Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Going Clear (2013)

  He even recommends a protein formula for feeding non-breast fed babies —a mixture of boiled barley and corn syrup—stating that he ‘picked it up in Roman days.’ ” Although Hubbard has “an insensate hostility” to psychiatrists and people in the field of mental health, the report noted, he is himself “mentally abnormal,” evincing a “persecution complex” and “an imposing aggregation of symptoms which, in psychiatric circles, are strongly indicative of a condition of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur—symptoms common to dictators.” The report led to a ban of Scientology in two Australian states, 3 and prompted similar inquiries in New Zealand, Britain, and South Africa. Hubbard believed that the US Food and Drug Administration, along with the FBI and CIA, were feeding slanderous information about the church to various governments. In the midst of all this upheaval, in February 1966 Hubbard finally declared another “first Clear.” This time it was John McMaster, a dapper, blond South African, in his mid-thirties, who was the director of the Hubbard Guidance Center at the church’s Saint Hill headquarters. Charming, ascetic, and well-spoken, McMaster had dropped out of medical school to become an auditor. He immediately proved to be a far more urbane representative of Scientology than Hubbard. His wry manner made him a welcome guest on talk shows and on the lecture circuit, where he portrayed Scientology as a cool and nonthreatening route to self-realization. Suddenly the idea of going Clear began to catch on. McMaster adopted a clerical outfit that befitted his designation as the church’s unofficial ambassador to the United Nations. At one point, Hubbard designated him Scientology’s first “pope.” It was a matter of puzzlement to Hubbard’s closest associates, given Hubbard’s disparagement of homosexuals in his books, that he would enlist a person to serve as the church’s representative who was obviously gay. “He was very pronounced in his affect,” one of Hubbard’s medical officers remembered. But Hubbard’s relationship to homosexuality was apparently more complicated in life than in theory. CONVINCED THAT the British, American, and Soviet governments were interested in gaining control of Scientology’s secrets in order to use them for evil intentions, Hubbard began looking for a safe harbor—ideally, a country that he could rule over. England had taken steps to “curb the growth” of Scientology, and Hubbard took the hint. He also suffered from the damp weather. “I had been ill with pneumonia for the third time in England and on the suggestion of my doctor was seeking a warmer climate for a short while in order to recover,” he said, in an unprompted explanation to the CIA.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Until he calms down,” Shawn answered. Five miles later, they let him pass. The trip lasted about a week, then we told Tony to find us a load to Idaho. “Well, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said when we pulled into the junkyard, “back three work.” —THE WORM CREEK OPERA HOUSE announced a new play: Carousel . Shawn drove me to the audition, then surprised me by auditioning himself. Charles was also there, talking to a girl named Sadie, who was seventeen. She nodded at what Charles was saying, but her eyes were fixed on Shawn. At the first rehearsal she came and sat next to him, laying her hand on his arm, laughing and tossing her hair. She was very pretty, with soft, full lips and large dark eyes, but when I asked Shawn if he liked her, he said he didn’t. “She’s got fish eyes,” he said. “Fish eyes?” “Yup, fish eyes. They’re dead stupid, fish. They’re beautiful, but their heads’re as empty as a tire.” Sadie started dropping by the junkyard around quitting time, usually with a milkshake for Shawn, or cookies or cake. Shawn hardly even spoke to her, just grabbed whatever she’d brought him and kept walking toward the corral. She would follow and try to talk to him while he fussed over his horses, until one evening she asked if he would teach her to ride. I tried to explain that our horses weren’t broke all the way, but she was determined, so Shawn put her on Apollo and the three of us headed up the mountain. Shawn ignored her and Apollo. He offered none of the help he’d given me, teaching me how to stand in the stirrups while going down steep ravines or how to squeeze my thighs when the horse leapt over a branch. Sadie trembled for the entire ride, but she pretended to be enjoying herself, restoring her lipsticked smile every time he glanced in her direction. At the next rehearsal, Charles asked Sadie about a scene, and Shawn saw them talking. Sadie came over a few minutes later but Shawn wouldn’t speak to her. He turned his back and she left crying. “What’s that about?” I said. “Nothing,” he said. By the next rehearsal, a few days later, Shawn seemed to have forgotten it. Sadie approached him warily, but he smiled at her, and a few minutes later they were talking and laughing. Shawn asked her to cross the street and buy him a Snickers at the dime store. She seemed pleased that he would ask and hurried out the door, but when she returned a few minutes later and gave him the bar, he said, “What is this shit? I asked for a Milky Way.” “You didn’t,” she said. “You said Snickers.” “I want a Milky Way.” Sadie left again and fetched the Milky Way. She handed it to him with a nervous laugh, and Shawn said, “Where’s my Snickers?

• From Educated (2018)

  What, you forgot again?” “You didn’t want it!” she said, her eyes shining like glass. “I gave it to Charles!” “Go get it.” “I’ll buy you another.” “No,” Shawn said, his eyes cold. His baby teeth, which usually gave him an impish, playful appearance, now made him seem unpredictable, volatile. “I want that one. Get it, or don’t come back.” A tear slid down Sadie’s cheek, smearing her mascara. She paused for a moment to wipe it away and pull up her smile. Then she walked over to Charles and, laughing as if it were nothing, asked if she could have the Snickers. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, then watched her walk back to Shawn. Sadie placed the Snickers in his palm like a peace offering and waited, staring at the carpet. Shawn pulled her onto his lap and ate the bar in three bites. “You have lovely eyes,” he said. “Just like a fish.” —SADIE’S PARENTS WERE DIVORCING and the town was awash in rumors about her father. When Mother heard the rumors, she said now it made sense why Shawn had taken an interest in Sadie. “He’s always protected angels with broken wings,” she said. Shawn found out Sadie’s class schedule and memorized it. He made a point of driving to the high school several times a day, particularly at those times when he knew she’d be moving between buildings. He’d pull over on the highway and watch her from a distance, too far for her to come over, but not so far that she wouldn’t see him. It was something we did together, he and I, nearly every time we went to town, and sometimes when we didn’t need to go to town at all. Until one day, when Sadie appeared on the steps of the high school with Charles. They were laughing together; Sadie hadn’t noticed Shawn’s truck. I watched his face harden, then relax. He smiled at me. “I have the perfect punishment,” he said. “I simply won’t see her. All I have to do is not see her, and she will suffer.” He was right. When he didn’t return her calls, Sadie became desperate. She told the boys at school not to walk with her, for fear Shawn would see, and when Shawn said he disliked one of her friends, she stopped seeing them. Sadie came to our house every day after school, and I watched the Snickers incident play out over and over, in different forms, with different objects. Shawn would ask for a glass of water. When Sadie brought it, he’d want ice. When she brought that he’d ask for milk, then water again, ice, no ice, then juice. This could go on for thirty minutes before, in a final test, he would ask for something we didn’t have. Then Sadie would drive to town to buy it—vanilla ice cream, fries, a burrito—only to have him demand something else the moment she got back.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But often the scores are near-middle-aged or older men. And they are mostly uneffeminate. And so you learn to identify them by their method of approaching you (a means of identification which becomes instinctively surer and easier as you hang around longer). They will make one of the standard oriented remarks; they will offer a cigarette, a cup of coffee, a drink in a bar: anything to give them time in which to decide whether to trust you during those interludes in which there is always a suggestion of violence (although, for some, I would learn later, this is one of the proclaimed appeals—that steady hint of violence); time in which to find out if you’ll fit their particular sexfantasy. I learned that there are a variety of roles to play if you’re hustling: youngman out of a job but looking; dont give a damn-youngman drifting; perrenialhustler easy to makeout; youngman lost in the big city please help me sir. There was, too, the pose learned quickly from the others along the street: the stance, the jivetalk—a mixture of jazz, joint, junk sounds—the almost-disdainful, disinterested, but, at the same time, inviting look; the casual way of dress. And I learned too that to hustle the streets you had to play it almost-illiterate. The merchant marine at the Y had been the first to tell me that With Mr. King I had merely acted instinctively. But I was to learn it graphically from a man I had met on Times Square. As he sat in his apartment studying me, I leafed through a novel by Colette. The man rose, visibly angered. “Do you read books?” he asked me sharply. “Yes,” I answered. “Then Im sorry, I dont want you anymore,” he said; “really masculine men dont read!” Hurriedly, his sexfantasy evaporated, he gave me a few bucks. Minutes later I saw him again on Times Square talking to another youngman.... And so I determined that from now on I would play it dumb. And I would discover that to many of the street people a hustler became more attractive in direct relation to his seeming insensitivity—his “toughness.” I would wear that mask. By now, of course, I have met several of the shadows along Times Square. There was Carlo, an actor, whom I met coming out of the subway head, who took me home and for a week came on strong—“helping me out”: How sad that I should hang around the streets. If I move in with him, he’ll give me Everything I Need.

• From City of Night (1963)

  They sure have got guts. They live the way they gotta live....” SKIPPER: A Very Beautiful Boy 1 ALONG THE PANEL OF AMBER MIRRORS at Harry’s bar, a panorama of searching eyes emerges out of the orangy twilight of cigarette smoke and dimlights: a stew of faces floating murkily in the smoky darkness. In the mirror I see the fat man on the stool beside me as he extends money across the bar to buy my drink. I turn away from the image of myself sitting next to him. I face him directly. Like pale dough, his pudgy face—coagulating into a tiny upturned nose—seems molded about a cigar which he munches lewdly, his puffy rounded lips caressing it intimately. He reeks of cologne and beer, cigar smoke. With one fleshy hand he slides the drink in my direction—after counting his change ostentatiously and stuffing it into his wallet. “Drink up, sonny!—drink up and I’ll buyyanother-one.” The skinny man standing beside us at the crowded bar slices the air with a cigarette holder. “Who are you playing tonight?” he asks the fatman. “Santa Claus?” Emaciatedly skinny, in his late 30s—his eyes gaunt with years of frustration—he stands there—body curved vampishly, one hand on his hips, the other balancing the black cigarette holder like a parody trumpet, lightly—lightly—between long manicured fingers. “Dont pay attention to her, sonny,” the fatman says to me. When he smiles, the flesh squeezes his tiny eyes, almost shutting them. “Shes just in from New York,” he explains, indicating the skinny man, “and I told her she’d have to see Main Street.”... And so the fatman has been playing the role of initiated Guide to the other’s First-Trip-to-Main-Street-and-Vice amazement. “Dont—call—me—‘she,’” the skinny man said, stretching his lips across his face tightly in a straight pink line.... I can tell hes Gigantically intrigued with this bar; nevertheless hes affecting indifference. Crazily, I imagine him walking along Madison Avenue in New York, mincing in a tight olive-green suit as if his legs were tied at the knees; carrying a pencil-thin umbrella as affectedly as he carries—and he carried it—the cigarette holder; entertaining, in the evenings, his equally closeted friends—with Cocktails. Late at night, he will lonesomely pull off, looking at pictures of youngmen.... Sometime tonight, I felt certain—if I stuck around (twice I had started to leave, repelled by the fatman, and twice he had showily slapped a large bill on the bar for drinks: “Drink up; buyyanother-one”)—sometime tonight, I would hear the skinny one, in excited tones, claim surprise that “supposedly straight men” take money from homosexuals in exchange for sex.... Still, I felt strangely sorry for him for the mask which defensively he has to wear. But I avoid looking at them now. I study this familiar bar: the exotic plants painted to suggest a jungle: a giant butterfly, trying futilely to Escape! —the canvas from wall to wall drooping heavily from the ceiling, shelteringly or oppressively.

• From Educated (2018)

  She was deemed unmarriageable by the respectable men in town. When she met and married my grandfather—a good-natured young man just out of the navy—she dedicated herself to constructing the perfect family, or at least the appearance of it. This would, she believed, shield her daughters from the social contempt that had so wounded her. One result of this was the white picket fence and the closet of handmade clothes. Another was that her eldest daughter married a severe young man with jet-black hair and an appetite for unconventionality. That is to say, my mother responded willfully to the respectability heaped upon her. Grandma wanted to give her daughter the gift she herself had never had, the gift of coming from a good family. But Faye didn’t want it. My mother was not a social revolutionary—even at the peak of her rebellion she preserved her Mormon faith, with its devotion to marriage and motherhood—but the social upheavals of the 1970s did seem to have at least one effect on her: she didn’t want the white picket fence and gabardine dresses. My mother told me dozens of stories of her childhood, of Grandma fretting about her oldest daughter’s social standing, about whether her piqué dress was the proper cut, or her velvet slacks the correct shade of blue. These stories nearly always ended with my father swooping in and trading out the velvet for blue jeans. One telling in particular has stayed with me. I am seven or eight and am in my room dressing for church. I have taken a damp rag to my face, hands and feet, scrubbing only the skin that will be visible. Mother watches me pass a cotton dress over my head, which I have chosen for its long sleeves so I won’t have to wash my arms, and a jealousy lights her eyes. “If you were Grandma’s daughter,” she says, “we’d have been up at the crack of dawn preening your hair. Then the rest of the morning would be spent agonizing over which shoes, the white or the cream, would give the right impression.” Mother’s face twists into an ugly smile. She’s grasping for humor but the memory is jaundiced. “Even after we finally chose the cream, we’d be late, because at the last minute Grandma would panic and drive to Cousin Donna’s to borrow her cream shoes, which had a lower heel.” Mother stares out the window. She has retreated into herself. “White or cream?” I say. “Aren’t they the same color?” I owned only one pair of church shoes. They were black, or at least they’d been black when they belonged to my sister.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Equity. How I was beginning to loathe this word. My banker used it over and over, until it became a tune I couldn’t get out of my head. Equity—I heard it while brushing my teeth in the morning. Equity—I heard it while punching my pillow at night. Equity—I reached the point where I refused to even say it aloud, because it wasn’t a real word, it was bureaucratic jargon, a euphemism for cold hard cash, of which I had none. Purposely. Any dollar that wasn’t nailed down I was plowing directly back into the business. Was that so rash? To have cash balances sitting around doing nothing made no sense to me. Sure, it would have been the cautious, conservative, prudent thing. But the roadside was littered with cautious, conservative, prudent entrepreneurs. I wanted to keep my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal. Somehow, in meeting after meeting, I held my tongue. Everything my banker said, I ultimately accepted. Then I’d do exactly as I pleased. I’d place another order with Onitsuka, double the size of the previous order, and show up at the bank all wide-eyed innocence, asking for a letter of credit to cover it. My banker would always be shocked. You want HOW much? And I’d always pretend to be shocked that he was shocked. I thought you’d see the wisdom… I’d wheedle, grovel, negotiate, and eventually he’d approve my loan. After I’d sold out the shoes, and repaid the borrowing in full, I’d do it all over again. Place a mega order with Onitsuka, double the size of the previous order, then go to the bank in my best suit, an angelic look on my face. My banker’s name was Harry White. Fiftyish, avuncular, with a voice like a handful of gravel in a blender, he didn’t seem to want to be a banker, and he particularly didn’t want to be my banker. He inherited me by default. My first banker had been Ken Curry, but when my father refused to be my guarantor, Curry phoned him straightaway. “Between us, Bill, if the kid’s company goes under—you’ll still back him, right?” “Hell no,” my father said. So Curry decided he wanted no part of this father-son internecine war, and turned me over to White. White was a vice president at First National, but this title was misleading. He didn’t have much power. The bosses were always looking over his shoulder, second-guessing him, and the bossiest of bosses was a man named Bob Wallace. It was Wallace who made life difficult for White, and thereby for me. It was Wallace who fetishized equity and pooh-poohed growth.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I WAS DEVELOPING an unhealthy contempt for Adidas. Or maybe it was healthy. That one German company had dominated the shoe market for a couple of decades, and they possessed all the arrogance of unchallenged dominance. Of course it’s possible that they weren’t arrogant at all, that to motivate myself I needed to see them as a monster. In any event, I despised them. I was tired of looking up every day and seeing them far, far ahead. I couldn’t bear the thought that it was my fate to do so forever. The situation put me in mind of Jim Grelle. In high school, Grelle—pronounced Grella, or sometimes Gorilla—had been the fastest runner in Oregon, and I had been the second-fastest, which meant four years of staring at Grelle’s back. Then Grelle and I both went to the University of Oregon, where his tyranny over me continued. By the time I graduated I hoped never again to see Grelle’s back. Years later, when Grelle won the 1,500 in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium, I was wearing an army uniform, sitting on a couch in the day room at Fort Lewis. I pumped my fist at the screen, proud of my fellow Oregonian, but I also died a little at the memory of the many times he’d bested me. Now I began to see Adidas as a second Grelle. Chasing them, being legally checked by them, irritated me to no end. It also drove me. Hard. Once again, in my quixotic effort to overtake a superior opponent, I had Bowerman as my coach. Once again he was doing everything he could to put me in position to win. I often drew on the memory of his old prerace pep talks, especially when we were up against our blood rivals Oregon State. I would replay Bowerman’s epic speeches, hear him telling us that Oregon State wasn’t just any opponent. Beating USC and Cal was important, he said, but beating Oregon State was (pause) different. Nearly sixty years later it gives me chills to recall his words, his tone. No one could get your blood going like Bowerman, though he never raised his voice. He knew how to speak in subliminal italics, to slyly insert exclamation marks, like hot keys against the flesh.

• From City of Night (1963)

  It was not a wellkept place, although it appeared superficially clean. Even the lights were grayish. It looked improvised, as if someone, deciding to open a bath, had merely adapted whatever was readily, cheaply, and most concealedly available. As I sit there with Buzz, several men walk from one door into another, glancing at us: the customers—older men, starved-eyed youngmen—in towels, the attendants in sweatpants. I notice how different each of the attendants Ive seen (and they all spoke familiarly to Buzz) is from the other—markedly dissimilar as if carefully selected as to type. Im struck by the atmosphere of overwhelming debauchery here—beyond the feeling of the streets and the bars: a fantastic apparent anonymity as the various attendants and clients move about, somehow like shadows, lifeless manikin people.... It was as if what revealed itself on the streets and some bars as at least wild, alive determination had reduced itself here to its rockbasis, a cold, unquestioned, unquestioning Availability. The squat man appeared. “We can talk better back here,” he said, leading us into a small room lined with shelves on which are stacks of clean towels. “Im sorry I kept you waiting. One of my helpers—I told you—” he said to Buzz “—he left abruptly—just didnt show up.” His voice was incongruous with the rest of him. He spoke clearly, precisely. He has put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses and now resembles someone trying to look like an aloof businessman. He stares penetratingly at me. Already I dislike him. “Do you have a record—other than just being rousted?” he asked me. “Why?” I asked him. “Because I cant hire anyone with a record,” he said impatiently. “Hire?” I asked. The squat man turns to Buzz exasperatedly. “Didnt you tell him?” “Just that I wanted him to meet you,” Buzz says. “Ive got a vacancy here,” the squat man goes on officially. “That kid you sent me—the skinny one,” he said to Buzz, “hes the one that left.” Purposely Im looking blankly at him. He seems uneasy at my attitude. Buzz notices it. “Hes all right,” he tells the squat man, “Ive known him a long time.” He puts his hand intimately on my shoulder to emphasize it. “Umm,” the squat man said. “All youve got to do here,” he said to me, “is hand out towels to these guys—keep the place clean. I dont pay you much. But I leave it up to you how much you make—on tips.” Im still playing it square, not saying anything. “You sure this is the guy you told me about on the telephone?” the squat man asked Buzz again impatiently.

• From Educated (2018)

  Then, just as Dad reaches the end of his lecture and takes a breath to begin again, Tyler slides all three of the flawless tacos into Mother’s juicer, the one she uses to make tinctures, and turns it on. A loud roar howls through the kitchen, imposing a kind of silence. The roar ceases; Dad resumes. Tyler pours the orange liquid into a glass and begins to drink, carefully, delicately, because his front teeth are still loose, still trying to jump out of his mouth. Many memories might be summoned to symbolize this period of our lives, but this is the one that has stayed with me: of Dad’s voice rising up from the floor while Tyler drinks his tacos. As spring turned to summer, Dad’s resolve turned to denial—he acted as if the argument were over and he had won. He stopped talking about Tyler’s leaving and refused to hire a hand to replace him. One warm afternoon, Tyler took me to visit Grandma- and Grandpa-over-in-town, who lived in the same house where they’d raised Mother, a house that could not have been more different from ours. The decor was not expensive but it was well cared for—creamy white carpet on the floors, soft floral paper on the walls, thick, pleated curtains in the windows. They seldom replaced anything. The carpet, the wallpaper, the kitchen table and countertops—everything was the same as it was in the slides I’d seen of my mother’s childhood. Dad didn’t like us spending time there. Before he retired Grandpa had been a mailman, and Dad said no one worth our respect would have worked for the Government. Grandma was even worse, Dad said. She was frivolous. I didn’t know what that word meant, but he said it so often that I’d come to associate it with her—with her creamy carpet and soft petal wallpaper. Tyler loved it there. He loved the calm, the order, the soft way my grandparents spoke to each other. There was an aura in that house that made me feel instinctively, without ever being told, that I was not to shout, not to hit anyone or tear through the kitchen at full speed. I did have to be told, and told repeatedly, to leave my muddy shoes by the door. “Off to college!” Grandma said once we were settled onto the floral-print sofa. She turned to me. “You must be so proud of your brother!” Her eyes squinted to accommodate her smile. I could see every one of her teeth. Leave it to Grandma to think getting yourself brainwashed is something to celebrate, I thought. “I need the bathroom,” I said. Alone in the hall I walked slowly, pausing with each step to let my toes sink into the carpet. I smiled, remembering that Dad had said Grandma could keep her carpet so white only because Grandpa had never done any real work. “My hands might be dirty,” Dad had said, winking at me and displaying his blackened fingernails.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now I’ll talk.” He turned toward me, and I will be startled by the new tone of his voice, his look. He will no longer be the man who only minutes earlier in the pictures assumed the groveling positions. No. Watch him now as he becomes a politician expounding a noble movement; a general indoctrinating his troops. Standing up—again reciting as if from memory, his voice welling with authority—Neil began: “Yes I do consider myself something of a Saint. The leader of a movement. Ive made Enormous strides here in Oakland and in San Francisco. Why, I practically organized the Stirrup Club—and that coffee shop nearby where all the cyclists go. And Im advancing rapidly in Los Angeles. Just look at all the leather bars there!... Yes, a magnificent movement! Previous such movements have failed. Mine wont—because I know The Secret. Youll watch this movement grow—the only truly militant current the world has ever known—and it will carry everything before it.” He swept his hand across the air, frightening the cat who at that moment had been approaching him again. “Hitler failed,” he said, pronouncing the inevitable name. Chin thrust forward, bowlegs spread, planted firmly like the hands on his flaring hips, he went on: “Yes, Hitler failed. But We will succeed. And women? Women will be out! They represent weakness!—but still they want to dominate their Masters—The Male!” He closes his eyes as if to contain the sudden hatred. “Women are vampires! Vicious, draining blood-suckers!” Carl shakes his head: “Listen... listen.” Neil: “Women will have but one purpose: to give birth to more of Us. That Is All! They say the great civilizations collapsed when We threatened to take over. Theyve missed the point. They collapsed because We didnt go to the inevitable limit: which is complete—...” Carl finishes for him again, as if hes heard it so often he can tell it himself; he barks mockingly: “Complete acceptance—right, honeypie? And not only acceptance!—but a rejection of the other!” “Exactly!” Neil boomed. “And Im not, of course, talking about the ordinary world of simpering faggots and lisping queens that exists now: Theyre weak! Sentimental! They disgust me!... Im talking about Power!... About a movement that has had a glorious history. Why, the Marquis de Sade (the Great! French! Nobleman!)—he and Dr Masoch used to have some exquisite experiments with each other.” His eyes glimmer relishingly. Carl comes in killingly: “Neil, Neil, Neil—youve been wrong all these years: The Marquis de Sade and Masoch didnt even live at the same time. Youve thrown history together for your own purposes—something like the way youve done with the furniture in this house!... Masoch wasnt even a masochist, sugarheart.” He spills some wine on his chin, pushes it with a finger into his mouth in a babyish gesture.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Her legs, supported precariously on the wobbly high-heeled witchshoes when she stands, reveal themselves strong and firm, molded solidly, massively, as if by years of physical labor or exercise which necessitates sustained straining. Yet this body and this voice (the husky voice too: as she turns, camping, to speak to me, the Cassandra owleyes becoming momentarily demure, the look of a man patently unsuccessfully mimicking a flirt woman), which should belong to that idealization of a man, are vitiated by the lavender drag-clothes. The gestures that were meant to match that man’s body have wilted.... Occasionally, as if by an impulse not quite drowned, not quite smothered by the perfumed femininity, she straightened up very much like a man. Then, as if realizing what shes done, her body relaxes, melts, curves effeminately, as if to compensate guiltily for the sudden flash of masculinity. An incredible gigantic white owl, I thought—as I leaned against the bar near her to allow the mashing tides of people to pass in their fervid display of restlessness (as I lean against the bar, too, in order to avoid facing Sylvia, whom I can see sitting at the other end, closely surveying the constantly changing panorama of her bar). And through pill-clouded thoughts, I imagine this queen next to me as though she had descended from the sky through the ceiling, perching owl-like on that stool—defiantly, to bring her unheard prophecy to doomed ears. Through the open door, near which she sat, facing it, the man-and-woman crowds, howling outside in the compulsive happiness which may be Terror, are visible like writhing worms gnawing at each other. And the blond-owl queen in lace drag turns toward the door, slowly as if to perform a ritual: With the cigarette holder clenched between her second and fourth fingers—the third finger, erect, supporting the holder—she aimed an unequivocal fuck-you symbol at the world Outside—and she rasps loudly: “Hey, world!” Then the curious curse of contempt was followed by unintelligible grumbling. And now loudly: “Why doesnt somebody close the fuckin doors? You wanna contaminate the Pure air in Here?” as, at each tossed-out word, she “purifies” the air with puffs of gray smoke, to create a smokescreen that will shelter her within the wombgrayness of this bar. She scowled meanly at the door. Open, it threatens her world. “Chi-Chi! Chi-Chi honey!” Miss Ange (Scarlett O’Hara) gushed at her, over somebody’s shoulder, unable to advance any closer through the deadlocking crowd, “you look simply Fabulous, honey! No, no, you dont look Fabulous—you look Real! ... And who made your gorgeous gown?—Im green with envy,” she says, unsuccessfully hiding her astonishment at the clumsy dress draping the huge body. “I made it myself,” the blond-owl queen, drag-named Chi-Chi, snorted. “When did you get back into town?” Miss Ange asked, wresting her arm free from between two people pulling her along. “I thought youd decided Not To Come Back. How was Boston, baby?” “Lousy,” Chi-Chi answered. “I kept getting busted.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She has vowed herself to seven women, and sees them all on different days; one of them is her sister-in-law! She has put together an album - my dear, I nearly died at the sight of it! - full of bits and pieces of stuff that she has cut off them or pulled out of them: eyelashes, and toe-nail clippings - old sanitary wrappings, from what I could see of it; and she has hair -’ ‘ Hair, Diana,’ broke in Dickie meaningfully. ‘- hair, which she has had made up into rings and aigrettes. Lord Myers saw a brooch, and asked her where she bought it, and Susan told him it was from the tail of a fox, and said she would have one made for him, for his wife! Can you imagine? Now Lady Myers is to be found at all the fashionable parties with a sprig of Susan Dacre’s sister-in-law’s quim-hair at her bosom!’ Diana smiled. ‘And Susan’s husband knows it all, and does not mind it?’ ‘Mind it? It is he who pays her jewellers’ bills! You may hear him boasting - I have heard him myself - of how he plans to rename the estate New Lesbos.’ ‘New Lesbos!’ Diana said mildly. Then she yawned. ‘With that tired old lesbian Susan Dacre in it, it might just as well be the original ...’ She turned to me, and her voice dropped a tone. ‘Light me a cigarette, would you, child?’ I took two fags from the tortoise-shell case in my breast pocket, lit them both at my own lip, then passed one over. The ladies watched me - indeed, even while they laughed and chattered, they studied all my movements, all my parts. When I leaned to knock the ash from my cigarette, they blinked. When I ran a hand over the stubble at my hairline, they coloured. When I parted my trouser-clad legs and showed the bulge there, Maria and Evelyn, as one, gave a shift in their chairs; and Dickie reached for her brandy glass and disposed of its contents with one savage swig. After a moment, Maria came close again. She said, ‘Now, Miss Nancy, we are still waiting for your history. We want to know all about you, and so far you have done nothing but tease.’ I said, ‘There’s nothing to know. You must ask Diana.’ ‘Diana speaks for the sake of cleverness, not truth. Tell me now’ - she had grown confiding - ‘where were you born? Was it some hard place? Was it some rookery, where you must sleep ten to a bed with your sisters?’ ‘A rookery?’ I thought very suddenly, and more vividly than I had in months, of our old front parlour at home - of the cloth with the fringe that dangled, fluttering, above the hearth. I said, ‘I was born in Kent, in Whitstable.’ Maria only stared. I said again, ‘Whitstable - where the oysters come from.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said to Florence, ‘I thought you said it was to be all toms here? There are blokes over there.’ ‘Blokes? Are you sure?’ She turned to where I pointed, and gazed with me at the billiard players. They were rather rowdy, and half of them were clad in trousers and waistcoats, and sported prison crops. But as Florence studied them, she laughed. ‘Blokes? she said again. ‘Those are not blokes! Nancy, how could you think it?’ I blinked, and looked again. I began to see... They were not men, but girls; they were girls - and they were rather like myself... I swallowed. I said, ‘Do they live as men, those girls?’ Florence shrugged, not noticing the thickness in my voice. ‘Some do, I believe. Most dress as they please, and live as others care to find them.’ She caught my gaze. ‘I had rather thought, you know, that you must’ve done the same sort of thing, yourself...’ ‘Would you think me very foolish,’ I answered, ‘if I said that I had thought I was the only one... ?’ Her gaze grew gentle, then. ‘How queer you are!’ she said mildly. ‘You have never tipped the velvet -’ ‘I didn’t say that I had never done it, you know; only that I never called it that.’ ‘Well. You use all sorts of peculiar phrases, then. You seem never to have seen a tom in a pair of trousers. Really, Nance, sometimes - sometimes I think you must’ve been born quite grown - like Venus in the sea-shell, in the painting ...’ She put a finger to the side of her glass, to catch a trickle of sugary rum; then put the finger to her lip. I felt my throat grow even thicker, and my heart give a strange kind of lurch. Then I sniffed, and gazed again at the trousered toms beside the billiard-table. ‘To think,’ I said after a second, ‘that I might have worn my moleskins, after all ...’ Florence laughed. We sat sipping at our rums a little longer; more women arrived, and the room became hotter and noisier and thick with smoke. I went to the bar to have our glasses re-filled, and when I walked with them back to our stall I found Annie there, with Ruth and Nora and another girl, a fair-haired, pretty girl, who was introduced to me as Miss Raymond. ‘Miss Raymond works in a print-shop,’ said Annie, and I had to pretend surprise to hear it. When, after half-an-hour or so, she went off to find the lavatory, Annie made us rearrange our places so that she might sit next to her. ‘Quick, quick!’ she cried. ‘She’ll be back in a moment! Nancy, over there!’ I found myself placed between Florence and the wall; and for lovely long moments at a time I let the other women talk, and savoured the press of her damson thigh against my own more sober, more slender one.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Carl echoes, amused, reaching for the decanter. He turned to me: “Have you found out why he tries to tank you up on tea?” “And food! ” Neil interrupted. “And I let him stay here. Then he stole my guns. But it wasnt a common, ordinary, everyday robbery, as you seem to think, Carl: He loved those guns.” The constant seesawing rationalization.... “Everyone in the world has the same loves you have, huh, lovebushel?” Carl asked. “Well, you do!—and Dont You Forget It!” Neil hurled at him. Carl closed his eyes, sipped the wineglass empty, refilled it “Their souls—our souls,” he sighed. Neil: “What are you babbling about?” Carl giggled. “You. Im babbling about you. And Souls!” “Besides,” Neil said absently as if to himself, “he wasnt even any good. He just wanted to lay there— naked!” “You told me he loved costumes,” said Carl in mock surprise. “And your guns, remember?—he loved those too. You mean, Neil, he just knocked you out—just like that—you werent even going through one of your fantasies?” “Naked!” said Neil contemptuously. Carl: “Why do you hate the body so much, Neil?” The phone rang. “Hello?” Neil answered.... Nothing. “Your new disciple?” Carl asked when Neil returned. “One day hell speak,” said Neil pensively. “Maybe theres lots and lots—and lots of em, Neil—all women! ” He spat the last word at Neil. “Maybe theres a counter-conspiracy afoot! To drive you may-ad!” “Shut up, Carl,” Neil said. “You really are a Saint,” Carl said. “You may say it sarcastically—youre so drunk you dont even know what youre saying. But I do bring people out.” “Hes really right about that,” Carl says to me. “Have you taken him around yet?” he asks Neil. To me: “He will—if you stick around. (But dont, baby, dont!) Hell take you to the bars—hell dress you up—hell show you around. Hes already taken pictures of you!... And he’ll introduce you to the motorcycle leather-crowd—show you their ‘initiations.’ The first time I went, they tied one guy up to a post, took turns—... The blood was coming, but he was screaming for more!” And still addressing me, he went on: “And then one day, Neil will show you his collection in his studio in the basement” He shuddered. “Did you know, Neil, that once, when I told you there was a guy who hung out in Union Square in leather and you went and sat there three straight nights in a row waiting for him—did you know that I made it up, hoping one of the park regulars would pick you up and really—and seriously—beat the hell out of you?”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Oh, I am growing slightly tired, child.” He snuffed out the cigarette he had been smoking, looked through the box by the bed, found the lavender one. Held it up toward me. “Now comes the time for the lavender,” he said. He lit it, inhaled it deeply, deeply, this time, placed it on the ashtray; said: “Now, Angel, come here, stand near me—but first, lower the bed for Tante Goulu please. Thats it. Now come closer, you see I have great difficulty moving. There, thats nice, thats fine—stand a little this way—thats—just—fine. Youre a good boy, an angel....” When he had finished, he leaned back on the bed. “Our first interview is over.... Larry!” he called, and instantly, the malenurse appeared. “Our young friend is leaving.” Then to me: “Do you have a telephone where you can be reached?” There was one in the hallway, but I said no. “A permanent address, then?” he asked me. “Yes? Marvelous. Please leave it with me,” he said, “and let me give you my number (we must observe the rules of Society).... I will see you tomorrow, then—tomorrow at this time. Please, please come—I will look forward to it. I shall listen to my heart until you come. And you must listen to yours and not deprive Tante Goulu of your company.... Larry—you will—please give—this youngman—a check.” The malenurse had a checkbook in his hand, he glanced at his watch, began to write. I looked at the check suspiciously. The nurse flashed a look of huge contempt at me. “Dont worry,” he snapped, “it’s all right.” The man in bed turned his bulging eyes toward me and smiled, the flesh spreading as if he were getting larger by the moment, as if the balloon shape was being inflated. “Child—dont stand me up—I couldnt take it. Tomorrow—tomorrow—And remember—” He waved his fat hand in an airy benediction, his face rolling to one side like a stone, the tape-measure dropping toward the floor. He reached for it quickly, wound it securely about his hand.... “And remember,” he finished, “remember: God Is Love....” CITY OF NIGHT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, WHICH IS SHAPED SOMEWHAT like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way.... This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night—usually starless here—comes down. And although youll soon discover youre still separated from the Sky, trapped down here now by the blanket of smog and haze locking you from Heaven, still theres the sun, even in winter, enough—importantly—to tan you healthy gold... and palmtrees drooping shrugging what-the-hell... green-grass... cool, cool blessed evenings even when the afternoons are fierce. And flowers... Roses, roses! Orange and yellow poppies like just-lit matches sputtering in the breeze. Birds of paradise with long pointed tongues; blue and purple lupines; Joshua trees with incredible bunches of flowers held high like torches—along long, long rows of phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair....

• From City of Night (1963)

  Look at those boots—the belt—...” He shook his head, smiling wryly. “Has he shown you his collection in the basement?” he asks me. “Carl, Im going to have to ask you to leave,” Neil said angrily. But Carl went on: “Do you know how he makes his contacts?—and, again, I dont know how he met you—” More wine. The masculinity has relaxed into a girlish wistfulness of the face, the body. “Well, sometimes, he advertises sales of leather goods, in the newspapers. Then he makes the people who turn up. Or he invites people over for... tea!” He chortles. “Neil is so buried in his fantasy that he cant acknowledge that several of these people come to him to get something else from him—at first: food or whatever—to stay if they dont have a place.... Why did you come?” he asked me. “What youre saying isnt true,” Neil said severely. “I get calls from Los Angeles—as far as Seattle—farther!—people wanting to meet me—just to talk to me, see my Collection!” “Collect?” Carl asked. Neil: “I said Collection. My Collection.” Carl: “I mean the calls from Seattle—are they collect?” “Prepaid!” Neil said annoyedly. “Although,” he added, making Carl smile, “if I help people out, what difference does that make? After all, a convert—...” “Is a convert,” Carl finished for him. “Well, you dont have to talk as if youre not!” Carl asked me: “Has he told you he considers himself a Saint?” Neil: “I lead people in the direction they want to go. I fulfill—...” Carl raised his glass in a toast. “To Saint Neil of the Leather Jacket!” He said to me: “I was brought over by a... ‘friend,’ and Neil—how do you put it so cleverly, dearheart?—oh, yes! He ‘opened the door—a quarter of the way only’—the first time. And all that attention he heaps on you! Whew! And then—then he pushed the door open!” He made a harsh gesture of shoving an invisible door. He laughed, straightening up decorously on the chair, realizing he was getting high. “And it was quite a world, Saint Tex—oops!—I mean: Saint Neil of the—of the—...What? Leather Jacket. Thats it: Saint Neil of the Leather Jacket!” “You were anxious to come in, whether you knew it then or not,” Neil hurled at him. “Was I?” Carl said, passing his hand over his eyes for clarity. “It was such a long time ago.... Remember, Neil, when you advertised one of your phony sales—and the man called, and he came over with his mother and his wife? He’d probably been warned about you. Did you dress all three up?” “You know I cant stand women,” Neil said icily. “Thats ruh-hight!” Carl turned to me: “Has Neil recited his poem—scuse me: I mean, speech—about the place of women in the world?” “Nevermind,” said Neil. “Youve been talking enough.

• From Educated (2018)

  As a child I scarcely knew my aunts, uncles or cousins on my mother’s side. We rarely visited them—I didn’t even know where most of them lived—and it was even rarer for them to visit the mountain. The exception was my aunt Angie, my mother’s youngest sister, who lived in town and insisted on seeing my mother. What I know about the engagement has come to me in bits and pieces, mostly from the stories Mother told. I know she had the ring before Dad served a mission—which was expected of all faithful Mormon men—and spent two years proselytizing in Florida. Lynn took advantage of this absence to introduce his sister to every marriageable man he could find this side of the Rockies, but none could make her forget the stern farm boy who ruled over his own mountain. Gene returned from Florida and they were married. LaRue sewed the wedding dress. —I’VE ONLY SEEN A single photograph from the wedding. It’s of my parents posing in front of a gossamer curtain of pale ivory. Mother is wearing a traditional dress of beaded silk and venetian lace, with a neckline that sits above her collarbone. An embroidered veil covers her head. My father wears a cream suit with wide black lapels. They are both intoxicated with happiness, Mother with a relaxed smile, Dad with a grin so large it pokes out from under the corners of his mustache. It is difficult for me to believe that the untroubled young man in that photograph is my father. Fearful and anxious, he comes into focus for me as a weary middle-aged man stockpiling food and ammunition. I don’t know when the man in that photograph became the man I know as my father. Perhaps there was no single moment. Dad married when he was twenty-one, had his first son, my brother Tony, at twenty-two. When he was twenty-four, Dad asked Mother if they could hire an herbalist to midwife my brother Shawn. She agreed. Was that the first hint, or was it just Gene being Gene, eccentric and unconventional, trying to shock his disapproving in-laws? After all, when Tyler was born twenty months later, the birth took place in a hospital. When Dad was twenty-seven, Luke was born, at home, delivered by a midwife. Dad decided not to file for a birth certificate, a decision he repeated with Audrey, Richard and me. A few years later, around the time he turned thirty, Dad pulled my brothers out of school. I don’t remember it, because it was before I was born, but I wonder if perhaps that was a turning point. In the four years that followed, Dad got rid of the telephone and chose not to renew his license to drive. He stopped registering and insuring the family car. Then he began to hoard food. This last part sounds like my father, but it is not the father my older brothers remember.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Skipper stands menacingly over the fatman. “You even smell fat!” he says. They stare at each other like two soldiers in opposing armies who realize that neither will be the victor—that each has been mortally wounded. Skipper repeats: “You even smell fat!” The fatman—the bull rallying once more after having been stabbed—yells at me: “Well—you comin with us or not?” “Fuck yourself,” I said. He roars over to the skinny man, lifts him from the booth, dangling him like a puppet. The skinny man, lashing out with his nails, burying them into the fatman as if to puncture the inflated body, wrests himself free of the bear clutch. “You do!” the skinny man shouted—and he is crying now. “You really do! You really smell fat!” He begins to laugh, repeating over and over: “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat... FAT!...” until the word was drowned in the hysterical laughter, as the fatman—dodging Skipper’s drunkenly aimed fist—thrusts his arms almost pitifully into the encircling crowd and rams his way into the escape of the sheltering night. As he stormed out, I heard a familiar voice saying, “Let me through, let me through,” and in the fatman’s wake—pushing her way insistently toward the booth and Skipper—Trudi emerged out of the curious crowd. Small, frail, completely made up—understanding instinctively what had gone on—she gathered the spilled photographs from the floor—neatly—with the clippings, and she put them carefully into the envelope. Her head barely reached Skipper’s shoulders, and she looked at him with the compassion that only one outcast can feel for another. Now she put her arms about his waist, whispering softly to him: “Cummon, baby—screw the beads—lets go home.” She leads him through the crowd, unsteadily but firmly—Skipper willingly surrendering now completely to the drunkenness. Outside, the air is cool. Night embraces Main Street blackly.... I stand watching the people as they leave the bar in pairs or in desperate aloneness. A few feet away, I see Skipper bent over the curb, vomiting. Now a queen passes by, stands staring at Skipper.... And I hear Trudi—holding Skipper lovingly as he vomits rackingly into the street—challenge the queen’s suddenly bewildered stare: “Whats the matter, queenie?... Aint you never seen a man puke?” 2 But I came back. He indicated not the slightest embarrassment over what had occurred the first time. In fact, he seemed to have been expecting me. “Im glad you came over. I want to take some photographs of you,” he said. Today hes dressed in a vaguely Western costume. “Oh, dont worry—I’ll just dress you up for the pictures,” he promised. “Nothing else.” But he eyed me slyly. He knows now that I am, at least, intrigued by his masquerade.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I know that, sober, Skipper would have left long ago—as I would have left—but in the willing surrender to drunkenness, he is answering the fatman’s questions as if testifying in his own defense. Sitting next to Skipper, the skinny man has completely abandoned his previous role of novice. He has given in, under the impact of the liquor and the fatman’s brutal attack, to the life the fatman has badgered him into. Watching him—his skinny form propped there resignedly against the brownish leather of the booth—I feel even more sorry for him now—now that the pose which up to tonight had made his existence more easily possible has collapsed under the ramming words of the fatman. The fatman, aware of his triumph there, has pushed the skinny man into the background. Now he is questioning Skipper with the certainty of a prosecutor interrogating a witness who has already confessed. “So then what happened?” the fatman repeats: He sits there, a giant caricature of Buddha. He has been sipping one drink since we sat here; and he holds that drink cupped in his fat-hand as if it were his sobriety, which for the purposes of tonight he was guarding. Skipper mutters: “Yeah, well, see—it was just after I got outta the marines—and I met this guy in L.A. And I—” “Louder,” the fatman says. “I cant hear you.” Skipper raised his voice. Hes creating the familiar circles on the table with the watery glass. “I knew this guy in L.A.—see—that I stayed with.... See, when I got outta the service, I made this Main Street scene. I met—lots of guys—you know—go with them—hang around here—Main Street—all the time.... Thats when I met this guy—right here, too, right here at Harry’s was where I met him.” “Oh?” the fatman says. He never removes the cigar from his mouth, except when it becomes a stub, and then he seems for a moment to be deliberating whether to swallow it—his lips tossing it about his mouth uncertainly—and then he Spits it out, replaces it. Occasionally he winks at me: For his immediate purposes—tonight—he is trying to separate me from the questions hes hurling at Skipper. But I know his contempt could easily—would easily—turn on me.... “And so this man—you stayed with him?" the fatman says. “Yeah,” Skipper said, downing the drink in his glass. “Wannanother,” he says. “Nother drink.” The fatman hands money to the skinny man. “Get some more drinks, Mary,” he says, and the skinny man—obediently now, unprotestingly—goes automatically to the bar, returns shakily balancing the drinks. The fatman slides his own drink toward Skipper. “Heres two,” he said. “Mustnt run out” “Mustnt run out,” Skipper echoed, shaking his head, whether for some kind of clarity or whether because, for him, the words have a more immediate meaning. “Mustnt—run—out” “And then?” the fatman persists impatiently. He seems to be delving into Skipper’s life for some mysterious vindication of his own. “Well—see—like I say—I was just outta the marines.