RULE 1: You’re miserable, OK that just proves you have been chosen.

      We all pile into six cars, heading out to Comanche. Somebody said a party was on out there: a party means anything might happen. Nothing’s happened yet, but we haven’t been to enough parties is why. Something could come out of the stars tonight, and make us electrify.
      Crank it up     crank it up
      Victor’s stereo wants to break the world. It’s louder & hurts more than anything. We are the notes, we shatter everything. But we also hear it like from far away. That distant little song that thinks it can exist.
      Sheryl says I’m stuck-up. Tiff is mad cause I wouldn’t help her boyfriend buy Southern Comfort. Julie told Mickey I’m a "spiritual whore." Freedom is something to do with other people. The earth has gravity so we won’t ever lose the smell of dirt.
      April Wilkins is my friend, because she believes she’s dirt, and her incarnation of dirt can make me cry how much it wants to be the mist over a grotto. I’m her friend because she’s in love with Victor and he’s with me. But Victor doesn’t know what to talk about, so he cranks up the tape deck. Me and him and April, leading the caravan, ride over the ridge, and we see Comanche. Comanche is on fire.
      Comanche is a word for Noplace. It’s the name of nothing but a big field, out by the foothills. The kids of this town called it the name Comanche so it’d be a place, so we’d have a place to go. There’s never anything there but ourselves.
      It’s all burning. Low little flames spread-out everywhere. I see the wishes on April’s face illuminated orange, I tell her she’s beautiful.
      I do know how the fire started. Victor’s stereo’s music’s misery can focus heat, I believe that, RULE 2 believe always believe, believe it and believe.
      I kiss him, and wishes knock us out of path, he swerves a little. Two fire trucks pass us on the right, ripping gravel out of the earth and dropping it back down again.
      Fathers and husbands prepare to shoot water across our empty burning field. We all sit in our cars, we’re viewers, like for movies at the drive-in. Our faces are glowed-down sad. We stop existing to ourselves, because somebody else is actually doing something. That’s how we look when we’re entertained.
      Smoke at night is like an unsolvable problem. They shine red lights on it because they want to encourage us to give up and die. In this town right now hundreds of high-school kids are driving their cars very slowly the entire length of Chester Avenue, from the traffic circle to the underpass. They’re watching each other, but alone, armored in cars. They’ve been doing this for hours, back and forth, pacing.
      Hundreds more kids on foot are pacing through the shopping mall. Shyness will prevent more life than long vapid buildings can ever create. These kids know better than any people on earth that there’s really nothing to buy.
      The train yard. Before any of us arrived, this town was already abandoned to destruction. The old station-master’s office like an earthquake museum: kids break in to stare at the destruction, then climb rubble and fall through the rotted floor trying to guess what these men were thinking when they invented a town like this. Southern Pacific uses Bakersfield to practice on, is all. Freight train backs up slowly for ten minutes, stops. Sits. Moves forward for ten minutes. You hear the train-whistle from everywhere: moaning because it has no reason to be here.
      An adobe-looking hotel at the center of town is the tallest building anywhere, 8 stories. The hotel owner’s having an obscure feud with the city fathers, and his hotel’s his cube-shaped body, quivering revealing his fury to the world. He’s covered the walls of his property with huge signs, which we all know by heart and have come to believe:

FALSITY RULES OUR TOWN

BLIGHT = EXODUS of TRUTH

CLIQUES RETARD GROWTH

BRAN DEN BURG GATE

QUAR     AN     TINE !

      Hotel Padre, it’s a place kids go sometimes. You walk through the big arch lobby casual like you live there, elevator up to the top floor, walk down the corridor pretend you feel fearless, and slide out window to the fire escape. Suddenly you’re in the wind at night. Go up step by step a scary wobbly metal fire ladder.
      The only idea: sit out on the roof edge and talk about what you see. Look out over the town and try and feel understand something. Drink sweet wine. Try to believe (seeing it all-at-once, dusk) it’s even beautiful here. Drink and gaze, and our eyes help our lives believe. It’s a place of viewership.
     
      Comanche’s all burned-away. They tell us we can’t hang out here, cause it’s unsafe. We’ve heard that before.
      Their water hoses made smell of wet ashes. Smell of plastic sodabottles melted into black windows in the new mud.
      No moon. Million stars. The milky part is an edge view of whole galaxy. A galaxy is a drop of milk sinking in black mud.
      A beer cooler made of styrofoam, half-blacked, flipped over on its mouth. Somebody’d put his foot through the bottom of it.
      The lights from our cars blossom into one huge blister of light.
      April’s crying, because she sees me crying, on my knees, in the mud, and she’s mud. We were brought to this pre-annihilated place as a test, and I’m crying because I want so much to know how to wrap my legs around the test.
      The car radio’s singing about farewell. If I have to lose you. Blaze of flame. Magic flame. Random flame, ARISE
      The big red plastic gasoline can in Victor’s trunk is so sloshing heavy because it’s full of purifying fire.
      Victor wrestles me for the gas can. So I give it up.
      They won’t let me light this place again and ruin it better. They’re both yelling at me. Their eyes make bonfire. They don’t see what I see at all.
     

RULE 3, let pain drag you into the mouth of the impossible.

      Each of us has to pass the test alone, for the redemption of who will fail it. It’s midnight, Victor drops me at work. Summer job teaches responsibility. To be responsible is to be culpable. I work at Howdy House Coffee Shop so that Howdy House Coffee Shop will be my fault.
      Cook says: None of us wants to be here. This is all there is. There are other jobs in this town they’re the same. You have to settle in stop resisting. You really are here, you really are a dishwasher. In Utopia I would feed you angel-cake from my own fingers, because you’re pretty. In Heaven I’ll visit you with a fresh peach. But right now work. Have faith, this is all there is, believe me have faith, give up and believe. Crack 150 eggs into that bucket, take this huge wire whisk, destroy the boundaries between the see-through whites and the floating-self yolks. Then we can scream breakfast!
      Busboy says: you should be up in the movies. You’re gorgeous. You distract me from off my work, there’s something about it, you’re so tiny. I could break you like that, makes me strong. You turn this shit job into seeming like it’s a poem. I start to love to pick up dirty dishes just because I know you’re gonna wash that dish. The good food turning into garbage, I used to hate that—clean paper napkins making into wad-up trash, everything mixing together on everything to where I got to throw it all in gray bins and wipe away the table with a rag—now that all hits me as good. It’s, like, nature. We’re nature, I mean we make nature go. I could love the whole world if I thought there was angels behind it. Come here.
      Waitress says: I don’t want to see you. There is no reason I should see you. You’re back at your station, and I’m out front. Only if you’re putting out a clean rack of coffeecups should I ever see your hands red from the steam, or your hair greased-out, or your eyes gone flat. I can’t stand that you should be here, it offends against hope. Me, I belong here, I fit in, I’m a fatso hag waitress. That’s all right. Except you, we’re monsters, we’re all horrible—we’re here, aren’t we? Here: please take this Peanutbutter Cup I’ve swiped out of the register case and wrapped in a napkin to give you. I want you to get strength up for escaping. Because I look at you and see a hole blown in the side of Howdy House. Don’t you know what you look like? I see a door that leads you out of this cripple-town. Hurry up your face won’t last. You go talk to my friend about getting some pictures took. It didn’t work for her, but look at you. Somebody has to deserve to escape. We’re low on silverware. Save yourself!
     

RULE 4: Promise me.

      On my belly. Crawling because that’s closest to the flames. On my belly crawling across kitchen floor (because I’m really beautiful). My mother at the breakfast table. She never eats (has no wish).
      Hate is a sin (says my mother) you’ve caused me to sin. Get away from me so I can feel love.
      (Staring my eye one inch down into the black japanese-lacquer-looking linoleum. World’s eye sees me from above. Heaven sees me crawling because beauty has a meaning.)
      My mother says First I drink the beer, then I crush the can in one hand and cast it away. The chance to crush something is what the beer means to me.
      (I tell her I don’t want anything for myself. Look how really perfect-looking my thighs are, photographing each other.)
      She says: I have to look at you every day. They make these beer cans very very delicate easy to crush. Because they’ve got tender hearts, the brewers. They understand what gives a mother solace.
      (I will do anything you want. Just let me not exist here. I want to only exist on magazine pages.)
      ((Because I am underage, the talent agency wants my unbeautiful, my never-was-beautiful mother to sign a piece of paper. The piece of paper will get me a job as a model! And then))
      (She can see the back of me, lying facedown. She can evaluate my curves. Me being underage is her fault.)
      Says: Your life can’t possibly depend on my signature. Life is not about paper. If they won’t photograph you till the law lets them, you must not be so beautiful as you think.
      (I tell her the busboy is ruining his career over me.)
      ((This piece of paper is way more beautiful than anything in this town including my mother’s face! Just sign this!))
      She says: We’re wasting electricity. Turn the light off [no!], we can talk in the dark [no!] if this is all we’re going to talk about. Go back to this agent tell him I’ll send him the waiver real soon. I won’t, though. If you deserve any happiness he’ll give you it on trust. Then you’ll have the teeth to scare even me.
      ((I’m looking down into the linoleum. Then: I absolutely concentrate my whole body and heart on raising my head—my head like a pause for breath, like catching your breath, like not breathing, like you can’t breathe, you’ll never breathe again, I raise my eyes and finally finally finally with all my hair and face and eyes look straight into her eyes.))
      She says: nothing. Then she says: Let me see the paper.
      She’s not looking at me, but at my face. Her face has already started to dream. I can change the atoms in a table into boats.
      Sit up, she says, that floor’s not swept—would you quit school, do you think?
      I altered everything! She’s a completely different voice. She says it’s up to me, entirely my decision and she doesn’t want to pressure me in any way.
      Her voice before was the size of a beer can, now it speaks out of the whole body under her ratsnest kimono.
      She points out, gently, that my body will be sometimes "unclad," according to the waiver. Unclad is a sword word.
      It’s up to you, she repeats. Repeats she mustn’t influence my decision. Of course, she says, this could be a wonderful opportunity.
      I believe in her. I can alter myself! I can be atoms of a Frieda living with a loving mother, if that’ll release me into the steam that rises. RULE 5 compassion for absolutely anyone. I declare that I am safe at the center of a loving protective curve rounded by her signing her name.
      Compassion because she’s trapped, her body is only a phrase she says to herself in her sleep, whereas my body, naked, is what people mean by prayer. I must resist the wish to save myself.
     
      The talent agent is also the photographer. I see that he also answers the phones at his agency, and feeds the fish. He is hiding the intense light of all the escape maps he knows, all the treasure routes, all this is concealed behind his brown suit, keys are secret within his balding head. He is my conduit. He is the velvet path. The path is right here before me.
      Speaking to me. I’m jumbled in his thick voice the color of burnt blood, his thin hair like dry rain, his high forehead bright with glass, he knows everything I love him I bear this willingly.
      Each of the photographic lights has to be turned on with an awkward twist of his big fingers. With each light, the wide room gets that much less in-the-world.
      The lights so bright make his brown suit seem crazy, heavy like a diving bell. The mechanics of film-loading are tremendously tense. Angrily he tells me get undressed. The viewer has the right to look at every inch of you. He has the right to hound you to the point of suicide. He cannot be saved except through his eyes, because his eyes take his life on this journey. And he’s always alone.
      I can’t see my agent, these big lights in my eyes—he’s a dark mirror with silver between me and his darkness. Me lying on the pure black paper that’s the floor but also curves up to be a wall, in the light I’m too white to look at, small bright and bent.
      He begins to pose me. He explains:
      “knowing innocence"
      "street angel"
      "lolita"
      I say, God in a rotted fish. This is what he means I say, a stinking hyena made of light. A dove that devours the universe, a silver feast of puke, that’s what he wants, that’s what he needs me to be.
      His instructions pass all the way through my body go right to the center of the light. I’ve always known what a model is. It’s what people need to see to live their lives. So they can live, I have to carve myself.
      Swimming this waterfall of light I stand up. My hips are my father, my eyes my mother. I lounge back hard against the paper wall. Mother when I’m following instructions, and when the light so bright it’s going through my face bones: father. I can’t think or know. But without knowing so, I know the moment of passing-through love is about to arrive (it will arrive).
      Click. My agent is the modulator of light. He instructs my face, he tangles my arms, but I love him and I understand. He knows his orders are only music. We are both working for the viewer.
      The viewer is staring at me.
      Viewer wants to be the black paper wall I’m leaning against. Viewer’s eyes’ inability to touch me feels to him like blindness. Viewer shaking, he’s shaking, seeing this square inch of my hip, and his eyes are without fingertip.
      Because the viewer’s eyes fork. They want the impossible solitary love, to have "me" yet be left alone with a magazine. They beg me:
      catch rain in weasel nets
      extract a sunbeam from cucumbers
      feed us he-goat milk in a sieve
      I shall.
      I have not come to fix people’s everyday life, but to demolish it.
      Turn my head to look at the camera. Because a sword must swing in an arc. The rat tangle of my hair has been touched, viewer-pre-handled. My skin doesn’t have to know it’s ringing through the soundproof wall of a lens. My lips can believe they are touching the wrist of the man who has nothing, nothing.
      And my eyes have to try! All the photographic light, all the clattering precision of my agent’s instructions, this all has to drop out of my eyes! So they can look at you. Viewer.
      There’s black in your eyes, my viewer. I know you’re older than me. I know you’re convinced you must go into the black earth, and your name be erased.
      Look, my agent has brought a big mirror. Because we love you, viewer. We’ll reach me out to you in two paths.
      Mirror on the floor, Frieda on the floor, a mirror lies down and Frieda lies down. When you die, your body will lie down and lie you down inside it. But I will be there.
      My cheek on the mirror.
      When you look in your own mirror, viewer, you grimace, because time won’t ever click to a stop.
      So I grinch my mouth. Not as girl box of white chocolates, but as apology. When you are put in your grave (are you there already?) I will come and take you up. I can show you: look down into this mirror. There’s no black earth down there, but sun! My face in the mirror’s looking away from the camera to look right at you in the mirror. We can meet, we can meet through this barrier.
      The girl on the sidewalk, who always seems to ignore you, here is her alternate face looking into you. I am her impossible wish, just as when you die your ghost will feel the white of my bloodless flesh. All this light so I can reverse myself, bones-first, and give my mirror skin to you alone.
      My face is white because blood takes time to flow, and time’s not in me. Click, see a click is not inside time. Trapped man I know exactly how you feel. When they walk up to me at school and say stuff that hangs in their eyes like fungus, "you think you’re something extra—I can just look at you and tell, you think you deserve some extra-special existence," I know the mechanism. You need me because you’re dying. Death has been pasted with papery colors and clocktime jokes and the flavors of starkest candy. For your sake I will not laugh at your jokes. I won’t embody myself just another girl in the elevator. I am a model, I have to compensate.
      The original is God. My agent limns God so I can step into the glowing lines. We reach to touch
      We want to love
      We give you life
      But—
      I wish my agent wouldn’t talk. Viewer please don’t listen to him.
      That click, that metal click. I’m shuttered. And my face goes for a walk, my face walks all through the world.
      So many viewers. He says the maximum number of viewers must be made to understand. He says the face is a story.
      Viewers will want me if I’m readable. Sophisticated yet easy to completely understand.
      Can I kiss a crowd? My throat, shown here in pale white, is a voice that tells the story, my private love, a gentle story, all you viewers. A timid understanding story to make a whole city of eyes go soft. Take the readers by the hand.
      Agent says words like clicks. A pose is an important form of art, he says. (He says it—he doesn’t believe it—he cannot—but wants me to pose like I believe something!) He says I am "creating a reality." A "heightened" reality. I have a thing he calls a face of genius.
      Light makes me sweat within. He says a package is full because it’s been packaged. Every box is a carton, whatever you put inside. What to do with a carton is sell it. Where existence begins is Distribution.
      Light hurts me. He’s heard there’s a brand of heroin called "Henry James," he says that’s good, it will get people reading books he’s trying to remove me and put my body instead. Shut up!
      No
      No, rise, expand, trust him if he says a pose is not a pose it’s all right to make a false smile false promise, it’s not really false it’s an evocation a carrier for God, it’ll come out true in the long run and cheer up a crowd of mouthless men
      (What’s going wrong?)
      Try to be understood, try to not hear too much
      (I have to speak as myself don’t I?) Hear nothing! Why’s my skin not me?
      My agent twists the aluminum knob of a black lightpole. Now the pole will have to stand up tall like it has a true idea, he choked it into freeze and it can glare authority down on us all. What happened?
      I’m still on, all I have to do to change everything is to become visually meaningful this second, before he clicks. I will try to hear my own voice.
      (Sweat. Gulp. What’s preventing my face?)
      Click click click. Not these pictures—wait—
      He says to stare into "the distance" but that’s why I want to look into the viewer’s eyes! Because I already know what’s in the distance!
      I (my version of trying to live) am my beloved, and my beloved (who is looking at me?) is mine, and if my face trying to look like a prayer for love actually appears bleak (in need) then I guess this is my truth, I offer you my face erasing itself, I show you that I can need (you) (can still love) (so so could you)
      Viewer
      Viewers: and the lie in my body lets metal technique click up to fill in with its own lie. I’m posing exactly a girl exactly like a girl in a magazine.
      Why doesn’t he save me?
      (But he’s doused the lights. Cold black zones press in all around my body)
      (My chance is over)
      (Now I’ll never exist. I’ll only be myself. He was right, distribution is the path, and only an obedient product ever gets dealt out into strangers’ laps)
      (But...he’s saying enthusiastic things! I think he means it. He does mean it. And it’s true that he took a lot a lot)
     
      In the mail, my mother receives an invoice from my agent. This invoice says she owes him $3200 for portfolio development and talent management. It mentions the contract she signed.
     
      A picture is a wish. A wish is without time.
     
      A wish is without time because it’s fucking impossible.
     
      Don’t hit me.
      "I have a daughter who can destroy me with money. My daughter Frieda, who has no money of her own, she uses money (which God gave us to stanch our wounds) uses money to devour her mother.
      "She lives by a fable she reads in the mirror. She believes $3200 is nothing compared to her face. But money is concentrate of God! I can’t pay this bill! I’m locked out of heaven! I’m damned by the self-love of my own child!"
      I’ll fix everything. I’ll hate myself. Help. I’ll die I’ll die
      "You have to die $3200 worth."
      Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I want to disappear.
     
      It doesn’t matter what I do when I’m unphotographed.
      My agent is a thief, and a lid over Bakersfield.
      He I love. Who knows all about the promise, all about transcending,
      He who I loved. Who knows all about (uses of) the promise, (techniques of) transcending,
      he will only meet me on the planet cash dirt money earth.
      (He was the promise)
      I will meet him and seduce him. This is my mother’s actual scheme for me. I will extract his pledge not to invoice my mom this sum.
      I will be more ordinary than anybody. I’ll be such trash I’ll control his eyes.
      I’ll keep the whole truth in a trap box by smiling.
      (He’ll never be the promise again)
      My mother’s flesh will be my sheath. Bakersfield has two nightclubs, which are machines that beat time into money, while people sit in them clubbing time into life. I will sit next to my agent in one of these buildings. He will believe in the tremendousness of my face, because he already believes in the tremendousness of his face!
      I’ll smile. I am as creep a creep as he is. My young-liar face has the fake power that will stupefy $3200 cash back out of his eyes.
      My mother’s flesh will protect me till the moment he actually kisses it. Then because she hates me she’ll disappear, I’ll be unclad. His schnapps-distilling mouth will kiss mine, and will boast. He’ll say:
      I believe in my craft.
      I’ll agree with him. (No—I believe in salvation)
      He’ll say:
      What’s important is charm.
      I’ll try to totally charm. (No—what’s important is clarity (I seek))
      He’ll say:
      Pretty faces arrive in crops, chopped-down according to what this year we harvesters find pretty.
      I’ll turn my neck to the scythe. (No!—every face on earth can express love!)
      Sex in redemption of $3200. He will undress me, unfuck my mother, return everything back how it was, every hope.
      I will accept this with love. I will try to learn from it. I will create out of earthbound nothing, invisible spirit.
      Virgin most Peaceful. Virgin most Merciful. Virgin most Renowned. Virgin most Wise.
      Virgin most Hopeful.
      Who can turn even a great evil into good, OK. Maybe.
      And when it’s over, will I come back home? Put my hand on my mother’s forehead and let her feel my breast, how it’s been scraped at? Will time stop there?
      Time won’t stop.
      I’ll wake up in his bed. That’s his leg. I’ll cling on.
      I’ll need him. Take me away from earth.
      He’ll say he loves me.
      The putty of his smile, the rolled-clay lower lip with its soft indent of fear. He might actually love me.
      I will be able to control his mouth. I will get him to say he loves his wife, as a first step to unsaying it. He will decide I’m "spiritual" and he’ll rip away some of his spirit, flap it in my eyes, love this. No, I’m serious.
      Nobody stops believing, they stop expecting. If even just one of us has faith, the world will see it in her face. Take my picture!
      And my agent will sit up, startled. I’m asking him to change totally. Leave his wife and have faith in the impossible. And because he’s a faith machine (senses what wishes are in the world, and connects them to models’ [fictional girls’] desire to fulfil) he will resist breaking down. He will attack what he can understand of me.
      There’s a visible Frieda, saleable, yet standing in the way of the money she contains. Because any moment I might touch his heart, and he be unable to stick his fork in. The money-waste of love makes fear of a girl’s neck. He is the book of himself burning in his own bedroom.
      So he won’t leave his wife! He’ll keep me, grin, he’ll enjoy our time together. "Love" a TV show he’ll watch me in, two thumbs-up to transcendence the weight and meaning of a pig-iron bucket full of silk.
      I will beat his ass with a rolled-up Paris-Match. I will shout at him about faith, believing in a deaf spirit locked in the cork and putty of his grin, his little sayings, his black puppet of being such a right guy, nice, who burns himself every day with the scalding shit of his smeared boyhood, who can so defile the human body as to put those tasseled beige shoes onto his human feet, who hates his own skull enough to spray funny brown paint onto its naked spot, this man must be abused!
      I’ll addict him to me. I’ll phone his wife. I’ll disappear for two weeks, I’ll tell him "most women prefer to be left alone." I’ll soften his little black dried clump of spirit.
      And my own spirit? So squeezed it smells of wet birds.
      Just one feather on my body, and I’ll pluck it out for him, not knowing if it’ll ever grow back.
      Because I love him. I love him, he has me.
      See a man shred a feather, then see him dance a little bit—slight—the dance you dance from a cup of tea.
      The burnt root of my feather. He’ll say something, finally, to pull the last gulp of prayer out of my throat. He’ll say "all dreams are lies," and I’ll slap his face, and he’ll finally finally finally get mad.
      And he’ll kill me! And as he kills me with a fresh new expensive knife, he’ll laugh and laugh, slice slice chop chop chop, because he’s giving me what I was asking for all along. He’s letting me out.
     
      My mother’s waiting for my answer. I’m locked in my room till I’m ready to promise. Promise you’ll fuck talk whore yourself out of this money invoice problem. I am dirt, grounded.
      Night. Wild rain, tub-dumping rain outside. Nobody could breathe in that. Stay dry. Better not move.
      The mirror on my locked door is a door to my mother.
      The mirror on the foggy window is a ghost bed where something still lives. On this planet, water comes from the sky. Mirrors tell us we’d be beautiful if we could be seen rightly. Older women drink because they won’t gamble, they want their bodies to give them the sure thing. Money is so incredibly important because it can buy things too heavy to lift. Sex was invented to give people something to do about what they can’t ever have.
      A fashion photo is a money-sex-mirror. A sure thing is dried rain.
      So now I am going to make my plan. I plan to fail, on a loud note, with grand crash. I’ll fail so well, nobody can fail to notice.
      Open the window. Do the sure-to-miss. My father taught me how.
      Window open crouched on my windowsill, the gorgeous wind, pajamas soaked instantly! Open window I’m already outside! The cloud field straight up heaven!
      Jump/land in mud LAUGH running I’m running out my mother’s yard down my mother’s street away upward up the slant rain up the cloud field
      If I can’t breathe I’ll drink, if I choke I’ll float, I can fly if I forget
      I gasping hear the music every gasp, total contact telephone of rain, all gasps on planet flow join this rain this rain gets in everyplace
      You all soak me to my skin, the earth all slippery but my path to you’s air water air
      thunder shatter my enemy
     
      Lightbulb light. He’s in there. I knew. He always works late.
      I’m going to walk right in, dripping, because it’s impossible. I’ll be caught stealing back the pictures, and that’s the ticket. Be caught and destroy this life, start the next life.
      I walk right in his reception door.
      And look how thin I am—I can slice air sideways, right through the light in the room.
      I smell the false lightning of his ozone photo lamps. He’s in the back, in the studio, among his electrical snakes, he is less interesting than the bottom of one of my feet when it’s most falsely posing, he’s more untruthful than the cat-shaped coffin of a cat. He’s crawling behind that wall damaging hope in a different girl.
      Suddenly it’s impossible for me to fail. I don’t even sneak. I don’t even hush. He’ll never see me here. I’m invisible to a man like him.
      Since he boasted and showed-off where everything’s kept, I know the file drawer with all my photographs, I only take what’s me. The negative strips in white glassine like tickets. The black box of prints, with my name in white grease-pencil written by his fingers. My pajamas cling to me soaking joy.
      Here in my hands is my bodying-forth. I’ll take pictures away, send them to a true agent (I still believe) an agent in a real city, who’ll beckon me. And my mother is frozen, and I am done. It’s like taking the sun off a black shelf, and carrying it outside to throw in the sky!
      BLAST outdoors THIEF running down the sidewalk I yell the rain it’s OK to stop now, and it instantly stops, I’m laughing because it took me so literal, it’s stopped in midair, mercury dimes hanging midair as I run, the proof is I’m breathing so hard and singing laughing and I never drown!
      Awning says Candy it’s striped peppermint, that is so nice of them. The grate is pulled down. Can’t see inside.
      But in my chest I see every piece of candy inside, behind my eyes taste every flavor. The flavors flip into me like cards shuffling, crackcrackcrack yum.
      Telephone booth has a light inside it that’s soft as when somebody holds you so well you close your eyes to feel it. People who make phone booths are very kind.
      Inside the booth the wind is still. Sound outside is a caress of music to help us talk to each other on telephones.
      I did it. I’m going to call Victor. I’m smiling so hard.
      Victor, to tell him it’s him I’m calling—and this telephone could put my lips to anybody’s on the planet! Victor who I love because he’s the force of beauty, he’s going to be my bodyguard when my future viewers turn toward the light behind me. How his strong shoulder, walking next to mine, can freeze people, keep them so transfixed they forget to say mean things to me, they forget to be beasts who make themselves unhappy, Victor my bodyguard will protect them. Victor, who’s beautiful because his job is to preserve beauty against the world. Who is a fire burning out the fires around me, so that to walk through the streets of my famous fame will be to pass out of time through silent circles.
      Victor, something funny happens. My hand reaches and hits my hip a little. My hand thinks my hipbone is going to give me something important.
      Oh.
      I don’t have a quarter, for the phone. My hand was looking for a coin, in a pocket, in pajamas.
      But I can call Victor, I can call Victor. I take the phone and dial his number. I dial like I don’t worry. I’m staring at the coin slot, and thinking quarter, feeling the quarter, the weight and clink ring of musical quarter, miracle quarter quarter quarter quarter quarter quarter quarter phone answers!
      An automatic woman asking please for 25 cents.
     
     
      It’s raining. It’s night.
     
      Victor won’t reach through the wire. He could ring this telephone, but he hates me. He’s at his house, in his bed, singing hymns of hate. The last time I saw Victor he said "The problem is you’re too nutsy, I don’t want to know." But I know that’s wrong.
      He can’t understand me yet. I love him so much I forgive him.
      I hear his voice. His bass note in the phonebooth glass. The voice of who I love. He’s saying crazy bitch.
      Victor even if you hate me ring this phone and tell me, tell me tell me what you want. If I want what you want, that could be like love.
      The rain I can’t stop, wind shaking my little phonebooth house, making the glass sing, that is Victor singing to himself rhyming ruthless with soundless, but I’m suddenly choked with the joy of the ruthless. The miracle I’m wishing for’s propped right here under my toes! Victor reminded me. What I’m about to become is so great he can’t even speak, he can’t even phone me, breathless.
      I will turn these beautiful photos of myself into a gift box to every cruel automatic beast, automatic beasts will love me so much time’ll pause, deactivate them all, time will pause, long enough.
      Clouds will appear. Music will play, sounding like an expensive jewelled bag ripped open. Buildings of Chinese alloy will rise, surrounded by straw. Viewers will seek me on the lakes and in the mass of impacted snow. Nonexistence, I’ll tell them all, touch me not. But that’ll deepen them.
      The town is a bonfire. People may be automatic beasts, but they need warmth. They circle, throwing their own stories into the flames. But a flame turned backwards is behind every face skin of them.
      Only a pit could have made me. Only the forced-low can spring up and float.
      My scrawny body can fill the pit
      My scrawny face can reverse the flame
      Human race, with only one tine to your fork, I will feed you.
      The tiger pauses, absolutely still, at the edge of the clearing. That clearing already belongs to him.
     
      Open your box. Expose the photos. Pause the miracle of time.
      And under the all-rounding light at the bottom of my telephone booth, I sit and open this box of my photographs, the gift I was born to give.
     
      The next ten minutes slide sideways on the ice. I’m waiting to reach a wall. It takes ten minutes to look at all these pictures. I start out knowing, then in a while I’m waiting to know.
      While waiting to know, I’m finding out.
      wham wham wham
      Percussion means somebody’s not pure
      These pictures are me. Pictures, me. They don’t change. I can’t hide this.
      Picture each picture pang pang bang.
      This is a true pause. A pause is horrible.
      Pose after pose. Who poses as saint? Lookit that ugly, vain, little, naked, chick!
      Poses next to poses revealed as poses. Horror
     
      I can’t move now. I’m this.
      My horrible little eyes, again and again, the same fake same same.
      What was the naked self-loving mirror creep thinking, behind her gosh "beautiful eyes"?
      I remember I was thinking glory. I was thinking wonder. I was true-feeling.
      None of that is here. One hundred forty of me, and they all agree I’m not real. They prove.
      What I must think of the viewer. What hate for the viewer I must feel. To make myself such a fake, setting my body against them, giving them what I think they need, but always withholding. Like whoremaster for the whole planet, I chose to show naked butts of mine that would slide farthest, to slide across their eyes and blind them with smear of me. Meanwhile my eyes mustn’t be touched! Arrogant little metal eyes must never see anything unpleasant.
      That’s what it is. Photos of a blind girl. She’s not even pretty.
     
      I’m lying in the bottom of the phonebooth, crying covered over with these pictures.
      I never want to see me again.
      Can’t live in this body now.
      I ruined my face.
      Slice along the scalp-line and peel face down and off. Nail it to the back of the world, where it won’t be found.
      Oh I wanted to be a thing, and I am a thing. I’m a paper doll, paper will rot. Rot will crumble. Crumb blow away.
      I did it wrong. It’s too late. A blind girl is totally invisible.
     
      I rotted-out my stomach.
      I’m sitting alone.
      In the Howdy House, the clink of bones is silverware of the ordinary. People need faith? People need...breakfast. Forks squeak potatoes off plates thousands of other eaters have scratched at. Absolutely new time that hasn’t existed yet is chewed slowly into gray. Sugar and ketchup. Tin of old milk. Bodies use this food as suicide. Even so, even so they’re sitting in groups looking exactly like themselves. They’re not posing and they don’t need me.
      A booth here is vast puffy orange. The shovel-blade table stretches miles. A girl is small, small. Posing Alone! Posing Misunderstood!
      Last night I rubbed the pictures harsh against my head and face erased them with my skull. I scattered the erased pictures into the street rainstorm. I hurled wet negatives like confetti so they fell back dead. Yes I can destroy anything that belongs to me. I can do that. I have flesh of my own to burn. But I can’t make the fire under that hamburger grill bloom up. I can’t make the clock slow, even a little bit. I can’t flicker the lights in here, or blink the window sun. That restaurant fly won’t stop midair to hover and gaze at my eyes. It has its own eyes.
      I forget how to sit in a coffeeshop booth. I’m broken. Beauty would be accessible. The viewers would be able to destroy it freely, because they would own it. Not just rip up its picture.
      Morning-crew people I don’t know. This busboy treats me like a customer. The waitress assumes I want to eat this food. You would have to make friends with everybody, one by one. You’d have to work in every diner on the planet.
      I don’t know what they’re thinking.
      Victor comes in. He sits a few booths away. He looks at me, and then he doesn’t.
      Victor is thinking: that face I used to kiss is the same type face I hate in magazines. Those faces that look at me from dry paper and say ADORE YOU AND YOU ALONE, YOUR SOUL HAS FOUND ME ACROSS THE ADVERTISING LIE, THANK YOU FOR EXISTING, KISS. Those faces I stare at but then they never move never change, they say that one thing forever. So I have to stare at the body, try to dry-rape her attention back, her face never cooperating, all beauty but no truth passion love no she doesn’t change, speaks her soul unceasingly it’s a horrible lie!
      Victor thinks: face, bullshit! You don’t look at me the way you look!
      The whole world is pointed right at me. Frieda we are all staring right at you, so what. We’d rather watch TV than look at your skinny ass. No more lies, liar.
      The light here is horrible. The voices horrible.
      I can’t look.