Mercy

walk, fast, dedicated, determined, stubborn, filled with fury,

spraying piss and vinegar, to M ax’s, about twelve blocks from

where I live, an artists’ restaurant and bar, because I know it

will be filled with ramrod hard noise and heat, a crush o f hard,

noisy men, artists and poseurs and I don’t know the difference,

poseurs and the famous and I don’t know the difference, it’s a

modern crime but I can’t concentrate on it enough to

remember the ones you’re supposed to know, except Warhol

because he’s so strange and he’d stand out anywhere and I

don’t want to go near him; but the difference mostly is that I

think I am the artist, not them, but you can’t say that and it’s

hard even to keep thinking it though I don’t know w hy it’s so

hard, maybe because girls aren’t ever it; but all the poseurs and

all the famous will be at the tables where I can’t go, even if I

had money to eat they w ouldn’t let me eat there, not alone,

and I w o n ’t be one o f the pleading girls who is begging to be

allowed to go to the tables, I will just get a stool at the bar if the

guy at the door lets me in, he might not and usually I am too

shy to defy him and I hang tight with a man but tonight I want

in myself, I want the noise and the hard edge and the crush and

I want to drink, I want to find a place at the bar for m yself and

it’s got m y name on it even though I don’t got no name for the

purposes o f the man at the door but the stool’s mine and I will

drink and I will stay as long as I have bills in front o f me and it’s

an unwritten law about girls, that they don’t let you sit

anywhere, so you never quite understand w hy you can be

somewhere sometimes and not the same place the next time

and you figure out you got to hang on to a man and you are his

shadow, like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on. It

sure insures a steady flow o f affection wom an to man if you

can’t even sit down without one. Tonight I have a singular

distaste for a man. I’m not starting out with any interest

whatsoever. H e’d have to catch m y eye like starlight or it’d

have to be like fairy dust where you want some and you need a

taste, it’s something that tickles you deep down but you can’t

reach it to scratch, like the cut o f a record you listen to a

thousand times or you got a taste you can’t get rid o f so yo u ’re

like some fucking hamster on one o f them wheels just running

and running or yo u ’re skim ming coke o ff the top o f something or smack o ff the top o f something, you just get smitten,

lightly but completely, stuck in the moment but also riveted

so you can’t shake it loose, infatuated now , freedom now ,

there’s some special charge com ing from him and yo u ’re

plugged in and it’s sparking, it’s not like you want to get laid

and yo u ’re looking for someone w h o ’s going to be good, it’s

more like some trait you can’t identify strikes you wham , it’s

got an obsession lurking under it, it’s a light feeling but under

it is a burning habit, a habit you ain’t got yet but you just want

to play with it once, like skinpopping heroin or something,

you know, it ain’t serious but you want it. I take an energetic

walk with the city all glowing wet, all sparkling, for me, as if

it’s for me, the light’s for me and the rain’s for me and it’s

stoned out o f its fucking mind for me; and the buildings are

just pure glitter and the light’s coming down from heaven

luscious and wet; for me. The boy at the door can’t keep me

out because I stride in and I am aglow; he’s a mandarin

standing there with his little list and his leather jacket and his

pretensions and his snobbish good looks and I mumble words

I know he can’t hear and I never yet met a man who wasn’t

stupider than me and he’s trying to decide am I someone or not

and I am not fucking anyone but I am striding in my

motorcycle boots and I am wet and I am bound for glory at the

bar and I push m y w ay through the crowd and fuck him and

he’s watching me, he sees that I ain’t headed for a table which

would transgress the laws o f the universe, and it ain’t a girl’s

trick to sit somewhere she ain’t entitled because a man didn’t

pick her out already; he sees I want the bar and I suppose it’s

faintly plausible that a girl might want a drink on her own or it

confuses him enough that he hesitates and he who hesitates is

lost. I take out all the bills I have and he’s watching me do it

and I put it down in front o f me, a nice pile, substantial, and I

am firm ly sitting on a stool and I have spread m y elbows out

on the bar to take up enough space to declare I am alone and

here to drink and he don’t know I don’t have more money and

I order m y Stoli on the rocks and I ain’t making no move to

take m y change or m ove m y money so he relaxes as if letting

me there will not do monumental harm to the system that is in

place and that it is his jo b to protect and the bodies close in

around me to protect me from his scrutiny and the noise closes

in around me and I am swallowed up and I disappear and I am

completely cosseted and private and safe and I feel like some

new thing, just new ly alive, and there’s the placenta hugging

me and I’m wet with fucking life and I stare into m y fucking

drink, m y triumphal drink, I stare into it as if it’s tea leaves and

I’m the w orld ’s oldest, wisest gypsy, I got gold earrings down

to m y knees and I got foresight and hindsight and I am a reader

o f history, there’s layers o f history, vulgar and occult, in the

stu ff and if you lit a fire to it yo u ’d burn history up. And shit I

love it; a solitary human being covered all over by noise, a

dense noise that bubbles and burns and cracks all over you like

fire, small fire, a million tiny, exploding fires; or a superhuman embrace by some green, slim y, scaly monster, it’s big and all over you and messy, it’s turbulent and dramatic and

ever so much bigger than a man and its embrace is overwhelming, a descent, an invasion that covers the terrain, a

crush o f locusts but you aren’t repelled, only exhilarated at

how awesome it is, how biblical, how spectacular; like as i f it

took you back to ancient E gypt and you saw something

sublime in the desert and you had to walk across it but you

could; it wraps itself around you like some spectacular excess

o f nature not man, yo u ’re crawling with it but it ain’t bad and

it ain’t loathsome and there’s no fear, it’s just exactly extreme

enough and wild enough and it says it’s nighttime in human

history now in Am erika and Moses has his story and you have