pride, and I need him to teach me; I need to learn it— defiance,
the kind a bullet can’t stop. I don’t know i f he’s kind to women
or not and it worries me but I put it aside because there’s what I
know about that bed o f pain he’s cuffed to; I think I’m
annihilated inside by it; I think I’m shot to hell inside, with
nothing but gangrene everywhere there was a wound; I see, I
feel, an inner collapse that comes from the humiliation o f how
they do you on the bed o f pain; bang bang. I tell him I know
the man; but I don’t know if he knows what I mean. I know
the man. He acts to me with respect as if he grasps m y
meaning. I am trying to say, without saying, that the man
fucked me too; but I don’t know how to say I became it and he
didn’t and now I’m refusing to be it or I’m in the process and
that there’s profound injustice in making someone it, in
crushing them down so their insides are fucked in perpetuity. I
die for men to admire, from a stance o f parity; I admire Huey; I
am struggling for parity, what I see as his revolutionary
dignity and self-definition, his bravery— not in defying
authority, I been through that, but in upending the reality that
said what he was and what was on top o f him. He sends me
poems and m axims, and I am thinking whether to send him
some. I love him. I think maybe he could be for women. In
some speeches he says so. He says men have been arrogant
over women and there’s new freedoms women need to have.
During the days I type for four dollars an hour, which means
that if I am prepared to go ape-shit or stir crazy I could
certainly make up to thirty-two dollars a day, on some days;
but I can only stand to do it four hours or maybe three, and I
really couldn’t stand to do it every day, although I have tried to
for the money, I have tried; if I could do three hours every day
I would be fine, unless something happened. It’s just that I do
it and I do it and I do it and not much time has elapsed it turns
out and I get bored and restless as if m y mind is physically
lifting itself out o f m y head and hitting the walls like some
trapped fly. I feel a profound distaste for it, sitting there and
doing this stupid shit. I feel a bitterness, almost guilt or
remorse, it’s unbearable in the minute or at that time as if I’m
betraying being alive, there’s too much m oving in me and I
cannot fucking waste it in this chickenshit way. It’s not a
matter o f having an idea o f a picture o f life, or taking exception
to the idea o f typing or being a secretary or doing something o f
the sort, I don’t have some prior idea o f how I should be or
how life should be, a magazine picture in my head, you know,
or from television, or from the romances other people say they
want. It ain’t a thought in any sense at all. It’s that I am not her
and I cannot be her, I fucking am not her, I can’t do it, I can’t sit
