that I learn how to think a certain w ay and answer certain hard
questions, very specific questions, about what w ill happen in
scenario after scenario; but I am not allowed to say anything
about what to do or how to do it or ask questions or the w ords
I do say ju st disappear in the air or in m y throat. The old men
really are the ones. T hey say how to do it. T hey do all the
thinking. T hey make all the plans. They think everything
through. I listen to them and I remember everything. I am
learning how to listen too, concentrate, think it hard as if
writing it down in your mind. It is not easy to listen. The peace
boys talk and never listen. The old men do it all for them, then
they swagger and take all the credit while the old men are
happy to fade to the background so the movement looks virile
and young. The peace boys talk, smoke, rant, make their
jokes, strum guitars, run their silky white hands through their
stringy long hair. They spread their legs when they talk, they
spread out, their legs open up and they spread them wide and
their sentences spread all over and their words come and come
and their gestures get bigger and they got half erect cocks all
the time when they talk, the denim o f their dirty jeans is pulled
tight across their cocks because o f how they spread their legs
and they always finger themselves just lightly when they talk
so they are always excited by what they have to say. Somehow
they are always half reclining, on chairs, on desks, on tables,
against walls or stacks o f boxes, legs spread out so they can
talk, touching themselves with the tips o f their fingers or the
palms o f their spread hands, giggling, smoking, they think
they are Che. I live in half a dozen different places: in the
collective on Avenue B on the floor, I don’t fight for the bed
anymore; in a living room in Brooklyn with a brother and a
sister, the brother sleeps in the same room and stares and
breathes heavy and I barely dare to breathe, they are pacifists
and leave the door to their ground floor apartment open all the
time out o f love for their fellow man but a mongrel bulldog-
terrier will kill anyone who comes through, this is the
Brooklyn o f elevated subways where you walk down dark,
steep flights o f stairs to streets o f knives and broken bottles, an
open door is a merciless act o f love; in an apartment in Spanish
Harlem, big, old, a beautiful labyrinth, with three men but I
only sleep with two, one’s a sailor and he likes anal intercourse
and when he isn’t there I get the single bed in his room to myself,
some nights I am in one bed half the night, then in the other bed;
some nights between places I stay with different men I don’t
know, or sometimes a woman, not a peace woman but
someone from the streets who has a hole in the wall to-
