The Gold Cell Read online

shredded pom-poms in her fists.

  Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor

  Outside the operating room of the sex-change doctor, a tray of penises.

  There is no blood. This is not Vietnam, Chile, Buchenwald. They were surgically removed under anaesthetic. They lie there neatly, each with a small space around it.

  The anaesthetic is wearing off now. The chopped-off sexes lie on the silver tray.

  One says I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more killing.

  Another says I am a thumb lost in the threshing machine. Bright straw fills the air. I will never have to work again.

  The third says I am a caul removed from his eyes. Now he can see.

  The fourth says I want to be painted by Géricault, a still life with a bust of Apollo, a drape of purple velvet, and a vine of ivy leaves.

  The fifth says I was a dirty little dog, I knew he’d have me put to sleep.

  The sixth says I am safe. Now no one can hurt me.

  Only one is unhappy. He lies there weeping in terrible grief, crying out Father, Father!

  The Solution

  Finally they got the Singles problem under control, they made it scientific. They opened huge Sex Centers—you could simply go and state what you want and they would find you someone who wanted that too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to Be Touched and Held and when someone came and stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.

  At first it went great. A steady stream of people under the sign I Like to Give Pain paired up with the steady stream of people from under I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only—No Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only—No Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a Sheet, because that’s the only way it was legal in Berkeley—but he stood there a long time in his lonely blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung to While Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been there weeks without a reply.

  Things began to get strange. The Love Only—No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only—No Love was doing really well, pair after pair walking out together like wooden animals off a child’s ark, but the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly, shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet—No Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.

  The din rose in the vast room. The line under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long that portable toilets had to be added and a minister brought in for deaths, births, and marriages on the line. Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless—no one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the enormous gym. More and more people began to move over to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into the fields. More and more people joined it, until Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they had to name it they named it, they called it the American Way.

  The Pope’s Penis

  It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate

  clapper at the center of a bell.

  It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a

  halo of silver seaweed, the hair

  swaying in the dimness and the heat—and at night,

  while his eyes asleep, it stands up

  in praise of God.

  When

  I wonder, now, only when it will happen,

  when the young mother will hear the

  noise like somebody’s pressure cooker

  down the block, going off. She’ll go out in the yard,

  holding her small daughter in her arms,

  and there, above the end of the street, in the

  air above the line of the trees,

  she will see it rising, lifting up

  over our horizon, the upper rim of the

  gold ball, large as a giant

  planet starting to lift up over ours.

  She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,

  looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,

  and the child will open her arms to it,

  it will look so beautiful.

  II

  I Go Back to May 1937

  I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

  I see my father strolling out

  under the ochre sandstone arch, the

  red tiles glinting like bent

  plates of blood behind his head, I

  see my mother with a few light books at her hip

  standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the

  wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

  sword-tips aglow in the May air,

  they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

  they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

  innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

  I want to go up to them and say Stop,

  don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

  he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

  you cannot imagine you would ever do,

  you are going to do bad things to children,

  you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

  you are going to want to die. I want to go

  up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

  her hungry pretty face turning to me,

  her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

  his arrogant handsome face turning to me,

  his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

  but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

  take them up like the male and female

  paper dolls and bang them together

  at the hips like chips of flint as if to

  strike sparks from them, I say

  Do what you are going to, and I will tell about it.

  Saturn

  He lay on the couch night after night,

  mouth open, the darkness of the room

  filling his mouth, and no one knew

  my father was eating his children. He seemed to

  rest so quietly, vast body

  inert on the sofa, big hand

  fallen away from the glass.

  What could be more passive than a man

  passed out every night—and yet as he lay

  on his back, snoring, our lives slowly

  disappeared down the hole of his life.

  My brother’s arm went in up to the shoulder

  and he bit it off, and sucked at the wound

  as one sucks at the sockets of lobster. He took

  my brother’s head between his lips

  and snapped it like a cherry off the stem. You would have seen

  only a large, handsome man

  heavily asleep, unconscious. And yet

  somewhere in his head his soil-colored eyes

  were open, the circles of the whites glittering

  as he crunched the torso of his child between his jaws,

  crushed the bones like the soft shells of crabs

  and the delicacies of the genitals

  rolled back along his tongue. In the nerves of his gums and

  bowels he knew what he was doing and he could not

  stop himself, like orgasm, his

  boy’s feet crackling like two raw fish

  between his teeth. This is what he wanted,

  to take that life into his mouth

  and show what a man could do—show his son

  what a man’s life was.

  What if God

  And what if God had been watching, when my mother

  came into my room, at night, to lie down on me

  and pray and cry? What did He do when her

  long adult body rolled on me

  like lava from the top of the mountain

  and the magma popped from her ducts, and my bed

  shook from the tremors,
the cracking of my nature

  across? What was He? Was He a bison

  to lower His partly extinct head

  and suck His Puritan phallus while we cried

  and prayed to Him, or was He a squirrel

  reaching through her hole in my shell, His arm

  up to the elbow in the yolk of my soul

  stirring, stirring the gold? Or was He

  a kid in Biology, dissecting me

  while she held my split carapace apart

  so He could firk out the eggs, or was He a man

  entering me while she pried my spirit

  open in the starry dark—

  she said that all we did was done in His sight

  so He must have seen her weep, into my

  hair, and slip my soul from between my

  ribs like a tiny hotel soap, He

  washed His hands of me as I washed my

  hands of Him. Is there a God in the house?

  Is there a God in the house? Then reach down

  and take that woman off that child’s body,

  take that woman by the nape of the neck like a young cat,

  and lift her up, and deliver her over to me.

  History: 13

  When I found my father that night, the blood

  smeared on his head and face, I did not

  know who had done it. I had loved his body

  whole, his head, his face, untouched,

  and now he floated on the couch, his arms

  up, like Mussolini hanging

  upside down in the air, his head

  dangling where they could reach him with boards and their

  fingernails, those who had lived

  under his tyranny.

  I saw how the inside of the body could be

  brought to the surface, to cover the skin,

  his heart standing on his face, the weight of his

  body pressing down on his head,

  his life slung in the bag of his scalp,

  and who had done it? Had I, had my mother,

  my brother, my sister, we who had been silent

  under him, under him for years? He lay in his

  gore all night, as the body hung all

  day outside the gas station in

  Milan, and when they helped him up and

  washed him and he left, I did not see it—

  I was not there for the ashes, I had been there

  only for the fire, I had seen my father

  strung and mottled, mauled as if taken and

  raked by a crowd, and I of the crowd

  over his body, and how could the day be

  good after that, how could anything be good

  in such a world, I turned my back

  on happiness, at 13 I entered

  a life of mourning, of mourning for the Fascist.

  The Meal

  Mama, I never stop seeing you there

  at the breakfast table when I’d come home from school—

  sitting with your excellent skeletal posture

  facing that plate with the one scoop of cottage cheese on it,

  forcing yourself to eat, though you did not want to live,

  feeding yourself, small spoonful by

  small spoonful, so you would not die and

  leave us without a mother as you were

  left without a mother. You’d sit

  in front of that mound rounded as a breast and

  giving off a cold moony light,

  light of the life you did not want, you would

  hold yourself there and stare down at it,

  an orphan forty years old staring at the breast,

  a freshly divorced woman down to 82 pounds

  staring at the cock runny with milk gone sour,

  a daughter who had always said

  the best thing her mother ever did for her

  was to die. I came home every day to

  find you there, dry-eyed, unbent, that

  hot control in the breakfast nook, your

  delicate savage bones over the cheese

  curdled like the breast of the mother twenty years in the

  porous earth,

  and yet what I remember is your

  spoon moving like the cock moving in the

  body of the girl waking to the power of her pleasure,

  your spoon rising in courage, bite after bite, you

  tilted rigid over that plate until you

  polished it for my life.

  Alcatraz

  When I was a girl, I knew I was a man

  because they might send me to Alcatraz

  and only men went to Alcatraz.

  Every time we drove to the city

  I’d see it there, white as a white

  shark in the shark-rich Bay, the bars like

  milk-white ribs. I knew I had pushed my

  parents too far, my inner badness had

  spread like ink and taken me over, I could

  not control my terrible thoughts,

  terrible looks, and they had often said

  they would send me there—maybe the very next

  time I spilled my milk, Ala

  Cazam, the aluminum doors would slam, I’d be

  there where I belonged, a girl-faced man in the

  prison no one had escaped from. I did not

  fear the other prisoners,

  I knew who they were, men like me who had

  spilled their milk one time too many,

  not been able to curb their thoughts—

  what I feared was the horror of the circles: circle

  sky around the earth, circle of

  land around the Bay, circle of

  water around the island, circle of

  sharks around the shore, circle of

  outer walls, inner walls,

  steel girders, chrome bars,

  circle of my cell around me, and there at the

  center, the glass of milk and the guard’s

  eyes upon me as I reached out for it.

  San Francisco

  When we’d go to San Francisco, my father

  seemed to seek out the steepest streets,

  he would sit behind the wheel and smile

  to himself, his face red as a lobster

  at Fisherman’s Wharf after they drop it

  green and waving into boiling water.

  His eyes would snap as if popping from a pod,

  his black hair would smoke in that salty

  air, he would tilt the nose of the car

  up and press on the gas. We’d begin

  the ascent, nearly vertical,

  tires about to lose their grip on those

  slanted cobbles, he’d inch us up, like an

  engineering experiment

  we’d barely rise, till we hung in space from

  nothing, like driving up an elevator shaft,

  the black pull of the earth’s weight

  sucking us back, he’d slow down more and

  more, we’d barely rise past buildings

  pressed to the side of the precipice

  like trees up the face of a cliff. I do not

  remember my mother, but she was there,

  this may have been for her. As we neared the

  top he went slower, and slower, and then

  shifted into first, I think he was smiling,

  and in that silence between gears

  I would break, weeping and peeing, the fluids of my

  body bursting out like people from the

  windows of a burning high-rise.

  We’d hit the peak, tilt level,

  but what was life when the man who had made my

  body liked to dangle it over empty space and

  tease me with death. He sat there sparkling, a

  refuse dump, the wheel loose

  in his hands, the reins of my life held slack.

  We’d climb out, my knees shaking and I

  stank, to look at the world s
pread out at our

  feet as if we owned it,

  as if we had power over our lives,

  as if my father had control of himself

  or I of my fate—

  far below us,

  blue and dazzling, the merciless cold

  beauty of the Bay, my whole saved life ahead of me.

  Looking at My Father

  I do not think I am deceived about him.

  I know about the drinking, I know he’s a tease,

  obsessive, rigid, selfish, sentimental,

  but I could look at my father all day

  and not get enough: the large creased

  ball of his forehead, slightly aglitter like the

  sheen on a well-oiled baseball glove;

  his eyebrows, the hairs two inches long,

  black and silver, reaching out in

  continual hope and curtailment; and most of

  all I could look forever at his eyes,

  the way they bulge out as if eager to see and

  yet are glazed as if blind, the whites

  hard and stained as boiled eggs

  boiled in sulphur water, the irises

  muddy as the lip of a live volcano, the

  pupils glittering pure black,

  magician black. Then there is his nose

  rounded and pocked and comfy as the bulb of a

  horn a clown would toot, and his lips

  solid and springy. I even like to

  look in his mouth, stained brown with

  cigars and bourbon, my eyes sliding down the

  long amber roots of his teeth,

  right in there where Mother hated, and

  up the scorched satin of the sides and

  vault, even the knobs on the back of his

  tongue. I know he is not perfect but my

  body thinks his body is perfect, the

  fine stretched coarse pink

  skin, the big size of him, the

  sour-ball mass, darkness, hair,

  sex, legs even longer than mine,

  lovely feet. What I know I know, what my

  body knows it knows, it likes to

  slip the leash of my mind and go and

  look at him, like an animal

  looking at water, then going to it and

  drinking until it has had its fill and can

  lie down and sleep.

  Why My Mother Made Me