want to have to be worried about being asked to leave or made
to leave because I’m ju st some impoverished girl or gash that’s
loose. I will stare at the clear liquid, crystal, in the glass, and I
will contemplate it as a beautiful thing and I will feel the pain
that is monumentally a part o f me and I will keep drinking and
I will feel it lessen and I will feel the warmth spread out all over
me inside and I will feel the surging, hard, nasty river go
warmer and smoother and silkier as the Stoli runs with it, as it
falls from top to bottom inside me, first it’s on the surface o f
the river, then it’s deeper down in it, then it’s a silk, burning
stream, a great, warm stream, and it will gentle the terrible
river o f pain. I will think deeply; about art; about life; I will
keep thoughts pouring through me as inside I get warmer and
calmer and it hurts less, the hurt dims and fades or hides under
a fucking rock, I don’t care; and m y brow will curl, you know,
sullen, troubled, melancholy, as if I’m some artist in m y own
right myself; and the noise will be beautiful to me, part o f a
new esthetic I am cultivating, and I will hear in it the tumult o f
bare existence and the fierce resonance o f personal pain as if it’s
a riff from Charlie Parker to God and I will hear in it the
anarchic triumph o f m y own individual soul over the deep evil
that has maimed me. I take the bills and crush them into m y
pocket and I walk, I run, I light down the stairs and out the
building, I leave my quiet room, and I hit the streets and I
walk, fast, dedicated, determined, stubborn, filled with fury,
spraying piss and vinegar, to M ax’s, about twelve blocks from
where I live, an artists’ restaurant and bar, because I know it
will be filled with ramrod hard noise and heat, a crush o f hard,
noisy men, artists and poseurs and I don’t know the difference,
poseurs and the famous and I don’t know the difference, it’s a
modern crime but I can’t concentrate on it enough to
remember the ones you’re supposed to know, except Warhol
because he’s so strange and he’d stand out anywhere and I
don’t want to go near him; but the difference mostly is that I
think I am the artist, not them, but you can’t say that and it’s
hard even to keep thinking it though I don’t know w hy it’s so
hard, maybe because girls aren’t ever it; but all the poseurs and
all the famous will be at the tables where I can’t go, even if I
had money to eat they w ouldn’t let me eat there, not alone,
and I w o n ’t be one o f the pleading girls who is begging to be
allowed to go to the tables, I will just get a stool at the bar if the
guy at the door lets me in, he might not and usually I am too
shy to defy him and I hang tight with a man but tonight I want
in myself, I want the noise and the hard edge and the crush and
I want to drink, I want to find a place at the bar for m yself and
it’s got m y name on it even though I don’t got no name for the
