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 63 of 79 · 20 per page

• From The Art of Memoir

  he said. The thought of him eying those raw, unfiltered pages embarrassed me. Few opinions mattered more than his—he was brilliant, ruthless, and didn’t truck in flattery. And he liked what I’d set down. He was one of the many fine writers—including all my teachers—telling me the pages came alive when I wrote in first person. It somehow felt small or weak or whiny to me. Still, at his urging and reurging, I took the pages and started to cannibalize them for lines and language and tone. Out came a few elegies and other poems both lyric and narrative, along with some hunks of prose that would wind up in Liars’ Club. Here’s one excerpt about my old man. It’s better than anything I’d done before. But it still sounded so emotionally bald that I only sent it out to a magazine at my husband’s urging. I tell the only truth I know: that I am helpless and sorry you’re dying, that this planet will weigh no less when you are ash. . . . and if, as Buddha says, life and death are illusory I will be fooled and suffer your absence, and somewhere you’ll always be rising from your oxygen tent, a modern Lazarus, or snapping open a Lone Star beer, or simply, too tired to talk, scraping mud from your black work boots onto the porch. The great Latin rhetoricians advised orators that funeral speeches should be unadorned, free of flowery similes without a lot of embroidery, but at the time these words—which don’t seem so awful now—seemed shamefully simple, hardly the stuff of capital-L Literature. Plus I had more posturing to do. The next line has Wittgenstein in it—dragged in, as Etheridge might have said, kicking and screaming. And if, as Wittgenstein thinks, problems are grammatical, I confess I find no syntax to pull nails from a coffin . . .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [80] The Council of Trent likewise did better than the disunited Protestants in establishing a uniform standard to define what a marriage might be, through one of its last decisions in 1563, the decree Tametsi (‘Although’). This laid down stringent conditions on valid marriage: now it must demonstrate a declaration of consent in front of a clergyman together with two witnesses, thus drastically simplifying the complicated possibilities of couples privately exchanging vows either with immediate or future intentions. Protestant England only caught up with Tametsi in 1753 when Parliament passed Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which, in its definitions, gave the established Church of England similar power over marriage, despite the existence of significant minority populations of both Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. Also significant and in accordance with the Gregorian revolution was the explicit stipulation of Tametsi that a marriage must be sexually consummated, so that the couple became ‘one flesh’. This was honouring the Pauline principle of the ‘marital debt’: one standard work of advice published in 1609 by one of the leading Counter-Reformation spiritual directors, Bishop François de Sales, further advised that a couple were entitled to pay this crucial sexual debt to each other the night before or even on the morning of receiving the Eucharist. Henry Dodwell, a theological writer adapting de Sales’s work for the Protestant Churches of England and Ireland in 1673, clearly found this permission embarrassing, so left it out of his English translation. [81] Above all, just as in Reformed Protestant Scotland, Tametsi did not make parental consent a requirement for marriage. This restated a standard Western canon law principle that had never pleased those seeing marriage as a dynastic transaction, and it emphatically did not please the very Catholic King of France, who refused to implement the Decrees of the Council perhaps because of this issue; on his own authority he restored the requirement for parental consent for valid marriages within his realm. [82] Few conciliar decisions met with immediate or universal observance in Catholic countries, but generally the close regulation of marriage through Tametsi suited secular rulers, particularly in Spain, where the authorities were alarmed at a perceptible decline in peninsular population. [83] Equally well-disposed to greater definition of marriage in Church courts were those seeking legal ways out of it via the annulment process. In Venice in the century after Tametsi, the principal ecclesiastical court was hearing around one request for separation every month, and around four petitions for outright annulment every year. This provoked the Republic’s Council of Ten (always jealous of independent Church authority) into increasing scrutiny of cases in the court, to correct what they regarded as its excessive lenience towards disobedient wives intent on humiliating husbands and winning back their dowries. [84] Part of the shared regulation of marriage was the successful cross-confessional curbing of medieval lay assumptions that a marriage started when the couple consented in ‘espousal’, with a wedding in church as an optional extra.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Lemme see that.” His thumb pad pressed around the bruise, testing it for tenderness. “Hell, you’ll be all right.” My eyes burned. I wanted to rest a minute with only Daddy keeping me suspended in the world, the way his big wide palms had when I’d learned to backfloat at the town pool. That’s how I felt listening, buoyed up in my own tiredness by Daddy’s presence. I fell dead asleep lying in his ghost lap. Moving too fast through the folders had one other side effect even worse than Big Bertha clocking me. The principal wanted to talk to Mother about my skipping another grade. The principal’s name was Mr. Janisch, and other than the fact that the kids called him Janbo, I remember not one distinct feature of his. He was a looming blur in a light-blue three-button suit and striped tie. Mother flounced toward him, holding out her hand. She wore her sheared-beaver coat. Gordon escorted her in. He was one of the barflies she paid in drinks to drive us to and from what she called the three poles of our being (school, bar, home). He steered her by the elbow from Mr. Janisch’s desk to the brown Naugahyde armchair in the corner. Gordon’s being there embarrassed me. He had white girly hands. His skin was a mass of acne pits and scarring. Some poet wrote once about “the young man carbuncular,” and that was Gordon. That day, he wore rumpled camouflage fatigues with black combat boots. Mr. Janisch asked about Gordon’s branch of military service. Old Gordon just ducked his head in fake modesty and lied through his beaver-like front teeth that that was a matter of national security. I knew for a stone fact that Gordon had been 4-F during Korea for something, being flat-footed or somehow nutty. Gordon’s whole military act was made extra pathetic by the fact that he had a big, soft ass like a woman’s. He tried to hide this by wearing his shirt pulled out, but that was the equivalent of wearing an I-have-a-fat-butt sign. In short, he was pompous and soft at once, and even having Mother explain that he was our chauffeur made me wince. No sooner was Mother seated than Gordon lit her cigarette with a butane lighter that sent up a flame about a foot high. He pocketed the lighter, then leaned his butt against the window ledge and opened a magazine he’d brought along, the cover of which showed a cartoon Nazi, skinny and with a long ferret-like nose, squinting his eye to hold a monocle in place. This Nazi was pinning back the arms of a large-breasted blonde dressed in a shredded nurse outfit. The intensity Gordon brought to studying this magazine made me feel even worse than the fact that Mr. Janisch could see the sleazy cover. I guess I concentrated so hard on Gordon that day, because I almost couldn’t bear to look at Mother.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "She stopped, turned her back upon her companions, lifted up her dress far above her knee, and displayed a very pretty though rather thin leg incased in a close-fitting, black silk stocking. The string which attached the stocking to her unmentionables had got undone, and she began to tie it. "By bending low I might quietly have peeped between her legs, and seen what the slit of her pantaloons afforded to the view; but it never came into my head to do so. The fact is, I had really never cared for her or for any other woman. I only thought now is my time to find her alone and to bow to her, without having all the other girls to giggle at me. So I quietly got out of my hiding-place, and advanced towards the next alley. "As I turned the corner, what a sight did I see! There was the object of my sentimental admiration, squatted on the ground, her legs widely opened apart, her skirts all carefully tucked up." "So at last you saw——" "A faint glimpse of pinkish flesh, and a stream of yellow liquid pouring down and flowing on the gravel, bubbling with much froth, accompanied by the rushing sound of many waters, whilst, as if to greet my appearance, a rumbling noise like that of an unctuous cannonade came from behind." "And what did you do?" "Don't you know we always do the things which ought not to be done, and leave undone the things which ought to be done, as I think the Prayer Book says? So, instead of slipping away unperceived, and hiding behind a bush to try and have a glimpse at the mouth from which the rill escaped, I foolishly remained stock still—speechless, dumbfoundered. It was only when she lifted up her eyes that I recovered the use of my tongue. "'Oh, mademoiselle! pardon!' said I; 'but really I did not know that you were here—that is to say that——' "'Sot—stupide—imbecile—bête—animal!" quoth she, with quite a French volubility, rising and getting as red as a peony. Then she turned her back upon me, but only to face the wandering old maid, who appeared at the other end of the avenue, and who greeted her with a prolonged 'Oh!' that sounded like the blast of a fog-trumpet." "And——" "And the only love I ever had for a woman thus came to an end." CHAPTER III"THEN you had never loved before you made Teleny's acquaintance?" "Never; that is the reason why—for some time—I did not quite understand what I felt. Thinking it over, however, I afterwards came to the conclusion that I had felt the first faint stimulus of love already long before, but as it had always been with my own sex, I was unconscious that this was love." "Was it for some boy of your age?"

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Mother wiggled out of her long-line girdle, which immediately shrank up with a dull snapping noise at her ankles. Why she wore that thing I don’t know, because she hated a girdle in summer like nothing else and sure didn’t need it. The diamond-shaped control panel left a mean imprint on her belly, where there was also a slanty scar from when I’d been born. (I had been a difficult birth, feet first, like Caesar , Mother liked to say.) She stepped into the steamy water with a grace she must have learned modeling for life study classes during art school in the forties, all flowing lines and violin curves. I was sitting on the toilet waiting for my own bath and fiddling with one of Grandma’s hair clamps. Grandma had cocked her hip out and leaned it against the bathroom sink while she crimped her lead-colored hair. She used these steel clamps with little teeth that made deep marks on my index finger as I played with them. Grandma had told Lecia to rinse out Mother’s stockings in the sink, but Lecia was idly playing at fitting her arm inside one and peeling it off like a snakeskin. So Grandma kept cutting her a look as if to say, Get on with it. Every now and then, from my spot on the toilet, I’d lean out and try to snatch the other stocking away from Lecia, but she was way too fast. “You can’t keep raising these children like heathens, Charlie Marie. The little one can’t even tie yet.” I don’t remember making any defense of my shoe-tying disability. I just stood up from the toilet, pulling up my white underpants, which had little red apples printed all over them. Lecia had learned to tie at three. Grandma had even taught her how to tat lace by the time she was five. (Tatting is an insane activity that involves an eensy shuttle, thin silk thread, and maniacal patience. Belgian nuns are famous for tatting, it turns out.) Lecia had immediately generated half a dozen doilies, which Grandma had draped over worn spots on the sofa. In my hands, even the simple Jacob’s ladder that any kid in Vacation Bible School could make went all tangled. No matter how many times I was shown, my brain refused to hold on to the pathways necessary to tying a shoe bow. I was thought not so much boneheaded as stubborn on this point. Mother lay soaking in the tub with a mint-green washcloth over her face. Her mouth made a dark spot in the terry cloth as she breathed. I always associate my grandmother’s house with Mother’s silence and the old woman’s endless bossy prattle. “Now this here is Crisco,” she said, cold-creaming her face. “You should never let anybody sell you anything else. They squeeze a couple of eye-droppers of perfume in it, and Charlie Marie will buy a tablespoon for a dollar. She just wants to throw money away!

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The landlady, Mrs. Jones, waited on us to our apartment, and with great volubility of tongue, explained to us all its conveniences: “that her own maid should wait on us... that the best of quality had lodged at her house... that her first floor was let to a foreign secretary of an embassy, and his lady... that I looked like a very good natured lady...” At the word lady, I blushed out of flattered vanity: this was strong for a girl of my condition; for though Charles had the precaution of dressing me in a less tawdry flaunting style than were the clothes I escaped to him in, and of passing me for his wife, that she had secretly married, and kept private (the old story) on account of his friends, I dare swear this appeared extremely apocryphal to a woman who knew the town so well as she did; but that was the least of her concern: it was impossible to be less scruple-ridden than she was; and the advantage of letting her rooms being her sole object, the truth itself would have far from scandalized her, or broke her bargain. A sketch of her picture, and personal history, will dispose you to account for the part she is to act in my concern.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I’ve wanted this moment, thought about it for a week, but staying put takes effort. The sun is so bright that it stings, a warning heat. My eyelid is spasming wildly now. It was nice to meet you, I manage. Maybe I’ll see you around. She nods, still smiling. Thanks again, she says. She’s already pivoting on her heel, back to her client. I turn fast, hoping she hasn’t seen whatever my eyelid is doing, what my whole face must be doing. I aim myself at the bus stop and start moving, who am I? who am I? who am I?, all the way down the street. When I get there, I’ve missed the bus, and the next won’t come for fifteen minutes. I rest my tote bag between my ankles and lean my shoulder against the steel frame of the bus shelter, hoping to steady the twitch in my gut. There’s a crowd of homeless men in front of the building across the street, their backs against its stone facade. I wonder if the stone feels cool in this heat. They must have been out here all day, while we sat in air conditioning. While I am forming this thought, Nora walks past them. She’s slung her jacket over her shoulder, and a soft-sided briefcase hangs at her hip. She lowers herself onto an empty bench at the bus stop opposite mine. Her hair looks stringy with sweat, and there’s a shadow under her eyes. She hasn’t noticed me. I don’t know what I’d do if she did. I look at the pavement. My bus arrives. In case Nora has seen me, I make a show of my eagerness to leave, my detachment from the past week. I lock my eyes onto the bus door as it passes me, swivel my head extravagantly to follow it to the curb. I am a stage actor in a play about a bus stop. I step up through the folding doors and take the first open seat on the street side, where I can still see her. She’s put in her earbuds now, leans forward, lets her hair hang. The bus lurches away from the sidewalk, and I watch her get smaller and smaller, until she disappears into the glare. I could have yelled to Nora when I saw her. I could have caught her eye. Or she could have seen me, yelled to me across the street. There’s a poem by Wisława Szymborska, “Could Have,” about chance, fortune, and the flukes that often decide life and death. It begins, “It could have happened. / It had to happen. / It happened earlier. Later. / Nearer. Farther off. / It happened, but not to you.”1 In another iteration, I could have lived it differently. In some other life, I could have stood next to her in a photo.

• From The Art of Memoir

  guitarist and music producer whose nickname back then was Little Hendrix—that he might make a cameo in a book about our teen years, he asked, Could I please not mention all the pot we’d smoked as kids? I looked at him, with his mass of hair and slim-fit jeans and boots, and asked him who he thought he was fooling. In my experience, young writers may stumble early on by misunderstanding the basic nature of their talents. We want to be who we’re not. The badass wants to be a saint, the saint a slut, the slut an intellectual in pince-nez glasses. My Syracuse colleague George Saunders murdered himself in grad school trying to sound like gritty, working-class minimalist Ray Carver. Ray was a lumbering trailer-park aficionado who favored stark realism using the fewest words, so George showed up driving a beater pickup and sporting a cowboy hat. Forget that he was actually a handsome surfer-looking guy, son of a successful businessman, prom king in his high school. Plus the nature of his talent—which produced for us fantastic talking foxes and cavemen in museum tableaux and masks that permit babies to speak—stands worlds away from Carver’s. George’s surreal situations grow more from the mode of, say, Isaac Babel or Nikolai Gogol. George trying to be Ray Carver would be like Gabriel García Márquez trying to be Hemingway. One of George’s teachers kept trying to steer him back to his humor pieces, which George found “too goofy”: “They were just stupid jokes I put in, messing around.” But eventually, as he got older, the satirical stuff started to make its way onto the page. Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it. In fact, usually it growls like a beast and stinks of something rotten. Age and practice help you to rout out vanities after you’ve ruined perfectly good paper setting them down, but you can’t keep them from clotting up early drafts. And every memoirist I know has a comparable story. I have dozens. Even this book tricked me. You’d think—after three memoirs and thirty years of teaching—I’d have inoculated myself against posing as somebody other than this damn self I’m stuck with.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She looked as if she would devour me with her eyes, staring at me from head to foot, without the least regard to the confusion and blushes her eyeing me so fixedly put me to, and which were to her, no doubt, the strongest recommendation and marks of my being fit for her purpose. After a little time, in which my air, person and whole figure had undergone a strict examination, which I had, on my part, tried to render favourable to me, by primming, drawing up my neck, and setting my best looks, she advanced and spoke to me with the greatest demureness: “Sweet-heart, do you want a place? “Yes, and please you,” (with a curtsey down to the ground). Upon this she acquainted me she was actually come to the office herself, to look out for a servant; that she believed I might do, with a little of her instruction; that she could take my very looks for a sufficient character; that London was a very wicked, vile, place; that she hoped I would be tractable, and keep out of bad company; in short, she said all to me that an old experienced practitioner in town could think of, and which was much more than was necessary to take in an artless inexperienced country maid, who was even afraid of becoming a wanderer about the streets, and therefore gladly jumped at the first offer of a shelter, especially from so grave and matron-like a lady, for such my flattering fancy assured me this new mistress of mine was, I being actually hired under the nose of the good woman that kept the office, whose shrewed smiles and shrugs I could not help observing, and innocently interpreted them as marks of being pleased at my getting into place so soon: but, as I afterwards came to know, these Beldams understood one another very well, and this was a market where Mrs. Brown, my mistress, frequently attended, on the watch for any fresh goods that might offer there, for the use of her customers, and her own profit.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Well, you see I was predisposed to love men and not women, and without knowing it I had always struggled against the inclinations of my nature. It is true that several times I thought I had already been in love, still it was only upon knowing Teleny that I understood what real love was. Like all boys I had believed myself bound to feel spoony, and I had done my best to persuade myself that I was deeply smitten. Having once casually come across a young girl with laughing eyes, I had concluded that she was just what an ideal Dulcinea ought to be; I therefore followed her about, every time I met her, and sometimes even tried to think of her at odd moments, when I had nothing to do." "And how did the affair end?" "In a most ridiculous way. The thing happened I think, about a year or two before I left the Lycée; yes, I remember, it was during the midsummer holidays, and the very first time I had ever travelled alone. "Being of a rather shy disposition, I was somewhat flurried and nervous at having to elbow my way through the crowd, to hurry and push about to get my ticket, to take care so as not to get into a train going in the wrong direction. "The upshot of all this was that, before being thoroughly aware of it, I found myself seated in front of the girl I believed myself in love with, and moreover in a carriage reserved for the fair sex. "Unfortunately, in the same carriage there was a creature who surely could not go under that denomination; for, although I cannot swear as to her sex, I can take my oath she was not fair. In fact, as far as I can remember her, she was a real specimen of the wandering English old maid, clad in a waterproof coat something like an ulster. One of those heterogenous creatures continually met with on the Continent, and I think everywhere else except in England; for I have come to the conclusion that Great Britain manufactures them especially for exportation. Anyhow, I had hardly taken my place, when— "'Monseer,' says she, in a snarling, barking way, 'cette compartement est reserved for dames soules.' "I suppose she meant 'seules,' but at that moment, confused as I was, I took her at her word. "'Dames soules!'—'drunken ladies!' said I, terrified, looking around at all the ladies. "My neighbours began to titter. "'Madame says that this carriage is reserved for ladies,' added the mother of my girl, 'of course a young man is not—well, not expected to smoke here, but—' "'Oh! if that is the only objection I certainly shall not allow myself to smoke.' "'No, no!' said the old maid evidently much shocked, 'vous exit, go out, ou moi crier!' 'Garde,' she shouted out of the window, 'faites go out cette monseer!'

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  She’d become the picture of somebody nuts. For one thing, she’d tried to dye her hair red that fall, but wound up with a substance less hair than pelt. It was the overall color and texture of dried alfalfa. For another, she hadn’t bothered actually dressing for the meeting. She’d just stepped bare-legged into her cowboy boots, smushed some muddy lipstick on her mouth, and thrown that fur coat on over her peach silk nightgown. But the scalloped hem of the gown kept peeking out her coat bottom whenever she crossed her legs, and it seemed to me she crossed her legs a lot that morning. Maybe she was trying to show her legs off to old Janbo, a man on whom good legs might well have been lost. He just rocked back and forth in his office chair, nodding politely over the vast green expanse of his desk blotter. I tried to keep a stiff smile welded on my face the whole time, even when Mother invited him and his wife down to the bar for drinks on the house any afternoon. She called the Longhorn “a family place.” She bragged that her own “brilliant” daughters—she smoothed my hair at this point—sat studying at a cocktail table, while the jukebox played classical music. I distinctly recall ducking my head out from under her hand. (Something about the small betrayal of moving away from her still gives me a stab of guilt.) I knew that old Janbo knew that the Longhorn was a sleazeball dive, and I didn’t want to sully myself any worse by seeming to back up such an obvious lie. Lecia and I did go to the bar after school. But instead of homework we played this electric game, a mix of shuffleboard and bowling, where you slid a hockey puck down a long glossy lane to whack up some bowling pins. Or else we sat at the bar sipping cherry Cokes and learning bar tricks. I knew how to build a house of playing cards, and could throw dice from a cup so they came up nothing but sevens. I could also follow the slick moves of a shell game (I was still too clumsy to execute them myself), or fold a bar towel so it resembled a huge erect horse penis that would set all the customers laughing themselves into a blended chorus of drunk donkey snorts. The only classical piece on the jukebox was Ravel’s “Bolero,” unless you counted the music from Exodus , which made the Irish bartender weep. Mother carried a screwdriver around in her purse to jack the volume of that box up or down depending on her mood and whether she felt like dancing. Mostly we listened to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about mining sixteen tons of coal or following the wild geese with his heart. Certain steady customers hadn’t moved for so long there were practically cobwebs stitching them to their bar stools.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Cole managed her objections, especially to his lodgings, and insinuations so nicely, that it became his own mere notion and urgent request, that this copy of a wedding should be finished at her house: “At first, indeed, she did not care, not she, to have such doings in it... she would not for a thousand pounds have any of the servants or apprentices know it... her precious good name would be gone for ever...,” with the like excuses. However, on superior objections to all other expedients, whilst she took care to start none but those which were most liable to them it came round at last to the necessity of her obliging him in that conveniency, and of doing a little more where she had already done so much. The night then was fixed, with all possible respect to the eagerness of his impatience, and in the mean time Mrs. Cole had omitted no instructions, nor even neglected any preparation, that might enable me to come off with honour, in regard to the appearance of my virginity, except that, favoured as I was by nature with all the narrowness of stricture in that part requisite to conduct my designs, I had no occasion to borrow those auxiliaries of art that create a momentary one, easily discovered by the test of a warm bath; and as to the usual sanguinary symptoms of defloration, which, if not always, are generally attendants on it, Mrs. Cole had made me the mistress of an invention of her own, which could hardly miss its effect, and of which more in its place. Every thing then being disposed and fixed for Mr. Norbert’s reception, he was, at the hour of eleven at night, with all the mysteries of silence and secrecy, let in by Mrs. Cole herself, and introduced into her bedchamber, where, in an old-fashioned bed of her’s, I lay, fully undressed, and panting, if not with the fears of a real maid, at least with those perhaps greater of a dissembled one which gave me an air of confusion and bashfulness that maiden-modesty had all the honour of, and was indeed scarce distinguishable from it, even by less partial eyes than those of my lover: so let me call him, for I ever thought the term “cully” too cruel a reproach to the men, for their abused weakness for us.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I made up then to this important personage, without lifting up my eyes or observing any of the people round me, who were attending there on the same errand as myself, and dropping her curtsies nine deep, just made a shift to stammer out my business to her. Madam heard me out, with all the gravity and brow of a petty minister of State, and seeing at one glance over my figure what I was, made me no answer, but to ask me the preliminary shilling, on receipt of which she told me places for women too slight built for hard work: but that she would look over her book, and see what was to be done for me, desiring me to stay a little, till she had dispatched some other customers. On this I drew back a little, most heartily mortified at a declaration which carried with it a killing uncertainly, that my circumstances could not well endure. Presently, assuming more courage, and seeking some diversion from my uneasy thoughts, I ventured to lift up my head a little, and sent my eyes on a course round the room, where they met full tilt with those of a lady (for such my extreme innocence pronounced her) sitting in a corner of the room, dressed in a velvet mantle (in the midst of summer), with her bonnet off; squat, fat, red-faced, and at least fifty. She looked as if she would devour me with her eyes, staring at me from head to foot, without the least regard to the confusion and blushes her eyeing me so fixedly put me to, and which were to her, no doubt, the strongest recommendation and marks of my being fit for her purpose. After a little time, in which my air, person and whole figure had undergone a strict examination, which I had, on my part, tried to render favourable to me, by primming, drawing up my neck, and setting my best looks, she advanced and spoke to me with the greatest demureness: “Sweet-heart, do you want a place? “Yes, and please you,” (with a curtsey down to the ground).

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “Who was that on the bike?” he asked. “Oh, that was my dad’s best friend.” “That was a cool bike,” he said. “Vintage.” “Yeah, he just got it.” “You ride with him a lot?” “Yes,” I said. I lied. “Cool,” Roger said. “Yeah, cool,” I said. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll see you around.” And then he walked away. Wow, he didn’t kick my ass. He was actually nice. He paid me some respect. He paid respect to Eugene and his bike. Maybe Grandma was right. Maybe I had challenged the alpha dog and was now being rewarded for it. I love my grandmother. She’s the smartest person on the planet. Feeling almost like a human being, I walked into the school and saw Penelope the Beautiful. “Hey, Penelope,” I said, hoping that she knew I was now accepted by the dog pack. She didn’t even respond to me. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. “Hey, Penelope,” I said again. She looked at me and sniffed. SHE SNIFFED! LIKE I SMELLED BAD OR SOMETHING! “Do I know you?” she said. There were only about one hundred students in the whole school, right? So of course, she knew me. She was just being a bitch. “I’m Junior,” I said. “I mean, I’m Arnold.” “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You’re the boy who can’t figure out his own name.” Her friends giggled. I was so ashamed. I might have impressed the king, but the queen still hated me. I guess my grandmother didn’t know everything. Tears of a Clown [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] When I was twelve, I fell in love with an Indian girl named Dawn. She was tall and brown and was the best traditional powwow dancer on the rez. Her braids, wrapped in otter fur, were legendary. Of course, she didn’t care about me. She mostly made fun of me (she called me Junior High Honky for some reason I never understood). But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I’d be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested. One night, at about two in the morning, when Rowdy slept over at my house, I made a full confession. “Man,” I said. “I love Dawn so much.” He was pretending to be asleep on the floor of my room. “Rowdy,” I said. “Are you awake?” “No.” “Did you hear what I said?” “No.” “I said I love Dawn so much.” He was quiet. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” I asked. “About what?” “About what I just said.” “I didn’t hear you say anything.” He was just screwing with me. “Come on, Rowdy, I’m trying to tell you something major.” “You’re just being stupid,” he said. “What’s so stupid about it?” “Dawn doesn’t give a shit about you,” he said.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "I ran back as fast as I could, regardless of consequences, holding my falling trousers in my hands, and followed by the wrathful screeching English old maid, very much like a wee chicken running away from an old hen." "And——" "Everyone was at the carriage windows laughing at my misadventure. "A few days afterwards I was with my parents at the Pension Bellevue, at the baths of N——, when, on going down to the table d'hôte dinner, I was surprised to find the young lady in question seated with her mother, almost opposite to the place usually occupied by my parents. Upon seeing her, I, of course, blushed scarlet, I sat down, and she and the elderly lady exchanged glances and smiled. I wriggled on my chair in a most uncomfortable way, and I dropped the spoon which I had taken up. "'What is the matter with you, Camille?' asked my mother, seeing me grow red and pale. "'Oh, nothing! Only I—I—that is to say, my—my stomach is rather out of order,' said I, in a whisper, finding no better excuse on the spur of the moment. "'Your stomach again?' said my mother, in an under-tone. "'What, Camille! have you the belly-ache?' said my father, in his off-hand way, and with his stentorian voice. "I was so ashamed of myself and so upset, that, hungry as I was, my stomach began to make the most fearful rumbling noises. "Everyone at table, I think, was giggling, when all at once I heard a well-known snarling, barking, shrill voice say— "'Gaason, demandez that monseer not to parler cochonneries at table.' "I cast a glance towards the side whence the voice proceeded, and, sure enough, that horrible, wandering English old maid was there. "I felt as if I could have sunk under the table for shame, seeing everyone stare at me. Anyhow, I had to bear it; and at last the lengthy meal came to an end. I went up to my room, and, for that day, I saw nothing more of my acquaintances. "On the morrow I met the young girl out with her mother. When she saw me, her laughing eyes had a merrier twinkle than ever. I durst not look at her, much less follow her about as I was wont to do. "There were several other girls at the pension, and she soon got to be on friendly terms with them, for she was in fact an universal favourite. I, on the contrary, kept aloof from everyone, feeling sure that my mishap was not only known but had become a general topic of conversation. "One afternoon, a few days afterwards, I was in the vast garden of the pension, hidden behind some ilex shrubs, brooding over my ill luck, when all at once I saw Rita—for her name was Marguerite—walking in a neighbouring alley, together with several other girls. "I had no sooner perceived her when she told her friends to go on, whilst she began to lag behind.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [80] The Council of Trent likewise did better than the disunited Protestants in establishing a uniform standard to define what a marriage might be, through one of its last decisions in 1563, the decree Tametsi (‘Although’). This laid down stringent conditions on valid marriage: now it must demonstrate a declaration of consent in front of a clergyman together with two witnesses, thus drastically simplifying the complicated possibilities of couples privately exchanging vows either with immediate or future intentions. Protestant England only caught up with Tametsi in 1753 when Parliament passed Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which, in its definitions, gave the established Church of England similar power over marriage, despite the existence of significant minority populations of both Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. Also significant and in accordance with the Gregorian revolution was the explicit stipulation of Tametsi that a marriage must be sexually consummated, so that the couple became ‘one flesh’. This was honouring the Pauline principle of the ‘marital debt’: one standard work of advice published in 1609 by one of the leading Counter-Reformation spiritual directors, Bishop François de Sales, further advised that a couple were entitled to pay this crucial sexual debt to each other the night before or even on the morning of receiving the Eucharist. Henry Dodwell, a theological writer adapting de Sales’s work for the Protestant Churches of England and Ireland in 1673, clearly found this permission embarrassing, so left it out of his English translation. [81] Above all, just as in Reformed Protestant Scotland, Tametsi did not make parental consent a requirement for marriage. This restated a standard Western canon law principle that had never pleased those seeing marriage as a dynastic transaction, and it emphatically did not please the very Catholic King of France, who refused to implement the Decrees of the Council perhaps because of this issue; on his own authority he restored the requirement for parental consent for valid marriages within his realm. [82] Few conciliar decisions met with immediate or universal observance in Catholic countries, but generally the close regulation of marriage through Tametsi suited secular rulers, particularly in Spain, where the authorities were alarmed at a perceptible decline in peninsular population. [83] Equally well-disposed to greater definition of marriage in Church courts were those seeking legal ways out of it via the annulment process. In Venice in the century after Tametsi , the principal ecclesiastical court was hearing around one request for separation every month, and around four petitions for outright annulment every year. This provoked the Republic’s Council of Ten (always jealous of independent Church authority) into increasing scrutiny of cases in the court, to correct what they regarded as its excessive lenience towards disobedient wives intent on humiliating husbands and winning back their dowries. [84] Part of the shared regulation of marriage was the successful cross-confessional curbing of medieval lay assumptions that a marriage started when the couple consented in ‘espousal’, with a wedding in church as an optional extra.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  My teeth got so crowded that I could barely close my mouth. I went to Indian Health Service to get some teeth pulled so I could eat normally, not like some slobbering vulture. But the Indian Health Service funded major dental work only once a year, so I had to have all ten extra teeth pulled in one day. And what’s more, our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave us half the Novocain. What a bastard, huh? Indian Health Service also funded eyeglass purchases only once a year and offered one style: those ugly, thick, black plastic ones. My brain damage left me nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, so my ugly glasses were all lopsided because my eyes were so lopsided. I get headaches because my eyes are, like, enemies, you know, like they used to be married to each other but now hate each other’s guts. And I started wearing glasses when I was three, so I ran around the rez looking like a three-year-old Indian grandpa. And, oh, I was skinny. I’d turn sideways and disappear. But my hands and feet were huge. My feet were a size eleven in third grade! With my big feet and pencil body, I looked like a capital L walking down the road. And my skull was enormous. Epic. My head was so big that little Indian skulls orbited around it. Some of the kids called me Orbit. And other kids just called me Globe. The bullies would pick me up, spin me in circles, put their finger down on my skull, and say, “I want to go there.” So obviously, I looked goofy on the outside, but it was the inside stuff that was the worst. First of all, I had seizures. At least two a week. So I was damaging my brain on a regular basis. But the thing is, I was having those seizures because I already had brain damage, so I was reopening wounds each time I seized. Yep, whenever I had a seizure, I was damaging my damage. I haven’t had a seizure in seven years, but the doctors tell me that I am “susceptible to seizure activity.” Susceptible to seizure activity. Doesn’t that just roll off the tongue like poetry? I also had a stutter and a lisp. Or maybe I should say I had a st-st-st-st-stutter and a lissssssssththththp. You wouldn’t think there is anything life threatening about speech impediments, but let me tell you, there is nothing more dangerous than being a kid with a stutter and a lisp. A five-year-old is cute when he lisps and stutters. Heck, most of the big-time kid actors stuttered and lisped their way to stardom. And jeez, you’re still fairly cute when you’re a stuttering and lisping six-, seven-, and eight-year-old, but it’s all over when you turn nine and ten.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  (Cruise himself didn’t admit his affiliation until two years later, in an interview with Barbara Walters.) The fact that the information was leaked, probably from a source within the church, was at once a great embarrassment for Miscavige and a relief, because Cruise’s name was now finally linked irrevocably in the public mind with Scientology. He offered an unparalleled conduit to Hollywood celebrity culture, and Miscavige went to great lengths to court him. At Thanksgiving 1990, he ordered Parman to cook dinner for Cruise’s whole family. Miscavige even arranged for Cruise to place some investments with the Feshbach brothers—Kurt, Joseph, and Matthew—three Palo Alto, California, stockbrokers. They were devoted Scientologists who had made a fortune by selling short on the stock market. According to Rathbun, when Cruise’s investments actually lost money, the Feshbachs obligingly replenished the star’s account with their personal funds. Early on, Cruise and Miscavige shared a powerful sense of identity with each other. They were both short but powerfully built, “East Coast personalities,” as Parman diagnosed them. They shared a love of motorcycles, cars, and adventurous sports. Miscavige was bedazzled by the glamour surrounding the star, who introduced him to a social set outside of Scientology, a world Miscavige knew little about. He had spent most of his life cloistered in the Sea Org. He was thrilled when he visited Cruise on the set of Days of Thunder , and the actor took him skydiving for the first time. Cruise, for his part, fell under the spell of Miscavige’s commanding personality. He modeled his determined naval-officer hero in A Few Good Men on Miscavige, a fact that the church leader liked to brag about. Just before Christmas 1990, Sinar Parman was told that Tom and Nicole were going to get married, and that he and a Sea Org pastry chef, along with their wives, would be cooking for the wedding party. Parman was assured that they would get paid for their trouble; in the meantime, they should buy some civilian clothes suitable for a cold climate. Parman went shopping and put everything on his credit card, along with a Christmas present for Cruise. Then Cruise’s private jet flew them to Telluride, Colorado, where the wedding took place. They spent three days preparing meals for guests. Cruise’s auditor, Ray Mithoff, performed the ceremony, and David Miscavige served as best man. Afterward, Parman was informed that Miscavige had changed his mind about paying for his services and the expenses incurred. Parman was left with hundreds of dollars charged to his credit card, which he struggled to pay off on his Sea Org salary—fifty dollars a week at the time. At first, Tom and Nicole seemed like the ideal Scientology power match. They were intelligent, articulate, extraordinarily attractive people. At Gold Base, Tom reached OT III. He would have spent a considerable amount of time after that self-auditing in order to exorcise his body thetans.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Accordingly the night was set, and I had all the necessary previous instructions how to act and conduct myself. The dining room was duly prepared and lighted up, and the young gentleman posted there in waiting, for my introduction to him. I was then, by Mrs. Cole, brought in, and presented to him, in a loose dishabille fitted, by her direction, to the exercise I was to go through, all in the finest linen and a thorough white uniform: gown, petticoat, stocking, and satin slippers, like a victim led to sacrifice; whilst my dark auburn hair, falling in drop-curls over my neck, created a pleasing distinction of colour from the rest of my dress. As soon as Mr. Barville saw me, he got up, with a visible air of pleasure and surprise, and saluting me, asked Mrs. Cole, if so fine and delicate a creature would voluntarily submit to such sufferings and rigours, as were the subject of his assignation. She answered him properly, and now, reading in his eyes that she could not too soon leave us together, she went out, after recommending to him to use moderation with so tender a novice. But whilst she was employing his attention, mine had been taken up with examining the figure and person of this unhappy young gentleman, who was thus unaccountably condemned to have his pleasure lashed into him, as boys have their learning. He was exceedingly fair, and, smooth complexioned, and appeared to me no more than twenty at most, though he was three years older than what my conjectures gave him; but then he owed this favourable mistake to a habit of fatness, which spread through a short, squab stature; and a round, plump, fresh coloured face gave him greatly the look of a Bacchus, had not an air of austerity, not to say sternness, very unsuitable even to his shape of face, dashed that character of joy, necessary to complete the resemblance. His dress was extremely neat, but plain, and far inferior to the ample fortune he was in full possession of; this too was a taste in him, and not avarice. As soon as Mrs.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  She laughed and told her girlfriend at the next desk that my name was Junior. They both laughed. Word spread around the room and pretty soon everybody was laughing. They were laughing at my name. I had no idea that Junior was a weird name. It’s a common name on my rez, on any rez. You walk into any trading post on any rez in the United States and shout, “Hey, Junior!” and seventeen guys will turn around. And three women. But there were no other people named Junior in Reardan, so I was being laughed at because I was the only one who had that silly name. And then I felt smaller because the teacher was taking roll and he called out my name name. “Arnold Spirit,” the teacher said. No, he yelled it. He was so big and muscular that his whisper was probably a scream. “Here,” I said as quietly as possible. My whisper was only a whisper. “Speak up,” the teacher said. “Here,” I said. “My name is Mr. Grant,” he said. “I’m here, Mr. Grant.” He moved on to other students, but Penelope leaned over toward me again, but she wasn’t laughing at all. She was mad now. “I thought you said your name was Junior,” Penelope said. She accused me of telling her my real name. Well, okay, it wasn’t completely my real name. My full name is Arnold Spirit Jr. But nobody calls me that. Everybody calls me Junior. Well, every other Indian calls me Junior. “My name is Junior,” I said. “And my name is Arnold. It’s Junior and Arnold. I’m both.” I felt like two different people inside of one body. No, I felt like a magician slicing myself in half, with Junior living on the north side of the Spokane River and Arnold living on the south. “Where are you from?” she asked. She was so pretty and her eyes were so blue. I was suddenly aware that she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen up close. She was movie star pretty. “Hey,” she said. “I asked you where you’re from.” Wow, she was tough. “Wellpinit,” I said. “Up on the rez, I mean, the reservation.” “Oh,” she said. “That’s why you talk so funny.” And yes, I had that stutter and lisp, but I also had that singsong reservation accent that made everything I said sound like a bad poem. Man, I was freaked. I didn’t say another word for six days. And on the seventh day, I got into the weirdest fistfight of my life. But before I tell you about the weirdest fistfight of my life, I have to tell you: THE UNOFFICIAL AND UNWRITTEN (but you better follow them or you’re going to get beaten twice as hard) SPOKANE INDIAN RULES OF FISTICUFFS: 1. IF SOMEBODY INSULTS YOU, THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HIM. 2. IF YOU THINK SOMEBODY IS GOING TO INSULT YOU, THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HIM. 3.