The New Womans Broken Heart Page 4
poor and no person either, a woman is what I am, a hisser, a goddam
fucking poor woman who stays goddam fucking poor because she
doesnt fuck various jerks around town.
its the white glove syndrome, the queen must be naked except for
the white gloves, while hes fucking her raw she has to pretend shes
sitting with her legs closed proper and upright and while hes sitting
with his legs closed handing out work assignments she has to pretend shes fucking him until she drops dead from it. yeah its tough on her. its tougher on me.
I dont mean for this to be bitter. I dont know from bitter, its true
that morning fell flat on its ass and when morning breaks its shit to
clean it up. and I dont much like sleeping either because I have technicolor dreams in which strangers try to kill me in very resourceful ways, and its true that since the ass wiggler snubbed me in the toilet
of the ritzy hotel I get especially upset when I go to pee in my own
house (house here being a euphemism for apartment, room, or
hovel—as in her own shithole which she does not in any sense own,
in other words, where she hangs her nonexistent hat) and remember
that the food stamps ran out and I have $11. 14 in the bank, bleak,
Arctic in fact, but not bitter, because I do still notice some things I
particularly like, the sun, for instance, or the sky even when the sun
isnt in it. I mean, I like it. I like trees. I like them all year long, no
matter what. I like cold air. Im not one of those complainers about
winter which should be noted since so many people who pretend to
love life hate winter. I like the color red a lot and purple drives me
crazy with pleasure. I chum inside with excitement and delight every
time a dog or cat smiles at me. when I see a graveyard and the moon
is full and everything is covered with snow I wonder about vampires,
you cant say I dont like life.
people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many
sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love
doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep
you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from
dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face
facts which also does not keep you from dying,
people ask, well, why dont you tell a story the right way, you woke
up then what happened and who said what to whom. I say thats shit
because when you are ass fucking poor every day is the same, you
worry, ok. she had brown hair and brown eyes and she worried,
theres a story for you. she worried when she peed and she worried
when she sat down to figure out how far the SI 1. 14 would go and
what would happen when it was gone and she worried when she took
her walk and saw the pretty tree, she worried day and night, she
choked on worry, she ate worry and she vomited worry and no matter
how much she shitted and vomited the worry didnt come out, it just
stayed inside and festered and grew, she was pregnant with worry,
hows that? so how come the bitch doesnt just sell that ass if shes in
this goddam situation and its as bad as she says, well, the bitch did,
not just once but over and over, long ago, but not so long ago that
she doesnt remember it. she sold it for a corned beef sandwich and
for steak when she could get it. she sold it for a bed to sleep in and it
didnt have to be her own either, she ate speed because it was cheaper
than food and she got fucked raw in exchange for small change day
after day and night after night, she did it in ones twos threes and
fours with onlookers and without, so she figures shes wiggled her ass
enough for one lifetime and the truth is she would rather be dead if
only the dying wasnt so fucking slow and awful and she didnt love
life goddam it so much, the truth is once you stop you stop, its not
something you can go back to once its broken you in half and you
know what it means. I mean, as long as youre alive and you know
what trading in ass means and you stop, thats it. its not negotiable,
and the woman for whom it is not negotiable is anathema.
for example, heres a typical vignette, not overdrawn, underdrawn,
youre done yr days work, fucking, youre home, so some asshole man
thinks thats his time, so he comes with a knife and since hes neighborhood trade you try to calm him down, most whores are pacifists of the first order, so he takes over yr room, takes off his shirt, lays
down his knife, thats yr triumph, the fuck isnt anything once the
knife is laid down, only the fuck is always something, you have to
pretend that you won. then you got to get him to go but hes all comfy
isnt he. so another man comes to the door and you say in an undertone, this fuckers taken over my house, so it turns out man 2 is a hero, he comes in and says what you doing with my woman, and it
turns out man 2 is a big drug dealer and man 1 is a fucking junkie,
so you listen to man 1 apologize to man 2 for fucking his woman, so
man 1 leaves, guess who doesnt leave? right, man 2 is there to stay,
so he figures hes got you and he does, and he fucking tries to bite you
to death and you lie still and groan because you owe him and he
fucking bites you near to death, between yr legs, yr clitoris, he fucking bites and bites, then he wants breakfast, so once you been through it enough, enough is enough.
ah, you say, so this explains it, whores hate men because whores
see the worst, what would a whore be doing with the best, but the
truth is that a whore does the worst with the best, the best undress
and reduce to worse than the rest, besides, all women are whores and
thats a fact, at least all women with more than $11. 14 in the bank,
me too. shit, I should tell you what I did to get the $11. 14. nothing
wrong with being a whore, nothing wrong with working in a sweatshop. nothing wrong with picking cotton, nothing wrong with nothing.
I like the books these jerko boys write. I mean, and get paid for. its
interesting, capital, labor, exploitation, tomes, volumes, journals,
essays, analyses, all they fucking have to do is stop trading in female
ass. apparently its easier to write books, it gives someone like me a
choice, laugh to death or starve to death. Ive always been pro choice,
the ladies are very impressed with those books, its a question of
physical coordination, some people can read and wiggle ass simultaneously. ambidextrous.
so now Im waiting and thinking. Anne Frank and Sylvia Plath leap
to mind, they both knew Nazis when they saw them, at some point,
there were a lot of ass wigglers in the general population around
them wiggling ass while ovens filled and emptied, wiggling ass while
heroes goosestepped or wrote poetry, wiggling ass while women,
those old fashioned women who did nothing but hope or despair,
died, this new woman is dying too, of poverty and a broken heart, the
heart broken like fine china in an earthquake, the earth rocking and
shaking under the impact of all that goddam ass wiggling going off
like a million time bombs, an army of whores cannot fail—to die one
by one so that no one has to notice, meanwhile one sad old whore
who stopped liking it has a heart first cracked then broken by the
the wild cherries of lust
(for Orisis)
bertha schneider had once been a woman and was now an androgyne. as a woman she had lain for 8 years on her back with her legs open as the multitudes passed by leaving gifts of sperm and spit,
now as an androgyne her legs were still open but at the same time
they ran, jumped, swam, stood up, skipped, and squatted, her
mouth was also open and what nestled there with restless fervor also
found its way to her armpits, under and between her breasts, to the
creases in her neck, to the small of her back as well as the bend of
her elbow, not to mention where the bend of her elbow often found
itself.
bertha had passed 2 years of celibacy before becoming an androgyne. she had fucked during that time in much the way vegetarians eat hamburgers—sometimes and not proudly, yes, she
had been fucked and gutted and ransacked occasionally by sweet
young boys who lived on street comers, yes, she had sucked the cunts
of brilliant, strong, and worthy women with abandon and no small
measure of delight, but all the while she had dreamed herself celibate and had even imagined that she was a virgin again as she once had been—only this time in spirit as well as in body, on purpose instead of by accident.
bertha had changed much in her one short life, as a woman she
had often been whipped and had lusted for that agonizing, exquisite
humiliation, those who had whipped her were not yr vulgar wife
beaters but velvet coated actors and curly haired painters as well as
revolutionaries and workers, the whips had been real leather and
when her back and ass were shredded and blood began to form puddles on the floor, the whip handle had often as not been stuffed up her cunt or ass. now as an androgyne she had renounced all that, she
was proud of the fact that in her soul whips did not speak to her. oh
yes, there were occasional fleeting seconds—moments even—of
desire that verged on need, yes, sometimes the muscles in the pit of
her stomach did tighten and she did lust for the lash of the whip, not
to mention the whip handle, but she was secure in her conviction
that she who was now an androgyne would not regress to being a
mere woman, it would take, she knew, more than one man could
offer to make her into a woman again, it would take, she knew, a
concert hall filled with thousands of people, her bare-assed naked on
stage shackled in wicked chains, being whipped by, dare she say it,
Jean-Louis Trintignant, before she would even be tempted in a
serious way.
bertha had changed physically as well, as a woman she seemed to
be all breasts and ass. indeed, if other parts of her body existed, they
went unremarked by the world at large, now as an androgyne her
breasts had diminished while her belly had grown, her belly was now
a giant luminous mound, glowing, exquisitely sensitive to every
touch, even to every thought of touch, a finger on her belly was the
instrument of ecstasy and a tongue brought on multiple orgasms
that were as vast and as deep as the universe, stars quaked and comets exploded when her belly came into contact with an electric vibrator.
her nose, of course, had grown, it had grown and grown and
grown, sometimes it hung, weak, limp, sweet, beautiful, sometimes
upon the passing of a gentle wind, a grazing cow, or a wood nymph,
her nose would stiffen and enlarge and become engorged with blood,
it was not very pleasant when this happened in the company of ordinary men and women with their hidden private parts and endless sources of shame, but when it happened in the presence of other androgynes, she herself would touch and fondle it. limp or stiff, her nose would roll over arms and into armpits, explore ears that opened
up like flowers, juicy and moist and yielding, find its way between
toes and rub itself against calloused heels, seek out with gentle insistence the backs of knees, immerse itself in puddles of saliva under the tongue and the rich resonances of slick assholes, vibrate and
heave, and finally come to rest on a nipple, touching it just barely,
then, as bertha lay exhausted, her lover would touch her belly and so
they would begin again and continue and replenish and deplete and
invent, and then begin again.
berthas hair of course had changed too. as a woman she had violated it without conscience—cut it, lacquered it, straightened it, curled it, even shaved it from her legs and armpits and pulled it out
from between her eyes, now as an androgyne her hair rose and fell
with the light, the wind, it danced between her legs, it reached
toward the sun in rich profusion from every part of her. each hair
was an antenna, sensitive, alert, one hair, like a new filling, could
send an icy thrilling chill through her whole body or warm her like
whiskey and Ben-Gay. her pubic hair flowed, billowing, curling,
lustrous, slightly rough and coarse so that when touched by her fingertips elecric impulses would tickle her knuckles and cause her palms to swell and sweat, her hair grew on her legs and reached out
and touched the wind and met the water and when touched by other
flesh sent thrills into the marrow of her bones and turned her almost
inside-out with pleasure.
her hands too had changed, her fingers looked now much like her
nose, and her fingertips resembled vulvas, her Mount of Venus had
thickened and the lines in her hand were deep, almost cavernous,
and her ass, which as a woman had been mostly for shitting and occasional rape, had become an interior tunnel into which flesh sometimes flowed, or honey it seemed, or ice cream, in fact, the whole space between her ass and mouth had become a winding energy
passage so that any touch or breath in either place caused sweet
chills and exquisite tremors.
bertha schneider, once a woman, then a celibate, had become an
androgyne—and when I tell you that she lived happily ever after, I
hope you will know what I mean.
bertha schneiders unrelenting sadness
as she kissed his neck, bertha schneider remembered her unrelenting sadness, this was her hidden part, all covered in the luxuriant twine of personality, learned facts, sardonic humor.
“oh, what a life our bertha has led, ” said the ignorant, as she held
forth on her research into remote jungle tribes where hymens were
impaled on wooden spikes and urethras were split wide open to
resemble precious cuntlike flowers, it was almost as if she had been
there, heard the tribal drums, drunk the sweet or nauseating brews
of livers and brains of deceased enemy warriors, danced the raucous
gyrating dances of birth, death, and rebirth, but bertha, truth to tell,
had in fact been to the New York City Public Library at 42nd and
5th, especially on snowy storming days, there she had sat under that
pale and dreadful light (which, she believed, was part of the very
design of that building, calculated by those who wanted no one
civilian to know too much), books opened up like leaves fallen on the
earth in late October, her giantesque thighs pulsating on the stiff
wooden chairs to the beat of the cold hum around her.
bertha schneider had unrelenting sadness flowing through her very
veins, and this had been a fact all of her long lived life, it was her
heritage, in fact—a sadness so large, so
soft, so sweet, so resonant,
that it interjected itself right into other peoples sentences and punctuated her own. the dead of bertha schneiders russian past churned in her, whole dead bodies of sadness never buried deep enough, this
sadness had passed, first in mother russia itself, from mother to
daughter and from mother to daughter and from mother to
daughter, in those dark grim russian urban alleys where her
forefathers had lived and studied Torah and died, the unrelenting
sadness had been bom, on those narrow dirt and stone streets, amid
shops and pogroms, amid hard benches and mountains of laundry to
do and meals to prepare and yes candles to light and heads to be
covered, that sadness had been bom. amid the hard screaming births and the quiet obedient deaths, amid the bone poor hunger and the melancholy prayers, amid the vile hatred of her kind, the sadness
had been bom.
bertha had her own idea, in fact, as to how the sadness had been
bom. she had long ago learned that the memories of men, in
whatever form, were not to be trusted, generations of men had
passed as scribes, rabbis, and storytellers and yet, bertha knew, the
real story had never been told, this was not mysterious to bertha,
since she knew that men avoided life, not respecting it, never daring
to look it squarely in the face, treasuring only their sons and their
own self-importance, this bertha might lament but she could not
change it. for those generations of scribes and rabbis and storytellers
life had been an abstract canvas full of abstract ideas—they had
obscured the actual shape of things and the actual facts of the case,
they had passed their avoidance of lines and proportions and direct
commitment on to each other over so many generations that now it
had soaked into the very marrow of their bones, and so they had invented Law and W ar and Philosophical Arguments and with all their arsenals of Culture and Learning and Civilization they had
stopped all dissent, even as their children were starving they could
ignore life and argue the philosophical ramifications of death, in
particular the men of whom bertha was thinking had worshiped