Free Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker Page A

able to go beyond. You know that medically, I am a doctor, a body cannot live without disease.'
    Mr Linker gave an example of his own disease. 'Isn't this rug beautiful?' he said. 'I will tell you the story of this rug. It is not an agreeable story. My wife worked on this rug for five years.' Tiny birds silver and white and pale blue clustered around bunches of grapes and the pale grey moon. 'Every day she stitched.' Mr Linker had married a young upper-middle class Viennese girl and brought her to the United States. He bought a resort in the Catskills, his first resort, and she cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, vacuumed, kept the accounts, washed, nursed the hotel guests, and waited on her husband. 'Soon her eyes began to fail her. She kept on making the rug. She began to have trouble breathing. One day she could no longer stand and she could no longer do the housework. The doctor told me she was very sick and she would have to stop working on the rug because the wool was affecting her lungs. I don't understand exactly how. While she was coughing up blood, she kept on working on this rug. The very moment she died, it was in her hand.'
    Actually Mr Linker's wife had been driven crazy and then locked up for life in a New York State Sanatorium.
    After Mr Linker's wife landed in the sanatorium, he added the white slavery business to his lobotomy and summer resort operations. He didn't need the money: at age seventy-five he was a very wealthy man. He wanted to be able to indulge in his other peculiarities. He was very powerful and intelligent.
    Janey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing.
    One day she found a pencil stub and scrap paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life . . .
    A book report
    We all live in prison. Most of us don't know we live in prison.
    A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments, were assembled in front of a gaol. They were waiting for a woman named Hester Prynne to walk out of the gaol.
    All of them even the hippies hated Hester Prynne because she was a freak and because she couldn't be anything else and because she wouldn't be quiet and hide her freakiness like a bloody Kotex and because she was as wild and insane as they come.
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    Long ago, when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he was living in a society that was more socially repressive and less materialistic than ours. He wrote about a wild woman. This woman challenged the society by fucking a guy who wasn't her husband and having his kid. The society punished her by sending her to gaol, making her wear a red 'A' for adultery right on her tits, and excommunicating her.
    Nowadays most women fuck around 'cause fucking doesn't mean anything. All anybody cares about today is money. The woman who lives her life according to nonmaterialistic ideals is the wild antisocial monster; the more openly she does so, the more everyone hates her. Women today don't get put in gaol for being bloody pieces of Kotex -only streetwalkers and junkies land up in gaol, gaol-and-law now being a business like any other business - they just starve to death and everyone hates them. Physical and mental murder help each other out.
    The society in which I'm living is totally fucked-up. I don't know what to do. I'm just one person and I'm not very good at anything. I don't want to live in hell my whole life. If I knew how this society got so fucked-up, if we all knew, maybe we'd have a way of destroying hell. I think that's what Hawthorne thought. He set his story in the time of the first Puritans: the first people who came to the northern North American shore and created the society Hawthorne lived in, the society that created the one we live in today.
    Another reason Hawthorne set his story in the past (in lies) was 'cause he couldn't say directly all the wild things he wanted to say. He was living in a society to which ideas and writing still mattered. In 'The