him: it’s a wonder I can count to one. He fucked one of us on
graduation night and kept up an emotional y abusive relationship with her for years. I almost commit ed suicide at sixteen because I didn’t think he loved me, though he later assured me
that he did in a hot and heavy phone cal : under his influence
and Salinger’s I had walked out into the ocean prepared to
drown. The waves got up to about chest level when I realized
that the water was fucking cold, and I turned myself around
and got right out of that big, old ocean, though the ocean
itself, not suicide, continues to entrance me. In my heart from
then to this day, I became antisuicide; it took me longer - far
too long - to become antipedophilic.
75
I thought Paul Goodman was right when he wrote in
adults to children; college-aged, I met Goodman, watched and
experienced some of his cruelty to women, and was bewildered, though I knew I didn’t like the cruelty and I didn’t like him. How could someone write a rebel’s book and be so
mean? To me, that was a formidable mystery. In later years my
friend Judith Malina, who directed a play of Goodman’s
though he taunted her repeatedly by saying women could not
direct, told me about how he slapped her during a therapy
session - he was the therapist. Of course, Goodman was a
pedophile and a misogynist, as was Allen Ginsberg, whom I
met later. I say “of course” because there is a specific kind of
education the pedophilic teacher gives: the education itself is
a seduction, a long, exciting-but-drawn-out coupling, an intellectual y dishonest, soul-rending passion in which the curiosity and adventuresomeness of the younger person is used as the
hook, a cynical use because the younger person needs what
the older provides. It may be at ention or a sense of importance or knowledge denied her or him by other adults. In my case I was Little Eva, and a snake offered knowledge and the
promise of escape from the constriction of a dead world in
which there were no poets or geniuses or visionaries. Al the
girls, after al , were expected to teach, nurse, do hair, or clean
houses, or combinations as if from a Chinese menu. Because
most adults lie to children most of the time, the pedophilic
adult seems to be a truth-tel er, the one adult ready and willing to know the world and not to lie about it. Lordy, lordy, I do still love that piece of shit.
“Silent Night”
It was the sixth grade, I was ten, we had just moved from
Camden to the suburbs, and I wouldn’t sing it: that simple.
They put me alone in a big, empty classroom and let me sweat
it out for a while. Then they sent in a turncoat Jew, a pretty,
