Mercy (52 page)

world o f it. I disavowed anyone who tried to put it on me.

There couldn’t be this garbage between me and life; like some

huge smelly dump you had to trudge through or crawl

through to slide up against someone else who was also real.

And by the time you got to them you smelled like the garbage.

I said no. I said I will not. I said it is not on me. I said I may be

poor but I am not afraid. I said I want. I said I am not afraid to

pay. I said I will not shield myself. I said I will not pretend to

live life; I will live it. I said I will not apologize and I will not

lie. I said, if I die, I die. I was never afraid to die. I got tough in

some ways but I stayed soft inside the core o f m y belief where

there was tenderness for others, sometimes. I kept a caring

eye. I kept a caring heart. O ver the injury I still believed there

was love; not the love o f two but the love o f many. I still

believed in us, all o f us, us, if we could get free from rules and

obedience and being robots. I liked doing sabotage, I’m not

saying I had a pretty heart, I wasn’t a nice girl and I’m not

claiming it. I had some ruthlessness. I wasn’t easy to kill. I

could keep going. I wanted to live. I’m just saying I cared.

Why didn’t I kill him? Why didn’t I? I’m the most ardent

pacifist the world ever saw. And fuck meant all kinds o f

making love— it was a new word. It was fucking if you got

inside each other, or so near you couldn’t be pulled apart. It

was jo y and risk and fun and orgasm; not faking it; I never

have. It didn’t have to do with who put what where. It was all

kinds o f wet and all kinds o f urgent and all kinds o f here and

now, with him or her. It was you tangled up with someone,

raw. It wasn’t this one genital act, in out in out, that someone

could package and sell or that there was an etiquette for. It

wasn’t some imitation o f something you saw somewhere, in

porn or your favorite movie star saying how he did it. It was

something vast, filled with risk and feeling; feeling; personal

love ain’t the only feeling— there’s feelings o f adventure and

newness and excitement and Goddamn pure happiness—

there’s need and sorrow and loneliness and certain kinds o f

grief that turn easy into touching someone, wild, agitated,

everywhere— there’s just liking whoever it is and wanting to

pull them down right on you, they make you giddy, their

mere existence tickles you to death, you giggle and cheer them

on and you touch them— and there’s sensation, just that, no

morality, no higher good, no justification, just how it feels.

There’s uncharted waters, you ain’t acting out a script and

there’s no w ay past the present, you are right there in the

middle o f your own real life riding a wave a mile high with

speed and grace and then you are pulled under to the bottom o f

the world. The whole w orld’s alive, everything moves and

wants and loves, the whole w orld’s alive with promise, with

possibility; and I wanted to live, I said yes I want to live.

There’s not something new about wanting love in spite o f

knowing terror; or feeling love and having it push against

your thighs from inside and then those thighs carry you out

past safety into hell. There’s nothing new about wanting to

love a multitude. I was born on Mickle Street in Camden in

1946, down the street from Walt Whitman’s house. I grew up

an orphan sheltered by the passion o f his great heart. He

wanted everyone. He wanted them, to touch. He was forced,

by his time and place, into metaphor. He put it in poems, this

physicalized love that was universal, he named the kinds and

categories he wanted, men and women, he said they were

worthy, all, without exception, he said he wanted to be on

them and in them and he wanted them in him, he said it was

love, he said
lam ,
he said
lam
and then he enumerated the ones

he wanted, he made
lam
synonymous with
you are
and
we are.

Leaves of Grass
is his lists o f lovers, us, the people, all o f us; he

used grandiose language but it was also common, vulgar; he

says
I ant
you and you and you, you exist, I touch you, I know

you, I see you, I recognize you, I want you, I love you,
I am.
In

the C ivil War he was devoted to wounded soldiers. He faced

the maiming and the mutilation, and he loved those boys:

“ (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d

and rested, /M any a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded

lips. )” It was before surgeons washed their hands, before

Lister, and legs were sawed off, sutures were moistened with

saliva, gangrene was commonplace. He visited the wounded

soldiers day in and day out. He didn’t eroticize suffering, no; it

was the communion o f being near, o f touching, o f a tender

intimacy inside a vale o f tears. He saw them suffer and he saw

them die and he wrote: “ (Come sweet death! be persuaded O

beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly. )” I got to say, I don’t

think a three-minute fuck was his meaning. I don’t. It’s an

oceanic feeling inside and you push it outward and once you

start loving humanity there is no reason to make distinctions

o f beauty or kind, there’s something basic in everyone that

asks love, forgiveness, an honorable tenderness, a manly

tenderness, you know, strong. He was generous. Call him a

slut. I f a war happens, it marks you for life, it’s your war.

Walt’s was the C ivil War, North against South, feuding

brothers, a terrible slaughter, no one remembers how bloody

and murderous it was. Mine was Vietnam; I didn’t love the

soldiers but I loved the boys who didn’t go. M y daddy’s war

was World War II. Everyone had their own piece o f that war.

There’s Iwo Jim a, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima; Vichy and the

French Resistance; sadists, soldier boys, S . S., in Europe. M y

daddy was in the Army. M y daddy was being sent to the Pacific

when Truman dropped the bomb; the bomb. He says it saved

his life. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved his life. I never saw

him wish anyone harm, except maybe Strom Thurm an and

Jesse Helms and Bull Connor, but he thought it was okay,

hell, necessary, for all those Japanese to die so he could live. He

thought he was worth it, even if it was just a chance he would

die. I felt otherwise. He had an unreasonable anger against me.

I
would have died, he said, I would have
died.
He was peace-

loving but nothing could shake his faith that Hiroshima was

right, not the mass death, not the radiation, not the pollution,

not the suffering later, not the people burned, their skin

burned right o ff them; not the children, then or later. The

mushroom cloud didn’t make him afraid. To him it always

meant he wasn’t dead. I was ashamed o f him for not caring, or

for caring so much about himself, but I found what I thought

was common ground. I said it was proved Truman didn’t have

to do it. In other words, I could think it was wrong to drop the

bomb and still love m y father but he thought I had insufficient

respect and he had good intuition because I couldn’t see w hy

his life was worth more than all those millions. I couldn’t

reconcile it, how this very patient, very kind, quite meek guy

could think he was more important than all the people. It

wasn’t that he thought the bomb would stop Jew s from being

massacred in Europe; it was that he, from N ew Jersey, would

live. He didn’t understand that I was born in the shadow o f the