Sensuous

17 February — Wednesday

I bought Screw.

Not from the newsstand where I first saw it. I passed that stand again, and hesitated, but could not do it. Instead I walked almost home. At Eighth Avenue I took a bus to 42nd Street and walked around Times Square.

I did this several times when I lived in Brooklyn. Rode in on the BMT and walked the same blocks over and over again. Oddly elevated every time, frightened yet exhilarated. The book stores, the movie houses, the black girls whoring on Seventh Avenue, the midnight cowboys draping themselves against 42nd Street store fronts.

Men can go to these places. Buy the books, see the movies, move at ease through this world of peep shows and model studios and a thousand forms of tawdry sex. And I yearn to do this. I read the books we carried in the candy store, spirited them upstairs when Mother was not watching, tucked them back into the pockets of the rack when I was done with them. I don’t suppose the books on Times Square are any more candid than the ones I read in my room with the door locked. But it would be good to be able to know. It would be good to be able to see the movies.

To be invisible. Because a woman would have to be invisible to do this, wouldn’t she?

I wonder.

I suppose a woman could go to a book store or a peep show or a movie without being bothered. The men who go there do not seem aggressive. She would be noticed, though. She would be stared at. Violated in the mind, raped by eyes and brains.

Arlene could not go. Jennifer would go, and be picked up, and enjoy herself, but Arlene extends herself merely by walking apprehensively down those mean and bitter streets.

The schemes that grow up in my mind. I could wear men’s clothing and hide my hair under a cap. Frigid, unapproachable Arlene in butch drag, walking with a sailor’s rolling swagger, buying books and sex toys, dropping quarters in a peep show machine, sitting in the darkness of a grubby theater between rows of panting onanists.

Years ago women wore men’s clothes in order to be served ale at McSorley’s. Arlene in male garb, liberating the world of pornography. Arlene in drag, invisible at last.

With my luck I’d be taken for a male hustler, latched onto by some Long Island closet queen who’d want to suck my nonexistent cock.

But I bought Screw. Went there to buy it and stalked three newsstands. Settled on a blind man, delighted to be invisible in his eyes.

How can I be so fully aware of the dimensions of my neuroses and yet so utterly their victim?

Bought it. Picked an issue off a stack. Had the right change, two quarters sweat-dampened in my palm. Dropped them in the blind man’s hand. And said, “Screw.”

Screw, blind man. Screw, Times Square. Screw, fuck, shit, piss, damn, cunt, cock, prick, whore, bitch, hell. Screw!

Folded it small as if to stuff it into a fortune cookie. Crammed it into my purse. Back downtown on the Ninth Avenue bus past shuttered meat markets and produce stalls and tenements. Near empty bus. Visions all the way of my purse springing open and Screw leaping out, unfolding magically on its way to the floor. And every eye turned on me, staring with lust and contempt at her who would purchase filth.

Home, and dizzily proud of myself for buying it. Such a pathetic act to generate pride.

And sat reading it. Reading it over and over and over.

And now sit staring at the typewriter looking at the last sentence and unable to go on. I have to write about all this but I can’t. Maybe tomorrow.