Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

treated, I say, I want, I say, to be treated with respect, I say, as

if, I say, I have, I say, a right, I say, to do what I want to do, I

say, because, I say, I am smart, and I have written, and I am

good, and I do good work, and I am a good writer, and I have

published, and I want, I say, to be treated, I say, like someone,

I say, like a human being, I say, who has done something, I

say, like that, I say, not like a whore, not like a whore, I say,

not any more, I say, and he says, calling my name, his tongue

whispering my name, he says, calling my name and weeping,

please, I know, I know. And I say to him, seriously, someday I

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will die from this, just from this, just from being treated like a

whore, nothing else, I will die from it. And he says dryly, with

a certain self-evident truth on his side: you will probably die

from pneumonia actually. Ice hangs, ready to cut each chest. I

hesitate, then crack up. We collapse, laughing. The blankets

bury us alive.

*

He sleeps curled up blond, like a pale infant, in a room five

floors above a desperate street corner. The windows are open,

of course, and he sleeps, pale and dreamless, curled up and

calm. The stairs outside his windows, rusty and fragile, go

from our tenement heaven down to the grimmest cement. The

sirens passing that corner blast the brick building, so that we

might be in a war zone, each siren blast meaning we must get

up and run to a shelter to hide. But there is no shelter. There is

the occasional bomb by terrorist groups. Arson. Prostitutes.

Pimps. Junkies. Old men, vagabonded, drunk with running

sores, abscesses running obscene with green pus, curled up like

my love, but blocking our doorway, on the front step, on the

sidewalk under the step, behind the garbage cans, curled up

just in the middle of the cement anywhere, just wherever they

stopped. The blasts of the sirens go all day and all night and in

between them huge buses make the building shake and wild

taxis careen with screeching brakes. Cars rocket by, men with

guns and clubs sounding their sirens, flashing lights that spread

a fierce red glare into our little home: red flashing lights that

climb five flights in the space of a second and illuminate us

whatever we are doing, wherever we stand, in one second a

whorish red, turn us and everything we see and touch into a

grotesque special effect. Sirens that blare and blast and make

the brick shake, announcing fire or murder or rape or a simple

beating. Screams sometimes that come from over there, or

behind that building, or in the courtyard, or some other apartment, or the nice man with the nice dog ranting at his mother over eighty and her screaming for help. Across the street there

is a disco: parties for hire and music that makes the light

fixtures quake between the siren blasts. Sometimes a flight

above us, right near the roof, the filthy vagabonds sneak

in and hide, piss and shit, urine runs down the hall stairs

from the roof and a stench befouls even the awful air, and so

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cautiously the police are called, because the drunken, ruthless

men might be armed, might hit, might rape: might kill.

The sirens blast the air, wind runs wild like plague through

the rooms: and outside on the street men are curled up in fetal

position, all hair and scabs and running sores, feet bandaged

in newspaper and dirty torn cloth, eyes running pus, a bottle,

sometimes broken to be used as a weapon, held close to the

chest. The women on the great spiked heels, almost as cold as

we are, can barely stand. They wobble from the fix, their

shoulders hang down, their eyes hang down, their skin gets

yellow or ochre, their faces are broken out in blotches, their

hair is dry and dead and dirty, their knees buckle: they are too

undressed for the cold: they can barely walk from the fix: they

have broken teeth: they have bruises and scars and great

running tracks: and all this they try to balance on four-inch,

six-inch, heels; toe-dancers in the dance of death. On this

corner mostly they are thin, too thin, hungered-away thin,

smacked-away thin: thin and yellow.

In the park down at the end of the block, not far away, the

drugs change hands. The police patrol the park: giving tickets

to those who take their dogs off the leash. In the daylight, four

boys steal money from an old man and run away, not too fast,

why bother. The dealers sit and watch. The police stroll by as

the deals are being made. Any dog off a leash is in for serious

trouble.

Ambulances drag by. Cars hopped up sounding like a great

wall falling flash by, sometimes crashing past a streetlight

and bending it forever. Buses trudge with their normal

human traffic. The cops coast by, sometimes with sirens,

sometimes flashing red, just to get past the stoplight. Fire

engines pass often, fast, serious, all siren and flashing light:

this is serious. Arson. Bad electrical wiring. Old tenements,

like flint. Building code violations. Whole buildings flame up.

We see the fires, the smoke, the red lights. First we hear the

sirens, see the flashing light with its crimson brilliance, then

we ask, is it here, is it us? We make jokes: that would warm

us up. Where are the cats? Can we get them out in time? We

have a plan, a cage we can pull down from a storage place

(we have no closets, only planks scattered above our heads,

hanging on to the edges of walls), and then we can rush

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them all in and rush out and get away: to where? He sleeps.

How?

On TV news we see that in New York City where we live

people die from the cold each winter. We have called and

written every department of the city. We have withheld rent.

We have sued. No one cares. We know that we could die from

the cold. But fire— they must care about fire, they have a fire

department, we see the fire engines and the flashing red lights

and we hear the sirens. No cold department, no whore department, no vagabond department, no running-pus-and-sores department, no get-rid-of-the-drug-dealers department: but fire

and dogs-on-the-leash departments seem to abound. I am

always pleasantly surprised that they care about fire.

The disco music is so loud that we cannot hear our own

radio: we call the police. There is an environmental-something

department. They will drive by and measure the decibel level

of the sound. This is a great relief. Can someone come and