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.

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But when you find the grey-faced building, rest a moment looking up at it; and if you see a lady cross its shadowy threshold, mark her well. She will walk - as I walked with Diana that day - into a lobby: the lobby is smart-looking, and in it sits a neat, plain, ageless woman behind a desk. When I first went there, this woman was named Miss Hawkins. She was ticking entries in a ledger as we arrived, but looked up when she saw Diana, and gave a smile. When she saw me, the smile grew smaller. She said, ‘Mrs Lethaby, ma’am, how pleasant! Mrs Jex is expecting you in the day-room, I believe.’ Diana nodded, and reached to sign her name upon a sheet. Miss Hawkins glanced again at me. ‘Shall the gentleman be waiting for you, here?’ she said. Diana’s pen moved smoothly on, and she did not raise her eyes. She said: ‘Don’t be tiresome, Hawkins. This is Miss King, my companion.’ Miss Hawkins looked harder at me, then blushed. ‘Well, I’m sure, Mrs Lethaby, I can’t speak for the ladies; but some might consider this a little - irregular.’ ‘We are here,’ answered Diana, screwing the pen together, ‘for the sake of the irregular.’ Then she turned and looked me over, raising a hand to twitch at my necktie, licking the tip of one glove-clad finger to smooth at my brow, and finally plucking the hat from my head and arranging my hair. The hat she left for Miss Hawkins to deal with. Then she put her arm securely through mine, and led me up a flight of stairs into the day-room. This room, like the lobby below it, is grand. I cannot say what colour they have it now; in those days it was panelled in golden damask, and its carpets were of cream, and its sofas blue ... It was decked, in short, in all the colours of my own most handsome self - or, rather, I was decked to match it. This idea, I must confess, was disconcerting; for a second, Diana’s generosity began to seem less of a compliment than I had thought it, posed that morning before the glass. But all performers dress to suit their stages, I recalled. And what a stage was this - and what an audience! There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I lit a cigarette and studied the scene: it was as good a thing to watch, I thought, as any. At length the girl behind the curtain ceased her intermittent fanning and rose. Stepping carefully around the group, she approached the window: it, like my own, opened on to a little balcony, upon which she now stepped, and from which she surveyed, with a mild glance and a yawn, the quiet street beneath. There were not more than twelve yards between us, and we were almost level; but, as I had guessed , I was only another shadow against my own shadowy chamber, and she hadn’t noticed me. 1, for my part, had still not seen her face. The window and curtains framed her beautifully, but the light was all from behind. It streamed through her hair, which seemed curly as a corkscrew, and lent her a kind of flaming nimbus, such as a saint might have in the window of a church; her face, however, was left in darkness. I watched her. When the music stopped, and there was a self-conscious smattering of applause and then a bit of desultory chatter, still she kept her place on the balcony and didn’t look round. At last my cigarette burned down, almost to my fingers, and I cast it into the street below. She caught the gesture: gave a start, then squinted at me, then grew stiff. Her confusion - despite the darkness, I could see from the tips of her ears that she flushed - disconcerted me, till I recollected my gentleman’s costume. She took me for some insolent voyeur! The thought gave me an odd mixture of shame and embarrassment and also, I must confess, pleasure. I took hold of my boater and raised it, politely. ‘G’night, sweetheart,’ I said in a low, lazy tone. It was the kind of thing rough fellows of the street - costers and roadmenders - said to passing ladies all the time. I don’t know why, just then, I thought to copy them. The girl gave another twitch, then opened her mouth as if to make me some rusty reply; at that moment, however, her friend approached the window. She had a hat fixed to her head, and was pulling on her gloves. She said, ‘We must go, Florence’ - the name sounded very romantic, in the half-light. ‘It is time for the children to be put to bed.

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

  1969 Suddenly, a whole new cast of characters was wandering in and out of the office. Rising sales enabled me to hire more and more reps. Most were ex-runners, and eccentrics, as only ex-runners can be. But when it came to selling they were all business. Because they were inspired by what we were trying to do, and because they worked solely on commission (two dollars a pair), they were burning up the roads, hitting every high school and college track meet within a thousand-mile radius, and their extraordinary efforts were boosting our numbers even more. We’d posted $150,000 in sales in 1968, and in 1969 we were on our way to just under $300,000. Though Wallace was still breathing down my neck, hassling me to slow down and moaning about my lack of equity, I decided that Blue Ribbon was doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder. Right before my thirty-first birthday I made the bold move. I quit Portland State and went full-time at my company, paying myself a fairly generous eighteen thousand dollars a year. Above all, I told myself, the best reason for leaving Portland State was that I’d already gotten more out of the school—Penny—than I’d ever hoped. I got something else, too; I just didn’t know it at the time. Nor did I dream how valuable it would prove to be. IN MY LAST week on campus, walking through the halls, I noticed a group of young women standing around an easel. One of them was daubing at a large canvas, and just as I passed I heard her lamenting that she couldn’t afford to take a class on oil painting. I stopped, admired the canvas. “My company could use an artist,” I said. “What?” she said. “My company needs someone to do some advertising. Would you like to make some extra money?” I still didn’t see any bang-for-the-buck in advertising, but I was starting to accept that I could no longer ignore it. The Standard Insurance Company had just run a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, touting Blue Ribbon as one of the dynamic young companies among its clients. The ad featured a photo of Bowerman and me... staring at a shoe. Not as if we were shoe innovators; more as if we’d never seen a shoe before. We looked like morons. It was embarrassing. In some of our ads the model was none other than Johnson. See Johnson rocking a blue tracksuit. See Johnson waving a javelin. When it came to advertising, our approach was primitive and slapdash. We were making it up as we went along, learning on the fly, and it showed. In one ad—for the Tiger marathon flat, I think— we referred to the new fabric as “swooshfiber.” To this day none of us remembers who first came up with the word, or what it meant. But it sounded good.

• From Educated (2018)

  Grandma led me into the bathroom and watched as I washed my hands … My ears burned, my throat felt hot. … “Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said. Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

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

  I matched them shot for shot, helped them finish off several platters of sushi, and generally bonded with them both. At my hotel that night I went to bed thinking, hoping, I’d been paranoid about Kitami. The next morning we all flew to Portland so they could meet the gang at Blue Ribbon. I realized that in my letters to Onitsuka, not to mention my conversations with them, I might have overplayed the grandeur of our “worldwide headquarters.” Sure enough I saw Kitami’s face drop as he walked in. I also saw Mr. Onitsuka looking around, bewildered. I hastened to apologize. “It may look small,” I said, laughing tightly, “but we do a lot of business out of this room!” They looked at the broken windows, the javelin window closer, the wavy plywood room divider. They looked at Woodell in his wheelchair. They felt the walls vibrating from the Pink Bucket jukebox. They looked at each other, dubious. I told myself: Whelp, it’s all over. Sensing my embarrassment, Mr. Onitsuka put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It is... most charming,” he said. On the far wall Woodell had hung a large, handsome map of the United States, and he’d put a red pushpin everywhere we’d sold a pair of Tigers in the last five years. The map was covered with red pushpins. For one merciful moment it diverted attention from our office space. Then Kitami pointed at eastern Montana. “No pins,” he said. “Obviously salesman here not doing job.” DAYS WENT SWOOSHING by. I was trying to build a company and a marriage. Penny and I were learning to live together, learning to meld our personalities and idiosyncrasies, though we agreed that she was the one with all the personality and I was the idiosyncratic one. Therefore it was she who had more to learn. For instance, she was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, trying to solve some problem or construct some plan. I often didn’t hear what she said, and if I did hear I didn’t remember it minutes later. She was learning that I was absentminded, that I would drive to the grocery store and come home empty-handed, without the one item she’d asked me to buy, because all the way there and all the way back I’d been puzzling over the latest bank crisis, or the most recent Onitsuka shipping delay. She was learning that I misplaced everything, especially the important things, like wallets and keys. Bad enough that I couldn’t multitask, but I insisted on trying. I’d often scan the financial pages while eating lunch—and driving. My new black Cougar didn’t remain new for long. As the Mr. Magoo of Oregon, I was forever bumping into trees and poles and other people’s fenders. She was learning that I wasn’t housebroken. I left the toilet seat up, left my clothes where they fell, left food on the counter. I was effectively helpless.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  The more deeply we explore, the more we see that peak turn-ons are not only very similar to other peak experiences, they’re also different. Whereas most peak experiences contain little to be embarrassed about, in peak sex the erotic impulse frequently strays far from our ideals. In the realm of eros all the contradictions and paradoxes of the human drama are played out. One way or another, erotic peaks always reveal secrets about our idiosyncracies, conflicts, and unresolved emotional wounds. More often than not, people fear that if their innermost experiences of arousal are revealed they will be pronounced abnormal. No wonder we discuss such matters, if we do so at all, only when we feel safe and are absolutely certain that we won’t be judged or ridiculed—by others or ourselves. THE SEXUAL EXCITEMENT SURVEYIn the mid-1980s I realized that even though I was learning an incredible amount about the erotic mind in my therapeutic work, my studies were being hampered. For one thing, relatively few clients were as open about their eroticism as Fred and Sabrina. In addition, most clients who did explore their peak experiences were impatient to get back to the problems that had brought them to therapy in the first place. I became keenly aware of both the advantages and the limitations of therapy as a means of investigating eroticism. I was eager to expand my work by studying peak erotic experiences in a totally different way. To that end I created the Sexual Excitement Survey (SES). The survey asks anonymous respondents to write in detail about especially arousing and memorable encounters and fantasies, as well as their ideas about what made these events so thrilling. My challenge would be to analyze the content of their stories and comments and look for recurring themes and patterns. It’s difficult to find people willing to spend at least ninety minutes disclosing the very things they naturally keep to themselves. So I distributed many of the surveys in undergraduate-and graduate-level human sexuality classes, where self-exploration is a part of the learning. Interested students mailed completed surveys directly to me—not to their instructors. Also, a number of professional and social organizations took an interest in this project and invited their members to participate. Whenever I spoke in seminars and workshops, I always mentioned the SES and had a stack of them available.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But when you find the grey-faced building, rest a moment looking up at it; and if you see a lady cross its shadowy threshold, mark her well. She will walk - as I walked with Diana that day - into a lobby: the lobby is smart-looking, and in it sits a neat, plain, ageless woman behind a desk. When I first went there, this woman was named Miss Hawkins. She was ticking entries in a ledger as we arrived, but looked up when she saw Diana, and gave a smile. When she saw me, the smile grew smaller. She said, ‘Mrs Lethaby, ma’am, how pleasant! Mrs Jex is expecting you in the day-room, I believe.’ Diana nodded, and reached to sign her name upon a sheet. Miss Hawkins glanced again at me. ‘Shall the gentleman be waiting for you, here?’ she said. Diana’s pen moved smoothly on, and she did not raise her eyes. She said: ‘Don’t be tiresome, Hawkins. This is Miss King, my companion.’ Miss Hawkins looked harder at me, then blushed. ‘Well, I’m sure, Mrs Lethaby, I can’t speak for the ladies; but some might consider this a little - irregular.’ ‘We are here,’ answered Diana, screwing the pen together, ‘for the sake of the irregular.’ Then she turned and looked me over, raising a hand to twitch at my necktie, licking the tip of one glove-clad finger to smooth at my brow, and finally plucking the hat from my head and arranging my hair. The hat she left for Miss Hawkins to deal with. Then she put her arm securely through mine, and led me up a flight of stairs into the day-room. This room, like the lobby below it, is grand. I cannot say what colour they have it now; in those days it was panelled in golden damask, and its carpets were of cream, and its sofas blue ... It was decked, in short, in all the colours of my own most handsome self - or, rather, I was decked to match it. This idea, I must confess, was disconcerting; for a second, Diana’s generosity began to seem less of a compliment than I had thought it, posed that morning before the glass. But all performers dress to suit their stages, I recalled. And what a stage was this - and what an audience! There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  Whilst I was chaffering for the fruit I wanted, I observed myself followed by a young gentleman, whose rich dress first attracted my notice; for the rest, he had nothing remarkable in his person, except that he was pale, thin-made, and ventured himself upon legs rather of the slenderest. Easy was it to perceive, without seeming to perceive it, that it was me he wanted to be at; and keeping his eyes fixed on me, till he came to the same basket that I stood at, and cheapening, or rather giving the first price asked for the fruit, began his approaches. Now most certainly I was not at all out of figure to pass for a modest girl. I had neither the feathers, nor fumet of a taudry town-miss: a straw hat, a white gown, clean linen, and above all, a certain natural and easy air of modesty (which the appearances of never forsook me, even on those occasions that I most broke in upon it, in practice) were all signs that gave him no opening to conjecture my condition. He spoke to me; and this address from a stranger throwing a blush into my cheeks, that still set him wider of the truth, I answered him, with an awkwardness and confusion the more apt to impose, as there really was a mixture of the genuine in them. But when proceeding, on the foot of having broken the ice, to join discourse, he went into other leading questions, I put so much innocence, simplicity, and even childishness, into my answers, that on no better foundation, liking my person as he did, I will not answer for it, he would have been sworn for my modesty. There is, in short, in the men, when once they are caught, by the eye especially, a fund of cullibility that their lordly wisdom little dreams of, and in virtue of which the most sagacious of them are seen so often our dupes. Amongst other queries he put to me, one was, whether I was married? I replied, that I was too young to think of that this many a year. To that of my age, I answered, and sunk a year upon him, passing myself for not above seventeen. As to my way of life, I told him I had served an apprenticeship to a milliner in Preston, and was come to town after a relation, that I had found, on my arrival, was dead, and now lived journey-woman to a milliner in town. That last article, indeed, was not much of the side of what I pretended to pass for; but it did pass, under favour of the growing passion I had inspired him with. After he had next got out of me, very dexterously as he thought, what I had no sort of design to make reserve of, my own, my mistress’s name, and place of abode, he loaded me with fruit, all the rarest and dearest he could pick out and sent me home, pondering on what might be the consequence of this adventure.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  We must not idealize the past. Every age has its bigots, and there have always been people who were less theologically skilled than others and interpreted the truths of religion in a prosaic, factual manner. When as a young nun I was being especially obtuse, my superior used to tell me that I was “a literal-minded blockhead.” There have always been such. But the theologians who promoted a more apophatic approach to God were not marginal thinkers. The Cappadocians, Denys, and Thomas; the rabbis, the Kabbalists, and Maimonides; al-Ghazzali, Ibn Sina, and Mulla Sadra were all major carriers of tradition. Before the modern period, this was the orthodox position. We now have such a different view of faith that this may be difficult to accept, because it is always hard to transcend the limitations of our own time. We cannot, perhaps, ever become fully aware of our own cultural mood precisely because we are in that mood, and as a result we tend to absolutize it. Today we assume that because we rationalize faith and regard its truths as factual, this is how it was always done. But this involves a double standard. “The past is relativised, in terms of this or that socio-historical analysis. The present, however, remains strangely immune to relativisation,” the American scholar Peter Berger has explained. “The New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.”3 We tend to assume that “modern” means “superior,” and while this is certainly true in such fields as mathematics, science, and technology, it is not necessarily true of the more intuitive disciplines—especially, perhaps, theology.

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

  Did the Japanese count differently? Alarmed, I wondered if thirteen western states might actually mean three? At Station 7 I stopped and bought a Japanese beer and a cup of noodles. While eating my dinner I fell to talking with another couple. They were Americans, younger than me—students, I assumed. He was preppy, in a ridiculous sort of way. Golf slacks and tennis shirt and cloth belt—he was all the colors of an Easter egg. She was pure beatnik. Torn jeans, faded T-shirt, wild dark hair. Her wide-set eyes were brown-black. Like little cups of espresso. Both were sweating from the climb. They mentioned that I wasn’t. I shrugged and said that I’d run track at Oregon. “Half-miler.” The young man scowled. His girlfriend said, “Wow.” We finished our beers and resumed climbing together. Her name was Sarah. She was from Maryland. Horse country, she said. Rich country, I thought. She’d grown up riding, and jumping, and showing, and still spent much of her time in saddles and show rings. She talked about her favorite ponies and horses as if they were her closest friends. I asked about her family. “Daddy owns a candy bar company,” she said. She mentioned the company and I laughed. I’d eaten many of her family’s candy bars, sometimes before a race. The company was founded by her grandfather, she said, though she hastened to add that she had no interest in money. I caught her boyfriend scowling again. She was studying philosophy at Connecticut College for Women. “Not a great school,” she said apologetically. She’d wanted to go to Smith, where her sister was a senior, but she didn’t get in. “You sound as if you haven’t gotten over the rejection,” I said. “Not even close,” she said. “Rejection is never easy,” I said. “You can say that again.” Her voice was peculiar. She pronounced certain words oddly, and I couldn’t decide if it was a Maryland accent or a speech impediment. Whichever, it was adorable. She asked what brought me to Japan. I explained that I’d come to save my shoe company. “Your company ?” she said. Clearly she was thinking about the men in her family, founders of companies, captains of industry. Entrepreneurs. “Yes,” I said, “my company.” “And did you… save it?” she asked. “I did,” I said. “All the boys back home are going to business school,” she said, “and then they all plan to become bankers .” She rolled her eyes, adding: “Everyone does the same thing—so boring.” “Boredom scares me,” I said. “Ah. That’s because you’re a rebel.” I stopped climbing, stabbed my walking stick into the ground. Me—a rebel? My face grew warm. As we neared the summit, the path grew narrow. I mentioned that it reminded me of a trail I’d hiked in the Himalayas. Sarah and the boyfriend stared. Himalayas? Now she was really impressed. And he was really put out. As the summit came slowly into view, the climb became tricky, treacherous.

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

  Portland was still a small town—minuscule, really—and we’d heard through the grapevine that someone had recently bumped into James the Just at his men’s club. The judge was having a martini, moaning about our case. “Dreadful case,” he was saying to the bartender and anyone who’d listen, “perfectly dreadful.” So we knew he didn’t want to be there any more than we did, and he often took out his unhappiness on us, berating us over small points of order and decorum. Still, despite my horrid performance on the stand, Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had a sense that James the Just was inclining toward our side. Something about his demeanor: He was slightly less ogreish to us. On a hunch, therefore, Cousin Houser told the opposing counsel that, if they were still considering our original settlement, forget it, the offer was no longer on the table. That same day, James the Just called a halt to the trial and admonished both sides. He was perturbed, he said, by all he was reading about this case in the local newspapers. He was damned if he was going to preside over a media circus. He ordered us to cease and desist discussing the case outside the courthouse. We nodded. Yes, Your Honor. Johnson sat behind our table, often sending notes to Cousin Houser, and always reading a novel during sidebars and breaks. After court adjourned each day, he’d unwind by taking a stroll around downtown, visiting different sporting goods stores, checking on our sales. (He also did this every time he found himself in a new city.) Early on he reported back that Nikes were selling like crazy, thanks to Bowerman’s waffle trainer. The shoe had just hit the market, and it was sold out everywhere, meaning we were outpacing Onitsuka, even Puma. The shoe was such a hit that we could envision, for the first time, one day approaching Adidas’s sales numbers. Johnson got to talking with one store manager, an old friend, who knew the trial was under way. “How’s it going?” the store manager said. “Going well,” Johnson said. “So well, in fact, we withdrew our settlement offer.” First thing the next morning, as we gathered in the courtroom, each of us sipping our coffee, we noticed an unfamiliar face at the defense table. There were the five lawyers… and one new guy? Johnson turned, saw, and went white. “Oh… shit,” he said. In a frantic whisper he told us that the new guy was the store manager… with whom he’d inadvertently discussed the trial. Now Cousin Houser and Strasser went white. The three of us looked at each other, and looked at Johnson, and in unison we turned and looked at James the Just. He was banging his gavel and clearly about to explode.

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

  Bankers and investors, reps from Nissho, all kinds of people we needed to impress, were passing through our new halls, and whenever they saw Strasser in his Hawaiian shirts, or Hayes in his bulldozer-driving outfits, they did triple-takes. Sometimes our eccentricity was funny. (A top executive at Foot Locker said, “We think of you guys as gods—until we see your cars.”) But most times it was embarrassing. And potentially damaging. Thus, around Thanksgiving, 1978, I instituted a strict company dress code. The reaction wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. Corporate bullshit, many grumbled. I was mocked. Mostly I was ignored. To even a casual observer, it became clear that Strasser started dressing worse. When he showed up to work one day in baggy-seated Bermuda shorts, as if he were walking a Geiger counter down the beach, I couldn’t stand by. This was rank insubordination. I intercepted him in the halls and called him out. “You need to wear a coat and tie!” I said. “We’re not a coat-and-tie company!” he shot back. “We are now.” He walked away from me. In the coming days Strasser continued to dress with a studied, confrontational casualness. So I fined him. I instructed the bookkeeper to deduct seventy-five dollars from Strasser’s next paycheck. He threw a fit, of course. And he plotted. Days later he and Hayes came to work in coats and ties. But preposterous coats and ties. Stripes and plaids, checks with polka dots, all of it rayon and polyester—and burlap? They meant it as a farce, but also as a protest, a gesture of civil disobedience, and I was in no mood for two fashion Gandhis staging a dress-in. I disinvited them both from the next Buttface. Then I ordered them both to go home and not to come back until they could behave, and dress, like adults. “And—you’re fined again!” I yelled at Strasser. “Then you’re fucked!” he yelled back.

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

  This wasn’t a simple matter, however. Mrs. Bowerman, a devout Christian Scientist, didn’t normally allow alcohol in her home. She was making an exception on this special night, but she’d asked me ahead of time to please be sure that everyone behaved and no one overdid it. So, though my wife and I both needed a stiff one, I was forced to make it a small one. Mrs. Bowerman now gathered us all in the living room. “In honor of our distinguished guests,” she announced, “tonight we are serving… mai tais!” Applause. Kitami and I still had at least one thing in common. We both liked mai tais. Very much. Something about them reminded each of us of Hawaii, that wonderful layover between the West Coast and Japan, where you could unwind before going back into the long workdays. Still, he and I stopped at one that evening. Mindful of Mrs. Bowerman, so did everyone else. Everyone but Bowerman. He’d never been much of a drinker, and he’d certainly never tasted a mai tai before, and we all watched in dread and dismay as the drinks took effect. And then some. Something about that tangy combination of curaçao and lime juice, pineapple and rum, hit Bowerman right on the screws. After two mai tais he was a different person. As he tried to fix his third mai tai he bellowed, “We’re out of ice!” No one answered. So he answered himself. “No problem.” He marched out to the garage, to the large meat freezer, and grabbed a bag of frozen blueberries. He tore it open, scattering blueberries everywhere. He then tossed a huge handful of frozen blueberries into his drink. “Tastes better this way,” he announced, returning to the living room. Now he walked around the room, slopping handfuls of frozen blueberries into everyone’s glass. Sitting, he began to tell a story, which seemed in highly questionable taste. It built to a crescendo I feared we’d all remember for years to come. That is, if we could understand the crescendo. Bowerman’s words, normally so crisp, so precise, were growing squishy around the edges. Mrs. Bowerman glared at me. But what could I do? I shrugged my shoulders and thought: You married him. And then I thought: Oh, wait, so did I. Back when the Bowermans attended the 1964 Olympics in Japan, Mrs. Bowerman had fallen in love with nashi pears, which are like small green apples, only sweeter. They don’t grow in the United States, so she smuggled a few seeds home in her purse and planted them in her garden. Every few years, she told Kitami, when the nashis bloomed, they refreshed her love of all things Japanese. He seemed quite beguiled by this story. “Och!” Bowerman said, exasperated. “Japples!” I put a hand over my eyes.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Then I find out about her scene. Isnt that a kick in the pants—I mean, like ain it?... Some people sure like to do it funny.... An that reminds me of something else—a real funny story.... When I was in Frisco once, this guy gave me a ride. You wouldnt believe it unless you saw it, man. Man, that guy, he was dressed up in boots with silver chains wrapped aroun them an a hat with these silver studs, an black gloves—an, dig, he even carried a gunbelt with all kindsa things danglin from it. An all those silver studpins all over everything. Dig this: At his pad he gives me tea! An I don mean pod, either; I mean real tea! Then he shows me this collection hes got—all kindsa weird costumes. An boots!—boots an costumes up the ass. You know what that guy done then? He dresses me up in chaps, boots, everything, an then he goes down on my boots, jes squirmin up a storm on the floor, lickin them cowboy boots an leather chaps, rubbin his face on em. Man, I... Hey! theres Buddy.” Buddy is standing by the water faucet, looking cautiously into the park. Next to him is a skinny, ugly, tough young girl, and I notice a screamingly shiny bracelet on her wrist “Hes lookin out for ole Darlin Dolly,” said Chuck. “You seen Darling Dolly?” said Buddy, coming over. The girl stayed by the faucet “Shes looking for you,” I said, perversely amused at how this put Buddy on. He shakes his head regretfully. “I hocked her dam drag-clothes again. Hell, I had to, I was busted real low....” And he adds, echoing Skipper—Im sure—trying to sound Tough: “Im tired of these small fucking scores, Im gonna knock me over a big one. A liquor store—or a bank!” It sounds almost ludicrous; he looks like a little boy.... And yet others like him would shoot into the frontpage unexpectedly: and one day a picture of a familiar face—the lost-boy look coming through the rehearsed tough-mug look—would greet you from the stacks of newspapers at the corner. “Not me,” says Chuck. “Too much hassle.” “I sure would hate ole Darling Dolly making a scene right here,” said Buddy, “and she told me she would. She means it, too. She said she’d start screaming at me wherever she saw me. And that sure would embarrass me.... Hell, I aint gonna hang around queens any more.... The only reason Im here is: Im looking for this score that digs watching me make out with a chick.” He indicates the girl still standing by the faucet “Oh, oh,” he said, moving away. “I think I see Darling Dolly over there.” With the girl, he dodged hurriedly through the crowds. “That chick hes with,” said Chuck, “man, I got the crabs jes standing next to her once.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  When hes real happy, he lays ten.” He shook his head regretfully. “But we can come again, and if youre cool we’ll score more. Why—didnya—call—him—Mom?” A week later, alone, I ran into the same man. This time he knew me and he came and talked to me. “Do you have a young friend whod like to come up and have dinner with us?” he asked me. “I havent seen Petey-boy here today,” he said, glancing around for him. “If you find another nice youngman, we’ll have a lovely dinner, and youll each be $10.00 richer.” “Ten?” I said. “Why, child,” he said somewhat indignantly, “I always give ten.” From my expression, he understood what had happened. “That Pete!” he said, and I thought he was going to stamp his foot. “Hes done it to me again. Why, I bet he only gave you five.” I felt embarrassed to admit I’d been taken, and I said, no, he’d given me ten. “Well, Im relieved!” the man said. “Hes done that before, you know—gives his young friend only five, and keeps fifteen. But what can I do? It embarrasses me so, when Ive first met a youngman, to give him the money. I dont really know what to do.” Then he smiles Tolerantly. “But Petey is a lovely youngman—only—only—” He frowns slightly. “—only I wish he wouldnt call me Mom.” When I saw Pete again, one night in Bryant Park, I mentioned the money to him. He looked at his feet, pretending—I was sure he was pretending—embarrassment. “You gotta learn not to trust no one too much,” he mumbled. Then he reached for his wallet, brought out three dollars. “Thats all I got now,” he said, sighing (“What Am I Going To Do Now?!”). “Here, take em,” he said. I did, and he stared at me in surprise. “Youre learning, spote,” he said. A few days later I got even with him. I told him I knew a girl who wanted to be a stripper. I had met her not too long ago in the lobby of an apartment house I had just scored in. Her name was Flip, and she asked me to come up with her—just like that She shows me sexy pictures of herself, turning me on. She was very pretty, very young. To the groaning sounds of “Night Train” she began to do a strip—then stopped coquettishly; tells me poutingly shes sorry, she cant go all the way: “You see, zoll—” (Thats how she said doll.) “—little Flip’s got the mean rag on.” Suddenly I realized without doubt that Flip was a man. She was the first dragqueen I had ever been with. I didnt let her know I had found out, and she went ahead and did what she told me she liked anyway.... When it was over, she says: “If you know any other cute zolls, tell them about me. Im always Ready, zoll.”

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

  NIGHT W e love going to the movies. We always have. But tonight we have a dilemma. We’ve seen all the violent movies, which Penny likes best, so we’re going to have to venture outside our comfort zone, try something different. A comedy, maybe. I leaf through the paper. “How about The Bucket List —at the Century? Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman?” She frowns: I guess. It’s Christmastime, 2007. THE BUCKET LIST turns out to be anything but a comedy. It’s a movie about mortality. Two men, Nicholson and Freeman, both terminally ill with cancer, decide to spend their remaining days doing all the fun things, the crazy things, they’ve always wanted to do, to make the most of their time before they kick the bucket. An hour into the movie, there’s not a chuckle to be had. There are also many strange, unsettling parallels between the movie and my life. First, Nicholson always makes me think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , which makes me think of Kesey, which takes me back to my days at the University of Oregon. Second, high on the bucket list of Nicholson’s character is seeing the Himalayas, which transports me to Nepal. Above all, Nicholson’s character employs a personal assistant—a sort of surrogate son—named Matthew. He even looks a bit like my son. Same scruffy goatee. When the movie ends, when the lights come up, Penny and I are both relieved to stand and return to the bright glare of real life. The theater is a new sixteen-screen colossus in the heart of Cathedral City, just outside Palm Springs. These days we spend much of the winter there, hiding from the chilly Oregon rains. Walking through the lobby, waiting for our eyes to adjust, we spot two familiar faces. At first we can’t place them. We’re still seeing Nicholson and Freeman in our minds. But these faces are equally familiar—equally famous. Now we realize. It’s Bill and Warren. Gates and Buffett. We stroll over. Neither man is what you’d call a close friend, but we’ve met them several times, at social events and conferences. And we have common causes, common interests, a few mutual acquaintances. “Fancy meeting you here!” I say. Then I cringe. Did I really just say that? Is it possible that I’m still shy and awkward in the presence of celebrities? “I was just thinking about you,” one of them says. We shake hands, all around, and talk mostly about Palm Springs. Isn’t this place lovely? Isn’t it wonderful to get out of the cold? We talk about families, business, sports. I hear someone behind us whisper, “Hey, look, Buffett and Gates—who’s that other guy?” I smile. As it should be. In my head I can’t help doing some quick math. At the moment I’m worth $10 billion, and each of these men is worth five or six times more. Lead me from the unreal to the real. Penny asks if they enjoyed the movie.

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

  When we weren’t touring factories, Gorman and I were being feted by factory owners. They stuffed us with local delicacies, some of which were actually cooked, and plied us with something called a Mao tai, which was a mai tai, but apparently with shoe cream instead of rum. Jet-lagged, Gorman and I both had lost our tolerance. After two Mao tais we were potted. We tried to slow down, but our hosts kept raising their glasses. To Nike! To America! At the final dinner of our Taichung visit Gorman repeatedly excused himself and ran to the men’s room, to splash cold water on his face. Every time he left the table I got rid of my Mao tai by pouring it into his water glass. Each time he returned from the men’s room there was another toast, and Gorman thought he was playing it safe by raising his water glass. To our American friends! To our Taiwanese friends! After another huge gulp of spiked water, Gorman looked at me, panic-stricken. “I think I’m going to pass out,” he said. “Have some more water,” I said. “Tastes funny.” “Nah.” Despite offloading my booze onto Gorman, I was woozy when I got back to my room. I had trouble getting ready for bed. I had trouble finding the bed. I fell asleep while brushing my teeth. Midbrush. I woke sometime later and tried to find my extra contact lenses. I found them. Then dropped them on the floor. There was a knock. Gorman. He walked in and asked me something about our next day’s itinerary. He found me on my hands and knees, searching for my contact lenses in a pool of my own sick. “Phil, you okay?” “Follow your mentor’s lead,” I mumbled. THAT MORNING WE flew to Taipei, the capital, and toured a couple more factories. In the evening we strolled Xinsheng South Road, with its dozens of shrines and temples, churches and mosques. The Road to Heaven, locals called it. Indeed, I told Gorman, Xinsheng means “New Life.” When we returned to our hotel I got a strange and unexpected phone call. Jerry Hsieh—pronounced Shay—was “paying his respects.” I’d met Hsieh before. In one of the shoe factories I’d visited the year before. He was working for Mitsubishi and the great Jonas Senter. He’d impressed me with his intensity and work ethic. And youth. Unlike all the other shoe dogs I’d met, he was young, twentysomething, and looked much younger. Like an overgrown toddler. He said he’d heard we were in the country. Then, like a CIA operative, he added: “I know why you are here…” He invited us to visit him in his office, an invitation that seemed to indicate he was now working for himself, not Mitsubishi.

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

  In Japan you couldn’t predict what either your competition or your partner might do. I’d given up trying. Instead, I wrote, “I’ve taken what I think is a big step to keep us informed. I’ve hired a spy. He works full-time in the Onitsuka Export Department. Without going into a lengthy discussion of why I will just tell you that I feel he is trustworthy. “This spy may seem somewhat unethical to you, but the spy system is ingrained and completely accepted in Japanese business circles. They actually have schools for industrial spies, much as we have schools for typists and stenographers.” I can’t imagine what made me use the word “spy” so wantonly, so boldly, other than the fact that James Bond was all the rage just then. Nor can I understand why, when I was revealing so much, I didn’t reveal the spy’s name. It was Fujimoto, whose bicycle I’d replaced. I think I must have known, on some level, that the memo was a mistake, a terribly stupid thing to do. And that I would live to regret it. I think I knew. But I often found myself as perplexing as Japanese business practices. KITAMI AND MR. Onitsuka both attended the Games in Mexico City, and afterward they both flew to Los Angeles. I flew down from Oregon to meet them for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Santa Monica. I was late, of course, and by the time I arrived they were full of sake. Like schoolboys on holiday: Each was wearing a souvenir sombrero, loudly woohooing. I tried hard to mirror their festive mood. I matched them shot for shot, helped them finish off several platters of sushi, and generally bonded with them both. At my hotel that night I went to bed thinking, hoping, I’d been paranoid about Kitami. The next morning we all flew to Portland so they could meet the gang at Blue Ribbon. I realized that in my letters to Onitsuka, not to mention my conversations with them, I might have overplayed the grandeur of our “worldwide headquarters.” Sure enough I saw Kitami’s face drop as he walked in. I also saw Mr. Onitsuka looking around, bewildered. I hastened to apologize. “It may look small,” I said, laughing tightly, “but we do a lot of business out of this room!” They looked at the broken windows, the javelin window closer, the wavy plywood room divider. They looked at Woodell in his wheelchair. They felt the walls vibrating from the Pink Bucket jukebox. They looked at each other, dubious. I told myself: Whelp, it’s all over. Sensing my embarrassment, Mr. Onitsuka put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It is… most charming,” he said. On the far wall Woodell had hung a large, handsome map of the United States, and he’d put a red pushpin everywhere we’d sold a pair of Tigers in the last five years. The map was covered with red pushpins.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  A bloke goes for the teeth.’ When the house wasn’t being shivered to its foundations by the thud of Janet’s footsteps on the stairs, it was trembling to the arguments and the laughter of Florence’s girl-friends, who came by regularly to bring books and pamphlets and bits of gossip, and to take tea. I thought them a very quaint breed, these girls. They all worked; but, like Annie Page, the sanitary inspector, not one of them had a dull, straightforward kind of job - making felt hats, or dressing feathers, or serving in a shop. Instead they all worked for charities or in homes: they all had lists of cripples, or immigrants, or orphaned girls, whom it was their continual ambition to set up in jobs, houses, and friendly societies. Every story they told began the same: ‘I had a girl come into the office today...’ ‘I had a girl come into the office today, fresh from gaol, and her mother has taken her baby and disappeared with it ...’ ‘I had a poor woman come into the office today: she was brought over from India as a maid, and now the family won’t pay her passage back ...’ ‘There was a woman come in today: she has been ruined by a gent, and the gent has given her such a thump she -’ This particular story, however, never got finished: the girl who was telling it caught sight of me, perched on an armchair at Florence’s elbow; then she flushed pink, and put her cup to her lips, and turned the subject. They had all had my history-my pretend history - from Florence herself. When they weren’t blushing into their tea-cups over it, they were taking me aside to ask me, privately, Was I quite well now? and to recommend some man who would prove helpful if I thought to take my case to court, or else some vegetable treatment that would ease the bruising at my cheek ... All of Ralph and Florence’s circle, in fact, were quite sickeningly kind and earnest and conscientious over matters like this. As I could not help but find out very early on, the Banners were big in the local labour movement - they always had some desperate project on hand, some plan to get a parliamentary act passed or opposed; the parlour, as a consequence, was always full of people holding emergency meetings or dreary debates. Ralph was a cutter in a silk factory, and secretary of the silk workers’ union. Florence - as well as working at the Stratford girls’ home, Freemantle House - volunteered for a thing called the Women’s Cooperative Guild: it was Guild work (not lists, as I had imagined, of friendless girls) which had kept her up so late on the night of my arrival at her home - and which, indeed, kept her up late on many subsequent nights, balancing budgets and writing letters.

• From Educated (2018)

  I was worried: Dad’s expectations were so high, and Richard’s fear of disappointing him so intense, it seemed possible that Richard might not take the ACT at all. —THE SHOP IN FRANKLIN was ready to roof, so two days after Christmas I forced my toe, still crooked and black, into a steel-toed boot, then spent the morning on a roof driving threading screws into galvanized tin. It was late afternoon when Shawn dropped his screw gun and shimmied down the loader’s extended boom. “Time for a break, Siddle Liss,” he shouted up from the ground. “Let’s go into town.” I hopped onto the pallet and Shawn dropped the boom to the ground. “You drive,” he said, then he leaned his seat back and closed his eyes. I headed for Stokes. I remember strange details about the moment we pulled into the parking lot—the smell of oil floating up from our leather gloves, the sandpaper feel of dust on my fingertips. And Shawn, grinning at me from the passenger seat. Through the city of cars I spy one, a red jeep. Charles. I pass through the main lot and turn into the open asphalt on the north side of the store, where employees park. I pull down the visor to evaluate myself, noting the tangle the windy roof has made of my hair, and the grease from the tin that has lodged in my pores, making them fat and brown. My clothes are heavy with dirt. Shawn sees the red jeep. He watches me lick my thumb and scrub dirt from my face, and he becomes excited. “Let’s go!” he says. “I’ll wait in the car.” “You’re coming in,” Shawn says. Shawn can smell shame. He knows that Charles has never seen me like this—that every day all last summer, I rushed home and removed every stain, every smudge, hiding cuts and calluses beneath new clothes and makeup. A hundred times Shawn has seen me emerge from the bathroom unrecognizable, having washed the junkyard down the shower drain. “You’re coming in,” Shawn says again. He walks around the car and opens my door. The movement is old-fashioned, vaguely chivalrous. “I don’t want to,” I say. “Don’t want your boyfriend to see you looking so glamorous?” He smiles and jabs me with his finger. He is looking at me strangely, as if to say, This is who you are. You’ve been pretending that you’re someone else. Someone better. But you are just this. He begins to laugh, loudly, wildly, as if something funny has happened but nothing has. Still laughing, he grabs my arm and draws it upward, as if he’s going to throw me over his back and carry me in fireman-style. I don’t want Charles to see that so I end the game. I say, flatly, “Don’t touch me.” What happens next is a blur in my memory.