1.
Who are you?
A person who loves you.
Anything else?
An incomplete female. An utter bore, an inoffensive blob trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes.
You read my manifesto.
I did. And loved it.
How is the world?
You wouldn’t want to know.
So same as always.
A cesspit of shame and nihilism.
Why have you called me here?
To tell you I love you.
Okay. You just did. Twice.
Lamp.
Shade.
Hat.
Cap.
Black.
White.
Man.
Woman.
2.
In a memory gray and pleasant to touch, like crepe de chine, I quail behind my mother in a temple to an artist begrudgingly named native son of a city more like your home state of Jersey than the New York he created, he of the silver wig, the innovator of irony who made himself orisha to the queens who sat out Stonewall, perched on the crumbling cross of a T cell, whiter than a blinded eye, uncultured culture who with every generation declare their own death then rise from the ashes a pigeon wearing dime store glitter on her feathers. This man you believed stole your art, they taught me in school was famous for painting soup cans and that never made sense, so on this day I learn he was a gay pornographer I know now why people care. The museum is doldrummed in gray light to protect the Apollos of the past who twist like ampersands behind panes of Popemobile glass, my return to a world that not long ago ruptured me with Broadway peepshows on our way to see Cats. On my shirt is a cartoon tiger, a Flintstones bandaid covers a cut on my knee, and the legs of my blue sweatpants start to itch as I ascend each cavernous floor. Here I push silver square-shaped balloons. I grow bored five minutes into a film of two men kissing. Art means absence, art means blistered toes, but art gentles my mother and so art we shall exalt. It must have been my idea to buy the screenplay displayed in the gift shop among soup can magnets and photo books of mythical prices. I must have salivated a little at Lili Taylor in triplicate, revolver at her hip. I dwell in a Narnia of Gen X angst and bohemian nostalgia impressive to the mother who would take me to see Welcome to the Dollhouse, the mother for whom I would smear myself in shame. Strange to discover in such a place a paean to the woman who doomed Warhol to corseted hell, though his acolytes might say he’d have liked the irony, though I doubt it. He would have enjoyed the sign atop the nearby factory of a bottle splooging red neon on a Heinz logo, though I think you would hate it because I cannot associate you with something so high above the streets. This is my failing, not yours.
O, Valerie! Un-fabulous assassin who with three bullets did slay the psychedelic 60s. Death playwright with evil eyes. We both had parents who made our growing bodies empty playgrounds, who touched us violently in lust and rage. You teach me it’s possible to live in a country and hate it. You teach me sex can be transactional. You show me the spectrum of beauty, you butch Marilyn Monroe, sweetheart of Greenwich Village; in the movie scores of men pay for the pleasure of shattering against you. Your loathing for the testicular italicizes the junkyard in my guts during the Pledge of Allegiance. When someone at school asks who my heroes are, I name a particularly savage pirate I’ve read of and you. Bad girl extraordinaire, self-proclaimed satirist, vagina mistress, you have stolen my heart (stomach, lung, liver, spleen, esophagus).
One time I am almost fired for assigning my twelfth grade class SCUM Manifesto. At a conference (because writers no longer attempt murder—we attend conferences) I am informing a pair of College Park students they walk the same halls as the Valerie Solanas, alumna emeritus who shot Andy Warhol, and their rabbit eyes name me a creepy fetishist. But I will never be ashamed of you. You appear above my shoulder every time I paint my nails. I, a man, a machine, zestfully wade through miles of vomit for women who wear flat caps and wish to break me. And sometimes women who look like men treat me gently as boys who tie one another’s shoes before a game of pickup. Warhol thought you another satyr in his menagerie. But in the moment when you became his world, and his life telescoped, I believe he saw beauty in the grays of the tortured steel.
3.
History has proven you the sane one, Valerie.
Your sistren would never imagine shooting a man for stealing their creation
because their tears are bullets made ready-to-wear
to oppress, the only freedom they know.
Your accusations against Warhol pale compared to conspiracies they spew
in service to the great white dick.
They punch down until their knuckles drag
and they break the earth to dwell in the sewer.
They would never imagine
your validation.
In the 80s you chose death before disintegration
to become the greatest of your generation.
In Bellevue for fifteen minutes
then you published SCUM to Pyrrhic silence.
Your metronome emotions fell to hateful voices
who turned the blurring numbers to termites.
Your vindication
came in the wheeze of a seagull, exhausted,
when I walked among the undulant tenderloins of humans
and looked for your bloated corpse in the blackened windows.
Your death came as slowly as his, and more lonely,
and out of respect I will never coddle my love
who pulled the trigger and missed.
You would be disgusted, Valerie, at white women today.