Studying Hunger Journals, page 42
June 9
I must’ve dreamed something about pictures of Roosevelt, said so to Max and he was seeing pictures of the thirties. And dreamed two aunts and the disposal of their bodies.
So now I must kill and eat him at this spot. So now I must kill and eat you on this spot. Strip the flesh from your body and lay it in pieces on the stone to dry for a while in the sun, then slowly eat it but before it spoils and so it will never be found. Yes I murdered David then, at dusk, in the cemetery and, hidden, we made a task of it all night; since he knew I wasn’t crazy he trusted me to perform the necessary act and the cannibalizing. He was a reverent and adoring victim. I remained a saint. I hope the use of the word cannibal, applied to a saint, will not shock a recognizably bourgeois audience. In my travels in Europe, I’ve become accustomed to these things, believe me it was a necessity, but I know this is not familiar to you. Anyway, there’s none but a fictional need to worry, since, war-torn, you are on the outside and I am on the inside now and can speak freely. You have no need to worry, I’ll be here for the rest of my life. Another thing you won’t understand, perhaps, is how liberating the murder and the eating of the body was. But this must be boring. I’ve already given you enough reason in my writing to fit together the motive and, as artists, you’ll understand. You would rather hear the method I devised. You are used to detective novels. It was easy to seduce him to the graveyard, especially after a few drinks. You see the thing I couldn’t stand was he felt sorry for me, poor David. While I was in Chicago I had spoken to someone I will call Jimmy and a few of his friends. They were helpful but could not understand my desire to be caught after the crime. Jimmy thought I was being sarcastic, flesh-eating, yes.
I had brought a bottle of whiskey along, and, spilling most of it on the ground, around dusk I pretended to be drunk. I yelled to David, in anger, to plant some flowers on the grave. I demanded that he steal them. He agreed, thinking he ought to give in to any whim of mine. I buried the bottle and prepared myself. All the while poor David was yelling back, “They’re all plastic.” I paid no attention. He came back, arms loaded with lilac blossoms he had cut from a tree. I pretended to go into a rage. I must’ve said, “They can’t be planted, find something else,” or, “Take them away,” I can’t remember, though my memory is much improved since I’ve been here. Finally I demanded “Plant them” and he laughed at me and pretended to do it. I waited a minute, laughing. I threw myself on him and the flowers fell to the ground. I demanded to make love. He refuses and I realize I can’t kill him but this doesn’t last. I have in my hand a large thorn which I’ve gotten from an abnormally grown wild rose bush. I scratch his face with it, pretending to play, with the excuse that I’m drunk. Lying around in the lilac blossoms, I take the first chance I get to push the thorn hard into his pineal gland, it’s the surest way. I suck the juices from it (as I write this it must be David’s birthday, I have no exact record of time here). I take out my other instruments and proceed to do what I have already related; I do not ignore the genitals. When dawn comes I take all evidence of my crime and drive away in David’s Mercedes-Benz. I bring some of the flesh with me to live on, exclusively, until I am arrested.
June 14, 1974 St. Matthias School
Bernadette Mayer 8 - B
Dog caught in class.
June 16
“You know how I listen to you.” Well, in fact, I’ve forgotten how, yes, I’ve gone and forgotten how and exactly how you listen to me and I know there must be some changes made, I turn on the radio. First of all, I must begin to remember how you listen to me, or maybe, I don’t have to.
Two) Parents, as if they were starving you, you run down, for potatoes again, in the middle of the night and hope they don’t catch you. Gulp em down before you get caught, I’ve always loved to eat in bed. You see, you almost fell asleep without eating.
Three) Write a pornographic work about Stanislaus and the little man he hides inside there, just like Rico.
Four) Settle the difference between you and them.
Max says, “Spider is a vulture.” So, who’s dead?
June 17
“Teresa has a very intelligent sister. As a matter of fact she’s sleeping right there. She’s already tried to (smile at) seduce me.” Belial becomes Max to say this, feeling his back all the while. “Let’s go down to the schooner (solution) by motorcycle.” The experiment with the monkey and the rose plants, the plants move away as the monkey’s heartbeat is monitored. “He wants his mommy” is the result. And then school: the meal. All appetizers. Soup in a cloth, potatoes cairn and butter, with spaghetti. $2.25. I find lemon and lime beer on ice. Then the airport: everybody lines up to be shot and killed. Are there three men from Rome here? And one of them’s Ugo Tognazzi and one’s Marcello Mastroianni from “Grand Bouffe.”
“It would be someone of a sexual origin.”
“Well I would want to be able to talk about Georgette (Georgie?).”
One girl smiles and gets in the front.
June 18
The people in the workshop seem to be discussing whether men and women are obscene, whether women are, whether women are misanthropic, whether women are, exist at all. Their solutions are probably monogamy, or probably it’s crazy, or probably it’s changing and getting old will solve it.
6 a.m. I wonder if Belial will ask me to marry him or cannibalize him at all. Same. So frank with Stanislaus till 5:30 a.m., then by 6, I won’t say. Spoke with Ullman before I realized I was openly making fun of him. Pilgrim’s Progress. There’s a lot of misogyny in the workshop, honey, needless to say. Then there’s the Italian woman who comes home from her husband’s funeral and the priest finds her frying her husband’s genitals: “Well what are you doing?” “I ate them the way he wanted for forty years, now I’m having them the way I want them.” Today’s daily life is odd at best.
Anyway I must write the dream: I am lying in my bed in the purple room. David, I mean Belial, and Ullman are speaking at the foot of it. Belial says: “Teresa has a very intelligent sister,…” and so on. I begin to smile in my sleep, I join them at the foot of the bed and watch myself, wonder if they notice I’m smiling. Then he says, “She’s already tried to seduce me,” said in the house, the beach house, this purple one.
“That’s not too smart.”
“Is that smart?” This is making fun of Ullman. When I begin to caress David’s back, he turns into Max, then back into himself: Fern: “My lover’s back.” My own schoolgirl’s back, burned at the bottom by the backs of the chairs (who will read it if you won’t), the hard wooden benches we sat on in school.
David and Ullman continue their conversation, they’re going to a “meeting” together: David: “It would be someone of a sexual origin…” (that I would prefer to take to the meeting).
Ullman: “Well I would want to be able to talk about Georgette.” This makes Ullman Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore show. MTM, MBM (Marie Bernadette Mayer). But why is this the purple beach house? And why, when the solution to the problem comes up, is it between David and Ullman: “Let’s go down to the schooner.” It’s the perfect solution, all are ecstatic. They go, up and down, by motorcycle. I see the schooner and it is a ship on shore, waiting. “I only want to see you.” That fucker. And who’s the monkey of this experiment? Do I even have to ask? A barrel of them. And when the monkey’s heartbeat is amplified to the audience, the plants, planters and all, move away, far away. I don’t like this guy Ullman! Move away! The audience goes “Ah!”
It does all have a reason, I only want one, interfering with me and Belial, I suppose. Strange sun setting in here, Montague is Romeo’s family name, Mercutio Romeo’s friend. And the roses are Stanislaus’ roses, what’s there to hide? Come to dinner? I always bring flowers home. And the monkey’s excuse, wanting his mommy, I don’t understand that. Florence? Marie? Fern even? No. I don’t move plants away although I want my jade plant back but I won’t go up there to get it cause that bastard…Spider’s the monkey I guess.
And we think the meal at school is free but it’s $2.25, even just for appetizers. We find the beer on ice in Mexico I guess, that’s too complicated now, it has to do with sucking cock. Then every body lines up to be shot of course, killed, whatever, and one girl, a collaborator, lines up right in front, she’s to be shot early. Why? I don’t know, she smiles so she must be me. I forget why they’re being shot in the airport maybe, where, military, the detectives spot three suitcases from Rome and they say, “Those three men from Rome must be here.” A move, then. “Spellbound” in Rome, Georgia, no doubt, the movie with an abreaction in it, Gregory Peck, Marie’s favorite actor, faints. Yes and cut to the shot of the “Grand Bouffe” men, those three, we leave out Michel Piccoli, men who eat themselves to death or else somehow we leave out Michel, we leave out Georgette, we leave out Lisette, “Wants his mommy, yes,” but why do they identify themselves in my movie? Maybe, to look forward to a day that’s moderate, in temperature. Baby, that’s a promise I can’t keep. I see all the sun in the smoke of the room, I leave the window open for you and I might as well have some fun, while waiting. Pictures make some memories.
June 23
Three men who can’t catch or bring back the black group in the trailer, what trailer, what black group? And before that I am so unhappy maybe it could stop on the day before: stricken at the sight of a black man on the street I dreamed we had the white lighter and I won’t eat I fear distinct admiration for the food just as Max fears distinct recognition from me. And Belial just goes on as if he had forever, what are our studies now?
Dreamed, June 22, I walked with the telephone, long cord of it for miles, with a man, I’m a boy, leaving a woman behind, so distinct. “You usually meet your dead lines.” Dead lines? Vultures again? Why does Max use these words at all and no one can understand it, though they kid me about it, why all the external things aren’t written down, carefully recorded, in chronology, in my journal is not external at all, though it’d make a good soap opera and engrossing too though I could never write it down. That’s why.
Stanislaus writes: “I don’t wear glasses anymore. I eat fast, hunger. This is because of what I told you, under certain conditions like because, and, reading because and behind because is the last word you have to read. I play more now.”
And Spider writes: “More so because and well enough to try and frightfully revealed and possibly entombed by my own hideous…”
And I write: no one has ever had an investment, surplice or amice, in my immobility or mobility therefore, except myself and I am quite sure of this one simple thing. You don’t get what you pay for but you get what you always provoke. Where should the word always not be in the above sentence. Too bad about my parents, so what. I am not the type to be on a CCLM committee. You always don’t always get what you always pay for but you always get what you will always provoke. Nothing to be embarrassed about in journal writing but decoration and emaciation. “Another spring day.” There is no found writing here.
In the middle of the night Florence said a peculiar thing to me. Joking, I said people offered bribes for the CCLM grants, like, “Larry said stay over and I’ll wake you up in time.” She said, “Well I can do that for you, wake you up in time, for free.” I said and I won’t have to pay then by making love; she said I can’t be sure of that. I don’t know if you get the gist of this, you see this is not my kind of journal writing. I take that back. I left something out.
It’s 7 a.m., at 11 a.m. I might be receiving a phone call, I’m under-nourished so I won’t be able to speak, anyway. Will see everyone tomorrow night at Bartholomew’s reading, a diagram of where I will be in relation to everyone else and the door, follows. Bye.
Follows a schedule for the next ten days: I must be too young for all this but it’s how I earn my living and get high. Dream think nothing. Be a psychologist. Conk out: to fail suddenly in operation, as, a motor. As = decision of the dictionary. Am bold as a bear and make a bull of it, and I am sick and tired of short poems and short prose pieces and adjunct poetics. You couldn’t pay me to read em but you can get me to do it for free, as, with everything, “The prostitute denies herself” or my heart belongs to Daddy, fuck him, persistent daddy, I curl around the magazines and books and sleep with them, hoping to learn what I already know, as, sun, don’t rise as, morning, don’t come, as daddy, or someone, see my plight and stay with me, I am all right: “The sanest people who ever dined at Neidersteins” crowded with cemeteries fraught with a moon and covered, in between, by blatant crimes. “It’s lost.”
A good bunch of rubber in bands will keep the vampires away so I lie in the sun singing the songs you want me to sing and keeping track of them.
June 24
Teresa has her second baby, my second red spot. Holland is vacuuming the room and the whole house too, the dogs and birds and sucking their fingers, “I’ve been living with a dog all this while,” a call from Teresa, “Listen to this,” rare music all the way from the bedspread, I hide my breasts in closets, the luxury of chairs comes up, a regular sitting room with breathing and moving in it.
Now I want Bartholomew just because he’s going away, I get my senses back. But as usual I’ve covered my bets and maybe better so, so naked someone said. Page, everybody’s bed. A bed bone, I still am not doing it, Marilyn Monroe said that, moralism.
Friday: Burroughs’ play, go to M’s and break the floor.
Saturday: break date with Max.
Sunday: dinner at loft, early hours for Max.
Monday: do magazines with Stanislaus in the park, get cold, Bartholomew’s reading, he’s leaving, visit him with Stanislaus, he gets spooked.
Tuesday: Belial is spooked too, Spider apprehends me as I call Stanislaus, two hours of relative catatonia, workshop, valium and milk, go to Stanislaus’ to get some sleep, break date with Fern.
Wednesday: CCLM meeting, get up at 9:30, late for meeting, Joel, take nap, dream about CCLM, visit Fern, sleep there.
Thursday: Put Fern in a taxi to Cherry Valley, move out of Florence’s and into Fern’s, dream “bitterroot: blame,” see Stanislaus.
The lieutenant was killed (A) en route to the subway (B). Later the wounded man sought treatment (C) and was considered suspect in mugging (D) shortly before murder. (Middle Village.)
June 30
Père David deer, Here’s a picture of Dondi. Like all comic-strip orphans he has no eyes, only black dots. It’s about time I give all this up. After all I’m not even set up and I must write a t.v. commercial, I mean, series. Serious, not the kind of thing you’d read in the hospital. “Be nice to yourself,” someone said and loving towards me, it’s because you’re so “fond” of me.
Green eggs and ham for four people. Leave out Stanislaus. Why? The dream of the mad dog: I am in a room, no, a house. I check out the beds to see how many people might be sleeping there, could sleep. In Fern’s house many people could sleep, in dream. I don’t want to tell the rest of this dream except everyone was wearing either black or white, there was a man/woman I did not know, blonde in white (she has mumps or crabs and it might be catching by mouth) she presents me with a bottle of Metaxa mixed with water, happy I would find something in the empty house to drink. And in the end I found myself in bed with Stanislaus and a dog, these dreams will wear off, as you are in the hospital. And the dog was a twin, can we have the bedroom tonight, of a dog I knew (?), Max’s, so many of them, there’s something wrong with the dog, and so on, it can’t be cured because “He hasn’t been fed in many months.” I’m in the closet, I wasn’t to blow someone, was I? I will stop writing all this down soon. Mumps, sex disease, Metaxa, mangy (dog) mouth disease, to cheat.
Godard dream. Godard holding up pictures and making a shutter with his hand, so we can’t see. They change, they’re jokes: like, “these are the American revolutionaries,” they change to monkeys in the air. Screen gets bigger and I figure out the secret, there’s actors and actresses behind the screen, maybe we will see some real visions, maybe like when Fern was packing up. The secret is out, one of the actresses is dressed in a blue gown smoking the very butt of a brown cigar and I wonder if this will shock Stanislaus. And they say, you’ve only been here, in this hotel, for a week, yet you’ve figured out our secret. Godard, and, Anna Karina is helping him.
Desperation noise, a need to hold off or let go or impress someone, Meg perhaps, she is living here too. I don’t write anything about sleeping with Fern and I don’t tell anything either except for the surprise of skin as a kind of workbook. All the ease of it, going away and jealousy. And all you guys, what’s it necessary for, sleep. Stay awake, telling and openly telling, not telling, the amorphous leaving off, it’s telling off, leave me alone.
July 1
Some kind of gravesite, watching a woman at it, the stone, like the three-mirror effect at a hat store, to look at hats or dresses. A man behind the woman.
Steve and I are at school together, I’m unpacking Max’s things. I’m amused he packed a large pencil sharpener. I’m anxious to be on time, nine o’clock for the class, but it’s been postponed an hour. Three girls rush in to take me, it wasn’t postponed at all and a class is coming in to be held in my room. Steve says will I go on a trip with him for four hours. We’ll go to Georgia, Alabama and so on. He’s delighted I’ll come. He must be Fern too.
