Free Need by Nik Cohn

tried to get up, but his legs were no use.
    Three days with no compass—the long journey from Scath to Manhattan, bus and train and plane, and Juice Shovlin in a tight white collar, no sleep, no food that would stay down, this heat, and his bed swarmed by strangers at the YMCA—the entire parcel rose up at him swirling, hit him one left hook to the solar plexus, and he fell down out of his standing.
    Miss Root’s freckles when she bent close were a shifting field of sandflies. A single strand of tobacco had lodged in the gap between her front teeth. She kept trying to suck it free but it wouldn’t budge. “Bed,” she said.
    “I have to go.”
    “You can have poor Godwin’s room.”
    “Juice Shovlin’s expecting me.”
    “I hope you don’t mind stained sheets.”
    Grains of birdseed stuck to her hair, and the beads of sweat on her upper lip were fat and full as raindrops on a wire. “Mind your step, there’s a loose runner here somewhere,” she said. Her slippers on the stairs flapped at every step, her housecoat hung shapelessly as sacking. From below she looked like an old woman toiling. But when she turned her head, and JohnJoe saw the green cat’s eyes, the strand of tobacco still stuck in the gapped front teeth, the face belonged to a schoolgirl. Then he was in a square room with no furnishings, just a mattress on a bedstead by another barred window. Miss Root switched on the light, but the bulb blew out. “Never mind,” she said. “It is an evil generation that asks for a sign.” And she shut him in the dark.

SECOND

 
    D
rowning not waving
, Stevie Smith wrote that, and wasn’t it the truth? Splash, splash, glug, glug. Only this morning Verse-o-Gram had called her about a gig down in the Washington meat market doing Sylvia Plath and
Lesbos
for a sisterhood bond-in at the Clit Club, and Anna was thrilled, she reverenced that woman, always had done since her days at Shalimar after Chase had had his accident and that nice Dr. Bone, instead of asking about her father, used to read her the Ariel poems. But what to wear? Verse-o-Gram’s wardrobe for London in the Sixties was strictly miniskirts and white Courrège boots
à la
Twiggy, which hardly seemed the thing, but then again, what was? The only snaps she’d ever seen of Sylvia were black-and-whites, bundled up against the English weather in somebody’s back garden, all nerves and wool. So miniskirt and Mod boots it was, and a mousy fringe wig that felt like Fuller brushes, never mind, the sisterhood seemed to lap it up,
Now I am silent, hate up to my neck, thick, thick
and
O vase of acid, it is love you are full of
, nobody said Boo.
    Cash on the barrelhead, quick curtsey out the door,
I say I may be back. You know what lies are for
, and afterwards she had gone walking in the meat market. It was just finishing for the day, the trucks rolling out on Little West 12th beneath the disused El, the men in their bloodstained white coats heaving the last sides of beef across the cracked sidewalks, the steelshutters crashing down like scrims on Green Turtle Products and Royale Veal, Spartan Meats and Adolph Kusy’s Pork Specials that had the best slogan,
We have the Meat and the Motion
, just the best, and the smells of sawdust, pickling brine, frozen slaughter everywhere, it made her feel sort of dreamy, coming so soon after Sylvia and
that night the moon dragged its blood bag
, it made her want her bed.
    So she was standing on the corner across from the Liberty Inn where all the transvestite hookers took their Johns, still in her miniskirt and boots trying to flag down a taxi, when up walked this gentleman of colour, two hundred pounds if he was an ounce, in midnight-blue hotpants and a matching wig, a love-charm bracelet dangling from one ankle, who spoke to her in a little-girl lisp. “You got my pitch, bitch,” he said.
    Another time and another place she might have laughed it off,
What an amusing misunderstanding! How frightfully delicious!
,