get what you got; peace, freedom, love, a fuck, a shy smile,
some quarters or dimes or dollars. The dark’s got a little anger
in it m oving right up against you. You can feel it pushing right
up against you now and then, a burning flash across your
thing; that’s me, I’m there, Andrea, a charred hallucination,
you know the w ay the dark melts in front o f you, I’m the
charred thing in the melting dark, the dark fire, dark ash
burned black; and you walk on, agitated, to find a living one,
not a shade stuck in midnight but some poor, trembling, real
girl, hungry enough even to smile at you. That’s m y home
you’re misbehaving in with your mischievous little indulgences, your secret little purchases o f girls and acts, because I was on every street, in every alley, fucked there, slept there,
got drugs there, found a bed for my weary head; oh, it got
weary; curled up under something, a little awake. C an’t be.
N o one can live that way. C an’t be. Isn’t true. C an’t be. Was.
Was. I wasn’t raped really until I was eighteen, pretty old.
Well, I wasn’t really raped. Rape is just some awful word. It’s a
w ay to say it was real bad; worse than anything. I was a pacifist
and I didn’t believe in hurting anyone and I wouldn’t hurt
anyone. I had been eighteen for a couple o f months; o f legal
age. It was winter. Cold. Y ou don’t forget winter. I was
w orking for peace groups and for nonviolence. It wouldn’t be
fair to call it rape; to him; it wouldn’t be fair to him. I wasn’t a
virgin or anything; he forced me but it was m y own fault. I
was working at the Student Peace Union then and at the War
Resisters League. I typed and I answered phones and I tried to
be in the meetings but they didn’t really ever let me talk and I
helped to organize demonstrations by calling people on the
phones and I helped to write leaflets. They didn’t really believe
in rape, I think. I couldn’t ask anyone or tell anyone because
they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this
word they used all the time. Women were it more than
anybody. They were hip or cool or hipsters or bohemians or
all those words you could see in newspapers on the Low er East
Side but anytime a woman said something she was bourgeois.
I knew what it meant but I didn’t know how to say it w asn’t
right. They believed in nonviolence and so did I, one hundred
percent. I w ouldn’t hurt anybody even if he did rape me but he
probably didn’t. Men were supposed to go crazy and kill
someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn’t hurt him for raping
me because they didn’t believe in hurting anyone and because I
was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the
people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you
were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and
needed to be fucked more or to begin with. At the Student Peace
Union there were boys m y age but they were treated like grown
men by everyone around there and they bossed me around and
didn’t listen to anything I said except to make fun o f it and no one
