Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

The phone is dead. The walls crawl with pink water bugs. The

heat hangs in the air like fire. In the bright glare of the day we

pick up Jimmy. He is a masseur. He is thick and squat with

muscles, black. He has no teeth. He comes to live with us, to

protect us. N says I have to fuck him because I found him. I

say I will because the neighbors are going to kill us: Jimmy

brings his cat: sometimes she kills water bugs: other times they

die in the coffee: I have to fuck Jimmy several times a day: it is

not fun: N goes in and out: one night Jimmy disappears, N

and I go out, we come back and everything has been smashed

like maniacs have been through with axes: I say they are going

to kill us, we have to get out of here: N says we have no

money: I say we get it from one of our rich school chums, I say

we call her and stick it to her: N is mortified by the implied or

actual rudeness in this but I don’t care: I call her: I make her

come down to where we are: I say we are going to die here

unless she puts us up in a hotel until the end of the summer: I

make her take us to the hotel and pay for a room. We move

in. I think we sleep for days. *

The room has one window that opens on an air shaft. It is hot

and stuffy. It has one closet. It has a sink. It has a very large

double bed, for three at least. It is brown, with a lot of yellow

in the brown. The bed has a bedspread, brown with a lot of

yellow. There are two shabby chairs, a small desk, a telephone

extension. Down the hall is the bathroom, the showers. The

halls are grand: not plush but wide, marble floors, huge

window at one end. We are off in a far distant end, narrow, as far

away from the huge window as one could be. The woman next

door asks us if we are on the circuit. I ask what circuit. The junkie

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circuit, you know, she says, Tangier, Morocco, Marseilles,

New York, Hong Kong. I say, no, we are not on that circuit.

Our door stays open, for air.

The hotel is famous. Thomas Wolfe lived there. There are

many kinds of rooms, suites for the rich and famous: rock

groups stay there: and the maid tells us that down this very

hall an old movie actor wrote his autobiography.

There is a rug on the floor too, brown with a lot of yellow

in it.

Everything is dingy in our room: but the hall is grand. So is

the elevator. So is the traffic: money and drugs.

N is bleeding again: it stops and it starts. We use our school

chums more. They come here more. We are cleaner, calmer.

We get dinners and various dates from them: they set things

up: N needs a camera to shoot some footage, we are broke,

the store requires a huge deposit, an old school chum finds a

woman friend of hers for N to have dinner with. They pretend

it is just regular life, like they lead: except they breathe faster.

There are things we have learned: principles we have discerned: now we let the men know we want each other, they can watch. We hold each other on the huge bed, we make love

with each other: the men watch, the men pay: sometimes the

men fuck but we can overwhelm them and they go soft, impotent: we have learned certain principles: we kiss each other, we tease, we hold out the possibility, we get dinner first, we

get cash first, we get breakfast after: they are content to sit in

the same room: sleep in the same bed: to be able to say they were

there, it happened to them. N bleeds. We touch each other. A

man watches. A man pays. It is easier on us. We use the women

for money more and more: it is more artful: there is less sex.

When a man is not there, or another woman, we just sleep.

We make love, the man pays, the man watches, or there is

just the hint that we will and he pays.

The footage gets shot.

We fuck less: N still bleeds: some nights we can’t tell what

the man will do: it is always a game of nerves: we play him: it

is a game of skill: we do what’s necessary: we start out playing

our game not his: he still gets in, still gets the fuck if he wants

it bad enough: N bleeds. Anyone we know we use for money.

We find their weakness. We use them for what we need. We

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fuck their minds. We play with them any way we can: we take

what we can get: but now we are selling something different,

not the fuck but the idea of two women together, the promise,

the suggestion. It turns out even more men are buyers.

We take acid, take mescaline, drink vodka. The camera

breaks. We sit in a bar, 10 am, and start drinking with the

$200 we have managed to collect. By 4 pm there is almost no

money left. We are writing a letter to the Beatles to ask for

money. We are drinking vodka martinis. We spill them all

over the letter we have just finished and watch the liquid wash

away the ink.

We go to an artists’ colony. I am going to read poems. N is

going to talk about the film. We want them to give us money.

It is in upstate New York, rural, trees, air, the moon. We get

there but instead of reading and talking we drop acid. We

spend the next two days driving all over with two school

chums, one of whom is not tripping, one of whom is having a

bad trip, climbs under the van we have, won’t come out, we

drive to hayfields to sleep, we drive to the ocean, we undress,

we swim, N raises herself out of the roof that opens in the van

bare-breasted on a turnpike, we go a hundred miles an hour:

she and I are happy: our school chums feel bad: we laugh: we

watch every particle of light: we are happy: they don’t forgive

us.

We get the men: we make love: they watch: they pay. Or we

promise, we touch, we flirt, they pay.

The hotel tries twice to throw us out for prostitution. I am

indignant beyond belief. I scream at them about the First

Amendment and the Bill of Rights. They desist, confused. What

do whores know about the Bill of Rights?

We hustle day and night: we are busy: we have hit our stride:

we get money: we hold each other tight and we kiss and we

fuck and the man watches and sometimes he fucks one or the

other of us if there is no way around it and the man pays. We

anticipate them. We know them better than they know themselves. N bleeds.

She goes to the hospital. Her cervix is cauterized.

The time is running out in the hotel. Our school chum won’t

pay for it anymore. There is not enough guilt in the world to

make her pay. N bleeds. She has acute pain in her side. She

needs quiet, a place to rest. We need a place to live. We go to