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 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 City of Night (1963)

  And while the man goes on trying to sing, a Negro fairy goes through the motions of a strip; and like an Indian doing a frantic war-dance, a harpy rocks and rolls about the neon-flashing jukebox—a badge across her desiccated breast proclaiming her name pitifully: “BEATRICE.” Mrs Haversham has rousted herself onto the stage to strum a guitar, producing an anarchy of sounds. A sadfaced man, surprisingly welldressed, guiltily buys drinks for all the derelicts around him, while a sullen old woman huddles against a cubicle, menacing with a fist anyone who approaches her. “Beatrice,” now on the stage, hopped like a puppet. A fat old fairy stares longingly at the young drifters and bursts uncontrollably into tears, the sound of his crying drowned (his pain reduced to paroxysmal pantomime) by a brownfaced man who howls like an Indian as Beatrice hops loose-limbly on the stage.... A mountainous woman calls out to a man across the bar: “Wottayalookinat?” “You, honey, I wanna kiss you.” “Kiss-my ass!” she roars (and Beatrice, still on the stage, wiggles hers for emphasis). “Okay,” the man says, getting up, “where?” The fat woman shakes her giant butt: “Cant miss it, baby,” she says, “Im ALL ass.”... Still hopping convulsively, Beatrice is ushered off the stage by the announcer. A fastidious man, in elegant tatters, sends back his beer because the glass is dirty. The waiter stares incredulously at him. Next on the stage are two skinny drunk men, leaning on each other singing plaintively: “Those far away places—...” Like a chipped record, repeating: “Far, far, farrrrr away places—... Far away—...” And cant go on. A Negro woman, perched like a crow on a stool next to a tattooed sailor, feels suddenly beautiful at his attentions (she smiles, rolls her round eyes in pleasure) as he strokes her butt, which she squirms deliriously—but stops its movements abruptly at the thud of the two drunk men collapsing on the stage. Against a wall a faded blonde woman—an exiled angel, the hints of beauty still lingering on her palewhite face—sits with blackoutlined eyes burning into the bar. A young tramp, drunk—the mark of premature doom stamped on his face which resembles James Dean’s (I have seen him before—hustling Main Street in Los Angeles—but he looked much younger then)—offers her a beer, paid for with a few coins I saw him clinch only moments earlier from the Negro fairy. The woman takes the beer wordlessly, her gaze piercingly buried beyond the bar. Now on the stage a fleshy woman is trying to do a belly-dance. Someone hooted: “TAKE HER OFF!” and misinterpreting the harsh command, she began to do a strip.... The boy who looks like James Dean touches the faded blonde woman intimately between her thighs.

• 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)

  —WHEN I LOST MY SISTER, I lost the family. I knew my father would pay my brothers the same visit he’d paid her. Would they believe him? I thought they would. After all, Audrey would confirm it. My denials would be meaningless, the rantings of a stranger. I’d wandered too far, changed too much, bore too little resemblance to the scabby-kneed girl they remembered as their sister. There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what? It was in this state of mind that I received another letter: I had won a visiting fellowship to Harvard. I don’t think I have ever received a piece of news with more indifference. I knew I should be drunk with gratitude that I, an ignorant girl who’d crawled out of a scrap heap, should be allowed to study at that grand place, but I couldn’t summon the fervor. I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it. —AFTER I READ AUDREY’S LETTER, the past shifted. It started with my memories of her. They transformed. When I recalled any part of our childhood together, moments of tenderness or humor, of the little girl who had been me with the little girl who had been her, the memory was immediately changed, blemished, turned to rot. The past became as ghastly as the present. The change was repeated with every member of my family. My memories of them became ominous, indicting. The female child in them, who had been me, stopped being a child and became something else, something threatening and ruthless, something that would consume them. This monster child stalked me for a month before I found a logic to banish her: that I was likely insane. If I was insane, everything could be made to make sense. If I was sane, nothing could. This logic seemed damning. It was also a relief. I was not evil; I was clinical. I began to defer, always, to the judgment of others. If Drew remembered something differently than I did, I would immediately concede the point. I began to rely on Drew to tell me the facts of our lives. I took pleasure in doubting myself about whether we’d seen a particular friend last week or the week before, or whether our favorite crêperie was next to the library or the museum. Questioning these trivial facts, and my ability to grasp them, allowed me to doubt whether anything I remembered had happened at all. My journals were a problem. I knew that my memories were not memories only, that I had recorded them, that they existed in black and white. This meant that more than my memory was in error.

• 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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This infamous lie carries its refutation on its face: for if the Roman soldiers who watched the grave at the express request of the priests and Pharisees, were asleep, they could not see the thieves, nor would they have proclaimed their military crime; if they, or only some of them, were awake, they would have prevented the theft. As to the, disciples, they were too timid and desponding at the time to venture on such a daring act, and too honest to cheat the world. And finally a self-invented falsehood could not give them the courage and constancy of faith for the proclamation of the resurrection at the peril of their lives. The whole theory is a wicked absurdity, an insult to the common sense and honor of mankind. 3. The Swoon-Theory. The physical life of Jesus was not extinct, but only exhausted, and was restored by the tender care of his friends and disciples, or (as some absurdly add) by his own medical skill; and after a brief period he quietly died a natural death.219 Josephus, Valerius Maximus, psychological and medical authorities have been searched and appealed to for examples of such apparent resurrections from a trance or asphyxy, especially on the third day, which is supposed to be a critical turning-point for life or putrefaction. But besides insuperable physical difficulties—as the wounds and loss of blood from the very heart pierced by the spear of the Roman soldier—this theory utterly fails to account for the moral effect. A brief sickly existence of Jesus in need of medical care, and terminating in his natural death and final burial, without even the glory of martyrdom which attended the crucifixion, far from restoring the faith of the apostles, would have only in the end deepened their gloom and driven them to utter despair.220 4. The Vision-Theory. Christ rose merely in the imagination of his friends, who mistook a subjective vision or dream for actual reality, and were thereby encouraged to proclaim their faith in the resurrection at the risk of death. Their wish was father to the belief, their belief was father to the fact, and the belief, once started, spread with the power of a religious epidemic from person to person and from place to place. The Christian society wrought the miracle by its intense love for Christ. Accordingly the resurrection does not belong to the history of Christ at all, but to the inner life of his disciples. It is merely the embodiment of their reviving faith. This hypothesis was invented by a heathen adversary in the second century and soon buried out of sight, but rose to new life in the nineteenth, and spread with epidemical rapidity among skeptical critics in Germany, France, Holland and England.221

• From City of Night (1963)

  Wide awake suddenly, I opened my eyes. I saw three cockroaches crawling on my arm. And in the flickering light of the movie, I looked down on a man squatting before me on the floor, his hungry hot hands on my thighs, his moist lips glued to the opening of my pants. The first church I telephoned was St Patrick’s. “I cant see you,” said the priest, “not until morning, we’re closed now.” And he hung up. I called St Louis Cathedral. “I cant see you—of course not—I get these calls all the time.” A third one—and I said hurriedly: “Dont hang up, Father. Ive got to talk to someone!” And he listened only a few moments. “You must be drunk,” he said angrily, and he hung up. And I called The Church of Eternal Succor, and I called other churches—and they all said: “No.” “Go to sleep.” “Come tomorrow to the confessional.” (Where life doesnt roar so loudly—in whispers, it can be listened to....) “Some time else.” “When we are open.” One even said: “God bless you,” before he hung up. And I was experiencing that only Death, which is the symbolic death of the soul. It’s the death of the soul, not of the body—it’s that which creates ghosts, and in those moments I felt myself becoming a ghost, drained of all that makes this journey to achieve some kind of salvation bearable under the universal sentence of death. And the body becomes cold because the heart and the soul, about to give up, are screaming for sustenance—from any source, even a remote voice on a telephone—and they drain the body in order to support themselves for that one last moment before the horror comes stifling out that already-dying spark. And I was thinking that although there is no God, never was a God, and never will be One—considering the world He made, it is possible to understand Him—or that part of Him that had forbidden Knowing, because—Christ!—at that moment I longed for innocence more than for anything else, and I would have thrown away all the frantic knowing for a return to a state of Grace—which is only the state of, idiot-like, Not Knowing. I called one more church. St Vincent de Paul. And a priest who sounded very young answered, and he didnt hang up and he was the one I had tried to reach, I knew, and he spoke to me and spoke—and I can remember only one thing he said—and the rest doesnt matter because all I had wanted was to hear a voice from a childhood in the wind.... And what I do remember that priest saying is merely this: “I know,” he said. “Yes, I know.” And I returned to El Paso. Here, by another window, I’ll look back on the world and I’ll try to understand.... But, perhaps, mysteriously, it’s all beyond reasons. Perhaps it’s as futile as trying to capture the wind.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Out of the darkness and the shadowed loneliness, like you I tried to find a substitute for Salvation. And the loneliness and the panic have something to do with that: with surfeit; something to do with the spectacle of everyone trying to touch and giving up, surrendering, finding those substitutes which are only momentary, in order to justify the meaningless struggle toward death.... Outside the Bourbon House, another blond Indian, much more cunning and much more naked, danced while cameras clicked, flashed and rolled—until the fat bald man whispered in the Indian’s ear, would he consider giving a private performance for himself And Friends? Now at Les Petits, where, on a small crowded platform, to the blaring of a record at full blast, a few couples try to dance, twisting and squirming as if to leave even their own bodies. Among them, Sonny danced with a small blackhaired girl (while the two scores who have promised to take him to Paris wait coldly for him). The girl’s hair is long and straight to her waist. As she bent from her knees, arching her thighs toward him, her hair sweeps the floor behind. Sonny twists before her. Male and female untouching, merely going through the distant gyrations of sex, as if to see how close they can come to each other without touching: carried into that limbo where savage music becomes the expression of life. And Sonny puts his hands in his pockets and arches his back sensually like a cat’s—the hair tumbles over his eyes; and he danced with such frenzy, such abandon, that the other couples left the floor, circled him and the girl—and soon even the girl steps aside, superfluous, while Sonny dances on alone as if with an imaginary partner: the world. He seemed suddenly to be all our defiant youth—desperate to spring from the Cage, futilely defying the world in that twisting dance. In the heat of the feverish dancing, he throws open his shirt, removes it—twirls his hand in the air as if he held a rope—“Yahoo!” he shouted—and he dances shirtless, chest gleaming with sweat—and the crowd applauds as he goes through the sex-gyrations. Alone. Leaving quickly, Im carried by the rivers of people outside.... White-robed mummers from the parade. Spears, plumed helmets catch the light. Devils dance with angels. Skirts part, invite.... The dusty-yellow wintersky. Tinseled bodies. Sequined faces. “The City That Care Forgot”: New Orleans. The Parade of Comus.... The last parade of Mardi Gras—a gaudy funeral.... And then, it was as if I were imprisoned in a glass room, looking out—isolated from the world, which could see me, which I could see—which couldnt hear me. Locked inside, away from the million people. And each of those million people in turn is separated within his own glass chamber from the others.... Suddenly the Devil leapt toward me! In red, with long black horns!

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Without Zena, it would be hard indeed ... Then I took my hands from my face at last, and turned to gaze at the bed beside me; and it was empty. Zena was gone. The money was gone. She had risen at dawn, with her servant’s habits; and she had left me, slumbering, with nothing. Understanding it at last left me curiously blank: I think, I was too giddy already to be dazed any further, too wretched to descend to greater depths. I rose, and drew my frock from beneath the mattress - it was creased worse than ever - and buttoned it on. The drunkard in the neighbouring bed had spent a ha’penny on a bowl of tepid water, and she let me use it, after she had stood in it and washed herself down, to wipe the last remaining flakes of blood from my cheeks, and to flatten my hair. My face, when I gazed at it in the sliver of mirror that was glued to the wall, looked like a face of wax, that had been set too near a spirit-lamp. My feet, when I stepped on them, seemed to shriek: the shoes were ones I had used to wear as a renter, but either my feet had grown since then, or I had become too used to gentle leather; I had gained blisters in the walk to the Kilburn Road, and now the blisters began to rub raw and wet, and the stockings to fray. We were not allowed to linger past the morning in the bedroom of the lodging-house: at eleven o’clock a woman came, and chivvied us out with a broom. I walked a little way with the drunkard. When we parted, at the top of Maida Vale, she took out the smallest screw of tobacco, rolled two thread-like cigarettes, and gave me one. Tobacco, she said, was the best cure for a bruise. I sat on a bench, and smoked till my fingers scorched; and then I considered my plight. My situation, after all, was a ridiculously familiar one: I had been as cold and as ill and as wretched as this four years before, after my flight from Stamford Hill.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Will you come downstairs with me and let us talk ... ?’ His tone was strange; and hearing it, I knew for certain. ‘No!’ I folded my hands over my belly: there was a hot, sour churning in there, as if they had fed me poison. At my cry Kitty shivered and grew white. I turned to her. ‘It isn’t true!’ I said. ‘Oh tell me, tell me - say it ain’t true!’ She wouldn’t look at me, only placed her hands before her eyes and began to weep. Walter came closer and put his hand upon my arm. ‘Get away!’ I cried, and stepped free of him towards the bed. ‘Kitty? Kitty?’ I knelt beside her, took her hand from her face, and held it to my own lips. I kissed her fingers, her nails, her palm, her wrist; her knuckles, that were damp from her own weeping, were soon drenched with tears and slobber. Walter looked on, appalled, still trembling. At last, she met my gaze. ‘It’s true,’ she whispered. I gave a start, and a moan - then heard her shriek, felt Walter’s fingers grip my shoulders, and realised that I had bitten her, like a dog. She pulled her hand away and gazed at me in horror. Again I shook Walter off, then turned to scream at him. ‘Get away, get out! Get out, and leave us!’ He hesitated ; I kicked at his ankle with my foot until he stepped away. ‘You are not yourself, Nan -’ ‘Get out!’ ‘I am afraid to leave you -’ ‘ Get out! ’ He flinched. ‘I shall go beyond the door - no further.’ Then he looked at Kitty, and when she nodded he left, closing the door behind him very gently. There was a silence, broken only by the sound of my ragged breathing, and Kitty’s gentle weeping: just so had I seen my sister weep, three days before. Nothing that Kitty ever did was good! she had said. I placed my cheek upon the counterpane where it covered Kitty’s thighs, and closed my eyes. ‘You made me think he was your friend,’ I said. ‘And then you made me think he didn’t care for you, because of us.’ ‘I didn’t know what else to do. He was only my friend; and then, and then-’ ‘To think of you and him - for all that time -’ ‘It wasn’t what you think, before last night.’ ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘Oh Nan, it’s true, I swear!

• From City of Night (1963)

  Darling Dolly is doing an imitation strip, proud of her smooth girlskin and figure, and everytime she bumps (like the queen at the 1-2-3 earlier), she says, “Sssssssssssufferrrrrrrrr....” Trudi’s daddy is giggling almost hysterically now, opening drinks, passing pills, joints. Suddenly theres a racket outside the window, like someone throwing a bottle, and Miss Destiny says, “It’s that psycho bitch!” and pulls the shades from the nails and theres the sex-hungry nympho in the next building hanging out the window in her half slip and brassiere (and she isnt badlooking) saying whats going on we’re disturbing the peace. Her piece, giggles Trudi, smothering herself cozily in her stole. And Miss Destiny coos, “Come on over, dear, come on over,” to placate her, and the sexhungry woman almost jumps through the window—“I’ll be right over, hear?” “Hoddawg!” said Chuck, and this puts Miss Destiny on. In just a few minutes heres the nympho and says it’s so warm she’ll take off her blouse if you dont mind, and I mean she wasted no time. Appalled at such uncouth effrontery, Darling Dolly Dane, smoking elegantly, inhaled accidentally and almost choked. To top it all off for Miss Destiny, who was becoming Most Depressed, heres another queen at the door: Miss Bobbi, with a drunk who tries to sober up immediately, rejects the scene, turns to leave—but Skipper gets a chance to Talk to him. “Cool it, cholly,” is all Skipper said, and the man reached for his wallet nervously, hands the money to Skipper, and stumbles out hurriedly. Miss Bobbi says icily hand over the bread which rightly belongs to her. Skipper gave her a nofooling? look. Miss Bobbi says she brought the score here, after all! Skipper says who got it? Miss Bobbi says she was going to until Skipper came on so bigassedly. Skipper says the score would have clipped her , and you saw it, jack, the score gave the bread to him. Miss Bobbie swished out in a huff. In absolute depression, Miss Destiny flung herself on the couch crying oh no, “Miss Thing, what are we doing here?”—clinging to a Poor Pitiful Pearl doll on the couch—a sadeyed orphan doll—but everyone was talking and moving and no one paid her any attention.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The defensive narcissism, I thought, avoiding his look.... That self-love that implies a completeness within yourself—and yet implies a huge incompleteness—your devouring need of others to sustain each battered return to the Mirror.... You have Yourself—only! He seemed to be waiting for me to say something; and when I didnt—purposely silent—he continued: “I sometimes wonder,” and he aimed the words clearly at me, “if it isnt more difficult for some people to believe theyre loved than it is actually to love....” “Maybe,” I said cautiously, “people like that resort to finding in themselves what they cant find in others because they know what it’s all about; and when they run away from those who may claim to ‘love’ them, they do it because maybe theyre afraid of being duped again with another myth—of finding out that, like ‘God,’ theres no such thing. And is it really so strange,” I went on, “when you consider the world? After all, I didnt make it—neither did you. It made us.... Sure, as a kid,” I continued slowly, wondering if I really want to go on, “as a kid, I wanted to right the messed-up world—or at least try to, somehow. Then, like everyone else, I looked around, I found out. I found out that nothing justifies innocence. I saw that other lives werent much different. Like me, everyone else had been tossed out.” And: Yes, I thought, you become aware of a terrible imposed fate—fate, or whatever else you called it: “the beads” for Trudi—or whether it became an evil angel, as for Miss Destiny. For the Professor, ugliness—and for Skipper, paradoxically, it had been his physical beauty—as it might have been for Robbie.... Lance, searching out his guilt shaped by a “ghost”—in turn, himself, possibly haunting Dean.... For Sylvia and her son, it had been... “love.” And as I thought that, and as I had been speaking, I knew how wrong I had been in thinking—so often, so many, many times—that I had sought out the world which now claimed me. No. Even outside that sheltered window, even then, that world had been waiting for me, scratching at the windowpanes, summoning me, tempting me by the very fact of its existence, like that tree in God’s primal garden. And I knew, too, why earlier I had been able—so easily, at last—to vindicate my father.... I had seen enough in that journey to know with certainty that the roots of rebellion went far, far beyond that. Beyond the father, beyond the mother. Far beyond childhood—and even birth. An alienation that began much earlier.

• From City of Night (1963)

  It cant last much longer, I keep thinking, searching for some way to stop it. But it goes on: that look like a doubly pointed knife on each side, stabbing each other mortally each moment it continues: the reflected pinpoints of each other’s eyes magnified like searchlights into their very souls; the reflections boomeranging, finding new, undiscovered, secret areas—mirroring their mutually ripped lives. The perspiration is running down the queen’s face in streams—the makeup melts from her painted eyelashes in waxlike smears: transforming her painted face now into a mask more terrifying than the ones that leer, eyeless, from the ceiling. And the man’s face is now a bloodless, hollow, tanned shell.... And his eyes! — the infinitely, infinitely, infinitely pale, unsurrendering eyes! Suddenly I brought out some change from my pocket, dropped it into the queen’s hat. And with an almost mortal groan, she rose from the table, her long legs thrust out into the clearing on the floor; and she swept the feathered hat in a loop. And with a peal of piercing laughter which seemed to emanate from the very depths of her slaughtered being, she placed the sacrificial hat on the floor. And in an insane gesture—hissing demoniacally—she shook her beaded arms fatally before the man’s face—and disappeared in a flash of tawdry colors beyond the door. I surrender to the sounds about us, now released. The man’s hand holds the bottle of beer before him as if for some kind of futile, transferred protection. The vein on his neck has begun to pulsate again. “Lets go,” he said. The sky is black. We walked along the beach, wordlessly. An old bent man combs the sand for lost coins. The fog hangs gray and ragged over the ocean.... We walk through Pacific Ocean Park—the gay sounds of the many people still on that candy-colored strip only emphasizing the thundering silence between us. We’re on Crystal Beach now. Inside Sally’s bar, there are only about seven people. Two youngmen play the pinball machine, rainbow-shattered, tap-tapping the players’ scores in colored numbers. The teeming screaming crowds have already left, but the beach seems somehow haunted, as if a part of their lives had been left buried in the sand, which will be carried into the ocean by the water and the wind which will rise. The desolate beach was purplish before us. Where, earlier, the desperate people had strained to look at each other and the false laughter had risen into a crescendo that rivaled the beating of the ocean, now I see only one lone figure—a youngman in white shorts—walking the sandy lonesomeness. I sat with the man on the concrete ledge—where I had first talked to him, only yesterday: trapped almost physically now by the roaring sound of the waves against the sand and by the silence shouting between us.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had had a vision, of my chamber, my closet, my dressing-table, my linen; my cigarette case, my cuff-links, my walking-cane with the silver tip; my suit of bone-coloured linen; my shoes, with the leather so handsome and fine I had once put out my tongue and licked it. My watch, with the strap that secured it to my wrist. Diana pushed me forward, and I turned and grabbed her arm. ‘Don’t cast me from you, Diana!’ I said. ‘Let me stay! I’ll be good! Let me stay, and I’ll pleasure you!’ But as I begged, she kept me marching, backwards; until at last we reached the high wooden gate, beside the carriage-house, at the far end of the garden. There was a smaller door set into the gate, and now Diana stepped to pull it open; beyond seemed perfect blackness. She took Zena from Mrs Hooper, and held her by the neck. ‘Show your face in Felicity Place again,’ she said, ‘or remind me of your creeping, miserable little existence by any word or deed, and I shall keep my promise, and return you to that gaol, and make sure you stay there, till you rot. Do you understand?’ Zena nodded. She was thrust into the square of darkness, and swallowed by it. Then Diana turned for me. She said: ‘The same applies to you, you trollop.’ She pushed me to the doorway, but here I held fast to the gate, and begged her. ‘Please, Diana! Let me only collect my things!’ I looked past her, to Dickie, and Maria: the gazes they turned upon me were livid and blurred, with the wine and with the chase, and held not one soft spark of sympathy. I looked at all the ogling ladies in their fluttering costumes. ‘Help me, can’t you?’ I cried to them. ‘Help me, for God’s sake! How many times have you not gazed at me and wanted me! How many times have you not come to say how handsome I am, how much you envy Diana the owning of me. Any one of you might have me now! Any one of you! Only, don’t let her put me into the street, into the dark, without a coin on me! Oh! Dam’ you all for a set of bitches, if you let her do such a thing, to me!’ So I cried out, weeping all the time I spoke, then turning to wipe my running nose on the sleeve of my cheap frock. My cheek felt twice its ordinary size, and my hair was matted where I had lain upon it; and at last, the ladies turned their eyes from me in a kind of boredom - and I knew myself done for.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I never felt my own lusts rise, raising theirs. I didn’t even need the coins they gave me. I was like a person who, having once been robbed of all he owns and loves, turns thief himself - not to enjoy his neighbours’ chattels, but to spoil them. My one regret was that, though I was daily giving such marvellous performances, they had no audience. I would gaze about me at the dim and dreary place in which my gentleman and I leaned panting, and wish the cobbles were a stage, the bricks a curtain, the scuttling rats a set of blazing footlights. I would long for just one eye - just one! - to be fixed upon our couplings: a bold and knowing eye that saw how well I played my part, how gulled and humbled was my foolish, trustful partner. But that - considering the circumstances - seemed quite impossible. All continued smoothly for, perhaps, six months or so: my colourless life at Mrs Best’s went on, and so did my trips to the West End, and my renting. My little stash of money dwindled, and finally disappeared; and now, since renting was all I knew and cared for, I began to live entirely from what I earned upon the streets. I still had had no word of Kitty — not a word! I concluded at last that she must have gone abroad, to try her luck with Walter — to America, perhaps, where we had planned to go. My months upon the music-hall stage seemed very distant to me now, and quite unreal. Once or twice on my trips around the city I saw someone I knew, from the old days - a fellow with whom we’d shared a bill at the Paragon, a wardrobe-mistress from the Bedford, Camden Town. One night I leaned against a pillar in Great Windmill Street and watched as Dolly Arnold - who had played Cinderella to Kitty’s Prince, at the Britannia - made her exit from the door of the Pavilion and was helped into a carriage. She looked at me, and blinked - then looked away again. Perhaps she thought she knew my face; perhaps she thought I was a boy that she had worked with; perhaps she only thought I was a miserable ningle, haunting the shadows in search of a gent.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  So I kept to the streets where I thought I should find it, the grim and uninviting streets where there were lodging-houses, doss-houses, houses with cards in the window saying Beds-to-Rent. Any one of them, I suppose, might have suited me; but I was looking for a sign to welcome me. And at last it seemed to me I found it. I had strayed through Moorgate, wandered towards St Paul’s, then turned and finished up almost at Clerkenwell. Still I had given no thought to the people about me - to the men and the children who stared, or sometimes laughed, to see me trudging, blank-faced, with my sailor’s load. My head was bowed, my eyes half-closed; but I became aware now that I had entered some kind of square - grew conscious of a bustle, a hum of business close at hand; grew conscious, too, of a smell: some rank, sweet, sickening odour I vaguely recognised but could not name. I walked more slowly, and felt the road begin to pull, a little stickily, at the soles of my shoes. I opened my eyes: the stones I stood upon were red and running with water and blood. I looked up, and saw a graceful iron building filled with vans and barrows and porters, all bearing carcases. I was at Smithfield, at the Dead Meat Market. I gave a kind of sigh to know it. Close at hand there was a tobacconist’s booth: I went to it and bought a tin of cigarettes and some matches; and when the boy handed me my change I asked him if there were any lodging-houses nearby, that might have rooms to spare. He gave me the names of two or three - adding, in a warning sort of way: ‘They ain’t werry smart, miss, the lodgings round these parts.’ I only nodded, and turned away; then walked on, to the first address that he had mentioned. It turned out to be a tall, crumbling house in an unswept row, very close to the Farringdon Street railway. The front yard had a bedstead in it, and a dozen rusty cans and broken-down crates; in the yard next door there was a group of barefoot children, stirring water into pails of earth. But I hardly raised my eyes to any of it. I only stepped to the door, laid my bag upon the step, and knocked. Behind me, in the cut of the railway, a train rumbled and hissed. As it passed, the step on which I rested gave a shake.