Portrait of a Young Girls as the Artist

When I was fifteen years old, I ran off to New York on impulse.  There I met people who took me in and so saved my life. I graduated from high-school six months later. By then I saw the world as a sexual partner. My revolutionary zeal turned libidinal because that was America's threshing ground. The fever was in getting high and having oral sex.  I planned to make up my life like a work of art, out of sheer imagination and appetite, be like a circus contortionist, exist as a movement. 
I enrolled in NYU to get a long-term visa, supported by an obscure scholarship fund from my high-school English honors class. Since my escape from home, I had called my parents once a month to reassure them I was alive and in school and out of trouble. They had hired a private detective to find me, but he had never even left Greece.  He would have cost them a fortune if I hadn't called.  I answered their basic questions, out of duty.  I didn't want the guilt if something bad happened to them.  I didn't miss them, and I didn't ever give them a phone number or mailing address where they could reach me. They never complained.  I could hear the defeat in their artificially chirpy voices, as they spoke simultaneously on the phone, Dad voluble and full of endless advice, Mom bursting in with meek questions about my health and eager gossip about people I'd long forgotten.  I was unmoved.  I wanted to live unrestricted, untainted, untaught and unattached, an orphan in the wild.Youth is indiscriminate that way, like a natural disaster. 
That summer, after graduating from high school, I flew to Daimon's parents' house in the Ivory Coast where I met a pagan black priest.  He didn't speak a word of any language I knew and lacked the civilized anxiety of Western men.  I met him walking in a village across the lake from Daimon's house, and he stood out because he had gray-silver eyes, suggestive of movie special-effects, and an apocalyptic life-altering gaze.  He immediately stared deep into me, I sensed imparting prophetic omens.  Sex was a form of worship for him, he began at my toes and culminated at my hair, discovering many dormant body parts on the way, so by the time we fucked I had transcended myself and all my definitions.  If I could have lived on in his mud village, occupying a dewy bamboo hut beneath the long trees, with the smell of burning firewood and dung wafting through the quiet blue dusk and only fireflies lighting up the serpentine roads, my later tragedies would have been avoided. But our cultural divide was immense, I missed my access to words, so in the end the fevers and worms and intestinal bacteria torturing my insides drove me away.
My next memorable lover that summer was a Saudi I met when I was hosted in Capri. He had a long doelike nape?an executioner's wet dream?langorous eyes, inch long lashes, lazy hips that floated in slow motion, and the most graceful dick I had ever seen.  I called him Parthenia, for his hairless Ionic delicacy.  His leathery body, the slicked back hair, the saliva coating his thick lower lip all reminded me of home.  He wanted to set me up in an apartment in Cairo with guards, as his mistress.  He planned to succeed his grandfather as the autocratic ruler of his sect and had to be strict.  He too was a reverent supplicant in bed.
At the time I looked vulnerable, but I was struggling to be "free."  I wore the same white T-shirt and jeans till they were torn enough to be replaced by newer replicas.  I feared emotions as much as I feared luggage, bank accounts, TVs, rings, clocks, attachments.  I kept moving, staying with people I met at the beach or the last place I had visited, luckily everyone was willing to put me up.  I ended in Marseilles with Michel who made up his mind to marry me.  After our travels, he took me home and painfully managed to persuade his rich snobbish parents to accept the mismatch, but I met some burly Hungarian sculptor and hooked up with him.  Michel spied and caught us celebrating the sculptor's birthday in a hot tub.  He made an operatic scene, when he asked what it was he couldn't give me, I shouted something tacky like "Myself" and left for NY.  He later sent me a gold letter in a gold envelop from Tokyo with our love story engraved on it, a sensitive narrative in the third person.  But most narrative is effete fluff.  I had to pawn it for cash, it was September 1980, I was in the East Village by then, deep in the labyrinth.
Back at NYU, I moved from dorm room to dorm room, and even slept in the park. There I met a drunk who reeked of booze who introduced me to two guys who had founded the movement to legalize marijuana, they had a warehouse near Bleecker St. where they let me live. It was a dim drafty mini hangar with old broken machines stacked against the walls in rusting piles, so the only empty space was a circle in the center with a single soiled urinal and a naked electric bulb hanging over it that was always lit. The drunk, who looked like the cross-legged picture of James Joyce, lived there, chainsmoking joints and discussing Brancusi with himself.  He told me he'd been hired to fix the machines or send them out for scrap six years ago.  A musty warm fridge was his closet-cupboard. He was a sculptor. We smoked together. One night a bat came zooming in from somewhere and I screamed in terror, but generally I felt heroic living within the narrow illuminated circle of that toilet bowl.
I was experimenting with expanding freedom, wanted to be an urban ascetic, and as open as anyone could be to the world.  At the time, many students did it for money.  On the pier the blow-job went for 10 bucks. One day I begged for dimes outside the NYU library and women in heavy furs told me to "Go home, girl."  Another time I bellydanced at a Greek restaurant and was mauled by obese men. These experiments lasted only long enough so I could get a story out of them which I later told at the Loeb student center for free drinks.
Next I moved in with a Southern writer whose mind I thought monumental.  Sex was chillying, seeing his two-toned ashen penis gave me spasms, but I kept trying, I didn't like to admit that appearances affected me, and it became easier, detached.  When he suggested I fuck his son, who was my age, and let him film it, I ran off.  He later became a famous man.
I moved in with my shy psychology professor next, he had published a book on sex as symbolic suicide, he was the first person I heard call orgasms "little deaths."  He liked Hemingway.  He poured cold pink wine on my body and lay back on his bed, speaking of tasting me.  He told me, "You're unique because your mind is so close to itself, I love to watch your thoughts undress." That made me realize that all my inner talking to myself, every monologue, was a talk with my death.  I liked the empty space that hung forgotten between his lips.  He said that by writing people could live out their fantasies. I said, How sad. He said even the creation of the world was a need for expression, God's text.  If a society trusts its artists, he said, it will destroy its progress: they must be outsiders. How sad, I said again. Then he put pearls in my pussy and pulled them out with his teeth.  It was excruciating. I left him because I liked to trust my immortality, and I didn't like to wait that long to come.
That period came abruptly to an end when I was raped at eight o'clock one evening by a group of high-school boys outside their uptown Catholic boys' school.  I had been visiting Eve who still lived with her Mom, and was attacked on my way to the subway.  No one came out of the fancy brownstones with the lit windows when I screamed.  I remember the boys' drunk frightened faces, the musty scratchiness of their sweaty woolen sweaters, the smell of the racing testosterone, the rancid fear that drove them.  It was a rite, their initiation.  I was utterly humbled.  It wasn't the ugly hands, crotches and body odors, but finding myself unable to react, to accept or refuse, to speak up, talk back, have any voice.  I was silenced.  I felt an extreme despair, a putrid hatred, but little anger. I was too powerless for anger.  I knew girls at school who had been raped, had heard all the stories, but I hadn't realized that what was at stake was not the contents of my vagina but my most basic assumptions about life amidst my species. When a car shone its headlights our way, they ran off in the shadows and I got up off the road dripping someone's cum and harriedly crawled back to Eve's door less than a block away.  I pressed that buzzer with more terror than I have ever known, without looking back to see if they were catching up wth me.  Inside, I  sat shivering in shock for a while. Eve did too.  Death is a physical knowledge, like sex.  I felt shamed.  I didn't want to wash myself, to see my body naked ever again. Then Eve called the detectives who made it much worse. They asked me where the boys penetrated me, what I did, what I wore, how it felt.  They exuded perversion.  I gave them precise descriptions—eye color and shape, anatomy, haircut, gait, the works.  They advised me that pressing charges would be a waste of time. They explained the boys had been young, had drunk a little too much, I looked a bit strange, they probably already regretted it.  Besides, only one boy had had time to molest me and even he had not ejaculated in "the vagina."  Eve's Mom said this was a safe neighborhood and she didn't want trouble with the community.  The one black detective who offered to help me identify the perpetrators was suddenly transferred.  Behind blinds at their private high-school, I was shown again and again irrelevant boys and yearbook photos, until in the end I had to give up on justice and look for other ways to rebuild my balance.
By then my quest for self-denial and material emancipation had evaporated in the aftermath of the rape and my crusade was reversed: I had to teach myself to receive joy and love again, to trust men again, to learn to bathe my body again now that it had been made despicable.  So I sublet a dealer's studio and decided to make myself a home.  I put up posters of Greece, soothing in lucid white and blue, and found rich fabrics hung like stage curtains in layers from the walls, I scattered around my pipes, bongs and rocks, and gave a big house-warming party.  It lasted four endless days, everyone was tripping, people cut their pubes to mail it to other people, they cut up the plants and ate them with mustard, they mixed the cake with mayo and smashed uppers, they kept adding stuff to the punch, I could not imagine what, some fucked in the bathtub in chains, someone shat on the rug, someone kept bleeding all over the place, and by the fifth day at dawn the studio looked like a scary Jackson Pollock installation and I just left it as it was and went looking for the seven straight nice guys I'd met at the Ludlow Str. art studio, feeling forever sick of all that unpleasant excessive freedom.
The guys had a very narrow six floor very run-down brownstone on Avenue A to themselves, and I moved in with them.  They were all asexual and said sex was just a social construct.  They had found it caused more angst than joy, it drove wedges into the strongest bonds, and distracted the mind from its path.  So they rechanneled their desires into painting. They all had beautiful bodies, I made them dance for me naked, dressed only in my scarves or masks, I sat back on pillows and did hash-oil or mushrooms and watched them perform, I liked the colors and muscles and curves and our guffawing. From then on we were always together, we shared that laughter that comes from the bottom of the stomach when life gets startling.  We went out all night and at dawn we'd sit on the steps of some bar flushed by all we had drunk and the bartenders would tell us stories, or we'd go over the outlandish things people had done that night, analyzing human nature, feeling enchanted. Bars were smoky microcosms of distilled unpredictabilities. Or we'd stage an impromptu play on the pavement outside the closing bar?I was usually Socrates or Sappho, and Vincent was Van Gogh, and Oleg was either Voltaire or Rousseau, Robin played Batman or James Bond, Nathan Marie Antoinette or Catherine the Great, Damian was Stalin or Kruschev or Breznev or some union leader, Adam always played a famous painter like Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Manet, any one of them, and Gabe played his own mean Dad, the brain surgeon.  We improvised meandering contemporary reenactments of the Symposium, complex in form but terribly short in action.
In school I was learning about logic and paradox, and Zeno.The professor of my high-level poli-sci course "War and Peace" had been U.S. ambassador to China, and his theory was that international peace would be achieved through the proliferation of multinational corporations. The kids ate it up. I knew he was recruiting the androids of the future.  Many bathroom stall signs said "Bruce is God."  Some days I liked to paint with my wrists tied or handcuffed.  Our abrasive art professor gave an assignment to draw a plausible monster, Oleg posed and I made an immense winged asshole and took it to class to exorcise that prof who  always called himself an asshole. He seemed happy and gave me Godivas.  I liked his wide graying chest, sticky and fatherly.  Another day he gave me lilies, and I jokingly ate them.  He insisted on driving me to the Emergency Room because they were poisonous and on the ride there we started making out, he called me Ophelia when he ejaculated, it was my first sexual contact since the attack.  At the Loeb pub they always played the Pretenders' "I Am Special." My other course was "Media in America" in the big auditorium, where we could smoke pot at the back row.  I had an ulcer by then and was taking up to four hits of acid a day.
I dropped my intensive Spanish course when I started spitting blood. The prof was a lesbian from Bogota who had a crush on me. Gay people were drawn to me, some kids called me faghag.  I wore blue velvet opera jackets, Victorian slips, floor-length red wigs, painted eyes on my forehead, but no one thought I was strange.  Life was strange, and I was doing my best to fit in.  I taught my seven boyfriends to Greekdance, and we'd break into a spirited "hassapiko" on cue anywhere, arms linked, feet in tandem, happy to be in a circle. At home we broke plates and dreamed of starting a commune of  artists, a new movement in art, an antireligious religion.  We called each other prophet, God, animal, Cybele, Astarte. Then they switched to heroine. I had to look the opposite way when they shot up my arm because I hate needles.  We always used a "shooting" bed that had been Oleg's cot up in the roof.  It wasn't the prevalent motto "Never say no to free drugs" that made me join in.  I didn't expect to find what was beyond or to find order or freedom.  But I didn't think anything made a difference.  I didn't believe in causes effects or having reasons.  Kids on the street used to extend back their arms at me and shout "Hey baby, don't look!"  I liked that sense of community.  I used to ask NYU boys "Do you know how to fuck?" but none of them simply answered "Yes," they fumbled and asked "Why?" "What do you mean?" so I remained celibate. Once Nathan dressed me up and took me to Westworld passing me for a drag-queen, I got hit on, I loved piling layers of masquerade and deceit. Reagan was shot and someone passed around free kegs of beer, we had a big feting party, then woke up with a mean hang-over and heard he was alive again.  I don't remember if this was before or during the deaths. 
That November I met Ameer in the library. He always sat there, staring at me, sad and silent, recording my every move. I tried to talk to him, but he didn't answer, only his eyes kept begging for something. So one day I followed him down to the subway and on the train to Bay Ridge, of course he knew I was behind him, and at his apartment building he silently held the door open, I went in.  We never spoke. He made a spicy dinner of syrupy carrots, raisins and nuts, we ate to mournful Persian music, then moved to his dark green bedroom.  We made love very slowly, I was exhilarated, he knew how to quietly adore both of us.  By the end we were growling, sighing, laughing hard. This went on every night, his eyes were deeply loving, he gave me melancholic poems and weightless orgasms.  He liked to bite my hair. I had assumed he was mute. But after the deaths when I badly needed someone by me I looked for him in the school and I found out then that he was from Iran, was majoring in religion, had friends, could speak, and he had just gone back home to join the tunteh; so he was probably dead at the hands of Khomeini's mobs. I learned then that his name was Ameer. It was thanks to him I regained my body and tentatively started having sex again, to the disappointment of my friends.  But sometimes lust is like ritual murder. 
I met Eduardo from Puerto Rico who once again wanted to marry me, it was his attempt to reestablish normalcy in my life, put our love in terms that would save us from the expanding chaos. He was very kind and loved me calmly and frenchbraided my hair, but it soon became repetitious. His family used the word "party" as a verb. His mother wore big long skirts with flounces and had huge breasts where I liked to hide when she hugged me.  It hurt me to hurt her when I left him, but my friends had soon reclaimed me.  One night a bulky police woman followed me down to the Fulton St. station, so I turned, knelt down and gently kissed her hand like a knight, but she ran away.  It had been a prank but still I felt rejected. An older guy some said was a judge whom we called The Hairdresser went around stealing hair, he would sneak up unnoticed and snip it off for his collection. He even asked me my name so he could label my sample, and then he told me sex repulsed him except for fondling unattached hair.  He took a big chunk off my head so my sides got lopsided which somehow suited me.  Another guy used to creep up and oil my hair and comb it straight for as long as we would let him, he complained of trichophilia. A  middle-aged gaunt woman kept stealing my jackets, she said she needed them so she could smell me wherever she was, because she had been a prehistoric man who loved me in another life but our affair had not been completed and she was left wanting.  She told me she'd give me a Balenciaga gown if I let her sit on my face once.  But I never could let anyone sit on my mouth, it scared me.
Eve drank turpentine to prove she was crazy and get on disability.  I met her brother who only fucked Perdue chickens, he pierced them with a metal rope, pushed a button on a rig he had invented and they moved on a wire to where he stood with his manhood exposed and ready, he could fuck them one after the other.  He said he was an avisodomist, given to the ancient practice of having sex with birds, when he was about to orgasm he liked to break the neck of the bird he was penetrating which made the bird's sphincter constrict and spasm, he said Parisian brothels provided turkeys for clients, but in NYC it was hard to find live birds except in the chicken coops upstate. He had painted his walls black and sawed off the lower half of all the doors and kept them locked.  We had to crawl through his doors when we visited but he always had cream cheese and lox and H&H bagels and Jack Daniels, and it was worth it.  He was a successful filmmaker. He shot a film called Forest of Tongues, and I played the main gory character though I didn't say a word because my character never talked and everyone else in the movie talked nonstop about her, kind of like As I Lay Dying. Maybe I had one little voice-over, but if so someone else said it I guess because of my accent. I had to exaggerate my expressions for his film, and I kept on doing it after the shooting was over, living my life as if it were a silent film. He called me Medea which made me proud.  For a week, everyone I knew was into Altered States.  It was a time of all encompassing confusion like swimming through rapids; even the oleaginous plebeians were running amok, commuting from the suburbs every night to Studio 54 to jump over the velvet rope and snort coke before the famous mirrors.  I assiduously avoided oblong words like beauty, truth, purpose. But I didn't forget them. I forgot a lot of things, but never ideas.
  By then my seven housemates were into witchcraft and alchemy, practicing voodoo and brewing things they read about in second-hand books.  They wanted me to cast eyebite spells, read their palms and coffee grounds, exorcise the evil eye, do everything the servants had taught me in Alexandria.  But our future looked dark, I needed more light, I asked them to wait until the spring.  But each of us had a journey to make, and the journey is the thing, the movement within the movement.  It confused them that I had got sexual again. Even our Doberman Pyrrhos suddenly started growling at any men who touched me even fleetingly, he was always between my legs, I kept tripping, I had to lock him in the bathroom to have sex and listen to him wail as if I was butchering him.  His eyes were very loving and I didn't know what to do. Whenever I took a bath, he'd jump right in uninvited.  Later, the guys gave him as a guard dog to the Bleecker St. warehouse. But we still went out every night till dawn, gay in our witty camaraderie, matching Socrates against Rousseau and Mondrian against Batman, a bit more violently perhaps, yet not at all suspecting how soon we would be separating. 
Then one night Oleg decided to have sex with me even though I didn't want to. He became violent, which brought out a strong compassion in me, I wanted to feed his hunger, it was stupid to have to defend myself from someone I loved, but I didn't desire him.  He was obsessed with it, it came to symbolize his self-worth, he even told me 25% of all men use force to get the sex they most want.  We were all becoming vicious, we hardly ate except for sweets, the boys said Oleg was just possessed by jealous spirits and they urged me to perform retaliative magic on him to lift his affliction. One night he held me down to rape me, I said "It's sick but let's do it if you think it's necessary."  There was no word for date-rape then, and I either had to call the police, of whom I knew what to expect, or adjust my mind to live through this homespun violation.  I had had an IUD inserted at a free clinic in France the previous summer, so my only risk was mental: if I could control my mind, if I could perceive it playfully, or at least charitably, we'd be OK and I wouldn't lose the messy sanctity of our big warm house.  He had no erection, he tried to penetrate but he just couldn't stay hard, he talked dirty about wanting to murder me after he had his way with me, he said rape was more arousing to him because society forbids it, but nothing could give him a lasting boner, it was sad, we both cried, both felt inefficient, humiliated, then he cursed me for having papers and pens under my body, writing away as he tried to fuck me, then he slept fitfully like a weary animal.  I ran out into the street, it was dawn, I saw a weakly little tree growing out of a hole in the pavement, it looked alone and real, I went closer filled with a happy innocence and slowly made love to it rubbed my skin on it and came and felt cleansed, and transported.
By then, life had tipped overboard, like a desert-stranded ship. The house resembled an abandoned bullet-riddled junkyard, smelly strangers from the street dropped in to spend the night, it was winter, the rooms were full of bodies and insects, I'd wake up to the sight of some malodorous blond boy sleeping on top of the stairs with his head in our knocked-over trashcan.  Nathan pulled a Richard Gere with some freshman's gerbil in our bathroom, he put it in a condom inside a Criscoed toilet paper roll up his butt, but when he yanked out the roll the bagged rodent struggled too hard and he had to be taken to ER to get rectal stitches.  The intern told me remains of fish or rodents were found in the lower intestines of many cadavers during autopsies, even women who inserted them into their pussies for pleasure. Pleasure had come to mean anything that would distinguish us from the rest of the homogenous species.  Every afternoon I woke up with a need to vomit, there was only one bathroom and it was always in use.  But I was needed and loved.  Rootlessness, rape, each little crisis gave my life a bigger perspective, something to conquer or overcome, like Communism once had, and my only worry was to escape a petty life. I never once agonized about being fat or skinny or short or what I would wear to go out.  Chaos absolved me from meaninglessness. Things are difficult by our own effort to change them to suit us, I thought. If there is no solution, then there is no problem.  I didn't want to brutalize things by trying to bend them to please me, or to predefine what gave me pleasure. We might have spiraled deeper into the abyss or pulled out of it with the coming of spring but I didn't stay to find out because of course I met Cora.