In the Shadow of the American Dream by David Wojnarowicz Page A

how she was gonna do the pill or some other method but I insisted she not, that I would do rubbers. What had upset me was that she immediately assumed the responsibility of taking precautions. I think it is the responsibility of the male since it comes down to the fact that all of the options available to women seem to endanger their own health. It’s complex, it’s just that when it comes to insertion of foreign objects or medicines I would rather undergo the slight decrease in sensitivity wearing a rubber than the woman do that to herself.
    Pat screamed out a few times and started talking to the doctor about how she was going to faint, and how very much like her adolescent periods the pain was, how she would have cramps so severe when she was younger that she would faint or get extremely nauseous. She yelled some more and I found myself tying my fingers into knots feeling what she must have been going through. I wished J.P. was there to hear. Pat went home afterwards and took a painkiller and went to sleep. J.P. and I went to the Marcel Proust Flea Market to check out clothes, etc. I found a couple of books that I’ve either wanted to read or have never seen or heard of. One was called Cut Up or Shut Up, a book by Carl Weissner and two other fellas with ticker tape by W. S. Burroughs. The other book was John Rechy’s Numbers, a book Brian had recommended.

    J.P. and Pat bought me a typewriter for my birthday! J.P. and I found it in the Proust Flea Market. It is an Underwood machine in great condition—type lined perfectly, all letters clear as new, and a handsome fuckin’ machine. Now I can write poems and start on the novel and finally write decent letters to friends. (Ah, but the fuckin’ postage!)
    So now I’m back in bourgeois St.-Germain, cruising grounds for prowlers/pickpockets/homosexuals/fire-eaters/jugglers and the famous Ratman who a year ago gave some woman a heart attack with his live rats on strings—now he’s been reduced to plastic rats by the police. Ate ravioli in my Italian restaurant with the waiter who reminds me of Jerry Leo—he looks like a French Bruce Springsteen. Real handsome in hustler tight pants.
    September 17, 1978
    Had an incredible lunch with J.P.’s mother, sweet woman white/blond haired, très French looking much like Giselle, Dolores’s friend from Paris who dug clams in the briny mint green surf of Atlantic City, New Jersey, with us in swimsuits back sometime in ’64–’65, a hot summer before I got into the Times Square scene and all that hot sooty neon and hotels.
    So she made potatoes and garlic, watercress salad, and veal and string beans and afterwards we went out in the car. She was powdered up and lipsticked and in a white suit we drove to le château du Versailles and strolled to one of the entrances of the gardens.
    We walked around the gardens and over to the fountains with les poissons rouges! Les poissons rouges! Like a Ferlinghetti poem I read years ago when in the silence of the November dusk when no one was watching a shadow turned its head.

    September 19, 1978
    Got my haircut today. (Pat and I took the metro—easy-riding rubber-wheeled trains in huge tile stations with curved walls.) I had to wear a fluffy pink robe because mostly women went to the place. Funny, my intense reaction to wearing the robe because of its pinkness, don’t know what I fear in that. The haircut was nice. Went to St.-Germain after lunch and wrote in my journal at a table at Café Flore, read sections of John Rechy’s Numbers, a good book though I feel I write much better and that there’s a lot I could do with the material had there never been books written by him, the stuff I come in contact with. He is good at times, very dry observatory eye. Wonder where he’s at now, somewhere in his forties? Wonder if he’ll commit suicide rather than face the decline of his body, that which he loved so fucking much