dark; like the great, unbearable wind but perfectly still, quiet,
thick; it pushed without moving. Them in the dark, the
cement was the bed, a cold slat o f death, a grave with no rest,
the best bed you could get, the best bed you would ever have,
you fell forward on your knees pushed by the dark from
behind and the dark banged into you or sometimes there were
boys in cars flying by in the dark and then coming around
from behind, later, the same ones; or sometimes different
ones. The dark was some army o f them, some mass, a creature
from the deep, the blob, a giant parasite, some spreading
monster, pods, wolfmen. They called you names and they
hissed, hot steam o ff their tongues. They followed you in
beat-up cars or they just stood around and they whistled and
made noises, and the dark pushed you down and banged into
you and you were on your hands and knees, the skin torn off,
not praying, waiting, wanting all right, wanting for the dark
to move o ff you, pick itself up and run. The dark was hissing
and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold, brutal bone, and
hips packed tight. The dark wasn’t just at night. The dark was
any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there,
right up against you, pressing. You can’t see anything and you
don’t know any names, not who they are or the names for
what they do; the dark is all you know, familiar, old, from
long ago, is it Nino or Joe or Ken or Curt, curly hair or
straight, hard hips, tight, driven, familiar with strange words
whispered in your ear, like wind lashing it. Do they see you,
do they know your name? I’m Andrea you whisper in the dark
and the dark whispers back, okay babe; shut up babe; that’s
cool babe; that’s a pretty name babe; and pulls out all the w ay
and drives back in, harder, more. Nino is rough and bad, him
and his friend, and he says what’s w rong with making love
here, right now, on this lunch counter. We are in Lits. I’m
alone, a grown-up teenage girl; at the lunch counter, myself.
They come up to me. I don’t know the name o f the other one. I
have never heard anyone say “ making love” before. Nino
takes the salt shaker and the pepper shaker from the counter
and he rubs them against each other, slow , and he talks staring
at me so I can’t m ove m y head aw ay from his eyes and he says
w hat’s w rong with it, here, now , in the daytime, on this lunch
counter, you and me, now, and I don’t know w hat’s w rong
with it; is N ino one o f them, in the dark? Stuart is m y age from
school before he stopped coming and went bad and started
running with gangs and he warned me to stay aw ay from him
and Nino who is older and bad and where they go. N ino has a
knife. I write m y first poem for Nino; I want it to be N ino; I’d
touch him back. I ran away lots o f times. I was on the bus to
N ew Y o rk lots o f times. I necked with old men I found on the
bus lots o f times. I necked with Vincent and Charles different
times, adults, Vincent had gray hair and a thick foreign accent,
Italian, and Charles had a hard, bronze face and an accent you
could barely hear from someplace far, far away, and they liked
fifteen-year-old girls; and they whispered deep, horsey,
choked words and had wet mouths; and you crunched down
in the seats and they kissed you all over, then with their hands
they took your head and forced it into their laps. One became a
famous m ovie star and I went to watch him in cow boy films.
He was the baddie but he was real nice to me. I said I wanted to
be a writer, a real writer, a great writer like Rimbaud or
D ostoevsky. He didn’t laugh. He said we were both artists and
it was hard. He said, Andrea, that’s a pretty name. He said
follow your dream, never give up, it takes a long time, years
even, and we slouched down in the seats. I knew the highw ay
to N ew Y o rk and the streets when I got there. I knew the back
alleys in Philadelphia too but I didn’t like Philadelphia. It was
fake, pretend folksingers and pretend guitar players and
pretend drug dealers, all attitude, some pot, nothing hard,
pretend poets, a different attitude, no poems. Y o u couldn’t get
lost in the dark, it w asn’t dense enough, it w asn’t desolate
enough, it was safe really, a playpen, the fake girls went there
to not get hurt, to have regular boyfriends, to pretend they
were different or bad; but I was really lost so I had to be lost,
not pretend, in a dark as hard and unyielding as the cement
under it. In N ew Y ork I got o ff the bus dank from old Charles,
old Vincent, he walked away, wet, rumpled, not •looking
back, and I had some dollars in my hand, and I took the A train
to Greenwich Village, and I went to the Eighth Street
Bookstore, the center o f the universe, the place where real
poets went, the most incredible place on earth, they made
beauty from the dark, the gray, the cement, your head down
in someone’s lap, the torn skin on your bruised knees, your
bloody hands; it wasn’t the raspy, choked, rough whisper, it
was real beautiful words with the perfect shape and sound and
filled with pain and rage and pure, perfect; and I looked
everywhere, at every book, at every poem, at every play, and I
touched every book o f poems, I just touched them, just passed
my hand over them, and I bought any poems I had money for,
sometimes it was just a few pages stapled together with print
on it, and I kept them with me and I could barely breathe, and I
knew names no one else knew, Charles Olsen, Robert
Duncan, Gregory Corso, Anselm Hollo, Leroi Jones,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Creeley,
Kenneth Rexroth; and when Allen Ginsberg had new poems I
almost died, Allen Ginsberg who was the most perfect and the
bravest and the best and the words were perfect beauty and
perfect power and perfect pain and I carried them with me and
read them, stunned and truly trembling inside because they
went past all lies to something hidden inside; and I got back on
the bus and I got back to Camden and I had the poems and
someday it would be me. I wrote words out on paper and hid
them because my mother would say they were dirty words; all
the true words were dirty words. I wrote private, secret words
in funny-shaped lines. Y ou could take the dark— the thick,
mean, hard, sad dark— the gray cement, lonely as death, cold
as death, stone cold, the torn skin, you on your knees your
hands bleeding on the cold cement, and you could use words
to say I am— I am, I want, I know , I feel, I see. N in o ’s knife,
cold, on the edge o f m y skin down m y back, the cement