not done and there’s not too many strangers to being fucked
on the street, he ain’t been fucked; it ain’t what he is. I love him
for it. I fucking love him for it. He’s spectacular and there is a
deep humanism in him that expresses itself precisely in
surviving, not going under, standing up; even tied down, he’s
standing up; and he’s gone beyond the first steps, the original
Black Panther idea that had to do with arming against police
violence, now he’s an apostle o f social equality and he is
fucking feeding the children; he’s been physically hurt and he’s
been laid out on the bed o f pain and his idea o f what’s human
has gotten broader and kinder and more inclusive, and that’s
revolutionary love, and I know it, and I got it, and while
there’s many reasons he can’t trust me, nor me him, we have
been on the same bed o f pain, cuffed, and I didn’t have his
pride, and I need him to teach me; I need to learn it— defiance,
the kind a bullet can’t stop. I don’t know i f he’s kind to women
or not and it worries me but I put it aside because there’s what I
know about that bed o f pain he’s cuffed to; I think I’m
annihilated inside by it; I think I’m shot to hell inside, with
nothing but gangrene everywhere there was a wound; I see, I
feel, an inner collapse that comes from the humiliation o f how
they do you on the bed o f pain; bang bang. I tell him I know
the man; but I don’t know if he knows what I mean. I know
the man. He acts to me with respect as if he grasps m y
meaning. I am trying to say, without saying, that the man
fucked me too; but I don’t know how to say I became it and he
didn’t and now I’m refusing to be it or I’m in the process and
that there’s profound injustice in making someone it, in
crushing them down so their insides are fucked in perpetuity. I
die for men to admire, from a stance o f parity; I admire Huey; I
am struggling for parity, what I see as his revolutionary
dignity and self-definition, his bravery— not in defying
authority, I been through that, but in upending the reality that
said what he was and what was on top o f him. He sends me
poems and m axims, and I am thinking whether to send him
some. I love him. I think maybe he could be for women. In
some speeches he says so. He says men have been arrogant
over women and there’s new freedoms women need to have.
During the days I type for four dollars an hour, which means
that if I am prepared to go ape-shit or stir crazy I could
certainly make up to thirty-two dollars a day, on some days;
but I can only stand to do it four hours or maybe three, and I
really couldn’t stand to do it every day, although I have tried to
for the money, I have tried; if I could do three hours every day
I would be fine, unless something happened. It’s just that I do
it and I do it and I do it and not much time has elapsed it turns
out and I get bored and restless as if m y mind is physically
lifting itself out o f m y head and hitting the walls like some
trapped fly. I feel a profound distaste for it, sitting there and
doing this stupid shit. I feel a bitterness, almost guilt or
remorse, it’s unbearable in the minute or at that time as if I’m
betraying being alive, there’s too much m oving in me and I
cannot fucking waste it in this chickenshit way. It’s not a
matter o f having an idea o f a picture o f life, or taking exception
to the idea o f typing or being a secretary or doing something o f
the sort, I don’t have some prior idea o f how I should be or
how life should be, a magazine picture in my head, you know,
or from television, or from the romances other people say they
want. It ain’t a thought in any sense at all. It’s that I am not her
and I cannot be her, I fucking am not her, I can’t do it, I can’t sit
still and type the shit. It’s just that I want what I want, which is
throughout me, not just my brain, and it’s to feel and move
and fuck. I don’t try to resolve it. I figure you have to be
humble before life. Life tells you, you don’t tell it, and you
can’t argue with what w on’t sit still long enough to be argued
with. I have to break loose one w ay or another, drink or fuck,
find some real noise, you know, a fucking stream o f real noise
and messing around to jum p right in; that’s my way. If it’s
tepid I don’t want it and I don’t do it from habit or just because
it’s there to be done, it’s a big change I made in myself, I have
to feel it bad, I don’t do nothing on automatic; people think if
it’s on the bad side it ain’t bourgeois but I don’t; I think if it’s
tepid it don’t matter what it is class-wise or style-wise. I don’t
solve things in m y mind to impose it on reality, because it ain’t
worth much to do so; for instance, to say you don’t want to be
some fucked thing so don’t fuck. Fucking never feels like you
will end up some fucked thing anyway; it pushes you out so
fast and so far it ain’t a matter o f what you think and it’s stupid
to misidentify it, the problem. Y o u ’re some poor, fragile
person in the middle o f an ocean you never seen the whole of;
you don’t know where it starts or where it stops or how deep
down it goes and what you got to do is swim and hope, hope
and swim; you learn everything you know from it, it don’t
learn a fucking thing from you. Y ou can make promises to
yourself in your mind but your mind is so small up against the
world; you got to have some respect for the world; or so I see it
and that’s m y way; but, then, I ain’t holding out for a pension.
I type m y hours, however many I can make it through,
putting as much pressure on m yself as I can stand, which isn’t
making a lot o f progress, and I keep a time sheet, which I make
as honest as possible but it is hard not because I want to lie but
because I ju st fucking cannot keep track, I can’t pay enough
attention to it to keep track, so I just approximate sort o f
combining what I need with what seems plausible and I come
up with something. I cannot write every fucking thing down
to keep track o f m y time as i f I’m some asshole and I find it
profoundly unbearable to do robot stuff. Sometimes I w ork
for a writer, a poet, and I deliver packages, which at least
means I go on subways and taxis and see places, and I file
papers aw ay alphabetically and I type, except she says you
have to put a space before the colon and a space after it, one
space after it instead o f just no space before it and two spaces
after it as every typist does. In theory I am for defying
convention but typing is something you do automatic like