Memoirs of a beatnik by Di Prima Diane

Author:Di Prima, Diane
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: California College of Arts and Crafts
Publisher: San Francisco : Last Gasp of San Francisco
Published: 1988-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Country Spring

Fuck The Pill: A Digression

On his first trip to town, Billy had embarrassedly purchased some Trojans, and he used them on our first night in our cottage-and, at my insistence, never used them again. I understood and appreciated the thought behind them, but they were a drag. Up to that time, I had never used any contraceptives at all. In fact, for the first few years of my running around town I never used anything to avoid pregnancy, and never once got pregnant. Some kind of youthful charisma kept the thing going.*

The one time I thought I was knocked up, two weeks late with my period, I took a long walk in the broiling sun (it was a July) with a red-haired maniac junkie named Ambrose, down along West Street, past the trucks and the cobblestones. Came to a ferry landing, and embarked on a ferry for Jersey City, where we were followed and hooted at by a band of youngsters, bought bologna sandwiches at a local delicatessen, and found our way into the town cemetery, where we sat down on tombstones to eat and recite Keats to each other. A huge white dog came out of nowhere and laid his head on my lap like a unicorn in an old tapestry while I sat on the tombstone, and immediately the bleeding started. This is a method of abortion that I highly recommend, though I have never heard of anyone else who tried it, either successfully or unsuccessfully. Only thing was, when it was time to go back to Manhattan, we could find no ferry and were told by the bus driver who took us to the Hudson tube that the ferry hadn't run in several years. . . .

Later, after I moved uptown, I got a diaphragm at the Sanger Clinic, with much trepidation and lying about being married, and I would scramble out of bed in that freezing cold-water flat, and go into the room called the Woodshed, where I would stand, trembling with cold, as I slipped the small rubber disk into place. And by the time I came back, shivering and with cold feet, to the bed,

*N.B. 1988-Please, folks, this is not, repeat is not an encouragement to avoid condoms now. Flirting with pregnancy is one thing: having a kid can be a great celebration of life; flirting with AIDS is something else: is simply courting a quick and ugly death.

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