Despair

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 Educated (2018)

  Every morning my father trudged up a flight of stairs to the communal shower in nothing but a small white towel. This would have humiliated me at BYU, but at Harvard I shrugged. I had transcended embarrassment. What did it matter who saw him, or what he said to them, or how shocked they were? It was his opinion I cared about; he was the one I was losing. Then it was their last night, and still I had not been reborn. Mother and I shuffled around the shared kitchen making a beef and potato casserole, which we brought into the room on trays. My father studied his plate quietly, as if he were alone. Mother made a few observations about the food, then she laughed nervously and was silent. When we’d finished, Dad said he had a gift for me. “It’s why I came,” he said. “To offer you a priesthood blessing.” In Mormonism, the priesthood is God’s power to act on earth—to advise, to counsel, to heal the sick, and to cast out demons. It is given to men. This was the moment: if I accepted the blessing, he would cleanse me. He would lay his hands on my head and cast out the evil thing that had made me say what I had said, that had made me unwelcome in my own family. All I had to do was yield, and in five minutes it would be over. I heard myself say no. Dad gaped at me in disbelief, then he began to testify—not about God, but about Mother. The herbs, he said, were a divine calling from the Lord. Everything that happened to our family, every injury, every near death, was because we had been chosen, we were special. God had orchestrated all of it so we could denounce the Medical Establishment and testify of His power. “Remember when Luke burned his leg?” Dad said, as if I could forget. “That was the Lord’s plan. It was a curriculum. For your mother. So she would be ready for what would happen to me.” The explosion, the burn. It was the highest of spiritual honors, he said, to be made a living testament of God’s power. Dad held my hands in his mangled fingers and told me that his disfiguration had been foreordained. That it was a tender mercy, that it had brought souls to God. Mother added her testimony in low, reverent whispers. She said she could stop a stroke by adjusting a chakra; that she could halt heart attacks using only energy; that she could cure cancer if people had faith. She herself had had breast cancer, she said, and she had cured it. My head snapped up. “You have cancer?” I said. “You’re sure? You had it tested?” “I didn’t need to have it tested,” she said. “I muscle-tested it. It was cancer. I cured it.” “We could have cured Grandma, too,” Dad said. “But she turned away from Christ.

• From Educated (2018)

  —I STOPPED GOING TO my French group, then to my sketching class. Instead of reading in the library or attending lectures, I watched TV in my room, working my way through every popular series from the past two decades. When one episode ended, I would begin the next without thinking, the way one breath follows another. I watched TV eighteen or twenty hours a day. When I slept I dreamed of home, and at least once a week I awoke standing in the street in the middle of the night, wondering if it was my own cry that I’d heard just before waking. I did not study. I tried to read but the sentences meant nothing. I needed them to mean nothing. I couldn’t bear to string sentences into strands of thought, or to weave those strands into ideas. Ideas were too similar to reflection, and my reflections were always of the expression on my father’s stretched face the moment before he’d fled from me. The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy . Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital. By December I was so far behind in my work that, pausing one night to begin a new episode of Breaking Bad, I realized that I might fail my PhD. I laughed maniacally for ten minutes at this irony: that having sacrificed my family to my education, I might lose that, also. After a few more weeks of this, I stumbled from my bed one night and decided that I’d made a mistake, that when my father had offered me the blessing, I should have accepted it. But it wasn’t too late. I could repair the damage, put it right. I purchased a ticket to Idaho for Christmas. Two days before the flight, I awoke in a cold sweat. I’d dreamed I was in a hospital, lying on crisp white sheets. Dad was at the foot of the gurney, telling a policeman I had stabbed myself. Mother echoed him, her eyes panicked. I was surprised to hear Drew’s voice, shouting that I needed to be moved to another hospital. “He’ll find her here,” he kept saying. I wrote to Drew, who was living in the Middle East. I told him I was going to Buck’s Peak. When he replied his tone was urgent and sharp, as if he was trying to cut through whatever fog I was living in. My dear Tara, he wrote. If Shawn stabs you, you won’t be taken to a hospital. You’ll be put in the basement and given some lavender for the wound.

• From Educated (2018)

  It took her and Dad most of the evening to cut away the dead flesh. Luke tried not to scream, but when they pried up and stretched bits of his skin, trying to see where the dead flesh ended and the living began, he exhaled in great gusts and tears slid from his eyes. Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe. She was good with burns—they were a specialty of hers—but I could tell she was worried. She said she’d never seen one as bad as Luke’s. She didn’t know what would happen. —MOTHER AND I STAYED by Luke’s bed that first night. He barely slept, he was so delirious with fever and pain. For the fever we put ice on his face and chest; for the pain we gave him lobelia, blue vervain and skullcap. This was another of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could tell it had no effect. I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God, but if I’d had morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke. The pain robbed him of breath. He lay propped up in his bed, beads of sweat falling from his forehead onto his chest, holding his breath until he turned red, then purple, as if depriving his brain of oxygen was the only way he could make it through the next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook the pain of the burn, he would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a cry of relief for his lungs, of agony for his leg. I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept lightly, waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of weight, so I could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully conscious and the pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended him and I stood in the doorway, listening to his gasps, watching Mother watch him, her face hollow, her eyes swollen with worry and exhaustion. When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I dreamed it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose bandages, mummified. Mother knelt on the floor beside me, pressing my plastered hand the way she pressed Luke’s, dabbing my forehead, praying. Luke didn’t go to church that Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or the one after that. Dad told us to tell people Luke was sick. He said there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that the Feds would take us kids away. That they would put Luke in a hospital, where his leg would get infected and he would die.

• From Educated (2018)

  He begged me not to go, saying a hundred things I already knew and didn’t care about, and when that didn’t work, he said: You told me your story so I could stop you if you ever did something crazy. Well, Tara, this is it. This is crazy. I can still fix this, I chanted as the plane lifted off the tarmac. —IT WAS A BRIGHT WINTER morning when I arrived on Buck’s Peak. I remember the crisp smell of frozen earth as I approached the house and the feel of ice and gravel crunching beneath my boots. The sky was a shocking blue. I breathed in the welcome scent of pine. My gaze dropped below the mountain and my breath caught. When Grandma had been alive, she had, by nagging, shouting and threats, kept my father’s junkyard contained. Now refuse covered the farm and was creeping toward the mountain base. The rolling hills, once perfect lakes of snow, were dotted with mangled trucks and rusted septic tanks. Mother was ecstatic when I stepped through the door. I hadn’t told her I was coming, hoping that, if no one knew, I might avoid Shawn. She talked rapidly, nervously. “I’m going to make you biscuits and gravy!” she said, then flew to the kitchen. “I’ll help in a minute,” I said. “I just need to send an email.” The family computer was in the old part of the house, what had been the front room before the renovation. I sat down to write Drew, because I’d promised, as a kind of compromise between us, that while on the mountain I would write to him every two hours. I nudged the mouse and the screen flickered on. The browser was already open; someone had forgotten to sign out. I moved to open a different browser but stopped when I saw my name. It was in the message that was open on the screen, which Mother had sent only moments before. To Shawn’s ex-girlfriend Erin. The premise of the message was that Shawn had been reborn, spiritually cleansed. That the Atonement had healed our family, and that all had been restored. All except me. The spirit has whispered to me the truth about my daughter, Mother wrote. My poor child has given herself over to fear, and that fear has made her desperate to validate her misperceptions. I do not know if she is a danger to our family, but I have reasons to think she might be. * I had known, even before reading the message, that my mother shared my father’s dark vision, that she believed the devil had a hold of me, that I was dangerous. But there was something in seeing the words on the page, in reading them and hearing her voice in them, the voice of my mother, that turned my body cold. There was more to the email.

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

  I got up several times, went to the window, watched the ships bobbing on Kobe’s dark purple bay. Beautiful place, I thought. Too bad all beauty is beyond me. The world is without beauty when you lose, and I was about to lose, big-time. I knew that in the morning Morimoto would tell me he was sorry, nothing personal, it was just business, but they were going with the Marlboro Man. At 9:00 a.m. the phone by the bed rang. Morimoto. “Mr. Onitsuka… himself… wishes to see you,” he said. I put on my suit and took a taxi to Onitsuka headquarters. In the conference room, the familiar conference room, Morimoto pointed me to a chair in the middle of the table. The middle this time, not the head. No more kei . He sat across from me and stared at me as the room slowly filled with executives. When everyone was there, Morimoto nodded to me. “Hai,” he said. I plunged in, essentially repeating what I’d said to him the previous morning. As I built to my crescendo, as I prepared to close, all heads swiveled toward the door, and I stopped midsentence. The temperature of the room dropped ten degrees. The founder of the company, Mr. Onitsuka, had arrived. Dressed in a dark blue Italian suit, with a head of black hair as thick as shag carpet, he filled every man in the conference room with fear. He seemed oblivious, however. For all his power, for all his wealth, his movements were deferential. He came forward haltingly, with a shuffling gait, giving no sign that he was the boss of all bosses, the shogun of shoes. Slowly he made his way around the table, making brief eye contact with each executive. Eventually he came to me. We bowed to each other, shook hands. Now he took the seat at the head of the table and Morimoto tried to summarize my reason for being there. Mr. Onitsuka raised a hand, cut him off. Without preamble he launched into a long, passionate monologue. Some time ago, he said, he’d had a vision. A wondrous glimpse of the future. “Everyone in the world wear athletic shoes all the time,” he said. “I know this day come.” He paused, looking around the table at each person, to see if they also knew. His gaze rested on me. He smiled. I smiled. He blinked twice. “You remind me of myself when I am young,” he said softly. He stared into my eyes. One second. Two. Now he turned his gaze to Morimoto. “This about those thirteen western states?” he said. “Yes,” Morimoto said. “Hm,” Onitsuka said. “Hmmmm.” He narrowed his eyes, looked down. He seemed to be meditating. Again he looked up at me. “Yes,” he said, “all right. You have western states.” The Marlboro Man, he said, could continue selling his wrestling shoes nationwide, but would limit his track shoe sales to the East Coast. Mr.

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

  He explained that he didn’t care what I said, or what I thought, or whether any of this was “fair,” or “American.” (He made air quotes with his bony “fingers.”) He just wanted his money. His money? I wrapped my arms around myself. Ever since the onset of burnout, this old habit was becoming more pronounced. I often looked in 1979 as if I were trying to keep myself from flying apart, trying to keep my contents from spilling out. I wanted to make another point, to rebut something the bureau-kraken had just said, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I feared that my limbs might go flailing, that I might begin screaming. That I might beat the living tar out of his telephone. We made quite a pair, him with his frantic pacing, me with my frenzied self-hugging. It became clear that we were at an impasse. I had to do something. So I commenced kissing up. I told the bureau-kraken that I respected his position. He had a job to do. It was a very important job. It must not be easy, enforcing burdensome fees, dealing with complaints all the time. I looked around his office-cell, as if to sympathize. However, I said, if Nike was forced to pay this exorbitant sum of money, the straight truth was, it would put us out of business. “So?” he said. “So?” I said. “Yeah,” he said. “So... what? Mr. Knight, it’s my responsibility to collect import duties for the U.S. Treasury. For me, that’s as far as it goes. Whatever happens... happens.” I hugged myself so tight, I must have looked as if I was wearing an invisible straitjacket. Then I released myself, stood. Gingerly, I picked up my briefcase. I told the bureau-kraken that I wasn’t going to accept his decision, and I wasn’t going to give up. If necessary I would visit every congressman and senator and privately plead my case. I suddenly had the greatest sympathy for Werschkul. No wonder he’d come unhinged. Don’t you know that Hitler’s father was a customs inspector? “Do what you gotta do,” the bureau-kraken said. “Good day.” He turned back to his files. He checked his watch. Getting close to five. Not much time before the workday ended to ruin someone else’s life. I BEGAN, MORE or less, commuting to Washington. Every month I’d meet with politicians, lobbyists, consultants, bureaucrats, anyone who might help. I immersed myself in that strange political underworld, and read everything I could about customs. I even skimmed WASP, Volume I. Nothing was working. Late in the summer of 1979 Werschkul got me an appointment with one of Oregon’s senators, Mark O. Hatfield. Well respected, well connected, Hatfield was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. With one phone call he might be able to get the bureau-kraken’s bosses to clear up that $25 million discrepancy. So I spent days preparing, studying for the meeting, and huddled several times with Woodell and Hayes.

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

  We all gathered in the conference room at Blue Ribbon. There was Woodell, who must have caught the first flight out of Boston, and Hayes, and Strasser, and Cale flew up from Los Angeles. Someone brought doughnuts. Someone sent out for pizzas. Someone dialed Johnson and put him on the speakerphone. The mood in the room, at first, was somber, because that was my mood. But having my friends around, my team, made me feel better, and as I lightened up, they did, too. We talked long into the evening, and if we agreed on anything, we agreed there wasn’t an easy solution. There usually isn’t when the FBI has been notified. Or when you’ve been ousted by your bank for the second time in five years. As the summit drew to a close the mood shifted again. The air in the room grew stale, heavy. The pizza looked like poison. A consensus formed. The resolution of this crisis, whatever it might be, is in the hands of others. And of all those others, Nissho was our best hope. We discussed tactics for Monday morning. That’s when the men from Nissho were due to arrive. Ito and Sumeragi were going to pore through our books, and while there was no telling what they might think of our finances, one thing was pretty much preordained. They were going to see right away that we’d used a big chunk of their financing not to purchase shoes from overseas but to run a secret factory in Exeter. Best case, this would make them mad. Worst case, it would make them lose their minds. If they considered our accounting sleight of hand a full-fledged betrayal, they would abandon us, faster than the bank had, in which case we’d be out of business. Simple as that. We talked about hiding the factory from them. But everyone around the table agreed that we needed to play this one straight. As in the Onitsuka trial, full disclosure, total transparency, was the only course. It made sense, strategically and morally. Throughout this summit the phones rang constantly. Creditors from coast to coast were trying to find out what was going on, why our checks were bouncing like Super Balls. Two creditors in particular were livid. One was Bill Shesky, head of Bostonian Shoes. We owed him a cool half million dollars, and he wanted to let us know that he was boarding a plane and coming to Oregon to get it. The second was Bill Manowitz, head of Mano International, a trading company in New York. We owed him one hundred thousand dollars, and he, too, was coming to Oregon to force a showdown. And to cash out. After the summit adjourned I was the last to leave. Alone, I staggered out to my car. In my lifetime I had finished many races on sore legs, gimpy knees, zero energy, but that night I wasn’t altogether sure I had the strength to drive home.

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

  I wanted to hit him. Instead I shook his hand. He and Iwano walked out. In the suddenly Kitami-less conference room, Woodell and I stared into the grain of the conference table and let the stillness settle over us. I SENT MY budget and forecast for the coming year to First National, with my standard credit request. I wanted to send a note of apology, begging forgiveness for the Kitami debacle, but I knew White would roll with it. And besides, Wallace hadn’t been there. Days after White got my budget and forecast he told me to come on down, he was ready to talk things over. I wasn’t in the hard little chair across from his desk more than two seconds before he delivered the news. “Phil, I’m afraid First National will not be able to do business any longer with Blue Ribbon. We will issue no more letters of credit on your behalf. We will pay off your last remaining shipments as they come in with what remains in your account—but when that last bill is paid, our relationship will be terminated.” I could see by White’s waxy pallor that he was stricken. He’d had no part in this. This was coming from on high. Thus there was no point in arguing. I spread my arms. “What do I do, Harry?” “Find another bank.” “And if I can’t? I’m out of business, right?” He looked down at his papers, stacked them, fastened them with a paper clip. He told me that the question of Blue Ribbon had deeply divided the bank officers. Some were for us, some were against. Ultimately it was Wallace who’d cast the deciding vote. “I’m sick about this,” White said. “So sick that I’m taking a sick day.” I didn’t have that option. I staggered out of First National and drove straight to U.S. Bank. I pleaded with them to take me in. Sorry, they said. They had no desire to buy First National’s secondhand problems. THREE WEEKS PASSED. The company, my company, born from nothing, and now finishing 1971 with sales of $1.3 million, was on life support. I talked with Hayes. I talked with my father. I talked with every other accountant I knew, one of whom mentioned that Bank of California had a charter allowing it to do business in three western states, including Oregon. Plus, Bank of Cal had a branch in Portland. I hurried over and, indeed, they welcomed me, gave me shelter from the storm. And a small line of credit. Still, it was only a short-term solution. They were a bank, after all, and banks were, by definition, risk-averse. Regardless of my sales, Bank of California would soon view my zero cash balances with alarm. I needed to start preparing for that rainy day. My thoughts kept returning to that Japanese trading company. Nissho. Late at night I’d think, “They have $100 billion in sales… and they want desperately to help me. Why?”

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

  I handed him a Tiger flat, told him about my trip to Japan, my meeting with Onitsuka. He bent the shoe, examined the sole. Pretty cool, he said. He was intrigued, but no. “I’m getting married,” he said. “Not sure I can take on a new venture right now.” I didn’t take his rejection to heart. It was the first time I’d heard the word “no” in months. LIFE WAS GOOD. Life was grand. I even had a sort of girlfriend, though I didn’t have much time for her. I was happy, maybe as happy as I’d ever been, and happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses. Thus, I wasn’t prepared for that dreadful letter. It was from a high school wrestling coach in some benighted town back east, some little burg on Long Island called Valley Stream or Massapequa or Manhasset. I had to read it twice before I understood. The coach claimed that he was just back from Japan, where he’d met with top executives at Onitsuka, who’d anointed him their exclusive American distributor. Since he’d heard that I was selling Tigers, I was therefore poaching, and he ordered me—ordered me!—to stop. Heart pounding, I phoned my cousin, Doug Houser. He’d graduated from Stanford Law School and was now working at a respected firm in town. I asked him to look into this Mr. Manhasset, find out what he could, then back the guy off with a letter. “Saying what, exactly?” Cousin Houser asked. “That any attempt to interfere with Blue Ribbon will be met with swift legal reprisal,” I said. My “business” was two months old and I was embroiled in a legal battle? Served me right for daring to call myself happy. Next I sat down and dashed off a frantic letter to Onitsuka. Dear Sirs, I was very distressed to receive a letter this morning from a man in Manhasset, New York, who claims…? I waited for a response. And waited. I wrote again. Nani mo. Nothing. COUSIN HOUSER FOUND out that Mr. Manhasset was something of a celebrity. Before becoming a high school wrestling coach, he’d been a model—one of the original Marlboro Men. Beautiful, I thought. Just what I need. A pissing match with some mythic American cowboy. I went into a deep funk. I became such a grouch, such poor company, the girlfriend fell away. Each night I’d sit with my family at dinner, moving my mother’s pot roast and vegetables around my plate. Then I’d sit with my father in the nook, staring glumly at the TV. “Buck,” my father said, “you look like someone hit you in the back of the head with a two-by-four. Snap out of it.”

• From Educated (2018)

  The swelling in her face was nearly gone, and she almost looked like herself again, except for the rings, which had gradually faded from black to dark purple, and were now a mix of lilac and raisin. An hour later Dad was no longer grinning. Tyler had not repeated his wish to go to college, but he had not promised to stay, either. He was just sitting there, behind that vacant expression, riding it out. “A man can’t make a living out of books and scraps of paper,” Dad said. “You’re going to be the head of a family. How can you support a wife and children with books ?” Tyler tilted his head, showed he was listening, and said nothing. “A son of mine, standing in line to get brainwashed by socialists and Illuminati spies—” “The s-s-school’s run by the ch-ch-church,” Tyler interrupted. “How b-bad can it b-be?” Dad’s mouth flew open and a gust of air rushed out. “You don’t think the Illuminati have infiltrated the church?” His voice was booming; every word reverberated with a powerful energy. “You don’t think the first place they’d go is that school, where they can raise up a whole generation of socialist Mormons? I raised you better than that!” I will always remember my father in this moment, the potency of him, and the desperation. He leans forward, jaw set, eyes narrow, searching his son’s face for some sign of agreement, some crease of shared conviction. He doesn’t find it. —THE STORY OF HOW TYLER decided to leave the mountain is a strange one, full of gaps and twists. It begins with Tyler himself, with the bizarre fact of him. It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his. Tyler liked books, he liked quiet. He liked organizing and arranging and labeling. Once, Mother found a whole shelf of matchboxes in his closet, stacked by year. Tyler said they contained his pencil shavings from the past five years, which he had collected to make fire starters for our “head for the hills” bags. The rest of the house was pure confusion: piles of unwashed laundry, oily and black from the junkyard, littered the bedroom floors; in the kitchen, murky jars of tincture lined every table and cabinet, and these were only cleared away to make space for even messier projects, perhaps to skin a deer carcass or strip Cosmoline off a rifle. But in the heart of this chaos, Tyler had half a decade’s pencil shavings, cataloged by year. My brothers were like a pack of wolves. They tested each other constantly, with scuffles breaking out every time some young pup hit a growth spurt and dreamed of moving up.

• From Educated (2018)

  She convinced herself, perhaps because it was a part of herself she couldn’t surrender without some kind of struggle. That winter, she midwifed two babies that I remember. After the first she came home sickly and pale, as if bringing that life into the world had taken a measure of her own. She was shut in the basement when the second call came. She drove to the birth in dark glasses, trying to peer through the waves distorting her vision. By the time she arrived the headache was blinding, pulsing, driving out all thought. She locked herself in a back room and her assistant delivered the baby. After that, Mother was no longer the Midwife. On the next birth, she used the bulk of her fee to hire a second midwife, to supervise her. Everyone was supervising her now, it seemed. She had been an expert, an uncontested power; now she had to ask her ten-year-old daughter whether she’d eaten lunch. That winter was long and dark, and I wondered if sometimes Mother was staying in bed even when she didn’t have a migraine. At Christmas, someone gave her an expensive bottle of blended essential oils. It helped her headaches, but at fifty dollars for a third of an ounce, we couldn’t afford it. Mother decided to make her own. She began buying single, unmixed oils—eucalyptus and helichrysum, sandalwood and ravensara—and the house, which for years had smelled of earthy bark and bitter leaves, suddenly smelled of lavender and chamomile. She spent whole days blending oils, making adjustments to achieve specific fragrances and attributes. She worked with a pad and pen so she could record every step as she took it. The oils were much more expensive than the tinctures; it was devastating when she had to throw out a batch because she couldn’t remember whether she’d added the spruce. She made an oil for migraines and an oil for menstrual cramps, one for sore muscles and one for heart palpitations. In the coming years she would invent dozens more. To create her formulas, Mother took up something called “muscle testing,” which she explained to me as “asking the body what it needs and letting it answer.” Mother would say to herself, aloud, “I have a migraine. What will make it better?” Then she would pick up a bottle of oil, press it to her chest and, with her eyes closed, say, “Do I need this ?” If her body swayed forward it meant yes, the oil would help her headache. If her body swayed backward it meant no, and she would test something else. As she became more skilled, Mother went from using her whole body to only her fingers. She would cross her middle and index fingers, then flex slightly to try to uncross them, asking herself a question. If the fingers remained entwined that meant yes; if they parted it was no.

• From Educated (2018)

  I was so tempted, the pain in my jaw so savage, that I must have held it for ten seconds before passing it back. —I HAD A JOB at the campus creamery, flipping burgers and scooping ice cream. I got by between paydays by neglecting overdue bills and borrowing money from Robin, so twice a month, when a few hundred dollars went into my account, it was gone within hours. I was broke when I turned nineteen at the end of September. I had given up on fixing the tooth; I knew I would never have fourteen hundred dollars. Besides, the pain had lessened: either the nerve had died or my brain had adjusted to its shocks. Still, I had other bills, so I decided to sell the only thing I had of any value—my horse, Bud. I called Shawn and asked how much I could get. Shawn said a mixed breed wasn’t worth much, but that I could send him to auction like Grandpa’s dog-food horses. I imagined Bud in a meat grinder, then said, “Try to find a buyer first.” A few weeks later Shawn sent me a check for a few hundred dollars. When I called Shawn and asked who he’d sold Bud to, he mumbled something vague about a guy passing through from Tooele. I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars. I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of terror—of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal—not from real interest in my classes. In December, after my last paycheck of the month, I had sixty dollars in my account. Rent was $110, due January 7. I needed quick cash. I’d heard there was a clinic near the mall that paid people for plasma. A clinic sounded like a part of the Medical Establishment, but I reasoned that as long as they were taking things out, not putting anything in, I’d be okay. The nurse stabbed at my veins for twenty minutes, then said they were too small. I bought a tank of gas with my last thirty dollars and drove home for Christmas. On Christmas morning, Dad gave me a rifle—I didn’t take it out of the box, so I have no idea what kind. I asked Shawn if he wanted to buy it off me, but Dad gathered it up and said he’d keep it safe. That was it, then. There was nothing left to sell, no more childhood friends or Christmas presents. It was time to quit school and get a job. I accepted that. My brother Tony was living in Las Vegas, working as a long-haul trucker, so on Christmas Day I called him.

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

  I read it, and reread it. I couldn’t make heads or tails. As best I could determine, the federal government was saying that Nike owed customs duties dating back three years, by virtue of something called the “American Selling Price,” an old duty-assessing method. American Selling—what? I called Strasser into my office and thrust the letter at him. He read it, laughed. “This can’t be real,” he said, tugging his beard. “My reaction exactly,” I said. We passed it back and forth and agreed it had to be a mistake. Because if it was real, if we actually did owe $25 million to the government, we were out of business. Just like that. All this talk of going public had been a colossal waste of time. Everything since 1962 had been a waste of time. There is no finish line? This right here, this is the finish line. Strasser made a few phone calls and came back to me the next day. This time he wasn’t laughing. “It might be real,” he said. And its origin was sinister. Our American competitors, Converse and Keds, plus a few small factories—in other words, what was left of the American shoe industry—were all behind it. They’d lobbied Washington, in an effort to slow our momentum, and their lobbying had paid off, better than they’d ever dared hope. They’d managed to convince customs officials to effectively hobble us by enforcing this American Selling Price, an archaic law that dated back to the protectionist days, which preceded—some say prompted—the Great Depression. Essentially the American Selling Price law, or ASP, said that import duties on nylon shoes must be 20 percent of the manufacturing cost of the shoe—unless there’s a “similar shoe” manufactured by a competitor in the United States. In which case, the duty must be 20 percent of the competitor’s selling price. So all our competitors needed to do was make a few shoes in the United States, get them declared “similar,” then price them sky high—and boom. They could send our import duties sky high, too. And that’s just what they did. One dirty little trick, and they’d managed to spike our import duties by 40 percent—retroactively. Customs was saying we owed them import duties dating back years, to the tune of $25 million. Dirty trick or not, Strasser told me customs wasn’t joking around. We owed them $25 million, and they wanted it. Now. I put my head on my desk. A few years earlier, when my fight had been with Onitsuka, I told myself the problem was rooted in cultural differences. Some part of me, shaped by World War II, wasn’t all that surprised to be at odds with a former foe. Now I was in the position of the Japanese, at war with the United States of America. With my own government.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then I come down with a fever. The sickness defeats all purpose, all purchase on the hawk. I feed her on the sofa, put her back on her perch and watch her drift into the place where goshawks go when they’ve eaten. It is very far away. I wave my hand in front of her face. She appears not to see it at all. Her eyes seem as remote from thought or emotion as a metal dish or a patch of sky. What is she thinking? What is she seeing? I wonder. I shut my eyes and guess. Blood, I am sure. Smoke, branches, wet feathers. Snow. Pine needles. More blood. I shiver. And the days pass and the fever continues. The rain continues. It dampens the house. Wide parchment stains bleed across the wall in the hall and front room. The house smells of stagnant water in the coal-cellar, hawk mutes, and dust. Nothing is moving, nothing improving, nothing heading anywhere. I am packing up boxes to leave, still not knowing where I’d live when the house was gone. In a fit of bitter misery I make a fort out of an old cardboard wardrobe box in the spare room upstairs and crawl inside. It is dark. No one can see me. No one knows where I am. It is safe here. I curl up in the box to hide. Even in my state of sickness I know this is more than a little strange. I am not going mad, I tell myself. I’m ill. That is all. 17 Heat The days of rain are followed by heat and insomnia and white nights that go on for ever. Outside at three in the morning a woman is calling ‘William! William!’, over and over again in a hoarse, stagey whisper. I have no idea why she is whispering; her hammering on William’s front door is waking the street. I give up after that, go downstairs, tiptoe past the sleeping hawk, sit outside on an upturned flowerpot and smoke a cigarette. A thick black sky, clear stars, an end-of-summer sky. Mabel had flown perfectly for the last two days; she’d come fifty yards instantly to my upraised fist. Everything was accelerating now towards that crucial point. Point in the sense of time. Point in the sense of aim. Point in the sense of something so sharp it hurts. Flying the hawk free, unencumbered by the creance, nothing stopping her headlong flight out and away but the lines that run between us; palpable lines, not physical ones: lines of habit, of hunger, of partnership, of familiarity. Of something the old falconers would call love. Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines. And it’s not a thing that’s easy to do when you’ve lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust.

• From Educated (2018)

  Then I’d remind her I was only seventeen, and she’d tell me I could stay. “You have an opportunity to help your father,” she said. “He needs you. He’ll never say it but he does. It’s your choice what to do.” There was silence, then she added, “But if you don’t help, you can’t stay here. You’ll have to live somewhere else.” The next morning, at four A.M ., I drove to Stokes and worked a ten-hour shift. It was early afternoon, and raining heavily, when I came home and found my clothes on the front lawn. I carried them into the house. Mother was mixing oils in the kitchen, and she said nothing as I passed by with my dripping shirts and jeans. I sat on my bed while the water from my clothes soaked into the carpet. I’d taken a phone with me, and I stared at it, unsure what it could do. There was no one to call. There was nowhere to go and no one to call. I dialed Tyler in Indiana. “I don’t want to work in the junkyard,” I said when he answered. My voice was hoarse. “What happened?” he said. He sounded worried; he thought there’d been another accident. “Is everyone okay?” “Everyone’s fine,” I said. “But Dad says I can’t stay here unless I work in the junkyard, and I can’t do that anymore.” My voice was pitched unnaturally high, and it quivered. Tyler said, “What do you want me to do?” In retrospect I’m sure he meant this literally, that he was asking how he could help, but my ears, solitary and suspicious, heard something else: What do you expect me to do? I began to shake; I felt light-headed. Tyler had been my lifeline. For years he’d lived in my mind as a last resort, a lever I could pull when my back was against the wall. But now that I had pulled it, I understood its futility. It did nothing after all. “What happened?” Tyler said again. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” I hung up and dialed Stokes. The assistant manager answered. “You done working today?” she said brightly. I told her I quit, said I was sorry, then put down the phone. I opened my closet and there they were, where I’d left them four months before: my scrapping boots. I put them on. It felt as though I’d never taken them off. Dad was in the forklift, scooping up a stack of corrugated tin. He would need someone to place wooden blocks on the trailer so he could offload the stack. When he saw me, he lowered the tin so I could step onto it, and I rode the stack up and onto the trailer. —MY MEMORIES OF THE UNIVERSITY faded quickly.

• From City of Night (1963)

  It’s just that— God damn it! —I want to see him—if only once more—just once—to tell him—...” and her voice trailed off into a barely audible whimper: “—to tell him Im sorry.” 2 Outside in the chilly air, I felt suddenly whirlingly dizzy. Two hands of darkness threaten to enfold me. But I tell myself Im still completely sober—still not even nearly high enough. The moment of panic is followed by renewed dazzlement. I toss myself into the thickening crowds. Bodies are passed out in Jackson Square as if on a battlefield before the mop-up, empty hurricane glasses like mock tombs beside them. Occasionally one of the bodies will rouse itself to blow a horn or shout into the night, which is calm and still—a sky like dark ice—and the world so turbulent. A flurry of tourists like a band of wide-eyed children in the midst of this flowing river of drowning faces passes gleefully blowing horns, and I think: We’re trying to swim in a river made for drowning. And I feel harrowingly sober. At Les Petits, equally crushed: A queen in wilting drag, in withering eye makeup, was singing raucously: “Howre you gonna keep them down on the fawm—after theyve seen a New Wor-lee-eens queen?”... The same jangling, jangled crowds. Angel Face—wide livermouthed—is singing a blue jazzsong. With great difficulty, advancing two steps, being pushed back one—feeling the ubiquitous hands on my legs—I worked my way to the back of the bar, where a glass was suddenly thrust into my hand by someone I know from the dozens of score-faces here. Liberatingly, outside, I stood in the courtyard, and I gulped the drink in a hurried swallow. The crowd was not so thick in this courtyard. Male-and-female couples, male-and-male partners cling in loveshadows against the wall. In the center of the courtyard three queens were posing for a man in a small party of tourists. The camera bulb flashed harshly expelling the gray darkness momentarily. The queens, feeling acknowledged as Women, struck impossible languid poses. One bends down, raises her skirt to reveal her man’s knee, invitingly. Miss Ange, in Scarlett-O’Hara plantation tones, says to the man taking the pictures: “Now me! Take My picture!”... Muttering “bitch,” the other queens glared at Miss Ange as she poses in her billowing ballgown—as if she has just returned, Triumphantly, to Tara. The flashbulb clicked on the smug at-last womanface of Miss Ange. I sit exhausted on the steps leading to the balcony over the bar. I breathe in the air, deeply, scanning the crowds—which are slowly thinning in respite for the renewed burst of merriment which will precede and follow the morning parade when the fever will rage uncontrolled, twisting across the city like a tornado, when the invasion of costumed revelers will raid the streets. In the shadows of the courtyards, Chi-Chi stood against the wall, her head cocked quizzically to one side as if she cant really understand what is going on about her.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And When They Came To Tell Miss Destiny, she senses it before they say anything and says: I Want To Be Alone... and there is no one to turn to....) “You see I was an orphan,” and then remembering her father who threw her out: “I had lived with my aunt and uncle and called them my father and mother—and it was my uncle who threw me out, the same uncle who Raped me when I was eight years old and I screamed it hurt so and my aunt said forget it, it would go away (she was a degenerate).... And each time I close my eyes, I see those goddam wheels going round, round, round—and I hear that tune they were playing when I met him. (’Put your little foot’),” she hummed.... “And it won’t stop until I hear the crash! ... Oh!” (So Miss Destiny lones it to Washington D.C. where she makes it with men who think shes Real. And when they reach That Point in the cramped car she must insist on, she will say no honey not that, I have got the rag on—she will of course be welltaped. “But thats no reason why we cant have a swinging time anyway.” And if not she will say shes underage and threaten to scream rape. (And dont ask how, Or If, she always got away with it.) But a jealous bartender, who Knows, tells three sailors who want to make it with her that shes not a fish, shes a fruit, and the sailorboys wait outside for her, mean, and start to tear off her beautiful dress and say, If youre a girl wow the world is yours honey, but if youre a goddam queer start praying.... And oh Miss Destiny runs as you will begin to think she is always doing, and they grab her roughly as you will begin to think they are always doing, and she rushes into the street and into a taxi passing by luckily and the driver says have you been clipped or raped lady?—and: I will take you to the heat station. She says oh no please forget it... and goes back to Philadelphia to place a Wreath on Duke’s grave, and comes to Los Angeles with a Southern Accent....) “And I became what you see now: a wild restless woman with countless of exhusbands,” Miss Destiny said. “But do you know, baby, that I have never been Really Married? I mean in White, coming down a Winding Staircase.... And I will!

• From Educated (2018)

  I wanted to rip my jaw from my mouth, just to be rid of it. I stumbled to a mirror. The source was a tooth that had been chipped many years before, but now it had fractured again, and deeply. I visited a dentist, who said the tooth had been rotting for years. It would cost fourteen hundred dollars to repair. I couldn’t afford to pay half that and stay in school. I called home. Mother agreed to lend me the money, but Dad attached terms: I would have to work for him next summer. I didn’t even consider it. I said I was finished with the junkyard, finished for life, and hung up. I tried to ignore the ache and focus on my classes, but it felt as though I were being asked to sit through a lecture while a wolf gnawed on my jaw. I’d never taken another ibuprofen since that day with Charles, but I began to swallow them like breath mints. They helped only a little. The pain was in the nerves, and it was too severe. I hadn’t slept since the ache began, and I started skipping meals because chewing was unthinkable. That’s when Robin told the bishop. He called me to his office on a bright afternoon. He looked at me calmly from across his desk and said, “What are we going to do about your tooth?” I tried to relax my face. “You can’t go through the school year like this,” he said. “But there’s an easy solution. Very easy, in fact. How much does your father make?” “Not much,” I said. “He’s been in debt since the boys wrecked all the equipment last year.” “Excellent,” he said. “I have the paperwork here for a grant. I’m sure you’re eligible, and the best part is, you won’t have to pay it back.” I’d heard about Government grants. Dad said that to accept one was to indebt yourself to the Illuminati. “That’s how they get you,” he’d said. “They give you free money, then the next thing you know, they own you.” These words echoed in my head. I’d heard other students talk about their grants, and I’d recoiled from them. I would leave school before I would allow myself to be purchased. “I don’t believe in Government grants,” I said. “Why not?” I told him what my father said. He sighed and looked heavenward. “How much will it cost to fix the tooth?” “Fourteen hundred,” I said. “I’ll find the money.” “The church will pay,” he said quietly. “I have a discretionary fund.” “That money is sacred.” The bishop threw his hands in the air. We sat in silence, then he opened his desk drawer and withdrew a checkbook. I looked at the heading. It was for his personal account. He filled out a check, to me, for fifteen hundred dollars. “I will not allow you to leave school over this,” he said. The check was in my hand.

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

  And even if we could somehow give them a year’s worth of revenue, we couldn’t continue to pay import duties that were 40 percent higher. So there was only one thing to do, I told Strasser with a sigh. “We’ll have to fight this with everything we’ve got.” I DON ’ T KNOW why this crisis hit me harder, mentally, than all the others. I tried to tell myself, over and over, We’ve been through bad times, we’ll get through this. But this one just felt different. I tried to talk to Penny about it, but she said I didn’t actually talk, I grunted and stared off. “Here comes the wall,” she’d say, exasperated, and a little frightened. I should have told her, That’s what men do when they fight. They put up walls. They pull up the drawbridge. They fill in the moat. But from behind my rising wall I didn’t know how. I lost the ability in 1977 to speak. It was either silence or rage with me. Late at night, after talking on the phone with Strasser, or Hayes, or Woodell, or my father, I couldn’t see any way out. I could only see myself folding up this business I’d worked so hard to build. So I’d erupt—at the telephone. Instead of hanging up, I’d slam the receiver down, then slam it down again, harder and harder, until it shattered. Several times I beat the living tar out of that telephone. After I’d done this three times, maybe four, I noticed the repairman from the telephone company eyeing me. He replaced the phone, checked to make sure there was a dial tone, and as he was packing up his tools he said very softly: “This is… really… immature.” I nodded. “You’re supposed to be a grown-up,” he said. I nodded again. If a phone repairman feels the need to chastise you, I told myself, your behavior probably needs modifying. I made promises to myself that day. I vowed that from then on I’d meditate, count backward, run twelve miles a night, whatever it took to hold it together. HOLDING IT TOGETHER wasn’t the same thing as being a good father. I’d always promised myself that I’d be a better father to my sons than my father had been to me—meaning I’d give them more explicit approval, more attention. But in late 1977, when I evaluated myself honestly, when I looked at how much time I was spending away from the boys, and how distant I was even when I was home, I gave myself low marks. Going strictly by the numbers, I could only say that I was 10 percent better than my father had been with me. At least I’m a better provider, I told myself. And at least I keep telling them their bedtime stories. Boston, April 1773.

• From Educated (2018)

  It took her and Dad most of the evening to cut away the dead flesh. Luke tried not to scream, but when they pried up and stretched bits of his skin, trying to see where the dead flesh ended and the living began, he exhaled in great gusts and tears slid from his eyes. Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe. She was good with burns—they were a specialty of hers—but I could tell she was worried. She said she’d never seen one as bad as Luke’s. She didn’t know what would happen. —MOTHER AND I STAYED by Luke’s bed that first night. He barely slept, he was so delirious with fever and pain. For the fever we put ice on his face and chest; for the pain we gave him lobelia, blue vervain and skullcap. This was another of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could tell it had no effect. I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God, but if I’d had morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke. The pain robbed him of breath. He lay propped up in his bed, beads of sweat falling from his forehead onto his chest, holding his breath until he turned red, then purple, as if depriving his brain of oxygen was the only way he could make it through the next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook the pain of the burn, he would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a cry of relief for his lungs, of agony for his leg. I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept lightly, waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of weight, so I could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully conscious and the pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended him and I stood in the doorway, listening to his gasps, watching Mother watch him, her face hollow, her eyes swollen with worry and exhaustion. When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I dreamed it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose bandages, mummified. Mother knelt on the floor beside me, pressing my plastered hand the way she pressed Luke’s, dabbing my forehead, praying. Luke didn’t go to church that Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or the one after that. Dad told us to tell people Luke was sick. He said there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that the Feds would take us kids away. That they would put Luke in a hospital, where his leg would get infected and he would die.