Part 9 (1/2)
Ask , she is the fire of et born from that place where life and death happened in me She carries me and will be the death of me
So when I tell you this, a little bit it makes me want to bite you
Really hard
Some people say that words can't ”happen” to you I say they can
One of ot all hopped up on mushrooms and went for a walk by the train tracks We lived next to the tracks in Eugene-in a neighborhood where you would find needles in the alley but also yuppies trying to buy and restore their way to better I was supposed to be writing a dissertation That night we sat down on the ground We drank Chivas from a flask Then a train slow rolled by, and I ju, and then I hopped it I have no idea why I looked back at the i smaller and s hiht The wind felt excellent Theto nowhere for all she orth took my breath away
Of course somewhere around five ht AHHHH what aht JUMP IDIOT and so I did, I juravel until I ca the high of organics and free I walked home Devin was exactly where I'd left hiiant drunk Caucasian Buddha
The night after ers on the keys My hands were all scraped up My forearms and elbows, too My chin and cheek I was supposed to be writing my dissertation chapter on Kathy Acker, who by then I'd met I stared at lines of hers I had typed and referenced as part of my critical discussion on the screen: Every ti layers of my own epidermis, which are layers of still freshly bloody scar tissue, black brown and red, and tearing each one of them off so more andis to me a woman (ES, 210)
When I went to write words over the top of hers, kind of I felt like I an to write a story The first line that came out of me was: ”I am a woman who talks to herself and lies”
Please understand, I loved reading literary theory - I mean I devoured the primary texts as if they were romance novels - I dove into the discourse as if its waters were e and thought But trying to write critically, academically, hurt
A lot
Why would someone do that to novels? For what purpose, other than a sadistic impulse to hush, silence, incarcerate art? It seemed like a violence to me to write that way about literature It seenant at worst - murderous even
Inpieces of noisy art White Noise and Almanac of the Dead and Empire of the Senseless - a book which I promise you, if you've never read it, will scrape your eyeballs Books in which culture towered and collapsed, border identities defied the cult of good citizenshi+p and revolutionaries turned back on their liberators with fire for hair Wars of ender and wars of fathers and language and power and wars of just the huliterary criticise - I felt like I was a torturer A killer A Betrayer An abuser I slept with three of et the body back into discourse HEY! What about bodies? The noisy, wet, rule-breaking body that seeht It didn't work
OF COURSE I considered quitting graduate school I paid ht? Half the people I started with quit I did not have to continue toward scholar But so on inside ray matter Some woman in me I'd never met You knoho she was? My intellect When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye Watch out, woman
To which she replied, I'e that will blow your ht Whatever And anyhere did you even come from?
Oh, I think you know I'm from your father Now open the Goddamned door
My father Whose mind curled around art and architecture and classical music and film Whose intellect I carried in my blood rivers That's when ed to leave a family and body batter my way into the world, and the me I'd never met, or even knew existed, except perhaps hidden in ers My father's daughter
”I aht after I jus, at the coreat gushi+ng return of the repressed Like a blood clot had loosened My hands frenzied Words froirls whose stories got stuck in their throats ca could have stopped the stories cohfroht - I wrote story after story There was no inside out There ords and there was uts out Until it was a book
Until
Short Story SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print I got published by an independent press One that did not care about how far I'd paddled outside the mainstream I called the book Her Other Mouths In every story, intense things happen to a body Because, well, they do Did And I kne to tell it Words the body of h It felt like walking through fire A crucible I called it Allegories of Violence By soot published too I still think it happened to soood caet to know each other Intellectualout Brush each other's hair Take bubble baths and draw soap pictures on each other's backs and clink glasses late into the night
But there was a cost
I was in e with the Devin I was a teacher of things, having achieved a doctorate and publications But that woed who I had been Her zany brain force would not go I didn't want to fuck I wanted to read I didn't want to go nuht I wanted to travel the country of ideas and feel thoughts and blast open the top of my head I didn't want to drink until I dropped I wanted to write A whole other book My husband becaed one And though my love did not leave, it went down into deeper darker places
Devin's life moved bedward, fueled by alcohol and woman need On one of his travels to another country for the first tin bed While he was in Vietnahts Then weeks Then one hts When I had to pee, I did When I was hungry, I cried When I ake, a white nothing At night I ate s I learned well from my mother More and entle friend broke into my house because he orried about me He and a bull dyke named Laurel broke down the front door ofup at work He put me in the shower Then he wrapped me in blankets Then he fed me Literally Then atched old movies for three days until I looked at hiht of Brody and his clarinet and beautiful black kid hands I thought of my best friend in Florida, the one el, Michael and hoe both left the Lubbock and made up lives There are many ways to love boys and men Or to let theain together
He drank hie - a suffering that once I again claihter Sister Ho thick underwater I lived the life of a devalued woman Not a wife Not a ave me value to myself I felt like a pointless wo no one to share a body with My clothes began to hang off of my body as if I were someone else Other women would compliment me on my supposed intentional feminine metamorphoses, and I'd s I'd lose interest in washi+ng h, and findat the floor or holdingfro to and fro, I was at home No, not ho rooeonto the street There were always htless and s h to not feel Every day About a bottle a day, roughly Evenly Soht I'd watch TV until sleep saved me Or didn't This is my life is what I felt It is slow like still water There is a dull hu or hborhood and a house and a refrigerator The coas station There is a car in which I ride to work and then come home There is a linear and accessible story to follow You don't have to do anything Or be
But then there was another wo nulassone day I saoman with ashen skin and dirty blond hair walk by in denim cut-offs and a tube top and cowboy boots Her arms looked like maps The circles under her eyes weren't shi+ners but could fool you She had a jerk to her right shoulder every third step or so Walking by woman Then I saw an emaciated man in jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shi+rt walk after her He hunched He had darty eyes He s down in a rat tail to theis, I'd seen them before Lots of times For about two years She was a hooker He was her pimp This was their beat The alleyway behindthis way - e life Them on the outside with some trace of my past in their skin and hair
This ti infor so there as they went out of view I tasted so warm in my mouth Then I realized I'd bitten the inside of rade papers, that day My chest and cheek aching That night I threw up for no particular reason Which was not eventful for that ti very sht e of her nose It wasn't the bruise It was the bruise that let me seeher eyes, were blue Likeslide to the floor I watched her walk by and wondered how uess I wondered what jobs she'd tried and failed, this walking wo maps for arms and a bruise and blue eyes I tried to picture howby the front door I watched her ass hanging out of her shorts - it hung limply - two little flesh commas Then she was around the corner I waited for her dance partner to co I knocked on theWithout thinking I got up and walked to my front door and opened it and walked outside and walked up to him and said ” How much”
In the short story I wrote about what happened next I ask her in I tell her to sit down She sits down In the story she s machines her left knee Her hand shakes In the story I say this is what it feels like to bedown at a woht as she sits on iven so infinitesi at her: she looks like Mary This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that e of christ I picture a Mary so drawn and gaunt and tired and angry to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face
In the story I say, what do I think I' s in my short stories really happened to me I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to e to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed coraphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind's powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?
An exchange happened Woman to woman If she is still alive, she can back ive? Out of the nothingness that was ive? Wo
Words
With this wo job and talked to students about ideas The ideas got intowith students about ideas had a pulse Some of them cared, some of theet to stand in a room ords and ideas I would have talked to myself alone in a classroom But I was not alone I hat youth should be I ith artists and writers and scholars and bartenders and musicians and nurses and strippers and lawyers and mothers and some of theo to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and soed us and everyone we'd been and everyone ould be allthe skin of words What is a family
Whatever it was or was not, there ords Not just my own I wrote stories, I wrote books, but thebehindfoot in it, s Together What we could make, was art How that s With other people I made perfors and strange outsider art events like filling the trees with bras and little raw narratives or unbooting booted cars or hooking up free cable for poor people with a friend orked for Bell or putting haikus about earthworms and cunts on the windshi+elds of cars in corporate parking lots
And I wrote my second book of stories
The book that cae was called Liberty's Excess If you pick it up, you will recognize the stories They are the stories of people trying to perforhter Mother Husband Wife Marriage They are the stories of women and men who try to love and fail And fail And they are the stories of people who live at theup, but some of us, aren't we still here? For the ones who aren't? I wonder, is it us that fucks up? Or the stories we've been given?
It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another Your freedoms will scar you Maybe even kill you Or one of your yous It's OK though There are more
How many times do we die?
Words, like selves, are worth it
Gray Matter I MAY HAVE BEEN A BIG FAT FAILURE AT MAKING A HOME, but Ielse in its place Out of the sad sack of sad shi+t that was my life, I made a wordhouse