Free Need by Nik Cohn Page A

but in the mouth of this man on this corner at this certain moment with the Clit Club and all those dead cows on meathooks behind her back it paralysed her almost. “I don’t want to hurt you. I can hurt you,” the man said, and what was the most galling thing, he didn’t even sound hostile, only airing an infomercial, as one impersonator to another.
    Praise the Lord, a gypsy cab pulled up in a cloud of dust and whisked her away before she could get herself in deeper, but changing scenes didn’t change the film. Even when she was back home at the Zoo inside her room where she paid to stay safe there was still the mirror like fucking George Washington who could not tell a fucking lie,
a man that don’t lie got nothing to say
, Waycross Martin used to say, but that was not the point, where was she? Oh, where was she?
    In front of the mirror, mother-naked except for her Sylvia wig flopping in her eyes like a dead rabbit, Cape Cadaveral with bangs at thirty-three and the fruits of too many fasts, toomany diet pills, too many IVs and stomach pumps, too many dance classes and not enough dance, a plucked chicken saying, “I don’t want to hurt you, I can hurt you,” but it sounded real weak, to be perfectly brutally frank, it sounded like nothing on earth.
    Don’t start her to talking, she might tell everything she knew. In bed, chafing and fretting under the off-white sheet, she took a look out the window across the roofs towards the Hudson River and saw a shower of sparks, but she was not in the mood; in fact she wasn’t even there but back at Shalimar where she’d hardly felt a thing, sedated from asshole to eyeball the way she was, in that clean white room and those clean white corridors, and on her balcony at night with the frogs all croaking in chorus, the cicadas likewise, a night-choir, while she memorized the poems that nice Dr. Bone had given her, Henry Vaughan and John Clare, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hopkins of course,
O let them be left, wildness and wet
, and
The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
, how did that go,
I am not hungry for berries, I am not hungry for bread
, that’s right,
But hungry hungry for a house Where at night a man in bed
, at Shalimar she had slept so good,
May never hear the plaster Stir as if in pain
, yes,
May never hear the roaches Falling like fat rain
, at Shalimar she had slept.
    When she woke it was darkness, she felt like a dead cow herself, and when she glanced through the window her voice of its own accord said
Uh-oh
, just like that,
uh-oh
. Then she was up and out across the landing, blundering in at poor Godwin’s door, forgetting in her hurry that Godwin was long gone, not even startled to find another man’s body in his place, only hoping it was breathing or at least not stiff. “Excuse, please,” Anna said. “I don’t like to intrude, honestly I don’t, but I was sleeping, well, not really sleeping, more drowsing, sort of dreaming, you know the way you do, when I chanced to look up at Kate Root’sJapanese garden, at least that’s what she calls it, a waste of space if you ask me, she’d be better off quilting or knitting some baby a nice pair of socks, anyway I looked up and of course I might be wrong, I often am, but I think the roof’s on fire.”
    The man in the dark said nothing, only wrestled down the front of his white shirt to cover his underpants with one hand while reaching for his jeans with the other. “Of course by rights I should tell Crouch, it’s his responsibility after all, but what would be the use, he wouldn’t lift a finger, couldn’t give a flying fuck, drunk again if not worse, so I took the liberty, though I hate to wake any man, still it’s better than burning alive, the name is Crow, Anna Crow, and who may I ask are you?”
    “John Joe Maguire of Scaith-na-Tairbhe.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “Three miles and a half from Croaghnaleaba, almost five from Lergynascaragh,” said John Joe. By the hall light his legs looked bony and