Read Online Mercy by Andrea Dworkin - Free Book Online

you fat
    he says. I just boil what there is. I buy whatever costs what I have
    in m y pocket. I don’t know what people are talking about
    sometimes but I stay quiet because I don’t want to appear so
    ignorant to them, for instance, there are funny words that I

    can’t even try to say because I think they will laugh at me but I
    heard them once like zucchini, and if someone makes something and hands it to me I eat it. Sometimes someone asks me if
    I like this or that but I don’t know what they mean and I stare
    blankly but I smile and I don’t know what they think but I try
    to be polite. I worked at the Student Peace Union and the War
    Resisters League to stop the bomb and I was a receptionist at a
    place that taught reading and I was a waitress at a coffee shop
    that poured coffee-to-go and I typed and carried packages and
    I went with men and they had smoke or food or music or a
    place to sleep. I didn’t get much money and I didn’t keep any
    jobs because mostly I lived in pretty bad places or on the streets
    or in different places night to night and I guess the regular
    people didn’t like it or wanted to stay away but I didn’t care or
    think about it and I never thought about being regular or
    looking regular or acting regular; I did what I wanted from
    what there was and I liked working for peace and the rest was
    for cigarettes. I slept in living rooms, on cots, on floors, on
    soiled mattresses, in beds with other people I didn’t know who
    fucked while I slept, in Brooklyn, in Spanish Harlem, near
    Tompkins Square Park, in abandoned buildings, in parks, in
    hallways, curled up in corners. Y ou can build your own walls.
    Even the peace people had apartments and pretty things and
    warm food, it seemed regular and abundant but I don’t know,
    I never asked them for anything but sometimes someone took
    me home and I could see. I didn’t know where it came from; it
    was just like some play with scenery. They had plants or
    pretty rugs or wool things or pots; posters; furniture; heat;
    food; things around. I tried to live in a collective on Avenue B
    and I was supposed to have a bed and we were going to cook
    and all but that was where the junkies kept rolling on top o f me
    because the collective would never tell anyone they couldn’t
    sleep there and I never was there early enough so there wasn’t
    someone asleep where I thought was mine. I never did really

    sleep very well, it’s sort o f a lie to say I could sleep with junkies
    rolling over on top o f me, a little bravado on m y part, except I
    fell o ff to sleep, or some state o f less awake, and then it’d
    happen. Y ou are always awake a little. I lived in a living room
    o f a woman for peace who lived with her brother. He slept in
    the living room, she slept in the bedroom, but she put me in
    the living room with him. He breathed heavy and stayed up
    watching me and I had to move out because she said he
    couldn’t sleep. I stayed anywhere I could for as long as I could
    but it w asn’t too long usually. I slept on benches and in
    doorways. D oorw ays can be like palaces in the cold, in the
    dark, when it’s wet; doorways are strong; you feel sheltered,
    like in the arms o f God, unless the wind changes and comes
    right at you and drives through you; then you wake up already
    shivering, sleep pulling you down because you want to believe
    you are only dreaming the wind is driving through you, but
    you started to shake unconscious and the cold permeates your
    body before you can bring your mind to facing it. Y ou can’t
    find any place in N ew Y ork that doesn’t have me in it. I’m
    stuck in the dark, m y remembrance, a shadow, a shade, an
    old, dark scar that keeps tearing, dark edges ripping, dark
    blood spilling out, there’s a piece left o f me, faded, pasted onto
    every night, the girl who wanted peace. Later I found out it
    was Needle Park or Bed-Stuy or there were whores there or it
    was some kind o f sociological phenomenon and