the world, no beautiful fairy godmother to wave her wand so
you can stop sifting through ashes and go to the ball. I slept
outside the kitchen in m y old friend’s apartment; I wrote
stories, slow, real slow, over and over, a sentence again and
again, I did peace stuff against the War, I got food from bars
mostly. Y ou go during happy hour and you only need one
drink. Y ou can get a man to get it for you or if you have the
change you can do it and then there’s warm food and you can
eat; they make it real fatty usually but it’s good, heavy and
warm and they bring out more and more until happy hour’s
over. I met the actor and his wife and she took me everywhere,
all around. Sometime I moved into the loony’s room with the
carnivorous plants and I wrote stories, slow, real slow, word
by word, then starting over. I had nothing and I was nothing
and I couldn’t tell no one how I was hurt from being married.
And I kept drinking with the painters. I liked the noisy bars
and the people all excited with drinking and art and all the love
affairs going on all around, with all the torment, because it
wasn’t m y torment, it didn’t come near m y torment. It was
distracting, a kind o f static that interrupted the pain I was
carrying. I got the peace group to give me seventy-five dollars
a week and I worked every morning for them, making phone
calls, writing leaflets, mimeographing, typing, doing shit. I
said I was a writer i f someone asked. I worked on m y stories,
slow; I stayed alive as best I could; I waited through long
nights, I waited. N o w it’s bitter cold; a bitter cold night;
unusual in N ew Y ork; with the temperature under zero; with
the wind blowing about fifteen miles an hour, trying to kill
you, cutting you in half and then in half again, you can’t
withstand it, there’s nothing can keep it from running through
you like a knife. I’m in m y little room, the loon y’s room; I’m
staying calm; I don’t like being alone, it’s hard, but I’ m
thinking I’m okay, I’m inside, I’m okay; I’m thinking I will
take out m y notebook and w ork, sit with the words, make
sentences, cross words out, you hear a kind o f music in your
head and you transpose it into words but the words sit there,
block letters, just words, they don’t sing back, so you have to
keep making them better until they do, until they sing back to
you, you look at it and it moves like a song. Y ou hear it
m oving, there’s a buzz on it and the buzz is music, not noise; it
can be percussive but it’s still lyrical, it sings. It’s a delicate
thing, knowing when it’s right. At the same time it’s like
being in first grade where you had to write the words down
careful in block letters and you had to make them perfect;
because you keep trying like some six-year-old to make the
words perfect so they look back at you and they are right, as if
there’s this one right w ay and it sits there, pure and clear, when
yo u ’re smart enough, finally, to put it on the page in front o f
