years old. My arms close around my father’s thighs. ‘Shall I get you some Jack Daniels?’
Daddy wasn’t an alcoholic. He drank the usual six martinis at night and mommy, she was a moralist, kept telling him he was an alky.
I knew he’d say ‘Yes’. Daddy could never reject Jacky Daniels. They were a bunch of homosexuals. When daddy went off to his bedroom, I opened the front door and snuck the boy I’d been fucking out.
I returned to their Parisian apartment with the J.D. I handed it to daddy. He was holding up a boy’s tie which he’d found in the bathtub. He didn’t believe my lies. He sat down on his bed where he always sat. My daddy was almost crying.
‘Abhor.’
My limbs were frozen with tension.
‘Abhor, I know what you’ve been doing.’ Lies never work except as lies. Like language and love. My mother taught me this. Like love. ‘These men don’t respect you, Abhor.’
How could I explain that I cared neither if they respected me nor who they were.
‘Abhor,’ daddy explained, ‘I’m the only man who’ll ever take care of you properly.’ His hands were reaching for my breasts while tears were coming out of his eyes.
‘Why don’t you do it with mommy, daddy?’
‘We’re too old. We don’t do it anymore.’ His right hand was rubbing my breast.
‘I’m going to phone mommy.’ Over the phone, I told her that her husband was trying to do something to me. I didn’t use the word ‘fuck’.
She said, ‘Let me speak to him.’
‘Daddy, mommy wants to speak to you.’
I don’t remember if his hand left my nipple. I don’t know what they said to each other.
After he put the phone receiver down on the table, he put his cock up me. There was no more blood than in a period.
Part of me wanted him and part of me wanted to kill him.
So I stayed in their apartment and that night I dreamed that the blood lying over the ocean in front of my eyes was light. The light by which I could see. The fishing boats sink or stink.
The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions as we do. Logocentricism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property’s pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. Well before Bataille, Kleist, Hoffman etc., made trial of Hegelian idealism, of the cloturing dialectic of recognition: the German Romantics sung brazenly brassily in brass of spending and waste. They cut through conservative narcissism with bloody razor blades. They tore the subject away from her subjugation to her self, the proper; dislocated you the puppet; cut the threads of meaning; spit at all mirrors which control.
I knew that pleasure gathers only in freedom. For I was soaring through the sky, my huge white and grey wings stretched out to the horizontal limits of my vision. I was alone. In the sky. I was almost white.
I flew downwards, hollering with pleasure, swoop as if into the slate of water. But I didn’t. Then swooped directly into the cold of that ocean, it was the light of morning, as directly as if I was going for food. Out of the tunnel my body had carved in the water, a fountain of light burst upward.
The city awoke. Bursting. Angels sat on its head. Everything burst. Carolled. There is only glory. Because I know there are angels and visions, there is freedom. Only in real living human life. After years of regular torture, boredom replacing all other mental activity, continuous fear, forgetfulness of all dreams to the point of inability to dream, to have visions, after years of being driven into the corners of rats, of garbage cans filled with plague, of cut-off limbs, driven into every form of living which is death: suddenly the people in this city were free. They were free to experiment.
This is what the people said to the sky. ‘Now the mad bird has won. Now even criminals can fly.’
But (in my dream) thousands of tiny fish were translucent and looked like worms. They leapt, with their tiny sharp teeth, out of the water at me. The teeth bit through the thin feathers into my flesh. From me the little teeth were red. One baby fish leaped so high, he bit through my rotting teeth with his teeth. Then through my tongue tip. Many fish tore my wings off of me out of hunger. Me actually courageous I tried to keep my life by screaming swooping dodging. Nobody and nothing came to my rescue. There was no such thing as rescue. There could have been no reality. I had only myself to save myself. I couldn’t save myself. My wings were more torn than dishrags, they were sick, and the tongue was so torn it couldn’t speak. I could neither fly nor cry. Nor could I stay alive.
Inside my mind I scream aloud; inside my mind, the world, I scream aloud. Somewhere I am a female and I have long hair and that hair is floating over the soil so dry, for centuries, that nothing ever grows in it. Here there is only emotion. I scream when I die. Then I sink into black. The rest of any living is nights. The cities have died. The cities are full of rats; the rats are bored; people seem as lonely as they are bored.
After that night I was so unsure of myself, I desperately made love with anyone. Since lots of boys fell wildly in love with this double material sex and mental lack of me, daddy was jealous. ‘If I was a young boy, I’d knife a boy who fucked you.’
‘I don’t like knives.’
‘We’ve hit bottom.’ Daddy knew how low love had brought us. ‘We’re downwind from even from where the rich spit. Any man would do anything to prevent our joy. But they’ll all be sorry for their rules which are crimes. If, by any chance, there isn’t any real justice, if we have no rescue: I hereby invoke all the gods or Energies who sanctify our love or so-called crime to make these men suffer the horrors of hell. May their suffering equal God’s.’
‘I didn’t know God existed.’
Not only did this monster to whose force I had, by force, yielded hate even the notion of my fucking a boy. He also, was, even more, frightened that other people, society, would notice his ridiculous restrictions of me and question why. He realized he had to give them, society, a reason why he was shutting me up.
All daddy cared about was what society thought about him. He didn’t care if he was really evil because he didn’t have any morals. He was free to do whatever he wanted as long as he was secret. He was a moralist. He just didn’t want society to think him evil.
So he gradually let it be known I was a cripple. For this reason, he was shutting me up for the rest of my life. I was a genetic cripple: I was weird. Also I was dyslexic and autistic. I was too crippled for anyone to love me.
My mother knew I wasn’t a cripple. She was real dumb. So daddy gave her the one reason for my life imprisonment which could penetrate her thick skull. He, he explained, was saving me from marriage because marriage is the worst life any woman can have.
My mother agreed.
‘Marriage,’ my father said, ‘turns woman into whining passive-aggressive liars
