large room, backward so that he could keep talking to me.
“Cal me, ” he had said, “but don’t come to New York just to
cal me or you’l drive me mad. ” He had scribbled his phone
number on a piece of paper. “Call me, ” he repeated over and
over. I could have happily died then and there.
I did go to New York just to see him, but when I got to
New York I was too shy to cal him. I'd spend every waking
hour worrying about how to make the cal . I picked a rainy
night. He answered the phone. “Come on over now, ” he said.
I told him that he was much too busy. I told him that it was
raining. I went anyway, shaking on the wet sidewalks, shaking
on the bus, so nervous on the five flights up to his apartment
that I could barely keep my balance. As always when I was
nervous, I broke into a cold sweat.
He had warned me that he was working on proofs for a
new book of poems and would have very little time for me,
but we spent the whole night talking - well, okay, not al of it
but many hours of it. He then walked me down to the bus
in the rain and told me he loved me. I counted. He told me
eleven times.
I called him one more time many months later. I had a
standing invitation to see him, but I never went back. I stayed
infatuated but I stayed out of his way. I did not know that this
was a shrewd move on my part for the writer I wanted to be.
Being in thrall to an icon keeps you from becoming yourself.
When
photographer Elsa Dorfman. She was a close friend of Allen’s
and had photographed him and other writers over years, not
days. She photographed me for the first time as a writer. When
Elsa had a baby I was asked to be his godmother and Ginsberg
was his godfather. We were now, metaphysically speaking,
joined in unholy matrimony. And still I stayed away from
him. I did not see him again, since that time in college, until
my godson was bar mitzvahed. By this time I had published
many books, including my work attacking pornography - the
artifacts, the philosophy, the politics.
On the day of the bar mitzvah newspapers reported in huge
headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornography il egal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be.
I did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a
pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man-
Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction
