My lawyer Mr. Gordon duly sent me his address; and he wrote after it on the card “just outside Alexandria, and close by the taxi stand.” Nevertheless, a taxi-driver, who seems to have as many jackets over his greasy winter coat as he is years old, packs me up in his taxi, hems me in by shutting the taxi doors and closing the taxi windows and locking the taxi doors, as if he’s going to take me fifty miles. His getting into his driver’s seat which is decorated by an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth, moth-eaten into rags, is a work of time. It’s a wonderful taxi, with six great horns outside the driver’s window, and ragged things behind for I don’t know how many kids to hold on by, and iron spikes below them to prevent the amateur kids from yielding to temptation.
I’m just beginning to enjoy this taxi and think how like a yard of straw it is, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why the horses’ nosebags are kept inside, when I see the taxi-driver beginning to open his door as if we’re going to stop presently. And stop we presently do, in a gloomy street, at certain offices with an open door, whereon is painted “EGYPT.”
We’re walking along the aqueduct which supplies water to the citadel. Stray dogs sleep and walk in the sun. Carrion vultures wheel through the sky. The dogs are tearing at a donkey’s leftovers, especially the head which is still completely covered in skin: the head is the least edible part of the skeleton. Always birds begin with eyes; dogs like the stomach or skin around the asshole. They all move from the tenderest to the toughest.
This old woman’s begging me to fuck her. Puke. I prefer boys in this heat. She’s uncovering her long flat tits, they look like worms, they’re hanging down to her belly-button. She’s stroking them. She has a sweet smile. Her head bends to one side; lips part over her yellow teeth. Another hag catches sight of me in this courtyard, cartwheels in front of me, shows me her ass. She does this when she sees a man because she wants a man so badly. A woman dancing all over her cell is beating up her tin toilet bowl like the picture we have of a crazy person cause she’s not getting affection.
Three nights now I’ve been chasing that creep guy I’m getting sick of not getting him I’m getting sick of getting what I don’t want and not getting what I want. I saw him every night at the Palace before I wanted him. He has a very pretty blonde girlfriend he’s even cuter than her so I didn’t want him. One night he asked me what I do with myself when he doesn’t see me. He finds it hard to talk to me cause he’s very shy. Since that night I’ve gotten this bigger crush on him and every time I’ve returned to the Palace every night this week—only my crush drives me out—every night this week he’s never there.
Quiet way of life here—intimate, secluded. Dazzling sun effects when one suddenly emerges from these alleys, so narrow that the roofs of the shuttered bay windows on each side touch each other.
Sometimes I think about my future … I don’t want to leave this life and go back to the horror that is New York. What shall I do when I get back to New York? What can I do to make New York not horrible? Before it descends on me and eats me up. I’m scared out of my wits.
I’m a scaredy-cat. I run away from everything. Being allowed to laze. This’ what it’s about.
Not only have I shirked facing my problems. I shall die at sixty before having formed any opinion concerning myself. I made a list of human characteristics: every time I had one characteristic I had its opposite.
How did I get to being always alone?
However I worry very little about any of this: I live like a plant filling myself with sun and light with colors and fresh air. I keep eating, so to speak; the digesting will have to be done then the shitting; and the shit had better be good! That’s the important thing.
The day beginning to rise—I have that smartness in my eyes that comes from being up all night. Several upperclass Greek women are walking by. A pleasant fragrance wafts out from under their veils, from the raising of their elbows when they reach up to make sure their veils are still on their heads, and from the edges of the veils themselves as they float up in the draft. In my mind’s eye, I see a pink stocking and a tip of a foot in a pointed yellow slipper.
Back in New York City, the tenth floor of an apartment building on 73rd street and Third Avenue:
HUBBIE: Goodbye, dear. (Shouting) I’m going to Long Island to go hunting.
WIFE (entering their wall-to-wall carpeted living room): But you can’t leave me. It’s Christmas.
HUBBIE: This is my vacation. I worked like a dog all year to keep you in trinkets and furs. I want to do what I want for once in my life and it’s Christmas.
WIFE: You’re gonna desert us on Christmas! You louse! You lousy louse! Mother always said you were a louse and, besides, she has more money than you! I don’t know why I married you I certainly didn’t marry you for your money. (Starts to sob)
HUBBIE: Stop it, dear. (Doesn’t know what to do when he sees a woman crying. It makes him feel so helpless.) The children’ll see and think something’s the matter.
WIFE: We don’t have any children. It’s all your fault.
HUBBIE: It’s always my fault. Everything’s always my fault. When your dog died when you were four years old it was my fault. When Three Mile Island was leaking away Mother threw out her new General Electric microwave cause she said it was a UFO Martian breeding ground: I caused that one. Your commie actor friends’re always telling me I’m not political enough cause I won’t stand on streetcorners and look like a bum just to hand out that rag (SEMIOTEXT(e)) they call a newspaper a bum wouldn’t even use to wipe his ass with, some communism, and then they say I’m responsible for the general state of affairs. All I do is work every day! I never say anything about anything! I do exactly what every other American middle-aged man does. Everything’s my fault.
WIFE (soberly): Everything IS your fault. (The wife starts to cry again.)
You don’t love me enough. You don’t want me to be a little girl. I’m … mmwah (her hands crawl at one of the lapels of his red-and-black hunting jacket). I’m a … googoo. Don’t you love me? Bobby? Do you love me and be nice to me and don’t desert me cause I love you so much?
HUBBIE (completely bewildered): Of course I love you. (His big strong arms pick her up. He carries her into the bedroom. He puts his cock into her pink rayon panties. He comes. He wants to do what he wants to do.)
WIFE: You promised and you can’t break your promise you’d stay here.
HUBBIE: Shit. (He fondles his old Winchester. He walks over to one of the large living room windows and sticks the rifle through the window. He shoots down a streetlight that’s red.) Goddamn.
WIFE: Bobby, what’re you doing? Don’t you know we all—the tenants—decided we’d have noise regulations during the night?
HUBBIE: I can have my shooting practice right here. Bam bam (says as he shoots). Three dead streetlights. Try crossing the street now, President Carter.
WIFE: Don’t insult President Carter that way.
HUBBIE: Bam. (The bullet goes right through a businessman’s hat. The businessman doesn’t notice a thing.) Bam bam bam bam. (The lamps which light the street below Mary and Bobby’s apartment burst open.) Those local hoods can thank me: tonight they’ll jerk their girlfriends off in the doorways and the cops won’t see a thing.
WIFE: You’re acting just like Mother said you would when you don’t get your way. All you want is attention. You’re gonna be a baby until I give in to you. Well, I’m not going to. I’ve got myself to think about.
HUBBIE: Bam. (Shoots down a four-year-old girl who’s wearing a baby-blue jumper. Her junked-out mother is too shocked to scream. It begins to snow.) Guess it’s gonna snow for Christmas.
WIFE: Ooh, I’m so glad! Now aren’t you glad you stayed home for Christmas?
Scene 2. The Husband’s Monologue.
WIFE: Where’re you going, Frank?
HUBBIE (putting on a torn khaki jacket over his checkered hunting jacket): I’m just going out for a second, hon. There’re a few things I can’t reach from here.
WIFE (flinging her arms across the door like she’s Jesus on the cross): You’re not going out on this cold night. Something horrible’s gonna happen.
HUBBIE (shouldering his gun): Don’t be ridiculous, Mary. There’s nothing out there.
WIFE: You’re going to get drunk and hang around with loose women and God knows what and Josie and Ermine’re coming at seven!
HUBBIE: Aw, honey. I don’t want to see those alcoholics.
WIFE: Josie and Ermine aren’t alcoholics. Ermine earns $75,000 a year.
HUBBIE: They drink up all my Scotch. I’ll tell you what. If they come in here, I’ll go bang-bang and Winchester will get rid of the beggars. I told you I was getting you a nice Christmas.
WIFE: You’ll do your shooting on the street. I just washed the kitchen floor.
HUBBIE: Here we go round the mulberry bush the mulberry bush the mulberry bush … I’m a child again. I’m happy. I haven’t been happy since I went out drinking with that black whore who threatened to burn my balls off with her BIC just cause I was teasing her a little about her kid sister. Women are too sensitive. Take my wife. Premonitions! (Huge black shadows start gathering around the husband.) Boy did she get hot under the collar huh … about nothing … about a dead four-year-old who in two years would be hooked on junk. All women are hooked on junk. Now I can do whatever I want.
Is there anything else? Is there anything else? What is it to know?
I, Peter, don’t know because I obsessively adore my father. My father was a poor German-Jewish refugee. He came to America and started a successful millinery business in those old days when men weren’t allowed to have their own businesses. Then he married a rich woman, well that’s what men did in those days, that’s the only way they could succeed. That and being pimps. Women don’t realize that marriage is a business for men—clothes makeup all the stuff women belittle; they want the men to wear that stuff and then they say “Men’s stuff is unimportant;” marriage and sex are the only business men got. My father thought money was everything; he had a right to think money was everything; he didn’t have a choice of thinking anything else considering where he lived when and he had made himself a success.
Unfortunately I’m shit to him because I don’t want to earn money. I don’t know what to do because I honor him and what he’s done.
My mother is a dummy and a piece of jellyfish. The most disgusting thing in this world is her. My worst nightmare is that I’ll have some of that jellyfish in me.
My mother, the jellyfish, wants me to be just like I am.
So I fall down in a fit. I decide to be totally catatonic. I am unable to know anything. I have no human contacts. I’m not able to understand language.
They call me CRAZY. But I’m not inhuman. I still have burning sexual desires. I still have a cock. I just don’t believe there’s any possibility of me communicating to someone in this world.
I hate humans who want me to act like I can communicate to them. I hate feeling more pain because I’ve felt so much pain.
My idea of happiness is numbness.
From what I’ve seen and read I think the people who live in Egypt don’t absolutely hate their lives.
I feel I feel I feel I have no language, any emotion for me is a prison
I think talking to humans, acting in this world, and hurting other humans are magical acts. I fall in love with the humans who I see do these things
I think these categories: this logic way of talking (perceiving) is wrong.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS POWER AND POWERLESSNESS. For instance, I, Peter, am totally passive or powerless. I live in a world in which one major power, the USA, is trying to artificially create a war with another great power to increase its military budget. All rich businessmen get richer while wars are always fought on top of the bodies of poor people. We are really really powerless.
Anything mental is real.
Dear Peter,
I think your new girlfriend stinks. She is a liar all the way around because her skin is yellow from jaundice, not from being Chinese like she pretends. She’s only pretty because she’s wearing a mask. You’re hooked on her tight little cunt: it’s only a sexual attraction I know you’re very attracted to sex cause when you were young you were fat and no girl wanted to fuck you. What you don’t know is that this cunt contains lots of poisons—not just jaundice—a thousand times more powerful than the coke she is feeding you to keep you with her—especially one lethal poison developed by the notorious Fu Manchu that takes cocks, turns their upper halves purple, their lower parts bright red, the eyes go blind so they can no longer see what’s happening, the person dies. Your new girlfriend is insane and she’s poisoning you.
Love,
Rosa
P.S. I’m only telling you this for your own good.
I want you wet. I want you dripping all over me. I want you just for sex. Once I know I can have you I might ignore you I know that would be very stupid. Then you’d run away as fast as you could. Then I’d want you so much I’d figure more subtle lasting ways to commit suicide than all the ways—like lobotomy, everyone in my family goes, I robot flesh made of steel—I have these past two years since you left me. Ours is the hottest love affair that has ever existed and I’m telling everyone that it is so. Physical sex doesn’t have to have anything to do with love affairs. Love affairs are when each person can do anything they want and the other person realizes that the most unbelievable behavior possible is usual.
Love,
Rosa
The Gritty State Of Things To Come
Dear Sylvére,
This serves you right. I told you this was going to happen. Now that I’ve spent last night fucking you, I’m in love with you. I’m writing these few lines to give you the news and the news isn’t good. A few minutes ago the cops arrested me for stealing a copy of SEMIOTEXT(e). You keep talking about how you’re making Italian terrorism fashionable: isn’t my ass here in New York worth at least a penny to you for every dollar of Italian terrorist ass over there? I think you should be nice to me because I’m just a helpless little girl. Also please try to get permission to come to see me and bring me some underwear. Put in your cat because I need affection and you don’t need anything. How are you? Darling, I’m awfully sorry about what’s happening to me. Let’s face it: some kids are born with silver spoons in their mouths. I’m an old woman whose teeth are falling out. I’m counting on you to help me out. I wish I could run into your chest and climb on your arms three hours a week and no more. Remember what we do together when I’m unparanoid enough to see you. Remember what we do together when I’m unparanoid enough to see you. Try to recognize the only reality of the real world: no one gives a shit about anything. Get on your knees, sweetheart, and kiss the earth,
Love,
Rosa
We Have Proven That Communication Is Impossible
Dear Susan Sontag,
Would you please read my books and make me famous? Actually I don’t want to be famous because then all these people who are very boring will stop me on the street and bother me already I hate the people who call me on the phone because I’m always having delusions. I now see my delusions are more interesting than anything that can happen to me in New York. Despite everyone saying New York is just the most fascinating city in the world. Except when Sylvére fucks me. I wish I knew how to speak English. Dear Susan Sontag, will you teach me how to speak English? For free, because, you understand, I’m an artist and artists by definition are people who never pay for anything even though they sell their shows out at $10,000 a painting before the show opens. All my artist friends were starving to death before they landed in their middle-class mothers’ wombs; they especially tell people how they’re starving to death when they order $2.50 each beers at the Mudd Club. Poverty is one of the most repulsive aspects of human reality: more disgusting than all the artists who’re claiming they’re total scum are the half-artists the hypocrites the ACADEMICS who think it’s in to be poor, WHO WANT TO BE POOR, who despise the white silk napkins I got off my dead grandmother—she finally did something for me for once in her life (death)—because those CRITICS don’t know what it’s like to have to tell men they’re wonderful for money, cause you’ve got to have money, for ten years. I hope this society goes to hell. I understand you’re very literate, Susan Sontag,
Yours,
Rosa
Dear David,
Are you a Tibetan monk yet? I used to hate you because you didn’t love me so much you would give up your whole life for me. I expect this of every man. In retrospect, I realize that I was also selfish: I should have stopped making demands that you not be the closet female-hating sadist you are. I understand it’s very hard to be rich because rich people are trained, they can’t just be poor, they are trained to act as if they need to work and be big worldly successes. Your explanation that you gave up writing your visions in order to do commercial Hollywood script writing because you needed Francis Ford Coppola’s $150,000 when you receive huge monthly estate checks rivals a university professor’s essay on the similarities between Moby Dick and Nazism. At least a university professor really has to make a living. Language means nothing anymore anyway. Walking down Second Avenue with you while you’re telling me you’re as poor as me when I know I have to fuck thirteen-inchers in porn films the next day so I can pay Peter, my husband, his goddam rent wasn’t as bad as how my other boyfriends treated me: at least you bought me lunch at Amy’s after we fucked. The only thing I resent is when you were doing everything you could to force me to fuck your Tibetan guru and I had bad gonorrhea. That your environmental richness does not excuse.
I’d like to fuck you when you return from London,
Yours,
Rosa
Dear Steve Maas,
Why don’t you give some of the money you are making off the Mudd Club to the poor starving artists who’re supporting it? Diego says you’re a millionaire now. Michael Betsy many of my friends, you know who they are, are desperate. You’re always saying you want to do something for art and you understand what art is. If you understand what art is, you wouldn’t be a power-monger: you’d let artists have the door at least between twelve and two, not between nine and eleven—as it is now—before anyone’s even allowed in the club.
Yours,
Rosa
I used to complain that the world isn’t fair. Now I don’t think the world isn’t fair. I don’t think. Have you made me into a lobotomy case? Has the world turned me into a lobotomy case? You are the world. I wish there was a man here who could put me back in touch with the world,
Love,
Rosa
“You’ll be a friend to me, won’t you?”
“I’ll try. But you know, it’s not easy to be your friend.”
“It isn’t? Why?”
“Oh, I’m such a mite of a thing and you’re so gorgeous. You always know what you’re doing. You’re so sure of yourself you could crush me. You make me feel like I’m nothing, I know you don’t mean it.”
“No one loves me, I lead this horrible life. Don’t think I’m someone I’m not. I’m like a hermit a nothing, I think I’m one of the true innocents.”
“You not being hermetic with me. You’re open and friendly!” Rosa, the pupil in the Nuns’ House says.
“How can I help it, sweetie? You fascinate me.”
“Me?” Rosa half-questions and, half-teasing, pretends to question. “It’s too bad Peter doesn’t feel it.”
The girls in the Nuns’ House heard endlessly every detail of Peter’s and Rosa’s relations.
“Peter adores you!” O, the orphan who’s the new pupil exclaims, fiercely blazing if Peter doesn’t adore Rosa she’ll make him do it.
“Well … he likes me,” Rosa begins to own up, twists her fingers in each other there’s still a bit of a question, “I know he does. Our arguments are my fault. My mind won’t stay still. I’m never contented. Everything dissatisfies me. Still … he CAN be ridiculous!”
O’s eyes demand what can possibly be ridiculous about gentle Peter. These days none of the boys are gentle.
“He never buys me coffee (Rosa means ‘he never buys me expensive meals’) … and he manipulates me I know he’s manipulating me he’s waving things over my head like marriage he knows I want to get married and he’s using my want to control me even though he’s a wimp.” Rosa answers as if everything she’s saying is absolutely true.
O’s realizing in a world where affection’s possible she will have none. Consciousness of this pain gives her power. She without thinking grabs Rosa’s hands and says, “Please, be my friend. I need affection.”
“I’ll be your friend,” Rosa replies straightway, “though you’re so far above me you must have lots of friends. I’ll be true to you and if I ever let you down, please understand, I don’t mean to let you down, I’m just weak. I don’t know anything about myself. You help me find who I am. You talk straight to me.”
O hugs her friends and holds her in her arms. “Tell me, Rosa. Who is this Mr. Sadat?”
Rosa shakes. Her eye pupils look slightly upwards.
“Just before I came here, my brother and I met him.”
“He’s Peter’s uncle.”
“You don’t like him?”
“Oh!” Rosa’s hands go over her face. “No.”
“He says he loves you very much.”
“Oh.” Rosa hugs her new resource (friend) even closer. “I don’t want to know … I don’t know what there is about him that makes me feel this way. It doesn’t make sense. I’m scared of him beyond any reason I know of. I think about him all the time. He terrifies me. He can get at me even when he’s not around. He’s evil. There’s no such thing as evil.”
“What happened between you and him?”
“I can’t talk now. I’m sorry. In a minute. Please don’t go away from me. I’ll be able to talk in a minute.”
“He DID do something horrible, didn’t he?”
“No … no. He’s very kind. He acts as he should. He never SAYS anything.”
“And yet …?”
“He doesn’t say anything, but I know, I know it’s true. He wants to have power over me he almost has power over me, I can hardly fight. He always acts kind to me. I have no reason to think this. I can’t tell it to anyone. I’m mad. When I’m playing piano, his eyes are always on my hands. When I’m singing I’m a horrible singer, his eyes are always on my lips. He’s telling me he’s controlling me I’m accepting that I’m accepting our nonverbal agreement. I don’t look at him. That doesn’t matter. Every now and then my eyes have to brush by his our eyes meet just for a second, this means I agree I’m under his spell. Sometimes he’s so powerful but he’s not there, do you know what I mean, he’s like a robot. I don’t have any way of talking to him.”
“What could he actually want from you?”
“I don’t know. All I do is fear. I can’t see beyond fear.”
“Did anything else happen tonight?”
“No. Tonight his look was more compelling … his eyes stood on me more unmovingly than they ever have. He was holding me in his arms tonight. I couldn’t bear the darkness. I cried out. Don’t tell this to anyone. It’s not true. Whatever you do don’t tell Peter, please don’t mention a word to Peter because he’s Peter’s uncle. Tonight you said you’re strong, you don’t know what fear is, please please be strong for me. I used to not know what fear is. I used to have the strength to believe what I feel is real and my affection for people makes me human. I can talk to you. You can’t go away. Don’t reject me. I’m scared now that I’m asking you you’ll walk away.”
The lustrous gypsy-face droops over those clinging arms and chest; the wild black hair falls over the thin form. The intense eyes hold a sleeping burning energy, now softened by compassion and wonder. Let the man who’s concerned NOTICE this!
Mr. Anwar Sadat’s monologue:
I’m seeing everything I’ve ever done rise up before me, just as they are; I have to see (face) everything, nothing is left untouched. I must see everything face-to-face, every action I do, and only finally when that is over, when I’m no longer horror, will I be free.
War is coming. I hate to say it, but it is. A more devastating war than before and the end of the world as we now know this world. There will be no more money, not much food or heat, diseases rampage, and fear hallucination will reign. It will be the days of nothing and the days of a kind of plenty where there are no causes and effects. There’s no way to prepare for horror. Language like everything else will bear no relations to anything else. The business corporations who’ll run the war are now bringing triple amounts of heroin and coke into this country to prepare the citizenship for soldiery. “Another?” says this woman, in a querulous rattling whisper. “Have another?”
The Lascar dribbles at the mouth. The graves are still.
“What visions can SHE have? Visions of more butcher shops and bars and MasterCharge cards? More and more people dying to throw their useless money away eat eat this horrible bed without these bodies on it this wall smooth and sanitary? What relations can drugged-up people have?”
He listens to the mutterings.
“Unintelligible!”
Culture has been chattering and chattering but to no purpose. When a sentence becomes distinct, it makes no more sense or connection. Wherefore the watcher says again “Unintelligible,” nods his head, and smiles gloomily. He puts a few coins on the table, grabs a cap, gropes his way down the broken stairs, mumbles good-morning to some rat-ridden super sitting in an old plastic chair under the stairs, and passes out.
Dear Peter,
I’m finding it very hard to live without you.
The whole day long, in that rather too countrified house at Tansonville, which had the air merely of a place to rest in when out for a stroll or during a shower, one of those houses in which every drawing-room gives the effect of a summerhouse, and where, in the bedrooms, on the wallpaper of one of the roses of the garden, and on the wallpaper of the other birds from the trees have come to join you and keep you company (but one by one, at any rate, for these are old-fashioned wallpapers, on which each rose is so distinct it could have been picked if it had been real, and each bird could be put in a cage and tamed) having none of the pretentious interior decorating of the rooms of this day, in which, on a silver background, all of apple trees of Normandy stand out sharply in Japanese style, to fill with fantasies these hours spent closeted up—that whole day I remained in my room, which looked out on the beautiful verdure of the estate and the lilacs at the entrance border, on the tall trees at the edge of the water, their green foliage glistening in the sunlight, and on the forest of Meseglise. The only reason, at bottom, why I enjoyed looking at Proust’s words was because I said to myself, “It’s pleasant to have so much verdure at my bedroom window,” until suddenly, in the vast, verdant picture I recognized—but brushed by contrast in deep blue simply because it was farther away—the spire of the church at Combray, not a representation of that spire, but the spire itself, which, bringing thus before my eyes distance in both space and time, had come and outlined itself on my windowpane in the midst of the given foliage but in a very different tone, so dark that it almost seemed as if it had been merely sketched in. And, if I stepped out of my room for a moment, at the end of the hall, because the hall faced in a different direction, I caught sight of a band of scarlet, as it were, just the wall covering of a small drawing-room which was of simple mousseline, but red and quick to burst into flame if a ray of sun was falling on it.
During our walks together, Gilberte talked to me about the way Robert was losing interest in her and increasing his attentions to other women. And it is true that his life was cluttered up with many affairs with women which, like certain masculine friendships in the lives of men who prefer women, had an air of hopelessly trying to defend their position and uselessly taking up space which, in most houses, characterizes objects that can serve no useful purpose.
During our many walks together, Peter’s new girlfriend Shang-shi talked to me about the way Peter was losing interest in her and increasing his attentions to other women. And it is true that his life was cluttered up with many affairs with women which, like certain masculine friendships in the lives of men who prefer women, had an air of hopelessly trying to defend their position and uselessly taking up space which, in most houses, characterises objects that can serve no useful purpose.
“How much?” I ask the taxi-driver.
The taxi-driver answers, “A dollar—unless you wish to make it more.”
I naturally say I have no wish to make it more.
“Then it must be a dollar,” observes the taxi-driver. “I don’t want to get into trouble. I know HIM!” He blackly closes an eye at my lawyer Mr. Gordon’s name and shakes his head.