Now we’re fucking:
I don’t have any finesse I’m all over you like a raging blonde leopard and I want to go more raging I want to go snarling and poisoning and teasing eek eek, curl around your hind leg pee, that twig over there, I want the specific piss shuddering of the specific cock. I want, help me. I need your help.
Take off your clothes. Clothes bind. Clothes bind our legs and mouths and teeth, still shudder want too much, taking off our clothes
Why can’t you ever once do something that’s not allowable? I mean goddammit.
Hit me.
Do anything.
Do something.
Sow this hideousness opposition blood to everyone proud I want to knock Ken over with a green glass I want to hire a punk to beat up Pam I will poison your milk if you don’t leave your girlfriend.
Sex is public: the streets made themselves for us to walk naked down them take out your cock and piss over me.
The threshold is here. Commit yourself to not-knowing. Legs lie against legs. Hairs mixing hairs and here, a fingerpad, a lot of space, a hand, a lot of space, hairs mixed with hairs, a real sensation.
Go over this threshold with me.
Thumb, your two fingers pinch my nipples while your master bears down on me. Red eyes, stare down on top of my eyes. Cock, my eyes are staring at you, pull out of the brown hairs. Red eyes, now you’re watching your cock pull out of the strange brown hairs. Thumb, your two fingers pinch my nipples while your master bears down on me.
Now you’ve gone away:
Joel Fisher whom I thought hated me saw me every other day and Rudy whom I thought the worst that is the meanest of my boyfriends always called me every other day or at least let me call him. Peter who lives with another girl three thousand miles away from me and he adores her phones me at least once a month.
This guy doesn’t care about me.
But when he looks at me, I know there’s a hole in him he loves me. No, he doesn’t. I can’t do anything until I know whether he loves me or not. I have to find out whether he loves me or not.
You might as well accept you’re in love with him because if you give him up just cause he doesn’t adore you enough, you’ll have nothing. In the other case, there’s a 50% (or 30% or 4% or 1%) chance you’ll keep touching his flesh.
Cynthia, sitting at her dressing-table in her little apartment overlooking the middle-class Roman whores’ section, is dressing her hair:
That goddamn son-of-a-bitch I hope he goes to hell I hope he gets POISONED wild city DOGS should drive their thousands of TEETH-FANGS through his flesh a twelve-year-old syphilitic teenager named Janey Smith should wrap her cunt around that prick I hate that prick I hate those fingers I hate black hair I want his teeth to rip themselves out in total agony I want his lips to dry up in Grand Canyon gulfs I want him paralyzed never to be able to move again and to be conscious of it:
Then, louse, you’ll learn. You’ll learn what it is not to know. I want you to learn what it is to be uncertain like I am. I want you to learn what it is to want like fire. The driest and coldest dry ice: the top of your head will burn and the rest of your body will freeze shake muscles will cramp like they do when they’re not yet used to the bedless floor, at night, you will know agony.
You must learn what it is to want.
Thus says the whore who’s unable to hold in and repress her emotions.
Among these women, free yet timorous, addicted to late hours, darkened rooms, gambling, and indolence, sparing of words, all they needed was an allusion.
I reveled in the admirable quickness of their half-spoken language which resembled more the suppressed diffused violence a teenager feels. These exchanges of threats and promises—as if once the slow-thinking male is banished every message from woman to woman is clear and overwhelming—are few in kind and infallible.
The first time I dined at her place, three brown tapers dripped waxen tears in tall candlesticks and didn’t dispel the gloom. A low table, from the Orient, offered a pell-mell assortment of les hors-d’oeuvre—strips of raw fish rolled upon glass wands, foie gras, shrimp, salad seasoned with pepper and cranberry—and there was a well-chosen Piper Heidsieck brut, and very strong Russian Greek and Chinese alcohols. I didn’t believe I’d become friends with this woman who tossed off her drink with the obliviousness a person caught in the depths of opium watches his hand burn.
This “master” was never referred to by the name of woman. We seemed to be waiting for some catastrophe to project herself into our midst, but she merely kept sending invisible messengers laded with jades, enamels, lacquers, furs … From one marvel to another … Who was the dark origin of all this nonsense?
“Tell me, Renée. Are you happy?”
Renée blushed, smiled, then abruptly stiffened.
“Why, of course, my dear Colette. Why would you want me to be unhappy?”
“I didn’t say I wanted it,” I retorted.
“I’m happy,” Renée explained to me, “but the sexual ecstasy is so great, I’m going to be physically sick.”
Propertius decides he doesn’t want to fuck Cynthia again:
How can such a stinking fish a cunt who has experienced what it is to be the wish-fulfillment of many men hordes of men more men than serve the Great Caesar be innocent? My fantasy is special. Moreover she’s had such a poverty-regulated life she can’t have any life in her to be elegant with me: to give me the beauty that is female that I deserve. She isn’t female, that elongation of steel triangles and bolts.
My girlfriend on the other hand, if anyone ever hurts me, is going to have to murder that person. For me. When I’m dying from a worn-out liver punctured guts three punches in the face and dirty track marks, I lived to the physical and mental hilts, my girlfriend will naturally die. On the other hand a whore goes from man to man; she’s no man’s girl. So there’s no possibility I’m going to love you and if I fuck you, it’s just cause you’re a present open cunt. The women’s liberationists are right when they want to get rid of all hookers by imprisoning all of you whores.
CYNTHIA: I’ve been waiting for you.
PROPERTIUS: What the he …? (Grabbing the other girl into him.) Oh, hello. I’m busy now.
CYNTHIA: I just wanted to see you.
PROPERTIUS: I’m busy with someone now. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.
CYNTHIA: Please. (There’s nothing she can do.)
OK. (Propertius and the dark-haired girl walk into the house. One of the dogs on the steet starts barking.)
The Street of Dogs. Two lines of houses lead to a Renaissance perspective. These lines are seemingly-only-surface connected three-story townhouses. A sun and a three-quarter moon hang over one townhouse. Common household objects such as lamps, a part of a table, half of a torn plastic rose kitchen curtain take up some of the window space. Outside a townhouse a dog leans over her basket of laundry. Two dogs, one leaning farther out of his window than the other, open their mouths to howl. Their teeth are sharp and white and they have long red tongues. One dog over her basket of wash gossips with another dog. Two young dogs are mangling each other next to the curb. On each side of the street the tall thin windows form a long row.
Cynthia barks like a dog:
I can’t help myself anymore I really can’t I’m just a girl I didn’t ask god to be born a girl. When I think, I know totally realistically I’m an alien existant. I hate or have nothing to do with everyone. I’m a whore. But I’m not thinking. You’re just so cute. I have to get you out of my body. It’d be good for me to get you out of my body cause then I’d be strong that is single. I don’t want to and why should I? I want to have this sweet thing that is you. I’m going to go after you, aching sore, (I don’t care what your reaction is to me) because why not, darling?
She walks up to the door where Propertius lives and sits herself in front of it. Even though she doesn’t care anything about him. He’s never bought her a present.
The door doesn’t move.
A big baldheaded half-naked man opens the door lays his palms on the doorway. Cynthia goes away.
You alone born from my most beautiful
carecure for grief
Shuts out since your fate
“COME OFTEN HERE”
Fiction by my will will become the most
popular formPropertius, your forgiveness, peace,
Peter, yours.to redefine the realms of sex so sex
I’m crawling up your wall for you.
I must face facts I’m not a female.
I must face facts I can’t be loved
I must face facts I need love to live.
Hello, walls.
How’re you doing today?
Hello, my watch.
Please watch over Propertius, you are here
because I will never get near him again.
He is now forbidden territory.
Cynthia lays down on the street and sticks razor blades vertically up her arm. The bums ask her if she needs a drink. Madness makes an alcoholic sober, keeps the most raging beast in an invisibly locked invisible cage, turns seething masses of smoke air into calm white, takes a junky off junk as if he’s having a pleasant dream, halts that need FAME that’s impossible.
I am only an obsession. Don’t talk to me otherwise. Don’t know me. Do you think I exist?
Watch out. Madness is a reality, not a perversion.