Blood and Guts in High School (5 page)

We should make this phone call short. These phone calls have been

costing me a fortune.
Janey:
I just called you 'cause I had to give you that message. I won't

call you again. By the way, if you want to come here and stay with

me, I'll pay for it somehow. . . .
Father:
I'm alone right now.
Janey:
Well, goodbye.
Father:
I never know how to say goodbye.
Janey:
We never do, do we? Just say, 'Goodbye.'
Father:
Take care of yourself, Janey.
Janey:
Goodbye.

PLEASE

ME NO LONGER MYSELF

Mr Smith puts Janey in school in New York City to make sure she doesn't return to Merida.

Excerpt from Janey's diary:

The scorpions

I was running around with a wild bunch of kids and I was scared. We were part of THE SCORPIONS.

Daddy no longer loved me. That was it.

I was desperate to find the love he had taken away from me.

My friends were just like me. They were desperate - the products of

broken families, poverty - and they were trying everything to escape their misery.

Despite the restrictions of school, we did exactly what we wanted and it was good. We got drunk. We used drugs. We fucked. We hurt each other sexually as much as we could. The speed, emotional overload, and pain every now and then dulled our brains. Demented our perceptual apparatus.

We knew we couldn't change the shit we were living in so we were trying to change ourselves.

I hated myself. I did everything I could to hurt myself.

I don't remember who I fucked the first time I fucked, but I must have known nothing about birth control 'cause I got pregnant. I do remember my abortion. One-hundred-ninety dollars.

I walked into this large white room. There must have been fifty other girls. A few teenagers and two or three women in their forties. Women lined up. Women in chairs nodding out. A few women had their boyfriends with them. They were lucky, I thought. Most of us were alone. The women in my line were handed long business forms: at the end of each form was a paragraph that stated she gave the doctor the right to do whatever he wanted and if she ended up dead, it wasn't his fault. We had given ourselves up to men before. That's why we were here. All of us signed everything. Then they took our money.

My factory line was ushered into a pale green room. In the large white room fifty more girls started to sign forms and give up their one-hundred-ninety stolen, begged-for, and borrowed dollars.

In a small orange room they explained an egg drops down from the ovaries and, when the cock enters this canal called THE UTERUS, it leaves millions of, I don't remember how many, sperm. If just one sperm out of all these sperms meets the dropping egg, the female (me and you) is in a lot of trouble. A female can use any of the many methods of birth control, all of which don't work or deform.

It's all up to you girls. You have to be strong. Shape up. You're a modern woman. These are the days of post-women's liberation. Well, what are you going to do? You've grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you. You're the only one.

Well, I couldn't help it, I just LOVE to fuck, he was SO cute, it was worth it.

We girls knew everything there was to know without having to say a word and we knew we had put ourselves here and we were all in this together.

An abortion is a simple procedure. It is almost painless. Even if it isn't painless, it takes only five minutes. If you MUST have it, weak, stupid things that you are, we can put you to sleep.

The orange walls were thick enough to stifle the screams pouring out

of the operating room. Having an abortion was obviously just like getting fucked. If we closed our eyes and spread our legs, we'd be taken care of. They stripped us of our clothes. Gave us white sheets to cover our nakedness. Led us back to the pale green room. I love it when men take care of me.

I remember a tiny blonde, even younger than me. I guess it must have been the first time she had ever been fucked. She couldn't say anything. Whether she wanted a local or not. A LOCAL means a local anaesthetic. They stick large hypodermics filled with novocaine in your cunt lips and don't numb where it hurts at all. A general anaesthetic costs fifty dollars more and fills you up with synthetic morphine and truth serum. All of us gathered around her, held her hands, and stroked her legs. Gradually she began to calm down. There was nothing else to do. We had to wait while each one of us went through it. Finally they came for her.

She was the believing kind. She had believed them when they said a local wouldn't hurt. They were taking the locals first.

I'll never forget her face when she came out. She couldn't have come out of her mommy's cunt any more stunned. Her face was dead white and her eyes were fish-wide open.

'I made a mistake. Don't do it. Don't do anything they tell you to.'

Before she could say more, they wheeled her away.

I got to like that pale green room, the women who were more scared than I was so I could comfort them, the feeling someone was taking care of me. I felt more secure there than in the outside world. I wanted a permanent abortion.

They strapped my ankles and wrists to this black slab. When I asked the huge blonde anaesthesia nurse if there was any chance I'd react badly to the anaesthesia, she told the other huge blonde nurse I was a health food freak. After that I didn't ask them anything and I did exactly what they told me.

An hour later a big hand shook me and told me it was time to go. Girls were lying all around me, half-dead. Blood was coming out between my legs. Another nurse gave me a piece of Kotex, half-a-cup of coffee, my clothes, twenty penicillin pills, and told me to get out. I didn't get to talk to any of the other girls again.

Penelope Mowlard was the creepiest girl in my class. Her skin was green. She was stupid. She didn't know how to kiss. She was gangly. She was an idiot. Her face was scrunched-up, covered with snot, partly eyeless, and her hair was full of puke.

Miss Richard's was a school for nice well-bred girls. We knew better than to get visibly in trouble. For months Penelope wandered through the classrooms and hallways with a larger and larger stomach. She was too stupid to know what was going on. The teachers didn't tell 'cause

they were scared or mean dykes. We didn't tell her 'cause it was fun to make her suffer.

Early one morning the janitor, an old man, found a bloody bundle in the bottom of one of the basement garbage cans. Later that day we saw Penelope's stomach had disappeared. The principal couldn't suspend her 'cause she had to do everything she could to prevent scandal.

I couldn't figure out what birth control method to use. Foams and diaphragm creams tasted so bad every time I got the chance to feel a tongue on my cunt, I chose the tongue. An IUD made me bleed and get PID again. There was a druggist in Harlem who'd slip me some pills every other month if I'd give him a blow job under the counter, but once every other month isn't enough. All the boys I fucked refused to use condoms.

I decided that if I got pregnant again, I'd stick a broken hanger up my cunt. I didn't care if I died as long as the baby died. Then I heard a story about a woman, I think it's true, who was so desperate to kill her baby she chained flatirons around her arms, legs, and stomach and threw herself down three flights of stairs. Even though almost every bone in her body broke, her baby didn't die and she gave birth in traction.

I was still desperate to fuck. Abortions make it dangerous to fuck again because they stretch out the opening of the womb so the sperm can reach the egg real easily. They upset the hormonal system: the hormones send out many more eggs to compensate. They leave gaping holes in the womb and any foreign object that nears these holes can cause infection.

I'm not trying to tell you about the rotgut weird parts of my life. Abortions are the symbol, the outer image, of sexual relations in this world. Describing my abortions is the only real way I can tell you about pain and fear . . . my unstoppable drive for sexual love made me know.

My second abortion took place two months after my first abortion.

It cost fifty dollars because it was a menstrual extraction. The differences between a menstrual extraction and an abortion are:

In a menstrual extraction the doctor doesn't dilate the cervix. The baby is still too small.

Since the doctor may or may not find the baby, menstrual extractions can be dangerous and are illegal.

Most of the doctors who perform menstrual extractions are not certified MDs.

The minute I entered the office, they doped me up with Valium.

The factory line was shorter.

I actually saw the doctor.

He was the only doctor there.

He killed 32 to 48 babies and netted 1,600 to 2,400 dollars a day.

He stuck his hand up my cunt and told me I was OK.

He stuck a little needle in my arm and tried to be nice to me.

A week after my second abortion I came down with a case of PID. When I called up the doctor to complain, he said it wasn't his fault and he had never heard of me.

I didn't know how much these abortions hurt me physically and mentally. I was desperate to fuck more and more so I could finally get love. Soon my total being was on fire, not just my sex, and I was doing everything to make the non-sexual equivalent of love happen.

The rest of THE SCORPIONS were growing the same way I was.

We started out making trouble. Early one morning we rode in a stolen van into a Connecticut town and busted into a hardware store. We threw everything in the store out of the door.

We don't hate, understand, we have to get back. Fight the dullness of shit society. Alienated robotized images. Here's your cooky, ma'am. No to anything but madness.

Broken glass lies over the floor. Gum sticks everywhere. Shit smeared in the cracks of the table. Their cash register is ash-black like a burnt-up telephone book.

We made the store into a death-house and the street look like the New York City east-side slum we had to live in.

As soon as we had accomplished our purpose, we left the Connecticut town.

We stole.

Me and Monkey were the first to steal. We were high on meth. We ripped off Bloomingdale's, a big department store in New York City.

I was going somewhere my father and his girlfriend were also going. Johnny and his girlfriend wanted nothing to do with me.

We took a taxi to Bloomingdale's so we could be straight. I was dressed in a red wool suit and a light brown wool coat. It's necessary to be straight when you steal.

I was hanging on to the end of the taxi Johnny and his girlfriend had picked me up in. Clearly they wanted nothing to do with me. The rest of Johnny's rock band were in the car.

As soon as Monkey and I got to Bloomingdale's, we separated. I checked my appearance. My dark curly hair, light makeup, and dark red suit made me look like a nice, rich girl. I wanted to stay that way. Being nice and rich is a dream. I checked my vibes. I told myself to stay guarded, slow and calm. As I entered the store, I checked out the store's vibes. No one was following me.

Daddy and I are standing in the downstairs of the Laguna Beach Hotel, which is Nixon's favourite hotel. Facing me there's a rectangular white wall. A few feet below this white wall and to its right, single stairs with no back move upwards. Further to the right, another large

rectangular white wall. Set in this wall, one-third of its width further right, an absolutely black hallway. Above this white wall, empty space; above the empty space, a white hanging rectangle means a room. There's nothing around these walls, staircase, and hall.

Back east, architectural objects are connected to, hidden in each other.

I move alone without daddy forwards BACKWARDS through the hotel. The hotel is now, is really large transparent squares. I glide to the final back room.

The back wall of this room is really windows. Windows are opaque. Windows through which I'm seeing a black phosphorescent ocean. None of the men in daddy's band want to be with me and daddy's with Sally. I want to go swimming I have to go swimming. The ocean is bright green, even though it's night. The ocean is glowing.

Now the window is totally transparent. Through it I see a man's body as if dead turning in the sparkling green water.

I wanted a fur coat.

Little halls surround one long black major hall. Thin white walls, almost non-existent, separate these halls.

I bought a red sweater in the Junior Department on the third floor so anyone who was watching would know that I wasn't a thief.

Then I rode the escalator upstairs to the Fur Department. Tossing my brown woolen coat across a rack, I tried on fur after fur. Stealing is luxury. Ten or fifteen minutes later the salesgirl had to run across the hall to get change.

Of course, daddy and Sally and the boys in his band are given their rooms first. My room is the room no one else in the world wants.

My bedroom is the huge white hexagon in the front left corner of the hotel. It has no clear outside or inside or any architectural regularity. Long white pipes form part of its ceiling. Two of its sides, which two is always changing, are open.

My bedroom's function is also unclear. Its only furniture is two barber's chairs and a toilet. It's a gathering place for men.

Hotel men dressed in white and black come in and want to hurt me. They cut away parts of me. I call for the hotel head. He explains that my bedroom used to be the men's toilet. I understand.

My cunt used to be a men's toilet.

I walk out in a leopard coat.

Dear dreams,

You are the only thing that matters. You are my hope and I live for and in you. You are rawness and wildness, the colours, the scents, passion, events appearing. You are the things I live for. Please take me over.

Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness.

Dreams by themselves aren't enough to destroy the blanket of dullness.