always; every time. Then they’d all laugh. So I wasn’t even
sure if there was rape. So I don’t think I could have been raped
even though I think I was raped but I know I wasn’t because it
barely existed or it didn’t exist at all and if it did it was only
with Nazis; it had to be as bad as Nazis. I didn’t want the man
to be fucking me but, I mean, that doesn’t really matter; it’s
just that I really tried to stop him, I really tried not to have him
near me, I really didn’t want him to and he really hurt me so
much so I thought maybe it was rape because he hurt me so
bad and I didn’t want to so much but I guess it wasn’t or it
doesn’t matter. I had this boyfriend named Arthur, a sweet
man. He was older; he had dignity. He wasn’t soft, he knew
the streets; but he didn’t need to show anything or prove
anything. He just lived as far as I could see. He was a waiter in a
bar deep in the Lower East Side, so deep down under a dark
sky, wretched to get there but okay inside. I was sleeping on a
floor near there, in the collective. Someone told me you could
get real cheap chicken at the bar. I would go there every night
for m y one meal, fried chicken in a basket with hot thick
french fried potatoes and ketchup for ninety-nine cents and it
was real good, real chicken, not rat meat, cooked good. He
brought me a beer but I had to tell him to take it back because J
didn’t have the money for it but he was buying it for me. Then
I went with him one night. The bar was filled and noisy and
had sawdust on the floors and barrels o f peanuts so you could
eat them without money and there were low life and artists
there. He smiled and seemed happy and also had a sadness, in
his eyes, on the edges o f his mouth. He lived in a small
apartment with two other men, one a painter, Eldridge, the
other I never met. It was tiny, up five flights on Avenue D,
with a couple o f rooms I never saw. Y ou walked in through a
tiny kitchen, all cracked wood with holes in the floor, an
ancient stove and an old refrigerator that looked like a bank
vault, round and heavy and metal, with almost no room
inside. His bed was a single bed in a kind o f living room but
not quite. There were paintings by the artist in the room. The
artist was sinewy and had a limp and was bitter, not sad, with a
mean edge to anything he said. He had to leave the room so we
could be alone. I could hear him there, listening. I stayed the
night there and I remember how it was to watch the light come
up and have someone running his finger under m y chin and
touching m y hands with his lips. I was afraid to go back to the
bar after that because I didn’t know if he’d want me to but it
was the only place I knew to get a meal for small change.
Every time he was glad to see me and he would ask me what I
wanted and he would bring me dinner and some beer and
another one later and he even gave me a dark beer to try
