their fucking ignorance against them; ignorance is a synonym
in such a situation for arrogance and arrogance is tonnage and
in jujitsu you use your opponent’s weight against him and you
do it if yo u ’re weak or poor too, because it’s all you have; and if
someone doesn’t know you’re human they’re a Goddamn fool
and they got a load o f ignorance to tip them over with. Y ou
ain’t got
understand— a chance; you got a chance because the bait’s
going to get it, and there’s going to be a lot o f w riggling things
jum ping o ff G o d ’s stick. I live in this real fine, sturdy tenement
building made out o f old stone. They used to have immigrants
sleeping in the hallways for a few pennies a night so all the
toilets are out there in the halls. They had them stacked at
night; men sleeping on top o f each other and women selling it
or not having a choice; tenement prostitution they call it in
books, how the men piled in the halls to sleep but the women
had to keep putting out for money for food. They did it
standing up. N o w you walk through the hall hoping there’s
no motherfucker with a knife waiting for you, especially in the
toilets, and if you have to pee, you are scared, and i f you have
to shit, it is fully frightening. I go with a knife in m y hand
always and I sleep with a knife under m y pillow, always. I
have not had a shit not carrying a knife since I came here. I got
a bank account. I am doing typing for stupid people. I don’t
like to make margins but they want margins. I think it’s better
i f each line’s different, if it flows like a poem, if it’s uneven and
surprising and esthetically nice. But they want it like it’s for
soldiers or zombies, everything lined up, left and right, with
hyphens breaking words open in just the right places, which I
don’t know where they are. I type, I steal but less now, really
as little as possible though I will go to waitress hell for stealing
tips, I know that, I will be a prisoner in a circle o f hell and they
will put the faces o f all the waitresses around me and all their
shabby, hard lives that I made worse, but stealing tips is easy
and I am good at it as I have been since childhood and when I
have any m oney in m y pocket I do truly leave great chunks o f
it and when I am older and rich I will be profligate and if I ever
go broke in m y old days it will be from making it up to every
waitress alive in the world then, but this generation’s getting
fucked unavoidably. Someday I will write a great book with
the lines m oving like waves in the sea, flowing as much as I
want them. I’m Andrea is what I will find a deep w ay to
express in honor o f m y mama who thought it up; a visionary,
though the vision couldn’t withstand what the man did to me
early; or later, the man, in the political sense. I make little
amounts o f m oney and I put them in the bank and each day I
go to the bank for five dollars, except sometimes I go for two
