Excitement

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 The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Lou, a black grease mark on his T-shirt, was standing beside me, holding my hand, chanting, “Gay is good.” We were all chanting it, knowing how ridiculous we were being in this parody of a real demonstration but feeling giddily confident anyway. Now someone said, “We’re the Pink Panthers,” and that made us laugh again. Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis. “This could be the first funny revolution,” Lou said. “Aren’t these guys great, Bunny? Lily Law should never have messed with us on the day Judy died. Look, they’ve turned the parking meter into a battering ram.” The double wooden doors to the Stonewall cracked open. I could hear the cops inside shouting over their walkie-talkies. One of them stepped out with a raised hand to calm the crowd, but everyone booed him and started shoving and he retreated back into Fort Disco. The city trash cans were overflowing with paper cups, greasy napkins, discarded newspapers. A new group of gays rushed up, emptied a can into the splintered-open doorway, doused it with lighter fluid, and lit it. A cloud of black smoke billowed up. “They’ve gone too far,” I said. A black maria came around the corner of Seventh Avenue and up Christopher the wrong way. The cops cleared the sidewalk, formed a cordon, and rushed the remaining bartenders into the van past the smoldering garbage, but the crowd booed even louder. Once the van had driven off, the cops pushed us slowly back from the bar entrance. Down the street, some of our men turned over a parked Volkswagen. The cops rushed down to it while behind them another car was overturned. Its windows shattered and fell out. Now everyone was singing the civil rights song, “We Shall Overcome.” The riot squad was called in. It marched like a Roman army behind shields down Christopher from the women’s prison, which was loud with catcalls and the clatter of metal drinking cups against steel bars. The squad, clubs flying, drove the gay men down Christopher, but everyone doubled back through Gay Street and emerged behind the squad in a chorus line, dancing the can-can. “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo,” they called. Lou and I stayed out all night, whooping like kids, huddling in groups to plan tomorrow’s strategy, heckling the army of cops who were closing off all of Sheridan Square as a riot zone and refusing to let cars or pedestrians pass through it. I stayed over at Lou’s. We hugged each other in bed like brothers, but we were too excited to sleep. We rushed down to buy the morning papers to see how the Stonewall Uprising had been described. “It’s really our Bastille Day,” Lou said. But we couldn’t find a single mention in the press of the turning point of our lives. [image file=image_rsrc1CE.jpg] GENET A Biography “A marvelous, irreplaceable writer.” —James Merrill

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We were passing below the women’s prison on the corner of Eighth and Sixth, just next to the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, and two women on the street were calling up to the metal-shuttered windows. “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save ya’ love for mama.” Over the motor hum and the tocsin of impatient horns, these women called out to each other, their New York voices penetrating and forlorn. “Look at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!” and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy, “it’s so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life.” On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people. Here a crowd circled a sidewalk artist sketching a solemn young man with waved hair and spotty skin. The sitter was posing as though his profile were about to go on the coin of the realm. He was the only one who couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along, this disappointment being patiently prepared for him. There, in the little park across from the Waverly movie theater, an impromptu game of basketball had broken out and bare sweaty black and tan torsos flashed through the dark, reflecting the lights surging up Sixth . Cars on MacDougal slowly waded through people like buffalo through flooded paddies. The sound of voices, of street musicians, rang off the brick walls of tenements. Above the streetlights shadowy families sat on metal fire escapes. Now we passed an ornate Italian coffee shop, flyblown mirrors hung in gilt frames dimmer than a helmet in a Rembrandt. The eagle atop the espresso machine flew imperiously through a cloud of steam. No faggots appeared to have strayed over to this side of Sixth Avenue, but once we recrossed it we were back among what Lou called the “Cha-cha queens, hairburners, and glandular cases.” A hissing trio like rattled snakes in an agitated basket were hanging out on a stoop, their lips flecked with foam. Another pair were dancing in the water of an open fire hydrant, shirts tied to expose their tummies. Lou was in a delirium: “Bunny, we’re home, you can press your ear to the pavement and hear the heartbeat,” and even though he made me feel such a prig, my heart did leap at all the possibilities this city offered to meet men. Before, I’d caught only half glimpses of queers, but like a hunter who pursues his deer deep into the night forest, at last I’d come upon a moonlit clearing filled with thousands of moving antlers, all these men. Lou had the address of a gay restaurant in the Village.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  As I listened to Maria, I absorbed each small wrenching of convention without a blink. The teasingly affectionate portrait of two such eccentrics stunned me, though I never let on. I knew I might be as diseased as they were—in fact, I had no doubt of it—but I’d never aired my neurosis as these women did, and if it were found out, I’d expect to be run to ground, not gently chided. But as the records spun, as Noel Coward talked about life coming to Mrs. Wentworth Brewster at the Bar on the Piccola Marina, when Marlene confessed that men clustered round her like moths to a flame and if they burned their wings she was not to blame, I felt plunged into a piquant world where sins were winked at, where in fact a juicy peccadillo was the price of admission. We sat in shabby rattan chairs under a naked light bulb inadequately screened by a lantern-shaped basket whose weave was too wide and let our eyes stray over the Ping-Pong table, the game of Chinese checkers, and the dart board, while just outside more and more moths, drawn by the light, or Dietrich, beat against the screens. Maria walked about restlessly as though she only half-believed her own daring words. We drove into town in her station wagon. It felt strange to be chauffeured by Maria, and I registered this new awkwardness, which certainly I had not known last winter. But then I’d still been her little Dumpling, whereas now I was, well, what I imagined the other colonists took me to be: bourgeois visitor, friend, possibly suitor. Yes, complete with bourgeois male anxiety about who drives the car. Maria led me in the slow dance at the bar, a noisy friendly hangout illuminated by the endless Niagara of the Miller’s High Life sign and by the bubbling jukebox. I was too young to be in a bar legally, but no one noticed and we drank beer after beer and danced to polkas or slow hillbilly songs. Maria said she loved the hillbilly songs because they were about grown-ups, adultery, divorce, heartache. With her, even loss sounded as glamorous as gain. [image file=image_rsrc1C5.jpg] My last year in boarding school during Christmas vacation in Chicago, I met a small Texan with bad eyes, bad skin, and the smell of Luckies on his breath. Tex ran a book and record store next to an art house showing movies near the Loop. “Art movies” were still new then. The label might mean Gina Lollobrigida jiggling provocatively up and down hills on a donkey or it might mean Gérard Philipe meeting an early death as the crazed painter Modigliani. Despite the range, art meant Europe, and something European shed its glow on Tex. I’d get on the elevated train in Evanston and ride an hour each way late in the afternoon just to escape my mother and sister and spend thirty minutes with him.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  On the floor I’d count out ninety-nine pennies for a ticket to the highest balcony at the City Center for the ballet and walk the fifty blocks home; Wilde’s idea that the luxuries are necessities, and the necessities luxuries, became my slogan. Many of my arty, bohemian friends from school had also moved to New York, and we went out together almost every night, usually to sit in a vast room on Bleecker Street. It had been a music hall in the nineteenth century and still possessed a rickety balcony and a ceiling chandelier with etched glass shades to screen the gas jets. No one went up to the balcony or lit the chandelier. The two old ladies with motherly vulgar voices (“What’ll it be, hon?”) seemed to be looking through us to earlier, more prosperous times. They wore bedroom slippers and nylons rolled below their knees, but above the neck they were impeccable: plucked eyebrows and glowing ruby lips. A few folding screens quarantined off most of the shadowy hall and surrounded half a dozen tables lit by the red neon letters in the window. There we sat for hours, warmed only by the beer, listening to Barbra Streisand’s melancholy record of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and the first Dionne Warwick songs. All around us an adult world was revolving quite indifferent to us; we didn’t realize that it existed, much less that it excluded us. Exposed to nothing but the classics and confined to a provincial campus until now, we knew very little about the latest books and artistic trends; the “young” who represented the newest tastes were thirty, not twenty. A few of the women in our crowd were sleeping their way up into more sophisticated spheres, and if I’d been handsome or socially ambitious I might have done the same. We were so dazed by the speed with which we were changing that we mistook this virtuosity for insincerity. My fellow workers had no idea what I did with my evenings. The married men commuted to their families on Long Island; the single women lived cooped up together on the East Side in doorman buildings. Nor did my school friends know that I walked up and down Greenwich Avenue sometimes till three in the morning looking for sex, dressed in “collegiate clothes” I’d never have worn in college. We were all leftists, of course, although we favored Cuba and China and felt vaguely uneasy about Russia. We’d never examined our socialism, which was composed of sympathy, rebellion, and enthusiasm, no economics, little history, and a total absence of political experience. For us, socialism was primarily social, since everyone we liked was on our side—the poor young (but not the indigent old), foreign peasants (but not bigoted American farmers), the Eastern European proletariat (but not Detroit auto workers), the inspired mad (but not the merely crazy), oppressed Negroes (but not white trash).

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by Latins. I had a friend, Hector Ramirez, a kindergarten teacher who, because he lived with his parents in the Bronx, borrowed my apartment every afternoon after school to rehearse new dance steps with another Latin twenty-two-year-old, similarly mustached and dressed in carefully ironed beige cotton shirts over guinea T-shirts and highwaisted pleated pants held up by a thin black crocodile belt. They were here tonight, twirling out of a tight clench, hips on small pistons, faces illegibly cool. Another friend, the death machine, came up to me and rested his size-twelve black hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes with a mad gleam: “… is dead.” “Who?” I shouted over the music. “Judy. Judy Garland.” Then the music went off, and the bar was full of cops, the bright lights came on, and we were all ordered out onto the street, everyone except the police working there. I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. Inside the metal palisades rose the dignified, smaller-than-lifesize statue of the Civil War officer General Sheridan. Our group drew a still larger crowd. The cops hustled half of the bartenders into a squad car and drove off, leaving several policemen behind, barricaded inside the Stonewall with the remaining staff. Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid. I had an urge to be responsible and disperse the crowd peacefully, send everyone home. After all, what were we protesting? Our right to our “pathetic malady”? But in spite of myself a wild exhilaration swept over me, the gleeful counterpart to the rage that had made me choke Simon. Lou was already helping several black men pull up a parking meter. They twisted it until the metal pipe snapped. By accident, the dial cracked open and dimes scattered over the pavement. Everyone laughed and swooped down to snatch up the largesse; the piñata had been struck open at this growing party. Two white, middle-class men in Lacoste shirts came up to me shaking their heads in disapproval. “This could set our cause back for decades,” one of them said. “I’m not against demonstrations, but peaceful ones by responsible people in coats and ties, not these trashy violent drag queens.” I nodded in sober, sorrowing agreement. But a moment later I pushed closer to see what Lou was doing. Someone beside me called out, “Gay is good,” in imitation of the new slogan, “Black is beautiful,” and we all laughed and pressed closer toward the door. The traffic on Christopher had come to a standstill.

• From Vox (1992)

  I started to feel myself beginning to come, and I filled my mouth with water, and I thought of the men on the expressway hearing my mouth fill with water, and as I started to come I pushed the water from my mouth so that it poured from my chin over me, which is what I usually do, and I said, and this was not theatrical, this was heartfelt, I said, ‘Oh, shoot it, shoot it, you cocksuckers!’ I guess that in my ecstasy I was a trifle confused.” “Perfectly understandable. So then you called tonight …” “I called tonight I think out of the same impulse, the idea that five or six men would hear me come, as if my voice was this thing , this disembodied body, out there, and as they moaned they would be overlaying their moans onto it, and, in a way, coming onto it, and the idea appealed to me, but then, when I actually made the call, the reality of it was that the men were so irritating, either passive, wanting me to entertain them, or full of what-are-your-measurements questions, and so I was silent for a while, and then I heard your voice and liked it.” “Thank you. Yours is nice, too, you know. Very smooth.” “Thanks. I just had it waxed yesterday. Shall we, do you think, should we perhaps come soon?” “Yes. You’re absolutely right. Are you naked?” “Wait a sec. Yes, I am now officially naked, except for the bra.” “Are your legs apart?” “My toes are holding on to the edge of the coffee table.” “Is your right hand touching your clitoris?” “How impertinent! But yes, the answer is yes. My clitoris is in fact squeezed between my two index fingers, left and right, which are on either side of it.” “All right. You do whatever you want with those index fingers, and I’ll tell you about a kind of sensing device that I own. What it does, it doesn’t eavesdrop, it doesn’t pick up sounds, it simply senses the presence nearby of any intelligent strumming woman. It looks like an antique pocket watch, it’s gold, with a cover, but when you open it, instead of the dial, there is this mysterious fluid, this very special fluid in there that glows in several colors when the right conditions are met, for reasons that are not clear, except that of course a woman masturbating is so important an event in the physical universe that elemental relations in matter are affected as it occurs, and there are these sort of currents in the fluid that slowly move in a certain direction, like lines of force, which give you some sense of where the masturbation signals are coming from, although it takes years of practice, and of course a great deal of native skill as well, to learn how to read the fluid correctly. It’s called the Bionic Mmmm-Detector, as you might suspect.

• From Vox (1992)

  82 not a particularly comfortable position. The rims of the paint cans hurt the balls of my feet slightly, and my legs were farther apart than I was used to standing, and the small of my back was pressing against the sheepskin lin ing of the hole in the wall. Not comfortable, but toler able. And then I felt knuckles brush against the inside of my thighs—and I knew that the first hall roller was now beginning to paint a stripe of Paper Lantern that started just at the top of my pubic hair and rolled very slowly over my clit and the rest of it, like some heavy steady piece of road equipment, and then back over my clit. And at the same time, the other hall painter had loaded his roller with the wrong paint, the Opulent Opal, and he'd turned his roller sideways and he was now pushing a horizontal stripe over my ass, at first a light stripe, and then, on the return, a harder stripe, and then he rolled down in between, and I called out, 'No no, I'm telling you that's the wrong paint!' but he was very deliberately working the roller in the region of my, what shall we call it, my 'tockhole,' without seeming to hear me. Nontoxic paint, of course. And then I heard him put down the roller and he planted his hands high on my ass, holding my hips, and then he did an amazing thing. I felt his whole weight go on his hands, and on my back too, and he was apparently supporting himself like a gymnast, entirely on his hands, with his knees bent and his legs apart, and then a second later I felt this burning blunt nub press against my Opulent Opal tockhole, and then

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My last year in boarding school during Christmas vacation in Chicago, I met a small Texan with bad eyes, bad skin, and the smell of Luckies on his breath. Tex ran a book and record store next to an art house showing movies near the Loop. “Art movies” were still new then. The label might mean Gina Lollobrigida jiggling provocatively up and down hills on a donkey or it might mean Gérard Philipe meeting an early death as the crazed painter Modigliani. Despite the range, art meant Europe, and something European shed its glow on Tex. I’d get on the elevated train in Evanston and ride an hour each way late in the afternoon just to escape my mother and sister and spend thirty minutes with him. He loved books. I remember running with him down the street one gray winter afternoon when the sun, discouraged by a cold reception, had withdrawn. Tex had nothing on but a tweed jacket and a ratty scarf steeped in smoke, itself the color of smoke. He was racing like a kid to the post office to carry back to the store two boxes of books, all copies of The Outsider by Colin Wilson. I carried one box. Tex had ripped open the other and was juggling with it as he read random pages to me. “Listen to this, will you,” Tex shouted with a sudden reemergence of his warm Southern accent. Generally he tried to sound contained, as though he’d just sucked a lemon, but now his mouth was filling up with hot sweet potato pie. In another instant we were back in Tex’s cozy store, which had been temporarily confided to the care of his pouty assistant, Morris. We settled into a heap on the pink velvet loveseat by the window to read The Outsider to each other in excited snatches. That was the way Tex read, as though a new book were a telegram addressed to him personally. This one was about a whole fortune that a spiritual uncle somewhere off in England had willed him, since the book told us about existentialism and its roots and suggested that, over there at least, to be an outsider was not a cause for shame but a condition that could be capitalized on, even capitalized. Tex talked to me about the Human Condition. Because he didn’t introduce his ideas and he threw away the ends of sentences, he seemed to be letting me in on a conversation I’d be gauche to interrupt and question. The bitter coffee we drank, the sound of the discreetly murmuring announcer on the classical music radio station, and the sight of reflected spotlights tilting off varnished new books and records still in their cellophane wrappers—all of these things came together to excite me, especially since I knew Tex was gay. Morris, the assistant, even used that word when there was no one else in the shop.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Judy Garland.” Then the music went off, and the bar was full of cops, the bright lights came on, and we were all ordered out onto the street, everyone except the police working there. I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. Inside the metal palisades rose the dignified, smaller-than-lifesize statue of the Civil War officer General Sheridan. Our group drew a still larger crowd. The cops hustled half of the bartenders into a squad car and drove off, leaving several policemen behind, barricaded inside the Stonewall with the remaining staff. Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid. I had an urge to be responsible and disperse the crowd peacefully, send everyone home. After all, what were we protesting? Our right to our “pathetic malady”? But in spite of myself a wild exhilaration swept over me, the gleeful counterpart to the rage that had made me choke Simon. Lou was already helping several black men pull up a parking meter. They twisted it until the metal pipe snapped. By accident, the dial cracked open and dimes scattered over the pavement. Everyone laughed and swooped down to snatch up the largesse; the piñata had been struck open at this growing party. Two white, middle-class men in Lacoste shirts came up to me shaking their heads in disapproval. “This could set our cause back for decades,” one of them said. “I’m not against demonstrations, but peaceful ones by responsible people in coats and ties, not these trashy violent drag queens.” I nodded in sober, sorrowing agreement. But a moment later I pushed closer to see what Lou was doing. Someone beside me called out, “Gay is good,” in imitation of the new slogan, “Black is beautiful,” and we all laughed and pressed closer toward the door. The traffic on Christopher had come to a standstill. Lou, a black grease mark on his T-shirt, was standing beside me, holding my hand, chanting, “Gay is good.” We were all chanting it, knowing how ridiculous we were being in this parody of a real demonstration but feeling giddily confident anyway. Now someone said, “We’re the Pink Panthers,” and that made us laugh again. Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis. “This could be the first funny revolution,” Lou said. “Aren’t these guys great, Bunny? Lily Law should never have messed with us on the day Judy died. Look, they’ve turned the parking meter into a battering ram.” The double wooden doors to the Stonewall cracked open. I could hear the cops inside shouting over their walkie-talkies. One of them stepped out with a raised hand to calm the crowd, but everyone booed him and started shoving and he retreated back into Fort Disco.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Believe it or not, the really humongous dicks are embarrassed, they try to hide it in loose folds. Now Negroes are good bets, but not invariably. Italians are reliable, if you don’t mind fur-balls in your mouth, they’re so hairy, and if you go for pecorino.” “What’s that?” “Italian goat cheese. They’re all uncircumcised and on a hot summer day It—Can—Get—Pret—ty—Smel—ly—in there.” He shook his head and growled: “ Love it.” A glance at my shock and he coolly added, “An acquired taste. ” He had other guides to cock size—big hands, big feet, big nose, fleshy ears, early balding (“Due to an excess of male hormones”), big thumb-to-palm ratio. He favored tropical people over those from temperate climes, though he’d discovered that as one approached the poles, cocks become larger again (“Nothing like a big Swede”). Short thick ones (“But beercan thick”) he preferred to very thin long ones. “But you , I don’t think you’d know what to do with a truly big dick except throw it over your shoulder, burp it, and weep. Are you Irish?” “Yes.” “I knew it, you Irish boys all have small mouths and small dicks, the worst of both worlds. Why ,” and he rolled his bulging eyes up to heaven, “do I always keep running into Irish boys? Punishment for being a Lit—tle—Bit—Pig—gy in my last life, you think?” When the new semester started I had my own room in a boardinghouse and I was free from all supervision for the first time in my life. I’d moved out of the fraternity house, although I continued to take my meals there. Indeed, I continued to juggle all these elements—fraternity brothers, Beats, Chinese, and my anonymous, half-seen lovers. I painted everything in my room white except the old desk I’d bought at a junk store, which had a tiny escritoire that folded out and a small oval mirror placed high above my head on a ladder-back of carved black pegs that inscribed the wall with an abacus of shadows. There I did my homework; everything else in my life was so chaotic that I needed to receive good grades. I covered the bed with a white blanket bordered in whitest, widest ribbon and I’d lie on it and watch the sunlight singing to itself out of that small Irish mouth of a mirror. I met a pretty Korean (“Forget Koreans,” William hissed angrily, “it’s clit size”) who lived next door. Whenever the mechanical world frustrated him—if his bike jammed or the laundry machine swallowed his coins, or his key snapped off in a lock—he’d ring my bell, trudge in, take off his clothes, fold them neatly on my white wooden chair, and lie face down on my white bed. He’d take it like a man, bite the pillow if I hurt him, and nothing had ever felt quite so good as those small taut muscles under that chamois-soft skin, the color of cinnamon when it’s sprinkled on cappuccino.

• From Vox (1992)

  105 back,' and I darted into the video place and went to the adult section that they had sequestered away and I started looking over the boxes. I was out of breath, and my senses were so hyper-alert, I was scanning the boxes for 'Atom' 'Atom' 'Atom.' I knew I had to get only one single film, the right film, which seemed impossible, but I could feel myself surging forward on this irresistible surge of luck, and I found a couple of 'Atom' productions among all the Caballero Controls and the Cal Vistas and all the other little companies, and I rented this thing called Pleasure So Deep. I mean the title reeked of trans lation, it was perfect. I signed up for membership, rented the movie, was back in the car in five minutes. Emily was there leafing calmly through the People magazine. She said, 'What did you get?' and I said, 'It's called Pleasure So Deep.' She made this little 'Oh!' and she said, 'And you're going to watch that tonight?' I said, 'Yes, I have to, I need to commit myself to a situation, you've totally convinced me.' And she said, 'Tell me again, so I have it clear in my mind. What you're ad vertising for is a woman who wants to sit on the couch next to you and watch this movie and masturbate, right?' She put her hand lightly on the box holding the tape. I said 'Yep' and she said, 'Just that, nothing else, only that, nothing beside that, right?' And I said, 'Yes, just that. And I think I really have a shot at formulating the ad that will find someone who wants to do that, thanks to you. You helped me pick out the right blanket, and I think

• From Vox (1992)

  We got to the scene where the guy with the wide yellow tie with a dollar sign on it has sex with the heroine. She says something like, ‘Don’t play around, just fuck me,’ and so he does. This scene really got to Emily, and she took the blanket in her teeth so she could have both hands free and yet have it over her, so now there were these loomings as her left hand moved back and forth between breasts, and the little circling rhythm was slightly less constrained.” “What were you doing?”

• From Vox (1992)

  So I told her that I, well er um, I was interested, you know, in sitting on my couch, next to a woman, with an X-rated tape on, and the woman’s looking only at the movie and I’m looking only at the movie, and she’s well, um, masturbating, and as she starts to come she says, ‘Look at my face,’ and I look at her face, and she looks at the TV, and we both come. So she says, Emily says, ‘All right, good, now we have something to work from.’ She takes out a pen and starts drafting the ad on the place mat, she writes, ‘You and me are sitting,’ and she goes, ‘Good, okay so far, nice colloquial note, that’s fine.’ I think she was really delighted not to be talking about Lee. And then she taps the pen on the place mat and she looks up at me and she says, ‘No, look, you need to make the situation a lot clearer. You need to make her feel that it’s all right. You need to talk about some kind of a blanket.’ Out of the blue, a blanket! No, wait, I know what she said, before the blanket, she said something like, ‘You need to make the woman reading it understand that some sense of what is right and fitting coexists alongside your depravities.’ Not those exact words, but close to that. You believe it? Then she brings up this blanket. This was a whole new side to her. I said, ‘All righty, what kind of blanket? You think we should specify the actual kind of blanket?’ And she nods and goes, ‘Yes, absolutely, the specific kind of blanket, the size, the thickness, the color, that’s all they have to go on.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, what do you think? Army surplus green blanket, Mormon quilt, what?’ She thought for a second, and then she said, she said, ‘I think you should mention a blanket with a fringe.’ I said, ‘But I do not have a blanket with a fringe.’ And she said, ‘You’re right, that’s a problem.’ And then she starts hitting me with all these questions. She goes, ‘How far is the TV from the couch?’ She’d never been to my apartment, of course. I said, ‘Well it’s on a rolling table, so there’s no fixed distance, but then, the cable cord limits the range, so I guess it’s probably about six feet from the couch.’ She noted this down and she goes, ‘Because the woman skimming these personals may need to know that. That little fact might be of the highest importance. Now, is the couch two pillows wide or three pillows wide or four pillows wide?’

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  taxes and social security, I’d be taking home over eighty dollars a week. I had spent a lot of time imagining what New York would be like, but the one thing that had never occurred to me was that the opportunities would come so easily. Aside from having to wear those embarrassing red-and-yellow uniforms with matching floppy hats, I loved the job. The lunch and dinner rushes were always exciting, with the lines backing up at the counter, the cashiers shouting orders over the microphones, the grill guys shoveling hamburgers through the flame-broiling conveyer belt, everyone running from the fixings counter to the drinks station to the infrared fries warmer, staying on top of the orders, the manager jumping in to help whenever a crisis cropped up. We got 20 percent off on our meals, and for the first few weeks there, I had a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake every day for lunch. • • • In the middle of the summer, Lori found us an apartment in a neighborhood we could afford—the South Bronx. The yellow art deco building must have been pretty fancy when it opened, but now graffiti covered the outside walls, and the cracked mirrors in the lobby were held together with duct tape. Still, it had what Mom called good bones. Our apartment was bigger than the entire house on Little Hobart Street, and way fancier. It had shiny oak parquet floors, a foyer with two steps leading down into the living room—where I slept—and, off to the side, a bedroom that became Lori’s. We also had a kitchen with a working refrigerator and a gas stove that had a pilot light, so you didn’t need matches to get it going, you just turned the dial, listened to the clicking, then watched the circle of blue flame flare up through the tiny holes in the burner. My favorite room was the bathroom. It had a black-and-white tile floor, a toilet that flushed with a powerful whoosh, a tub so deep you could submerge yourself completely in it, and hot water that never ran out. It didn’t bother me that the apartment was in a rough neighborhood; we’d always lived in rough neighborhoods. Puerto Rican kids hung out on the block at all hours, playing music, dancing, sitting on abandoned cars, clustering at the entrance to the elevated subway station and in front of the bodega that sold single cigarettes called loosies. I got jumped a number of times. People were always telling me that if I was robbed, I should hand over my money rather than risk being killed. But I was darned if I was going to give some stranger my hard-earned cash, and I didn’t want to become

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.” You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is. And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. And it really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run : “his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit there long enough, something will happen. My students stare at me for a moment. “How do we find an agent?” they ask. I sigh. When you are ready, there are books that list agents. You can select a few names and write to them and ask if they would like to take a look at your work. Mostly they will not want to. But if you are really good, and very persistent, someone eventually will read your material and take you on. I can almost promise you this. However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff. But my students don’t believe me. They want agents, and to be published.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I took the countertenor home with me. He held me against his capacious chest and sang in his piercing high voice. Later I stood over him in bed, which led the singer, who was serious and sentimental and full of imported beer, to smile and blow me kisses. “Do you live here all by yourself?” he asked me, looking around my mother’s gilded cage. “Yes,” I said. “Are you in school or do you work?” “No, I don’t do anything,” I said. “I know that sounds terribly un-American, but I haven’t decided yet what to do with my life.” The tenor nodded and hugged me. The next morning, after several telephone calls, he arranged for us to eat with all the other men we’d met on the beach. It turned out Lou lived in the same building, in the identical apartment twelve stories down. We all went to a coffee shop on Rush for breakfast. I ate so many syrup-soaked pancakes and drank so much bitter coffee that I got a stomachache. Maybe it was due to the excitement I felt looking at and talking to Lou. He was wearing a blue velour sweatshirt. No one I’ve ever known before or since had his curious way of moving. When something excited him (usually something he was saying), he’d sit up straight in his seat, widen his eyes, and talk with hushed, oracular intensity. A second later, God, that bored puppeteer, would drop the strings and Lou would lie splayed all over the table, nearly comatose. On the street he’d stop in the middle of a stream of pedestrians to make a point, and as he did so he’d hold my hand between both of his, but lightly, lightly, almost as though he were a medium who needed only the merest touch to establish contact with the other world. I found out that he was an advertising man who wrote poetry, but when I trotted out my newly acquired urbane ironies for him (“The Muses Bow to Mammon,” I think I actually said), he flushed with anger. “I can’t bear middle-class ruefulness,” he said. He was sitting straight up, fully inflated. “I love advertising. It’s an art in no way inferior to poetry and not much different from it. Lofty disdain toward making money strikes me as …” He adjusted his head to an odd angle. “Yes!” Now he was in full cry. “Yes! all that well-bred ruefulness. That’s exactly what I despise about The New Yorker. A cartoon shows a middle-aged man in front of his typewriter typing, ‘This is the story of my life’—and that’s supposed to be a joke!” His features froze in horror as he looked through me. Then a rich baritone laugh, so at odds with his light speaking voice, poured maniacally out of him. “A joke!” he shrieked in agonies of disbelief. His laugh, soundtrack for a horror film, rang out through the restaurant.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Yeah, isn’t it? I finally got out of that shitty gay life.” Yet it didn’t seem so shitty just now. We maintained, of course, the premise that we were sick, that our experience was limited, that we were missing out on the good things of life, and that our old age would be lonely. Worse, we anticipated a steady effeminization with the years. I knew I’d end up a seventy-year-old waiter, hair peroxided, camping with my gay customers and eyeing with hatred all the women customers I didn’t already know and share beauty secrets with, a wizened old bird lined from excessive dieting and unwilling to go out at night for fear of hoodlums. But just now that seemed a long way off. With Sean, of course, I pretended to be very studious and serious and even unfamiliar with gay life, but on nights when I was free I went out cruising. After the World’s Fair cleanup, gay bars started opening again, every month a new one. The Village gay life, which until now had collected along Greenwich Avenue, began to seep slowly down Christopher Street. Spring came, and boys were sitting on stoops almost all the way down to the Hudson. Every day I’d arrive at work later and later. We were supposed to be there at ten, but I never arrived before eleven. No one said anything. I had my captions to write, then whole paragraphs, but the company was so overstaffed that we were given two weeks to write a hundred lines. We typed on lined paper that gave the exact character count, but it didn’t matter, since every textblock was rewritten by all those idle editors over us. I closed my door and fell asleep on my desk, called all my friends, took two-hour lunches, had my shoes shined by a man who went from floor to floor with his kit and who once even offered to bump off anyone I wanted for two hundred dollars. I lived for my nights. I’d rush home and fall asleep in my clothes. Hours later I’d awaken, eat cottage cheese out of the carton and a whole tomato, then I’d dress for cruising and head out into the night.

• From Vox (1992)

  And then I felt knuckles brush against the inside of my thighs—and I knew that the first hall roller was now beginning to paint a stripe of Paper Lantern that started just at the top of my pubic hair and rolled very slowly over my clit and the rest of it, like some heavy steady piece of road equipment, and then back over my clit. And at the same time, the other hall painter had loaded his roller with the wrong paint , the Opulent Opal, and he’d turned his roller sideways and he was now pushing a horizontal stripe over my ass, at first a light stripe, and then, on the return, a harder stripe, and then he rolled down in between, and I called out, ‘No no, I’m telling you that’s the wrong paint!’ but he was very deliberately working the roller in the region of my, what shall we call it, my ‘tockhole,’ without seeming to hear me. Nontoxic paint, of course. And then I heard him put down the roller and he planted his hands high on my ass, holding my hips, and then he did an amazing thing. I felt his whole weight go on his hands, and on my back too, and he was apparently supporting himself like a gymnast, entirely on his hands, with his knees bent and his legs apart, and then a second later I felt this burning blunt nub press against my Opulent Opal tockhole, and then kind of urge itself a little ways in. I went, ‘Yew!’ and the painter in the living room turned in surprise and registered my existence for the first time. My hands were still planted on the cans of paint. And back in the hall, while the one gymnast painter was sinking himself unapologetically deep into my ass, I felt the other, the one who’d responsibly used the right kind of paint all along, now use his thumbs to hold my real … self open, my lips, and then I felt him slide slowly up my real hole. I said, ‘Vvoo!’ The living-room painter’s eyes got big, and he studied my face with this look, like, ‘What exercise tape has this lady been using?’ I’m afraid that by now I was curling my upper lip with pleasure. My expression in fact was exactly the one I would have had if I had been biting open a condom packet with my teeth, that gnashy look, but the thing was— there was no condom packet .

• From Vox (1992)

  11 facedown on my chest, entranced by those tights, and a conception, this conception of thrilling wrongness, took shape in my brain stem. I had a vision of myself jerking off while I ordered that pair of tights, specifically the vision was of, of, of. . "Of?" "Of being in the bathtub, but on the phone with the order-taker from Deliques, who's got, you know, this nice innocent voice, a mistaken but lovable overfrizzed perm, a hint of twang, bland face, freshly laundered jeans, cute socks, but probably wearing a pair of Deliques finest 'fusion panties' with a chevron of lace or something over her mound, which she's bought at the employee discount, while I'm in my bathtub, which is ridiculous since I never take baths, but I'm in my bathtub moving so carefully so she won't hear any aquatic splips or splaps and know that I've taken the portable phone into the bathroom and that I'm semi-submerged, and she says, 'Let me check to be sure we have that in stock for you, sir,' and during the pause, I arch myself up out of the water and sort of point the phone at my Werner Heisen- berg so she can see it somehow or get its vibes, and at the moment she says, 'Yes, we do have the pointelle tights in faun,' I come, in perfect silence, making a Smurf gri mace." "That's awful." "I know, but I don't know, I was there on the living- room floor. I don't often lie down there."

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  It seemed that outside the Y everyone was living on the streets and no one ever went to bed. Lou and I took the subway to the Village, emerged at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, and walked up Greenwich Avenue. Most of the strollers were straight couples, but here and there, flashing past like a parakeet, was a gaudy little queen, a paste clip on a shirt that might have started life as a blouse, her gait complex with extra motions, micro-motions somehow added, as though a mad scientist, after breaking walking down into its components, had had trouble reassembling the elements into a convincing continuity. “But we all walk that way,” Lou said. “We queens are so self-conscious, our little heads so drugged on just the sheer thrill of existing publicly, that we can’t even cross a room without simpering and mincing. It’s not that we start out wanting to appear effeminate. It’s that we use effeminacy after the fact as an alibi for our embarrassment, our florid but somehow ill-timed gestures, the bizarre tilt of our heads, our—” But here his lecture dissolved into a tearful laugh, for Lou loved to assail us in terms that were pushed to such an extreme that even he saw the absurdity. We were passing below the women’s prison on the corner of Eighth and Sixth, just next to the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, and two women on the street were calling up to the metal-shuttered windows. “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save ya’ love for mama.” Over the motor hum and the tocsin of impatient horns, these women called out to each other, their New York voices penetrating and forlorn. “Look at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!” and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy, “it’s so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life.” On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people. Here a crowd circled a sidewalk artist sketching a solemn young man with waved hair and spotty skin. The sitter was posing as though his profile were about to go on the coin of the realm. He was the only one who couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along, this disappointment being patiently prepared for him. There, in the little park across from the Waverly movie theater, an impromptu game of basketball had broken out and bare sweaty black and tan torsos flashed through the dark, reflecting the lights surging up Sixth.