Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

take the temperature in our apartment? The policeman hangs

up. A crank call, he must think, and what with so many real

problems, so much real violence, so many real people dying.

My pale blond friend sleeps, his skin bluish. I call the police

about the noise.

The landlord has installed a lock on our building. The lock

must be nearly unique. You turn it with a key and when you

hear a certain click you must at that second push open the

door. If you miss the click you must start all over again. If

your key goes past the click, the door stays locked and you

must complete the cycle, complete the turn, before you can

start again, so it takes even longer, and if you miss it again you

must still keep going: you must pay attention and put your ear

right up against the lock to hear the click. The fetal vagabonds

run pus at your feet and the drooping prostitutes come at you,

perhaps wanting one second of steadiness on their feet or

perhaps wanting to tear out your heart, and this is a place

where men follow women with serious expectations not to be

trifled with, pursue in cars, beep from cars, follow block after

block in cars, carry weapons, sneak up behind, rob, need

money, need dope, and you must stand there at exquisite attention and listen for the little click.

The cement on the corner has been stained by its human

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trash: it is the color of a hundred dead junkies somehow ground

into the stone, paved smooth, running like mud in the rare

moonlight. Sometimes there is blood, and sometimes a savage

dog, belonging to one of the drunken men, chases you and

threatens to tear you apart and in terror you edge your way

inside: listening carefully for the little click. In a great urban

joke, God has given us all the trappings of a civilized society.

We have a huge intersection with a traffic light. We have a bus

stop. Across the street there is a bank and a school as well as a

disco. Next door there is a large church with stained glass and

ornate and graceful stonework. The intersection has the bank,

a hospital diagonal from us, and a fast-food chicken place.

And then, resting right next to us, right under us, tucked near,

is the home of the hamburger itself, the great gift of this

country, right on our corner, with its ascending ordure. I laugh

frequently. I am God’s best fan.*

The windows are open, of course, and he sleeps, pale and

dreamless, curled up and calm, nearly warm except that his

skin has become a pale blue, barely attached to the fine bones

underneath. Outside the sirens blast the brick building, they

almost never stop. Fire and murder. Cars rocketing by, men

with guns and clubs and flashing lights that climb five flights

in the space of a second and turn us whorish red, like great

wax museum freaks in a light show.

I listen to the music from the disco, which is so loud that the

Mozart on my poor little $32 radio is drowned out. Tonight,

perhaps, is the Italian wedding, and so we have an imitator of

Jerry Vale to a disco beat that carries across the wide street,

through air freighted with other weight, screams and blasts,

and into the epicenter of my brain. If I close the windows,

however, I will probably die. But it is the vibration, in this

case the endless clucky thumping of the badly abused instruments, that worms its way under my skin to make me itch with discontent, irritation, a rage directed, in this case, at

Italian weddings, but on other nights at French crooners, at

Jaggerish deadbeats, at Elvisian charlatans, at Haggardish

kvetchers, and even, on occasion, at Patti Pageish or even Peggy

Leeish dollies embellished by brass.

I watch the limos pulling up, parking in front of the fire

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hydrants and no-parking signs. I see a man in a tux tear down

with his bare hands a no-parking sign. I see an endless supply

of kids attending these adult parties. The house used to be a

synagogue. One day it was empty. Then a man with many

boys moved in. The boys had tattoos and did heavy work and

had lean thighs. They all lived on the top floor. The parties

were on the lower two floors. The boys flew a flag from the

top floor. I called it never-never-land. The parties drove me

mad.

The women who went into the house were never contemporary cosmopolitan women. They always wore fluffy dresses or full skirts and frilly blouses, very fifties, suburban, dating,

heavy makeup. Even the youngest women wore wide formal

skirts, maybe even with crinolines, in pastel colors, and their

hair was set and lacquered. They were deferential and flirty

and girlish and spoke when spoken to. Sometimes they had a

corsage. Sometimes they wore female hats. Sometimes they

even wore female gloves or female wraps. Always they wore

female shoes and female stockings and stood in a female way

and looked very fifties, virgin ingenues. They never met the

rough boys from the top floor, or not so that I could see. They

came with dates. There were floral arrangements inside, and

white tablecloths, and men in white jackets. Then, during the

day, the boys from the upper floor would ride their bikes or

get wrecked on drugs. Once my favorite, a beautiful wrecked

child who at fifteen was getting old, too covered with tattoos,

with hair hanging down to his shoulders and some beautiful

light in his eyes and thighs, had a young girl there. She too was

beautiful, dark, perfect, naked, exquisite breasts and thighs,

they hung out the window together and watched the sun rise.

They seemed exquisitely happy: young: not too hurt yet, or

young enough to be resilient: he must have been hurt, all

tattooed and drugged out and in this house of boys, and she

had been or would be, and I prayed for her as hard as I have

ever hoped for myself. That she was and would be happy; that

she was older than she looked; that she would be all right. It

was only at dawn that the human blood seemed to have washed

out of the cement and that injury seemed to disappear: and

men began emerging from the park where they had been

fucking and sucking cock all night: they were weary and at

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peace: and there seemed to be a truce just then, for the duration

of the dawn, between night and day, between people and despair. The boy and girl, radiant and tender with pleasure, hung out of the window. Underneath them men dragged themselves

toward home, tender with fatigue. I sat by the open window