In Amsterdam I knew a hippie man whose children from an
early mar iage were coming to stay with him. They were thirteen and eleven, I think. The older girl had been incested by her stepfather. This came into the open because the older girl
tried to kill herself. This she did at least in part valiantly
because she saw the stepfather beginning to make moves on
the younger girl in exactly the same way he had gradually
forced himself on her. The stepfather had started to wash and
shower with the younger girl. The mother, in despair, wrote
the hippie man, who had abandoned al of them, for help. She
wanted to mend the relationship with the second husband
while keeping her children safe. The hippie man made clear
to those of us who knew him that he considered his older
daughter responsible for the sex; you know how girls flirt and
al that. His woman friend made clear to him that he was
wrong and also that she was not going to take care of the children. She wouldn’t have to, he said; he would be the nurturer.
When the girls arrived in Amsterdam, one recently raped, the
other exceptionally nervous and upset by temperament or
contagion or molestation, the hippie man forgot his vows of
responsibility, as he had always forgotten al the vows he had
ever made, and let al the work, emotional and physical, devolve
on his woman friend. She wasn’t having any and simply
refused to take care of them. Eventually she left.
One night I got a cal from her: the hippie man had given
each kid 100 guilders, set them loose, and told them to take
care of themselves. He just could not be with them without
fucking them, he told her (and them). In a noble and compassionate alternative gesture, he put them out on the streets. His woman friend made clear to me that this was a mess she was
not going to clean up. I asked where they were.
They had taken shelter in the frame of an abandoned building, squatters without a room that had walls. They lived up toward the wooden frame for the ceiling. Their light came from
burning candles. I found them and took them home with me,
although “home” would be stretching it a bit. At that moment
I lived in an emptied apartment, the one I had lived in with
my husband, a batterer. I had married him after I left Bennington for the second time (the first was Crete, the second Amsterdam). After I had played hide-and-seek with the brute
for a number of months, he decided I could live in the apartment he had cleaned out. By then I was grateful even if it meant that he knew where I was. A woman’s life is ful of
such trade-offs. So when the girls came with me, it wasn’t to
safety or luxury or even just enough. The apartment, however,
did have walls, and one does learn to be grateful.
The older girl thought that she was probably pregnant. Her
father, the hippie man, did light shows, many for rock bands;
he had the habit of sending musicians into the older girl’s bed
