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.

Page 101 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Vox (1992)

  68 talks about relieving aching muscles and lower back pain, when what we're all really talking about is women mak ing themselves come in bed. What this Book Mate is is this rigid-backed thing to which you strap the book using this quote 'see-through strap.' There's nothing the book can do, it's powerless—it's strapped wide open—open for all the hungry eyes of the world to admire. The ad says, This wonderful invention makes reading a pure plea sure! Ingenious design holds paperback books OPEN and FLAT so even wind can't ruffle pages—leaves your hands free to do other things.' And that's the page of this book Beginner's Luck that I finally masturbated to: the thought of a woman reading that this invention will leave her hands free to do other things, and the thought of her ordering it and then maybe holding the strapped-open book between her bent knees so she can read the crucial page of pleasure while she goes to town down there . . . needing to have both her hands free to do other things . . . ho God! The problem is, though, that you yourself almost certainly don't find any of this arousing." "No, well," she said, "I find it mildly arousing, for the very reason you already said—it's something that's arous ing to you." "But there's the thing," he said. "If you only find it mildly arousing because I found it exceedingly arousing, then I have to cancel my strong arousal and replace it with mild arousal, since the degree of your arousal is the primary source of my arousal. And then, the problem is, 69 you'll find it only infinitesimally arousing and I'll then have to discard it as a total turnoff. That's the problem." "We have to find a middle way/' she said. "The middle way is for you to tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your candy corn." "I liked the story you told about the jeweler pretty well." "No no, before tonight. Whenever the last time was you made yourself come." "Last night. I really don't remember. These are fleet ing things. " "Oh, you do remember." "I was in the shower. " "Wait a second. Okay. You were in the shower." "What did you just do?" she asked. "Nothing. My underpants were starting to bug me. Go on. "I was in the shower, which is almost always the place I come best. In college there were very nice marble show ers, with high showerheads, and the water, the shape of each drop of water, was exactly right, fat soothing gen erous drops, but billions of them. I came many many times in those showers." "Public showers, you mean?" "No no, private," she said. "This little high marble box, with a marble foyer. It was very loud, and some times when the water collected and flowed together down

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The silence was intense, intensified by the timed flush of water. Then silence again, the throb of my pulse in my neck, the businessman’s impatient, audible exhalation, the scratch of a match in a stall and soon the rich scent of burning tobacco creeping out over the ammonia smell of disinfectant. The concentration was strong and focused, every heart pounding, every sense open. When it became obvious that I, too, was waiting and no longer pissing, the businessman shot his shiny black mohair cuff and consulted his massive gold wristwatch. Face burning, fingers going cold on my cock, I turned to look at the businessman. He regarded me expressionlessly, leaned his head back hoping to glimpse into my urinal, took a step away from the wall to expose his short, engorged, nearly purple penis. I stepped back to show mine, though I knew he didn’t want me, just as a sign that I was a friendly player in the game. In a flash he was squatting, the student turned to feed the businessman’s mouth, the smoker in the stall dropped his cigarette in the water, quick hiss, and he and his neighbor in the next stall were on their knees, hands reaching under the partition between them and grabbing each other, as I could see by stooping over. No one cared about me one way or the other. I was one of them. I looked at the student being sucked. His soft white belly with its explosion of black hair and wet cock shiny as glass were flashed on the screen of my mind as was that rush of male hands under the partition. I listened to the quick clink-clink of a belt buckle on the tiles. Then the muffled sound of an approaching step, followed by someone pushing open the door, released the echoing chatter in the corridor. Instantly the couple in the stalls regained their seats; the businessman and his client broke off their deal; and I revolved to face my urinal. The intruder, a big, pigeon-toed athlete, splashed, dribbled, left, but not before he’d made us feel like Sleeping Beauty’s courtiers the moment before the prince melts the rime of sleep.… If I use that implausible image I do so to cool my burning face, since the athlete, after buttoning up, flicked his hair out of his eyes and voiced a simple grunt of disgust. Home to Chicago for Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to slip away for a wild evening with Morris, the clerk in Tex’s store. Tex had disappeared but had left a note promising to come back with money. Morris opened the store only when it suited him. He hadn’t been paid in months, and besides, there were no new books to sell. Tonight he was wearing pocketless black trousers molded to his full buttocks. “Not bad, hunh?” he said, standing on tiptoe, sticking out his ass, hand on hip, and looking back over one shoulder like a wartime pinup.

• From Vox (1992)

  92 my pencil made it to the place between two of her fin gers, but she was brave, she stayed put. Her name was Martha. I'm pleased to have remembered that! A teacher showed us how to make a turkey, using two hands su perimposed. But that wasn't interesting, that was just a trick. It's the same with shadows: the beautiful thing isn't the alligators or bats you can make with your hands, the beautiful thing is the way the shadow image allows you to see so precisely what the outer contour of your own hand really looks like, those little bunches of flesh under each bent finger joint. Obviously this was what I had to do. So I closed the top of the copier and I took a blank piece of paper and again I concentrated on the idea of this wom an's surprise and then transfixion when she saw my memo until I was hard again. I traced around my dick with a pen, holding myself in place with a finger and holding the pen straight up and down, and it was a very interesting sensation, not pleasurable, but very interest ing, this cold pen. I went around about five times. And the great thing was, on paper, my dick looked really impressive. It looked like a big dick. Because of course the image you get is bigger all the way around by what, two pen radii, or one full pen diameter, so a good quarter of an inch. Much better than the copy, which as I said was this miniature sideways thatched farmhouse there in the right margin. So I wrote FULL-SCALE COCK TRACING, you know, 11:43 PM - > SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH or what ever the date was. And I put the memo and the two pieces of artwork in her in box."

• From Vox (1992)

  See, to me the word ‘tights’ is much more exciting than just ‘stockings.’ Anyway I went into the living room and put the phone on the floor, and then I lay down on the floor next to the phone and I just studied this shot, went through the rest of the catalog, but back to this one picture again, until my arms started to get tired from holding the pages in the air, and I put the catalog facedown on my chest, and I went into a state of pure bliss, rolling my head back and forth on the rug. If you roll your head back and forth on the floor it usually increases any feeling of awe or wonder that you’ve got going. But no tingling of the extremities, unfortunately.” “No.” “And I don’t eat lots of meatball subs. I mean I do enjoy a meatball sub occasionally, with mushrooms—I just want to differentiate myself from, you know …” “Oh don’t worry about that,” she said. “Your accent is very different from his, your voice is quite … compelling.” “I’m glad to hear that. I was nervous when I called. My temperature dropped about fifteen degrees as I was deciding to dial the number.” “Really. Where did you see the ad?” “Ah, a men’s magazine.” “Which one?” she asked. “This is oddly embarrassing. Juggs. Juggs magazine. Where did you see the ad?” There was a pause. “Forum.” “What does your ad say?” he asked. “Let me see,” she said. “There’s a line drawing of a man and a woman, each holding a telephone, and the headline is ANYTIME AT ALL . I liked the drawing.” “I’ve seen that one,” he said. “That’s very different from my ad. My ad has a color shot of a woman with a phone cord wrapped around her leg and one arm kind of covering her breasts, and the headline over the phone number is, MAKE IT HAPPEN . But there is something intangibly classier about this ad than the other ads, something about the layout and the type that the phone number is in, despite the usual woman-plus-phone image, and I thought that maybe it might attract a different sort of caller. Although, boy, that flurry of assholic horniness from the men on the line when you first spoke was not exactly cucumber sandwich conversation. That one guy that kept interrupting—‘You like to sock on a big caulk?’ ‘How big and brown are your nips?’ But then, I suppose we aren’t calling for cucumber sandwich conversation.” “I wouldn’t object—cucumber away. But I guess not. Anyhow, here we are, ‘one on one,’ as they say, in the famous fiber-optical ‘back room.’ ” “True enough.” “So go on,” she said. “You were telling me how you were on the floor rolling your head back and forth?” “Oh, right.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  That evening there was no hint of disaster at the bookshop. Morris, his lashes suitably brown, not black, was seated behind the cash register, ringing up sale after sale. Despite his shyness, Tex was circulating among the customers in a dim parody of a Southern belle. The polite young male announcer on the FM station was reading long sentences with a venom in their bite and a rattle in their tail. Then he announced he’d just finished the first part of tonight’s story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Tex silenced him and put on a record of Callas’s mad scenes. I myself preferred the radio and the idea that other listeners liked Henry James. At one point, Tex whispered to me that the man in the corner owned several quality bookshops in New York and, though he was married, might make a nice date for me. “But if he’s married …?” Tex said, “My pet, he’s a New Yorker. They’re all bisexual, at least a man of his class. He’s here alone without his wife, you’re here, not an uncomely ephebe. If you’re subtle about it, he might let you demonstrate the difference between sucking and blowing.” A crazy Texas laugh, so at odds with his modulated tone, wildcatted up out of him till he capped it over by slapping himself and saying in mild admonishment, “Miss Me.” And he slid toward a potential customer and said professorially, “The Kierkegaard boom seems to be continuing, doesn’t it? Sartre’s influence, no doubt.” I had an image of a vast city in which people ate breakfast when it was still dark out, drove to work in patient files under raw red skies, peeled off boots in fluorescent-lit offices, at home after work practiced the Hammond organ or dozed, joked about their “spare tire” and patted it fondly—a whole gray world in which I was biding my time, stupid with longing and fear. But here, in Tex’s shop, something dangerous was glowing as bright as the waste gas flaring day and night off exhaust stacks above the factories in Gary, Indiana. I felt exhilarated by the presence of so many sophisticated adults: the woman in a black turtleneck examining Either/Or; Morris playing efficient behind the cash register and conspicuously effacing himself like a glamourpuss actress in a nun film; Tex tapping his cigarette in a Ricard ashtray, his fear of bankruptcy temporarily pushed aside; and this successful New York heterosexual who might tolerate me in his bed.

• From Vox (1992)

  And I got to this set of red books, only about maybe fifty of them, called the Silhouette Desire series, and ‘desire’ is written in this luscious sloppy longhand, in a diagonal— Desire . Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I thought of going over to Bonnie and saying, ‘Um, do you know those Silhouette Desire books? Can you tell me which title in that series is the most arousing of all of them, in your judgment?’ But I could never have done that. And it didn’t matter anyway, because hundreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves—you didn’t need to harass any particular woman, you didn’t need to invade anybody’s privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbed-ness of the book itself—it practically shouted at you, ‘I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.’ ” “So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?” she asked. “ Love’s Tender Gender Bender ?” “Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it.” “I guess so, sure.” There was a pause. “It’s called Beginners Luck ” he said, “by Dixie Browning, and it’s singled out by the publisher as a quote ‘Man of the Month’ volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it’s all wavy. It’s got a permanent wave. You can imagine.” “Whew.” “As I was driving home I was so stiff from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there—the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement—but she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It’s about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He’s a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he’s cleaned up he’s irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch.

• From Vox (1992)

  104 started really hunting through those blankets, I was ready to call the manager over and have him go in the back. And god damn it if I didn't find this little acrylic blanket, jammed behind on a high shelf, kind of a standard green- and-blue plaid thing, no beauty, let me tell you, but with a long thick twisted fringe. She looked at it, she touched it, and she blushed, and she said, This one will do.' So I marched right over to the register and bought it. There was a cardboard insert saying, you know, SEEDYCREST FIRST QUALITY ACRYLIC BLANKET, and there was this stock picture of a woman smilingly asleep under a blanket, and as we're waiting for the woman to enter in the SKU number Emily and I both looked at this picture, and I'm telling you, nothing, anywhere, was as obscene as that picture on the blanket insert. " "How much was it?" "Ten bucks, something like that, I can't remember. On an impulse, I bought a People magazine, too. So then we went back to the car, and the great lucky thing was, I'd been able to park craftily not right in front of the discount store, but to one side, a little ways down—we were driving in my car—and I'd parked almost directly in front of this video spot. The place hadn't been too no ticeable when we'd driven in, but now that it was darker it had the flashing lights on, video video video, it was the brightest thing in the whole mall. So I opened the door for her, and she got in, and I handed her the blanket in this enormous bag, and I said, 'Hang on, I'll be right

• From Vox (1992)

  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 lining of the hole in the wall. Not comfortable, but tolerable. 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?’

• From Vox (1992)

  127 alternative opportunity cost of her orgasm, you feel the force of all the other perceptive things she could be think ing at that moment and is not thinking because she is coming, and they enrich it. You still there?" "I'm just trying to feel my wrist tendon," she said, "to see what it might have felt like for you. Actually, you know, there is a little muscle high up on the outside of my forearm that is moving, almost at my elbow. That's the one that's more visible in my case. Feels kind of interesting. " "Ooh, don't say that or I'll shoot." "Hah hah! I like a man who knows what he likes. Do you want to hear what I thought about when I came in the shower yesterday?" "Yes." "I'll tell you. No, I know what I'll tell you. First I'm going to tell you something else. First I'm going to tell you about how I masturbated in front of somebody. It's short." "By all means, tell me." "Shall I tell you every nasty thing that comes into my head?" "Yes." "I will then," she said. "We went to the circus. It's funny, it excites me quite a bit just to tell you that I'm going to tell you. Doing that is probably the best part. It's just like that moment when you're lumbering around on the bed to get into opposite directions to do sixty-nine, 128 that feeling of parting my legs over a man's face, before you put your hands on my back and pull me down, and my legs remember the feeling from the last time, the feeling of being locked into a preset position that is right for human bodies to be in, like putting a different lens on a camera, turning it until it clicks." "And I," he said, "would feel the mattress change its slope, first on one side of my head, and then the other, as the weight of one of your knees and then the other pressed into it, and I'd look up at you and open my mouth and I'd slide my hands over your ass with my fingers splayed and hold your ass and pull you down to my tongue." "Kha." There was a pause. "You there?" he asked. "Yes." "Tell me about the circus." "Okay. Excuse me. I'm going to have to get a fresh towel pretty soon. This guy took me to the circus." "The guy with the fancy stereo?" "Another guy," she said. "It wasn't Ringling Brothers, it was some smaller-scale South American circus, with lots of elephants, and lots of women in spangles riding the elephants. It was incredibly hot in the tent, and ev erything had this reddish tint, because the sun was bright enough outside to make it through some of the tent seams, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt but I was

• From Vox (1992)

  66 done that. And it didn't matter anyway, because hun dreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves—you didn't need to harass any particular woman, you didn't need to invade anybody's privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbed- ness of the book itself—it practically shouted at you, 'I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.' " "So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?" she asked. "Loves Tender Gender Bender?" "Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it." "I guess so, sure." There was a pause. "It's called Beginners Luck," he said, "by Dixie Browning, and it's singled out by the publisher as a quote 'Man of the Month' volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it's all wavy. It's got a permanent wave. You can imagine." "Whew." "As I was driving home I was so stiff from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there— the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement—but

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  They thought it was funny. They’d grown up in the Village. Slowly my body took shape in the gym mirror. Stomach muscles emerged. A chest, biceps, triceps, lats—the whole kit. The gym instructor measured my arms (which grew) and my waist (which shrank). The diet pills gave me a jaw-clenching intensity. If I started looking up something in the Yellow Pages at eight in the evening, I’d still be reading the columns of names at four in the morning, docilely obeying the cross-references (see appliances; see sanitary engineering). If I lay my head on the pillow I’d dip just below the waterline, but I was like a fish kept in a net bag and dragged through the waves buffeted by the speed. I wrote with the attentiveness of a manuscript illuminator, but after hundreds of hours I’d produced only a gnomic one-act about a pair of lovers, in some scenes played by two men, in others by a man and a woman. I had this idea that my play would demonstrate that the dynamics of love are always the same, no matter which sexes are involved. And then I met Sean. He rang my bell one day because he was looking for the Russian dancer who’d lived with me. I invited him in for a cup of coffee. He shed his coat and sat down. He didn’t say anything but seemed expectant and bursting with contained energy. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He was six feet tall and had white blond hair that covered darker layers as though his head were a hay mow. He had a hearty manner irrelevant to his surroundings, for I was murmuring in my usual vague, ironic way, whereas he was replying with loud, strangely definite emphases almost as though he’d been paid to exclaim in a commercial. He gave the impression of having been scrubbed very clean. Even his cheeks glowed ruddily. I thought he wouldn’t smell of anything if I sniffed his body. He laughed loudly when I said something sort of amusing, but his restless eyes roamed over my little kitchen as though he found nothing worthy of his attention. He leaned forward when he spoke. He seemed to be one of those people so anxious that they don’t listen to anyone else and only worry about their own next statement. He appeared to be Polish, or my idea of Polish. The back of his head was flat, as though a Polish grandmother had molded it that way so he wouldn’t roll out of his cradle. His eyes were too small to be handsome, but his skin was so taut that there was only a single fold under his eyes and not a hint of darkness. The pure skin ran right up to the edge of the pale lashes and framed the sort of pale blue eyes that in a flash photo come out pink as a rabbit’s.

• From Vox (1992)

  83 kind of urge itself a little ways in. I went, Tew!' and the painter in the living room turned in surprise and regis tered 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 unapologet- ically 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. My painter loaded up his roller with wall paint, this was a warm neutral gray, and I mean warm, and he came over and he lay down on the floor underneath me, in the opposite direction, with his head touching the baseboard, so I could see his face and his paint-spattered glasses between my breasts, and he touched the roller to one of my nipples, and then rolled up between my breasts and down and over the other nipple, and as he was doing that he used his foot to pull another paint can into position, and then, still lying on his back, he lifted his hips up in the air with both boots resting on the can of paint sort of like a circus elephant on one of those little stools, you

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The artist’s game is to move over into reality. It is to see beyond the mere “disaster” which the picture of a lost battlefield renders to the naked eye. For, since the beginning of time the picture which the world has presented to the naked human eye can hardly seem anything but a hideous battle ground of lost causes. It has been so and will be so until man ceases to regard himself as the mere seat of conflict. Until he takes up the task of becoming the “I of his I.” Reading the Face of the World—PlexusThere exists a curious book by an American anarchist, Benjamin R. Tucker, entitled INSTEAD OF A BOOK BY A MAN TOO BUSY TO WRITE ONE. The title describes my new-found situation to a T. My creative energy suddenly released, I spilled over in all directions at once. Instead of a book, the first thing I sat down to write was a prose poem about Brooklyn’s backyard. I was so in love with the idea of being a writer that I could scarcely write. The amount of physical energy I possessed was unbelievable. I wore myself out in preparation. It was impossible for me to sit down quietly and just turn on the flow; I was dancing inside. I wanted to describe the world I knew and be in it at the same time. It never occurred to me that with just two or three hours of steady work a day I could write the thickest book imaginable. It was my belief then that if a man sat down to write he should remain glued to his seat for eight or ten hours at a stretch. One ought to write and write until he dropped from exhaustion. That was how I imagined writers went about their task. If only I had known then the program which Cendrars describes in one of his books! Two hours a day, before dawn, and the rest of the day to oneself. What a wealth of books he has given the world, Cendrars! All en marge . Employing a similar procedure—two or three hours a day regularly every day of one’s life—Rémy de Gourmont had demonstrated, as Cendrars points out, that it is possible for a man to read virtually everything of value which has ever been written. But I had no order, no discipline, no set goal. I was completely at the mercy of my impulses, my whims, my desires. My frenzy to live the life of the writer was so great that I overlooked the vast reservoir of material which had accumulated during the years leading up to this moment. I felt impelled to write about the immediate, about what was happening outside my very door. Something fresh , that’s what I was after.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  A bearded sculptor in his early twenties named Ivan, who dutifully molded and cast big bronze insects, though he far preferred living the life of the artist to making art, had discovered me in the Eton barbershop. The art academy was side by side with the boys’ school, but the students and teachers of the two institutions never mixed, although a few of the poorer artists worked in the Eton kitchen. The barbershop, the kitchen, the Saturday-night movies when everyone sat on folding chairs on the basketball court of the boys’ gymnasium—those were the only places where the two populations might have spoken to each other, though they never did. I did. I spoke to Ivan. I don’t know what I said, but he invited me to his studio. He thought I was precocious for some reason; maybe he just picked up on my eagerness to gnaw off the restraints. Through him I met other painters and sculptors, including Maria. In the long winter afternoons when the skies would turn as cold and silvery as fish scales, I’d sit in the painters’ studios and smell the espresso cooking down in nickel-coated pots on hot plates and try to find in their work what they’d secreted there. At first I’d struggle to see things, guess at what was being masked by all that fudge-thick impasto, that haze of flung drops, but I discovered very quickly how “bourgeois” my interpretations—or any interpretations—seemed to the artists. I also learned to say “painter” not “artist.” I was so eager to please (an extension of the high-school urge to Be Popular) that after only a few hasty observations of how the painters responded to each other’s work, I’d mastered their technique. I, too, would sit on a high wood stool, itself piebald with spattered paint, and look and look without saying a word. That was the trick: say nothing, show nothing. A senile radio would be muttering to itself. The smell of oil paint and turpentine (for acrylics had not yet been introduced) stung my eyes and made my nose run. Windows climbed one wall, floor to ceiling, and through them I could see the silver-lined gray clouds boiling and descending like a deity about to abduct an extremely willing shepherd. I looked and looked at the painting, trying to figure out what was there to be seen. Was it a sort of chess problem to be solved, a visual riddle, or was it a cat’s cradle of tensions (I’d heard someone talking about “push” and “pull”)? Or was I being too “intellectual” (a fault, as I’d gathered)? Should I regard the painting as a spiritual X-ray, a glimpse into the painter’s unconscious ecstasy or agony? Or was it something like a football field on which conflicting teams of thoughts and feelings had skirmished and left this muddy aftermath of the action (for people spoke of “action painting”)? The painters themselves weren’t quite sure, I realize now.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  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. When we were led by that majestic personage called the Mater D to our table in the garden, we were studied by other customers, and only after we’d sat down, ordered our oysters Rockefeller (with Pernod sauce on a bed of spinach), and sipped our daiquiris did we relax and look around. A gay bar, a cruisy toilet—that I understood, but a gay restaurant? The suggestion that gay men, like Negroes, might want to enjoy one another’s company astounded me. The city seemed like a Bring-Your-Own party that had gone on too long. Even children were still playing at midnight. A blind woman stood on a corner singing in a quavering voice the song my mother had sung to me at bedtime when I was a child: “I’ll be seeing you in apple-blossom time.” At stoplights cars shouldered each other out of the way, jockeying to gain a few inches at the starting gate. As we headed up Park Avenue in a taxi (Lou was treating), we leaned our heads back and looked up at the illuminated spires streaming past. At another stoplight a group of Puerto Rican teenagers dressed in baseball uniforms shouted at each other over the roof in raucous voices. In Chicago there’d been the Loop, but it had been virtually deserted after dark; here people seemed to live in the center city, and I expected to see lines of wash strung between skyscrapers.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Sometimes I would sit at the machine for hours without writing a line. Fired by an idea, often an irrelevant one, my thoughts would come too fast to be transcribed. I would be dragged along at a gallop, like a stricken warrior tied to his chariot.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us , but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! “I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and whatnot; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed un-fecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit towards death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought. I Am Chancre, the Crab—Black SpringI am thinking of that age to come when God is born again, when men will fight and kill for God as now and for a long time to come men are going to fight for food. I am thinking of that age when work will be forgotten and books assume their true place in life, when perhaps there will be no more books, just one great big book—a Bible.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jinglebells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings… .” Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes! Yes, Monsieur Antipyrine! Yes, Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara! Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt! Yes! Monsieur René Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is crazy, you were right. Yes, Monsieur Blaise Cendrars, you were right to kill. Was it the day of the Armistice that you brought out your little book—J’ai tué? Yes, “keep on my lads, humanity….” Yes, Jacques Vaché, quite right—“Art ought to be something funny and a trifle boring.” Yes, my dear dead Vaché, how right you were and how funny and how boring and touching and tender and true: “It is of the essence of symbols to be symbolic.” Say it again, from the other world! Have you a megaphone up there? Have you found all the arms and legs that were blown off during the melee? Can you put them together again? Do you remember the meeting at Nantes in 1916 with André Breton? Did you celebrate the birth of hysteria together? Had he told you, Breton, that there was only the marvelous and nothing but the marvelous and that the marvelous is always marvelous—and isn’t it marvelous to hear it again, even though your ears are stopped? I want to include here, before passing on, a little portrait of you by Emile Bouvier for the benefit of my Brooklyn friends who may not have recognized me then but who will now, I am sure…. “… he was not at all crazy, and could explain his conduct when occasion required. His actions, none the less, were as disconcerting as Jarry’s worst eccentricities. For example, he was barely out of hospital when he hired himself out as a stevedore, and he thereafter passed his afternoons in unloading coal on the quays along the Loire. In the evening, on the other hand, he would make the rounds of the cafés and cinemas, dressed in the height of fashion and with many variations of costume. What was more, in time of war, he would strut forth sometimes in the uniform of a lieutenant of Hussars, sometimes in that of an English officer, of an aviator or of a surgeon. In civil life, he was quite as free and easy, thinking nothing of introducing Breton under the name of André Salmon, while he took unto himself, but quite without vanity, the most wonderful titles and adventures. He never said good morning nor good evening nor good-bye, and never took any notice of letters, except those from his mother, when he had to ask for money. He did not recognize his best friends from one day to another….” Do you recognize me, lads? Just a Brooklyn boy communicating with the red-haired albinos of the Zuni region.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  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.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Now look at little Jimmy here,” he said with a curator’s pride, “isn’t he fabulous?” A round-faced man of thirty trying to look twenty in skin-tight black jeans and white boots and an open white shirt tied high at the waist to show a hairless midriff came hopping up to us. He kissed Lou in a crisp stylization of a kiss and revolved into his arms as Lou reached down from the stool to embrace him. “Hi, toots, who’s the brainy chicken?” Jimmy jerked his head toward me, effortlessly lifted my horrible glasses off my face, and perched them on the tip of his adorable snub nose. “Don’t let me wreck your nerves, doll,” he whispered to me, very gal-to-gal, “I’m just the frisky type.” Lou lowered his eyes, charmed by such brassiness. We drank beer after beer, darted across the street to another bar, so I could see that bartender’s “perfect buns,” then headed down Rush toward the Chicago River where a little gay dance spot was hidden behind a restaurant with checked tablecloths. We watched couples foxtrotting cheek-to-cheek to Timi Yuro singing “Make the World Go Away.” A black man the color and shininess of eggplant was dancing with a white boy the shape and golden paleness of a pear. A thug with a porkpie hat and a cigar guarded the door. At last we stumbled into a taxi. I got out a block away from home because I didn’t want Gerald, the doorman, to see me with Lou. Gerald was very thick with my mother. But then at last I was in Lou’s apartment; he bolted the door and we stood in his living room, not floating above the night city as in my mother’s apartment but rather surrounded by it. Between two unlit glass-sheathed buildings I could see Lake Michigan and its trails of breaking foam on black water. We picked our way over the debris in the dark and drank one more beer on the low couch. Lou kept dozing off. At last we undressed, our clothes thrown on the floor. But when I held Lou in my arms and kissed him all over, he whispered, “Let’s wait till the morning. I’d like to sleep with my ass pressed against your hard-on,” and he drifted off. Several times at the bars he’d introduced me with a laugh as his new “college-boy trick,” and now I could see myself as just that.