Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

Until we became sophisticated about it, sex was everything Freud said it was.

In Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts. What he didn’t say—and this was his trouble, his real complaint—was that underneath their skirts they also had souls. When they were undressed, I saw their souls as well as their cunts. They wore their souls like negligés that they never took off. And one man in

He frowned; he shook his head at his mother. Her will, he said, is a terrible force.

Sex was the last thing such a girl gave a man, an ultimate or ultimatum. It was as much a philosophical decision on her part as an emotional one and it had to be justified on ethical and aesthetic grounds. To sleep with a man was the end of a long chain of behavior that began with calling yourself a liberal, with appreciating modern art—sex was a m

The bed called to me from the other room. How small it was for all the distances we had traveled in it. We had been like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Leaning on the doorjamb, I gazed at the bed as you gaze in museums, from behind a tasseled cord, at the curtained four-posters of kings and queens.

It shook my faith. It was my first great disappointment as an adult, my first postwar defeat. I rallied briefly and painted the walls grass green. I tacked burlap on the windows, but I was still lonely. It was a green loneliness now.

Whoever had the apartment before me had painted the walls in wide vertical stripes in three different shades of blue. I lay on my sterilized bed and felt blue too, every shade of blue.

I would make it my own, turn it into a home, a studio, as we used to say, a magic word. I gave the super fifty dollars, bought a sterilized secondhand bed, and moved in. Now, I said to myself, I can start to live. I was always starting to live, another beginning, a final beginning.

To make it worse, I suffered from a kind of boyhood chivalry and politeness that kept me from being natural, so that I was acting all the time, and that was fatiguing.