Embarrassment

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.

Page 13 of 79 · 20 per page

• From The City of God

  But so long as the will retains under its authority the other members, without which the members excited by lust to resist the will cannot accomplish what they seek, chastity is preserved, and the delight of sin foregone. And certainly, had not culpable disobedience been visited with penal disobedience, the marriage of Paradise should have been ignorant of this struggle and rebellion, this quarrel between will and lust, that the will may be satisfied and lust restrained, but those members, like all the rest, should have obeyed the will. The field of generation [756] should have been sown by the organ created for this purpose, as the earth is sown by the hand. And whereas now, as we essay to investigate this subject more exactly, modesty hinders us, and compels us to ask pardon of chaste ears, there would have been no cause to do so, but we could have discoursed freely, and without fear of seeming obscene, upon all those points which occur to one who meditates on the subject. There would not have been even words which could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body. Whoever, then, comes to the perusal of these pages with unchaste mind, let him blame his disposition, not his nature; let him brand the actings of his own impurity, not the words which necessity forces us to use, and for which every pure and pious reader or hearer will very readily pardon me, while I expose the folly of that scepticism which argues solely on the ground of its own experience, and has no faith in anything beyond. He who is not scandalized at the apostle's censure of the horrible wickedness of the women who "changed the natural use into that which is against nature," [757] will read all this without being shocked, especially as we are not, like Paul, citing and censuring a damnable uncleanness, but are explaining, so far as we can, human generation, while with Paul we avoid all obscenity of language. [755] Luke xx. 34. [756] See Virgil, Georg. iii. 136. [757] Rom. i. 26.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  At the end of Augustine’s life, his last bitter foe, Julian of Eclanum, found it easy and persuasive to level against him the charge that his hostile view toward bodies and sexuality, so foreign to Julian’s notion of orthodox Christianity, were the legacy of a Manicheism never fully abjured. When Julian could quote a Manichean commentary on Paul that argued that concupiscentia (Augustine’s favorite word for the hankerings of the flesh that survive the purifying bath of baptism) is a permanent evil force, he was sure he had Augustine dead to rights as a Manichee. The embarrassment to Augustine was palpable.92 But the very last words of Augustine’s last book, the Unfinished Work Against Julian, are directed to turning the accusation back on Julian. You’re the real Manichee, Augustine is saying, a tactic as familiar as it is ineffective.93 The portrait easiest to paint of Augustine the Manichee is of a failed enthusiast, and the enthusiasm is as important to see as the failure. The theological question asked in Augustine’s lifetime about the lingering effect of Manicheism on his thought has persisted to this day, constantly readdressed. Augustine was smart enough to know what it took to disavow the doctrines and practices of Manicheism—that much is beyond question.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Quite apart from any trenchant psychological interpretation, the genuinely puzzling thing about Monnica’s presence in Augustine’s story is that she looms so large in the telling. Augustine was scarcely intending to offer us raw material for psychobiography, and indeed, nothing of what he gives us should be thought of as “raw” material for anything. In both the Confessions and his early dialogues at Cassiciacum, Monnica plays a large and striking part. At Cassiciacum, she ventures into the most exalted philosophical dialogues, a role that ancient writers gave to women only very rarely. Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium may be the only truly comparable example. Whatever unconscious factors influenced Augustine’s portrayal, the overt and conscious factors deserve attention too. The key to Monnica’s presence lies in her religious history and its capacity to embarrass Augustine. Her past was shaded by a childhood and adolescence played out in a church that Augustine found embarrassing and which he rejected. “Monnica the Donatist” is almost never mentioned by moderns, but she always haunts Augustine’s presentation. She grew up in the majority Donatist church, then found her whole community hustled into allegiance, or nearly so, to the minority Roman-sanctioned sect when she was married. When she passed into that Caecilianist community, doubtless scarcely understanding the issues at stake, she retained the characteristic piety of the conventional African Christian community in which she had grown up. For example, she would take a picnic basket to a graveyard to honor the blessed dead, a habit she was surprised to find forbidden when she came to Italy. Even after giving his allegiance to the Caecilianist church, Augustine still spoke years later of the Christianity that he saw in his childhood and under his mother’s influence as “superstition”—already a disdainful word for religious behavior deemed light on credibility and heavy on mumbo-jumbo. But when Augustine shows us Monnica and her religion, we see nothing of a Donatist past and no direct censure. The most Augustine says comes early in the Confessions, when he suggests that concern for his worldly career trumped her religious ambitions for him, at least in his student days. That whisper of criticism is counterbalanced and erased in most readers’ memories by all the other displays of her virtue and piety. A few weeks after the moment in the Milan garden, in which a mysterious semi-divine voice tells Augustine to pick up his book and read what it says, a process that leads to his crisis of faith and eventual rebirth, Augustine, Monnica, his friend Alypius, and the rest of the family went up to a borrowed country villa at Cassiciacum.99 The delights of philosophical retreat were surely appealing there,100 but its distance from big-city temptation also probably made it a fine place in which a recovering libidinist could test his resolve.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  At Carthage he studied, lived in a way he blushed to recall later, and went to the theater. He talks of going to church to pursue his sexual conquests.71 Moderns with the slightest possible familiarity with Augustine’s name often think of him obscurely as a paragon of promiscuity. “Oh, Master, make me chaste and celibate—but not yet!” He did write those words, to parody his commonplace adolescent dithering between libido and restraint.72 The Confessions are intended to underscore the middle-aged bishop’s sense that his youth had been dissolute and sexually unrestrained, but nothing suggests he was unusual, and indeed among the privileged young of his time he was probably more rather than less restrained than most. We know of the woman he made his wife and we hear of another woman with whom he lived for a few months in Milan after sending the first away, but he does not tell us anything of either, not even their names. Back in Carthage in earlier days, he could attest, as we have seen, to having gone to church to find what might now be called “hookups,” but we have no hope of measuring their number and every reason to suspect that the bishop rather overdid the accusations against his younger self. In the end nothing indicates that his conduct in adolescence could have called attention to itself in any way, save possibly for modesty and discretion. But at least a few women knew him in a way we cannot hope to recover.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But the center of the buzz was Jerome. At Rome, he had made his way as an ascetic and patron of fashionable ascetics, especially fashionable female ones. Like Paulinus, he took a long time finding a town he wouldn’t be asked to leave, and eventually that meant settling at Bethlehem, though his fights even there with the local bishops and his old friends more than once brought him risk of dislocation. For Jerome, the great screaming extremist of his generation, virginity was absolutely superior to sexual experience. (He proclaimed this with the considerable authority of an ex-virgin.540) He was embarrassed when one of his protégés, the young Christian woman Blesilla, of a very good family at Rome, died suddenly and rumor had it that excesses of fasting and self-denial had done her in. He was embarrassed again by the rumors that his relations with his wealthy patroness Paula were not quite as chaste as they should have been. The great patron of asceticism was run out of Rome, on one argument, for hypocrisy and extremism.541 Jerome, in his book Against Jovinian, made himself particularly offensive as the shameless excoriator of Jovinian, a monk who had a good word or two to say for marriage. None could admit that the very ideal of chastity made temptation and suspicion necessary and inevitable, with peccadilloes and worse highly likely to follow.542 All sides could agree on at least some things. That is why when the rich young woman Demetrias chose the religious life a few decades later, she was the object of the pastoral attentions of all the best writers, from Augustine to Jerome to Pelagius, all vying to be seen as the patron at a distance of so distinguished a convert to the higher life. Modern readers may have trouble seeing what there was to disagree about. This was the world in which Augustine found himself fumbling toward his own idealized version of monasticism, or something. Augustine flung his own share of dustbin lids, only gradually becoming aware of what other people were doing and saying. Augustine has a considerable reputation for shaping later Christian ideas about sexuality and takes the blame for what are seen as extreme positions. But his positions emerged slowly and clumsily. To be sure, from the time he encountered Ambrose in Milan he thought chaste continence the highest form of life, though he must have thought similar things during his Manichee days, when he was impotent to enact his belief. In his later years, Augustine quoted Ambrose on these issues repeatedly, as a way of signaling that his views were orthodox and moderate, and that whatever hostility had sought him out, he was the true mainstream figure.543 He could not stand that Pelagius seemed to have staked out the moderate position for himself and made Augustine look like the extremist, though Pelagius was himself a monk and presumably as personally ascetic as Augustine.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  “Who will guard the guardians?” was Juvenal’s famous question.320 Augustine knew it was his responsibility to do so, but he was not what we would call today a “proactive manager.” The embarrassments ended when he died, and we have no information about the state and fate of Augustine’s clergy after his lifetime. A GLIMPSE OF THE SAINTLY BISHOP The oldest biographical novel about Augustine dates to his own time. Sometime in the fifth century, probably fifteen to twenty years after Augustine’s death (to judge by mention of the Huns in one passage), an unknown writer composed a series of letters supposedly exchanged between Augustine and the Roman general Boniface.321 They don’t come anywhere close to being authentic, and the compiler could not have thought they were. He likely had seen Possidius’s Life of Augustine and perhaps was the first to feel those pages lacking in appropriate drama. These letters come to us only by the chance survival of a single manuscript. The story they tell represents a memory and image of Augustine that is not defined by books and doctrine, but by his engagement in the military politics of Africa in his last years. Boniface, the Roman general charged with protecting the African province, is known to have been a slightly difficult friend for Augustine, moving from initial appearance of intimacy and religious devotion to a more distanced position after a trip back to Italy from which he returned with a new heretic wife and concubines besides. The novelist knows something of this story and of the invasions that troubled Africa in Augustine’s last years, and he attributes to both parties in the correspondence stereotypical roles. Augustine is high-minded enough to chastise and then to forgive, while Boniface is the military man who expects war to be hell. So the collection begins with a devout Boniface and a reprimanding Augustine. A Gothic soldier in Roman service has sexually approached a consecrated virgin and Augustine demands discipline; Boniface promises that the man will rot in jail; oh, please, no, replies Augustine, I didn’t mean quite that. Let him have a chance to repent himself, for after all, if we wanted to punish all the sins of barbarians, there wouldn’t be many barbarians left, and they wouldn’t be much good for fighting. But now Boniface goes wrong, arresting a man on the church steps—or was it just inside? Has he violated the sanctuary principles of the law? Called to account, he is apologetic and promises to make things right.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She warned me that a girl with such fancy luggage might expect to live higher on the hog than a poet would. The irony? It had been Lecia’s Hartmann luggage from the Rice Baron before they’d divorced—borrowed so as not to be embarrassed bringing an army duffel bag to his parents’ house. A week or so later, we unwrap our brown-papered Christmas gifts decorated with crayons and string—homemade gifts all. I’d stitched up a giant pillow to serve as a faux headboard, stars on a background of deep blue. He’ll spend Christmas with his family, because otherwise he’d never see his far-flung siblings. To me their cool exchanges mirror chatter at a bus stop. My pending visit to Daddy is an event on a par with cyanide. Warren stretches his legs in front of the red leather club chair appropriated from his parents’ attic. He picks at a moist banana muffin I’d made from scratch—black bananas being cheapest. I unwrap the small packet of audio tapes he made me—recordings of some lost lectures on the epic by an unknown prof. Some girls pine for jewelry, but for me the tapes are like an invitation into Warren’s monastery, since his devotion to poetry has a monkish quality. I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet—buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture—than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order. I slide the cassette into the tape deck and press play. The old recording is scratchy enough to conjure a time before we were born. The professor’s first sentence brings me up short, for it sketches a football field-sized hole in my reading. He notes there’s as much distance between Homer and Virgil as between Chaucer and us. I press stop, saying, Isn’t that like a thousand years ? Around that, Warren says. He peels the paper from the muffin. Since grad school, I’d felt as stuffed full of knowledge as a Christmas goose. Suddenly, a thousand unknown years of poetic history yawns unstudied before me. How little I know panics me. I say, I’d always figured those toga-wearing guys hung out around the same time. His smile is soft. You always know what poets wore. I say something like, Baudelaire tweezed his nose hairs and wore the floppy black satin bow. Dickinson wore white like a virgin bride. Warren Whitbread wore Brooks Brothers shirts, button-down, oxford-cloth. Jeans and khakis. He was long of limb and lean in a blue bathrobe. He says, And Mary Karr? Black black black. Plus loads of mascara. Spike heels. He reaches among the wrappings on the floor and holds up the eye-fryingly pink sweater his mother picked up for me in Bermuda, saying, You’re not ready for this yet? Grotesque as it looks, in some ways, I want nothing more than to look right occupying it.

• From Shunned (2018)

  During the third grade, I found a wise and sympathetic teacher in Ms. Levy. She was pretty, kind, and smart. All the girls wanted to grow up and be just like her, driving a convertible VW bug and wearing hoop earrings. Every boy had a crush on her. When it came time for that year’s holiday program, which would be held in the gymnasium, she invited me to stay in the classroom. She reserved a film projector to play cartoons and gave me a fresh box of colored chalk and free rein over the long blackboard. As the other kids lined up to leave for the program, I slipped into the bathroom, hoping no one would notice I was staying behind. Being a Witness often meant being different and standing out, but there was no need to call undue attention to myself. My ear to the door, I prayed for a clean exit. If anyone found out I was in there, they might feel sorry for me, or I’d have to explain myself. When all was quiet, I emerged into the room, now empty. The only movement was the class’s pet gerbil spinning on her wheel. My steps echoed against the linoleum as I crossed the room and turned off the lights, keeping open the window blinds that lined one side of the room. Taking my seat next to the projector, I clicked it on. The sprockets combed through the film as it transferred from reel to reel, a cone of light delivering images to the screen. After a few episodes, I lost myself, isolation trumped by laughter as Bugs Bunny taunted the Tasmanian Devil and massaged Elmer Fudd’s scalp to the rhythms of The Barber of Seville. A few hours later, when my classmates returned from the auditorium, I was amusing myself by telling the gerbils make-believe stories as I changed the water in their cages. “Where were you?” asked Julia, a new girl I had befriended. She rushed over to stand next to me and seemed relieved that I was okay. “I thought we would sit together.” “She’s one of those Jehovahs!” answered Billy Gustafson, the class smart aleck with a butch haircut. “She doesn’t get any presents at Christmas.” Everyone in the class heard him and turned to look at me. In a split second, my biggest fear was realized: I had become the center of attention. I wanted to disappear, but I swallowed hard and stood taller. I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. Ms. Levy entered the room and sensed something was up. “Is that true?” asked Julia. Her eyes were peering and curious. “Yes,” I said. “It’s true. I’ve never celebrated Christmas. It’s against my religion.” “Never, ever?” asked Julia.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The very idea of a priest’s wife was radically new; those who lived with priests had previously been denounced as priests’ whores, excluded from honorable society, and their children considered bastards. Indeed, not everyone hailed the wedding. A pamphlet of a mock “wedding Mass” was published, which called Karlstadt a “fisherman of wives” when he should have been, like the disciples of Jesus, a fisher of men. 26 A man who liked to give splendid parties, Karlstadt spent fifty guilders on the wedding feast held on January 19, even traveling to Leipzig for special spices: He clearly intended the banquet to be a public statement. There was a large guest list, including the whole town council and the university, while his invitation to the Elector was even printed. Spiteful stories about the wedding soon circulated among the Reformation’s opponents. Cochlaeus told the tale of Karlstadt’s neighbor who was asked to procure the prized game for the wedding feast, and killed “the miller’s donkey” instead. The guests only discovered what they were eating when they came across its cloven hooves. 27 — T HE pace of reform in Wittenberg further accelerated. On January 6, 1522, the Augustinian order met in the town. From the sidelines, Luther had written to Linck and Lang, admonishing them to follow the gospel and support reform. The meeting was not very well attended but it reached radical conclusions: The chapter decided that any who wished to leave the order might do so, and that begging and Masses for the dead should be abolished. The prior of the Wittenberg house, his authority undermined by the charismatic preaching of Zwilling, received no support from the order, which refused to punish those monks who had left. Then, on January 10, the remaining Wittenberg Augustinians went even further and, probably under Zwilling’s leadership, “made a fire in the cloister square, went into the church, broke the wooden altars, and took them with all the paintings and statues, crucifixes, flags, candles, chandeliers, etc. to the fire, threw them in and burnt them, and cut off the heads of the stone statues of Christ, Mary and other saints, and destroyed all the images in the church.” 28 Karlstadt too now turned his attention to images, writing a treatise on begging and the removal of images—not a chance combination. At one level, the tract, published in late January in Wittenberg, rejected images on biblical grounds: The First Commandment condemned the worship of idols.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Once that happens, active Witnesses are not allowed to talk to you or have anything to do with you. You are considered worse than a person without faith; there really isn’t much anyone can do to save you. You have to initiate that on your own. For a while, Eric’s wife, Rachel, continued to come to the meetings, but it was difficult for her to attend alone. She was utterly devoted to her husband, even if she didn’t share his doubts. Social invitations from the community came to a screeching halt. I once saw them dining at the local Red Robin, as Ross and I waited for a table. Because of Eric’s status in the congregation, we avoided them both. It felt boorish to be so evasive, our eyes darting to the floor and then to the other side of the room, pretending not to notice them. As we lumbered past their table, following the hostess to our own, I noticed their downward glances and took it as a small sign of contrition. Eric’s once-innocent doubts had come to this. As Vince cited another Scripture, I wondered how Eric’s questions had started. Had he heard his words anew on the doorstep of a coworker? And where was he now? It was impossible to picture him living a happy life. I’d spent a lifetime absorbing Bible stories like Dinah’s and naturally assumed that anyone who discarded The Truth was doomed to isolation, to slog through time, aimless and miserable. Over the years, the Watchtower Society had discussed religious doubts in the literature, acknowledging that they were natural and should be tended to with diligent prayer and study. Maybe it was my time to go through a minor doubting phase. On my thirtieth birthday, I had found myself in the company of Virginia Ellis, a gray-haired woman of faith and distinction. She got a winsome look in her eyes and said, “I remember turning thirty. It was then I noticed—for the first time in my life—I had my own unique, original thoughts. It was a lovely time.” Perhaps that was what these new internal rumblings were—evidence of my maturity, an emerging ability to have my own credible and unique thoughts; thoughts that broadened me, thoughts that could transform my view of God and life and expand my horizons. The clutch in my belly loosened. After a lifetime of faithful service, I decided, a little bit of questioning was normal. Clearly, I was sitting at a spiritual plateau. Once I transcended it, I could reach new heights of spiritual conviction and awareness. In retrospect, I know that is exactly what happened, but not the way I imagined it that day. Vince concluded his sermon and left the stage. The clapping of the congregation rattled me out of my reverie. We were halfway through the two- hour meeting. Next would come a question-and-answer discussion of The Watchtower, led by another elder, Jerry Mendez.

• From Shunned (2018)

  As I said this, I was struck by how arrogant it sounded. “The Bible suggests God has a purpose for the earth, that there is a reason why, generation after generation, He allows so much suffering. We’re living in a unique time in human history, when God will bring about His original purpose for the earth.” “And what is that purpose?” His voice had tightened, and he glanced down at his watch. “To destroy all man-made governments and to set up His own government that will solve all of man’s problems.” I had a cadre of Scriptures at my fingertips and was capable of using my Bible to build a case for this bold statement, but the moment I heard the word “destroy” cross my lips, embarrassment swept over me. I’d uttered that sentence many times before, but this was the first time in my life I had noticed how harsh and partisan I sounded. My face felt so hot, I wondered if it glowed. Did Nick notice my fleeting, stunned expression, the discomfort I suppressed? I babbled and hoped the dog would start barking again so I wouldn’t have to keep going. Hannah stood off to the side and said nothing. A few years earlier, Nick had taken a three-month leave of absence. He wanted to spend time with his father, who was diagnosed with a rabid, rare form of brain cancer. Nick was already on the corporate fast track by then, closing some large deals and showing promise for more. Others might have feared that taking time off could delay the next promotion or cause management to question their dedication. For all I know, those thoughts did cross his mind, but Nick felt compelled to play an omnipresent role in his dad’s final days. “You can always make money,” he said. “But you can never go back and get more time.” Now, as I stood on his doorstep, I heard a condemnation in my words that did not line up with my personal experience of Nick. Ordinarily, this was when I would read a passage from The Book of Revelation about the Last Days, or something from the Gospels about seeking first the Kingdom, but now, an unfamiliar reticence stopped me. Standing before this well-informed and worldly, wise man, I had nothing new or useful to say. The story line I came with seemed fanciful and egotistical. How silly of me to think I could offer him —or anyone—some definitive method for salvation. I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I had to get out of there, the sooner the better. I handed Nick a tract, saying something about how he might enjoy reading it in the privacy of his own home. His shoulders dropped as a glint of relief passed through his eyes. I turned and fled to the street.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Four of us had to hoist him up and lay him on the cot. When he came to, there was a funny new look on his face, almost sheepish, as if he'd been caught committing some terrible crime. He wouldn't talk to anyone. For the rest of the day he stayed off by himself, sitting alone under a tree, just staring down at the field tent. He seemed a little dazed. Now and then we could hear him cussing, bawling himself out. Anyone else would've laughed it off, but for Curt Lemon it was too much. The embarrassment must've turned a screw in his head. Late that night he crept down to the dental tent. He switched on a flashlight, woke up the young captain, and told him he had a monster toothache. A killer, he said—like a nail in his jaw. The dentist couldn't find any problem, but Lemon kept insisting, so the man finally shrugged and shot in the Novocain and yanked out a perfectly good tooth. There was some pain, no doubt, but in the morning Curt Lemon was all smiles. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me. I heard it from Rat Kiley, who swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty. Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say. If Rat told you, for example, that he'd slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting su perlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Still, with this particular story, Rat never backed down. He claimed to have witnessed the incident with his own eyes, and I remember how upset he became one morning when Mitchell Sanders challenged him on its basic premise. "It can't happen," Sanders said. "Nobody ships his honey over to Nam. It don't ring true. I mean, you just can't import your own personal poontang." Rat shook his head. "I saw it, man. I was right there. This guy did it." "His girlfriend?"

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  All those eyes on me—the town, the whole universe—and I couldn't risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried. It was loud now. Loud, hard crying. Elroy Berdahl remained quiet. He kept fishing. He worked his line with the tips of his fingers, patiently, squinting out at his red and white bobber on the Rainy River. His eyes were flat and impassive. He didn't speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun. And yet by his presence, his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them. "Ain't biting,” he said. Then after a time the old man pulled in his line and turned the boat back toward Minnesota. I don't remember saying goodbye. That last night we had dinner together, and I went to bed early, and in the morning Elroy fixed breakfast for me. When I told him I'd be leaving, the old man nodded as if he already knew. He looked down at the table and smiled. At some point later in the morning it's possible that we shook hands—I just don't remember—but I do know that by the time I'd finished packing the old man had disappeared. Around noon, when I took my suitcase out to the car, I noticed that his old black pickup truck was no longer parked in front of the main lodge. I went inside and waited for a while, but I felt a bone certainty that he wouldn't be back. In a way, I thought, it was appropriate. I washed up the breakfast dishes, left his two hundred dollars on the kitchen counter, got into the car, and drove south toward home. The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war. Enemies

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Curtis can’t afford marijuana, Richard says, adding, It’s probably floating up from the alley. And with that, I tell him how—visiting me once at college—Mother got gunched out of her brains with my pals. In my twenties, she sat in on a poetry workshop with Etheridge, and afterward, I found her on his back step sharing a blunt with him and a bunch of young brothers. Which embarrassed me at the time, since she flirted like a saloon floozy, but also since her lack of maternal posture always unconsciously felt like some failure of mine on the child front. By the end of the Mother stories, Richard’s finger-combing through the suds in my hair with warm water has sent an ease from the scalp down my spine and along my limbs. She’s in good hands with Curtis, Richard says. He’s wrapped my hair in a towel, and I sit upright. And there’s nobody else here? We closed the shop for you two. Very exclusive, Richard says, adding, we have caught kids getting high in the alley before. Not long after, Curtis swans in, giving off an odor of patchouli oil as he rifles a drawer. He says, Your mom’s a riot. I’m gonna visit her in Texas. She knows a place I can buy ostrich-skin cowboy boots. I’m sure she does, I say. Some time later, when Curtis presents her, I see he’s jacked her hair up into a concoction only a drag queen could relish. Her eyes are glassy, and her neck has that bobblehead swivel. Mother! I say. Don’t I look precious? she says, hands on her hips. You look high! Do you think? Curtis says. She made me do it that high. Mother tips her head coquettishly, which, with the giant hairdo, has the effect of a topiary starting to topple over. She says, We smoked a little maryjane . Then we’re in Warren’s tiny backseat. As he navigates the river road traffic to the Ritz, I’m violently trying to de-escalate her hair. Why now, Mother? I say, almost in tears. Why’d you have to start now? Ow, she says. She’s holding her ears as I tug. Don’t ruin your mascara. You reek of marijuana, I say. The city of Cambridge is sliding away behind us. At the boathouse, we pass somebody hauling a lone scull from the water. I apologize to Warren as I work at the vast rats’ nest of her head. I don’t smell anything, he says. With Warren, you can never know if this is impeccable denial or politeness. Maybe at all those heavy-drinking WASP country club events, he’d learned to ignore the average soused-up human. I stop yanking at her hair and notice the buildings of Harvard—carved from various fine types of stone—slipping by like a kingdom I’d never gain the keys to. The whole city is so profoundly Caucasian.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  It’s like the M&Ms commercial. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands,” I sang. Andrew still didn’t laugh. Maybe he hadn’t seen that commercial, I thought, so I tried another joke, an easy one about a person staying in a hotel room who hears small voices moaning from the bathroom. “‘When the log rolls over, we’re all going to die!’” I said, imitating the voices. “The person freaks out, grabs his stuff and checks out of the hotel. Then another person checks into the room. He hears the voices, freaks out and runs out of the room. Then a third person checks into the room. He hears the voices and is curious, not scared like the others, so he enters the bathroom to check things out. He looks careful-like into the toilet bowl and guess what he finds? A group of ants sitting on a turd.” I laughed myself silly at this punch line, but Andrew didn’t seem to get the joke. “All right,” I said. “This one’s really funny.” I was about to launch into the joke about a man who was supposed to gather golf balls, but tried to get King Kong’s balls instead, when Andrew leaned toward Theresa and whispered into her ear. Her cheeks tinged with red, she stood up and motioned to me to follow her. We went out to the foyer. “Celena, Andrew wants you stop telling the penis jokes and poop jokes. They’re making him uncomfortable.” I felt my face grow hot. I thought I was being such a great dinner partner. We returned to the table, and for the rest of the meal I barely looked at Andrew. Theresa made good on her promise and a trip was arranged for us to go to Los Angeles to visit my father and other relatives for a weekend. Later she told me that she hadn’t requested the visit outright, predicting that the request would be turned down. Instead, she’d applied for welfare, knowing Synanon would gladly accept the money. She then told management that since the organization was receiving public aid, my father had a legal right to visitation. We arrived at my grandparents’ home in the early evening. It felt strange to be back at the house where I’d spent my days in refuge from Aunt Terry, who lived across the street. My father arrived shortly after we did, seeming to burst through the door. “Hey!” he called. “Daddy!” I ran into his open arms, and he held me tight, laughing, his voice deep and rumbling. His warmth seemed to spread into my own being. He smelled of aftershave and spicy cologne. His shiny brown face and large forehead gleamed in the light. His dark eyes crackled with humor. I felt as if we had seen each other only yesterday. My father sat on the sofa and pulled me onto his lap.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Desperately I tried to listen, but my heart beating in my ears took precedence over the words. With him, it became a game. “Okay, let’s see if the idiot picked up anything this time,” he’d announce. All eyes would turn to me while I sat as mute as ever. Sometimes I’d recite back fragments, trailing off after a bit and wondering why I couldn’t remember what he’d said. Fortunately, I did not have to deal with Don often, as he was a male demonstrator and usually oversaw the boys’ dorms. Years after I left Synanon, the constant probing into my psyche by the school staff and greater collective of the commune took the form of nightmares. In my dreams, I lay on an operating table surrounded by doctors dissecting my brain and discussing among themselves what they found. It was clear, one of the doctors always concluded, that my brain was no good at all. They would need to insert something into it to improve my intelligence and keep track of my whereabouts. The assassination of Theresa’s role as my mother succeeded only in creating a deeper longing to see her and venerate the mother’s role. I had no greater wish than to be with her and become a mother myself. By the close of my first year in the commune, I developed an all-encompassing desire to be in a nuclear family with a mom and dad and a hunger for traditional domesticity that was out of reach outside of the cult, and nonexistent within it. The TV show Little House on the Prairie put images to my longings, creating an idealized vision of American frontier life and later a deep desire for self-sufficient remote living. Not all Synanon children experienced my intense want for family life. Some had been born into the commune or arrived as babies, spending the first formative years of their lives in the Hatchery. For them, parents were of little consequence. The demonstrators, who were supposed to replace the role of parent, appeared, disappeared, reappeared and dropped out of the school and were replaced by new demonstrators, suddenly on hand. We children experienced this same randomness in our living arrangements through regular moves. I would live in one room for a while, and then move to a different room or different building, or another child would share my room, replacing the previous child. I also never knew what grade I was in because I usually found myself in two grades simultaneously. Years later, when I read old archives of Synanon school logs at a UCLA library, I learned in an entry dated August 13, 1977, that there were forty-four members on staff. Twenty-one of them where younger than twenty-one and a need was expressed for older, more mature adults. Half of the demonstrators responsible for raising the children were barely out of puberty themselves. Many were recently reformed drug addicts.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Four of us had to hoist him up and lay him on the cot. When he came to, there was a funny new look on his face, almost sheepish, as if he'd been caught committing some terrible crime. He wouldn't talk to anyone. For the rest of the day he stayed off by himself, sitting alone under a tree, just staring down at the field tent. He seemed a little dazed. Now and then we could hear him cussing, bawling himself out. Anyone else would've laughed it off, but for Curt Lemon it was too much. The embarrassment must've turned a screw in his head. Late that night he crept down to the dental tent. He switched on a flashlight, woke up the young captain, and told him he had a monster toothache. A killer, he said—like a nail in his jaw. The dentist couldn't find any problem, but Lemon kept insisting, so the man finally shrugged and shot in the Novocain and yanked out a perfectly good tooth. There was some pain, no doubt, but in the morning Curt Lemon was all smiles. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me. I heard it from Rat Kiley, who swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty. Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say. If Rat told you, for example, that he'd slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting su perlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Still, with this particular story, Rat never backed down. He claimed to have witnessed the incident with his own eyes, and I remember how upset he became one morning when Mitchell Sanders challenged him on its basic premise. "It can't happen," Sanders said. "Nobody ships his honey over to Nam. It don't ring true. I mean, you just can't import your own personal poontang." Rat shook his head. "I saw it, man. I was right there. This guy did it." "His girlfriend?"

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Whenever I spoke, she corrected my grammar. “Black English” was a pet peeve of hers and my father’s, though she was more stringent in scouring the dialect from my tongue. “That way of speaking will only hold you back,” she’d snap. Her expression soured when I’d blurt out, “Watcha doin’, huh?” “What are you doing?” she’d say, emphasizing each word. “My orm horts,” I’d say. “My arm hurts,” she’d correct. Alice and my mother were both fair-skinned Creole beauties, but Alice’s personality—critical, detailed and highly organized—couldn’t have been more different from my mother’s earthy and childlike qualities. Alice, chic and fashionable, lived in high heels, even wearing high-heeled slippers around the house. Her deformed toes curled inward from gripping the soles of her shoes. Routine-oriented and strict, she had little patience for kid-type nonsense. Most of her nieces and nephews found her formidably frosty; so, recognizing that she was softer on me, they often used me as a go-between when they wanted something from her. Along with insisting I use proper grammar, Alice enrolled me in an etiquette school called Sugar-and-Spice, for girls and boys. The lessons were held in the back room of a department store. My new etiquette skills came into play when I took a train journey with my grandma Gladys to New Orleans and met my great aunt Dolly for the first time. I recall my grandmother prodding me into my aunt’s living room, where she waited to meet me in her easy chair. Aunt Dolly was a large woman, and she didn’t walk around much. Not knowing what to do as she gazed intensely down at me, I fell back on my etiquette. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” I said and curtsied. Aunt Dolly shifted the bulk of her rotund body in her chair to peer speechless at me for a moment, before she tilted her head back and let loose a howl of deep husky laughter. “Well ain’t you somethin’ else, um-huh, my, my. Look at that baby. What else can she do?” she demanded to know of my grandma. “Do she sing and dance?” When my grandmother opened my suitcase later that night, which Alice had packed, she found my clothes ironed, starched, perfectly folded and smelling of flowers. This left such an impression on my grandmother that for the rest of her life she spoke of my neatly organized clothes whenever she heard Alice’s name. Alice taught me to sit still with my hands held lady-like in my lap so I would not draw attention to myself when adults talked among themselves. Unlike my mother, she had no interest in being my friend, but acted as a parent in every sense. At night I slept with curlers in my hair to create the ringlets Alice adored. My dresses were either frilly and shiny or conservative and chic like hers, streamlined to fit my small figure.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Linda stood in the doorway holding a large cowbell and hitting it with a metal rod, her movements measured and methodical. Sophie was already out of bed. As Linda left our doorway, clanging as she moved to the next room, I watched my roommate pad over to me, a silhouetted figure in shadowy lighting. “It’s time to get up,” she said. “We have to get ready for inspection.” I removed my bed covers and glimpsed several girls still in their gowns running down the hallway. Sophie turned on the overhead light and I watched as she briskly made her bed. Without turning, she told me to make up my own bed. She looked over my work, pulled a little at the gray blanket to unfurl a wrinkle and tucked in the corners tighter, emphasizing the crispness of the folds. This constant quest for perfection puzzled me. I followed her to the bathroom, where the three sinks were already in use, each with one or two girls vigorously brushing their teeth. The other children eyed me, but their curiosity was gone. We shrugged off our gowns, and I stepped in line behind the other naked girls waiting to enter the massive shower room. Each stood naturally, some yawning. They were used to this strange situation. I didn’t know how to act or where to put my hands as I still hadn’t grown used to the naked lineup. At my home, people didn’t stand naked in a crowd. Everyone had privacy in the bathroom. The door always remained locked. I needed to go number one and make a BM. I peered over my shoulder at the room where the toilets were. I already knew what was there: two toilets with no doors. I wasn’t sure I could go to the bathroom with other people watching me. Several girls emerged from the showers, their bodies slick and dripping wet. Our group was next. There were five showerheads and thick bars of green soap in holders. In an instant, the enormous stall fogged with steam. I wrapped one of the short, thin white towels around my body and tiptoed to the toilets. A girl sat on one of them, wiping herself. I turned to leave. “Look,” she called out. I glanced over my shoulder. Her cheeks indented in a dimpled smile, she held the paper smeared brown with feces. “It’s poop,” she chirped. Unsure what to say, I turned around and scurried to my room, where I finished getting ready for the inspection. Sophie had already dressed. Wielding a white rag, she dusted our dressers, nightstands and lamps, glimpsing now and then at the cloth. “The demonstrator always checks to make sure that everything is clean and that our clothes have no dirt or stains.” I looked down at my overalls and didn’t see any spots or dirt marks. My tennis shoes were creased and a bit scuffed. They were obviously a second-hand pair. Sophie handed me some shoe polish.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  I could not have thought any differently. Once the Betty blitz wound down, we returned to our regular routine and talk of The Magic Lady dwindled. One day, not long after Betty’s death, the other children and I were told after inspection to wait outside our dorm instead of walking to the Commons. We stood for minutes in the crisp, cold air. I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets to stay warm. The demonstrators responsible for our dorm emerged. One of the women walked behind a small boy with reddish-orange hair, her hands on his scrawny shoulders. She smiled widely in an I’m-making-a-point-here way. The boy, whose name I knew to be Santiago, looked toward the ground. “This is a very special day,” the demonstrator said. “Santiago woke up to a dry bed.” She glanced down at him, the exaggerated smile never leaving her face. “When we put our mind to it, we can overcome our bad habits. Good job, Santiago!” His pale cheeks blossomed to a ruddy red. The demonstrator wasn’t finished. “Everyone should know about and celebrate your success.” She brought her hands together, methodically clapping, the loud, hollow, echoic sound breaking the quiet of the morning. Santiago’s head drooped. I wondered why the demonstrator didn’t notice how much she was embarrassing him. “Stand up straight,” the demonstrator said, motioning for us to join her clapping. We clapped long and hard while Santiago remained in his stiff stance, his brown eyes glazed and focused on some distant object. Finally the clapping died down, and the demonstrated patted his shoulder. “Congratulations!” she said. “You’re all excused for breakfast.” As we walked to the Commons, I watched one of the boys elbow Santiago in the ribs. “Yeah, congratulations, dork,” the boy hissed. Some of the other boys overheard this remark, and a dry laughter erupted from the group as they jostled one another, grinning hard as if to prove they were better than Santiago. Several of them had the same problem and lived on a floor dedicated to habitual bedwetters. The stench of urine clotted the air of their hallway like an unwanted badge of their inability to control themselves. While most of the kids who suffered from this problem managed to wake up now and then with dry sheets, Santiago never had until that morning. Because of that he’d become the scapegoat for the other bedwetters’ pent-up humiliation. Santiago had all the strength of a limp noodle and never bothered to defend himself, though he was often physically attacked by bigger boys who grabbed his thin arms and twisted them around his back. His strategy: wait it out. Throughout breakfast and then in the classroom that morning, adults and children continuously came up to Santiago to congratulate him. The boys pumped his hand and said, “Way to go. Good job!” in loud voices. Our first grade teacher Ginny didn’t get caught up in all the hoopla of fussing over poor Santiago.