A piece from Kathy Acker (obsession)

See how random this is.....


My Father


Kathy says, For finally my father was coming back. As soon as the night turned black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.



Once he had settled down inside, with his pint and slippers, the cat nodding drowsily against his shoulder, he told me that he hadn't brought back what he had promised me, my own whip. Instead he had come back with a non-white brat, outcast, orphan.



This devil's child who was nameless was a pale, skinny male. His hairs were blacker than a witch's vagina. When I smelled him, there was a reek of sheepdog who had never been taught anything.



I spent the night, sleepless, weeping into my pillow, and so did he.



I wasn't a good child. Or, the same thing, they (the males in my family) told me that I wasn't a good child. I didn't know how to react to this identity, this reification, other than by throwing my badness, which my shyness always wants to keep hidden, into their faces.



But openly I loved the night. Whenever it was black, outside, I talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew they had languages and I began to learn their languages.



Then father tried to make the gipsy brat into something less than outcast by giving him the name of a child who had already died. Day after day I watched the brat. Unlike me he wasn't bad because he was being told that he was bad; nameless, from as deep as his self or sea went, all he wanted to do was to spit at the world. The human world that seemed nonhuman. I admired his ability; it didn't matter to him, as nothing mattered to him, that I did.



Even though he was only six years old, he would have stolen everything from this father's house, but there was nowhere to go with it.



Though I never spoke to him openly, I would have done the same thing.



My father loved his false son. Hindley, my father's real son, hated the new Heathcliff.



My father knew that I saw that all that I couldn't and wanted to do, Heathcliff did. "Why can't you be a good child, Kathy?"



"Why can't you be a good father, father?"