Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

Staten Island to look for a house. The film is not yet finished.

We find a house. It is raining. There are hundreds of steps up

to it. It is up a steep hill. N is hurting very bad in her side. We

want to move there, we have the money in hand, but how will

we get more for next month and the month after? She is very

sick. We have to leave the hotel. I take her to the Lower East

Side apartment of a woman who has always wanted her. I

deliver her. The building is a piss-hole, a stagnant sewer. The

apartment is five flights up. In the hall there are caverns in the

wall, the plaster broken away, with screen and wire covering

them. Behind the screen and wire, as if they are built into the

wall and caged there on display, are live rats, big ones, almost

hissing, fierce. N is in acute pain. N bleeds. I take the money I

need. I leave her there. I arrange to have pills waiting for me in

Europe. The film isn’t finished. N can’t stand up. I leave her

there on a soiled mattress, curled up in pain. I make her

promise to finish the film. I don’t think about her again. I

don’t feel anything. I take the money and leave on a boat for

Europe. The great thing is to be saturated with something—

that is, in one way or another, with life; or is it?

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I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that

nothing good can come of it: I mean the

physical facts of life, the sun, the grass,

youth. It’s a much more terrible vice than

cocaine, it costs me nothing, and there is an

endless abundance of it, with no limits: and

I devour, devour. How it will end, I don’t know.

Pasolini

*

I can’t remember much of what anything was like, only how

it started. No light, no weather. From now on everything is

in a room somewhere in Europe, a room. A series of rooms,

a series of cities: cold, ancient cities: Northern European

cities: gray, with old light: somber but the gray dances: old

beauty, muted grandeur, monumental grace. Rembrandt,

Breughel. Mid-European and Northern winters, light. Old

cruelties, not nouveau.

He was impotent and wanted to die.

On the surface he was a clown. He had the face of a great

comic actor. It moved in parts, in sections, the scalp in one

direction, the nose forward, the chin somewhere else, the

features bigger than life. A unique face, completely distinct, in

no way handsome, outside that realm of discourse altogether.

Someday he would be beautiful or ugly, depending on his life.

Now he was alternately filled with light or sadness, with great

jokes and huge gestures or his body seemingly shrivelled down

to a heap of bones by inexplicable grief, the skin around the

bones sagging loose or gone. He was a wild man: long, stringy

blond hair; afghan coat making him into some wild mountain

creature; prominent, pointed, narrow, but graceful nose; a

laugh that went the distance from deep chuckle to shrill hysteria, and back each calibrated niche of possibility, and walls shivered.

It was amidst hashish and rock ’n’ roll.

The youth gathered in huge buildings set aside for dissipation. Inside we were indulged. The huge rooms were painted garish colors. There were garish murals. Political and cultural

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radicals were kept inside, tamed, self-important, it was the

revolution: big black balls of hashish and rock ’n’ roll.

Inside there was this figure of a man, all brassy on the outside, and inside impotent and ready to die.

I took his life in my hands to save him. I took his face in my

hands, I kissed him. I took his body to save him from despair.

A suffering man: a compassionate woman: the impersonal love

of one human for another, sex the vehicle of redemption: you

hear about it all the time. Isn’t that what we are supposed to

do?

*

It doesn’t matter where it was, but it was there, in a huge mass

of rooms painted in glaring colors: rock music blaring, often

live, old-time porno films— Santa coming down a chimney—

projected on the walls, boys throwing huge balls of hashish

across the room, playing catch. Cigarettes were rolled from

loose tobacco in papers: so was grass: so was a potent mixture

of hashish and tobacco, what I liked. I got good at it. You put

together three cigarette papers with spit and rolled a little filter

from a match cover, just a piece of it, and put down a layer of

loose tobacco, and then you heated the hash over a lit match

until it got all soft and crumbly, and then you crumbled it

between your fingers until there was a nice, thick layer of it

over the tobacco, and you sort of mixed them together gently

with your fingers, and then you rolled it up, so that it was

narrow on the end with the filter and wider at the bottom, and

with a match, usually burnt, you packed the mixture in the

papers at the bottom, and brought the papers together and

closed it up. Then you lit it and smoked. It went round and

round.

The boys had long, long hair. There were only a few junkies,

a little hard dope, not a lot of stealing, very congenial: music:

paint: philosophy. There were philosophers everywhere and

artistes. One was going to destroy the museum system by

putting his paintings out on the sidewalk free for people to see.

I met him my first afternoon in the strange new place. He was

cheerful about destroying the museum system. They were all

cheerful, these energetic talkers of revolution. One spent hours

discussing the history of failed youth movements in Europe: he

had been in them all, never aged, a foot soldier from city to

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city in the inevitability of history. Another had M ao’s red book

and did exegesis on the text while joints were handed to him

by enthralled cadres. Another knew about the role of the

tobacco industry in upholding Western imperialism: he

denounced the smokers as political hypocrites and bourgeois

fools. Meanwhile, the music was loud, the porno movies played

on the walls as Santa fucked a blond woman in black lace, the

hash was smoked pound after pound.

The women stood out. Mostly there were men but the women

did not fade into the background. There was M, who later

became a famous dominatrix near Atlantic City. She was over six

feet tall and she wore a short leather skirt, about crotch level. Her

thighs were covered with thick scars. She had long, straight,

blonde hair. She wanted to know if I had carried guns for the

Black Panthers. Since I had been too young then, she wouldn’t