow, over time. It’d make
the maggots easier to take, that’s for sure. It does that now.
They ain’t all maggots, o f course. I been with people who
matter. I been with people who achieved something in life. I
want excellence myself. I want to attain it. There’s this woman
married to a movie star, they are damned nice and damned
rich, they take me places, to parties and dinners, and I eat
dinner with them at their house sometimes and she calls me
and gets me in a cab and I go with her. I met her because I was
w orking against the Vietnam War some more. I got back to
N ew Y ork in Novem ber 1972. It was a cold winter. I had
nothing; was nothing; I had some stories I was writing; I slept
on the floor near someone’s bed in a rented room. Nixon
bombed a hospital in North Vietnam. All these civilians died. I
couldn’t really stand it. I went to my old peace friends and I
started helping out: demonstrations, phone calls, leaflets,
newspaper ads, the tricks o f the trade don’t change. I had this
idea that important Amerikans— artists, writers, movie stars,
all the glitz against the War— should go to North Vietnam sort
o f as voluntary hostages so either N ixon would have to stop
the bombing or risk killing all them. It would show how venal
the bombings were; and that they killed Vietnamese because
Vietnamese were nothing to them, just nothing; and it was
morally right to put yourself with the people being hurt.
Inside yourself you felt you had to stop the War. Inside
yourself you felt the War turned you into a murderer. Inside
yourself you couldn’t stand the Vietnamese dying because this
government was so fucking arrogant and out o f control.
There was a lot o f us who never stopped thinking about the
War, despite our personal troubles; sometimes it was hard not
to have it drive you completely out o f your mind— if you let it
sink in, how horrible it was, you really could go mad and do
terrible things. So I got hooked up with some famous people
who wanted to stop the War; some had been in the peace
movement before, some just came because o f the bombings.
We wanted to stop the bombing; we wanted to pay for the
hospital; we wanted to be innocent o f the murders. The U . S.
government was an outlaw to us. The famous people gave
press conferences, signed ads, signed petitions, and some even
