tiny bookstore, and my love af air with books became a wild
and long ride, bucking bronco after bucking bronco; I found
Genet and Burroughs; I read
Literature exploded. I found and read the early pirated edition
of
The only bad part was that I couldn’t live there, sleep in a
corner resting my head on a messed-up coat; the store would
close and I had to go home. By the next day I’d barely be able
to breathe from the thrill of knowing I was going to find a
way to get back to the bookstore and find another book and
one after that, another author and one after that.
It would be a few years before the feminist ferment would
begin to produce a renaissance of luminous and groundbreaking books; and
absorbed the writers she exposed, I had believed in them; in
the euphoria of finding what I thought were truth-tellers, I
had forgotten my father’s warning that some writers lie. But
stil , one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know, even Mailer,
even Albee. It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can
see and so one can say, “There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten
by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone wil fil
in the empty patch and I’l find what I need, what I must
know in order to lead a ful and honorable life. ” These writers,
Stein excepted, did not acknowledge women as other than
subhuman monsters of sex and predation; and their prose and
chutzpah made me a fellow traveler. Al one can do is to fight
illegitimate authority, expressed in my world by adults, and
find a church. Books were my church but even more my native
land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on,
but exile welcomed me; it was where I belonged.
The Fight
I loved Al en Ginsberg with the passion that only a teenager
knows, but that passion did not end when adolescence did. I
sent him poems when I was in high school and barely
breathed until I heard back from him. He critiqued the poems
I sent on a postcard that I got about three weeks later, though
it seemed like ten years. I thought I would die - he acknowledged me as if I were a writer and we lived in the same world.
In col ege I went to every reading of his that I could. My heart
breathed with his, or so I thought, but I was too shy ever to
introduce myself to him or hang around him until the one
reading after which I did introduce myself. “Call me, ” he said
to me a half dozen times as I was walking backward out of the
